Slavery Ordained of God — Context and Discussion

Speeches as Structural Pillars

The book’s two speeches anchor its argument. The first, delivered in Buffalo in 1853, lays out Ross’s central thesis: that slavery is not a sin per se, but an evil in certain circumstances, and that the Golden Rule can exist within the master-slave relation. The second, from New York in 1856, shifts to a combative tone, attacking abolitionist readings of the Declaration of Independence. Ross frames these speeches as live performances, preserving the rhythms of oral debate—direct address, rhetorical questions, and exclamations like 'Sir, are you satisfied?' This structure gives the reader a sense of witnessing a public controversy, with Ross positioning himself as a moderate defending biblical truth against Northern fanaticism.

The Mistletoe and the Oak

In the letters, Ross develops a striking metaphor for the Declaration of Independence: it is a 'mistletoe' that must be cut from the 'noble tree' of American liberty. He urges his correspondent to 'cut away this mistletoe with golden knife, as did the Druid; enshrine its imaginary divinity in a grove or cave; then retire there, and leave our oak to stand in its glory.' This image recurs as Ross argues that the Declaration’s claim that 'all men are created equal' is not a self-evident truth but a falsehood contradicted by the Bible, natural history, and providence. The metaphor reveals Ross’s strategy: he does not reject the Declaration outright but seeks to prune it of what he considers a parasitic idea, preserving the document’s core while discarding its egalitarian principles.

Movement Between Audiences

Ross’s text shifts between addressing Northern and Southern readers, a movement that reflects his stated goal of maintaining 'harmony among Christians' and 'the integrity of the union.' In the preface, he calls on Northern philanthropists to learn that slavery is not sin, and on Southern Christians to accept that it is not perpetual. The speeches then dramatize this dual appeal: the Buffalo speech is conciliatory, urging mutual understanding, while the New York speech is confrontational, denouncing abolitionist interpretations. The letters, written to an unnamed correspondent, allow Ross to engage in sustained exegesis of biblical passages and the Declaration. This movement between audiences creates a layered rhetorical structure, where each section reframes the argument for a different listener.

Recurring Biblical Anchors

Ross repeatedly returns to Romans 13:1—'The powers that be are ordained of God'—as the epigraph and foundation of his argument. He uses this verse to claim that slavery, as a form of government, is divinely sanctioned. In the letters, he also invokes the Golden Rule, arguing that it can coexist with slavery, and cites the curse on France after 1793 as evidence of God’s judgment against egalitarian revolutions. These biblical references are not merely proof texts but structural devices: they recur at key moments to ground Ross’s claims in what he presents as unchanging divine law. The effect is to frame the slavery debate as a theological question, not a political or moral one, and to position Ross as a defender of scriptural authority against the 'infidelity' of abolitionism.

Ross’s book is best approached as a specimen of mid-19th-century proslavery theology, where structure—speeches followed by letters—mirrors the author’s attempt to mediate between Northern and Southern audiences. Readers attentive to the movement between oral and written forms, and to the recurring metaphors like the mistletoe, will find a carefully crafted argument that uses biblical authority to defend a hierarchical social order. The work does not pretend to be objective; it is a polemic that reveals the intellectual strategies of a Southern clergyman on the eve of the Civil War.

Some evenings, when I close the old minister’s letters defending human bondage by divine will, I think of Prairie Gold — Inside the Classic. Both whisper of a time certain of its own rightness, one in scripture’s name, the other in the prairie’s. I feel their kinship in quiet certainty — and the long shadows that certainty casts over later years.