Slaveholding; buying or selling slaves

The Text

This is the ceiling of the document — the clause where the General Rules stop being a period piece and become a judgment, including a judgment on the church that prints them. Among the harms a Methodist must cease, the American Book of Discipline lists, in four words, “Slaveholding; buying or selling slaves.” Behind those four words stands the longer historic wording — “the buying or selling the bodies and souls of men, women, and children, with an intention to enslave them” — and behind that stands a fact that must be stated before anything else: it is not in Wesley’s 1743 text. The English General Rules, written by a priest of a slave-trading empire in the hinterland of Bristol’s own slave port, say nothing about slavery. The prohibition is American, and its history is the history of a church writing abolition into the one part of its constitution it had forbidden itself to change — and then not keeping it. This entry does not smooth that. The smoothing is the failure.

Translation Notes

“the bodies and souls of men, women, and children.” The historic long form is doing deliberate theological work the modern four-word version loses. It does not say “slaves.” It says bodies and souls — the whole person, the soul included — and men, women, and children, refusing the abstraction by which a human being becomes a chattel. The phrase is built to make the trade unspeakable in its own terms: you are not buying labor or property; you are buying souls, and children. The modern abbreviation “Slaveholding; buying or selling slaves” is administratively cleaner and morally quieter, and the quieting is itself part of this clause’s sad history.

“with an intention to enslave them.” The historic wording forbids the intent-laden act — the predatory acquisition. This phrasing was, notoriously, also the seam through which accommodation crept: a slaveholder could claim he had not bought “with an intention to enslave” but had inherited, or held “kindly,” or kept under the laws of his state. The clause that was meant to make the trade impossible was read, in the slaveholding conferences, for its loopholes. The words did not fail; the keepers did.

”— (no such clause): 1743.” The most important textual note in the whole document is an absence. Wesley’s harm-catalog (annotation 7) names smuggling and reckless debt and says nothing of the slave ships then sailing from Bristol. The silence is not Wesley condoning; it is, as the Wesleyan Voice will show, Wesley not yet having written into the rule what he held with ferocity and would publish in Thoughts Upon Slavery. But the absence teaches the document’s hardest lesson on its own: a conviction not written into the rule is a conviction the rule cannot enforce. The American church learned that twice over — once by adding the clause, and once by failing to keep the clause it added.

Historical Context

The chronology is exact and should be told without flinching. Wesley’s English General Rules (1743) have no slavery clause. The American Methodists supplied one. The 1780 Baltimore Conference declared slavery “contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature.” The 1784 Christmas Conference — the founding of American Methodism under Coke and Asbury — adopted stringent anti-slavery legislation, including timetables for members to emancipate. Within six months, in 1785, that legislation was suspended under resistance from the slaveholding states. The prohibition that endured was the one lodged in the General Rules themselves — and in 1808 the General Conference adopted the Restrictive Rules, the first of which forbids the General Conference ever to “revoke, alter, or change” the General Rules.

Read that sequence slowly. By 1808 American Methodism had placed an abolition clause in the only part of its constitution it had deliberately made unamendable. It had bound its own hands for freedom. And it still did not hold. Enforcement collapsed wherever slavery was profitable; bishops and conferences temporized; the “with an intention to enslave” wording was mined for exemptions. The contradiction could not be contained, and in 1844 it tore the church in two: the Plan of Separation, the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1845. The Southern church then altered or removed the rule its own constitution said could not be changed. The denominations did not reunite until 1939; the present text descends through that reunion and the 1968 union that formed the United Methodist Church. The clause survived. The unity it should have protected did not.

Lines of Interpretation

The disputed question here is not “is slavery wrong” — every line of the tradition now says yes. It is harder: what does it mean that the church wrote this and could not keep it, and how should that be read now?

Reformed

Tradition: natural law and natural rights; the higher law

Wesley’s own argument in Thoughts Upon Slavery is, structurally, a natural-law argument, and the Reformed natural-rights tradition reads the clause as positive law catching up to a justice already binding: liberty is a natural right “as much… as to the air they breathe,” and no human statute can validly transfer it.

Strengths

• Grounds the clause in a justice prior to and judging the church’s own legislation — exactly why its suspension was lawless, not merely unfortunate
• Explains why Wesley could call slavery sin before any rule said so

Weaknesses

• Natural-law confidence did not, historically, move the slaveholding conferences; the argument was available and ignored
• Can make the failure look like an intellectual lapse rather than a sustained, interested refusal

Evangelical

Tradition: the abolitionist awakening; Wilberforce, the Clapham conscience

The evangelical reading places the clause inside the great evangelical antislavery movement — Wesley’s dying letter to Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, the conviction that conversion obligates social action — and reads it as gospel producing abolition.

Strengths

• Historically true: evangelical conversion did drive real abolitionist courage, Wesley’s included
• Honors the clause as fruit of exactly the “desire of salvation… shown by its fruits” the document demands

Weaknesses

• The same evangelical church produced the slaveholding conferences; the movement cannot claim the clause without owning its betrayal
• Can flatter the tradition with its abolitionists while passing over the majority who accommodated

Liberation / the Black church

Tradition: the enslaved and freed reading; the church judged by its captives

The most searching reading comes from those the clause was about. Black Methodists — Richard Allen and the AME secession (1816), Zion, the freedpeople — read this clause as a promise the white church made and broke, and read the Black Methodist churches’ existence as the verdict: the rule was true, and the church that would not keep it had to be left so the rule could be lived.

Strengths

• Refuses the comfort of reading the clause apart from those it failed; makes the schism and the AME founding part of its meaning
• Reads the document the way the prophetic clause (“most generally practiced”) demands — from underneath

Weaknesses (of the church, not the reading)

• There is no weakness in the reading; the weakness it exposes is the church’s, and an honest annotation says so plainly
• Any attempt to “balance” this reading against the accommodationist one is itself the accommodation reasserting itself

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: repentance, apology, and reparative honesty

The contemporary reading treats the clause as a permanent summons to corporate repentance — the 2000 United Methodist act of repentance toward historically Black Methodist churches, ongoing reparative work — rather than as a moral trophy.

Strengths

• Keeps the clause active: not “we were right” but “we wrote it and failed it, and that failure has a present bill”
• Resists the museum reading the modern abbreviation invites

Weaknesses

• Apology can become its own evasion if it substitutes language for reparation
• “We have repented” can quietly reinstate the self-congratulation the clause’s history forbids

Wesleyan Voice

Here the empty seat of 1743 is filled, and it is filled with fire. What Wesley did not write into the Rules he wrote into Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774), and there is no gentleness in it. He demolishes the property argument: a man “can not sell himself to be a slave… what equivalent can be given for life or liberty?” He asserts the natural right without qualification — the African has “the same natural right” to “liberty itself… as an Englishman, and … sets as high a value” on it. He documents the atrocities from the slaveholders’ own laws and travelers’ accounts and refuses the reader the distance of abstraction: “mothers hanging over their daughters, bedewing their naked breasts with tears.” And he annihilates the one defense the trade actually lived by — it is necessary: “D—n justice: it is necessity,” he quotes the statesman, and then dismantles it line by line, ending where the whole catalog’s prophetic clause (“most generally practiced”) always pointed: the most profitable, most customary, most defended evil of the age is, for that very reason, the one the desire of salvation must cease first.

And Wesley did not soften with age; he sharpened. His last surviving letter, written four days before he could no longer write, was to William Wilberforce: “Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.” American slavery — named, in 1791, as the vilest. The founder’s dying word and the American church’s founding document point the same direction; the American church then spent seventy years not going there.

So the Wesleyan voice on this clause is double, and an honest annotation must hold both halves. The first: the clause is Wesley — it is Thoughts Upon Slavery and the Wilberforce letter made into binding rule, the American church writing its founder’s conscience into the one part of its law it could not later amend. That is to the American church’s lasting credit and it should be said. The second, and it must be said in the same breath: the church that wrote it did not keep it. It suspended it in 1785, mined it for exemptions, split over it in 1844, and let the Southern church delete what the constitution said was undeletable. The failure is not Wesley’s; he is on record, ferociously, decades early. The failure is the church’s, and the Wesleyan datum here is precisely the gap between the rule and the keepers — the same gap the 1743 absence first taught. A rule not written cannot bind; a rule written and not kept indicts. This clause has been, in its history, both.

Hymnody

There is, tellingly, almost no eighteenth-century white Methodist hymnody on slavery — the silence in the songbook matching the silence in the 1743 rule, and just as damning. What the church has to sing at this clause came from the people it failed. The Spirituals — “Go down, Moses… let my people go,” “Steal away,” “Oh freedom” — are the truest hymnic commentary the General Rules possess on this entry, sung by the enslaved within and against a church that had this clause in its book. The honest modern Wesleyan hymn at this point is not a triumph but a confession; where congregations now sing James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (“we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered”), they are letting the people the clause names supply the words the white church did not write. The right liturgical instinct here is the Athanasian one in a new key: at the gravest clause, the church does not get a hymn of its own virtue; the silence, and whose voices fill it, is the interpretation.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The first pastoral use is to refuse every available evasion, because this clause’s whole history is the history of evasions. Do not preach it as Methodist heroism (“we were abolitionists”): the church suspended the rule in 1785 and split rather than keep it in 1844. Do not preach it as embarrassing antiquity to be hurried past: it is constitutionally unalterable and still in the book. Do not preach it as resolved: the Black Methodist churches exist because it was not. The only honest homiletical use is the one the document’s own prophetic clause demands — this is the tradition’s standing proof that “the evil most generally practiced” is exactly the evil a respectable church will write a rule against and then arrange not to obey.

The second use turns the clause on the present, which is what makes it unbearable and necessary. Wesley’s principle — cease first the profitable, customary, defended harm — does not retire when one instance is (legally) ended. The clause’s permanent pastoral question is: what is, now, the harm this church has the words to condemn and the interests not to cease? A congregation that can lament 1844 with feeling and cannot ask that question of itself has learned nothing from the clause; it has only relocated to a later, more comfortable pew.

The third use is repentance that costs. The modern church’s act of repentance toward historically Black Methodism is right, and it is not finished by being spoken. The pastoral discipline this clause imposes is to keep apology tethered to reparation, lest “we have repented” become the last and smoothest of the evasions. The clause was written to be kept, not admired and not merely mourned. Its liturgical home is not a heritage moment; it is a confession, followed by amendment of life — which is, exactly, what the General Rules said the desire of salvation looks like when it is real.

Further Reading

• John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774) — the natural-right argument, the demolition of “necessity,” the documented atrocities
• John Wesley, letter to William Wilberforce, 24 February 1791 — his last: “American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun)”
• The 1780 Baltimore Conference minute; the 1784 Christmas Conference Discipline and its 1785 suspension
• The First Restrictive Rule (1808) — the General Rules made unalterable
• The 1844 Plan of Separation; the formation of the MEC, South (1845)
• Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors; the founding of the AME Church (1816)
• The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, vol. 9 — the recension history showing the clause’s American provenance
• Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists — Wesley’s antislavery and the early American church
• The United Methodist Act of Repentance toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous Peoples and the repentance toward Black Methodism — the clause as present obligation
• The prophetic clause this entry fulfills: [[general-rules/first-rule-do-no-harm]]
• The discipline this clause was meant to invoke, and did not: [[general-rules/the-closing-discipline]]