Conscience and Slavery

Victor B. Howard asserts that northern evangelical Calvinists played a major role in mobilizing popular antislavery sentiment. He thus demolishes the claim, occasionally heard, that Calvinists were characteristically soft on slavery. Howard concentrates on the influential New School Presbyterians and Congregationalists who cooperated in evangelising the nation and attempting to shape its ethos, especially through the American Home Missionary Society and its rivals and offshoots.