How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery

[struggle4progress]

39. That the First Arkansas used the Say Brothers tune for their marching tune

strongly suggests that the hymn was already known in the black community; and that fact might affect the meaning of the use of the tune in John Brown's Body. That Howe set out to rewrite John Brown's Body is well-known and leaves no doubt that her hymn is abolitionist in its intent

So this little sequence nicely suggests the abolitionist hymn tradition, in which the publisher Garrison participated, as well as the theological underpinnings of Brown's suicidal rebellion, and it shows some connections to the black community, stretching from the time before to the time after

This provides multiple independent lines of evidence against the view you suggest in your OP, that "religion" is responsible for slavery --- and therefore, of course, some people will screech that such evidence is "spam" or "gish gallop"