Since its founding in 1770, religion and slavery worked together to construct the intellectual backdrop for academic life at the College of Charleston. The original bill that established what would become the College outlined the school as an Anglican institution requiring that the President of the school be “of the Religion of the Church of England”. Though this requirement was later dropped in the 1791 charter, many of the founding Board of Trustees members were invested both in the Church and in slavery as institutions, being slave owners, clergymen, or both (Easterby 11). The College directly benefited from the slave economy, and as such it offered a platform for racist arguments in favor of slavery and lent its academic legitimacy thereto. Protestantism served as a common cultural force across the South, and was frequently at the heart of arguments in favor of the antebellum social order.

President Bowen’s story is deeply tied to Robert Smith’s. In fact, Robert Smith had helped raise Bowen as a boy, and Smith was his mentor when he attended the College in the 1790s. It was only fitting, then, that Nathaniel Bowen would also grow up to become the Bishop of South Carolina and the President of the College in 1823.

In his role as the Bishop, Bowen published a pastoral letter on behalf of the Diocesan Convention of 1835. In it, he laid out a very thorough argument in favor of Christian Slavery. This letter largely restated the common apologetic arguments for slavery at the time and added to them a sort of handbook on how the Protestant Episcopal Church expected the conversion and religious education of slaves to occur.

Examples of the former included arguments that slaves led better lives in bondage than they would free in Africa, that Christian slaves were less likely to revolt (with special attention given to the insurrection Denmark Vesey planned still in recent memory for most Charlestonians), and that Christian slaves would work harder than their “heathen” counterparts (Bowen 5, 8, 11). The most novel point Bowen made in favor of educating slaves was that Methodists and Baptists already had large missionary programs, so the Episcopalians might as well work to Christianize slaves so that they will learn the proper form of Christianity rather than those Bowen saw as less orthodox (Bowen 29).

The more interesting part of the letter comes in the second half when Bowen outlined the techniques that should be used to instruct enslaved people in Christianity. The lessons were all oral because it was illegal to teach black people to read. Missionaries used illustrated cards to teach Bible stories to children. Otherwise, basic Church doctrine was to be taught from a Catechism and sermons were to be given on passages from the Bible. Additionally, Bowen included a number of New Testament passages that condoned slavery and defined how to be a so-called “good slave.” Please see the “President Bowen’s Bible” section of the site for a more detailed look at the latter part of this letter.

It’s important to remember that the College fit into a larger system of academic slavery apologetics that existed across the South in the Antebellum period. Smith and Bowen were not individual actors who supported the institution of slavery and happened to have roles at the College, but indeed, the College itself sought to uphold enslavement as a moral institution. Two brothers, James Warley and William Porcher Miles are perhaps the greatest examples of systematic, academic defenders of slavery, not only as professors at the College, but in the South as a whole.

James Warley Miles was an Episcopal priest who was active in Charleston’s literary scene, although he gave up preaching and writing to work as a professor of history and philosophy in 1850. His most famous book, Philosophic Theology; or, Ultimate Ground of all Religious Belief Based on Reason sought to harmonize Christian doctrine, European philosophy, and the Southern worldview. Miles cited the two creation myths in the book of Genesis as proof of a racist, pseudoscientific theory called polygenesis. He argued that the Bible proved that white people were created by God separately from other people who he saw as inferior. Philosophic Theology was a well-respected theological work that built its ideas on racism which demonstrates the way that universities in the South used scholarship and religion to defend enslavement.

William Porcher Miles graduated from the College before returning to his alma mater to teach mathematics in 1843. In a lecture he delivered to the Alumni Society in 1852, he outlined his social philosophy arguing “men are born neither Free nor Equal,” and no one should “make a Statesman of him who God intended should be a Ploughman” by which he meant enslaved people. Encoded in these words was a simple message: brutal forced labor was the essential and divinely ordained condition of enslaved people in the South, and subverting that fact would not only be unnatural, it would be immoral. His ideas on slavery were directly dependent on his religious views.

W.P. Miles took these opinions with him into the political realm too. He was elected Mayor of Charleston in 1855, Congressional Representative from the Lowcountry (where he made a name for himself as a radical slavery apologist known as a Fire-eater) in 1857, and then on to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1860. He also fought as a colonel in the Confederate Army to uphold the institution of slavery.

The College of Charleston and those affiliated with it fought literally and figuratively to preserve the institution of chattel slavery. The College provided a platform for an intellectual and moral justification of slavery, often weaving in broader religious aims such as evangelism or exploiting the ethical influence of the Bible in Antebellum America to further their economic and social goals. Not only were the constituent individuals invested in the institution of slavery, but the College itself relied on the work of enslaved bricklayers and money coming from private donations and the municipal coffers -- wealth that was largely made from the stolen labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Figures such as Nathanial Bowen and the Miles Brothers served as mouthpieces for the College, the Church, and the Antebellum South at large when they spoke in one voice in the defense of slavery.