The most devout slaveholders were reputedly the most brutal slavers
Evidence
Douglass is also clear that his experience of the impact of Christian piety on Auld was not an exception but rather the rule among slaveholders. When Auld found Douglass to be insufficiently servile, he was sent as punishment to live with Edward Covey, who was known in the area for two things: as the area’s “nigger breaker” and as “a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church.” A frequent visitor to Auld’s house was Reverend Rigby Hopkins, an ordained minister in the Reformed Methodist Church, who boasted frequently of his slave management tactic of issuing regular, preemptive whippings of his slaves. He had such a fierce reputation that his household was known among slaves as the worst in the area. Yet, as Douglass notes, “there was not a man any where round [sic], who made higher professions of religion, or was more active in revivals—more attentive to the class, love-feast, prayer and preaching meetings, or more devotional in his family—that prayed earlier, later, louder, and longer—than this same reverend slave-driver, Rigby Hopkins.” — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 249
Categorization
- CANDY: The image of a Methodist ‘pious soul’ class-leader working as the region’s ‘nigger breaker’ is a tight, grim conversational detail.
- XREF: connects to: Slaveholder religious conversion made slave treatment harsher, not gentler. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 245; Religious slaveholders were judged the cruelest of all by enslaved people — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 250; Religious conversion made slaveholders more cruel, not less — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 246 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Religious slaveholders were judged the cruelest of all by enslaved people
#corroborates(0.92) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 250 - Enslaved people regarded religious masters as the worst masters
#corroborates(0.90) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 250 - Religious conversion made slaveholders more cruel, not less
#corroborates(0.88) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 246 - Religion supplied slaveholders moral sanction rather than conscience for cruelty
#expands(0.85) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 246