To Preach Deliverance to the Captives: Freedom and Slavery in the Protestant Mind of George Bourne, 1780-1845

"George Bourne (1780-1845) was one of early American Republic's first immediate abolitionists, an influential figure who helped prepare the way for the campaign against slavery in the antebellum period. His radicalism, however, was tied to an ultra-Protestantism, at the center of which was a virulent hostility to Catholicism. Ryan McIlhenny's trenchant analysis of Bourne is among the first studies to focus on his complicated, if somewhat paradoxical, ideology by examining both his pioneering efforts in abolitionism as well as the development of his anti-Catholic writings in his approach to reform. In "To Preach Deliverance to the Captives," McIlhenny suggests that while Bourne presents a significant challenge for the contemporary mind because he was a traditionalist and a progressive, a liberal emancipationist and a religiously intolerant dogmatist, his beliefs offer a glimpse into a unique the nineteenth-century mentality. Bourne's commentary on a variety of controversial topics - he had strong opinionson slavery, race, and citizenship; the role of women; Christianity and republicanism; the importance of the Bible; and the place of the church in civil society - put him at the center of debates about these issues. Bourne remains a complex figure, a polymath situated within the political, social, and cultural possibilities indicative of the early Republic. He understood the developing nature of the young nation and was eager to play a part in shaping it. In this first-ever comprehensive assessment of Bourne, McIlhenny reveals that his religious radicalism, which drew on the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, gave shape to his hopes for an emerging post-revolutionary republic that would focus mainly on its religious foundations. The strength of the American nation, in Bourne's mind, rested not only on institutions indicative of a republican form of government but also on a pure Christianity, exemplified best in historical Protestantism. To Bourne, the nation depended not only on principles or institutions but on the activism of Protestant leaders like himself, guardians of what he believed was a pure and undefiled faith against the twin evils of slavery and Catholicism"--