1 Taylor Ellis Professor Wing HIST 490 24 April 2019 The Curse of Ham and the White Man Interpretation of the Bible The abolition of the Slave Trade and eventually slavery itself was influenced by many reasons, including morals, money, and Christian religion. While all of these played a role in abolition in some way, the Christian religion plays one of the most complex roles in abolition. In the Jewish and Christian religions, the Bible is seen as a trustworthy historical document of the beginning of time. Within this document, there are many stories of slavery and freedom. While religious scholars, theologians, Christian pastors, and society as a whole debate about whether the Bible is pro slavery or anti-slavery, it is clear that slavery has been around since the time of Moses and is prevalent throughout the Old and New Testaments. In this paper, I do not plan to prove that the Bible is either for or against slavery. Instead, I plan to show how the Bible has been historically interpreted in different ways to support both sides. While people in our modern society can decide for themselves how they feel about what the Bible says about slavery, historically, white people have determined what the Bible says about slavery and used it to first justify slavery and the Slave Trade, and then to abolish both. Before the abolition of slavery and the Slave Trade, white Europeans and Americans decided what passages of the Bible they would use in order to justify their wicked ways of enslavement, using primarily the Curse of Ham, found in Genesis. While white Europeans believed Africans were inferior to them, they still believed in “Christianizing” them and letting them read just enough of the Bible for them to be saved and understand the importance of their servitude. The idea that the Curse of Ham