Immigrant Abolitionists

How pietistic Swedish and Norwegian Americans (sometimes) fought against slavery

On April 14, 1865 the United States flag again flew over Fort Sumter, almost exactly four years after its surrender to Confederate troops marked the beginning of the American Civil War. Present were the fort’s original commander, Robert Anderson, who raised the Stars and Stripes, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, who gave a speech, and a Union naval officer who recalled feeling in that moment “that it had been a sublime calling to wield the sword in the great war by which the shackles of four million slaves had been stricken off forever.”

That officer’s name was John Alexis Edgren. Six years later he would found the tiny Baptist seminary that grew into Bethel University, my employer of the last twenty years. It’s not as compelling a story as Jonathan Blanchard making Wheaton College a stop on the Underground Railroad, but I’ve always appreciated that Bethel’s founder was a Swedish immigrant so appalled by slavery that he would delay his calling to ministry and risk his very life in order to demolish it.

As a new book reminds us, Edgren wasn’t alone among Scandinavian immigrants in going to war for that reason, though future generations of Swedish and Norwegian Americans would come to embrace the same racial prejudices as other European Americans.

Edgren as he looked on the eve of the Civil War - Bethel Digital Library