The Poison Book Analysis

We have Douglass and Garnet, both African Americans, as they face in a debate related to a campaign to request money to send Bibles to the slaves of the South. Lincoln wanted to achieve a union between the South and the North, and to achieve its purpose he use the argument that both, people of the South and the North read the same Bible and pray to the same God. The Bible is a set of books that contain the word of God, include rules and doctrines to follow to behave in the best way. Blacks and whites interpret the Bible differently and adjust it to their personal ideals and beliefs. In The Poison Book, Callahan offers us many examples of how blacks and whites interpreted the Bible and how these interpretations were applied at the convenience

Although the Bible was the same and both prayed to a God, the interpretation they gave of the teachings and the readings of the Bible were different. The curse of Canaan and his descendants was related to the issue of servility and slavery, the whites used this relationship as a justification that God was in accordance with slavery. As Callahan mentioned in The Poison Book, “Jefferson Davis defended chattel slavery and the foreign slave trade as the “importation of the race of Ham,” fulfillment of Africans’ destiny to be “servants of servants.” They used this text to defend slavery and that blacks had been destined to be slaves. The most important teaching of whites to Christianize blacks was the importance of obedience. The blacks did not believe in what the whites preached. According to Sarah Fitzpatrick, a black slave, she said that on Sunday the whites wanted them to go to church, to Sunday school and to read the Catechism, but on Monday there was no comparison with them, if they did not obey they punished them. She believed that all of Christianity was to try that the blacks thinks that white were good people, when in fact they were not. The blacks do not stay behind, they use the texts of the bible for their own interpretation of the story, for example the Southern African American preacher says that “got so scared that his hair stand straight and his face turn right pale — and sisters and brothers, there am what the first white man come