Caroline Winterer

So that's where we get the term black belt for the sort of layers of the lower south.

First, it refers to the black soil that is exceptionally rich.

And then eventually it begins to refer to the black people who work the land there.

It's a leap, but they are up against a growing number of northerners and former enslaved people themselves saying slavery is unjust.

It is a human rights violation and we need to get rid of slavery.

We know these people as the abolitionists and southern planters are grasping at straws.

Any argument that is going to justify slavery

The existence of four million slaves below the Mason-Dixon line.

And so if God made an ancient ocean and wants black people to work the land on that ancient ocean, so be it.

They form part of what's called the pro-slavery argument.

And it is preached from every pulpit in the South.

Yeah, you have to kind of simultaneously, you know, believe that the Genesis myth is maybe sort of true.

I mean, they're all, you know, Bible reading people.

But now alongside the Genesis story, there is the deep time story.

So that's, it is fascinating how we can carry multiple and in fact, contradictory stories in our heads at the same time.

By the end of the Civil War era, there are a growing number of evangelical Protestants who begin to push back against what they see as the sidelining of the Genesis story of creation.

So many, many Protestants say, yeah, I can do both, right?

I can read the Genesis story on Sunday, and then go out and dig for really ancient fossils on Monday and

Fine.

I have no problem with that because, you know, science, right?