fired up by the preaching of the Wesleys, Whitefield, Harris, and their heirs and successors, fomented a social revolution that transformed much of the social structure, and part of that transformation was the abolition of slavery. The result was that in the minds of countless observers, virulent Christianity was associated with the front end of healthy social change. The slave trade across the Atlantic was largely stopped, long before the Civil War, by British gunboats (as they also stopped the