One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  “You are answerable,” Jefferson concludes, “not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.”

  This was the kind of practical pluralism one can see also in his formal position on religious freedom, which became the official position of the nation as well. Crafted in collaboration with James Madison, the First Amendment’s notion that one could neither prescribe nor proscribe religion, in the words of constitutional scholar John Witte, echoes precisely the two points made in his more personal advice to his nephew. For all to be considered, all must be allowed.

  This was not unlike the stipulation he made with regard to his library. In order to have even a single one of his books, he stressed, Congress had to accept the lot. Undoubtedly there was an element of pragmatism in this: It would be far easier for an older gentleman to have a roomful of books packed and shipped than for him to pick through the collection volume by volume. But there was also perhaps something more significant in his desire to keep his library complete: a recognition that books—like beliefs, ideas, and the people who hold them dear—mean nothing in isolation. It is only through their interaction with each other that they may prove their worth.

  Among the thousands of volumes pulled by oxcart from the hilltop of Monticello to the newly restored Capitol, only one was by Jefferson himself. Notes on the State of Virginia stands alone as the collection of Jefferson’s writings that he allowed to be published in his lifetime. In these Notes, first published in 1787, Jefferson divided his thoughts on his home state—which was to him something of an America in miniature—into twenty-three categories, or queries, taking each in turn to create a kind of encyclopedia of a place, its past, and its potential. The section on religion, more than any other piece of his writing, captures the purpose and possibilities of spiritual diversity as he understood it.

  Jefferson is often remembered as an avatar of a kind of “live and let live” pluralism that encouraged a form of indifference about the beliefs of others. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, he saw that religious systems inevitably and necessarily interact with each other in ways at once contentious, intimate, and transformative. Assessing the function of religious difference in his young country, he wrote, “the several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.”

  Censor morum: a moral censor. The medieval implications of the phrase bring to mind an Inquisition staffed with busybody Torquemadas annihilating variety and shutting down discourse in the name of the public good—precisely the kind of role Congressman King from Massachusetts proposed to play in removing objectionable material from Jefferson’s library. Yet Jefferson’s meaning, like his theology, was broader than that. For each sect to be a moral censor of the others around it is not a call for mere tolerance. It is a recognition that faiths do not exist in a vacuum. They exist only in relation to each other. They change and grow, live and die, through adaptation, competition, imitation, and assimilation.

  Elsewhere in the query on religion found in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson writes, “Let us reflect that the Earth is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.” Not only is this an argument that those in the religious majority might have something to learn from those living on the margins of the dominant faith, it is an argument that, in fact, all faiths are marginal. Each on its own is just one in a thousand. Yet joined together in a community of faiths, and of belief and unbelief, each can somehow become part of something grander, ennobled through moments of interaction and transformation.

  “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no gods; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson famously said. Considered on its own, this again might seem nothing more than benign disinterest. But in the context of his full understanding of religion, he seems here to suggest that not only does it do no injury if your neighbor believes in twenty gods or none, it may in fact do you some good. Whether you look across the fence and discover the one God brought by the Puritans or the thirty-seven Native American gods encountered by Roger Williams, the hinted atheism of William Livingston or the unabashed blasphemy of Jacob Lumbrozo, these beliefs transform each other through their interaction. And those who hold them cannot help but be changed as well.

  If General Ross’s burning of the original Congressional Library was necessary to have such heretical ideas enshrined within the Capitol, it may have been worth the price. However, it would be a mistake to overpraise Jefferson’s notion of religious liberty without remembering an unfortunate truth. Though he championed loosening the spiritual strictures that bound all humanity, he believed physical freedom was unalienable only for some.

  Omar ibn Said. (University of North Carolina Libraries)

  CHAPTER 11

  O People of America!

  1810–1865

  In a faded photograph of the nineteenth-century Cumberland County jail, the squat assemblage of thick walls and barred windows stands like a child beside the more imposing courthouse that dominated the public square of Fayetteville, North Carolina. On the day in 1810 when an escaped slave found himself standing in front of these two buildings, the local authorities pushed him toward the former without hesitation. As far as his captors were concerned, runaways had no right to expect due process or legal protection. Even if he had been given the chance to plead his case, he would have found it impossible. Inside a courtroom, he would have understood neither the words spoken by the judge nor those within the book upon which he might have placed an oath-swearing hand. He was no stranger to laws, but his were found in another scripture, formed of another tongue.

  His home for the foreseeable future, he soon discovered, was a dirty cell, its floor blackened with the dust of charcoal shards that fueled the sooty fires that in the colder months provided prisoners with their only source of warmth. As he awaited his fate—most likely an unwelcome reunion with Mr. Johnson of Charleston, from whose cruel treatment he had fled four weeks before—he passed the days as he had throughout his life: with prayer.

  Decades earlier he had learned the proper way to express submission to God: Five times through the day a man should fall to his knees, press his forehead to the ground, and speak words in the language of the Prophet.

  It was his devotion, in fact, that had caused him to be captured. After his escape from Johnson’s farm, he had wandered in fright across much of the Carolinas, sleeping where he could, living on whatever found sustenance tobacco country could provide. He was somewhere on the northern side of the border between the two states, almost three hundred miles from where he had started, when he looked to the evening sky and noted it was a new moon. According to his faith, this was a sight that marked the beginning of things, a period of reflection and thankfulness, no matter one’s present circumstances. As he walked, he had spotted what seemed to him a few “great houses,” as he would later call them, in which it seemed no one lived. They were clearly gathering places, possibly sites of worship not too dissimilar from those he had known in his youth. He approached one of them with the hope that he had found shelter for his prayers.

  At the time he had been taken from his homeland, three years before, he was already a man of middle age. His name, then, had been Omar ibn Said. Thirty-seven years old, set in his ways, he had been well instructed in the tenets of his faith. From boyhood, he had walked each morning to the mosque, where he washed his face and neck, his hands and wrists, his feet and ankles, all in preparation for coming before the presence of the divine. Before he was forced to scurry anonymously in the Carolina darkness, he had been a pillar of his community, a man who lived in the open in the country of the Fula people, in what is now Senegal.

  In that other life, he had given tithes—gold and silver, livestock and grains—to support the less fortunate, and at the time he had never imagined he would one day count himself among them. A man of means and of family, he had five sisters and five
brothers, one of whom was a learned scholar who had taught him to read and write in the manner of their holy book. So instructed, he himself had become a teacher of religion to the youth of his village.

  “Then there came to our country a big army. It killed many people,” he later recalled. “It took me, and walked me to the big sea, and sold me into the hand of a Christian man, who bought me and walked me to the big ship in the big sea. We sailed in the big sea a month and a half until we came to a place called Charleston. And in a Christian language, they sold me.”

  It had taken years, but finally he had managed to free himself from the one who had bought him. The “weak, small, evil man called Johnson,” he remembered, was “an unbeliever who did not fear God at all.” With the distance between himself and the man he called a kafir, an infidel, growing with every step, he was not without reason to be grateful. Aware of the new moon through its seeming absence, just as he was aware of Allah, he knew the prayers fitting for the occasion, which could not have seemed more appropriate to a man stolen from the country of his birth, unimaginably reduced from his former stature.

  “I have faith in Him who lights up the darkness through thee, illuminates jet-black shadows by thee,” the new moon prayers declare to the moon itself, “and humbled thee through increase and decrease, rising and setting, illumination and eclipse.”

  Omar ibn Said slipped into one of the great houses under the cover of the dark new moon night. He might have merely rested and passed a few hours there unnoticed before moving on, but a boy who lived nearby saw him and rode off to report to his family that an escaped slave—the bogeyman of southern fantasies—was hiding in their church. The boy and his father returned on horseback with dogs and reinforcements, a miniature militia that seized Omar ibn Said and marched him twelve miles to the jail in Fayetteville.

  Despite the bitter disappointment of capture, and the inevitable terror at the prospect of being sent back to the evil place from which he had escaped, Omar ibn Said endured his latest imprisonment with apparent equanimity. He fell back on the solace of prayer, and turned to the walls around him as another venue for his devotion. Among the ashy cinders that littered the floor, he found a piece of coal large enough to hold between his fingers like a calligrapher’s pen. With it, he began to inscribe the walls with thoughts and verses in a language he had not spoken to any person since before he had been taken. The words he wrote were, to him, as sacred as any that might be found in Fayetteville’s Bibles.

  As he decorated his walls with Arabic script—most likely snippets of prayer and Quranic chapters, or suras, given the type of religious education he had received—it fell to his jailer, Cumberland County sheriff Robert Mumford, to find a way to dispose of this unusual fugitive. Word had begun to spread of the dignified man redecorating the jail cell with coal-black strokes that might have looked to the locals like sketches of fish hooks strung with cat gut lines. Gawkers came to get a closer look, to see the spectacle of an African writing words his supposed betters could not understand. The small lockup was becoming more of a gallery than a jail, and Sheriff Mumford had to do something about it.

  It was common practice at the time to post notices in the local press of runaway slaves, both those who remained at large and those who had been caught and held awaiting their masters’ claims of lost property. If Mumford had checked the local papers, he would have read dozens of advertisements either in search of wayward humans or reporting their capture, each cataloguing the appearance and effects of desperate men and women like an immoral lost and found. On one page of an 1810 edition of the Raleigh weekly The Star, for example, Mumford would have seen these notices a few inches apart:

  Run-Away: A Negro man named Prince, about five feet eleven inches high, twenty-one years of age; had on when he went away a white furred hat, a light mixed cotton coat, cotton shirt, white & striped over-alls, and walks with a halt which is occasioned by his having had his right thigh broke, and is shorter than the other.

  Runaway: A Negro man named Emanuel… He is about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high, stout made, is of a dark copper colour, has lost two of his fore teeth, has a bold look, speaks quick with great confidence.

  Capture of either Prince or Emanuel, the paper reported, offered a twenty-dollar reward.

  Interspersed with such runaway announcements were other notices, usually printed at the request of jailers like Mumford, providing information about African Americans who had been apprehended as probable escapees. With phrases such as “Passing himself as a free man,” these reports fostered suspicion even of those who had managed to win their release from bondage, sometimes resulting in the reenslavement of recently liberated men and women who had believed their new freedom irreversible.

  In the case of either type of advertisement, a crude depiction of a man was frequently shown beside the descriptive text. If the fugitive’s whereabouts remained unknown, the image showed a silhouette of a body in motion, one arm forward, one leg back, a stick-and-parcel sack on his shoulder, a jaunty hat on his head, as if the image of a slave unrestrained and moving with apparent speed through the countryside would be enough to stir the citizenry to action. If the runaway had been caught, this same figure was shown shorn of his hat, stick, and parcel—all those symbols of his illicit and frightening autonomy. In these images, the recaptured fugitive is reduced to little more than an inked slash on the page, his bowed head barely a serif on a narrow line.

  Placing such an ad in the Raleigh Star or the Fayetteville Observer surely would have been the protocol for Omar ibn Said, as with any other black man the sheriff had found unable or unwilling to account for his freedom. Yet Mumford had not been able to glean anything about who this fugitive was, where he had come from, or whose supposed property he might be. With no way to communicate, no mention of him in the press, and no one arriving at the jailhouse to claim him as their own, little could be known about him. He apparently knew no English and, except for the foreign warbling of his prayers, seemed disinclined to speak.

  He was not without obvious talents, however, as the growing numbers of visitors to the jail attested. The markings he made in his cell perhaps held an unexpected, exotic beauty for the residents of Fayetteville. Because the practice of importing slaves directly from Africa had been outlawed three years before, he was the last of his kind that many in Fayetteville were likely see, which only heightened his mystery.

  When the crowd at the jail got to be too much, Sheriff Mumford decided he had waited long enough. He knew what to do with his prisoner. With an impatient mob outside, the sheriff made a rash decision to take matters into his own hands, and allowed a hurried removal of the accused black man from his cell.

  Such a scene has played out with horrific consequences throughout the nation’s history, often ending with a stout tree branch and a deadly stretch of rope. After he had led Omar ibn Said from his cell, however, Mumford did what no white small-town sheriff in the mythology of the South had ever done: He brought him home.

  Unlike the overwhelming majority of the half-million men, women, and children of African descent who were brought against their will to North America from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the escaped slave who found his way to Sheriff Mumford’s jail left a record of his life, composed at the request of his eventual owners. His brief autobiography—The Life of Omar ibn Said, Written by Himself—allows us a window into the inhumanity of slavery. It also reveals the estrangement of those marginalized by race and faith in a nation that often used religion to justify the practice of treating human beings as property.

  Yet while Omar ibn Said’s autobiography is singular—the only extant personal history written in Arabic by an American slave—his life was not. He was but one of the perhaps 20 percent of African-born men and women who were followers of Islam before losing their faith and their history when transported as captives first to the English colonies and later to the young United States. Their presence is affirmed in documents dated more than one hundred years before
Omar ibn Said’s arrival, as in a Virginia law of 1682 which referred to “negroes, moores, molatoes, and others, born of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan, and Mahometan parentage and country” who “heretofore and hereafter may be purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned, as slaves.”

  In an era of fracturing traditional affiliations and endless schisms among the newly established churches, the number of Muslims brought to this predominantly Christian land would have rivaled the populations of many Christian denominations in eighteenth-century America. In fact, to compare several groups that have historically faced discrimination at the hands of the majority religious culture, the number of Muslims in the newly independent United States would likely have dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews through the early years of Omar ibn Said’s life. Considered another way: While Muslims accounted for less than 1 percent of the total population of the United States in 2010, enslaved Africans with a connection to Islam likely made up more than 5 percent of the population two hundred years before.