One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Now that the abominable slave trade is no longer legalized; now that it is abolished and strictly prohibited by the general laws of Christendom, excepting Spain and Portugal: even now there are apostate Americans, who, sailing under Spanish and Portuguese colours, are robbing Africa of her sons and daughters and transporting them in fetters under every afflicting and appalling circumstance, to hopeless and most cruel servitude—even now there are American merchants, sitting in their counting room and coolly casting up their probable gains from such nefarious voyages, who, peradventure, on Sunday, appear at church with devout faces, and bow their heads at the name of Jesus!

  A scathing attack on religious hypocrisy, but also an affirmation of a set of beliefs previously regarded as barbarous, if not demonic, this passage proposed the unthinkable: Not only could Islam provide moral instruction to Christianity, perhaps Christians themselves had something to learn from the enslaved Muslims in their midst.

  After the story of Omar ibn Said became known—first in newspaper reports published in the 1830s, and then again when his Life was published in the English translation in 1848—the former fugitive slave became even more famous than he had been for filling the Fayetteville jail with Arabic graffiti.

  Now a frail old man who had spent decades in the United States, he happily met those who came to see him—journalists, missionaries, scholars, and the simply curious. He claimed that though he had lived half of his life as a Muslim, those days, and those beliefs, were long behind him. An 1837 article in the Boston Reporter hailed him as “A Convert from Mohammedanism” and devoted two columns to an exhaustive catalogue of his Christian virtues. A magazine reporter suggested in 1854 that anyone hoping to steal a glimpse of the “venerable coloured man” could find him in the local Presbyterian congregation, where he was “a consistent and worthy member.” Though he had been discovered in a church on the night he was returned to slavery forty-four years before, he now apparently sought out such “great houses” for comfort. “There are few Sabbaths in the year in which he is absent from the house of God,” the magazine writer noted.

  Perhaps unwittingly, Omar ibn Said was presented in the press as a “safe” Muslim to the Christian nation. It was surely not a coincidence that his story became known in the aftermath of a slave revolt in the Brazilian city of Bahia that focused the fears of slaveholders in the South and captured the imagination of the country as a whole. A report typical of the dozens that appeared throughout the winter and spring of 1835 was published in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Though far removed from the immediate threat of slave revolt, the piece described the events in Brazil in breathless detail: “On the morning of the 25th of January the whole city of Bahia was thrown into a state of the greatest excitement in consequence of an insurrection of the slaves of the Nagoa tribe, one of the bravest and most warlike of African slave nations. It was by far the best planned and most extensive rising ever contemplated by those unfortunate beings…”

  According to the estimates of the day, 800 to 1,000 African-born slaves, inspired by the teachings of local Muslim teachers, had armed themselves with swords and pikes and launched an organized assault directed not just at individual slaveholders but at the government and military support that made slavery possible. According to the Gloucester Telegraph, the targets of the attack included “the Barracks of the Municipal Guard, the Arsenal and lastly the Palace of the President.…”

  Later called the Malê rebellion—from the Yoruba word for Muslim—this slave uprising was Islamic not only in the sense that most of those who fought and died were followers of Muhammad (the Nagoa tribe mentioned—now known as Nagu—accounted for the majority of Muslims in Brazil); it was also regarded as a religious battle waged against Christian slavery. Many of the nearly two hundred dead were found to be wearing protective amulets made of leather pouches containing slips of paper upon which were inscribed Quranic verses much like those Omar ibn Said had written on his jailhouse walls. Armed with this spiritual protection, the Malês “displayed the greatest intrepidity and fearlessness,” the Telegraph continued, “many of them rushing on the bayonets when they found their project defeated, thus preferring death to continuance of slavery.”

  It was, in other words, every Christian slaveholder’s worst nightmare—a potential holy war on every plantation. Though the revolt was ultimately quashed, news of its religious motivation spread all over the United States. The terror it caused revealed that the desire to see Muslim slaves either freed and deported (as in the cases of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Abd al-Rahman) or converted and brought under the control of the slaveholders’ faith (as in the case of Omar ibn Said) were two means toward the same end: the eradication of Islam among the enslaved.

  In the shadow of the Brazilian revolt, Omar ibn Said was cast as a formerly Muslim slave now made harmless both physically and spiritually. He was given the folksy nickname “Uncle Moro”:

  Being of feeble constitution, Moro’s duties have been of the lightest kind, and he has been treated rather as a friend than a servant. The garden has been to him a place of recreation rather than toil, and the concern is not that he should labor more but less. The anxious effort made to instruct him in the doctrines and precepts of our Divine Religion have not been in vain. He has thrown aside the bloodstained Koran and now worships at the feet of the Prince of Peace.

  He was portrayed, in short, as everything the Muslim slaves of Bahia were not, and offered as living assurance to American slaveholders that such unpleasantness could not happen here.

  “Mohammedanism has been supplanted in his heart by the better faith in Christ Jesus,” his magazine biographer wrote. No longer a fugitive, he lived now “in the midst of a Christian family, where he is kindly watched over.” “Since his residence with General Owen,” another observer noted, “he has worn no bonds but those of gratitude and affection.”

  Of course, the Christian family who owned him never attempted to test this claim by setting him free.

  Omar ibn Said was ninety-three years old when the Emancipation Proclamation formally liberated the enslaved African Americans of the rebelling slave states. Yet because its effects were not immediately felt across the South, he did not live long enough to again live in submission only to God and the holy book of the Prophet. His words survived him, however, and soon came to seem prophetic.

  Within a year of his death in 1864, the city in which he had been jailed as a runaway slave fifty-four years earlier fell to General William Tecumseh Sherman as part of the Union army’s infamous scorched-earth campaign through the Carolinas. Fayetteville had grown considerably by then, and was home to an arsenal and rifle machining facility that was one of the Confederacy’s major sources of ammunition and small arms. “Since I cannot leave a guard to hold it,” Sherman wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant concerning the arsenal, “I therefore shall burn it, blow it up with gunpowder, and then with rams knock down its walls.” In recompense for the city’s reputation as a rebel stronghold, he also ordered the destruction of “railroad trestles, depots, mills, and factories,” calling for the “utter demolition” of entire neighborhoods and the wholesale pillage of the town for food and supplies. As one witness later remembered, before Sherman moved on, “the nights were made hideous with smoke.”

  Through this dark cloud of war, the flag of the United States again rose over the courthouse in which Omar ibn Said had never had a chance to plead his case. The Arabic verses he had written on the jail cell walls by then had been gone for more than half a century. Assuming the words he wrote then were similar to those he later committed to paper, he did not predict the destruction of this society built on the suffering of slaves. Nor did he plainly express hope that such destruction would come to pass. He did, however, ask questions fraught with the portent of prophecy:

  O people of America, O people of North Carolina…

  do you have a good generation that fears Allah so much?

  Turning the terms of his religious upbringing against the institutio
n of slavery, just as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass had done with theirs, he directed his most chilling challenge toward the nation that had become his own:

  Are you confident that He who is in heaven

  will not cause the earth to cave in beneath you,

  so that it will shake to pieces and overwhelm you?

  As Fayetteville shook with falling buildings and gunpowder blasts, and the peculiar institution of slavery crumbled on its cracked foundation, it was as if the city walls had finally succumbed to the weight of his prayers.

  The Hindu god Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi resting on Anata, the serpent without end. Illustration from Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature, and Art, by Johann G. Heck. New York: Rudolph Garrigue, 1851.

  CHAPTER 12

  Krishna’s Sisters

  1822–1893

  The Reverend Elijah Parish’s parsonage, in the village of Byfield, Massachusetts, was a wood-shingled embodiment of the religious legacy of New England. While it stood for more than two centuries as an undeniable monument to the influence and continuity of Puritanism in the American experience, it was also home to an accidental meeting of religious perspectives that shaped the radically pluralistic sensibility of the nation.

  Built in 1703, the parsonage housed the Congregational ministers of the village for generations. It played host to major religious figures of the colonial era (the spark of the First Great Awakening, the English preacher George Whitefield, was a friend of Rev. Moses Parsons, the village’s minister from 1744 to 1783) and even saw the birth of a drafter of the state constitution and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (Moses’s son Theophilus). The stubborn relevance of this humble pastor’s lodging—from the era of Cotton Mather, through the ages of religious revival and revolution, and into the nineteenth century when the separation of church and state was in theory the law of the land—suggests something of the spiritual inheritance of the young democracy. The descendants of men who had ruled in an openly theocratic society often rose to prominence in the secular framework that succeeded it.

  In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, everyone in the vicinity of Byfield would have known that the parsonage had a deep and significant history. To some it seemed haunted by it. As the poet Thomas Buchanan Read described it in verse (A modest building, somewhat gray / Escaped from time, from storm, disaster; / The very threshold worn away / With feet of those who sought the pastor…), the parsonage was a place that wore its past on its sleeve, evident for all to see. The three-story clapboard house stood behind a grove of ancient trees, which gave it the appearance of a ruin. It was said that when the branches of these trees were not fully spread with leaves, the stars shone through them like spirits staring down on the living souls who passed beneath.

  Even these spirits might have been surprised by the meeting that occurred between a pair of visitors to the parsonage in the spring of 1822. The first of these guests, a forty-six-year-old woman named Mary Moody Emerson, seemed initially not at all out of place, at least not in her appearance or her background. She had in fact stayed at Byfield before (“never was solitude better personified,” she said of the place). Moreover, she came from a long line of ministers, so she felt at home under Reverend Parish’s roof. Yet as she was stubbornly unmarried (having sworn fifteen years before “never to put that ring on”), and traveling alone on what she called a pilgrimage, she had an autonomy that seemed suspicious to many at the time. If questions arose concerning the propriety of her solo excursions around the region, she might have pointed out that she had been present in her infancy at the first skirmishes that won the nation its independence (her father, it was said, had carried her swaddled across the battlefield at Concord), and so she expected nothing less than independence for herself.

  As any who met her at the parsonage would have immediately realized, Mary Moody Emerson possessed a quick tongue, a quicker wit, and a peculiar demeanor. She stood just four foot three inches tall and kept her blonde hair cropped short, but lest anyone treat her as they might a child because of this, she became a master at challenging the expectations of others with little more than a glance. As one admirer noted, “Her blue eyes flashed like steel and stabbed like swords; she was expert in the look that demolishes.” In her later years, apparently impatient for death so that she might leave behind the bothersome attentions of the living, she was known to wear a long black veil, as if she did not trust her kin to fit her with a proper burial shroud. When her death finally did come, in 1863, a Boston newspaper remarked, “She was thought to have the power of saying more disagreeable things in a half hour than any person living.”

  A prototypical American eccentric, she was also, many of her contemporaries said, an undeniable genius. In her youth she had been formed by works ranging from the poet of the Enlightenment John Milton to the preacher of the Great Awakening Jonathan Edwards, as well as from the classical philosophy of Plato to the classical liberalism of John Locke, and of course her Bible. A devout Christian, she nonetheless inherited the tradition of “strange opinions” that had served as counterpoint to majority religious belief in New England from the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In another era she might have joined Anne Hutchinson in exile, or Mary Dyer on the gallows. Yet by the early nineteenth century, she was free to pursue her strange opinions with only the sniffing of polite society to fear—and she did not fear it in the slightest.

  All of this made Mary Moody Emerson particularly receptive to the second unusual guest to arrive at Reverend Parish’s parsonage that season. He arrived about a month after she did—fortuitously, as Mary was beginning to find that her host’s orthodoxies were wearing thin. Though this second visitor’s name is lost to history, we know that he had recently come from India. “Our Stranger,” Mary would later call him.

  The Reverend Parish had traveled the globe as a missionary. He counted himself not only a preacher but a historian of world cultures, even something of a geographer, providing his less well-informed neighbors with descriptions of the terrain and organization of far-flung lands. In his sermons he regularly expressed his thoughts on the great variety of nations and beliefs that had not yet had the good fortune, as he and his congregants of the Byfield church would have seen it, to embrace the Gospel. If any home in New England should play host to such an exotic figure as a man from the region then sometimes called Hindustan, it would have been Parish’s parsonage.

  In all of the reverend’s recorded thoughts on the subject of “the Hindoos,” however, he does not give the impression that he would welcome one of them into his home. “If you sail to India, you may see sixty millions of people bowing to thirty millions of gods,” he once preached. “You may see a system of morals which strike the mind with horror; you may see infants murdered by their parents; you may see their sick friends deserted to die alone; you may see the widows burning in the same fires with their husbands.”

  According to the theory Reverend Parish had cited in his book Sacred Geography, a “gazetteer” of all the places mentioned or alluded to in the Bible, India was a land settled by Ham, a son of Noah, following the biblical flood.

  “Noah foretold that the children of Ham would be servants of servants,” he reported. As a result, “this country has been inhabited from the earliest antiquity by a people who have no resemblance, either in their figure or manners with any of the nations contiguous to them; though different conquerors have established themselves at different times, and in various parts of India; yet the aboriginal inhabitants have lost very little of their original character.” It was, he notes, a place “where the primitive religion and languages of the Hindoos prevail at this day.”

  This of course was the reason Christian missionaries like himself traveled there, secure in their belief that bringing the light of Jesus Christ to a people still in darkness was a glory all its own. Yet to an extent rarely realized at the time, mission work was often a two-way street. Parish expressed some surprise at the
areas of overlap between the supposedly heathen beliefs he had hoped to expunge from the earth and those with which he hoped to replace them. Of the biblical story of the ancient grudge between the serpent and humanity, in which it was said that the two species were doomed to an endless cycle of animosity in which man would crush the serpent’s head and the serpent would bite the son of man’s heel, Parish’s gazetteer proposed: “Much the same notion, we are informed, is prevalent in the mythology of the Hindoos. Two sculptured figures are yet extant, in one of their oldest pagodas, the former of which represents Chreeshna, an incarnation of their mediatorial God, Vishnu, trampling on the crushed head of the serpent; while in the latter, it is seen encircling the deity in its folds, and biting his heel.”

  There was, the preacher grudgingly admitted, some connection between this backward people and those he considered by God’s grace to possess the true faith. It was precisely on this subject that “Our Stranger” was invited to discourse at the parsonage.

  With a former missionary and the pugnacious daughter of a long line of unyielding Puritans looking on, the guest from India presented his audience with images of the god Vishnu in various forms. The collection of icons he showed them is usually called the Dashavatara, in which a sky-blue deity is depicted alternately with the swinging tail of a fish or a whale, with the bared teeth of a ferocious jungle cat, with the shell of a tortoise, and with the tusks of a boar. In other images he is represented as Rama, as Krishna, as Buddha, and as a dwarf. The Dashavatara is a visual representation of the core truth of Hinduism: that divinity exists in all manner of manifestations.

  There is no record of what Reverend Parish thought of this display. Yet something in these images apparently touched Mary Emerson deeply. Her faith as a Christian was not shaken by the Dashavatara or the accompanying explanations of devotion in a radically different context. On the contrary, she saw in this diversity of faith an affirmation of her own, not at the expense of the other but as its complement. She recognized in it something akin to the classical mythology that was then part of every well-rounded education; but more than this, Our Stranger’s display seemed to point to something beyond the flawed deities sung about by the poets of the Romans and the Greeks. To her surprise, this story of Vishnu presented aspects of God she counted among her own beliefs.