After the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison framed the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the law that did away with all established churches and served as the intellectual foundation for the First Amendment. “God Almighty hath created the mind of man free,” began the two slave owners, and so man’s government was not to impose any specific religious dogma on its citizens. But white evangelicals, prime beneficiaries of the disestablishment of the state churches that had characterized most of the prerevolutionary colonies, increasingly concluded that God Almighty was just fine with keeping the bodies of some men and women unfree. Many of the early white Baptists in Virginia had moved to Kentucky to escape religious persecution. But those same people, charged Kentucky Baptist minister David Barrow, saw no sin in separating “husband and wife”—indeed, they did so “without the least apparent signs of fellow feeling.” William Thompson, enslaved in Virginia, remembered how the hypocrisy of “Christian” enslavers had spoiled his taste for evangelical religion: “I went to meeting on a Sunday after I had seen the gang chained, but the preaching did me no good.” In Virginia, before the beginning of the forced migrations west, one-quarter of all Methodists had been black. In Kentucky, only 10 percent were. On Sundays at Congaree, where Charles Ball lived in South Carolina, an enslaved migrant from Virginia named Jacob led religious meetings—but most of Wade Hampton’s captives preferred to spend the Sabbath raiding orchards for fruit to supplement their limited diets. And when Betsey Madison, a Virginia woman transported to Natchez in the 1790s, tried to spread her version of the faith, cotton planters tried to stop her from preaching. As Ball noted, enslavers feared that slaves “may imbibe with the morality . . . the notions of equality and liberty, contained in the gospel.”51
Yet the power of African-influenced spiritual practices was too useful for white preachers to resist the temptation to borrow. African-American participation on the frontier would thus ultimately reshape the religious dynamic of the entire United States. In the summers of 1800 and 1801, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist ministers in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky led a series of dramatic revivals. Thousands of free white and enslaved black settlers fell on church floors or wandered around shouting and jumping and praising God. They spilled out of the doors until the ministers decided to move their services outside. At the Cane Ridge meeting in August 1801, 10,000 attendees exploded into seven days of mass conversions, accompanied by fainting, ecstatic dance, visions, and unconsciousness.52
Soon, similar revivals broke out across slavery’s frontier, dramatically increasing church membership in all denominations. Critics scoffed: “Some came to be at the camp meeting / And some perhaps to get good eating,” rhymed a skeptical attendee; and as the preacher’s tempo mounted, “the altar soon was filled with lasses / Some kicked so high they showed their a—.” Enslaved migrants’ influence also began to gall some observers. From “the blacks’ quarter” of revival camps, complained Methodist John Watson, came Saturday-night music turned to religious purpose: extemporaneous verses “sung in the merry chorus-manner of the southern . . . husking-frolic method.” Singers stomped rhythms, “the steps of actual negro dancing.” We cannot “countenance or tolerate such gross perversions of true religion!”53
As mass revival and emotional individual conversion on the frontier reverberated back East, one could argue that enslaved migrants’ influence was expanding, too. Especially after the Cane Creek revivals, a long-lasting nationwide boom of evangelical conversion transformed the American religious landscape. From zero in 1770, the number of Methodists in the United States climbed to a quarter million by 1820, and doubled in the next decade. From 1790 to 1820, the number of Baptist churches exploded, from 500 to 2,500. In some ways the process initiated by this evangelical take-off continued all the way into the twenty-first century. Continuously seeking new adherents—often by utilizing the most “modern” tools of marketing to spread their message—evangelicals have inhabited a process of constant transformation. True believers’ competing claims have led to constant denominational splintering among evangelicals, with each group typically insisting that it possessed a truer fundamentalism than any other and that it was rebuilding the “primitive church” of Jesus’s first followers. By the early twenty-first century, believers around the world had, in this process of creative destruction, created more than 30,000 Protestant denominations, most of which were born in the United States. Evangelical Protestantism claimed almost as many adherents worldwide as Catholicism or Islam. A young tradition, created in large part on slavery’s frontier out of elements that included a healthy dose of West African religious practices, has become one of the most influential cultural exports in world history.54
Back to the early nineteenth century, however, and to an encounter between a white man and Pompey, a black Methodist preacher in Mississippi. Why, asked the white man, did the enslaved man sing hymns all day? “It makes my soul so happy,” Pompey responded. “You simpleton,” replied the white man. “A negro has no soul.” New evangelical denominations have always drawn converts from the poor and the excluded—as in early twenty-first-century Brazil, for instance—because emotional conversion experiences and informal participatory services treat disempowered people as if they have souls equal in value to those of the powerful. Yet one of the fracture lines along which evangelical Protestant denominations have split has been the question of whether believers like Pompey should challenge structures of worldly power.
The “perfectionist” evangelicals who began to create and support moral reform movements in the North after 1830, including the new abolitionism, insisted that Jesus’s instruction—“Feed my sheep”—required believers to improve their society and protect the weak from the sins of the strong. In the slave society, however, official theology’s social prescription was slowly bent to a different frame. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, as conversion experiences and churchgoing became the expected thing for proper white citizens, most Christianized enslavers abandoned the claim that African Americans had no souls to be saved. Thus, they had to “consider the dreadful responsibility,” as a Methodist minister told Natchez whites, that they “would incur if [they] prevented the Negroes from hearing the message sent by our gracious Creator to the whole family of the human race.” From 1800 to the 1820s, mixed black-and-white frontier congregations emerged, and they welcomed new African-American members. When “Adam[,] a black brother,” joined Louisville Baptist Church in Mississippi, all the members—white and black—greeted him with “the right hand of fellowship.” As churches multiplied, more enslaved people could avoid worshipping with their masters on the Sabbath.55
“However sable their hue and degraded their condition in life,” a group of Mississippi Baptist preachers reminded their fellow enslavers, enslaved African Americans “possess rational and immortal souls.” Yet the pull of slavery distorted white evangelicals’ theology, and by the 1820s whites in biracial churches were deleting rituals that recognized recently joined African Americans as “brother” and “sister.” After the Missouri crisis, touchy enslavers claimed that a “Christian,” paternalistic slavery would counter criticism of the South. Along with neutralizing the bad odor of the whipping-machine, ministers writing in new denominational magazines insisted that conversion to white-authenticated Christianity would not infect enslaved people with the idea that Jesus came to set the captives free. Instead, they generated a tame theology that was in many ways the Calvinist opposite of the early slave-frontier revivals, with their emphasis on a believer’s decision to ask for forgiveness and faith. Even as famous northern evangelical Charles Finney told tens of thousands of converts in 1820s Erie Canal boomtowns that they could choose to turn to God for salvation, Mississippi Baptists were trying to ensure that the enslaved believed that nothing important in heaven or on earth was up to their choosing. God himself, the Baptists’ state convention announced, had established their bondage: “However dark, mysterious, and unpleasant these dispensat
ions may appear to you we have no doubt they are founded in wisdom and goodness.” “The great God above has made you for the benefit of the Whiteman, who is your law maker and law giver,” a Kentucky captor preached to his human property, whom he had gathered in his yard for his Sunday morning sermon.56
Enslaved people, however, believed otherwise. In 1821, one Georgia slave wrote a letter to a white preacher. “If I understand the white people,” he wrote, “they are praying for more religion in the world.” Well then, “If god sent you to preach to sinners did he direct you to keep your face to the white people constantly or is it because they give you money?” “We are carried to market and sold to the highest bidder,” and whites “never once inquire whither you are sold, to a heathen or a Christian?” Yet enslaved people continued to flock to churches, even if ministers turned their backs on them, and to hold their own religious meetings as well. For in the story of Jesus, believers found kinship and a promise. Jesus was a god made mortal, a wrongly captured man who endured torture and violent death. Forced migrants already knew what it was like to journey into a grave. But the story told them that Jesus had risen from his tomb and returned to tell the captives of a new kingdom whose gate he had opened.57
So now one understands how that teenaged girl, the one interviewed as an old woman, had come to be in a Tennessee prayer meeting. She was agonizing over her future, specifically, over her inability to protect her first child, who had just been born, from violence, hunger, and separation. And one understands why, when the girl heard a voice no one else could hear and rose up from her knees in wonder, her own mother rushed to her side to guide her to the edge. “Pray on, daughter,” she remembered the older woman telling her, “for if the Master has started to working with you, he will not stop until he has freed your soul.” The mother had already traveled this road, and she pushed her fearful daughter against all the impending crucifixions she’d have to survive. “It wasn’t long,” the daughter remembered, before, collapsing to the ground, “I died.”58
She fell into an abyss. But as the young woman plunged, a different voice, a new one, breathed in her ear. It told her that the thefts in her own life, and her own transcendence of them, mattered. Both, it told her, were part of the greatest drama in creation. And it told her not to hide from the pain and the fear, but to plunge into her own desolated emotions and powerless complicity, for the voice specifically said, “You must die and go to hell,” or she could not live again. She twitched, and was fully in the dream.
She found herself walking down the slave trail. People who survived the southwestern daylight fields called the acres of cotton “Hell without fires” for the sad zombies and evil demons that stalked in them, but in the perpetual night on each side of this road, she could see the fires clearly. Flames raged unceasing in the cotton and logs and stumps. Beside her staggered stolen people, people lost in their chains. People who did not know their own names. She saw babies left on the ground by mothers. She heard mothers whose screams sounded like wounded animals.59
The coffle she was in came to the forks in the road. A little man stood there. He beckoned her to follow him up a narrow path. Because this was a dream, a vision, somehow she had come unlinked from the coffle, so follow him she did. She gasped for breath, lagging as she struggled up the path’s dizzying switchbacks. So the man called down “a great multitude” of angels, and told them to sing to her as she climbed. “Mama, Mama, you must help carry the world,” they chanted. What would become of her baby, what would become of her, she could not know. Somehow she had to care for, instruct, defend her child against forces too heavy to fight. She had a whole world to carry.
Then the angels began to sing her name. They sang her weary legs to the top of the stairs, where the last step emptied upon a high courtyard. There she stood, and somehow she knew she stood before God. A disembodied voice rang out. “How did she come?” Ranks of spirits flickered into sight, and they echoed the question in song. In her waking life, not even her mother knew how hard her path had been. But a second voice did know. It said what she couldn’t: “She came through hard trials with the hell-hounds on her trail.” She realized that voice had breathed in her ear all along. Mary and Martha, Jesus’s helpers, came forward, clothed her with a new robe, and the first voice said: “You are born of God. My son delivered your soul from hell and you must go and help carry the world.”
She awoke. She was alive. She believed that the most powerful forces in the universe could name the pains and fears that even she could not. These forces recognized her. From them, she was not stolen. All she had to do in return for this gift was to carry the whole world.60
The experience of spiritual death and rebirth reassured converted slaves that they had a value and a responsibility that went far beyond the number of dollars one could sell for, of pounds one could pick, or of babies one could bear for the market. They spoke of their own transformed spirits as being set free from the fear that their enslavers were, in the end, their final judges. “I heard a voice speak to me,” said William Webb. “From that time I lost all fear of men on this earth.”61
No matter how vigorously white preachers argued that conversion made slaves more docile, enslavers worried that freedom from fear might launch other quests for change. True, in the New Testament, as nineteenth-century Christians often heard it, the Spirit gave redemption from sin and commanded forgiveness. Many Christian slaves believed that God had commanded them to put violent vengeance aside, if only for their own souls’ sake. But following the command to forgive one’s enemies was a difficult task—“a lifetime job,” said one ex-slave: “I don’t care how long God lets me live, it will still be a hard job.” And forgiveness did not mean that enslaved people believed that the thieving powers of this world would never bow, that the lowest would not one day be the highest, or that their kidnappers would never face judgment. “Him claiming to be a Christian! Well I reckon he’s found out something about slave driving by now,” mused ex-slave Robert Falls about his now-dead former owner, whom he believed was toiling on Satan’s labor camp. “The good Lord has to get his work in some time.”62
But there was another text available. In some books of the Old Testament, the Spirit kindled not forgiveness but the uncompromising fire of holy warriors like Sampson or Saul, commanding them to slay all the Lord’s enemies down to the last man, woman, and child. And many enslaved migrants dreamed of that. “The idea of a revolution in the conditions of the whites and the blacks is the corner-stone of the religion of the latter,” recalled Charles Ball of conversations among other captives of Wade Hampton. “Heaven will be no heaven” to the average slave, Ball said, “if he is not to be avenged of his enemies.”63
Perhaps God demanded that his followers start to “get his work in,” even if avengers lost their lives in the process. That impulse found fertile soil in Southampton County, Virginia, an old tobacco county where the accelerating growth of slavery carved deep scars in the 1820s. John Brown, born there around 1818—the year Francis Rives took his first coffle from Southampton to Alabama—belonged to an old white woman. She “used to call us children up to the big house every morning, and give us a dose of garlic and rue to keep us ‘wholesome,’ as she said, and make us ‘grow likely for market.’” Then she “would make us run round a great sycamore tree in the yard, and if we did not run fast enough to please her, she used to make us nimbler by laying about us with a cow-hide.”64
Throughout the 1820s, the new national slave market drained people like Brown from Southampton. Forty-eight of them, for instance, passed through the hands of New Orleans slave traders between late 1829 and early 1831. In Southampton, the enslaved despaired over the increasing destabilization of their temporal lives, and whites tried to extend their control over African Americans’ spiritual lives. In 1826, an enslaved Southampton lay preacher named Nat Turner had told a white man named Ethelred Brantley of his religious visions. Brantley believed that Turner’s touch cured him of a skin disorder. The two decided th
ey wanted Turner to baptize Brantley at a local Methodist church, but the white church hierarchy would not let Turner perform the ritual. So Turner and Brantley went down to the river, where Turner baptized him. A crowd of whites gathered, and “reviled us.” So the preacher later put it.65
By 1828, Nat Turner had stopped believing that he should leave vengeance in God’s hands. Instead, he saw visions that he thought demanded violence: white people and black people fighting in the sky, blood condensing like dew on the corn, a voice like thunder telling him, “Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.” Turner retreated into his wilderness. He later said, speaking to a local Southampton lawyer named Thomas R. Gray, who recorded Turner’s words and published them as The Confessions of Nat Turner, “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” With his orders clear, Turner gathered a small group of angry, broken men into his confidence and waited for another sign. Then, in early 1831, a total eclipse blocked out the sun.66
THE FIRST HEADLINES DID not reach New Orleans until September 1831. But from there the news spread quickly up the river-veins of the slave frontier’s network of steamboats and cotton landings. In Southampton County, on August 22, insurgent slaves had begun killing whites. Almost sixty had been slaughtered in a two-day rampage across Southampton. They included a baby in a crib and ten children in a log-cabin school. Then masses of white troops descended on Southampton and crushed the revolt. They executed, through shootings, beheadings, and torture, about fifty African Americans, many of whom had not participated in the rebellion. Turner himself was captured two months later, then tried, convicted, and hanged—but not before dictating his confessions to Gray.67
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