Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  White Virginians passed one law after another severing the legal connection of Christianity and freedom. The laws, however, reflected aspiration more than actuality. Regardless of what they said, slaves did not dissociate baptism from freedom. Anglican slaves understood themselves as free by the terms defined by the English. They continued to insist that Christianity should eventuate in freedom.

  The laws also failed in one of their central tasks: to persuade planters that conversion was safe, as it would not lead to freedom. Despite the laws and reassurances, many Anglo-Virginians scorned the very notion of African conversion. Morgan Godwyn served a tour as an Anglican missionary in Virginia in the 1660s before going to Barbados in 1670. Even after the establishment of legal codes separating baptism from freedom, he encountered resistance to Christianization, with one planter telling him that baptism was “to one of those [slaves] no more beneficial, than to her black Bitch.” Godwyn blamed this intransigence on “Hellish Principles, viz. that Negroes are Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts.” The Virginia law of 1667, while intending to aid conversion by reassuring slaveowners that Christians who became slaves could not claim freedom, clashed with the perception of one group of planters that the “baptizing of their Negro’s is the ready way to have all their Throats cut.”

  Most white Christians could not feel secure in the extension of Christian freedom beyond the boundaries of Anglo-American society. This ambivalence, together with a cultural style of Anglican missionaries that appeared strange to African practices, hindered the work of groups such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Formed in 1701 in England by Thomas Bray and other devout Anglicans, the Society served as the primary missionary vehicle to spread the word sponsored by the Anglican Church and to combat false ideas propagated by Quakers, Catholics, and others. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Society sent over four hundred missionaries to various parts of England’s possessions in the New World, including several to the newly forming colony of South Carolina.

  Francis Le Jau, an early missionary for the SPG, worked in South Carolina’s Goose Creek Parish (near Charleston) in the early eighteenth century. Le Jau faced a challenging task in his program of preaching to and Christianizing black slaves and Indians. He rebutted the widespread view among his parishioners that religious instruction would make slaves “proud and Undutiful,” with his contention that, in fact, Christianity would produce more obedient and diligent workers.

  Moreover, many in the colony were skeptical of whether blacks and Indians could be said to possess souls. “Many Masters can’t be persuaded that Negroes and Indians are otherwise than Beasts,” he noted in 1709, “and use them like such. I endeavour to let them know better things.” He could not “prevail upon some to make a difference between Slaves and free Indians, and Beasts.” The Anglican missionary heard one well-off female colonist ask, “Is it Possible that any of my slaves could go to Heaven, & must I see them there?” Another young man swore he would not take communion while slaves were also invited to partake. In 1712, Le Jau recorded his desire to baptize some more slaves who had been “well Instructed” and had no complaints concerning their conduct but noted that “their Masters Seem very much Averse to my Design, Some of them will not give them Leave to come to Church to learn how to Pray to God and to Serve him, I cannot find any reason for this New Opposition but the Old pretext that Baptism makes the Slaves proud and Undutifull.” He provided examples of “those who are Admitted to our holy Communion who behave themselves very well,” to no avail. This was hardly surprising given the stories Le Jau also recounted of slaves beaten to death by Christian masters, who continued going to church after effectively murdering their slaves.

  Le Jau was sensitive to the real possibility that slaves might feign conversion to achieve freedom. He sought to counteract that fear. He required the declaration that the slave did not “ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live, but merely for the good of your Soul and to partake of the Graces and Blessings promised to the Members of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

  But even the most careful and sensitive missionary, such as Le Jau, could not control the effect of the biblical message. His own converts did not always prove to be reliable at interpreting the meaning of Christianity correctly, in his estimation. One convert in particular, Le Jau recounted, although a “very sober and honest Liver,” created confusion through his apocalyptic reading of biblical passages: “He had a Book wherein he read some description of the several judgmts. That Chastise Men because of their Sins in these latter days, that description made an Impression upon his Spirit, and he told his Master abruptly there wou’d be a dismal time and the Moon wou’d be turned into Blood, and there wou’d be dearth of darkness and went away.” When he spoke of his vision to his master, “some Negroe overheard a part, and it was publickly blazed abroad that an Angel came and spake to the Man, he had seen a hand that gave him a Book, he had heard Voices, seen fires &c.” That was not, to say the least, what Le Jau had in mind when he had taught him to read.

  This early convert did not spell out in precise terms what his prophecy meant. Probably he did not have to. Planters could extrapolate from the imagery provided to the meaning intended. Drawing from this experience, Le Jau determined to exercise discretion in teaching select groups of slaves to read. He acknowledged that “it had been better if persons of a Melancholy Constitution or those that run into the Search after Curious matter had never seen a Book.” Given how biblical stories could inspire ideas that ran contrary to what even the most careful missionaries (such as Le Jau) taught, it certainly made sense for whites to fear that apocalyptic ideas dangerous to the social order would be transmitted in Christian language.

  Through the eighteenth century a variety of African American spiritual leaders sprang up and challenged the sole authority claimed by the whites over religious matters. In the Virginia Chesapeake, Anglican clergy explained to their head in London that slaves converted principally for two reasons: first, because they believed they would “meet with so much the more respect” among Christian masters once Christianized and secondly because some believed that “at some time or another Christianity will help them to their freedom.” A rumored rebellion in 1730 suggested the ambiguities between religion and race even in what seemed to be a peaceable era of Anglican rule in the South. One Sunday, blacks assembled while locals were at church, supposedly choosing among themselves “Officers to command them in their intended Insurrection.” Later, after their capture, Virginia officials hung twenty-four of the rebels, but many more escaped after committing “many outrages against the Christians.” The revolt followed some meetings in which, one reported, there were “some Loose discourses that His Majesty had sent Orders for setting them free as soon as they were Christians, and that these Orders were Suppressed, a Notion generally Entertained amongst them.”

  Meanwhile, in South Carolina, religiously inspired revolt shook the foundation of a colony populated primarily by recently arrived Africans and blacks from the Caribbean. On the Sunday morning of September 9, 1739, an enslaved man named Jemmy, originally from the Kingdom of Kongo, gathered a group of slaves near the Stono River in South Carolina. An engagement ensued in which, according to South Carolina’s quasi-official account, “one fought for Liberty and Life, the other for their Country and every Thing that was dear to them. But by the Blessing of God the Negroes were defeated.” The group may have been inspired by recent runaways who had made it to Spanish Florida, where they had been promised freedom if they joined the Spanish military. The Kongolese South Carolinians understood the Spanish offers to join them in Florida as especially attractive. A previous group of slave escapees who had made it to St. Augustine were “received there with great honours, one of them had a Commission given to him, and a Coat faced with Velvet . . . the Jesuits have a Mission and School in that Kingdom and many Thousands of the
Negroes there profess the Roman Catholic Religion. . . . The good reception of the Negroes at Augustine was spread about.” The very date of the rebellion may have held a specific religious meaning for Kongolese Catholic rebels who believed September 8 to be the day of Nativity for the Virgin Mary. Kongolese Catholics believed that Mary held protective power for those who venerated her.

  Historical Marker of the Stono Rebellion

  Source: Copeland hdes.copeland/ Flickr CC.

  Led by Jemmy, the slaves gathered slaves near Charleston (then called Charles Town), broke into a store, secured firearms, and set about “burning and destroying all that came in their Way, so that the Messenger who came, told us the Country thereabout was full of Flames.” Later, others joined them, “they calling out Liberty, marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating, pursuing all the white people they met with.” That afternoon, a posse of whites, many of whom had been worshipping (firearms by their side, as per colonial regulation) that morning at a nearby Presbyterian church, gathered and killed at least thirty of the rebels.

  As with the case of the Anglican slaves who had petitioned for their freedom in 1723, the Stono rebels understood the connection between Christianity and freedom. Some of them may have known how to fight based on their military experience with militia orders in the Kongo kingdom, which had been Christianized in the sixteenth century following the conversion of its King. Like the English, they understood that violence sometimes was necessary for freedom and for faith. The Stono Rebellion shook the colony of South Carolina to its core. It would be the role of the leaders of the Great Awakening to preach to all without conveying messages too disturbing to the social order.

  GREAT AWAKENING

  These sorts of rumors and fears arose just as the Great Awakening swept down the colonies and produced a religious revolution. George Whitefield, the English Anglican who had perfected theatrical styles of expression in the pulpit, emerged as America’s celebrity preacher of the mid-eighteenth century. He drew thousands wherever he went to preach and attracted admirers even among those, such as Benjamin Franklin, who viewed the evangelical with skepticism at best, contempt at worst. Most importantly for our story here, the Awakening drew in black and Indian converts and compelled evangelicals to consider anew the relationship of religion, slavery, and race. Most, like George Whitefield, settled on the conviction that while the slave trade engendered undeniable evils, slavery itself clearly was sanctioned in the Bible. Moreover, they perceived that God’s plan for slavery was to take a potential evil and transform it into good by converting African peoples in preparation for the proselytization of the dark continent. A few religious idealists, such as the Quaker John Woolman, developed antislavery ideas, but they were in a distinct minority. Awakeners soon discovered that the Christian message attracted souls in subordination. It could also make them question that subordination.

  Nowhere was this more evident than in the true origins of widespread Christianity among enslaved African Americans during the Great Awakening and the rise of the Baptists and Methodists from the 1750s forward. During the Great Awakening and especially through the later eighteenth century, evangelical revivalists spread the word and welcomed black people into their midst. Slaves exposed to Christianity in this manner responded enthusiastically. The parallels between Baptist and Methodist preaching and practice (including, among the Separate Baptists, crying, falling down, and lying paralyzed on the floor) and African belief systems and religious rituals were apparent. White evangelists were both excited and troubled by this fact. The Presbyterian minister and evangelist in the Chesapeake region Samuel Davies preached to upward of one thousand slaves, converting about one hundred of them in his initial forays in the 1750s. Davies recognized the peculiar situation of preaching spiritual freedom to enslaved peoples: “Many of them,” he wrote, “only seem to be, they know not what. They feel themselves uneasy in their present condition, and therefore desire change.” Their “pious thirst for Christian knowledge” left him uneasy but exhilarated. Some slaves, he knew, recognized salvation as potential liberation; they desired baptism “that they may be upon an Equality with their Masters.”

  Just as significant is a lesser-known portion of this story, one only recently explored by scholars: the idea of an Indian Great Awakening. In assessing the impact of Protestant Christianity on native peoples in the mid-eighteenth century, scholars have examined both the conversion of Indians through the preaching of pietists such as the Moravians in Pennsylvania as well as New England New Divinity men such as David Brainerd and even Jonathan Edwards. The latter, most famous for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and an apostle of Calvinist doctrine, successfully ministered to natives on his mission tour of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the most successful Christian-Indian settlement of the eighteenth century in the English-controlled part of the colonies. He was affected greatly by the Indians’ response and contemplated deeply the theological mysteries of the movement of God’s spirit in peoples from vastly divergent religious training. That is one significant part of the story. While the Great Awakening was certainly not aimed at Indian listeners, it nevertheless had a powerful effect among some who found meaning in its message within their own cultural contexts.

  The Indian response to Christianity involved both acceptance and integration into tribal customs and in others resistance, both peaceful and forcible. The response had the common base of being a pan-Indian phenomenon in which natives found meaning in the revitalization of their own traditions combined with the invention of new ones. It was part of what one historian has called a “spirited resistance.” In the multicultural world of mid-eighteenth-century America, a time in which Indian identities were being reformed all over the continent, Indian prophets and visionaries—some using Christianity, others profoundly opposed to the new ways and committed to recapturing the customs of the forefathers—found receptive audiences. In the imperial conflicts among Europeans and Indian groups in the mid-eighteenth century—culminating in the bloody and ever-shifting Great War for the Empire from 1754 to 1763—Indian groups allied themselves on all sides of a European struggle for dominance in the North American continent.

  Through the national conflicts of the Europeans, Indians were in effect learning that they were Indians, as opposed to members of individual tribal groups. Just as white Americans had been in the process of developing ideas of whiteness and, later, of Americanness, Indians were learning that they were a “single people with common interests that transcended national rivalries.”

  The Presbyterian preacher David Brainerd, later the subject of a hagiography by Jonathan Edwards, learned of the Indians’ racialized perceptions of the origins of the major racial groupings on the American continent. Speaking to a group in Pennsylvania in 1751, he heard an Indian version of the creation story that signified the solidification of racialist views. The story significantly paralleled the use of the Son of Ham story among white Christians to comprehend the origins of the alleged “curse” on Negroes:

  They told me that the great God first made three men and three women . . . the Indian, the Negro, and the White Man. That the White Man was the youngest brother, and therefore the white people ought not to think themselves better than the Indians. That God gave the white man a book, and told him that he must worship him by that; but gave none either to the Indian or Negro, and therefore it could not be right for them to have a book, or be any way concerned with that way or worship. And, furthermore, they understood that the White people were contriving a method to deprive them of their country in those parts, as they had done by the sea-side, and to make slaves of them and their children as they did of the Negroes; that I was sent on purpose to accomplish that design, and, if I succeeded . . . I was to be chief ruler in those parts.

  Although Brainerd attempted to assuage their fears, the Indians rejected his message and asked that he not return. Throughout Indian country, accounts of the separate creation of red, white, and black men would be re
told in diverse tribes and inspire numerous prophets. Some had been influenced by Christianity, others spurned it as a dangerous potion of the white people. While European settlers on the frontier were making Indians into red men, Indians themselves were understanding “red men” as a category set up in opposition to Europeans, the white men. Religious conflict contributed to this racialization of peoples on the frontier.

  Some European Christian sects, notably the Quakers and the Moravians, served as intermediaries on this volatile frontier. The Moravians in particular established a reputation for close connection with their Indian converts. They learned native languages and translated religious materials (including hymns) into them. As a Presbyterian minister noted of the Moravians’ efforts, “They go among them without noise or parade, and by their friendly behaviour conciliate their good will. They join them in the chace, and freely distribute to the helpless and gradually instill into the minds of the individuals, the principles of religion.” The Great Awakeners and the Moravians in Pennsylvania nevertheless recognized that preaching to the natives would be made easier when “the whites are so much increased that the Indians are Cooped up into a narrow Compass and Subdued.”