by Paul Harvey
African Americans such as Forten seized on the universalist languages of Christianity and republicanism. Meanwhile, conservative ministers (mostly in eighteenth-century New England) articulated some of the first versions of the proslavery argument in America. Nineteenth-century southern divines picked up on its themes and added their own variations. Meanwhile, African Americans responded vigorously to the proslavery argument. They created an eloquent and voluminous protest literature that centrally engaged American ideas of freedom as expressed through Christian language.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the creation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Philadelphia and, a few years later, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) denomination in New York City. The original African American denominations emerged from the labors of Richard Allen. Born a slave in Delaware, Allen purchased his freedom. He moved to Philadelphia, where he joined the St. George’s Methodist Church. Through the 1780s and early 1790s, Philadelphia had become a haven for blacks seeking freedom in revolutionary-era America. Despite that reputation, former slaves and free people of color who migrated there often found themselves bound out to indentures, or at best placed in physically exhausting working-class positions. Allen found a receptive audience for his preaching among the struggling black population of the City of Brotherly Love. Together with his friend and comrade Absalom Jones, he formed the Free African Society, the first mutual aid group for African Americans in the United States. Allen believed blacks should have their own church, and he wanted it to be Methodist. Sometime in the early 1790s, while praying at the altar of St. George’s Methodist Church, Allen and his colleagues were ordered to remove themselves to segregated seats at the back of a gallery set aside for them, until whites had finished their prayers. Jones, Allen, and the others in the black contingent removed themselves from the church, raised money for their own congregation, and opened Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church. “We all went out of the church in a body, and they were no longer plagued by us,” Richard Allen tartly wrote later. They were still within the Methodist Episcopal order, but this was a church for African Americans.
In 1816, black churchmen from Pennsylvania and surrounding states convened to incorporate themselves as the AME Church. Six years later, African Americans in New York organized a rival federation, the AMEZ Church. James Varick, a black New Yorker resentful of Richard Allen’s intrusions into his territory, insisted on the black Methodists there forming their own group. Both new black denominations, the AME and AMEZ Church, portrayed themselves as restoring the simplicity and purity of the old Methodist order. They adopted the Doctrine and Discipline of the American Methodist Church largely as their own. Unlike the white Methodists, however, the black Methodists followed Francis Asbury’s rule prohibiting membership to slaveholders.
Portrait of the Bishops of the AME Church from the nineteenth century
Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In 1817, one year after the formation of the AME Church, a group of elite southern and northern whites formed the American Colonization Society (ACS). Its purpose was to provide for the emigration of black Americans “back to Africa,” thereby “solving” America’s intractable problem of slavery and race. Soon thereafter, black proponents and opponents of colonization began debating the relationship of black Americans to their motherland, a philosophical and practical controversy that raged among black thinkers over the next century. Daniel Coker, ironically, most strongly urged mission work in and removal to the home shores of Africa. He and others held a providential view of history, by which God would use the evil of slavery to prepare a group of Christianized African Americans to bring the gospel message back to Africans who remained mired in heathen customs. Shortly after the formation of the AME Church, Coker became a missionary to Africa.
Richard Allen denounced colonization. While Allen and his AME comrades fought for the organization of a separate black denomination marked by the title “African,” they also insisted on the rights of black people as Americans. Allen and his close comrade Absalom Jones put their philosophy into practice just as they originally formed their Bethel congregation in the 1790s. Absalom Jones authored one of the first African American petitions to Congress, on behalf of four men kidnapped back into slavery. Two years later, Jones authored an antislavery petition signed by some seventy others, including Allen. If the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence meant anything, they said, blacks should enjoy the inalienable rights promised them in the founding documents.
Jones, Allen, and the early black Methodists fused Christian universalism, revolutionary liberalism, and black separatism. It was a delicate balancing act, one which thereafter defined the role of black Christian churches. They claimed an African heritage and understood black churches and societies to be necessary for the defense of African American rights. They also insisted on their status as free Americans, subject to every protection under the laws.
The church articulated African American interests through the antebellum era, most especially after the church was banned from the South in 1822. That year, Charlestonians had uncovered what they believed (with good reason, albeit derived from coerced testimony) to be an insurrectionary plot engineered by Denmark Vesey, a free black man known for broadcasting antislavery sentiments. Vesey was a member of the First African Church (later renamed Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church). Over 4,000 black Charlestonians formed the First African Methodist congregation. Its initial life was short. Local authorities shut it down several times and imprisoned its pastor for violating state laws against slave literacy. The Vesey Plot of 1822, whites believed, took shape in class meetings in the church, where “inflammatory and insurrectionary doctrines” fostered rebellious sentiments. After the discovery of the plot, thirty-five local blacks were executed, the church building was burned, and later the AME as an organization exiled from the state.
After the Civil War, Denmark Vesey’s son helped to rebuild the church, which later came to be called Emmanuel AME in downtown Charleston. The church was rebuilt again following an 1886 earthquake, and in the 1960s it hosted a variety of civil rights leaders. In 2015, the church became famous due to the murder there of the pastor and eight parishioners during a Wednesday evening service, a shocking act of white supremacy that compelled the state finally to remove the Confederate battle flag from flying outside the State House in Columbia.
Although quasi-independent black churches in the South dated from the 1770s, it was primarily in northern black churches, most especially those affiliated with the AME and AMEZ, that provided African Americans with an independent voice, with publications, with educational institutions (including Wilberforce College, in Ohio), and with well-known ministers from Richard Allen to Daniel Payne. Beginning in the 1850s, the church’s publication the Christian Recorder served as a central repository of African American thought. Later publications, including the A.M.E. Church Review and several others, gave African American ministers a forum for published theological discussion. The AME Church was, as the female church activist Mary Still put it, the first to “elevate and Christianize their outcast brothers and sisters by encircling them within the enclosure of the Church, and by faithfully administering and constantly instructing and encouraging them in the way to respectability to Heaven.”
From the late eighteenth century, when Absalom Jones and Richard Allen prepared a pamphlet defending the conduct of African Americans during the yellow fever crisis in Philadelphia in 1793, to the famous (and infamous) Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World of David Walker in 1829, to the published proceedings of the black convention movement later in the antebellum era, African Americans responded vigorously, passionately, and eloquently to the strengthening of slavery and the rapid spread of racist ideologies. They did so sometimes through carefully pitched dialogues and printed “conversations,” and other times through angry pamphlets directed at white American hypocrisy.
In the few decades prior to David
Walker’s Appeal of 1829, black pamphleteers adopted a rhetoric of reasonable discourse with a (presumably) reasonable and largely white readership. For them, the clear relationship of American Protestantism and American freedom provided a clear means of dialogue with whites who could, and should, see the justice of ending slavery. Perhaps the best example of the point is Daniel Coker’s “A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister.” Published in 1810, the fictional conversation features a Virginian speaking with a black minister and working through biblical passages on the Bible and slavery. For example, when Virginian brings up the standard litany of biblical passages about slavery from the Apostle Paul, the minister reminds him that Christians in Paul’s time were under Roman yoke and had to take expedient stands accordingly. By contrast, “ours is not a heathen, but is called a Christian government, so that the Christians are not, by it, persecuted unto death. In such circumstances, therefore, had the apostle proclaimed liberty to the slaves, it would probably have exposed many of them to certain destruction, and injured the cause he loved so well,” without freeing anyone. While Paul acted with “prudent reserve,” it nevertheless could easily be inferred from the “righteous and benevolent doctrines and duties” of the New Testament that “slavery is contrary to the spirit and nature of the Christian religion.” By the end of the polite dialogue, Virginian is convinced by the minister’s proposal for a plan of abolition and education of black people toward their incorporation into American society as citizens.
Through the 1810s and 1820s, the assumptions of a universalist Christianity put in the context of a free and democratic Republic kept black Christian writers imbued with visions of the freedom that would soon come. “Wherever Christianity is considered as a religion of the affections,” as one member of the Philadelphia black elite put it before a newly created black literary society, “every well instructed, practical Christian, habitually aspires . . . to yield a cheerful and unreserved obedience to the precepts and instructions of its heavenly founder.” Christianity was peculiarly adapted to be a “universal religion,” because “wherever its spirit enters into the councils of nations, we find it unbinding the chains of corporeal and mental captivity, and diffusing over the whole world, the maxims of impartial justice, and of enlightened benevolence.” In another twist on this rhetoric, one mixed with a somewhat heterodox version of black messianism, a black New Yorker called on all “Ethiopians” to recognize “the power of Divinity within us, as man,” which should implant “a sense of the due and prerogatives belonging to you, a people.” The time was at hand, he proclaimed, “when, with but the power of words and the divine will of our God, the vile shackles of slavery shall be broken asunder from you, and no man known who shall dare to own or proclaim you as his bondsman. We say it, and assert it as though by an oracle given and delivered to you on high.” Slaveholders would learn the bitter lesson that God’s will rested not in their hands, but that, rather, “God decrees to thy slave his rights as man.”
Written at a time after the Revolution when numerous manumissions created a substantial class of free people of color, and after the closing of the international slave trade to the United States in 1808, a dialogue toward resolving the issue of slavery still seemed possible. These kinds of polite dialogues, some of them not unlike John Eliot’s ersatz “Indian Dialogues” put together for the aid of seventeenth-century proselytizers, gave way later in the nineteenth century to polemically powerful attacks on slavery and slaveholders. Twenty years later, at the time of Walker’s Appeal and the appearance of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, the stakes appeared very different, and the rhetorical balance shifted dramatically.
The turning point was David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Born free in North Carolina, Walker was a used clothes merchant in Boston at the time of the publication of his jeremiad in 1829. It soon became nationally notorious and even blamed for Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831. Copies were found sewn in the sleeves of black sailors aboard ships headed southward.
Walker’s cri de couer was a jeremiad about America’s sins, one that would have made any Puritan proud but for the subject. “Oh Americans! Let me tell you, in the name of the Lord, it will be good for you, if you listen to the voice of the Holy Ghost,” Walker warned his readers, “but if you do not, you are ruined!!! Some of you are good men; but the will of my God must be done.” The United States might have passed itself off as the “most enlightened, humane charitable, and merciful people upon earth.” Yet its white citizens treated black people “secretly more cruel and unmerciful than any other nation upon earth.” Walker mixed a rational appeal about the injustices of slavery with a kind of desperate jeremiad attuned to the hypocrisies of American as a Christian civilization. “Christians!! Christians!! I dare you to show me a parallel of cruelties in the annals of Heathens or of Devils, with those of Ohio, Virginia and of Georgia—know the world that these things were before done in the dark or in a corner under a garb of humanity and religion.” Bitterly rejecting the nostrums of the ACS as well as those of his compatriots who had chosen repatriation to Africa, Walker insisted that “this country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by.”
Rejecting biblical arguments from the Old Testament that identified blacks as the seed of Cain, murderer of his brother Abel, Walker could find no biblical warrant for such a genealogy. Instead, “I ask those avaricious and ignorant wretches, who act more like the seed of Cain, by murdering the whites or the blacks? How many vessel loads of human beings have the blacks thrown into the seas? How many thousand souls have the blacks murdered in cold blood, to make them work in wretchedness and ignorance, to support them and their families?” White people “know well, if we are men—and there is a secret monitor in their hearts which tells them we are,” that the black man was made in the image of God, “though he may be subjected to the most wretched condition upon earth, yet the spirit and feeling which constitute the creature, man, can never be entirely erased from his breast, because the God who made him after his own image planted it in his heart, he cannot get rid of it.” The fears of whites about black brutes attacking them had persuaded whites to “keep us in ignorance and wretchedness, as long as they possibly can.” Americans might think that blacks were “so well secured in wretchedness” that catastrophic punishments would not wait. They were as deluded as those who doubted Noah, “until the day in which the flood came and swept them away. So did the Sodomites doubt until Lot had got out of the city, and God rained down fire and brimstone from Heaven upon them, and burnt them up. So did the king of Egypt doubt the very existence of God . . . Did he not find to his sorrow, who the Lord was, when he and all his mighty men of war, were smothered to death in the Red Sea? So did the Romans doubt, many of them were really so ignorant, that they thought the whole of mankind were made to be slaves to them; just as many of the Americans think now, of my colour.”
Black thinkers and writers picked up on Walker’s themes, if not his super-heated prose, and pressed their case for the Christian humanity of black people through the antebellum era. “These things have fired my soul with a holy indignation, and compelled me to come forward,” wrote Maria W. Stewart, a schoolteacher and pamphleteer in Boston and New York. As was customary for preachers of the era, she pled her lack of education and her inability: “I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy Spirit.” With a prose smoother than Walker’s exclamation-laden messianistic writing, but with a force of righteous anger equal to any, Stewart condemned those who held “religion in one hand, and prejudice, sin and pollution in the other.” Drawing from an unusual Old Testament analogy, Stewart compared Americans to King Solomon, “who put neither nail nor hammer to the temple, yet received the praise.” Likewise, the name of white Americans was great, but black workers had been “their principal foundation and support. We have pursued the shadow, they have obtained the substance; we have formed the lab
or, they have received the profits; we have planted the vines, they have eaten the fruits of them.” America had become “like the great city of Babylon,” thinking itself a queen while being “a seller of slaves and the souls of men . . . her right hand supports the reins of government, and her left hand the wheel of power.”
Starting in 1830s and extending to the Civil War, free black northerners gathered in conventions. This black convention movement promoted ideas of moral reform, temperance, self-help among black Americans. Leaders also protested the rise of laws requiring separate and unequal lives for black northerners and fought back against the popular idea of colonizing black Americans abroad as a means of “solving” the race problem. The black convention movement debated the ideals of a color-blind society based on Enlightenment and universalist ideals versus the clear necessity of separate organizations for African Americans. The project of black freedom always had been premised on the universalist language dating from the Enlightenment, documents such as the Declaration of Independence, and the ideals of the American Revolution. Northern black thinkers in particular enthusiastically joined in the rhetoric of America’s mission in the world and God’s plan for the nation. At the same time, nationalism fused with religiomessianic ideals increasingly informed black thought as the antebellum era progressed. Enlightenment universalism and black nationalism often merged, for both spoke to profound and deep aspirations of African Americans as a people. Also, both came out of Afro-American religious traditions. Christianity was a universal message of the gospel, and yet particular forms of it thrived in ethnonational and racial groups, as everyone recognized. Black clergyman J. W. C. Pennington suggested that the “highest obligation of an oppressed people, is fidelity to god and firm trust in Him as the God of the oppressed.” God himself demanded people who showed themselves worthy of the full rights of citizenship. This was a variation of the politics of respectability that would be a staple of black sermons.