When we consider the origins of Black Christianity in America, I am equally determined to tell the truth about what we learn from stories like that of David George. Yes, he was a Black man determined to be free. But he did not negotiate his fugitive existence on his own. He worked with white, Black, and Native people to get away from the oppression he had been born into. And when he heard the good news of the gospel and became a preacher himself, he was not building up a “Black church.” He was demonstrating the potential of a freedom church to interrupt the lies of slaveholder religion.
About 250 years have passed since David George received the call to preach good news to all people. But the tension between the Chapel he grew up knowing and the chapel he helped to build is still central in American life. Though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, the Christianity that blessed white supremacy did not go away. It doubled down on the Lost Cause, endorsed racial terrorism during the Redemption era, blessed the leaders of Jim Crow, and continues to endorse racist policies as traditional values under the guise of a “religious right.” As a Christian minister myself, I understand why, for my entire ministry, the number of people who choose not to affiliate with any religious tradition has doubled each decade. An increasingly diverse America is tired of the old slaveholder religion.
But this is why the freedom church that David George joined in the late 1760s is so important. We who speak out in public life to insist that God cares about love, justice, and mercy and to call people of faith to stand with the poor, the uninsured, the undocumented, and the incarcerated are often accused of preaching something new. But those who claim “traditional values” to defend unjust policies do not represent the tradition of David George, George Liele, and Brother Palmer. They do not represent the Black, white, and Tuscaroran people of Free Union, North Carolina, who taught my people for generations that there is no way to worship Jesus without being concerned about justice in the world.
The United States has a moral tradition, deeply rooted in the faith of a freedom church, that has inspired movements for abolition, labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental justice. While that tradition has often been marginalized and overlooked, its values are no less traditional than those of the Chapel who claimed to own David George. To know George’s story is to know that another kind of faith is possible. As James Baldwin said, “We made the world we are living in and we have to make it over again.” But we don’t have to make it from scratch. We can build on the faith of people like David George to become the nation we have never yet been.
1774–1779
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Martha S. Jones
Not every revolutionary moment was marked by the firing of shots or the drafting of a declaration. In 1780 a woman known as Mumbet changed the course of the American Revolution when she sued for her freedom. She acted out of a turn of mind. She had been abused in the home of John Ashley, the man who claimed her as a slave.
It was time to preserve her life and get free. Mumbet believed that the law might help. Her home, in the newly independent state of Massachusetts, was governed by the aspirations of men like her owner who were free, white, and propertied. But those same men had produced a constitution that spoke directly to her: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” These same rights, Mumbet argued in the court of common pleas in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, were also hers.
Even before Mumbet filed suit, her life had followed the course of the American Revolution in the way that so many enslaved people’s lives did. As a household servant to the Ashley family in Sheffield, Massachusetts, she saw to the backbreaking and often dangerous work of keeping up a home in the late eighteenth century. She was also a silent figure in the parlor, in the dining room, and in the corridors, as politics, military strategy, and more were debated. There in 1773 John Ashley hosted a meeting that produced the Sheffield Declaration, a manifesto that challenged British tyranny and championed colonists’ individual rights: “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”
Ashley was among the local men who felt the strain when Parliament pressed back. In 1774 the Intolerable Acts punished Massachusetts colonists for their defiance by repealing their charter, imposing governance from England, and limiting town meetings. It was not a declaration of war, but it was a spark for the hostilities that would follow. This was Mumbet’s political education, from which she gleaned new lessons about how to oppose her own bondage.
Both sides of the conflict understood that people like Mumbet could change the course of events. The British expressly tapped into enslaved people’s ever-present pursuit of liberty through a series of military proclamations. First in the fall of 1775, John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore and the British royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that he hoped would advantage his troop strength while also destabilizing the colony’s plantations. Dunmore declared “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others…free that are able and willing to bear arms.”
In the summer of 1779, British Army general Sir Henry Clinton did much the same. From his headquarters in Westchester County, New York, Clinton deemed all enslaved persons belonging to American revolutionaries to be free. Neither proclamation won the British much military success. But the lessons went beyond how not to win a war. Enslaved people learned that they possessed genuine bargaining power against imperial-scale authority. Neither Dunmore nor Clinton had acted out of humanitarian or antislavery impulses. Instead, they had been forced to subordinate their commitments to slavery for a military advantage. It was a lesson that enslaved people carried into subsequent conflicts, including the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, where they would again trade military service for the promise of freedom.
Contradictions—the enslavement of some alongside calls for the liberty of others—were the foundation of the Ashley household in the 1770s. But perhaps Mumbet understood this juxtaposition differently: that the liberty of some in Massachusetts rested upon the bondage of others. Slavery and freedom were two parts of one society.
The words of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence emerged from a similar morass. When composing that galvanizing manifesto, Jefferson omitted language that would have condemned the slave trade. The Articles of Confederation, completed the following year in 1777, did not speak to the problem of slavery. It was a scheme that relegated human bondage to a matter to be regulated by the individual states.
Historians continue to debate the meaning of these silences. For Mumbet, these failures to speak directly to slavery and its future were not exactly an invitation. Her ongoing enslavement in the Ashley household showed how even in the midst of revolution, contradictions wrought of old inequalities could persist. Mumbet’s claim to liberty appears all the more audacious in the face of the silence that characterized the founding texts.
Mumbet’s freedom suit reflected her interpretation of what the Revolution might make possible. It was, however, no naïve impulse. She took her ideas to a local lawyer, another party to the Sheffield Declaration, Theodore Sedgwick. He was likely a known figure to Mumbet, someone who had joined deliberations over colonists’ liberty in the Ashley home. Sedgwick was also a highly regarded lawyer who accepted Mumbet’s case along with that of a man named Brom.
Some historians have suggested that Sedgwick aimed to test the full meaning of the new state constitution. It was, however, a jury that finally heard the claim. Mumbet was declared free by strangers who concluded that “Brom & Bett are not, nor were they at the time of the purchase of the original writ the legal Negro of the said John Ashley.�
� Ashley initiated an appeal to the state high court but dropped it just a month later. Mumbet—newly self-baptized as Elizabeth Freeman—was a free woman who had put a nail into slavery’s casket, at least in Massachusetts. Her case along with others ended enslavement in one New England state, a revolution that came about when an aggrieved woman seized upon revolutionary ideas.
Last summer I visited the place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman was laid to rest in 1829. My trip was a pilgrimage in honor of a woman who changed the fates of Black Americans in Massachusetts. Her story is also a starting point for the long saga of how Black Americans have wrestled with constitutions. Freeman’s story is but one in countless efforts by people of African descent to bend the aspirations set to paper by free, white, propertied men to their own ends.
I came to Stockbridge to honor this too-often-overlooked figure in U.S. constitutional history. There she is not forgotten. Still, buried in Theodore Sedgwick’s family plot, Freeman is not honored as a figure of consequence in the epic battle for freedom over slavery in Massachusetts. Instead, her headstone is a tribute to her labor for Sedgwick’s family in the years after winning her freedom. Her prominently sited marker tells of a loyal servant who had no equal “in her sphere,” was trustworthy, dutiful, and efficient in the domestic realm, and was a tender friend and “good mother” to the white Sedgwicks.
It is another lesson in the politics of monuments. Freeman’s burial site remains an incomplete and misleading monument to her life.
NOT WITHOUT SOME INSTANCES OF UNCOMMON CRUELTY
Justin Phillip Reed
Patrick Henry, addressing the Second
Virginia Convention, 1775, thrice mentioned
“chains,” “slavery,” “submission,” the myth,
in transcription, refraining his Homeric
homoteleuton of royal blues—“We have
petitioned,” “remonstrated,” “supplicated,”
“prostrated,” and “implored”—all before
demanding God deliver death or liberty.
That year in Virginia existed so many actual
slaves that Henry’s echoes could have been
nine Negroes opportunely plotting in open
air, his shadow daring daydreams of out-
running streams of liquid sterling under
evening’s seasickness of starlight and silence.
When Southern night shuffles the black
capacities of bull rustle, bark knots, clots
of nettle, I know insurrection is an act
of intellect. If not the slave’s will to kill
to live free, what animates humanity’s
heat for reason? Let me never fix my face
to say Wheatley’s mistress mistreated her
with literacy. (I have also exalted Christ
until salvation and survival were two
tines of the same fork, and eaten.) It’s just
this abolitionist’s education takes me
at times for a fool, uses my gifts against me,
enters at ease assuming that because I enjoy
the music I haven’t stashed the duller strings
and meanwhile practiced strangulation.
Not all rebels yell. Not all run. Not all
of Carolina is a complacent swamp.
This is a gator road. This, the Isle of Wait.
My people stay places eponymous for
plantations, patriots—Marion, Sumter,
many Greene streets. They stay like
depressions in plaster walls or knives
in their never-owned tapestries war routes
gallantly streak. Militia-secreted creeks
taper to tap hiss in pots where rice still
whitens and rises. Remembering’s expensive
if you can’t afford to know what is owed.
My people’s self-retention inside this theft
is investment—enviable, thick-leggedness
of shall-not-be-movement. They don’t move
easily from home (again) or (back) to tears.
No one has liberated my mouth except
to give me more elaborate things to do
with these teeth. Assume I mean nothing
by it, that the overwrought rhyme lucy-
terries mastery as a matter of fact, a draught
to steal them off to sleep, a loose leaf,
a draft on the way to someday seal them
up in it. They still have their guns, still
go to separate church. No, sir, this poem
torched none of the houses on the road,
merely wrote: Here was a row of angels,
molting, folded—stars, aligned—and the reddest
gullet of God hollered their ankles to powder.
1779–1784
SAVANNAH, GEORGIA
Daina Ramey Berry
Nestled along the Atlantic coastline, paralleled by the Savannah River, the city of Savannah is the oldest urban center in the Peach State. Established in 1733 by King George II’s 1732 charter, the colony was an experiment to provide British debtors and war criminals a second chance at life in the New World. Thus 114 colonists set sail across the Atlantic on the Anne, arriving in February 1733. They “were expected to become farmers and citizen-soldiers on a hostile and desolate frontier,” and they worked hard to create amicable relations with the Yamacraw Indians.
Between 1779 and 1784, Savannah residents experienced changes in the economy, in the population, and in social and religious institutions. They witnessed the importation of enslaved people from various regions of West Africa, the growth of religious public worship through the Second Great Awakening, and severe losses during the American Revolution’s Siege of Savannah.
Savannah had been planned by William Bull of South Carolina and James Oglethorpe, the British leader sent to establish the colony, and it included a series of squares, wards, and trust lots. Planners intended to create a city that would resemble London. Each ward was “built around central squares with trust lots on the east and west sides of the squares for public buildings and churches, and tything lots for the settlers’ homes on the north and south sides of the squares.”
With so many enslaved people residing in those wards, in many ways Savannah was nothing like London. There is not a singular way to think about the lives of people of African descent in Savannah, especially between 1779 and 1784. Many and varied factors and circumstances were in play, including the tremendous restrictions of slavery, the freedom some experienced as a result of war, and the spiritual expression realized through religious conversions.
Even though Georgia was the only colonial region that issued a ban on slavery from its inception in 1733, colonists from South Carolina and other regions brought enslaved people to the city before the ban was lifted by a royal decree in 1751. At that time there were about four hundred enslaved people in Savannah. This means that for them, life in the budding urban center may have been difficult because many worked in the homes of their enslavers and had little contact with other people of African descent.
Some of the early descriptions of experiences in the city from an African perspective come from Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo captive, in the 1760s. Equiano shared his nearly fatal public beating by a well-known physician, his time in jail after the beating, as well as his recovery aided by another prominent physician, in his memoir, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789). The shipping and slave-trading industry brought Equiano and thousands of other African captives to the city.
African people forced into the belly of slave ships crossed the Atlantic and came to Savannah through several different routes, but beginning in the late 1760s, African
s came directly from West Africa. While the trade continued and the colony grew, enslaved Africans and their descendants contributed to a growing religious community. During Equiano’s time in Savannah, he witnessed a moving sermon by George Whitefield. The spirit-filled preaching, such as was common within the African and African American community, impressed him greatly.
Savannah was home to the First African Baptist Church (established in 1777), hailed as the oldest Black church in North America. Reverend Andrew Bryan, an enslaved preacher who became the second leader of this congregation in 1782, used a rice barn on his enslaver’s property for services. Bryan later bought property in Oglethorpe Ward to build a church.
In January 1788, a white minister named Abraham Marshall visited Savannah with one of his Black colleagues, Jesse Peters, and the two baptized more than forty members. Marshall also ordained Bryan. Church membership continued to grow, from 575 members in 1788 to 2,795 in 1831.
In the fall of 1779, while people of African descent worked and worshiped, some had the opportunity to fight for their liberty during the American Revolution. Savannah was home to the second-deadliest battle of the Revolutionary War: the Siege of Savannah. American allies along with the French failed to ward off the British navy when it increased its occupation of the Savannah River by adding “two row galleys.” British Captain Hyde Parker ordered “twelve negroes” to serve as part of the crew.
This military strategy to enlist troops of African descent represented a significant moment in African American history. Guides of African descent “were instrumental in the defense of Savannah” because these men knew the waterways better than anyone in uniform. Fighting against the Franco-American forces, the British enlisted some “two hundred negroes” to help with “skirmishes on the outskirts of the city.” At the same time, Savannah residents feared armed Blacks and petitioned to disarm them because they walked around with “great insolence.”
Four Hundred Souls Page 14