Читать книгу Dividing the Faith - Richard J. Boles - Страница 11

The Mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had greater religious diversity than most of New England, but the churches of these colonies did not uniformly baptize black or Indian peoples. Anglican parishes were the most commonly interracial, followed by some Lutheran and Moravian congregations. Presbyterian and Reformed churches rarely baptized blacks before the Revolutionary era. The educational programs, pietism, and missional worldviews held by Anglicans, Lutherans, and Moravians help explain why they often sought out black congregants. The rules governing these denominations also made baptism relatively accessible to adult converts. The presence of blacks and Indians in worship services of these types of churches and their participation in the rituals of baptism, communion, and marriage were not directly tied to the revivalism of the Great Awakening.

Church of England clergy and congregations generally distrusted the awakenings as eccentric, leveling, and even devilish, though George Whitefield was an ordained Church of England clergyman. Although there were some evangelical-leaning Anglicans, they were in the minority. Some Anglican clergy campaigned passionately against revivalism.68 Black people valued the educational opportunities that Anglican churches offered, and Church of England parishes, including New York City’s Trinity Church, Staten Island’s Saint Andrew’s Church, Christ Church of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, Christ Church of Philadelphia, and Trinity Church of Oxford, Philadelphia, baptized numerous black people between 1730 and 1749.69

In addition to being baptized, some blacks and Indians took communion, were married by priests, and were buried under the auspices of the church. Their presence, as well as their selective adoption of Anglican Christianity, should not be underestimated because this affiliation was an important origin of African American Christianity, especially in New York City and Philadelphia, where separate black Anglican/Episcopal churches were formed after 1790. Black people who had been baptized and instructed in catechism classes could take communion in Anglican churches. Thomas Thompson, SPG missionary to Monmouth County, New Jersey, from 1745 to 1750, described ministering to black people: “I catechized them in the Church on certain Sundays, and sometimes at Home: and after due Instruction, those whom I had good Assurances of I received to Baptism, and such as afterwards behaved well I admitted to the Communion.” In attendance at services, through the sacraments, and in catechism classes, blacks and Indians became a significant minority in the Church of England.70

Trinity Church in New York City was a model of the ways that Anglicans in northern colonies sought to minister to black people through education and sacraments, and hundreds of black people were baptized at this parish. Reverend Elias Neau began work in 1704 as a catechist, and he held school sessions that included enslaved blacks, free blacks, and a small number of Indians.71 In 1726, Trinity Church sent a letter to the SPG requesting a new catechist to minister to blacks and Indians. Since “about One Thousand and four hundred Indian and Negro Slaves” were in New York, they wrote, the need for a catechist was great. “A Considerable number of those Negroes by the Society’s charity have been already instructed in the principles of Christianity, have received Holy Baptism, are Communicants of our Church and frequently Approach the Altars,” but many more needed instruction.72 Reverend Richard Charleton operated Trinity Church’s school for blacks from 1733 to 1747, and from his school, fifteen to twenty black people were baptized annually. According to missionary reports, approximately 24 black adults and 195 black children were baptized at Trinity Church between 1732 and 1740.73 Sermons and letters from members of the SPG attest to a widely held desire, especially among Anglican clergymen, to baptize blacks and Indians.

Church of England clergymen, like almost all colonial clergy, claimed that baptism did not alter the bondage of enslaved blacks. Reverend George Berkeley, while in Newport, Rhode Island, in October 1729, preached a sermon on baptism, arguing that “Our Saviour commandeth his disciples to go & baptize all nations,” and he specifically stated that this included baptizing enslaved black people. He also insisted that children and slaves should be baptized under the authority of the head of Christian households, and that “Christianity maketh no alteration in civil rights,” that is, in the right to own slaves. New York’s legislature in 1706, at the request of Anglican missionaries, passed “An Act to Encourage the Baptizing of Negro, Indian and Mulatto Slaves.” It decreed “That the Baptizing of any Negro, Indian or Mulatto Slave shall not be any Cause of reason for the setting them or any of them at Liberty.” Since the 1660s, English colonists had to keep insisting that baptism did not free slaves because the “heathenism” of Africans was an early justification for their enslavement and because enslaved people kept trying to use Christianity to obtain freedom.74

By meeting with slaves directly and by encouraging masters to promote religion among their slaves, Anglican clergy successfully laid the foundation for interracial church life in northern colonies, but little information about individual black Anglicans has survived in archives. Although autobiographical accounts by black and Indian Anglicans are scarce, some telling demographic characteristics can be extracted from church records. Many blacks and Indians were baptized as adults, and there was a roughly equal balance between men and women. At Christ Church Philadelphia, at least seventy-eight people were clearly identified as blacks in the baptismal records between 1730 and 1749. One of these people was “Pompsey, an adult negro slave belonging to ye minister of ye parish.” Additionally, at least two Indians were baptized in 1733: “John, Son of Peter & Margret Moutanne, an Indian,” and “Anne daughter of Amoritta, Mr. Lawrence’s Indian woman.” Of the black people baptized, forty-two were male and thirty-six were female. These people appear to have been, moreover, equally divided between adults and children/infants. The high proportion of adult baptisms contrasts sharply with the typical trend among whites. English Anglicans were much more likely to have been baptized as children. Many of these black people were forcibly abducted and carried across the Atlantic as slaves, so they did not necessarily learn about Christianity from their parents. In fact, many enslaved Africans practiced Islam or other West African religions. Enslaved adults, as well as children, were targets of the Church of England’s outreach.75

In most cases, black people who were baptized in the Church of England parishes were identified by their race, status, and master’s name. Identifying black men, women, and children in this manner meant that their legal status as slaves and perceived racial identity was reinforced at the very same time white society recognized them as Christians. There were, however, some exceptions to this pattern. In a few cases, the enslaved parents were listed for a child’s baptism with or without the owner’s name. For example, “Salisbury, son of Richard & Dinah slaves of Griffith,” was baptized in 1748 at Christ Church Philadelphia. Although black families under slavery always faced the possibility of being separated, black family relationships were, to an extent, acknowledged by churches. The white ministers implied that parents, as well as the masters, had a responsibility to raise the enslaved children in the Christian faith.76

In addition to the parishes located in cities and coastal areas, Anglican priests also ministered to Indians, Africans, and colonists on the outskirts of Britain’s North American empire at missionary chapels. Reverend Henry Barclay recorded nearly three hundred baptisms at Queen Anne Chapel located at Fort Hunter, New York, between 1735 and 1746. Fort Hunter marked the border between English settlements west of Albany and Mohawk territory. In the setting of a military and commercial outpost, Barclay ministered to and taught Indians (he could speak some Mohawk) until he left in 1745 to become rector of Trinity Church New York. Not only was this a place of interracial trade and diplomacy, but it was also a site of interracial religious exercises, supported by the SPG.77 Although the racial notations in these records appear haphazard and inconsistent, at least four “negroes” were baptized at Queen Anne Chapel, all slaves of John Wemp or Captain Hellen. Some of the Indians baptized there were identified as Oneida, Tuscarora, or simply as Indian. Although English and Dutch last names predominate in the records, there are dozens of Indian last names recorded.78 These families and baptized individuals of different ethnicities likely worshipped and occasionally took communion together. Even at the edges of the empire, or perhaps especially at the edges of the empire where different cultures collided and where shared rituals facilitated trade and politics, religion often occurred in interracial contexts.

Some Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Mid-Atlantic also ministered to blacks or Indians between 1730 and 1749, but fewer blacks and Indians affiliated with these churches than with Anglican and Congregational ones. Lutheran and Moravian churches, most of which were ethnically German, were relatively young transplants from Europe, and there were fewer black people in German American communities. Nevertheless, their participation in some of these other denominations suggests that early African American and Indian forms of Christianity were not limited to one or two types of churches and were not limited to the churches that promoted the Great Awakening revivalism.79

During the 1730s, German Lutheran churches in Pennsylvania were struggling to become well established, but blacks occasionally participated in Lutheran churches. German and Swiss migrants were growing in numbers and were spreading out from Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century, but there were few ordained clergy among them. From 1733 until 1742, there was only one ordained German Lutheran minister, Casper Stoever, in Pennsylvania. In these nine years, Stoever baptized at least 1,418 people, some of whom were identified as English rather than as German congregants. The first German Lutheran church in Pennsylvania was organized in 1717, but dozens were planted across Pennsylvania by the 1740s.80

The circumstances of German colonists and their churches did not make them natural centers of interracial religious experiences. Given the early years of German congregations in Pennsylvania and the immigrant status of most Germans, their Lutheran churches baptized few blacks or Indians during the 1730s and 1740s. Most of the recently arrived German and Swiss immigrants lacked the money to purchase slaves. Some of the German migrants were themselves bound to years of service as payment for the cost of transportation to America. German farmers generally preferred indentured Germans over enslaved blacks, at least while the supply of indentured servants remained steady, so there were fewer blacks among Germans than among English or Dutch colonists. Pennsylvania Germans’ pattern of eschewing slavery was similar to the practices of German colonists elsewhere. Lutherans in Ebenezer, Georgia, feared the effects of having enslaved people in their community, and they supported continuing the ban on slavery in Georgia. After 1750, when slavery was allowed into Georgia, Ebenezer Lutherans owned fewer enslaved people than was typical for southern communities. Some Germans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere owned slaves, but they owned fewer slaves on average than did English and Dutch colonists.81 Overall, circumstances particular to German colonists hedged against black and Indian participation in their churches.

Black people were baptized in a couple of Pennsylvania Lutheran churches before 1750; there was a higher concentration of black people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania than in the Pennsylvania countryside. At St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church in Philadelphia, “Wilhelm Peter son of Peter & Mary (free negroes)” was baptized in 1747 (the earliest baptismal records available for this church are from 1745). At the Swedish Lutheran Church of St. Gabriel’s, located about forty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia in Berks County, four black children were baptized in 1741.82 Pennsylvania Lutherans baptized few blacks from 1730 to 1749, but the absence of blacks was mostly due to the low levels of slave ownership among German and Swedish migrants in Pennsylvania and not to a disposition to exclude blacks.

The Lutheran Church of New York, which included German, Dutch, and Scandinavian Lutherans, “was weak and struggling” until the first years of the eighteenth century, but it was accessible to blacks and Indians. Soon after his 1725 installment as the minister in New York, Reverend Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer wrote to the Amsterdam Lutheran Consistory requesting their opinion about how to administer the rite of baptism. Lutherans, unlike Congregational churches, believed in the doctrine of “de necessitate baptismi,” whereby it is necessary to baptize children as soon as possible to avoid the possibility of children dying before their baptism. In the context of New York, with its many religious groups and nationalities, Berkenmeyer wanted the opinion of theologians and church officials in Europe as to how widely this doctrine applied. He wrote to ask about whether or not the rule that “pastors must baptize all children that are not baptized when they are requested to do so” applied to children “born of savage parents.”83

The Amsterdam Lutheran Consistory responded with statements that indicated the Lutheran stance on baptism; Lutheran churches should have, in theory, baptized some blacks and Indians. The Consistory argued that children should almost always be baptized, even if born out of wedlock, because “withholding baptism is a punishment for the child, for one deprives it meanwhile of the merits of Christ; one leaves it in a state of unbelief, since baptism is a means of planting faith in the hearts of children and thereby enabling them to accept Christ.” This recommendation to baptize children extended to Christians outside the Lutheran Church, including children of Reformed parents (Reformed churches, conversely, placed more limits on who could be baptized). The requirement to baptize regardless of the parents’ denomination did not, however, extend to indiscriminately baptizing Indians. The Consistory instructed that if Indian children were to “remain in the blindness of heathenism” with their parents, then they “cannot be baptized.” However, “if such children at and after their baptism become Christians, to be brought up and instructed by them, they can and must be baptized, as such children, by right of cession, adoption, gift or purchase, or being acquired in any other way, can and must be regarded as personal property.” In essence, Indians who professed belief were to be baptized, and Indian children raised in Christian households as slaves or servants were to be baptized under the authority of their master’s faith. The letter also implied that baptism did not change the enslaved status of bondsmen and bondswomen. While the Consistory did not discuss enslaved blacks, it is reasonable to assume that Lutheran pastors would have treated them similarly because both groups were held as servants or slaves and because Europeans believed both unconverted Indians and blacks were heathens. Berkenmeyer believed that blacks and Indians in Lutheran households should be baptized, and he baptized his three enslaved people.84

The 1735 constitution for New York and New Jersey Lutheran congregations, written by Berkenmeyer, instructed pastors to admit enslaved people to the church as long as they seemed sincerely interested in abiding by Christian morality and promised to continue serving their masters. When baptizing black people, the constitution says that “preachers should be careful that they [enslaved people] promise not to abuse their Christianity or break the bond of submission.” This concern reinforced the practice that dated from at least 1708 of requiring enslaved people to promise not to use baptism or church membership as arguments for emancipation.85

Black people were theoretically allowed to become communicants in Lutheran churches by the 1730s, and they certainly became communicants in later decades. At the Lutheran church in Hackensack, New Jersey, the church council, headed by Reverend Michael C. Knoll, in 1733 decided that, “If, by the grace of God, some Negroes would also be willing to come to catechetical instruction,” then they would be instructed with white children and white young adults in preparation to “be admitted to the Lord’s Supper.”86 The possibility of learning to read, as part of catechism lessons, likely appealed to black northerners.

The Lutheran churches in New York, according to Graham R. Hodges, were “sufficiently open to black membership as to be considered interracial communities,” and they seemed to attract free blacks particularly.87 At the Lutheran church in New York City, there were at least nineteen blacks baptized in the 1730s and 1740s. Among the individuals baptized were “Peter Jaksen, a free negro, about 20 years old”; “David, a negro slave of Niclaes Walther”; Abraham, the son of “Joseph Matthyeen and Annatje, free negreoes,” and Eva, the illegitimate child of “Maria Poppelsdorf, white and an unknown negro.” Some consensual sexual relations and even marriages between Germans and free black people occurred in the eighteenth century. These black individuals, some free and some enslaved, requested baptism at the Lutheran church and likely attended services there.88

The Moravian Church (Renewed Unity of Brethren), a mission-driven and pietistic Protestant sect from central Europe, also ministered to some blacks and Indians during the 1740s. The Moravians promoted emotional piety and focused on semi-communal living, heartfelt devotion to Christ, and worldwide missionary efforts. Moravians were engaged in missionary work to thousands of African slaves on the Danish Caribbean Island of St. Thomas by 1740.89 A group of Moravians from Saxony settled in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1740 to practice their religion without state harassment and to minister to Pennsylvania Indians. Eventually, by the 1760s, Moravians established five communities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut for Delaware, Mohican, and other Indians interested in Christianity. Missionary work at Indian villages, such as Shekomeko, New York, was a central component of the faith of these Christians. Like Anglicans, Moravians sometimes offered educational opportunities to enslaved people. Moravians also did not demand that their converts possess a high degree of religious knowledge or memorize doctrines before baptism, and Moravians sought to learn Indian languages and could be more accepting of traditional Indian practices than most English Protestants. All that was required of adults seeking baptism was a simple profession of faith, and as such, Moravians made this sacrament relatively accessible to blacks and Indians.90

In addition to the small number of black Moravians, including Andreas and Magdalene, Indians affiliated with Moravian Christianity in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, usually in Indian towns that were visited by missionaries. Several families of Delawares decided to be baptized by Moravians in the late 1740s and 1750s, and roughly sixty-six Delaware or Mohican women were baptized in 1749 alone. Delawares often felt pressures from growing white settlements and the more powerful Six Nations Iroquois (Haudenosaunee). Consequently, for some Delawares, Christian affiliation and missionaries were seen as means of maintaining community cohesion and local autonomy. The Moravian missionary town of Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, became an important site of Indian Christianity, but other Delawares were skeptical and disinterested in Moravian Christianity and white alliances.91

Moravian women played central roles in many of the spiritual interactions with Indians. Several eighteenth-century female Moravian missionaries in New York and Pennsylvania became close friends with Indian believers, and both Europeans and Indians found mutual support in these relationships. Moravian women such as Jeannette Mack met individually with Indian women, discussed religious beliefs with them, and encouraged their spiritual growth. When Indians were baptized in the Moravian church during the 1740s, white Moravians served as sponsors or godparents for Indian children, and correspondingly, Indians sometimes served as sponsors or godparents for white children. These relationships facilitated spiritual as well as physical support among the Indians and Europeans at the Moravian missions. The central role played by Moravian women in missionary work among Indians in the 1740s and 1750s was one of the key factors that made these missions successful examples of interracial Christianity.92

The Moravian missionaries who created personal friendships with Indians in Pennsylvania and elsewhere show one way in which interracial religious activities flourished in the 1740s, but such experiences were fragile and not shared by all whites and Indians in Pennsylvania and New York. New York officials persecuted the white Moravian missionaries at Shekomeko in 1744 by charging that they were in league with French Catholics and by expelling white Moravians. The migration of the white and some Indian Moravians effectively ended this Moravian interracial religious community in New York. Some religious societies that were interracial and that practiced some measure of equality occasionally existed in the early eighteenth century, but these endeavors came into conflict with the inequality and injustice that more often characterized relations between whites and Indians.93

In contrast to the other Mid-Atlantic churches, most Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and Presbyterian churches did not baptize or admit to membership black or Indian peoples during most of the eighteenth century. Graham Russell Hodges, who examined baptismal records from more than fifty Reformed churches from 1680 to 1776, was able to find only “scattered black baptisms.” The Dutch Reformed Church of Albany, New York, baptized at least ten black people between 1733 and 1745, but those baptisms appear to be the largest concentration of black baptism in a Reformed church before the 1780s. The Old Tennent Presbyterian Church of Manalapan (formerly Freeport), New Jersey, baptized five black adults upon their professions of faith and four black children, whose parents had been baptized previously, between 1740 and 1749. Few other Presbyterian churches followed their lead. Albany’s Dutch Reformed Church and the Old Tennent Presbyterian Church were exceptions.94

Most Reformed and Presbyterian churches did not baptize blacks or Indians because of parishioners’ direct opposition to doing so and because church policies made these sacraments relatively inaccessible, even for enslaved people in Christian homes. Writing in February 1728, James Wetmore, Anglican missionary at Rye, New York, noted that “some Presbyterians will allow their servants to be taught, but are unwilling they should be baptized.”95 Reformed and Presbyterian churches would baptize only children of members (not other household members such as servant children), and they required adults who wanted to be baptized to be admitted as communicants at the same time, which made baptism more difficult to obtain. Presbyterian and Reformed churches did not have the equivalent of the Congregationalists’ Halfway Covenant, which separated adult baptisms from the requirements of full membership. More so than among English colonists, Dutch slaveholders feared that baptism would imply equality or undermine their ownership of slaves. Reformed churches also lacked missionary activities directed toward blacks and Indians, which played such a central role in the number of black baptisms in other churches.96 After the American Revolution, however, Reformed and Presbyterian churches changed their baptismal policies, and African Americans joined these churches, sometimes in substantial numbers (see chapters 4 and 5).

In the Mid-Atlantic colonies as a whole, most Anglican and some Lutheran and Moravian churches ministered to blacks and Indians between 1730 and 1749. Their theology of baptism and missionary activities help explain why these churches included blacks and Indians, even though Germans, in general, owned fewer slaves, and German churches were often less well established than other denominations.

Throughout New England, most Congregational churches and most Church of England parishes were interracial religious communities between 1730 and 1749. Blacks and Indians regularly participated in these churches as attendees and through the rituals of baptism and communion. The presence of blacks and Indians in all these types of churches was not solely the result of Great Awakening revivals because they participated in churches before the Great Awakening began and were participants in churches whose leadership emphatically opposed the Great Awakening. Rather, blacks and Indians found various types of Protestant Christianity appealing for the spiritual and material benefits they could confer. In the middle of the eighteenth century, many of these trends continued. However, European exploitations of Indians and blacks also strained the dynamics in these churches, leading to conflicts and even the dissolution of some interracial religious communities as Indians increasingly opted for separate churches in the 1750s.