Читать книгу Dividing the Faith - Richard J. Boles - Страница 7

Phillis Wheatley was stolen from her family in Senegambia, and, in 1761, slave traders transported her to Boston, Massachusetts, to be sold. The Wheatley family, who purchased her, treated Phillis far better than almost all slaves in the eighteenth century, and she received a thorough education, but she still longed for freedom. Wheatley began writing poetry in 1765 that frequently contained religious themes. In 1771, she was baptized and became a member of a predominantly white Congregational church in Boston. Two years later, some of her poetry was published in London, England, as a book titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. This book and the engraving of her likeness that appeared as the frontispiece are evidence that her experience of enslavement was exceptional.

Wheatley remains today the most famous black Christian from the colonial era.1 Despite the uniqueness of her experiences and accomplishments, Phillis Wheatley’s religious affiliation with a predominantly white church was quite ordinary. Thousands of African Americans and hundreds of American Indians publicly participated in and affiliated with predominantly white churches in New England and Mid-Atlantic regions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The history of these churches and our perspective on them, however, have been whitewashed.

Most Americans today usually think of northern colonial churches as being entirely “white” institutions, but black and Indian peoples regularly affiliated with these churches. Historians have known about Phillis Wheatley and some other black church members, but for a long time, they were treated as outliers in the narratives of American religious history.2 The old Congregational churches of New England, often situated on public green spaces in quaint town centers, are iconic symbols of New England, and for many Americans, of colonial America and early American religious history as a whole. However, no broad, comparative study of black and Indian affiliation in northern churches exists that treats both changes over time and denominational differences.3 This neglect obscures the history of interracial churches in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions, where northerners typically worshipped in interracial but not integrated congregations from the 1730s to the 1820s.4

FIGURE I.1. Title page and frontispiece of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, NYPL, “Title page and frontispiece,” Image ID 485600, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/.

Take the First Parish Congregational Church of Hingham, Massachusetts, for instance. Although colonial Hingham had a relatively small black and Indian population in the eighteenth century, black and Indian people were active participants in this town’s churches. There were eight people of African descent and three Indians baptized at the First Parish between 1730 and 1749, including “Emme George an Indian woman,” “Francis a Molattoe woman,” and “Jack a Negroe.” Jack was also admitted to membership in the church. Black children and adults continued to be baptized there periodically into the 1770s.5 And Hingham was hardly alone. Indeed, it was the norm. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most northern churches of various denominations baptized and admitted some blacks or Indians into their church congregations.6

Dividing the Faith builds on the works of a growing number of scholars who have been describing, with greater levels of sophistication, the lives of blacks and Indians in the colonial era and nineteenth century.7 Building on this scholarship, this book furthers the conversation by demonstrating that dynamic interracial interactions in northern churches were more common and persisted longer than has generally been acknowledged. Protestant churches helped define the institution of slavery and later were on the frontline of creating the first segregated society in American history during the early nineteenth century. Much attention has been given to the remarkable story of the rise of separate black churches after the Revolution, especially the dramatic departure of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones from St. George’s Methodist Church. The attention on that turning point toward racial separatism in American Christianity, however, has partially obscured the extent and depth of the long history of interracial churches that persisted even decades after Allen and Jones founded their churches.8 During the religiously vibrant Early American Republic, both separate African American congregations and interracial churches expanded alongside one another.

The extent of interracial religious activity during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in northern churches has been obscured because historians have not fully utilized the church records where congregants of color are documented and because American Christians themselves have forgotten or glossed over this history. In general, scholars of American religious history have neglected black and Indian people in northern churches, and historians studying northern black and Indian people have underutilized church records as essential sources for studying the experiences of these groups in northern society. Blacks and Indians in northern colonial churches were long understudied because of the “whitening” of New England’s history that persisted until quite recently. Blacks in northern churches have also been neglected in part because many scholars of church history have tended to dismiss early conversion and church participation of enslaved Africans as nothing more than forms of oppression.9 Only in the past decade or so have some northern congregations begun to examine the diversity of their eighteenth-century predecessors and the ways that they supported and benefited from the enslavement and displacement of African and Indian peoples.10

The work of later Christians who sought to integrate American churches, years after the proliferation of separate African American churches, also sometimes obscured the complicated history of racial interactions in northern churches. For example, in downtown Boston sits the Tremont Temple Baptist Church. The current edifice was completed in 1896, and above one of the church’s doorways is a plaque announcing, “First Integrated Church in America—Organized 1838.”11 This congregation was founded on the principle of inclusion, as neither race nor class nor gender determined who could worship there or where people sat in the sanctuary. One of the leading founders, Timothy Gilbert, was a white abolitionist who left the Charles Street Baptist Church because African Americans were not permitted to sit in ground-floor church pews. However, this statement that Tremont Temple was the first integrated church in America can erroneously be read as implying that black, white, and Indian peoples never worshipped together in early American churches. In 1738, one hundred years before Tremont Temple was founded, nearly every church in Boston included black congregants, sometimes in large numbers. A few Boston churches of the eighteenth century also included American Indians. The sentiment behind Tremont Temple’s “first” claim reflects a blind spot common in the historical memory of most Americans. Many people today assume, incorrectly, that American churches have always been firmly divided along perceived racial lines.

Tremont Temple was not the first northern church to include racially diverse members and congregants, but it was exceptional in antebellum Boston because northern churches became less interracial as the nineteenth century wore on, contrary to the narrative of racial progress sometimes associated with northern states. Americans’ sense of their racial past and present is at stake in understanding the presence and influences of blacks and Indians in northern churches. The extent of interracial interactions in northern churches challenges two truisms about northern states that have fed into Americans’ racial consciousness. The first is that colonial New England was fundamentally a white region with only a sprinkling of blacks in the cities and Indians along the frontier. It is no coincidence that “the North,” particularly New England, has often been held up as the most “American” of regions in a country that has long associated whiteness and national identity.12 In popular memory of the past, the North is also commonly held up as being racially progressive in contrast to the South, which is epitomized historically by plantations and Jim Crow segregation. Racism was and is a national problem, not merely a southern one. This study of people of color in northern churches, therefore, furthers the reintegration of northern colonies and states in the racial history of American church life.

How Sunday mornings became the most segregated time in American life is not a linear story of declension. Instead, it is a complex history replete with remarkable individuals who made religious choices that defied the common patterns and assumptions of American society. American Indians and African Americans (and black Americans in the colonial era) affiliated with predominantly white churches in significant numbers before slowly forming separate churches, and in the process, they influenced patterns of race relations across northern society. Many blacks and Indians affiliated with predominantly white churches even as these congregations were complicit in supporting slavery and the dispossession of Indian land.

From the early to mid-eighteenth century, most Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in the northern British colonies were interracial congregations as blacks and Indians participated through weekly church services and the rituals of baptism and communion. These churches were dedicated to missionary outreach to these groups and made their sacramental communities relatively accessible to them. During the eras of the American Revolution and the Early Republic, northern churches became vastly more interracial as Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed Christians, Methodists, and Baptists admitted more African Americans and Afro-Indians into their churches. Separate Native American churches, especially in the 1750s, and independent African American churches after 1790, provided church alternatives for people of color. However, for a couple of decades, both interracial and segregated types of churches grew and developed side by side. In other words, churches wholly divided by the color line were not inevitable.13 Ultimately, though, segregated churches came to dominate northern states. The ejections and withdrawals of blacks and Indians from predominantly white churches were central building blocks in the creation of widespread segregation in northern society by the 1830s.

Even if a northern town included only a small number of blacks or Indians, it is significant that many northern churches were interracial because churches were the central institutions of most colonial towns. Churches remained culturally influential organizations in the nineteenth century. Since so many churches contained people of color, these institutions helped define the place of blacks and Indians in northern society. Often this influence meant that churches reinforced colonists’ widespread oppression and marginalization of blacks and Indians. Almost wherever there were people of color in New England and within every major northern city, they participated in the central institutions of these communities, and this fact alters how we think northern colonies and states operated. Although New England colonies had small shares and proportions of enslaved blacks compared to most British colonies, it would be a mistake to suggest that New England colonies were not greatly influenced by the enslavement of Africans and Indians. The activities of the enslaved blacks and Indians widely affected British colonial societies’ laws, economies, and religions. In regard to religion, black and Indian agency and participation affected northern and southern churches alike.14 New England’s churches, in this sense, were not exceptional.

Interracial religious activity was common in many northern churches from 1730 to 1820. In some denominations, a majority of congregations were interracial. By interracial, I mean that people whom contemporaries judged to be of different races jointly participated in almost all the religious activities and rituals of these churches. Numerous blacks and Indians were baptized, had their children baptized, partook of communion, listened to sermons, sang psalms and hymns, and prayed along with their white fellow congregants. These churches were interracial not only because of the physical presence of blacks and Indians but also because diverse people entered through religious rituals into a defined community of a local church that believers imagined was also part of a broader and eternal spiritual community.

Interracial worship, however, does not imply that blacks and Indians received equal treatment in predominantly white churches. These churches usually did not allow blacks and Indians to vote in church affairs or to hold leadership or pastoral positions. Along with seating arranged by status and sometimes by gender, predominantly white churches required blacks and Indians to occupy segregated seats in the balconies or the back of the main floor during worship. Yet the fact remains that blacks and Indians were present in and members of a sizable number of northern churches, thereby making churches common sites of interracial relations. In turn, churches also became important sites for the contestation of racial issues from the Great Awakening to the nineteenth century’s era of democratic ferment. The ways that racial issues were decided in churches influenced society more broadly because churches were one of the most common places of public gatherings and because they exercised a unique influence on society’s morals.

Historians have generally overemphasized the appeal of evangelical denominations, such as Methodists and Baptists, among northern blacks in the colonial period. The fact is that significant portions of the black northerners chose to affiliate with more liturgical or subdued forms of Protestantism, particularly Anglican churches, before 1810.15 By the antebellum era, northern African Americans overwhelmingly favored Baptist and Methodist forms of Christianity, but it is important not to assume that this later preference was common in the earlier context of the colonial era. Black and Indian people affiliated not only with evangelical and revivalist churches but also with the more hierarchical and traditional forms of Christianity. Moreover, they did so for a variety of pragmatic and principled reasons.

Black patterns of religious affiliation in New England churches differed from their participation in Mid-Atlantic churches, and both these northern regions exhibited patterns that were sometimes dissimilar and sometimes similar to black participation in southern and Caribbean churches.16 Across the British Atlantic world, small numbers of enslaved and free black people participated in Church of England parishes and some other churches, but larger percentages of the black population participated in northern Anglican churches compared to the parishes in southern and Caribbean slave societies. As a general rule, planters in Caribbean and southern slave societies more often opposed baptizing enslaved people than the slaveholders in northern colonies, although some northern slave owners prevented their slaves from being baptized. Across the entire Atlantic world, the pursuit of education was a common reason for black and Indian people to engage with churches and missionaries, especially in Anglican and Moravian congregations.17

The church affiliations of Indians, Afro-Indians, and black people speak to the need in American historiography to “triangulate” racial dynamics during the colonial and early national eras.18 By scrutinizing similar and dissimilar experiences of blacks and Indians, this book also contributes to the growing historiography on the construction of racial identities in early America and shows the need to treat churches as influential social institutions, not just religious ones. The construction of racial identities in churches affected and reflected broader social changes.

Comparing the rise of separate Indian and separate black churches reveals some of the shared experiences and also disparate conditions of these groups of people. Indians who had affiliated in predominantly white churches in southern New England withdrew and founded new churches in the 1750s, and black people, especially in the Mid-Atlantic, began establishing separate churches after 1790. These churches became segregated not only because whites did not want to extend equality and did not want to worship alongside people of color but also because Indians and blacks themselves chose to found new churches for both religious and nonreligious reasons. This comparative story also describes part of the process by which northern societies became more racially segregated as slavery collapsed and Revolutionary political principles took hold.

The chapters that follow, starting with the year 1730, progress chronologically, although their date ranges occasionally overlap. As the chronology progresses, northern churches, on the whole, became more interracial until the steep drop in interracial churches that occurred after 1820. Blacks and Indians regularly participated in Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches from 1730 to 1749, and their participation was not limited to revival-focused congregations. A wide variety of conflicts between whites, blacks, and Indians occurred in northern churches between 1740 and 1763 because of the oppression that blacks and Indians experienced in colonial society and because blacks and Indians sometimes combatted white prejudices in churches. Some of the conflicts in the 1750s influenced the rise of new, separate Indian churches in southern New England. Between 1730 and 1776, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and Presbyterian churches rarely baptized or admitted blacks, which stands in stark contrast to both these churches in the early United States and other denominations in the colonial period. Whites in these denominations expressed fears about the effects of interracial churches on their ability to hold men and women as chattel slaves, and they maintained church policies that made baptism less accessible to blacks and Indians.

The era of the American Revolution was a crucial turning point in race relations in northern churches. Throughout the American Revolutionary era from 1764 to 1790, a dramatic expansion of interracial worship occurred, especially in the Mid-Atlantic, despite the disruptions of the imperial crisis and Revolutionary War. Newly formed Methodist churches, an expanding number of Baptist churches, Dutch Reformed churches, and Presbyterian churches began to or increasingly included black members. Contrary to common perceptions, the development of white antislavery opinions did not commonly precede or cause this increase in black participation. Between 1791 and 1820, African Americans created separate black churches, especially in major cities, but the rise of independent black Christianity also coincided with increased black participation in predominantly white Dutch Reformed, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches. Both interracial and independent forms of black Christianity rose together in the Early Republic. Northeastern Indian churches also became interracial as blacks and Afro-Indians joined Indian communities.

Black participation in predominantly white churches swiftly declined between 1821 and 1850, and this decline affected race relations in the rest of northern society. In this period, antiblack violence peaked in northern cities, and segregation spread across northern society. In response to these developments, some Christian reformers argued that churches should be reintegrated, but more commonly, African Americans and Indians articulated radical, Christian critiques of white society and white Christians. The narrative arc of this story progresses from a surprising number of interracial churches in the mid-eighteenth century to an expansion of interracial churches during the era of the American Revolution and the Early Republic and finally to antebellum churches firmly divided along racial lines.

Church records, particularly lists of members and persons baptized, are the foundational source material for this book. These sources, written by white ministers or clerks, are the best and most reliable sources for determining levels of black and Indian participation in predominantly white churches. That said, some of the people who wrote church records did not use racial notations, so in some churches, it is more difficult to determine black or Indian participation levels. Whites, especially after 1780, increasingly described Indians or Afro-Indians as blacks, which also conceals some Indian participants in these churches. My analysis should not imply that the racial identifiers or categories used by white people necessarily matched the ways that black people and Indians identified themselves. Moreover, these sources and the records of white churches provide hardly any specific information regarding why blacks or Indians chose to affiliate with any given church. Despite the drawbacks of this information, by surveying large numbers of churches and identifying general trends, this book describes the religious choices and experiences of many northern blacks and Indians with detail and nuance. The choices and actions of thousands of blacks and Indians speak loudly about their religious experiences.19

Dividing the Faith does not make claims about the proportion of northern blacks or Indians who were Christians, although many of these people identified themselves as Christians. There is no reliable way to determine the portion of a city’s or colony’s black and Indian populations that were baptized since population data for the colonial period was so inconsistent and incomplete and since baptism was generally a once-in-a-lifetime event. Moreover, I do not assume that church attendance or participation in Christian rituals, such as baptism or communion, signifies anything concrete about the beliefs or doctrines held by the participant. Rituals can signify a wide range of meanings to the people who participate in them. Blacks and Indians practiced Christianity and adopted at least some of its theology, but they did not necessarily believe the same things as European Christians, and many of them incorporated Christianity into preexisting beliefs, rituals, and spiritual practices.20 Without a doubt, enslaved men and women born in Africa retained and continued to practice a range of religions from West Africa, including Islam and Catholicism, but this book does not seek to examine all the religious beliefs and practices of people of African descent in northern colonies. Rather, I focus on how and when black and Indian people affiliated with churches, as institutions, and what their affiliation can and cannot tell us. I am more concerned with the range of meanings that church affiliation held to black and Indian peoples than with their internal, private religious beliefs, although these two aspects of religion were necessarily inseparable.

I generally use the term “black” to describe people who self-identified or were identified by other people as being partially or wholly of African descent. Terms such as “negro,” “mulatto,” “black,” “African,” and “colored” appear in church records, but these terms are all problematic, and “African American” is anachronistic for the colonial period. I use the term “black” not because American racial categories are self-evident or logical. It is merely the least awkward of the terms that can be used to explore race relations and changes in racial categorizations in early America. I use the term “white” to describe people of mostly or entirely European ancestry, and this category is no less constructed, contested, and problematic than “black.” When possible, I identify Indians by their tribal nation or community names. Although modern Native Americans differ in their preference for the terms “Native American” or “Indian,” most northeastern Indian nations today use the term “Indian” because it is treaty language. It is the word used by white officials to make all the promises they then broke, and it appears in the written historical records that connect today’s Indigenous nations to their land.

The diversity evident in many eighteenth-century churches, and the changes over time in black and Indian participation in predominantly white churches, is a story that includes evidence of the tragic oppression of blacks and Indians in America. However, it also contains rarer moments in which religious beliefs challenged the prejudices of white northerners. For people more accustomed to thinking in terms of twentieth-century American churches, the rise of racially segregated northern churches may be a surprising history indeed.