Читать книгу Dividing the Faith - Richard J. Boles - Страница 8

On the evening of Wednesday, October 29, 1738, church members and other congregants converged on the New London, Connecticut, meetinghouse to attend the midweek lecture service and to witness several baptisms. As many of the town’s inhabitants arrived, they took their assigned seats in the high-walled box pews or benches. Church seating was a contentious issue in New London, as it was in many New England towns. A committee determined where congregants sat and assigned pews based on people’s ability to pay rental fees as well as by factors including wealth, status, age, public service, family connections, gender, and race. There was such a high demand for seating that a second gallery was added above the first one. As with most services, the congregation sang psalms without instrumental accompaniment and listened to a well-prepared sermon by Reverend Eliphalet Adams.1

At each of the previous Wednesday gatherings in October, a child was baptized, but on this night, an adult named Phillis and four children named Ishmael, James, Ziba, and Sylvanus were to be baptized. At the appointed time, Phillis and the children proceeded toward the front of the church, likely descending narrow stairs from the galleries. They walked toward Reverend Adams, who was both the pastor of the First Church of Christ in New London and the person who held legal title to these five enslaved people of African descent. By law and custom, these slaves owed Adams their obedience and lifelong labor. Phillis stood in front of the congregation. She saw wealthier congregants nearest to her, but if she raised her eyes toward the galleries, she might have seen some of the other black people and Mohegan or Pequot Indians who attended this church. Phillis made a profession of faith and “owned the church covenant,” which is to say, she affirmed her understanding of and belief in the doctrines of Christianity and submitted herself to the oversight and discipline of the church members. She was always liable to be punished by her master, but the church members could now censure Phillis or remove her from the church’s fellowship for moral failings. After owning the covenant, Phillis was baptized. Next, Adams baptized Phillis’s children James, Ziba, and Sylvanus, as well as a “servant child Ishmael.” Ishmael was the child of another of Adams’s slaves. Adams promised to educate these four children in Christianity as part of his responsibility as their metaphorical patriarch, a role typically assumed by English masters of bound laborers, when he stated, “for all whose education I also publically engaged.”2

For Eliphalet Adams, the sacrament of baptism was a sacred duty performed regularly for the children of believing parents and adults who owned the covenant or made a profession of faith in Christ. Infants, children, and adults could all receive this sacrament, either on the testimony of a guardian’s faith or by their own profession. He baptized fifty-seven people in 1738. For Phillis, the meaning and significance of her baptism are unclear as historical records provide no access to her words or thoughts. Perhaps Adams used promises or threats to pressure her into being baptized, or perhaps she made a choice herself to do so. Although a minority in the New London church, Phillis and her children were hardly the only nonwhite worshippers. In the 1730s and 1740s, at least sixteen Indians (nine adults and seven children) and fifteen blacks (eight adults and seven children) were baptized at this church. These baptisms were a small but noticeable minority among the roughly 1,080 baptisms performed there during this era, and the black people baptized at this church represented a small percentage of the enslaved population of the New London region.3 The trend of black and Indian baptisms, though, was not limited to one location. People of color from across the region joined predominantly white churches as individuals and in small groups. Collectively, they were making those churches more representative of the diversity in British colonial societies.

In the 1730s and 1740s, long before separate black churches were formed, black Christians regularly attended and joined predominantly white churches. Although separate Indian churches dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century existed in Massachusetts, Indians also participated in predominantly white churches. In these two decades, significant numbers of blacks and Indians were baptized in Congregational churches in New England, Anglican churches from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, and some Lutheran and Moravian churches in Mid-Atlantic colonies. Strikingly, most people in southern New England and a significant minority of people in the rest of the northern colonies experienced formal religion in interracial contexts between 1730 and 1749.

The participation of black and Indian peoples in so many of these churches is significant for several reasons. White Christians by the eighteenth century frequently believed it was their religious duty to teach blacks and Indians the doctrines of Christianity and to invite them into their churches. They thought that churches ought to contain all parts of their hierarchical society, and numerous pastors and congregants made strides in putting this ideal into practice. In some other colonies, Europeans adopted a model of Christian practice that sought to delineate boundaries of “whiteness” from “blackness” by excluding enslaved black people from churches.4 In contrast, northern Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches generally felt that the participation of blacks and Indians in their churches helped justify their existing social order, including whites’ elevated status therein. Since blacks and Indians were active in numerous churches, racial identities and slavery were created and contested in these spaces and upon religious terms. Moreover, it is crucial to examine black and Indian participation in colonial churches because it contextualizes and explains the multifaceted origins of Native American and African American forms of Christianity. In order to understand how and why churches eventually became divided along perceived racial lines, we must first understand the extent to which churches were interracial.

Even though black and Indian Christians produced few written records in this era, the patterns of their affiliation in predominantly white churches tell us much about their religious experiences. Levels of black and Indian affiliation can best be determined through baptismal and membership lists; no sources indicate how many people attended church services regularly week after week. Many churches were interracial religious communities, meaning that blacks and Indians engaged in the same religious activities as whites, including baptism, communion, public worship, singing, catechism classes, and other shared religious events. When white ministers baptized blacks and Indians or admitted them to membership, these ministers and church leaders envisioned that these people would one day be in heaven too. They imagined a spiritual community that transcended their specific time and place.

The interracial practices of churches in northern colonies contrast with the more segregated religious practices in some British slave societies. In other colonies, slave owners were more determined to prevent enslaved black people from participating in churches. In South Carolina, Barbados, and Jamaica, white people were often baptized and married in the private spaces of their homes to distinguish themselves from the small number of free and enslaved black people who were baptized and married in Anglian church buildings. White people in northern colonies did not separate their baptisms from church settings to distinguish their baptisms from those of black or Indian peoples. But, creating interracial churches was not the same as treating blacks and Indians as equals, which was not the goal of white colonists.5

The impressive extent of black and Indian participation in northern Protestant churches meaningfully amends our understanding of the Great Awakening’s effect on the origins of African American and Native American Christianities. The participation of black and Indian people in churches was varied and not inherently connected to the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening was a disruptive period of religious controversy that dramatically changed the religious composition of New England. It was particularly connected to the traveling preaching tours of Reverend George Whitefield. Although religious awakenings occurred in earlier periods, later commentators and historians identify the revivals that occurred in the early 1740s as the Great Awakening because of the intense upsurges of religious activity that occurred in New England and also in locations across the British Atlantic world. Early forms of African American Christianity are often closely associated with evangelical revivalism, including the radical elements of the Great Awakening. However, black men and women did not solely participate in the churches that promoted or embraced awakenings. They also affiliated with Congregational, Anglican, and Lutheran churches that opposed the new revival techniques, sometimes in substantial numbers.6

Some scholars of religious history have overstated the role of revivalism and the Great Awakening in explaining black and Indian Christian practices in northern colonies. The emotional preaching and lay involvement in religious services of the Great Awakening played a role in black and Indian participation, but scholars have misidentified it as the primary—or even the only—source of their affiliation in Christian churches.7 In some of the New England churches that became centers of revivalism, Indian and black participation increased from hardly any adherents to a noticeable minority of members. Some pastors who promoted revivals, such as Reverends James Davenport and Daniel Rogers, brought groups of Indians or blacks into Congregational churches.8 The Great Awakening encouraged higher numbers of blacks and Indians to enter churches, but such participation was not necessarily tied to the prorevival theology or styles of preaching. Blacks and Indians participated in churches before Whitefield’s famous preaching tour of 1739–1740, and they joined churches whose ministers emphatically opposed Whitefield and other revivalists, so there were multiple origins of African American and Indian forms of Christianity.

I argue that the forms of Christianity practiced by eighteenth-century blacks and Indians were nearly as varied as the forms of Christianity practiced by the European colonists. The Great Awakening increased minorities’ church participation in total, but “revivalism” or “the Great Awakening” are insufficient explanations for black and Indian peoples’ affiliation in a wide variety of churches. They participated in Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian congregations. Moreover, the churches they joined ranged from passionately “New Light” (revivalist, “Whitefieldarian,” or evangelical) congregations that sought to stir up revivals to staunchly traditionalist (“Old Light”) ones opposed to religious excesses that disrupted communal unity. The evidence to support this argument is divided by northern regions because the New England colonies and Mid-Atlantic colonies contained different religious landscapes. After a section that addresses motivations for religious affiliation, this chapter progresses to a section about Congregational and Anglican churches in New England and ends by examining Anglicans, Lutherans, and Moravians in Mid-Atlantic colonies.

Already by 1730, blacks, Indians, and Europeans in the northern colonies had been coexisting, although rarely peaceably, for more than a century. People from these groups interacted in homes, fields, marketplaces, and churches, but the threat of violence or actual violence undergirded their interactions. During the century that followed the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the number of Europeans and blacks grew considerably while war, enslavement, poverty, and diseases diminished Indian populations. Even before English and Dutch migrants created permanent settlements in what became Massachusetts and New York, the Indians who lived in the northern woodlands and coastal regions traded with Europeans and felt the devastating effects of European diseases. Epidemic diseases continued to decimate Indian communities. Initially, Europeans were dependent on Indians for trade and even food, but as European settlements grew in strength and size, colonists increasingly sought to claim more Indian land for themselves. Some attempts were made to convert Indians to Christianity, especially between the 1640s and 1675. Puritan minister John Eliot established “Praying Towns” for Christian Indians in Massachusetts, and Thomas Mayhew Jr. and Richard Bourne established churches among the Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. Dozens of Indians received religious training from English colonists and became missionaries and pastors to their own people. But, conflict rather than charity more often characterized English and Indian relations. Colonists waged wars against Indians, and colonists convinced some tribal nations to fight against one another by capitalizing on their long-standing differences. The Pequot War of 1636–37 and King Philip’s War in 1675–76 ended with devastation for Pequot, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Podunk, and Nipmuck peoples. In addition to deaths in battle, New England colonists enslaved more than 1,300 Indians in the seventeenth century.9

Despite the substantial human losses from war and disease, several eighteenth-century Indian communities not only persisted but also retained control over territory and local resources. Wampanoag communities lived near Plymouth and on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket in Massachusetts; Narragansetts had a reserve of land in Charlestown, Rhode Island, and Mohegans and Pequots held reserves in southeastern Connecticut. Montauketts and Shinnecocks maintained their homes on Long Island. More than a dozen different tribes, including Delawares and Shawnees, lived in polyglot communities on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Smaller Indian enclaves existed near Farmington, Kent, Bridgetown, and Lyme in Connecticut, near Worcester in central Massachusetts, and at Crossweeksung and Cranberry, New Jersey. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation remained, six nations strong, in the northern and western parts of New York. The geographic distribution of Indians meant that they were most likely to affiliate with the predominantly white congregations located relatively close to these land reserves.10

Colonists forcibly brought African slaves to northern colonies within the first decades of European settlement. The abundance of land and scarcity of labor, even without staple crop economies, made slaves and indentured servants economically valuable. A ship named Desire brought the first enslaved Africans in Boston in 1638. Colonists sold Indian prisoners of war to the West Indies in exchange for enslaved Africans. The Dutch West India Company was especially active in bringing slaves to their New Netherland colony and to New Amsterdam (soon to be renamed New York City), where black slaves accounted for around 20 percent of the city in 1664. Enslaved blacks engaged in all types of work, from farming and fishing to skilled crafts and manual labor, and most blacks lived and worked in close proximity to whites.11

Enslaved blacks were numerous and economically important in the northern colonies, and the types of coercion, violence, and resistance common in American slavery were present in northern colonies. The northern population of enslaved black people exceeded 14,000 by 1720 and grew to more than 30,000 by 1750; more than one-third of these black people were in New York. Black people were mostly clustered near port cities and towns, though they could be found practically anywhere in the colonies. These societies were stratified, with Indian and black servants and slaves occupying the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Slavery was not easy or benign in northern colonies, but enslaved people in northern colonies were often allowed to learn how to read, could generally own personal property, and might access courts of law. Northerners used an array of strategies to try to control servants and slaves, including renaming them, brutal violence, and justifying their actions with religion. Christian masters hoped they could control or effectively direct the spiritual development of their slaves. Enslaved men and women, however, did not passively submit to masters and were sometimes successful in frustrating attempts to control them and in negotiating some conditions within the institution of slavery. Most black people in these colonies were enslaved, but there were also small numbers of free blacks. The northern British mainland colonies were already ethnically and religiously diverse by 1730, and they continued to become more so over the eighteenth century.12 This diversity was reflected in many of the northern churches during the early and mid-eighteenth century.

Some black and Indian people participated in northern churches during the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century, so this chapter’s focus on the period of 1730 to 1749 should not be taken to imply that churches only began baptizing black or Indian peoples in the 1730s. Dozens of black people were baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church of New Netherland between 1639 and 1655, and a free black man named Emmanuel was baptized and admitted to membership in the Lutheran congregation in Albany, New York, in 1669. After Elias Neau began catechizing enslaved New Yorkers in 1704, the city’s Anglican churches routinely baptized black adults and children. Reverend Cotton Mather advocated for the instruction and Christianization of enslaved blacks in Boston by 1706. A thirty-year-old enslaved man named George and an unfree “Indian Boy” were baptized at Boston’s Brattle Street Congregational Church in January 1709, and a dozen other black people, including three free black people, were baptized there before 1730. Four black people were baptized in 1707 at the First Congregational Church of Dorchester, Massachusetts.13 This study begins with 1730 because it is instructive to look at baptismal rates in the years immediately preceding the Whitefield-inspired revival of 1740–42. The baptisms that occurred in the 1730s suggest that revivalism was not the only cause of black people’s participation in northern churches. In the broader English Atlantic, 1729–30 was also an important turning point in Anglican proselytization to slaves because the York-Talbot legal opinion asserted that baptism did not free enslaved people, and the Virginia House of Burgesses voted to support the conversion of blacks and Indians in that colony.14