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Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Early American Studies) - Softcover

Gerbner, Katharine

 
9780812224368: Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Early American Studies)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812224361 ISBN 13: 9780812224368
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion.

When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery," arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal.

Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katharine Gerbner teaches history at the University of Minnesota.

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Introduction

On November 16, 1651, a man named Lazarus entered the Anglican church in Christ Church parish, Barbados. As he walked toward the church doors, he passed the "strong pair of Stocks" where public punishments took place. The church itself was a wooden structure and one of the oldest buildings on the island. Constructed in 1629 just two years after the first English settlers arrived, the church would meet a tempestuous end: it was destroyed by flood in 1669 and washed out to sea. The second and third iterations of the church were destroyed by hurricane. But before the first church structure met its watery demise, it served as the site of Lazarus's baptism. Lazarus, who was described only as "a negro" in the church register, was the first Afro-Caribbean to receive baptism in the Anglican Church on Barbados. Neither his age nor place of birth were given, nor any indication of godparents or kin.

Lazarus's baptism challenged the emerging culture of slavery in the Protestant Caribbean. The Anglican Church in Barbados was exclusive, the domain of slave owners and government officials. While most historians have downplayed the relevance of institutionalized Christianity in the seventeenth-century Protestant Caribbean, viewing the sugar colonies as islands of depravity, the Anglican Church was central to the maintenance of planter power in Barbados and elsewhere. The Anglo-Barbadian elite believed that their status as Protestants was inseparable from their identity as free Englishmen. Like their counterparts in England, they purchased pews, memorialized themselves within church walls, and used the church as a place for both punishment and politics. Aside from the stocks that sat outside its doors, the church was the site of island elections and served as a community bulletin board where white inhabitants could post news about stolen goods or runaway slaves.

Unlike the parish churches in England, however, the Anglican Church in Barbados was restricted. It separated masters from their enslaved "heathen" laborers and marked Anglo-Barbadians as both English and free. The association between Protestantism and freedom was so strong that most slave owners came to dismiss the idea that their slaves were eligible for conversion. In 1661, when the British Parliament instructed Lord Willoughby, the reinstated governor of Barbados, to "[win] such as are purchased . . . as slaves to the Christian faith and [make] them capable of being baptized thereinto," the Assembly and Council refused to pass Willoughby's 1663 bill "recommending the christening of Negro children, and the instruction of all adult Negroes, to the several ministers of this place." By 1680, the Barbadian planters' stance against slave conversion had become even more pronounced. When William Blathwayt, on behalf of the Lords of Trade and Plantations in London, wrote to the merchants of Barbados to inquire as to "the unhappy state of the negroes and other slaves in Barbadoes by their not being admitted to the Christian religion," the self-titled "gentlemen of Barbados" explained that "the conversion of their slaves to Christianity would not only destroy their property but endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others."

Anticonversion sentiment was one of the defining features of Protestant slave societies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While enslaved Africans in Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonial societies were regularly introduced to Catholicism and baptized, whether willingly or not, Protestant slave owners in the English, Dutch, and Danish colonies tended to view conversion as inconsistent or incompatible with slavery. Their anticonversion sentiment was indicative of the changing meaning of Protestantism in the American colonies: over the course of the seventeenth century, Protestant planters claimed Christian identity for themselves, creating an exclusive ideal of religion based on ethnicity—a construct that I call "Protestant Supremacy."

Protestant Supremacy was the predecessor of White Supremacy, an ideology that emerged after the codification of racial slavery. I refer to "Protestant" Supremacy, rather than "Anglican" or "Christian" Supremacy, because this ideology was present throughout the Protestant American colonies, from the Danish West Indies to Virginia and beyond. It was most likely to develop in places with an enslaved population that was larger than the free population, such as Barbados, Jamaica, or South Carolina. In these colonies, Anglican, Dutch Reformed, and Lutheran slave owners conceived of their Protestant identities as fundamental to their status as masters. They constructed a caste system based on Christian status, in which "heathenish" slaves were afforded no rights or privileges while Catholics, Jews, and nonconforming Protestants were viewed with suspicion and distrust, but granted more protections.

When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they encountered slave societies that had already developed churches founded on exclusion. Planters regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Missionaries responded to this hostile environment by articulating and promoting a vision of "Christian Slavery" that reconciled Protestantism with bondage.

"Christian Slavery" was a polysemic concept. At the most basic level, it was an attempt to Christianize and reform slavery. Protestant theologians and missionaries drew on biblical descriptions of slavery as well as the ideal of the godly household to encourage slave owners to assume responsibility for the spiritual lives of their enslaved laborers. They also noted that Christian slavery had a long and well-established history in Europe and the Catholic American colonies. As missionaries faced opposition from slave owners, however, the meaning of "Christian Slavery" shifted. Missionaries increasingly emphasized the beneficial aspects of slave conversion, arguing that Christian slaves would be more docile and harder working than their "heathen" counterparts. They also sought to pass legislation that confirmed the legality of owning enslaved Christians. Over time, they integrated race into their arguments for Christian slavery. Since the ideology of Protestant Supremacy used religion to differentiate between slavery and freedom, missionaries suggested that race, rather than religion, was the defining feature of bondage.

Protestant missions to enslaved people have traditionally been examined within the context of antislavery thought, and have often been evaluated on humanitarian terms. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it is more accurate to understand the conflict between missionaries and slave owners as a clash between Protestant Supremacy, which excluded enslaved people from Christianity, and Christian Slavery, which sought to include slaves within the Protestant community. In this period before the abolitionist and proslavery movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is possible to see the early Protestant debates about Christianity and slavery in a new light. In contrast to historians who have studied the origins of antislavery, I emphasize the ways that Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries fought hard to accommodate slavery to their Christian principles and argue that their efforts bore fruit in legislation affirming that Protestant status was compatible with perpetual bondage. As a result, their advocacy should be understood within the long history of proslavery thought as well as an antecedent of antislavery and abolition.

The tendency to read abolition into the early Protestant missions is especially pronounced in the...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812224361
ISBN 13 
9780812224368
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
280
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

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Breda
4831 GR
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