The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

by Charles F. Irons

Her YWCA leader encouraged Lumpkin to consider the parable of the Good Samaritan when deciding whether or not to allow an African American woman to address their group. The force of the parable overwhelmed Lumpkin's segregationist upbringing and launched her on a career in which she championed equal justice for all.' I have often wondered why more white southerners in the colonial and antebellum periods did not have such conversion experiences. If the command to love one's neighbor made Lumpkin realize in 1915 that segregation was wrong, why did so few white southerners realize that race-based slavery was wrong? By all accounts, white southerners in the nineteenth century were among the most devoted Christians in the Western world, but their faith seems only to have strengthened their determination to hold another people in bondage. This book represents my attempt to understand this staggering moral failure-to understand why the parable of the Good Samaritan fell on deaf ears for so many generations.

Birney and Brown lashed out at southern churches because they saw the enormous practical and ideological work that white southern Christians were doing to protect slavery. The region's white Christians penned compelling defenses of slavery for the secular and denominational presses, guarded against insurrection by policing worship meetings in the quarters, gave regional apologists grounds for boasting by converting thousands of slaves to their faith, and enabled those skeptical of slavery's justice to subvert their concerns through mission work among the enslaved. It is for good reason, then, that historians of slavery and of the sectional conflict have endorsed abolitionists' contention that the South's white Christians contributed decisive ideological support to an evil institution.' At the same time,

understood to be those outside God's covenant, in bondage. When black men and women of their own initiative joined evangelical churches in numbers that far surpassed white evangelicals' expectations, white evangelicals realized the irrelevance of the Old Testament model of slavery and searched for new ways to understand a master-slave relationship in which both parties belonged to the community of faithful. White evangelicals thus embraced paternalism, the idea that master and slave owed each other reciprocal duties. From the perspective of evangelical whites, one of those responsibilities was "civilizing" people of African descent. Some white evangelicals followed the logic of their paternalist mission in the early national period to the idea that they were preparing slaves and free blacks for self-governance. They therefore tolerated black evangelicals' persistent attempts to exercise spiritual leadership and strongly supported-indeed, they led-the colonization movement. Nat Turner abruptly brought an end in 1831 to this tolerance of black assertiveness. With his militant revolt against slaveholder authority, he precipitated a spiritual crisis over how much access whites should allow the enslaved to the Gospel. Whites' resolution of this crisis involved a determination to expand blacks' access to evangelicalism but to curtail autonomous black religious expression. In the resulting mission to the slaves, white evangelicals tried to defuse the liberating power of black Chr...

Other scholars have demonstrated how profoundly enslaved persons shaped the ways in which whites thought about everything from family life to politics. Several have worked directly on the commonwealth. Anthony lacca- rino, for instance, showed how African American Virginians put enough pressure on their owners to shape the development of the first party system, and William Link placed enslaved persons at the center of his account of secession in Virginia. In some ways, this book is an ecclesiastical version of laccarino's and Link's political analyses; while they argue that Virginia slaves altered the political process, in this work I argue that slaves altered the ecclesiastical processes through which white Virginians forged a politically relevant proslavery argument.28

Since many white evangelicals derived (or hoped to derive) their economic welfare from black labor, they were unwilling to eliminate slavery, either. The middle course that Virginia whites chose, a massive state-sanctioned and privately funded effort to organize enslaved evangelicals into faith communities where they could be supervised by whites, largely replaced colonization. In simpler terms, control replaced stewardship. Turner thus failed to free the state's blacks, but he successfully chained whites-at least white evangelicals-to a program of slave missions and to the conviction that slaveowning mandated a constant posture of spiritual oversight.

Ultimately, African American Virginians indicated to whites that they were most likely to join quasi-independent churches composed entirely of black evangelicals. Whites accordingly allocated money and personnel to build separate houses of worship or to facilitate separate worship services in the same buildings. This physical separation, especially evident in urban congregations, symbolized the growing emotional separation between white and black evangelicals. Whites were more responsive to black evangelicals than ever, but their motivation was conditioned less by interpersonal relationships and more by a desire to bring blacks into the safety of the visible church. Northern

In the increasingly rancorous sectional conflict, the quasi-independent churches that black Virginians had formed in the state's towns and cities became rhetorical treasures for white Virginians, who began to regard these thriving congregations as normative of slave religion. Whites attributed to clerics associated with these missions considerable spiritual and political influence. The thrivin...

White Virginians who wanted to preserve their access to bonded labor and who perceived a growing cultural distance between themselves and these new arrivals described Africans as "savages" or "heathens" and used this definition to justify their perpetual enslavement.6 Whites at the same time increased their financial commitment to African labor and intensified this sense of cultural difference by purchasing new slaves at a furious rate over the next several decades, roughly i,ooo persons per year between 170o and 1740. This figure often surpassed the annual totals for voluntary European immigrants, and by 176o, more than 40 percent of Virginia's population was African-based.7 In the context of such a tremendous influx of non-Anglican peoples, white authorities gave less weight to individual conversions and emphasized instead the unchurched status of the group. Since most African arrivals were not Christian, Anglicans felt justified in enslaving them. Anglo-Virginians found in their King James Bible a description of Hebraic slavery that seemed to correspond perfectly to the labor patterns that emerged in the commonwealth during the late seventeenth century. English indentured servants, most of whom were baptized while infants into the Anglican Church, were the equivalent of the biblical ered ivri (Hebrew slaves), while men and women of African descent fit the description of ered canaani (non-Hebrew slaves).

Anglicans in Virginia who accepted this religious distinction between slave and free could not make the imaginative leap of including people of color in the body of Christ. They cited myriad difficulties in ministering to slaves, especially the linguistic and cultural differences between African arrivals and Englishmen. Many whites felt that such a gulf, in terms of both language and customs, made either conversion or true communion impossible.

In the relatively peaceful year of 1617, the colonists' enthusiasm for inclusion of Indians within the Anglican Church peaked. Flushed with the triumph of Pocahontas's Anglican baptism and subsequent journey to England, Anglo-Virginians planned a system of schools for Indians-hoping to facilitate similar cultural and religious transformations. One generous English donor to the proposed schools suggested that Indian children might be trained until the age of twenty-one, then given the same liberties as Englishmen. Opechancanough, powerful heir to the Powhatan Confederacy and kinsman of Pocahontas, brought all such dreams abruptly to an end when he led a devastating uprising against the Virginia English in 1622. His warriors killed 347 people, roughly one-quarter of the colony's white residents. Colonialists then defined even geographically proximate Indians as outside and antagonistic to their community-and therefore excepted from the obligation of attending Anglican worship.13

The absence of Africans from the established church was more theologically problematic than was that of the Powhatans. Anglo-Virginians could cultivate the fiction that Indians belonged outside the geographic bounds of their settlements, but they invited Africans into their most intimate spaces to perform their domestic and agricultural labor.15 Virginia blacks were thus undeniably parishioners of the colonial establishment, even if, as John Nelson explained, "few among them would have considered themselves as such" or "few, if any, of the dominant white inhabitants would have been willing to acknowledge it."16 Rather

At the same time that Godwyn demanded that blacks be included within the Church of England, he inadvertently helped engender a powerful pro-slavery argument. In seeking to overturn whites' objections to black participation in parish life, he not only cited the 1667 statute that conversion would not lead to emancipation, but he went much further and assembled a list of reasons why slaves' conversion was in slaveowners' best interest. In prioritizing the goal of bringing all ethnicities under the care of the church, Godwyn was apparently willing to leave intact the hierarchical relationship between masters and slaves. To this end, he argued too forcefully against owners' reservations about slave conversion and insisted that access to Anglican teaching would make enslaved men and women more efficient and less insubordinate: "So that this Authority of the Master is so far from being hereby diminished," he insisted, "that it is rather confirmed, and a stricter observance for that cause charged upon the Servants Conscience." The minister's own words elsewhere in his most famous pamphlet suggest strongly that Godwyn made such claims only for rhetorical effect and that he was actually opposed outright to chattel slavery. But his audience heeded the prophetic minister's concessions to slaveowners more than they did his criticism of slavery.23 White Virginians in the late seventeenth century still did not take any substantive steps to expose their slaves to Anglicanism, but they gai...

In the half-century following Godwyn's diatribe, Virginia Anglicans continued to ignore the tens of thousands of unconverted slaves among them, even as they embraced the idea that conversion did not threaten slavery. They drew additional confirmation of this idea from William Fleetwood's 1705 The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants, in which the author taught that God had ordered the world in a series of overlapping hierarchies-and that baptism left those hierarchies intact.24 Like Godwyn, Fleetwood also advocated recruitment of slaves into the church, so much so that he helped organize in 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (sPG) to promote the Christianization of American Indians, slaves, and others unreached by the Gospel. The SPG sent out dozens of missionaries to the American colonies, but none to Virginia. The decision by SPG officials to bypass the commonwealth indicated, on one hand, the relative strength of the Anglican Church in Virginia. On the other hand, it indicated that white Virginians did not consider the proselytization of their slaves a high enough priority to ask for assistance from the sPG.25

In an irony that demonstrated both black Virginians' spiritual independence and white Anglicans' enduring lack of interest in black Christianity, baptized slaves planned their insurrection for Sunday morning, when whites would be at church without them. It is an arresting image: whites meeting serenely to read through Morning Prayer and perhaps to hear a sermon or to receive the sacrament, totally uninterested in the spiritual lives of their bondmen-who even at that moment were acting on their own faith and leaving their chains behind. These Africans, among whom probably ranked some Kongolese Christians, erroneously believed that George II had declared all baptized slaves free but that Virginia's officials had suppressed that mandate. Between 20o and 300 slaves selected leaders, "commit[ted] many outrages against the Christians," and fled into the swamps of Norfolk and Princess Anne counties. Vengeful whites and their Indian allies apprehended the group fairly quickly and killed at least 29 of them. James Blair, the Anglican commissary in Virginia, reported on the event in a 1731 letter to England, indicating that "there was a general rumor among them that they were to be set free. And when they saw nothing came of it they grew angry and saucy, and met in the night time in great numbers. 1131 This episode confirms that Elizabeth Key and Fernando were not the only black Virginians who equated spiritual and civil freedom-or who acted on that equation in a manner sure to gain...

3,814 white members.72 Even so, African Americans made up less than io percent of early Methodist

The lopsided ratio of black to white, even after intentional attempts by evangelical dissenters to recruit black members, underscores the rhetorical quality of the early ministry to the slaves. Evangelicals did believe that all men, regardless of ethnic background, deserved to hear of Christ's sacrifice for them. But their outreach to black Virginians was as much a part of the fashioning of an identity in the context of a hierarchical, Anglican society as it was an expression of interracial concern. By spending time with slaves, the lowest on Virginia's social ladder, evangelicals could claim that they, like Christ, identified with the poor and downtrodden of the world, while the apostate Anglicans catered to the rich and the proud.73 Despite the willingness of twentieth-century scholars to accept such claims at face value, eighteenth-century evangelicals meant them less as a declaration of sociological fact than as a spiritual critique of the established church. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists did evince a concern for the spiritual welfare of the lowest in their society, slaves, but they also courted wealthy and powerful members. None of these groups could have developed as successful movements without the active support of elite Virginians.74

The small proportion of early African American evangelicals, especially relative to the intensity of white calls for their conversion, is significant in other ways as well. First, it shows the fragility of evangelicalism's early biracial character. With so few black coreligionists, whites could have easily jettisoned the practice (if not the theory) of interracial ministry once they did not need blacks' symbolic presence to compete with an established church. Second, the relatively low number of black conversions muted the ideological conflict among whites about the justice of slavery. Since the vast majority of Virginia's enslaved men and women remained outside the Christian tradition, even if a few joined evangelical churches and a few more received a pro forma baptism as infants in the Anglican Church, the correspondence between slave and "heathen" remained close in white minds. The theological question for whites thus remained whether or not conversion should mean freedom for an exceptional few, rather than whether or not the wholesale enslavement of their fellow Christians was morally objectionable.

Damn.

He justified slavery as one of many hierarchical relationships approved by God in a 1757 sermon, The Duty of Masters to Their Servants. In what would become the most important plank of the proslavery argument, he taught that "the appointments of Providence, and the order of the world, not only admit, but require, that there should be civil distinctions among mankind; that some should rule, and some be subject; that some should be Masters, and some Servants. And Christianity does not blend or destroy these distinctions, but establishes and regulates them, and enjoines every man to conduct himself according to them."75 In

property, the net result of the statute was still an expanded free black population. Prominent Virginians such as George Washington and Robert Carter freed significant numbers of slaves, and the free black population in the commonwealth rose from an estimated 2,000 in 176o to more than 30,ooo by 181o.80 Enslaved Virginians in the 178os could thus count on a growing cohort of free black allies and could draw upon inspiring memories of friends or acquaintances who had gambled successfully for freedom during the Revolution. These changes empowered African Americans within evangelical churches and elsewhere to display much more initiative.

Indeed, to the surprise of many whites, sometimes blacks exercised spiritual authority over members of both races. In the Baptist church at Allen's Creek, for example, slaves who were "preachers of talents" baptized both whites and blacks in the late 178os.86 Sometime after 179o, Robert Semple reported that the biracial congregation at Gloucester "at length did what it would hardly have been supposed would have been done by Virginians; they chose for their pastor William Lemon, a man of color. He, though not white as to his natural complexion, had been washed in the laver of regeneration; he had been purified and made white in a better sense."87 No