by Jemar Tisby
Even after surviving the middle passage, Africans were only beginning to experience the horrors of slavery. Ships usually landed at a port in the Caribbean—Barbados or Antigua, for example. Then slave-ship captains did their best to sell their cargo as quickly as possible. Sometimes buyers would purchase an entire ship’s cargo. But they purchased enslaved people a few at a time. Slave captains would then sail from port to port looking for buyers. Sometimes the captains used the “scramble.” With all the slaves corralled into one pen, potential buyers would rush into the pen, grabbing as many slaves as they could afford in a chaotic spectacle of greed and brutality.13
Upon purchase, the newly arrived Africans were “seasoned” to prepare them for their lives of bondage and labor in the Americas. Seasoning involved adapting to a different climate and new foods. It also involved teaching the Africans a new language, usually French, Spanish, or English. Africans were trained for their work, which was typically agricultural and involved plowing, hoeing, and weeding from sunup to sundown. This acculturation took a toll. As many as one-third of African slaves died within their first three years in the Americas.14
Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and outlawed slavery in Britain and its colonies in 1833. Much of the momentum for these changes came from Christians. For example, William Wilberforce was influenced by John Newton, who encouraged the young Parliamentarian to remain in his post and fight to end slavery.15 Yet abolitionism did not arise from purely altruistic motives. The decline of slavery in Britain coincided with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. The factory became the urban farm that produced most British goods. The poet William Blake called factories “dark Satanic mills.” Men, women, and children worked twelve-hour days in stifling heat tending whirring, steam-powered machines that could slice off a finger or crush a skull in the blink of a sleep-deprived eye. Although British slavery declined around this time, the rise in industrial productivity fed an astronomical demand for raw materials. The demand for cotton grew twentyfold in the decades after the turn of the nineteenth century.16 North American slavery supplied the ravenous international appetite for cotton.
THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE IN NORTH AMERICA
In 1619, a Dutch trading ship landed off the coast of Virginia with “20. and odd Negroes.”17 The arrival of these enslaved women and men was a matter of economic convenience. The British colonists had not requested slaves, but the Dutch ship had stolen the Africans from a Portuguese slave trading ship called São João Bautista, or Saint John the Baptist, and were looking for a place to sell their “cargo.” As historian Gregory O’Malley explains, “The arrival of African captives had less to do with planters’ demand for enslaved laborers than with the privateers’ desire for a market in which to vend stolen Africans.”18
Prior to the arrival of Africans in the British Virginia colony, Europeans had been transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas for more than a hundred years. Haiti and Jamaica, as well as South American countries such as Brazil, used millions of Africans to work on farms producing rice, sugar, and coffee. In fact, these other regions received far more enslaved persons than North America ever did. An estimated ten to twelve million slaves were brought across the Atlantic, and the majority ended up in the Caribbean or South America.19
Enslavement was different in South America and the Caribbean than in North America. The labor-intensive crops and enormous plantations meant that Africans usually outnumbered Europeans. The Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, and its success was due, in part, to the population discrepancy between enslaved Africans and European landowners.
The harsh working conditions on sugar plantations and deadly diseases resulted in a high mortality rate. Deaths outnumbered births, so it was more cost-effective for plantation owners to replace slaves rather than to invest in keeping them alive. This led to a gender imbalance as slaveowners preferred male slaves who they could literally work to death. North America, by contrast, developed more gender parity, so a growing population of the enslaved came through birth, often referred to as “natural increase.” Slave women in North America had an average birthrate of 9.2 children, twice as many as those in Caribbean colonies.20
In North America, slavery developed differently but no less cruelly. At first, some Africans were treated as indentured servants—workers bound to an employer for a certain time, usually to pay off a debt. Indentured servants could marry, save money, and eventually work themselves out of servitude. The women and men who arrived on the Virginia coast in 1619 had names like Angelo and Pedro and were likely Catholic. After a number of years, they may have gained their liberty. As early as 1623, two Africans, Anthony and Isabella, married. They had a son, William, who was baptized as an Anglican and likely born free.21
By the mid-seventeenth century, some Africans lived as free people and worked in a variety of professions. A few, like Anthony Johnson, became wealthy enough to own land and buy enslaved Africans themselves. The life of an indentured servant was not a desirable one, but it was not always permanent, nor was it limited to Africans. Indigenous people and Europeans could become indentured servants too.
Although many Africans arrived as enslaved persons, colonists sometimes permitted them certain rights, such as earning their own money, purchasing their own and their family’s freedom, and learning skilled trades. Edmund Morgan writes, “While racial feelings undoubtedly affected the position of Negroes, there is more than a little evidence that Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior.”22 As Morgan indicates, colonists may have initially seen Africans in America as laborers just like any other and patterned their economy and politics to allow for their full inclusion. American history could have happened another way. Instead, racist attitudes and the pursuit of wealth increasingly relegated black people to a position of perpetual servitude and exploitation.
The practice of indentured servitude gradually gave way to slavery, and Europeans preferred Africans as laborers over other Europeans or the indigenous Americans. With the success of tobacco in the colonies and the increasing demand for the crop in Europe, agriculture became big business. A larger appetite for cash crops meant planters needed more labor. The indigenous population in America had been decimated by war and disease. Additionally, indigenous people proved to be difficult to control as enslaved workers because they often knew the landscape better than their European masters and could escape or count on help from their tribe. Africans, divorced from their homeland and potential allies, emerged as more vulnerable targets of enslavement.
The shift toward slavery over indentured servitude happened gradually over the last few decades of the seventeenth century. Conflicts such as Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) had alerted the Virginia gentry to the ongoing threat of a disgruntled population of white indentured servants and African laborers. Much of the transition to slavery, though, had economic roots. In the early days of colonization, European and African mortality rates were both extremely high. The chance of living five years or more was about fifty-fifty, which made it more financially feasible to use indentured servants rather than enslaved persons, who had a higher up-front cost. As life expectancy increased, lifelong labor became a more lucrative investment. Tobacco, the most profitable crop in Virginia at the time, required less capital and less punishing labor than producing a commodity such as sugar, which was popular in the West Indies and parts of South America. Enslaved men and women thus lived longer making lifetime bondage even more attractive. A scarcity of labor also led to slavery. Fewer Europeans were moving to the colonies, and the indigenous population continued to decrease. Wealthy colonists looked to imported Africans as a steady supply of labor.23
As slavery became more institutionalized, more rules regulated its practice. By the mid-seventeenth century, colonies began developing “slave codes” to police African bondage. The codes determined that a child was born sla
ve or free based solely on the mother’s status. They mandated slavery for life with no hope of emancipation. The codes deprived the enslaved of legal rights, required permission for slaves to leave their master’s property, forbade marriage between enslaved people, and prohibited them from carrying arms. The slave codes also defined enslaved Africans not as human beings but as chattel—private property on the same level as livestock.
As reliance on slave labor increased, sticky questions about Christianity, race, and bondage began to emerge. Slave-owning colonists and European missionaries often clashed over the issue of proselytizing. Christianity had inherent ideas of human equality imbedded in its teachings. If slaves converted to Christianity, would they not begin to demand their freedom and social equality? How could missionaries preach to the slaves when their owners feared the loss of their unpaid labor? Over time, Europeans compromised the message of Christianity to accommodate slavery while also, in their minds, satisfying the requirement to make disciples.
In The Baptism of Early Modern Virginia, historian Rebecca Anne Goetz explains how Europeans on the Atlantic coast of North America developed religious and racial categories in tandem. At first, colonists debated whether Africans were capable of becoming Christians. They adhered to a concept that Goetz calls “hereditary heathenism.”24 Just as parents passed down physical characteristics to their children, they also passed down their religion. Hereditary heathenism tethered race to religion. From their earliest days in North America, colonists employed religio-cultural categories to signify that European meant “Christian” and Native American or African meant “heathen.” Over time, these categories simplified and hardened into racial designations.
Many Europeans initially held an optimistic view of their capacity to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity. These Christians adhered to a “monogenesis” theory of humankind, meaning they believed that all people descended from Adam as described in Genesis. So according to European Christians, indigenous people had at least the potential to receive salvation, which meant colonists had a duty to teach the Scriptures to these so-called heathens.
The effort to convert indigenous people to Christianity was always tied to ideas of European colonization. Europeans evangelized non-Europeans with the intention not only of teaching them Christianity but also of conforming them to European cultural standards. One of the most well-known illustrations of how Europeans conflated religion and culture is in the marriage of John Rolfe and Metoaka (or Matoaka), better known as Pocahontas.
John Rolfe was an Englishman hoping to achieve fortune and notoriety in the new English colony of Virginia. He arrived in Jamestown in 1610 and eventually became a member of the Virginia General Assembly. He met an indigenous woman named Metoaka, the daughter of Chief Powhatan. Metoaka converted to Christianity in 1613 and received the “more Christian” name of Rebecca. She and Rolfe were married and had a child together. They only had a brief marriage, however. On a visit to England in 1617, she became ill and died abroad.
Although it lasted only briefly, Metoaka’s marriage to Rolfe inspired hope in some English colonists. “For the English, Metoaka’s marriage symbolized heathen submission to proper religion and to English gender norms,” wrote Goetz.25 The English colonists’ goal was to evangelize and assimilate the indigenous peoples. Metoaka’s conversion to Christianity, taking on a common English name, and bearing a son to an Englishman signified the possibility of making indigenous Americans into “respectable” English persons. Rolfe and Metoaka’s marriage also meant that, according to English custom, their son would be born into Christianity. To the English colonists, hereditary heathenism could be interrupted by marrying into the “better” spiritual lineage of English Christians.
Of course, most indigenous people did not see it this way. European missionaries made few converts because converting to Christianity included European cultural assimilation and the loss of tribal identity.26
Europeans thought Africans, like indigenous peoples, could be “civilized” through cultural conformity and conversion to Christianity. European missionaries, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, attempted to preach Christianity to the slaves. It must be noted, however, that Europeans did not introduce Christianity to Africans. Christianity had arrived in Africa through Egypt and Ethiopia in the third and fourth centuries. Christian luminaries like Augustine, Tertullian, and Athanasius helped develop Trinitarian theology and defended the deity of Christ long before Western Europeans presumed to “take” Christianity to Africans.27 African people also had a rich history of practicing Islam and tribal religions, a history that Europeans disregarded in their evangelistic fervor.
Even though European missionaries sought to share Christianity with indigenous peoples and Africans, social, political, and economic equality was not part of their plan. Missionaries carefully crafted messages that maintained the social and economic status quo. They truncated the gospel message by failing to confront slavery, and in doing so they reinforced its grip on society.
In 1701, Anglican church leader Thomas Bray helped found the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).28 As the name suggests, the primary purpose of the SPG was to spread the Anglican version of Christianity, primarily in the English colonies. But SPG’s motivations were more complex than that. While many officials had an interest in sharing the gospel with non-Europeans, they were not interested in sharing power or promoting equality. Instead, the SPG, like many European missionary endeavors in North America, preached a message that said Christianity could save one’s soul but not break one’s chains.
SPG’s missionary Francis Le Jau illustrates their philosophy of evangelism well. The SPG sent him to South Carolina in 1706 where he stayed until his death in 1717. His journal entries from the time show his sincere desire to convert indigenous peoples and Africans. He even spoke out against British exploitation of the indigenous population.29 However, his outrage had limits. To circumvent slave owners’ opposition, Le Jau emphasized obedience instead of liberation among the slaves.
When Le Jau was able to persuade African slaves to adopt the Christian religion as their own, he confirmed their profession by baptizing them. The vows he made the slaves recite show how European missionaries maintained a strict separation between spiritual and physical freedom. “You declare in the presence of God and before this congregation that you do not ask for holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your master while you live, but merely for the good of your soul and to partake of the Grace and Blessings promised to the Members of the Church of Jesus Christ.”30
Le Jau was more ardent than many European missionaries in his desire to convert indigenous peoples and Africans. He labored to convince slave-owning men that people of color were not mere beasts without souls. To make his case, he had to assuage fears that slaves would demand emancipation once they became Christian. So from the beginning of American colonization, Europeans crafted a Christianity that would allow them to spread the faith without confronting the exploitative economic system of slavery and the emerging social inequality based on color.
(DE)CONSTRUCTING RACE
This chapter began with the premise that race was constructed. It has shown how in the wet cement of early European colonial society the racial boundaries had not yet been traced. It took decades for patterns of unfree labor to harden into a form of slavery that treated human beings as chattel and dictated a person’s station in life based on skin color. In European North America, Christianity became identified with the emerging concept of “whiteness” while people of color, including indigenous peoples and Africans, became identified with unbelief.
Christianity served as a force to help construct racial categories in the colonial period. A corrupt message that saw no contradiction between the brutalities of bondage and the good news of salvation became the norm. European missionaries tried to calm the slave owners’ fears of rebellion by spreading a version of Christianity that em
phasized spiritual deliverance, not immediate liberation. Instead of highlighting the dignity of all human beings, European missionaries told Africans that Christianity should make them more obedient and loyal to their earthly masters.
But if racism can be made, it can be unmade. Like a house with a crumbling foundation, it is more difficult to change an existing structure than to build a sound one from the beginning, but it is possible. “The fierce urgency of now,” to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., demands a recognition of the ways Christians, from before the founding of the United States, built racial categories into religion.31 That knowledge must then be turned toward propagating a more authentically biblical message of human equality regardless of skin color.
CHAPTER
3
UNDERSTANDING LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION AND REVIVAL
Indigenous American and African blood flowed through the veins of Crispus Attucks. But during the Boston Massacre of 1770, his blood spilled onto the streets along with four other men as part of the conflagration leading to the Revolutionary War. As well-known as Attucks is now, very little of his biography is certain. He was likely born in the early 1720s near Natick, Massachusetts, a “ ‘praying town’ of Christianized Indians.”1 He endured life as a slave, but in 1750 he escaped his master and made a living for himself as a sailor. Twenty years later he joined a crowd of Bostonians in a confrontation with a small contingent of British soldiers. The dispute turned violent, and a soldier shot and killed Attucks. He remained relatively obscure in American memory until the 1850s when the growing abolitionist movement appropriated his story.
However mythical his memory has become, Attucks is a fitting figure to associate with the beginnings of American independence. He took freedom into his own hands just like the colonists believed they were doing. He represented the racial mix of America and stands for indigenous men and women as much as black Americans. Moreover, he died for a nation that failed to recognize his freedom because of his racial background. Attucks symbolizes that bitter combination of freedom and bondage, racism and patriotism, that characterized the Revolutionary era.
