Sarah’s call to arms was inspired by Ephesians 6, a chapter that also includes Paul’s restrictive “household codes” for children, wives, and slaves. “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh,” Paul advised, “with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” Like Paul, Sarah did not see any contradiction between fighting “against spiritual wickedness in high places” and accepting slavery. Though she was willing to wage war against Satan himself in order to teach slaves about Jesus, she would not fight to free them.
Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands unto God
Sarah Osborn’s meetings failed to challenge the justice of slavery, but they represented a new spirit of religious outreach to enslaved and free Africans. As evangelicals absorbed, challenged, and reinterpreted Enlightenment ideas, they argued that anyone who had experienced conversion—including Africans and Native Americans—had been given new religious authority. Transformed by a “saving knowledge of Christ,” they had become “new creatures.”46
Although earlier generations of Christians in America had tried to convert slaves, their efforts had been hampered by their ambivalence about seeking religious intimacy with “the most Brutish of Creatures.” Even the Quakers, who were notorious for their antislavery sentiments, seemed reluctant to worship side by side with blacks, and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting did not allow them into membership until 1796.47 Christians echoed the words of Acts—“God hath made of one blood, all nations of men”—but they rarely treated Africans as their spiritual equals. Few slaveholders were willing to teach their slaves how to read the Bible, a crucial requirement for membership in most Protestant churches.
In contrast, evangelicals were convinced that the most important mark of a true Christian was heartfelt religious experience, and despite their commitment to fostering biblical literacy they did not require converts to know how to read or write. There are no comprehensive statistics available on the number of blacks who were baptized or admitted to eighteenth-century churches, but it is clear that ministers increased their efforts to evangelize them during the revivals. The First Congregational Church of Salem, for example, admitted ten blacks into membership between 1739 and 1758, and by 1755 Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian minister in Virginia, had baptized more than a hundred slaves—a small number in comparison to the thousands living in his county but still remarkable in comparison to the past.48 In the mid-eighteenth century many churches added slave names to their membership rolls for the first time.
Evangelical ministers knew that they spoke to only a small proportion of the black population, but they were exhilarated by the presence of slaves and free blacks at their meetings. Jonathan Edwards reported that many “ignorant and barbarous” slaves had been born again, a sign that the revival was “exceeding glorious,” and after visiting Philadelphia in 1740, George Whitefield boasted that “Near fifty negroes came to give me thanks for what God had done to their souls.” The sight of Africans flocking to hear the gospel seemed like proof that the Holy Spirit was at work and, even more remarkable, that the millennium might be near. Quoting Psalm 68:31 (“Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”), evangelicals rejoiced that the Bible’s promise was coming true in their own day. They dreamed that Christianity would become an interracial movement uniting the globe. Imagining the millennial age, Edwards predicted that in the future “many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Turkey.”49
If evangelicals could have lived according to this hopeful vision of the future, they might have created a more racially egalitarian world, but when they encountered real, flesh-and-blood slaves, their visceral response was to recoil from blackness as a deformity. Like most early Americans, they associated the color black with evil and ugliness—a curse that Africans supposedly had to bear because of Ham’s sin. When Sarah searched for an image to evoke the depth of her sinfulness, she described herself as black. “Though I am black,” she prayed to God, “Let me be comely in thy sight.” In a poem that a master wrote on his slave’s gravestone, he imagined him losing his black skin in heaven: “His faithful soul has fled/To realms of heavenly light/And by the blood that Jesus shed/Is changed from Black to White.”50 To be a Christian was to be white.
Instead of challenging these stereotypes of racial inferiority, Enlightenment philosophers often reinforced them. In the abstract the principle of human equality seemed to contradict slavery, and both Montesquieu and Rousseau pointed out the absurdity of claiming that anyone had the “right” to own another human being.51 Yet most Enlightenment philosophers scoffed at the idea of blacks ever overcoming their “savagery.” When they argued that “all men” had been created equal, they usually meant that only white men were equal. As David Hume explained in 1748, “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Echoing these arguments, Immanuel Kant proclaimed whites to be superior to blacks in “mental capacities,” and Linnaeus classified the “European” kind of man as “gentle, acute, inventive,” and the African as “crafty, indolent, negligent.”52
The most skeptical thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire, laid the foundation for the “scientific” racism of the nineteenth century by denying the biblical account of human origins. Instead of monogenesis—the belief that all humans had a single ancestor—they posited that humans had sprung from several races, some more advanced than others. Portraying racial differences as intractable, they reviled blacks for their dark skin and wooly hair. (Montesquieu satirized the proslavery argument by imagining slaveholders saying, “These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose that they can scarcely be pitied.”)53 Blacks were posited as physically and intellectually inferior by nature.
Thomas Jefferson’s struggles are representative of Enlightenment thinkers’ ambivalent ideas about race and slavery. In principle Jefferson opposed slavery, and in an apocalyptic passage in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he admitted that a righteous God might punish Americans for the sin of slaveholding: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” Yet Jefferson also voiced his suspicion that “the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Despite fathering six children with his slave Sally Hemings, he expressed deep disgust for black bodies, criticizing the “immoveable veil of black” that shadowed slaves’ faces and their “very strong and disagreeable odor.”54 He was convinced that slavery was a moral evil, but he freed few of his own slaves.
Historians have pointed to these tortured debates over slavery as evidence that the “Enlightenment project” was racist at its core. Even though Enlightenment thinkers claimed to speak on behalf of all humanity, they imagined reason as the sole property of white European men, denigrating all other peoples as “racially inferior and savage.” One critic has even referred to the Enlightenment as the “Enwhitenment.”55
Yet as we have seen in the case of women, the Enlightenment involved more than the privileging of rationality, and its emphasis on individual experience had radical implications. Because evangelicals rooted religious knowledge in the experience of being born again, they gave both Native Americans and Africans a surprising degree of religious authority. A Presbyterian church ordaine
d Samson Occom, a Mohegan, to the ministry, and the most radical “New Lights” (as those who supported the revivals were termed) seem to have allowed blacks and Native Americans to exhort publicly, an innovation that infuriated their critics. “Men, Women, Children, Servants, & Negros are now become (as they phrase it) Exhorters,” scoffed Charles Brockwell, an Anglican minister.56 By the 1760s the evangelical public of letters had expanded to include blacks and Native Americans as well as white women. Besides Phillis Wheatley, who published her first poem in the Newport Mercury in 1767, Samson Occom, Jupiter Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and John Marrant published their spiritual writings. Though their individual stories differed, they all claimed that the experience of conversion had given them the authority to appear in print. In the preface to Gronniosaw’s Narrative, a white minister explained that “there are certain Particulars exceedingly remarkable in his Experience. God has put singular Honor upon him in the Exercise of his Faith and Patience.” Samson Occom’s book of hymns included “A True Christian’s Experience.”57
Yet even though white evangelicals were thrilled by the stories of African converts, they still assumed that blacks should accept slavery and racial hierarchy (like sexual hierarchy) as part of God’s plan. On one hand, they condemned the slave trade as the grossest example of what was wrong with a burgeoning capitalist economy: the reduction of a person to a thing. According to Jonathan Edwards, nations did not have the right to deprive Africans of their liberty solely for material gain. On the other hand, Edwards also quoted a passage from Leviticus to justify enslaving debtors, war captives, and the children of slaves. (In later years his disciples would argue that his position was morally flawed: it could not be ethical to keep the children of those who had been violently kidnapped from Africa.) Edwards himself owned several slaves, the first purchased at a Newport auction in 1731, and when asked for his opinion on slaveholding he compared it to eating or drinking: even though it could lead to sin, Christians did not have to abstain completely from it. His comparison implicitly underlined the naturalness of slavery, which seemed as inevitable to him as taking nourishment. He never once described slavery as a sin.58
When Sarah Osborn began holding meetings for slaves, she, too, seems to have taken slavery for granted. Although a few scholars have suggested that she may have harbored secret abolitionist sympathies, this seems to be wishful thinking on their part.59 Sarah never criticized slavery in her diaries or letters from the time, and although she decided not to sell Bobey, she was more concerned about slaves’ salvation than their bodily freedom. Encouraging them to be content with their situation, she assured them that “they are free from cares, because it is their master’s part to provide, and theirs only to do their duty.” She knew that slavery often included physical abuse and exploitation, but she perpetuated the fiction that the system benefited slaves: since generous masters did the hard work of providing food, clothing, and shelter, slaves had few real “cares.”60
Sarah set strict rules for the “black folk” who came to her house. Slaves were not welcome without the consent of their owners, and besides urging them to be “diligent and faithful to their own Masters and Mistresses,” she warned them not to “Neglect their business” to attend. Because of a law against blacks and Native Americans being on the street after nine o’clock in the evening without a pass, she also instructed them to “repair as soon as possible to their own Homes at or after Nine o’clock [so] that magistrates May not be offended.”61 Fearful that some might “run into wild enthusiasm and start out of their proper places,” she also tried to prevent black men from taking leadership roles. She refused to let them pray aloud “Lest they be Lifted up with Pride and proceed from praying to Exhorting &c.” (The “&c” pointed in the direction of blacks preaching, a possibility that Sarah could not even bring herself to name.) As a final condition she insisted that they “come entirely Empty handed without thought of Making any recompense by way of present.” Although she remained poor, even resorting to baking and selling biscuits in order to make ends meet, she did not want anyone to suspect that her evangelism to them was motivated by a desire for money.62
Little about Sarah’s message to slaves seems to have been subversive or radical. Besides teaching them about their inherent corruption, she demanded that they repent of drinking, gambling, swearing, Sabbath breaking, and sexual “uncleanness.” Even though many masters were reluctant to allow slaves to marry, Sarah insisted that anyone who had a sexual relationship outside of marriage was guilty of promiscuity. As a result, according to a letter that she wrote to Fish, “Several couples” were married who had formerly lived together “but could not bear to Live in the Sin any longer.”63 This was the kind of sin she decried at her meetings, not the sin of kidnapping Africans and forcing them into slavery.
Given Sarah’s insistence that the enslaved must remember their places, it might seem surprising that they flocked to her meetings in such large numbers. Even when a “free Ethiopian” began holding weekly meetings that attracted “many of His own color,” blacks continued to crowd into her house. According to a letter Sarah wrote to Fish, many slaves tried to give her gifts in return for her kindness. “I have the Hardest work to suppress their gratitude of my part,” she exclaimed. Perhaps she was exaggerating, but it is probably not a coincidence that one of the slaves who attended her meetings during the 1760s, Zingo Stevens, named his infant daughter Sarah.64 It is hard to imagine a greater sign of his admiration.
What did Sarah say or do to make such an impression on Newport’s slaves and free blacks? The fact that she exposed herself to criticism by welcoming them into her house, singing and praying with them and listening to their stories, must have struck them as remarkable. Although they saw the inside of many whites’ houses as they did chores, they were usually treated as if they were invisible—as if their only worth lay in their ability to sweep a floor or build a fence. At other times they were too visible, paraded in front of guests as a sign of their masters’ wealth and status. At the Osborn house, in contrast, they were treated as more than chattel. Most white people had little interest in hearing about their suffering, but Sarah encouraged them to share their stories with her, searching for evidence of God’s grace in their lives. Although she occasionally referred to blacks in derogatory terms as “Negros,” she usually called them “Ethiopians,” a word that recalled the biblical promise that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”65 When slaves crowded into her house on Sunday nights, they knew that despite her defense of slavery, she expected them to play a crucial role in Christian history.
Perhaps because of her close relationship with Bobey and Phillis, Sarah also does not seem to have shared the common contempt for blacks’ intelligence—a difference that the enslaved almost certainly noticed. Although she once described blacks as “children” in a letter to Fish, she never described them this way in her diaries, and her condescending language in the letter may have been a strategy to deflect Fish’s criticism of her meetings. In practice she does not seem to have talked to Africans as if they were simpleminded or, as Thomas Jefferson claimed, “inferior” in reason. “I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid,” he argued.66 In contrast, Sarah eventually encouraged two of the black men who attended her meetings, Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, to study at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in order to return to Africa as missionaries.
Even though Sarah seemed more interested in slaves’ salvation than their treatment on earth, they seem to have been touched by her concern for them. Many of them had suffered traumas that she could not begin to imagine. Because Newport was one of the largest slave-trading ports in the colonies, it was home to a large population of African-born slaves who had experienced the horrors of the slave trade firsthand. Torn away from loved ones and forced to march to the African coast, they endured humiliation, beatings, and a brutal journey in chains across the Atlantic. Captains wanted to
keep as much of their human cargo alive as possible, but assuming that large numbers would die, they squeezed as many as possible into cramped, unsanitary quarters below the ship’s deck. (In 1762, a ship arrived at Newport after having lost a quarter of its slaves.)67 The enslaved spent weeks shackled together, suffocated by the stench of vomit, urine, and excrement. When they finally arrived at Newport, they were displayed on the auction block and sold to the highest bidder and, in a final indignity, they were stripped of even their names. For masters who prided themselves on their resemblance to the illustrious Roman slaveholders of antiquity, there was something satisfying about having slaves with names like Caesar or Pompey.
Slaves chafed at their degradation, but because physical resistance was usually met with a whip, they tried to preserve their dignity in small ways: for example, by refusing to give up their African names. “Pompey Stevens” was also known as “Zingo” and “Jack Mason” was the same person as “Salmar Nubia.” (One notable exception is John Quamine, who seems to have chosen a new name as a sign of his conversion.) As revealed by an archaeological dig that unearthed African cowry shells and beads—objects that were associated with spiritual power and protection—the enslaved may have also continued to practice traditional West African religions.68 Yet even though slaves wanted to preserve their tribal identities (they were not “Africans” as much as they were Ashantis or Yorubas), they knew that they would have to learn white customs and beliefs in order to survive. Sarah Osborn’s meetings offered them an avenue into the alien, Christian world of their masters.
Slaves may have found Sarah’s support of black literacy especially appealing. Although it is not clear whether she spent any of her Sunday-night meetings teaching them to read, there is no doubt that she urged them to read the Bible for themselves. In a letter to Fish, she expressed pride that many “were now intent upon Learning to read etc. at Home and abroad.”69 Nothing symbolized white power better than the ability to read and write.
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