by Simon Schama
I told him that the Lord had revealed to me that I must preach the gospel…But as to women preaching he said that our Discipline knew nothing at all about it—that it did not call for women preachers. This I was glad to hear because it removed the fear of the cross from me—but no sooner did this feeling cross my mind than I found that the love of souls had in a measure departed from me, that holy energy which burned within me as in a fire began to be smothered…
If a man may preach because the Savior died for him why not the woman seeing he died for her also? Is he not a whole Savior instead of a half one as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach would seem to make it appear? If to preach the Gospel is the gift of heaven, comes by inspiration solely, is God straitened? Must he take the man exclusively? May he not, did he not and can he not, inspire a female to preach the simple story of the birth, life, death and resurrection of our Lord and accompany it too with power to the sinner’s heart?…
In my wanderings up and down among men, preaching according to my ability, I have frequently found families who told me that they had for several years been to a meeting and yet, while listening to hear what God would say by his poor female instrument, have believed with trembling—tears rolling down their cheeks, the sign of contrition and repentance towards God.
1821
It was now eight years since I had made application to be permitted to preach the gospel during which time I had only been allowed to exhort…the subject now was renewed afresh in my mind; it was as a fire shut up in my bones. During this time I had solicited of the Reverend Richard Allen who…had become Bishop of the African Episcopal Methodists in America, to be permitted the liberty of holding prayer meetings in my own hired house and of exhorting as I found liberty, which was granted me…
Soon after this the Reverend Richard Williams was to preach at Bethel Church—where I with others was assembled. He entered the pulpit, gave out the hymn which was sung and then addressed the throne of grace…the text he took is Jonah, 2nd chapter, 9th verse “Salvation is of the lord.” But as he proceeded to explain, he seemed to have lost the spirit; when in the same instant I sprang, as by altogether supernatural impulse, to my feet to give an exhortation on the very text which my brother Williams had taken…
I told them I was like Jonah; for then it had been nearly eight years since the Lord had called me to preach but that I had lingered like him and delayed to go to the bidding of the Lord…
During the exhortation God made manifest his power in a manner sufficient to show the world that I was called to labor according to my ability and the grace given unto me…
At the first meeting…at my uncle’s house there was with others who had come from curiosity to hear the woman preacher, an old man who was a deist and who said he did not believe the colored people had any souls—he was sure they had none. He took a seat very near where I was standing and boldly tried to look me out of countenance. But as I labored on in the best manner I was able, looking to God all the while it seemed to me I had but little liberty, yet there was an arrow from the bent bow of the gospel and fastened in his till then obdurate heart. After I had done speaking he went out and called the people round him, said that my preaching might seem a small thing yet he believed I had the worth of souls at heart…he now seemed to admit that colored people had souls whose good I had in view…He now came into the house and in the most friendly manner shook hands with me saying he hoped God had spared him to some good purpose. This man was a great slave-holder and had been very cruel, thinking nothing of knocking down a slave with a fence stake or whatever might come to hand. From this time it was said of him he became greatly altered in his ways for the better…
The Lord was with me, glory be to his holy name. I next went six miles and held a meeting in a colored friend’s house…and preached to a well-behaved congregation of both colored and white. After service I again walked back which was all twelve miles in the same day.
1822
I returned to Philadelphia and attended meetings in and out of the city…I felt a greater love for the people than ever.
In July I spoke in a schoolhouse to a large congregation…here we had a sweet foretaste of heaven—full measure and running over—shouting and rejoicing—while the poor errand bearer of a free gospel was assisted from on high. I wish my reader had been there to share with us the joyous heavenly feast…
I was sent for by the servant of a white gentleman to hold a meeting in his house in the evening. He invited the neighbors, colored and white, when I spoke according to the ability God gave me. It was pleasant to my poor soul to be there—Jesus was in our midst…
I next attended and preached several times at a camp meeting which continued five days. We had Pentecostal showers—sinners were pricked to the heart and cried mightily to God for succor from impending judgment and I verily believe the Lord was well pleased at our weak endeavors to serve him in the tented grove.
1823
In the month of June 1823 I went on from Philadelphia to New York with Bishop Allen and several elders to attend the New York Annual Conference of our denomination where I spent three months of my time…On 4 June I spoke in the Asbury Church from Psalms chapter 33. I think I never witnessed such a shouting and rejoicing time…The spirit of God came upon me I spoke without fear of man…the preachers shouted and prayed and it was a time long to be remembered.
1824
In company with a good sister who took a gig and horse I travelled about 300 miles and labored in different places. Went to Denton African Church and on the first Sabbath gave two sermons. The church was in a thriving, prosperous condition and the Lord blessed our word to our comfort…by request I also spoke in the Old Methodist Church in Denton which was full to overflowing. It was a happy meeting. My tongue was loosened and my heart warm with the love of God.
I have travelled in four years 1,600 miles and of that I walked 211 and preached the kingdom of God to the falling sons and daughters of Adam counting it all for the sake of Jesus…
In Milford…at night the people came in their carriages from the country but were disappointed for I spoke in a colored church. The doors and windows were open on account of the heat, but were crowded with people; pride and prejudice were buried. We had a powerful time. I was quite taken out of myself; the meeting held till daybreak, but I returned to my home. They told me sinners were converted, backsliders reclaimed, mourners comforted…Then they wished us to stay until next night to preach again but I thought it best to leave them hungry.
I made an appointment at a place called Hole in the Wall, it was a little settlement of colored people but we had no church but used a dwelling house and had a large congregation. I had no help but an old man, one hundred and odd years of age, he prayed and his prayers made us feel awful, he died in the year 1825 and has gone to reap the reward of his labor…
Although in a slave state we had every thing in order, good preaching, a solemn time long to be remembered. Some of the poor slaves came happy in the Lord, walked twenty to thirty and from that to seventy miles to worship God. Although through hardships they counted it all for joy.
1827
I went to Baltimore with the bishop and enjoyed great preaching. We had a good time rejoicing in the Lord. I left them for Albany…Glory to God…the people in Niagara seemed to me to be a kind and Christian-like people. The white inhabitants united with us and ladies of great renown. The slaves that came felt their freedom, began to see the necessity of education…I…crossed the lake from Buffalo to Fort George and spoke about eight miles from there; it was cold and snowed very fast—it was four o’clock in the afternoon—the congregation had been there and gone. We were on a sleigh and the driver got lost; we were all brought up in a swamp among fallen tree tops but we turned round and found a house and lodged all night…after I spoke to the people I left them and made an appointment for the Indians; two of the chiefs called at where I stopped to see me. I asked them to pray for us, they complied but in their ow
n tongue. I felt the power of God in my heart.
That year I travelled 2,325 miles and preached 178 sermons.
On and on went the inexhaustible road warrior, Jarena Lee, walking and riding, going by gig and wagon, by steamboat and railroad, sleigh and mule train; lugging her portable lectern with her, through Ohio and Illinois, New York and Delaware, Massachusetts and across the border in Ontario, through every corner of Pennsylvania, and into the slave state of Maryland and the half-slave city of Washington; teaching in schools, exhorting in field and forest, in camp revivals and Love Feasts, comforting the dying, of which there were a good many in the terrifying cholera year of 1831 when in New York 160 perished horribly every day; clocking a record 692 sermons in 1835, the year of the great abolitionist push in the South. In her prodigious diary—one of the great unread black narratives—can be heard the exultation of those meetings and services: the shouting and clapping, the sobbing and singing, in city chapels and backcountry churches. She had begun as a little slave girl, struck by guilt when she told her mistress a fib, saved from drowning by a sense of God’s help, and become an authentic American phenomenon, preaching to overflowing congregations, the first, in her way, of the great black orators. She was in her own person what W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk identified as the first kind of true black leader: the Preacher and the Teacher. And the astonishing thing is, that although revolutionary in her way, Jarena was by no means alone. By the time that she hung up her lectern in the 1840s, there was a whole black sisterhood of traveling preachers, defying mobs and magistrates, male prejudice and skeptical indifference: Amanda Smith, “Elizabeth, a Colored Minister of the Gospel,” Mary McCray in Kentucky, and Bethany Veney, “Aunt Betty.”
Though they were very much mistresses of their own vocation, all these women needed some help from the Protestant black church which was becoming powerfully entrenched in the cities, as Jarena and Bethany Veney were going on their travels. Jarena’s most significant conversion was the famous Richard Allen, the black Methodist bishop of the Mother Bethel Church in Philadelphia. Once he was persuaded that Jarena was a force to be reckoned with, Allen took her along on his own preaching tours to New York and Baltimore, both slave cities, where to be a black preacher at all was to invite assault and sometimes not just the vocal kind.
But the work of Allen and his counterparts in Savannah—Andrew Bryan and later Andrew Marshall—was to create an entire black dominion of the saved, out of reach of both the slaveholders and the patronizing plantation missionaries. In towns like Savannah, the local citizenry often had plenty of second thoughts as to whether it was such a good idea to have crowded black churches instructing their flocks. And even though Bryan in particular always claimed he was no threat to the institution of slavery, he was viciously beaten up on the streets of the town until his master Jonathan Bryan found him a disused rice barn in which he could hold services. The history of these black Baptists of the South had begun as a flight to freedom, when thousands of them had taken advantage of the British offer, made during the Revolutionary War, to give freedom to escaped slaves from rebel plantations who would serve the king. When the British cause was lost, many left with the royal army, north to Nova Scotia or to the Caribbean. But those who stayed found mutual support in worship and somehow hung on in their own churches amid intimidation and poverty. Though those first heroic generations of Savannah Baptists are buried (needless to say) in a separate lot in Laurel Grove cemetery, they were nonetheless the origin of the freedom church in the South, the first encampment of an army that would have to fight its way through war and a century of Jim Crow segregation before it got anywhere near the Promised Land.
In the histories I read at school decades ago, American slaves before the Civil War were never capable of shaking off their chains, mental as well as physical, except by flight. Their imprisonment in the system of degradation was so total that the best they could do, other than become a fugitive, was to wait for deliverance at the hands of white evangelical abolitionists like John Rankin, Charles Finney, and Theodore Weld. The notion that from North to South, New York to Baltimore to Savannah, there existed a free black church, numerous (1,400 alone at Bethel Church, Charleston, where Denmark Vesey’s sect had been uprooted, maybe 400,000 through the prewar South according to W. E. B. DuBois), a church that was vigorous, well disciplined, restlessly active at saving both souls and bodies, with dauntless outriders like Jarena Lee before whom whites and blacks quailed, rejoiced, and celebrated—all this would have seemed far-fetched. But a look at the rich trove of memoirs and spiritual autobiographies of that period, and in anthologies collected later in the century like the Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama, reveals an entire world of daring self-determination.
And even where it was impossible to organize in the manner of the city black churches of Baptists and Methodists, slave religion found a way to shake off the yoke. The historian Albert Raboteau has collected evidence of a religious counterculture existing under the noses of the plantation overseers and missionaries. Their real worship, not the permitted decorum of churches like Colcock Jones’s at Midway, but one inflected with the body movements, chants, and storytelling of Africa. When they could do so more or less openly in fellow slaves’ cabins, the brothers and sisters worshipped as they wanted, as Jarena Lee often heard, with the power of the ring shout, call and response, handclapping, and the exclaimed A-MEN! But where such worship was suspected of instigating some sort of quasi rebellion, the slaves resorted to “hush harbors,” in woods, ravines, and gullies, where the slaves would “steal away to Jesus.” The ex-slave Washington Wilson explained that “when de niggers go round singin ‘Steal away to Jesus’ dat mean dere gwine be a religious meetin dat night. De masters…didn’t like dem religious meetins so us natcherly slips off at night down in de bottoms or somewhere. Sometimes us sing and pray all night.” In Prince George County, Virginia, Peter Randolph described the boughs of trees bent over and held in place to fashion a natural chapel, slaves openly recounting what they endured the past week and—just as in Raven with the Primitive Baptists—breaking off to give each other the handshakes of Christian fellowship. When they had a visit from a traveling black preacher, probably more down at heel and ragged than Jarena Lee, he would also deliver a touch of African American poetry when recounting the Exodus or the sufferings of Christ at the Passion, stories that meant something to slaves that no white oppressor or for that matter benefactor could understand in quite the same way: “I see the sun when she turned herself black, I see the stars a-fallin from the sky and them old Herods coming out…and then I knew ’twas the Lord of Glory.”
The temptation to raise the voice in praise and hope was so strong that wet quilts or iron pots turned upside down were used as mutes (how painful that must have been for a world that lived to set the voice free). Another slave, Anderson Edwards, reported “we didn’t have no song books, and the Lord done give us our song.” Sometimes, though, the music could be sung in the open, in the summer after work and supper at bonfires lit “to keep the mosquitoes away and listen to our preachers preach half the night.” There would be singing and testifying and shouting. And then, the “Frenzy” that DuBois describes, “the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor—the stamping shrieking and shouting, the rushing to and fro, and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance.” Often others from neighboring plantations would come and join in at the fire. And sometimes the blacks in the midst of their song would turn and notice, at the edge of the circle, white faces lit by the burning wood.
20. The sovereignty of the voice
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Unitarian minister turned Union army colonel, walked toward the bonfire as was his habit after supper; heading for the shout. In other regiments across the theater of war, taps would have already been sounded; men would be stretching out for the night in their tents. Not here, though, at Beaufort on the sea island of Port Roya
l off the Carolina coast in 1861. Higginson and his commander and comrade in arms, General Rufus Saxton, had been of one mind. Let the 1st South Carolina Volunteers sing. Had not Cromwell’s men sung as they girded themselves for the morning fight? And Higginson was sure that not since the New Model Army had there been such a spirit of religion among soldiers as among his freed slaves. He and brother-abolitionists in the North had long spoken of a “gospel army,” but they had meant it metaphorically, Fighting the Good Fight, Christian Soldiers, and so forth. After a while Higginson had found, somewhat to his surprise, the figure of speech disingenuous, shaming, a sign that fighting against slavery would be done merely with words and prayers. Higginson, Massachusetts Brahmin, Harvard man, a fixture of the literary world, had become exasperated with the rhetoric. He hungered to smite the despotic enemy hip and thigh, to lay about them with a mighty whack. His sermons at Newburyport turned intemperate, so complained the local citizenry, and it did not help matters that he used the pulpit to castigate the way they saw fit to run their cotton textile businesses, calling on them to feel shame for buying from the South. He was politely warned to moderate. He declined to do so, and Newburyport bid him farewell.
At Worcester Free Church, the people were more inclined to allow Higginson to agitate hard for the Anti-Slavery Association, although his appetite for action could still try tempers. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 requiring the return of runaways triggered the creation of a Vigilance Committee organized to thwart seizure. Higginson was one of their most ardent militants, participating in an attempt to storm the Boston Courthouse in order to liberate the ex-slave Anthony Burns. Even this was too remote a gesture for the handsome, tirelessly immoderate Reverend Higginson. He had run for election to Congress as a Free Soil candidate, so the division of republic into free and slave worlds was, for him, the ultimate national question. In Kansas, on the frontier between those versions of America, Higginson swore to be the scourge of the slave hunters, the refuge of the escaping slaves. Known from Wichita to Lawrence as a dangerous traveling preacher man, Thomas kept the outward sign of the cloth but rode with a revolver at his belt; running guns to the blacks and their helpers, getting food to the fugitives, laying on shelter and his own hands (as much in aid of homeopathic cures as blessings), still the smooth white hands of the Harvard divinity student. One night in a saloon (for even God’s ministers needed a little warmth against the prairie bitterness) he heard men talking about someone they were going to have to deal with, tar and feather, maybe, but run out of town for sure: a preacher man. “First he has his text,” the ringleader looking for like-minded men explained, “and he preaches religion, then he drops that, pitches into politics, then he drops that too and begins about the suffering niggers. Well boys we’ve got to take care of that.” Higginson was unafraid. God and Samuel Colt would shield him from harm; the Lord’s work had still to be done. The true fight had scarcely begun. There were those among his bien-pensant friends in the North who frowned on those such as John Brown as a raver, a mischief-maker. But he thought Brown, with his silvery mane and his high exhortations, another such as had come at the time of Oliver: a holy warrior. And Higginson raised secret funds for Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and when it went awry, raised more money for his hero’s defense. After Brown was hanged, Higginson went to see his widow and children at New Elba and offered what poor comfort he could.
