The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (43 page)

Along with millions of individual choices, the growth of slavery helped to make evangelical Protestantism the hegemonic pattern of American religion. Yet the relationship between
the two expansions was complex. As of 1790, although Africans and their children had been slaves in North America for more than 160 years, few enslaved people had converted to the staid, planter-dominated Anglicanism of their enslavers. Sometime around 1770, however, the first evangelical Protestant preachers—many of them exiles from theological struggles within the churches of New England—began
to travel through the South. Though the planter gentry of the Chesapeake persecuted these “New Light” ministers, other Virginians and Carolinians flocked to their revival meetings. Many enslaved people were at those gatherings. Their presence often galvanized the already emotional New Light revivals into something electric. Enslaved people born in Africa—still in the late 1700s a significant
percentage of Chesapeake slaves—came from a part of the world where it was common for gods to throw people on the ground, to breathe in and through them, to ride worshippers’ spirits and remake their lives. These new converts demonstrated the same intensity of conversion, and their fervor was catching. White converts modeled their conversions on enslaved people’s behavior, learning that shouting
and singing were appropriate responses to
the breath of the divine. Some who expected to scoff with amusement at a slave preacher’s sermon found themselves lying on the ground, soaked in sweat, not quite sure what had happened. Evangelical church communities adopted enslaved men and women as spiritual brothers and sisters, even as experts and guides.
⁵⁰

After the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison framed the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the law that did away with all established churches and served as the intellectual foundation for the First Amendment. “God Almighty hath created the mind of man free,” began the two slave owners, and so man’s government was not to impose any specific religious dogma on its citizens. But white evangelicals, prime beneficiaries of the
disestablishment of the state churches that had characterized most of the prerevolutionary colonies, increasingly concluded that God Almighty was just fine with keeping the bodies of some men and women unfree. Many of the early white Baptists in Virginia had moved to Kentucky to escape religious persecution. But those same people, charged Kentucky Baptist minister David Barrow, saw no sin in separating
“husband and wife”—indeed, they did so “without the least apparent signs of fellow feeling.” William Thompson, enslaved in Virginia, remembered how the hypocrisy of “Christian” enslavers had spoiled his taste for evangelical religion: “I went to meeting on a Sunday after I had seen the gang chained, but the preaching did me no good.” In Virginia, before the beginning of the forced migrations
west, one-quarter of all Methodists had been black. In Kentucky, only 10 percent were. On Sundays at Congaree, where Charles Ball lived in South Carolina, an enslaved migrant from Virginia named Jacob led religious meetings—but most of Wade Hampton’s captives preferred to spend the Sabbath raiding orchards for fruit to supplement their limited diets. And when Betsey Madison, a Virginia woman transported
to Natchez in the 1790s, tried to spread her version of the faith, cotton planters tried to stop her from preaching. As Ball noted, enslavers feared that slaves “may imbibe with the morality . . . the notions of equality and liberty, contained in the gospel.”
⁵¹

Yet the power of African-influenced spiritual practices was too useful for white preachers to resist the temptation to borrow. African-American participation on the frontier would thus ultimately reshape the religious dynamic of the entire United States. In the summers of 1800 and 1801, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist ministers in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky led a series of dramatic revivals.
Thousands of free white and enslaved black settlers fell on church floors or wandered around shouting and jumping and praising God. They spilled out of the doors until the ministers decided to move their
services outside. At the Cane Ridge meeting in August 1801, 10,000 attendees exploded into seven days of mass conversions, accompanied by fainting, ecstatic dance, visions, and unconsciousness.
⁵²

Soon, similar revivals broke out across slavery’s frontier, dramatically increasing church membership in all denominations. Critics scoffed: “Some came to be at the camp meeting / And some perhaps to get good eating,” rhymed a skeptical attendee; and as the preacher’s tempo mounted, “the altar soon was filled with lasses / Some kicked so high they showed their a—.” Enslaved migrants’ influence
also began to gall some observers. From “the
blacks’
quarter” of revival camps, complained Methodist John Watson, came Saturday-night music turned to religious purpose: extemporaneous verses “sung in the merry chorus-manner of the southern . . . husking-frolic method.” Singers stomped rhythms, “the steps of actual negro dancing.” We cannot “countenance or tolerate such gross perversions of true
religion!”
⁵³

As mass revival and emotional individual conversion on the frontier reverberated back East, one could argue that enslaved migrants’ influence was expanding, too. Especially after the Cane Creek revivals, a long-lasting nationwide boom of evangelical conversion transformed the American religious landscape. From zero in 1770, the number of Methodists in the United States climbed to
a quarter million by 1820, and doubled in the next decade. From 1790 to 1820, the number of Baptist churches exploded, from 500 to 2,500. In some ways the process initiated by this evangelical take-off continued all the way into the twenty-first century. Continuously seeking new adherents—often by utilizing the most “modern” tools of marketing to spread their message—evangelicals have inhabited a
process of constant transformation. True believers’ competing claims have led to constant denominational splintering among evangelicals, with each group typically insisting that it possessed a truer fundamentalism than any other and that it was rebuilding the “primitive church” of Jesus’s first followers. By the early twenty-first century, believers around the world had, in this process of creative
destruction, created more than 30,000 Protestant denominations, most of which were born in the United States. Evangelical Protestantism claimed almost as many adherents worldwide as Catholicism or Islam. A young tradition, created in large part on slavery’s frontier out of elements that included a healthy dose of West African religious practices, has become one of the most influential cultural
exports in world history.
⁵⁴

Back to the early nineteenth century, however, and to an encounter between a white man and Pompey, a black Methodist preacher in Mississippi. Why, asked the white man, did the enslaved man sing hymns all day? “It
makes my soul so happy,” Pompey responded. “You simpleton,” replied the white man. “A negro has no soul.” New evangelical denominations have always drawn
converts from the poor and the excluded—as in early twenty-first-century Brazil, for instance—because emotional conversion experiences and informal participatory services treat disempowered people as if they have souls equal in value to those of the powerful. Yet one of the fracture lines along which evangelical Protestant denominations have split has been the question of whether believers like Pompey
should challenge structures of worldly power.

The “perfectionist” evangelicals who began to create and support moral reform movements in the North after 1830, including the new abolitionism, insisted that Jesus’s instruction—“Feed my sheep”—required believers to improve their society and protect the weak from the sins of the strong. In the slave society, however, official theology’s social prescription
was slowly bent to a different frame. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, as conversion experiences and churchgoing became the expected thing for proper white citizens, most Christianized enslavers abandoned the claim that African Americans had no souls to be saved. Thus, they had to “consider the dreadful responsibility,” as a Methodist minister told Natchez whites, that they
“would incur if [they] prevented the Negroes from hearing the message sent by our gracious Creator to the whole family of the human race.” From 1800 to the 1820s, mixed black-and-white frontier congregations emerged, and they welcomed new African-American members. When “Adam[,] a black brother,” joined Louisville Baptist Church in Mississippi, all the members—white and black—greeted him with “the
right hand of fellowship.” As churches multiplied, more enslaved people could avoid worshipping with their masters on the Sabbath.
⁵⁵

“However sable their hue and degraded their condition in life,” a group of Mississippi Baptist preachers reminded their fellow enslavers, enslaved African Americans “possess rational and immortal souls.” Yet the pull of slavery distorted white evangelicals’ theology,
and by the 1820s whites in biracial churches were deleting rituals that recognized recently joined African Americans as “brother” and “sister.” After the Missouri crisis, touchy enslavers claimed that a “Christian,” paternalistic slavery would counter criticism of the South. Along with neutralizing the bad odor of the whipping-machine, ministers writing in new denominational magazines insisted
that conversion to white-authenticated Christianity would not infect enslaved people with the idea that Jesus came to set the captives free. Instead, they generated a tame theology that was in many ways the Calvinist opposite of the early
slave-frontier revivals, with their emphasis on a believer’s decision to ask for forgiveness and faith. Even as famous northern evangelical Charles Finney told
tens of thousands of converts in 1820s Erie Canal boomtowns that they could choose to turn to God for salvation, Mississippi Baptists were trying to ensure that the enslaved believed that nothing important in heaven or on earth was up to their choosing. God himself, the Baptists’ state convention announced, had established their bondage: “However dark, mysterious, and unpleasant these dispensations
may appear to you we have no doubt they are founded in wisdom and goodness.” “The great God above has made you for the benefit of the Whiteman, who is your law maker and law giver,” a Kentucky captor preached to his human property, whom he had gathered in his yard for his Sunday morning sermon.
⁵⁶

Enslaved people, however, believed otherwise. In 1821, one Georgia slave wrote a letter to a white
preacher. “If I understand the white people,” he wrote, “they are praying for more religion in the world.” Well then, “If god sent you to preach to sinners did he direct you to keep your face to the white people constantly or is it because they give you money?” “We are carried to market and sold to the highest bidder,” and whites “never once inquire whither you are sold, to a heathen or a Christian?”
Yet enslaved people continued to flock to churches, even if ministers turned their backs on them, and to hold their own religious meetings as well. For in the story of Jesus, believers found kinship and a promise. Jesus was a god made mortal, a wrongly captured man who endured torture and violent death. Forced migrants already knew what it was like to journey into a grave. But the story told
them that Jesus had risen from his tomb and returned to tell the captives of a new kingdom whose gate he had opened.
⁵⁷

So now one understands how that teenaged girl, the one interviewed as an old woman, had come to be in a Tennessee prayer meeting. She was agonizing over her future, specifically, over her inability to protect her first child, who had just been born, from violence, hunger, and
separation. And one understands why, when the girl heard a voice no one else could hear and rose up from her knees in wonder, her own mother rushed to her side to guide her to the edge. “Pray on, daughter,” she remembered the older woman telling her, “for if the Master has started to working with you, he will not stop until he has freed your soul.” The mother had already traveled this road, and she
pushed her fearful daughter against all the impending crucifixions she’d have to survive. “It wasn’t long,” the daughter remembered, before, collapsing to the ground, “I died.”
⁵⁸

She fell into an abyss. But as the young woman plunged, a different voice, a new one, breathed in her ear. It told her that the thefts in her own life, and her own transcendence of them, mattered. Both, it told her,
were part of the greatest drama in creation. And it told her not to hide from the pain and the fear, but to plunge into her own desolated emotions and powerless complicity, for the voice specifically said, “You must die and go to hell,” or she could not live again. She twitched, and was fully in the dream.

She found herself walking down the slave trail. People who survived the southwestern daylight
fields called the acres of cotton “Hell without fires” for the sad zombies and evil demons that stalked in them, but in the perpetual night on each side of this road, she could see the fires clearly. Flames raged unceasing in the cotton and logs and stumps. Beside her staggered stolen people, people lost in their chains. People who did not know their own names. She saw babies left on the ground
by mothers. She heard mothers whose screams sounded like wounded animals.
⁵⁹

The coffle she was in came to the forks in the road. A little man stood there. He beckoned her to follow him up a narrow path. Because this was a dream, a vision, somehow she had come unlinked from the coffle, so follow him she did. She gasped for breath, lagging as she struggled up the path’s dizzying switchbacks. So
the man called down “a great multitude” of angels, and told them to sing to her as she climbed. “Mama, Mama, you must help carry the world,” they chanted. What would become of her baby, what would become of her, she could not know. Somehow she had to care for, instruct, defend her child against forces too heavy to fight. She had a whole world to carry.