“It is a remarkable event not merely because of the risks incurred (200 lashes of the whip often awaited those caught at such a meeting) but because of the hurdles overcome merely to arrive at this moment. For decades all manner of people and circumstances conspired against African Americans even hearing the gospel, let alone responding to it in freedom and joy.”

Peter Randolph, a slave in Prince George County, Virginia, until he was freed in 1847, described the secret prayer meetings he had attended as a slave. “Not being allowed to hold meetings on the plantation,” he wrote, “the slaves assemble in the swamp, out of reach of the patrols. They have an understanding among themselves as to the time and place. … This is often done by the first one arriving breaking boughs from the trees and bending them in the direction of the selected spot.

“After arriving and greeting one another, men and women sat in groups together. Then there was “preaching … by the brethren, then praying and singing all around until they generally feel quite happy.”

The speaker rises “and talks very slowly, until feeling the spirit, he grows excited, and in a short time there fall to the ground 20 or 30 men and women under its influence.

“The slave forgets all his sufferings,” Randolph summed up, “except to remind others of the trials during the past week, exclaiming, ‘Thank God, I shall not live here always!’ “

It is a remarkable event not merely because of the risks incurred (200 lashes of the whip often awaited those caught at such a meeting) but because of the hurdles overcome merely to arrive at this moment. For decades all manner of people and circumstances conspired against African Americans even hearing the gospel, let alone responding to it in freedom and joy.

No time for religion

The plantation work regimen gave slaves little leisure time for religious instruction. Some masters required slaves to work even on Sunday. Even with the day off, many slaves needed to tend their own gardens, which supplemented their income and diet (others opted to socialize, to dance, or get drunk).

One of the largest obstacles was sheer prejudice. Many masters believed Africans were too “brutish” to comprehend the gospel; others doubted Africans had souls. Anglican missionary to South Carolina Francis Le Jau reported in 1709, “Many masters can’t be persuaded that Negroes and Indians are otherwise than Beasts, and use them like such.”

Such thinking was combated by men like Puritan Cotton Mather, who, in his tract The Negro Christianized, pleaded with owners to treat their “servants” as men, not brutes: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. Man, thy Negro is thy neighbor.”

Other masters believed conversion would make slaves “saucy,” since they would begin to think of themselves equal to whites. According to John Bragg, a Virginia minister, slave owners agreed that conversion would result in the slaves “being and becoming worse slaves when Christians.” Some even believed “A slave is ten times worse when a Christian than in his state of paganism.”

There were legal complications as well. Many masters in colonial America believed if a slave was baptized that, “according to the laws of the British nation, and the canons of the church,” he must be freed. Colonial legislatures sought to clear up this matter, and by 1706 at least six had passed acts denying that baptism altered the condition of a slave “as to his bondage or freedom.” It wasn’t just economics but a twinge of Christian conscience that prompted the legislation. As Virginia’s law put it, it was passed so that masters, “freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity.”

But clergy were in short supply even for whites in the eighteenth-century South. In 1701 Virginia, for example, only half of the forty-some parishes containing 40,000 people were supplied with clergy. And regarding white settlers in Georgia, one missionary said, “They seem in general to have but very little more knowledge of a Savior than the aboriginal natives.”

Finally, there were cultural obstacles. In 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was formed, and one of its purposes was to seek the conversion of slaves in colonial America. As an arm of the Church of England, however, it was less than effective with the “target” population. Le Jau described his refined and rational method of teaching African Americans: “We begin and end our particular assembly with the collect. … I teach them the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Commandments. I explain some portion of the catechism … “

With culture, prejudice, and injustice joining forces, few slaves were converted. As one missionary reported in 1779 about conditions in South Carolina: “The Negroes of that country, a few only excepted, are to this day as great strangers to Christianity and as much under the influence of pagan darkness, idolatry, and superstition as they were at their first arrival from Africa.”

It would, it seemed, take a miracle to turn things around. And a miracle is just what America had already begun to experience.

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