How The Great Awakening Helped Ignite The Fight For Black Freedom
The numbers are staggering.
“At the time of the [American] Revolution, the American colonies had something like two and a half million people,” said Jon Sensbach, professor of history emeritus at the University of Florida in Gainesville and author of “Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World.”
“About 20 percent of them were enslaved,” he added, referring to the 400,000 and 500,000 Africans.
Approximately 50,000 free Blacks also lived in the original colonies.
It is almost impossible to talk about the complex and varied faith of the enslaved people brought to the colonies and increasingly public and vocal calls for spiritual and bodily liberty, without understanding how prevalent slavery was and how intertwined it was with most colonial economies at the time of the Revolution (that’s not even to mention slavery in the French and Spanish colonies).
To further complicate the picture, Native peoples, who had been enslaved during the early colonial period, also became enslavers.
The vast majority of those enslaved ended up in the Caribbean, said Sensbach, where, as in the Southern colonies, the climate was conducive to growing crops like cotton, indigo and rice. They were taken from countries like modern-day Senegal, Gambia, Liberia and what we now know as the Congo, among other regions in West and West-Central Africa.
It was Britain, he said, that dominated the Atlantic slave trade from the late 17th to the end of the 18th century.
In South Carolina, for example, (though the numbers ebbed and flowed to some extent) around 60% of the total population was enslaved. The South was overwhelmingly composed of plantations, said Christine Heyrman, a history professor at the University of Delaware and author of “Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt.”
Spanish colonies aside, the largest number of enslaved people probably resided in Virginia, according to said George Washington University history professor Warren Milteer, the author of “Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South.”
While the population of enslaved people diminished the farther north one traveled in the colonies (Massachusetts, say, had three or four percent), slavery prevailed in all of them. Massachusetts, like other northern colonies, profited not only from slave labor but by turning goods produced by the enslaved in other places into products like fabric and rum.
While anti-slavery sentiment was growing in northern redoubts like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts (though many abolitionist Quakers owned slaves), it wasn’t until 1780 that Pennsylvania passed the Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act. But that law applied only to those born after the passing of the legislation and only when they turned 28. In a series of court cases focused on the state Constitution over the years from 1780–83, Massachusetts conclusively abolished it. In 1777, Vermont, not one of the original colonies, had enshrined the abolition of slavery in its Constitution.
At the same time, the seeds of the First Great Awakening were beginning to bear sometimes unpredictable fruit, leading both enslaved people and some of their White allies to ask whether spiritual freedom was sufficient.
In this context, one in which slavery pervaded the fabric of the young nation while faith-based rebellion against it was growing, it may be easier to understand why both the signers of the Declaration of Independence and those who drafted and ratified the Constitution were conspicuously silent on the matter.
“The founders don’t want to talk about slavery or religion, because they are trying to get the Constitution framed. Ben Franklin tries to get them to talk about it, but they tell him to leave it alone, leave it to the states,” Heyrman said.
Yet, though they avoided making moves that might roil the sometimes-tenuous and occasionally combative relationships among the new states, forces were already stirring that would, in retrospect, make the revolt against enslavement almost inevitable.
As with women and Native Americans, the flourishing of evangelical preaching and the enthusiasm of the preachers, began to affect not only the crowds of white colonists who gathered to hear them but the enslaved men and women who might read something else entirely in their invitation to spiritual freedom.
“Until you get the first step in the First Great Awakening (towards individual spiritual liberty), you don’t get the second step (a call for be free in body and in spirit),” said Richard Freeman, a professor of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of “Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers.”
Survival of African faith traditions
Reconstructing the religious practices of enslaved people in colonial times is challenging for a number of reasons. They include the rural nature of plantation life, poor records kept by some enslavers, a (relative) scarcity of surviving material culture and records from that period, and, of course, the desire of some plantation owners to ban these practices.
The faith backgrounds of the Africans brought over here in bondage from West and West-Central Africa were, as one might expect, rich, complex, and most of all, diverse. “They are bringing many faith traditions with them,” Sensbach added.
“It really depends on where the individual came from, whether the Gold Coast, Benin, Senegal – and what ethnic, religious, or spiritual practices they brought with them,” said Michael Idriss, an African-American interpretive fellow at the Museum of the American Revolution. It also mattered, he said, whether they were able to practice in a way that didn’t necessarily draw attention and then pass on those rituals to future generations.
A number of enslaved people were raised as Muslims, said scholars. That includes the remarkable Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known to Europeans as Job Ben Solomon. Of noble birth, Diallo became somewhat of a celebrity and was one of a very small number of Africans who secured their freedom and returned home. His story is not typical.
Some enslaved people were Catholic, either because they had been born in parts of Africa colonized by majority-Catholic countries like Spain and France, or because they lived on American plantations owned and operated by religious orders like the Jesuits.
“Afro-Christianity becomes kind of a big thing in the 18th and early 19th-century because African peoples in the Americas can find ways to channel their own religious beliefs, say in the spirit world,” Freeman said.
Complicated legacy of ‘The First Great Awakening’
While preachers like the Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies and the famed English evangelist George Whitefield preached a message of spiritual equality and displayed interest in the well-being of the enslaved people who heard their sermons, it didn’t necessarily mean that they believed that people of color were also entitled to legal and physical equality.
Whitefield, for example, ended up not only connected to slaveowners who had converted after hearing one of his sermons, but became a slaveholder himself.
Some of the enslaved men and women who heard the invitation to spiritual freedom drew rather different conclusions. When evangelical preachers came South, said Sensbach, and started preaching a highly experiential, emotion-laden Gospel message, “this appealed greatly to a number of enslaved people who heard the message.” By the 1730s and ’40s, he said, they were responding to “this language of inclusiveness.”
While Whitefield said that the Gospel was “open to everybody, and you shouldn’t be turned away because you are Black or a slave,” plantation owners were considerably more ambivalent.
Among plantation owners and others who profited from their labor, “there was a long-standing hesitation to convert enslaved populations, because that spiritual power might lend itself to arguments for equality,” said Shelby Balik, a history professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver and author of “Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography.”
When Christianity made inroads into these communities during the First Great Awakening, “it was always kind of in synthesis with other African rituals,” said Balik. It was enslaved women, she added, who sustained those traditions, adapting them in a way that might cushion them from the violence they often had to endure.
As the 18th century progressed, churches that were largely composed of enslaved Black men and women began to gather for worship in the South, said Heyrman. Methodists were identified as a primarily Black church with an explicitly anti-slavery testimony.
That was true, to some extent, of Baptist congregations as well. In Southern White congregations, enslaved people might sit in the galleries or outside of the crude structures where crowds gathered to hear evangelists preach, she said.
As inspired as enslaved people might be by the message that they too could be redeemed, she suggested, their circumstances put a limit on their aspirations — particularly when, as in places like 18th-century South Carolina, enslaved Black men and women finally were in circumstances that could produce stable families and communities.
“That may well limit the amount of risk you want to take. You embrace Christianity and see its potential for racial equality, but because of all these other social factors, and because you don’t have the guns, your ability to act on it was very limited,” Heyrman said.
In Virginia, particularly in the late 18th and early 19th century, there may have been a few congregations in which people of color “ran their own churches to some extent,” said Milteer.
Some congregations may even have had populations of mixed White and enslaved people, he suggested – a hierarchy focused on class (White servants and enslaved people) as much as it was on race.
“Eventually that falls apart in a lot of places because changes in the law prevent free people of color and all people of color, from preaching and things of that nature in many parts of the South,” Milteer added.
‘Crossroads between slavery and freedom’
For a number of reasons, Philadelphia and its surrounding towns became central to the growth of the Free Black community, the development of a Black church life separate from White congregations and the debate over the abolition of slavery itself. One factor was simple geography: Pennsylvania bordered slave states like Maryland to the south and became a refuge for those who were able to successfully escape.
Another element, of course, was the state’s historical focus on religious tolerance and its strong Quaker culture. Eighteenth-century Philadelphia was home to a number of historically important men and women, including the Quaker Benjamin Lay, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Richard Allen (and his second wife, Sarah Allen) and Absalom Jones, an abolitionist and the first African-American priest in the Episcopal Church (now revered as a saint in the Episcopal Church).
As early as 1758, the Philadelphia Quaker meeting, inspired by member John Woolman, condemned the practice of slave-holding and moved not to allow those who owned slaves to hold leadership positions within the Society.
In the effort to encourage Quakers to condemn the slave trade, it is likely that (though he is relatively unknown today), the British-born Benjamin Lay was quite significant. A diminutive man (he was likely around four feet tall), Lay, shocked by the plight of the enslaved men and women he saw on the streets of Philadelphia, would protest enslavement, both within and outside Quaker meetings, with what seems to have been a memorable theatricality.
He lived long enough (he died in 1759) to learn of the steps the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had taken to discipline slaveowners among them. By 1776, said Freeman, “you can’t be a Quaker and own slaves.”
Both Richard Allen and Absalom Jones had been numbered among the enslaved. Jones was freed by his enslaver. Allen purchased his freedom.
“Jones and Allen are the first Black founding fathers,” said the Rev. Carolyn Caveness, first female pastor of Mother Bethel AME Church, founded by Allen in 1794. “Though they took different pathways, you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.”
In 1787, Jones and Allen worked together to found the Free African Aid Society, the first mutual aid society started for Black people in the United States. As lay ministers, the two men served the Black membership of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church until the decision to segregate Black members in the balcony prompted a walkout by Black congregants.
In 1794, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas was admitted to the Episcopal Church, with Jones as its first leader (in 1802, he was ordained a priest).
That same year, Allen launched Mother Bethel Church on what is now the oldest continuously owned parcel of Black land in the United States, said Caveness. In addition to creating businesses and educational institutions, she said, the genius of the Black church since its inception was a determination to unite love of God with that of neighbor in concrete ways, she said. “I can’t be so heavenly bound that I’m no earthly good, right?” she added.
In 1816, Allen and delegates from other Black churches founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His second wife, “Founding Mother” Sarah Allen, not only founded the women’s missionary society but also helped assist runaway slaves.
The Black faith community in the Philadelphia area also had White allies, like the surgeon and educator Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Other colonies (like Massachusetts) contributed both to the growth of a community of free Black men and women who birthed the Black Church and to the crusade against slavery. But it is hard to imagine what those movements would have been like without the conversations and the theological, social and political controversies of the founding city, one in which a revolution was being birthed.
Abolition movement
Voices calling for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade didn’t start with the American Revolution. In fact, they go back at least as early as the late seventeenth century and the Germantown Protest against slavery, penned by four Pennsylvania Quakers.
In 1799, Jones and 70 other free Black men petitioned Congress to end the international slave trade (the petition was ultimately denied).
But the fight for American independence accelerated the process, said Freeman, with a confluence of factors undercutting slavery. They include African-Americans taking the opportunity to escape, British military leaders offering enslaved men freedom if they would defect and calls for abolition by American statesmen like Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay.
Abolitionism was coming into its own. After the Revolution, said Freeman, “you get this formal push for abolitionist laws that start to reshape the dimensions of freedom in the United Sates. That’s where Pennsylvania and Philadelphia become really important.”
The post-revolutionary era, he said, is when “abolition for the first time becomes an organizing principle among African-Americans and some whites. Slavery is on the defensive. It’s a big transition.”
Yet the forces that fueled a slave-focused economy, particularly in the South, weren’t about to surrender without a fight.
In fact, it wasn’t long, historically speaking, before the denominations that had, to some extent, embraced an anti-slavery message moved to quell it. In fact, the battle over slavery in the 1830s and ’40s was to divide denominations like the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians.
In this evolving context, said Freeman, African Americans (and their allies) continued a conversation, one begun during the First Great Awakening. It lingered — through the massive casualties of the Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond. In a culture in which the quality of freedom and the meaning of redemption were inextricably intertwined, and in spite of the efforts some of the Founders made to avoid it, the conversation was, it seems, just getting started.
Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Religion News Service, National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Christian Century, The Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer.