African Americans

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African Americans

Slavery. During the early national period, most African Americans were slaves. Of more than 750, 000 black Americans in 1790, all but 60, 000 were enslaved. Their enslavement was the single most important feature of African American religious life in this period. Black Americans used religion to find some relief from slavery even as the forms of religion they practiced were shaped by this “peculiar institution.” Because they were in bondage, the religious history of African Americans is a telling example of the limitations of religious freedom in early America, as well as of its growth. For despite the limitations and deprivations slavery and racism imposed on many African Americans, a richly varied religious culture evolved that was a powerful force in black life and was just as complex as the religions of white Americans.

African Religions. Africans brought their own religions with them from Africa, although we cannot know how many traditional practices and beliefs survived or how they changed once in America. The importation of these religions continued well into the early national period. Traffic in slaves was heavy from the Revolution to 1808, when the slave trade ended, with as many Africans being imported into the United States in these years as had arrived over the entire colonial period. Although the native-born black population was quickly growing, there was a steady infusion of African traditions into the slave communities. This meant that for many blacks, religion meant not Christianity, but some variant of African folk traditions. These included ideas such as reincarnation and the veneration of ancestors shared by many West African religions, as well as a wide variety of healing practices and magical beliefs, often called conjure. Conjuring was widely and informally practiced, often including such things as herbal medicines, charms, aphrodisiacs, and witchcraft lore. Sometimes conjuring became a set of more-formal practices, as was the case with the voodoo cults of French Louisiana. But usually it was extremely flexible and open to all who could find meaning in the various practices it included. African Americans were by no means alone in having such beliefs at the center of their religious lives. Many white Americans held similar beliefs, and folk traditions were a primary area of interchange between the races. Many whites took up the healing traditions of Africa, and the African American witchcraft stories that have come down to us show the important influence of the European witchcraft traditions that easily survived the Salem witch-hunts of 1692.

Christians. The presence of African traditions did not mean there was no room for Christianity in the black community. With the emergence of the revivals in the South, Christianity made important gains in the African American population during the early national period. The emotionalism and egalitarianism of the evangelical churches of the Baptists and the Methodists appealed to many black Americans. These religions resonated with their cultural legacy from Africa and spoke to their condition as slaves or, at best, second-class free people. As the numbers of black Christians grew and the racism of European Americans persisted, African Americans began to assert themselves as independent religious leaders. Black pastors emerged, and they contributed to the growth of black Christianity with their greater willingness to pursue mission work among the black community. This process was not an easy one, especially in the South, as the example of Andrew Bryan shows.

Andrew Bryan. A former slave living in Savannah, Georgia, Bryan in the late 1780s began to preach and gathered a following among other blacks. They began to meet together to worship but were harassed by whites who feared the slaves were meeting to plot their escape. Bryan and others were imprisoned and whipped, but Bryan turned persecution into opportunity and praised the chance to suffer for Christ. Finally, in 1788 Bryan was able to organize the First African Baptist Church, with the help of a white Baptist sponsor. The church had 40 members at first and grew quickly; by 1790 there were 225 communicants and 350 other baptized members. Persecution by neighboring whites let up by 1800, but it was an uneasy truce. Despite the survival of Bryan’s church and the founding of two other black Baptist churches in Savannah in the early 1800s, slavery was a fact of life for most black congregants. Some were forbidden by their owners to become full members. Bryan’s brother Sampson assisted in his duties while remaining a slave. And Bryan himself, despite his experiences, was a slave holder. He reported to English Baptists in 1800 that he was “well provided for … having a house and a

lot … and a fifty-six acre tract of land … and eight slaves; for whose education and happiness, I am enabled thro’ mercy to provide.”

Richard Allen. In the North the gradual abolition of slavery may have made it easier for African Americans to assert religious independence, but those assertions were still shaped by the oppression of blacks by whites. Like Andrew Bryan, Richard Allen was a former slave who had converted to Christianity and become a preacher. Despite his piety and his long membership in Saint George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Allen suffered the effects of discrimination against blacks. In 1787 he and two other black members of Saint George’s were forced from their knees and told to go to the church’s gallery by white members angry that blacks had presumed to leave their assigned area. Allen and his friends responded by separating from Saint George’s and founding an independent black congregation, eventually called Bethel Methodist Church. Once again separation did not mean the end of troubles. Saint George’s later tried to take control of Bethel Church’s property, leading the black congregation to sue for their rights, a legal struggle that lasted until 1816, when Allen and his group were finally successful. In the meantime Allen had initiated an even more important step in securing religious independence for black Christians. Tensions continued between white church leaders and the black Methodist congregations growing up with Allen’s help in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. The discord led Allen to call a meeting of the black churches in 1816. When the delegates gathered, they formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African American denomination, and elected Allen as their bishop. This move gave black Christians a stronger institutional voice and was a mark of how important these new churches were becoming to African American life and identity. Black Methodists were not alone in forming such churches. The first black Episcopal Church, established in Philadelphia in 1794, was joined in 1807 by a black Presbyterian congregation. Black Baptist churches were formed in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston between 1804 and 1809. These institutions offered significant opportunities for leadership and public presence, and they became centers of the free black communities in these cities. They had social, economic, and political significance in addition to supporting the spiritual lives of their members. Black churches began to find their place as a key expression of African American independence and resistance to white racism, a role that continued through the civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

The “Invisible Institution.” Despite these important developments in the northern states, most African Americans lived in the South. This meant that slavery was at the heart of their religious lives, in one way or another. For some whites and blacks alike, the southern evangelical emphasis on an intensely individual conversion experience gave an African American Christian a dignity that was hard to reconcile with slave status. Within the black communities slavery prompted much soul-searching. Leading black ministers such as Richard Allen were early public opponents of slavery. They articulated religious as well as political arguments against the institution and sought to ease its effects through the missionary work they sponsored. They struggled with the theological question of why God permitted the evil of slavery to exist. In the South, where black churches were not as strongly established and where the slave codes limited the public presence of black preaching, the response to slavery took a different tack. Many slaves made Christianity into a religion that spoke to their condition. They gathered together outside the view of white missionaries and their churches, creating an “invisible institution” beyond the sight of their masters. In these meetings the slaves rejected their owners’ view that the Bible justified slavery and developed their own view that emphasized themes of freedom and deliverance by Christ, though for their safety they cast this in ambiguous terms. Slaves expressed these beliefs in the sermons they preached, the Bible stories they told each other, and, most dramatically, in the songs they sang. These spirituals are the deepest expressions of both their painful position and the hope they found in their form of Christianity. They expressed how their religion let African Americans accept their condition at the same time as they were resisting it. The performance of these songs, in dances called “shouts” that dramatized the stories they told, was much like the enthusiasm of many participants in the revivals of the era. In these songs African Amerians were participating in one of the most important developments of American religion, while at the same time making that development distinctively their own.