Baptism

Before slavery became a fixture on the North American mainland, Europeans, both Catholics and Protestants, debated the relationship between African slaves and Christianity. Baptism, particularly its liberating connotations, became a significant element in this debate during the era of American slavery and was an issue of growing importance for slaves themselves.

During the early development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Catholic nations insisted their traders baptize the newly enslaved. This perfunctory act certainly meant little to captured Africans; and as David Brion Davis observes in his 1966 study of slavery, neither baptism nor the Spanish legal template providing some protection for slaves, las Siete Partidas, prevented Spanish or Portuguese traders from treating Africans in a harsher manner than they did livestock.

Early North American colonial baptisms were only marginally more significant. Not until the population of African American slaves became relatively large did baptism grow in its meaning to slaves. The catalyst for this development was the popularity of evangelical Protestant denominations in the early-nineteenth-century South. Among Southern Presbyterians, Methodists, and especially Baptists, baptism was the transition between spiritual death and rebirth. It marked initiation into the fellowship of all believers and cleansed one of one's sins through the application of water and prayer. Slaves experienced baptism as the unmistakable understanding that freedom was theirs to possess, even if one was forced to wait until death. Evidence from slave narratives of the 1930s shows that baptisms were centrally important to slaves in the final years of the institution. Large crowds of slaves turned out for baptisms, often becoming frenzied and boisterous during the ceremony.

In 1958 Melville J. Herskovits suggested that slaves were attracted to baptism because they recognized it as similar to the water cults in some African countries. However, subsequent historians and anthropologists have criticized this interpretation, emphasizing instead the slaves' attraction to the evangelical aspects of baptism rather than a harkening back to a practice from the past.

The dramatic full-immersion baptism practiced by Baptists perhaps held particular meaning for slaves. Often dressed in white gowns, initiates felt a heavenly presence underwater and reported feeling fundamentally changed in their spiritual understanding once they emerged. Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians dabbed or sprinkled baptismal water on initiates in a less dramatic fashion though also imparting a sense of transformation. Slaves found this newly autonomous self deeply satisfying.

Efforts to convert slaves, culminating in baptism, were ever-present in the colonies, although eighteenth-century slave owners often resisted the Christianizing of bondpeople. According to Jon Butler (1990), complaints about slave baptism persisted throughout the era of slavery. Working for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Dr. Francis Le Jau (1665–1717) claimed to have baptized many slaves around Charleston, South Carolina, despite slave owners' religious ignorance and reluctance. To counteract such resistance Le Jau, who kept a journal of his activities, was forced to make slaves profess that their understanding of baptism would not free them or even partially relieve them of their obedience to their owners.

A fundamental problem for colonial planters was their understanding of Protestant Christianity as a religion built on freedom. In particular baptism freed the individual to become self-directed, with responsibility to others and, most important, to God. Slaves could not attain this faith-derived autonomy. Moreover, as Albert J. Raboteau explains in his 1978 study of slaves and religion, many owners believed British law required planters to free baptized slaves. This provision of the law so threatened the continuation of slave owners' practices that six colonial legislatures, including Maryland and Virginia, passed laws rejecting the claim.

During the nineteenth century evangelical denominations compromised on their early opposition to slavery and at least as a partial consequence were fairly widespread by the 1830s. Among these denominations the mission to lead the uninitiated to conversion was a passionate focus, with baptism, as Frederick A. Bode (1994) notes, the bellwether of a church's progress toward building a godly community. As more slaves became Christian, baptism became an important spiritual element of their lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bode, Frederick A. "The Formation of Evangelical Communities in Middle Georgia: Twiggs County, 1820–1861." Journal of Southern History 60, no. 4 (November 1994): 711-748.

Butler, John. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958; repr., 1990.

Le Jau, Francis. The Carolina Chronicle, 1706–1717, ed. Frank J. Klingberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956.

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; rev. ed., 2004.

Rawick, George P. ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972–1979.

Sernett, Milton C. Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975.

                                        David F. Herr