Neau’s ministry. The conspirators’ blood oaths and suicide before capture suggest African rituals, as pantribal confraternities participated in such undertakings. But blacks sought religious power where they could find it, including in the church of their masters. Neau’s convert had reportedly been angry that his master had not granted him permission to be baptized, and other whites complained that blacks desired the magical (or possibly abolitionist) powers of baptism. Other rebels probably attended Neau’s Anglican school to gain literacy, a form of power that could hold magical promise, but also pragmatic resistance. New York’s blacks took Africa with them, but did not shut out the possibility of Christian influence.35
New York’s governor, Robert Hunter, continued to support Neau’s efforts, so the Anglican instruction of blacks continued through Neau’s death in 1722. Neau complained in 1718 that it was nearly impossible for him to gain new pupils. Postrevolt laws severely limited blacks’ religious activity. Black catechumens could meet only on Sunday afternoons, when slaves did not have to work, after regularly scheduled religious services, and when blacks could travel in daylight under the gaze of watchful authorities. These strictures limited opportunities for black religious instruction; white opposition nearly ended it completely. One observer contended in the 1720s, “Negroes instructed in Christianity are more conceited than their countrymen who are not.”36 After Neau, Anglican efforts to catechize slaves subsided until shortly before midcentury.
The next visible signs of black unrest, however, would lead to more, not fewer, attempts at evangelization. In 1741, another ostensible rebellion rocked New York City. Mysterious fires coupled with a wave of robberies fueled white fears of a full-scale slave revolt. The trail of evidence led to a few core conspirators, who under torture named others involved in a large-scale plot. City authorities executed thirty-one blacks—thirteen hanged, eighteen burned—and deported seventy more. Courts also condemned and executed four whites suspected of involvement.37
The truth behind the 1741 conspiracy remains shrouded in secrecy. The self-serving nature of the official trial report led an earlier generation of historians to doubt the truth of any rumors of concerted black revolt. They generally agreed with Winthrop Jordan’s assessment that anxiety over a lack of social cohesion led whites to viciously turn on blacks. Ethnic and religious differences among New York’s whites had fueled political factionalism for more than fifty years. The bitter conflicts did not obscure that blacks remained easy targets, lowest on the social ladder. Certainly the trials reveal that white prejudice toward blacks had strengthened by midcentury.38
The rise of anthropological approaches and recognition of African cultural survivals led more recent historians to find evidence of conspiracy in the events of 1741. But the motives for conspiracy remain wide-ranging in these interpretations. Some have stressed a proletarian union of blacks and laboring whites against elite merchant overlords; others have focused on the African influence on slaves, whose numbers swelled in the years before the trials. In all these interpretations, the attempted revolt would appear a natural response in the mid-eighteenth century; as Graham Russell Hodges has argued, the uprisings in 1712 and 1741 mark end points of a thirty-year revolt of Africans against white New Yorkers’ increased attempts to strengthen the bonds of chattel slavery in the colony.39
The range of conspirators condemned in 1741 reveals a fragmented community, at best. Some blacks clearly had ties to African culture, but others embraced a more polyglot identity. New York’s laboring culture could be interracial, as poorer whites and blacks joined in activities ranging from the leisurely to the criminal. And it was pluralistic, as some of the accused blacks were Hispanic sailors who occupied a higher social status in Latin America, but whose Catholic religion and darker skins nonetheless condemned them in the eyes of the judges, and in society as a whole.40
In an environment where both white and black communities remained fragmented, the Anglican Church and SPG advocated social cohesion. This stance gained the church new adherents. Throughout the eighteenth century, SPG officials contended that evangelization would make slaves less, not more, likely to revolt, and would increase their industry and honesty. Following tumultuous decades of master-slave relationships, after 1750 more masters were inclined to agree. SPG missionary Samuel Auchmuty noted a marked increase in the number of slaves attending catechism classes during the early 1760s. Every year he baptized dozens of children and a handful of adults. Each year, Auchmuty judged a few slaves advanced enough in their catechism studies to partake of the Lord’s Supper at regular church services. Scores of African slaves received a rudimentary education under Auchmuty, who reported around thirty regular communicants during the 1760s and early 1770s. No other New York denomination made such an effort to convert blacks before the American Revolution.41
For their part, blacks were more likely to accept catechization after 1750. Slave imports into New York City dropped dramatically after the 1740 revolt, and while the black population grew, the number of new arrivals directly from Africa shrank. Auchmuty’s catechumens were native New Yorkers, and perhaps saw in their activity a way to gain the patronage of the city’s leading government officials and merchants, not to mention their own masters. But in these actions, their identity as outsiders to an inside faith remained. Analyses of New York City’s African burial ground, which colonial blacks used throughout the eighteenth century, reveal continued survivals of tribal rituals.42
Black Movement toward Methodism
Aside from the SPG, most churches did not actively seek black members, yet over time blacks attended some churches. The outpouring of revivalist energy in George Whitefield’s trips to America cracked the door for black conversion, as Whitefield attacked the proud and preached spiritual equality of all before Christ. Later revivalists grew more explicit in promoting social or political egalitarianism. The Great Awakening upended churches’ old social relationships on many fronts. Lay ministers were especially successful among the poor. Blacks converted to Christianity in significant numbers for the first time. Some blacks and women took to the fields to preach. A few revival groups, like the Baptists in Virginia, willingly accepted black converts as equals, a drastic breach of social mores. The Methodists missed these early waves of revivals, but when they entered the colonies in the 1760s, they made up for lost time.43
Methodists fed from the energy of revivalism, and went further than Anglicans to welcome blacks to worship. According to oral tradition, at the first meetings of New York City’s Methodists one of the five participants was a black slave named Betty. Methodist ministers preached the gospel to all individuals, white and black, and welcomed slaves as spiritual equals. Methodist church leaders repeatedly celebrated the presence of black worshipers at their services. New York City missionary Joseph Pilmoor wrote to John Wesley in 1770, “Even some of the poor, despised children of Ham are striving to wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Pilmoor closed with the verse “God is no respecter of persons.” That same verse appeared in the journal of Francis Asbury when he recounted seeing blacks worship in New York. Asbury repeatedly voiced his enjoyment at seeing the “sable faces” of blacks in the services. In a few cases, black exhorters preached to crowds of white and black Methodists.44
Many blacks found low church Methodism more attractive than high church Anglicanism because early Methodists believed slavery to be a sin. Ministers denounced the institution of slavery from the pulpit, and many early Methodist converts freed their slaves after experiencing the grace of Christ.45 In contrast, Anglican messages to black slaves stressed duty and obedience. Even so, both Anglicans and Methodists cared for Africans’ spiritual needs, in marked contrast with most other New York religious groups.
Shortly after the midpoint of the eighteenth century, Anglicans and Methodists had an established place in colonial New York: established by law toward legal preference, but also established in fact as socially acceptable institutions in a burgeoning city. They were part of a church that had little formal power but did hold legal privileges, cultural prestige, and universal aspirations. And both groups ministered to blacks whose degraded status within the
