humanity and the resistance to evangelization of enslaved people. William Frith preached in his parish in the Barbados in 1677 that “Negroes have souls to be saved, no less than other people, and an equal right, even to be saved, to the merits of Christ.” One of the other five Church of England clergy on the island preached in a similar vein. Both he and Frith were ejected from their parishes as a result.66 Clergyman Morgan Godwyn (baptized. 1640, died between 1685 and 1709), who served in a parish in Virginia and also spent time in Barbados, raised similar objections. After returning to England he published a critique of the colonial practice (Negro’s and Indians Advocate, 1680). He advocated adoption of the Bermuda scheme of the 99-year indenture (which potentially preserved the free status of children), chided the European settlers to baptize Africans and Native Americans, and suggested that failure to evangelize and allow free religious practice to an enslaved person should result in “a present and absolute release to the said Slave for ever.”67 Some Virginia clergy were apparently not supportive of the 1691 ban on intermarriage, for the legislature thought it necessary in 1705 to adopt a further act that specified a fine of ten thousand pounds of tobacco for any clergyman who presided at a marriage of a black to a white.68
These individual protests were not capable of turning back the expanding institution of slavery. The title of a sermon that Godwyn preached in London and published in 1685—Trade Preferr’d before Religion69—did a good job of summarizing the problem. The churches in the British colonies, divided as they were into competing denominations, were no match for the economic lure of the fortunes to be made in the African slave trade.
The enslaving of Native Americans did end—though for economic and political—rather than humanitarian—reasons. The English settlements in the middle colonies initially lacked the numerical advantage that had enabled Virginia and Massachusetts colonists to dominate Native Americans and as a result opted for negotiated treaties.70 The enslaving in the Carolinas continued until colonists learned of the lethal consequences of war with Native Americans and Native Americans became convinced that sale of captives from other tribes to the English was unwise as a long-term policy.71 Perhaps most importantly, the English grew aware of the need to cultivate Native American allies against the French and Spanish.
Virginia banned the further enslavement of Native Americans in 1705. Massachusetts (1712) and Connecticut (1715) followed suit with similar legislation.72 The Yamasee War in the Carolinas (1715–17) marked the end of ended large-scale slaving there.
NOTES
1. Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011), 106–7.
2. Prior to the 1970s it was common for historians to assume that the English people had embraced an internally consistent Protestant Anglicanism at some point in the reign of Elizabeth I. James Anthony Froude argued in his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth (1856–1870), for example, that the failed invasion of the Spanish Armada convinced the English people to accept the Reformation. A. G. Dickens argued in his English Reformation (1964) that what he identified as a “balanced Anglicanism” came into being around 1600. It is now common for historians to suggest that change for a whole nation comes at a far slower pace and that English religion was in flux during a “long Reformation” that, according to some accounts, lasted into the eighteenth century. See, for example, Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation: 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1998).
3. For a sympathetic description of late medieval Catholicism in England, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992). In contrast to such earlier authors as A. G. Dickens (The English Reformation, 1964) who suggested that much about late medieval Catholicism was superstitious and non-Biblical, Duffy has argued that “late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of the Reformation,” and “traditional religion had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay.” See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale, 1992), 4; and A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2d edition (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 25–45.
4. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, a new and complete edition, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley, 8 vols. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837), iv: 635. See also Marcus L. Loane, Masters of the English Reformation (London: The Church Book Room Press, 1954), 6.
5. Foxe, Acts, iv: 635.
6. The comfortable words first appeared in the English liturgy in the Order of Communion of 1548 and were included in editions of the Book of Common Prayer from 1549 on. The Episcopal Church retained the comfortable words in the rite I Holy Eucharist of 1979, but altered the introduction that had given words their name—“Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him.” See Book of Common Prayer (1928), 76; and the Book of Common Prayer (1979), 332.
7. At the time of the coronation of Edward VI in 1547, the English used the term Protestant to apply to German Lutherans and Reformed Christians. By the end of the following century, however, the word Protestant was in general use in England as a generic term for non-Roman Catholic, non-Anabaptist western Christians. The Act of Settlement of 1700, for example, specified that the English monarch should be “in the Protestant Line for the Happiness of the Nation and the Security of our Religion.” Since the nineteenth century, however, many Episcopalians have avoided use of the adjective Protestant to describe their church, suggesting instead that Anglicanism occupies a middle ground between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. While Protestant still remains part of the official corporate title of the Episcopal Church (the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America), the General Convention of the Episcopal Church authorized the use of the shorter title (the Episcopal Church) in 1967 and 1976. For further information see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), xx, and Act of Settlement (1700 CHAPTER 2 12 and 13 Will 3), http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Will3/12-13/2 (accessed February 11, 2014).
8. George MacLaren Brydon, Virginia’s Mother Church and the Political Conditions Under Which It Grew, 2 vols. (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1947), 1:411–13.
9. M. Kelso, Jamestown: The Buried Truth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 78–79, 194–95.
10. Owanah Anderson, Jamestown Commitment: The Episcopal Church and the American Indian (Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 1988), 16–18; and Louis B. Wright, ed., The Elizabethans’ America (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 136.
