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In 1724 Thomas Bray secured a charter for a third missionary society, known as Dr. Bray’s Associates.40 The organization’s efforts were directed to the evangelization and education of black Americans. It supported schools for blacks in Philadelphia (1758–75?); New York (1760–74); Williamsburg (1760–74) and Fredericksburg (1765–1770), Virginia; and Newport, Rhode Island (1762–1775?). While male clergy served as superintendents of these schools, most of the actual instruction was given by white school mistresses, such as Anne Wager of Williamsburg. After the American Revolution halted all ongoing projects, the society’s managers devoted its assets to charitable projects within England.41 As the existence of the Dr. Bray’s Associates suggested, some colonial members of the Church of England shared the concern for evangelization of African Americans that critics of slavery, such as Morgan Godwyn, had voiced in the seventeenth century. They were a distinct minority in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, with many slave owners actively resisting directions from England about providing Christian instruction of enslaved persons. They were most opposed to evangelization of the African-born. The General Assembly in Virginia ignored an act of the English Parliament and a declaration of the acting colonial governor (1713) calling for catechizing enslaved persons.42 Attitudes began to change in the 1720s. In the case of Virginia the year 1727 was an apparent tipping point. The accumulated effect of regular calls for action by the English (Bishop of London Edmund Gibson’s inquiry about baptism of enslaved people, 1724; Gibson’s two letters on baptism, 1727; instruction to Governor William Gooch by the Board of Trade on the importance of baptism, 1727; etc.), the growing percentage of enslaved people who had born in the colonies rather than Africa, and a careful political calculation that perhaps Christian slaves might be more easily managed than followers of African traditional religions began to make a difference. The Virginia General Assembly issued its own call for baptism in 1730, and parish clergy began to meet with increasing success in their efforts to convince slave owners to allow their baptism of the enslaved. As the number of baptisms rose, so did church attendance with at least one Virginia parish constructing its first designated pew for enslaved persons in 1732.43 Colonial courts in Virginia and Maryland even extended the curious “right of clergy” to African Americans in the 1720s. Originally a medieval privilege of clergy to be tried in church rather than secular courts, the “right of clergy” had morphed into a plea to be spared the death penalty and given some lesser punishment such as branding that could be made by anyone who could demonstrate the ability to read a portion of the Bible (usually Psalm 51).44
For their own part, enslaved people were not simply passive recipients of instruction in the Christian faith. Many sought baptism for themselves and their children, recognizing “Christianity’s implicit message of freedom.” Long after the passage of colonial laws denying any connection between servitude and baptism, enslaved people continued to hold out hope. Slaves in Virginia, for example, revolted in 1730 as a result of a rumor that colonial authorities had suppressed an opinion from English legal authorities that all enslaved Christians should be set free.45
Clergy who were most deeply involved in the effort to evangelize and teach enslaved people were often those most critical of the institution. Anthony Galvin became a slave owner when he came to Henrico parish in Virginia in 1735. Three years later he had baptized 172 enslaved persons and come to believe that slave ownership was “unlawful for any Christian, and particularly for Clergymen.”46
Some historians have argued that slavery was a primitive traditional agricultural institution to which supporters of a more enlightened, liberal, mercantile economy would object.47 The truth was, however, more complex. In the 1680s some of the enlightened thinkers of England did, to be sure, come to object to slavery. John Locke, for example, moved from supporting slavery in the 1660s (when he coauthored the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina that allowed slavery) and 1670s (when he bought shares in the Royal African Company) to rejecting in his Two Treatises of Government (published 1690) any form of involuntary servitude except for that of prisoners of war.48 Nevertheless, enlightened ideas about human rights worked in the opposite direction as well. As William Pettigrew has demonstrated in Freedom’s Debt (2013), “The ‘rights of man,’ or their more elastic substitute ‘freedom,’ contributed to the escalation of the slave trade. Eighteenth-century Britons believed that the Glorious Revolution would protect their liberties,” and one of those liberties was “the right of all English subjects to trade in the enslaved.”49 It was with appeals to the rights of free citizens that independent slave traders were able in 1712 to convince the British parliament to overturn the monopoly of the Royal African Company and to open the slave trade to independent traders. The result was “a massive expansion of slave trading” and a loss of any regulation of the way in which the enslaved were to be treated.50 While no single private slave company would rival the number of slaves carried by the Royal African Company, collectively the independent traders were able to transport far more enslaved people.
During the first decades of the eighteenth century, colonies north of Maryland began to adopt comprehensive slave legislation of the sort that colonial governments had pioneered in the Caribbean, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. New York adopted, for example, its first comprehensive slave code in 1702, and New Jersey followed two years later.51
Some colonists began to accept a curious reading of Genesis 9:10–27, the story of Noah’s curse on his grandson Canaan. In the biblical account Noah declared that Canaan, who was one of the four sons of Ham, would be a slave to Ham’s brothers Shem and Japeth. The passage was probably intended in the first instance as a justification for the Jewish conquest of the Canaanite people. Later interpreters, however, reapplied the passages to a variety of convenient targets. Some ninth-century Muslims reinterpreted the passage as a justification for the enslaving of sub-Saharan Africans. An alternative medieval Christian reading was to use the passage to justify treatment of heretics and sinners. The Spanish and Portuguese picked up the sub-Saharan argument from the Muslims, and by the late sixteenth century the English had adopted the argument from them or directly from Muslim sources. A number of seventeenth century supporters of English colonization suggested applying the passage to Native Americans.52 By the eighteenth century, however, it became common for defenders of the slave trade to apply the story exclusively to Africans; they would continue to do so up to the time of the American Civil War.
Having lost its monopoly, the Royal African Company began to remake itself as an advocate for a humane, regulated trade in slaves and a critic of the excesses of the independent slave traders. The company’s new
