black people, but Christ Church baptized fifty-five blacks between 1730 and 1749, which was 5.5 percent of the roughly one thousand total baptisms. Of these, twenty-five can be identified as female and twenty-two as male. Considering both the percentage and the absolute number of baptisms, Christ Church’s minister Timothy Cutler baptized more black people than any other Boston church (even though he was a consistent opponent of Whitefield and the revivals). It seems likely that black people were often in attendance at Christ Church’s services, including some who were never baptized. The claim that masters were hesitant to baptize their slaves does not seem to apply to this church. As was the case with northern Anglicans in general, an opportunity to gain an education and outreach by Reverend Cutler to enslaved blacks likely contributed to the high rate of black affiliation in this congregation.53
The blacks and Indians who joined the churches that opposed the new religious practices of the awakenings may not have needed enthusiastic revivalism to find meaning in Christianity, including the few who were baptized at the antirevivalist Hollis Street Church. Among the people affiliated with Hollis Street Church was Primus, an “Indian servant belonging to Hon. Anthony Stoddard,” baptized in 1738, and Dinah, “negro servant to Deacon Clough,” baptized in 1742.54 Some members of the Clough family were already members of this church when Dinah was baptized, but Stoddard and his family do not appear elsewhere in these church records. Primus had no obvious connection to this church, such as a master or employer who attended. In his case and for the free black people who affiliated, we can assume they chose to attend this particular church. Some of the blacks baptized at Hollis Street were free, including John Cuffee, a “free negro” who was baptized in 1746, and a free black child named Sarah Vingus, who was baptized on October 19, 1735.
Sarah Vingus was the seven-year-old daughter of John Vingus, and their affiliation with Hollis Street Church is best understood in a wider Atlantic context. In order to have his daughter baptized, John Vingus owned the covenant on the day she was baptized. Like many white parents in New England, the desire to have his child baptized was the immediate cause of Vingus’s official affiliation with this church. These church records describe John Vingus as “a free negro, baptized in his own country by a Romish priest, who also owned the covenant with us.” In all likelihood, “his own country” was somewhere in Africa, perhaps the Kingdom of Kongo, whereby Kongolese royalty and others had practiced Catholicism since the end of the fifteenth century. It is also possible that “his own country” could have been a Spanish or Portuguese colony.55 If he came from Kongo, then John Vingus was likely raised as a Roman Catholic and baptized and catechized as such. We do not know when or under what circumstances he reached Boston, but he was there and was free since at least 1725, when he married Parthenia Barteno. They were listed as “free negroes” when married by Peter Thatcher, associate minister of the New North Church. Perhaps he crossed the Atlantic as a free person, or perhaps he was brought as a slave and regained his freedom. Whatever the case, it was important to him that his daughter be baptized, and he was willing to ascribe to the doctrines of this Protestant church in order to have it done. White Christians evidently judged him worthy of being in fellowship with them. These facts suggest that Vingus was a black man who valued access to Christian sacraments in a Congregational church.56
The inclusion of black people in Congregational churches was so ubiquitous that even pastors who publicly opposed revivalism, such as Charles Chauncy of First Church Boston and Ebenezer Gay at First Parish Hingham, baptized and admitted some blacks to their churches (both before and after the awakenings peaked).57 Chauncey was an ardent opponent of revivalism who famously complained that blacks and other people who “have no learning” were preaching in revival meetings. But opposition to revival practices was not the same as opposition to interracial churches, and 15 of the 738 baptisms (2.03 percent) from 1730 to 1749 at Chauncey’s church were of black people. Included in these baptisms were two children of an enslaved woman named Rose, who was owned by Nathaniel Byfield. Rose was baptized and admitted as a member, and two of her other children were baptized in 1729. Byfield purchased Rose from the West Indies in 1718, when she was about thirteen years old. Byfield, in his will, wrote that Rose “proved a faithful Servent, she hath with Great Pains & Diligence learned to Read & attained to Considerable knowledge of Religion, Concerning whom I am persuaded to Believe that she truly fears God, which obliges me to set her free from the Servitude she stands obliged to Me both by Purchase & Custom.” Although granting freedom to slaves was an uncommon practice in British Atlantic colonies, Byfield believed that Rose’s sincere Christian faith and faithful service entitled her and her children to freedom. She was freed in 1733, upon Byfield’s death. Was Rose surprised that her Christian faith led to emancipation, or had she deliberately leveraged religious devotion to gain concessions from Byfield? Had she prayed for both emancipation and salvation for her children for years before that moment? These are unanswerable questions, but it seems more likely than not that Rose valued her affiliation with this church. Her religious affiliation and experiences more resembled the experience of “godly walkers” than later Whitefieldarian converts.58
Even though blacks participated in most Congregational and Anglican churches in New England, there were still deterrents to their full participation, and white Christians held diverse opinions regarding black and Indian Christians. Some masters forbade the baptism of their servants and slaves on the grounds that it might suggest the equality of blacks and whites or that Christianity might be used by blacks to obtain freedom, though historians appear to have overstated this opposition. Some masters were at least ambivalent about the baptism of slaves, for Reverend Roger Price complained in 1740 that “till masters can be persuaded to have a greater value for their own souls, we have but small hopes they will be very anxious about the salvation of their negroes.” On one occasion, for an ordination service in 1733, the Congregational church of Bradford, Connecticut, ordered that “no negro servant be admitted to enter ye meeting house” to leave plenty of room for white attendees.59
Perhaps to counter resistance among slaveholders, colonial laws tended to support the inclusion of blacks and Indians into New England churches. The Connecticut legislature in 1727 passed a law that directed masters and mistresses to attentively teach Indian servants to read English and to understand Christianity. The General Assembly in 1738 stated that infant slaves of Christian masters could be baptized on the authority of the master’s faith and that it was the duty of masters to educate their enslaved children about Christianity. While these laws were not uniformly followed, the force of law promoted the religious participation of blacks and Indians.60
Several of Connecticut’s churches, particularly those near the Mohegan, Pequot, and Western Niantic reservations had relatively high numbers of Indian participants, in addition to some black congregants. Indians were active in the Congregational churches of Groton, Stonington, New London, Lebanon, Old Lyme, Hebron, and Norwich, Connecticut. Some pastors in these towns had ministered directly to Indians since the 1720s. These pastors sought to bring Indians into their churches because they believed it was their religious duty to convert Indians and because missionary societies provided monetary incentives for doing so. Though Indians attended these churches occasionally before the awakenings, there was a considerable spike in Indian participation from 1741 to 1743, when the revivals peaked.61 Moreover, it was not simply “radical” revivalists who were laying the foundations for Indian affiliation in Congregational churches since several moderate or even conservative pastors also worked to teach Christianity to the Indians near their churches.
The Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America (known as the New England Company, or NEC) provided some ministers and congregations with substantial monetary support for ministering to Indians and encouraged churches to be inclusive. Money, it seems, helped make seats accessible to Indians in English meetinghouses. For example, in 1749, the NEC pledged one hundred pounds old tenure for building a new meetinghouse in Rochester, Massachusetts, and additional money for Reverend Thomas West’s salary because the church planned to make “part of the house for the use & service of the Indians.” They paid Reverend Daniel Lewis of Pembroke, Massachusetts, twenty pounds in 1732 because he had “for divers years instructed a Number of Indian families in P[raying] town & having brought them to attend the publick Worship
