first integrated church in America can erroneously be read as implying that black, white, and Indian peoples never worshipped together in early American churches. In 1738, one hundred years before Tremont Temple was founded, nearly every church in Boston included black congregants, sometimes in large numbers. A few Boston churches of the eighteenth century also included American Indians. The sentiment behind Tremont Temple’s “first” claim reflects a blind spot common in the historical memory of most Americans. Many people today assume, incorrectly, that American churches have always been firmly divided along perceived racial lines.
Tremont Temple was not the first northern church to include racially diverse members and congregants, but it was exceptional in antebellum Boston because northern churches became less interracial as the nineteenth century wore on, contrary to the narrative of racial progress sometimes associated with northern states. Americans’ sense of their racial past and present is at stake in understanding the presence and influences of blacks and Indians in northern churches. The extent of interracial interactions in northern churches challenges two truisms about northern states that have fed into Americans’ racial consciousness. The first is that colonial New England was fundamentally a white region with only a sprinkling of blacks in the cities and Indians along the frontier. It is no coincidence that “the North,” particularly New England, has often been held up as the most “American” of regions in a country that has long associated whiteness and national identity.12 In popular memory of the past, the North is also commonly held up as being racially progressive in contrast to the South, which is epitomized historically by plantations and Jim Crow segregation. Racism was and is a national problem, not merely a southern one. This study of people of color in northern churches, therefore, furthers the reintegration of northern colonies and states in the racial history of American church life.
How Sunday mornings became the most segregated time in American life is not a linear story of declension. Instead, it is a complex history replete with remarkable individuals who made religious choices that defied the common patterns and assumptions of American society. American Indians and African Americans (and black Americans in the colonial era) affiliated with predominantly white churches in significant numbers before slowly forming separate churches, and in the process, they influenced patterns of race relations across northern society. Many blacks and Indians affiliated with predominantly white churches even as these congregations were complicit in supporting slavery and the dispossession of Indian land.
From the early to mid-eighteenth century, most Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in the northern British colonies were interracial congregations as blacks and Indians participated through weekly church services and the rituals of baptism and communion. These churches were dedicated to missionary outreach to these groups and made their sacramental communities relatively accessible to them. During the eras of the American Revolution and the Early Republic, northern churches became vastly more interracial as Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed Christians, Methodists, and Baptists admitted more African Americans and Afro-Indians into their churches. Separate Native American churches, especially in the 1750s, and independent African American churches after 1790, provided church alternatives for people of color. However, for a couple of decades, both interracial and segregated types of churches grew and developed side by side. In other words, churches wholly divided by the color line were not inevitable.13 Ultimately, though, segregated churches came to dominate northern states. The ejections and withdrawals of blacks and Indians from predominantly white churches were central building blocks in the creation of widespread segregation in northern society by the 1830s.
Even if a northern town included only a small number of blacks or Indians, it is significant that many northern churches were interracial because churches were the central institutions of most colonial towns. Churches remained culturally influential organizations in the nineteenth century. Since so many churches contained people of color, these institutions helped define the place of blacks and Indians in northern society. Often this influence meant that churches reinforced colonists’ widespread oppression and marginalization of blacks and Indians. Almost wherever there were people of color in New England and within every major northern city, they participated in the central institutions of these communities, and this fact alters how we think northern colonies and states operated. Although New England colonies had small shares and proportions of enslaved blacks compared to most British colonies, it would be a mistake to suggest that New England colonies were not greatly influenced by the enslavement of Africans and Indians. The activities of the enslaved blacks and Indians widely affected British colonial societies’ laws, economies, and religions. In regard to religion, black and Indian agency and participation affected northern and southern churches alike.14 New England’s churches, in this sense, were not exceptional.
Interracial religious activity was common in many northern churches from 1730 to 1820. In some denominations, a majority of congregations were interracial. By interracial, I mean that people whom contemporaries judged to be of different races jointly participated in almost all the religious activities and rituals of these churches. Numerous blacks and Indians were baptized, had their children baptized, partook of communion, listened to sermons, sang psalms and hymns, and prayed along with their white fellow congregants. These churches were interracial not only because of the physical presence of blacks and Indians but also because diverse people entered through religious rituals into a defined community of a local church that believers imagined was also part of a broader and eternal spiritual community.
Interracial worship, however, does not imply that blacks and Indians received equal treatment in predominantly white churches. These churches usually did not allow blacks and Indians to vote in church affairs or to hold leadership or pastoral positions. Along with seating arranged by status and sometimes by gender, predominantly white churches required blacks and Indians to occupy segregated seats in the balconies or the back of the main floor during worship. Yet the fact remains that blacks and Indians were present in and members of a sizable number of northern churches, thereby making churches common sites of interracial relations. In turn, churches also became important sites for the contestation of racial issues from the Great Awakening to the nineteenth century’s era of democratic ferment. The ways that racial issues were decided in churches influenced society more broadly because churches were one of the most common places of public gatherings and because they exercised a unique influence on society’s morals.
Historians have generally overemphasized the appeal of evangelical denominations, such as Methodists and Baptists, among northern blacks in the colonial period. The fact is that significant portions of the black northerners chose to affiliate with more liturgical or subdued forms of Protestantism, particularly Anglican churches, before 1810.15 By the antebellum era, northern African Americans overwhelmingly favored Baptist and Methodist forms of Christianity, but it is important not to assume that this later preference was common in the earlier context of the colonial era. Black and Indian people affiliated not only with evangelical and revivalist churches but also with the more hierarchical and traditional forms of Christianity. Moreover, they did so for a variety of pragmatic and principled reasons.
Black patterns of religious affiliation in New England churches differed from their participation in Mid-Atlantic churches, and both these northern regions exhibited patterns that were sometimes dissimilar and sometimes similar to black participation in southern and Caribbean churches.16 Across the British Atlantic world, small numbers of enslaved and free black people participated in Church of England parishes and some other churches, but larger percentages of the black population participated in northern Anglican churches compared to the parishes in southern and Caribbean slave societies. As a general rule, planters in Caribbean and southern slave societies more often opposed baptizing enslaved people than the slaveholders in northern colonies, although some northern slave owners prevented their slaves from being baptized. Across the entire Atlantic world, the pursuit of education was a common reason for black and Indian people to engage with churches and missionaries, especially in Anglican and Moravian congregations.17
The church affiliations of Indians, Afro-Indians, and black people speak to the need in American historiography to “triangulate” racial dynamics during the colonial and early national eras.18 By
