href="#uf7286455-bb17-5fdd-b077-4b49032149d0">1 / “Not of Whites Alone, but of Blacks Also”: Black, Indian, and European Protestants, 1730–1749
On the evening of Wednesday, October 29, 1738, church members and other congregants converged on the New London, Connecticut, meetinghouse to attend the midweek lecture service and to witness several baptisms. As many of the town’s inhabitants arrived, they took their assigned seats in the high-walled box pews or benches. Church seating was a contentious issue in New London, as it was in many New England towns. A committee determined where congregants sat and assigned pews based on people’s ability to pay rental fees as well as by factors including wealth, status, age, public service, family connections, gender, and race. There was such a high demand for seating that a second gallery was added above the first one. As with most services, the congregation sang psalms without instrumental accompaniment and listened to a well-prepared sermon by Reverend Eliphalet Adams.1
At each of the previous Wednesday gatherings in October, a child was baptized, but on this night, an adult named Phillis and four children named Ishmael, James, Ziba, and Sylvanus were to be baptized. At the appointed time, Phillis and the children proceeded toward the front of the church, likely descending narrow stairs from the galleries. They walked toward Reverend Adams, who was both the pastor of the First Church of Christ in New London and the person who held legal title to these five enslaved people of African descent. By law and custom, these slaves owed Adams their obedience and lifelong labor. Phillis stood in front of the congregation. She saw wealthier congregants nearest to her, but if she raised her eyes toward the galleries, she might have seen some of the other black people and Mohegan or Pequot Indians who attended this church. Phillis made a profession of faith and “owned the church covenant,” which is to say, she affirmed her understanding of and belief in the doctrines of Christianity and submitted herself to the oversight and discipline of the church members. She was always liable to be punished by her master, but the church members could now censure Phillis or remove her from the church’s fellowship for moral failings. After owning the covenant, Phillis was baptized. Next, Adams baptized Phillis’s children James, Ziba, and Sylvanus, as well as a “servant child Ishmael.” Ishmael was the child of another of Adams’s slaves. Adams promised to educate these four children in Christianity as part of his responsibility as their metaphorical patriarch, a role typically assumed by English masters of bound laborers, when he stated, “for all whose education I also publically engaged.”2
For Eliphalet Adams, the sacrament of baptism was a sacred duty performed regularly for the children of believing parents and adults who owned the covenant or made a profession of faith in Christ. Infants, children, and adults could all receive this sacrament, either on the testimony of a guardian’s faith or by their own profession. He baptized fifty-seven people in 1738. For Phillis, the meaning and significance of her baptism are unclear as historical records provide no access to her words or thoughts. Perhaps Adams used promises or threats to pressure her into being baptized, or perhaps she made a choice herself to do so. Although a minority in the New London church, Phillis and her children were hardly the only nonwhite worshippers. In the 1730s and 1740s, at least sixteen Indians (nine adults and seven children) and fifteen blacks (eight adults and seven children) were baptized at this church. These baptisms were a small but noticeable minority among the roughly 1,080 baptisms performed there during this era, and the black people baptized at this church represented a small percentage of the enslaved population of the New London region.3 The trend of black and Indian baptisms, though, was not limited to one location. People of color from across the region joined predominantly white churches as individuals and in small groups. Collectively, they were making those churches more representative of the diversity in British colonial societies.
In the 1730s and 1740s, long before separate black churches were formed, black Christians regularly attended and joined predominantly white churches. Although separate Indian churches dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century existed in Massachusetts, Indians also participated in predominantly white churches. In these two decades, significant numbers of blacks and Indians were baptized in Congregational churches in New England, Anglican churches from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, and some Lutheran and Moravian churches in Mid-Atlantic colonies. Strikingly, most people in southern New England and a significant minority of people in the rest of the northern colonies experienced formal religion in interracial contexts between 1730 and 1749.
The participation of black and Indian peoples in so many of these churches is significant for several reasons. White Christians by the eighteenth century frequently believed it was their religious duty to teach blacks and Indians the doctrines of Christianity and to invite them into their churches. They thought that churches ought to contain all parts of their hierarchical society, and numerous pastors and congregants made strides in putting this ideal into practice. In some other colonies, Europeans adopted a model of Christian practice that sought to delineate boundaries of “whiteness” from “blackness” by excluding enslaved black people from churches.4 In contrast, northern Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches generally felt that the participation of blacks and Indians in their churches helped justify their existing social order, including whites’ elevated status therein. Since blacks and Indians were active in numerous churches, racial identities and slavery were created and contested in these spaces and upon religious terms. Moreover, it is crucial to examine black and Indian participation in colonial churches because it contextualizes and explains the multifaceted origins of Native American and African American forms of Christianity. In order to understand how and why churches eventually became divided along perceived racial lines, we must first understand the extent to which churches were interracial.
Even though black and Indian Christians produced few written records in this era, the patterns of their affiliation in predominantly white churches tell us much about their religious experiences. Levels of black and Indian affiliation can best be determined through baptismal and membership lists; no sources indicate how many people attended church services regularly week after week. Many churches were interracial religious communities, meaning that blacks and Indians engaged in the same religious activities as whites, including baptism, communion, public worship, singing, catechism classes, and other shared religious events. When white ministers baptized blacks and Indians or admitted them to membership, these ministers and church leaders envisioned that these people would one day be in heaven too. They imagined a spiritual community that transcended their specific time and place.
The interracial practices of churches in northern colonies contrast with the more segregated religious practices in some British slave societies. In other colonies, slave owners were more determined to prevent enslaved black people from participating in churches. In South Carolina, Barbados, and Jamaica, white people were often baptized and married in the private spaces of their homes to distinguish themselves from the small number of free and enslaved black people who were baptized and married in Anglian church buildings. White people in northern colonies did not separate their baptisms from church settings to distinguish their baptisms from those of black or Indian peoples. But, creating interracial churches was not the same as treating blacks and Indians as equals, which was not the goal of white colonists.5
The impressive extent of black and Indian participation in northern Protestant churches meaningfully amends our understanding of the Great Awakening’s effect on the origins of African American and Native American Christianities. The participation of black and Indian people in churches was varied and not inherently connected to the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening was a disruptive period of religious controversy that dramatically changed the religious composition of New England. It was particularly connected to the traveling preaching tours of Reverend George Whitefield. Although religious awakenings occurred in earlier periods, later commentators and historians identify the revivals that occurred in the early 1740s as the Great Awakening because of the intense upsurges of religious activity that occurred in New England and also in locations across the British Atlantic world. Early forms of African American Christianity are often closely associated with evangelical revivalism, including the radical elements of the Great Awakening. However, black men and women did not solely participate in the churches that promoted or embraced awakenings.
