Lutheran churches that opposed the new revival techniques, sometimes in substantial numbers.6
Some scholars of religious history have overstated the role of revivalism and the Great Awakening in explaining black and Indian Christian practices in northern colonies. The emotional preaching and lay involvement in religious services of the Great Awakening played a role in black and Indian participation, but scholars have misidentified it as the primary—or even the only—source of their affiliation in Christian churches.7 In some of the New England churches that became centers of revivalism, Indian and black participation increased from hardly any adherents to a noticeable minority of members. Some pastors who promoted revivals, such as Reverends James Davenport and Daniel Rogers, brought groups of Indians or blacks into Congregational churches.8 The Great Awakening encouraged higher numbers of blacks and Indians to enter churches, but such participation was not necessarily tied to the prorevival theology or styles of preaching. Blacks and Indians participated in churches before Whitefield’s famous preaching tour of 1739–1740, and they joined churches whose ministers emphatically opposed Whitefield and other revivalists, so there were multiple origins of African American and Indian forms of Christianity.
I argue that the forms of Christianity practiced by eighteenth-century blacks and Indians were nearly as varied as the forms of Christianity practiced by the European colonists. The Great Awakening increased minorities’ church participation in total, but “revivalism” or “the Great Awakening” are insufficient explanations for black and Indian peoples’ affiliation in a wide variety of churches. They participated in Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian congregations. Moreover, the churches they joined ranged from passionately “New Light” (revivalist, “Whitefieldarian,” or evangelical) congregations that sought to stir up revivals to staunchly traditionalist (“Old Light”) ones opposed to religious excesses that disrupted communal unity. The evidence to support this argument is divided by northern regions because the New England colonies and Mid-Atlantic colonies contained different religious landscapes. After a section that addresses motivations for religious affiliation, this chapter progresses to a section about Congregational and Anglican churches in New England and ends by examining Anglicans, Lutherans, and Moravians in Mid-Atlantic colonies.
Already by 1730, blacks, Indians, and Europeans in the northern colonies had been coexisting, although rarely peaceably, for more than a century. People from these groups interacted in homes, fields, marketplaces, and churches, but the threat of violence or actual violence undergirded their interactions. During the century that followed the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the number of Europeans and blacks grew considerably while war, enslavement, poverty, and diseases diminished Indian populations. Even before English and Dutch migrants created permanent settlements in what became Massachusetts and New York, the Indians who lived in the northern woodlands and coastal regions traded with Europeans and felt the devastating effects of European diseases. Epidemic diseases continued to decimate Indian communities. Initially, Europeans were dependent on Indians for trade and even food, but as European settlements grew in strength and size, colonists increasingly sought to claim more Indian land for themselves. Some attempts were made to convert Indians to Christianity, especially between the 1640s and 1675. Puritan minister John Eliot established “Praying Towns” for Christian Indians in Massachusetts, and Thomas Mayhew Jr. and Richard Bourne established churches among the Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. Dozens of Indians received religious training from English colonists and became missionaries and pastors to their own people. But, conflict rather than charity more often characterized English and Indian relations. Colonists waged wars against Indians, and colonists convinced some tribal nations to fight against one another by capitalizing on their long-standing differences. The Pequot War of 1636–37 and King Philip’s War in 1675–76 ended with devastation for Pequot, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Podunk, and Nipmuck peoples. In addition to deaths in battle, New England colonists enslaved more than 1,300 Indians in the seventeenth century.9
Despite the substantial human losses from war and disease, several eighteenth-century Indian communities not only persisted but also retained control over territory and local resources. Wampanoag communities lived near Plymouth and on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket in Massachusetts; Narragansetts had a reserve of land in Charlestown, Rhode Island, and Mohegans and Pequots held reserves in southeastern Connecticut. Montauketts and Shinnecocks maintained their homes on Long Island. More than a dozen different tribes, including Delawares and Shawnees, lived in polyglot communities on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Smaller Indian enclaves existed near Farmington, Kent, Bridgetown, and Lyme in Connecticut, near Worcester in central Massachusetts, and at Crossweeksung and Cranberry, New Jersey. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation remained, six nations strong, in the northern and western parts of New York. The geographic distribution of Indians meant that they were most likely to affiliate with the predominantly white congregations located relatively close to these land reserves.10
Colonists forcibly brought African slaves to northern colonies within the first decades of European settlement. The abundance of land and scarcity of labor, even without staple crop economies, made slaves and indentured servants economically valuable. A ship named Desire brought the first enslaved Africans in Boston in 1638. Colonists sold Indian prisoners of war to the West Indies in exchange for enslaved Africans. The Dutch West India Company was especially active in bringing slaves to their New Netherland colony and to New Amsterdam (soon to be renamed New York City), where black slaves accounted for around 20 percent of the city in 1664. Enslaved blacks engaged in all types of work, from farming and fishing to skilled crafts and manual labor, and most blacks lived and worked in close proximity to whites.11
Enslaved blacks were numerous and economically important in the northern colonies, and the types of coercion, violence, and resistance common in American slavery were present in northern colonies. The northern population of enslaved black people exceeded 14,000 by 1720 and grew to more than 30,000 by 1750; more than one-third of these black people were in New York. Black people were mostly clustered near port cities and towns, though they could be found practically anywhere in the colonies. These societies were stratified, with Indian and black servants and slaves occupying the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Slavery was not easy or benign in northern colonies, but enslaved people in northern colonies were often allowed to learn how to read, could generally own personal property, and might access courts of law. Northerners used an array of strategies to try to control servants and slaves, including renaming them, brutal violence, and justifying their actions with religion. Christian masters hoped they could control or effectively direct the spiritual development of their slaves. Enslaved men and women, however, did not passively submit to masters and were sometimes successful in frustrating attempts to control them and in negotiating some conditions within the institution of slavery. Most black people in these colonies were enslaved, but there were also small numbers of free blacks. The northern British mainland colonies were already ethnically and religiously diverse by 1730, and they continued to become more so over the eighteenth century.12 This diversity was reflected in many of the northern churches during the early and mid-eighteenth century.
Some black and Indian people participated in northern churches during the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century, so this chapter’s focus on the period of 1730 to 1749 should not be taken to imply that churches only began baptizing black or Indian peoples in the 1730s. Dozens of black people were baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church of New Netherland between 1639 and 1655, and a free black man named Emmanuel was baptized and admitted to membership in the Lutheran congregation in Albany, New York, in 1669. After Elias Neau began catechizing enslaved New Yorkers in 1704, the city’s Anglican churches routinely baptized black adults and children. Reverend Cotton Mather advocated for the instruction and Christianization of enslaved blacks in Boston by 1706. A thirty-year-old enslaved man named George and an unfree “Indian Boy” were baptized at Boston’s Brattle Street Congregational Church in January 1709, and a dozen other black people, including three free black people, were baptized there before 1730. Four black people were baptized in 1707 at the First Congregational Church of Dorchester, Massachusetts.13 This study begins with 1730 because it is instructive to look at baptismal rates in the years immediately preceding
