Missionary Movements

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Richard Newman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Missionary Movements

Missionary activity among African-descended people formed one of the most important and still-studied chapters in African American history. Christianity spread gradually and haltingly among Africans in America; indeed, many African Americans held strong to their indigenous religious beliefs under slavery, while others melded Christian practice with African religion. Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century Christianization had occurred among significant numbers of African Americans. Though constantly fraught with issues of cultural hegemony, missionary work was intimately connected to the process of black conversion.

Missionary Movements in the Colonial Era

Interactions between Christian missionaries and Africans occurred well before the establishment of well-known Protestant missionary groups like the Church of England's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, Portuguese and Spanish slave traders utilized Catholic missionaries to interact and trade with West African peoples. The transatlantic slave trade created a class of people known as “Atlantic Creoles”—free Africans who served as go-betweens for European traders. Multilingual and savvy, they were also among the first Africans to be converted to Christianity. The scholar Ira Berlin notes that the royal house of Kongo converted to Catholicism at the start of the sixteenth century. Although Catholic missionaries infiltrated other locales, African converts often blended traditional beliefs and practices—including deities, religious customs, and rituals—with Catholic doctrine, forming what is referred to as a syncretic religion.

One of the earliest issues confronting missionaries was the status of nonbelievers' souls. Could converted Africans be enslaved? As European countries established colonies on North American soil during the seventeenth century, Protestant institutions struggled with the implications of spreading Christian theology to so-called heathens, or non-Christian peoples. Early Dutch settlements in New York City initially denied baptism to Africans, establishing a theological color line that itself rationalized bondage.

By the early 1700s, however, some religious groups began to shift positions, arguing that Africans could and should be converted. Missionary activity among colonial black New Yorkers accelerated at the start of the eighteenth century. Although outreach efforts had begun as early as the 1680s with attempts to baptize enslaved blacks, African religious practices remained vibrant even in northern colonies like New York and New Jersey; slaves' rebelliousness thus convinced some church officials to spread the Christian Gospel among Africans. The Church of England's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, formed in 1701 as the missionary arm of the Anglican Church, dispatched missionaries to Greater New York to convert slaves and convince masters that such itinerant activity would not entail emancipation. Anglican missionaries hoped that Christianity would not only pacify but also improve the condition of slaves.

Elder Lott Cary's biography, title page. Cary (or Carey) was born a slave, purchased his freedom, went through a period of dissipation, reformed, prospered in Virginia, and then became a pioneering missionary to Africa. His biographer noted that Cary “was willing to leave all, and to venture all for Christ, and for the sake of those who were perishing for lack of vision, in a far distant land.”

Pitts Theology Library, Emory University; and Wilson Library, University of North Carolina.

view larger image

English missionaries were not the only ones concerned with spreading the Gospel among the enslaved in colonial America. German Moravians settling in North Carolina in the 1750s, for example, also hoped to convert enslaved people to Christianity. Moravians proved to be one of the more radical missionary groups in the Atlantic world: they believed that conversion led to the spiritual equality of enslaved people. In Moravian settlements in the Caribbean, missionaries utilized creole languages to interact with slaves. In New England some clerical leaders came to believe that God intended believers to spread the word among heathens. In 1706 the Puritan minister Cotton Mather published a pamphlet entitled “The Negro Christianized,” challenging masters to bring Christianity to servants and slaves. New Englanders had encouraged proselytization of slaves since the 1630s. Still, early missionary efforts fell short of mass conversion, and most African Americans in New England remained unconverted through the early 1700s.

The First Great Awakening, the surge in religious revivalism of the 1740s, intensified missionary efforts among African Americans. Dissenting religious groups (particularly New Light Baptists and Congregationalists) eagerly sought converts among black as well as white people. Quaker activists worked on plantations in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. The British itinerant George Whitefield worked among slaves in several colonies and established an orphanage in Georgia. Believing that the proof of salvation lay not in the hands of ministers but in an individual's conversion experience, itinerant preachers roamed the countryside in search of potential Christian believers. Because they utilized familiar, emotional forms of religiosity and actively sought out Africans, itinerants found a significant number of black converts. Black preachers began working revival circuits as well, and post–Great Awakening evangelical churches continued to recruit African Americans. Quakers in particular began reaching out to enslaved people by the mid-eighteenth century.

Why would enslaved Africans and free blacks embrace Christianity? For Africans, conversion was a complex process. Some slaves believed Christianity to be a pathway to autonomy and even freedom. Viewing baptism, catechism classes, and conversion from radically different perspectives than did missionaries, slaves turned Christian doctrine against slaveholding. Richard Allen, the founder of the American Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and a converted slave, famously chastised American slaveholders for violating the Bible, asking whether Christian masters knew not that the Lord had struck down Egyptian slaveholders in ancient times. Converted slaves were also more likely to achieve literacy. Finally, slaves craftily utilized Christian belief to preserve African customs. For example, some New York slaves attended catechism classes that revolved around call-and-response prayers, which were found in Dutch as well as African religious practices. In southern colonies slaves used “Afro-Christian” belief systems to maintain a whole series of “enthusiastic” practices, such as dancing and shouting, associated with African culture.

Revolutionary Era and Early Republic

The American Revolution intensified Protestant missionary work and expanded Christianity's reach among people of African descent. To begin with, the Revolution accelerated millenarianist beliefs, particularly among Baptists and Methodists; the Revolution found evangelicals competing for souls throughout American society. They focused intensely on the conversion of African Americans, who increasingly took up the Gospel. Additionally, a new generation of northern reformers sought to spread Christian messages among newly freed blacks. In the last decades of the eighteenth century Philadelphia Quakers sent representatives into free black communities to inculcate principles of Christian piety and moral rectitude.

During the Revolutionary era missionary work also became associated with antislavery movements, making Christianity more appealing to both slaves and free blacks. Where before 1770 every major religion sanctioned bondage, by the following decade antislavery movements, initially led by Quakers, existed among Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Roman Catholics as well. The Methodist pioneer John Wesley's antislavery views attracted the support of black leaders like Richard Allen. The Methodist minister Francis Asbury preached to, and even with, enslaved people in Maryland, Delaware, and some southern locales. By 1787 blacks constituted 15 percent of Methodist congregations; missionary work increased that figure to 20 percent, or nearly fourteen thousand people, by 1800.

Missionary work in southern states had an impact on slavery, too. Some masters began questioning the legitimacy of slavery in the wake of itinerant activity and slave conversion. In 1783, for example, the Virginia legislature lifted prohibitions on private emancipation to satisfy the appeals of guilty slaveholders. Traveling Methodist preachers convinced hundreds of masters to liberate their slaves in Maryland and Delaware during the same period. Although neither the Baptist Church nor the Methodist Church adopted strictures against slaveholding in the early national period, they did foster important debates over slaveholding, inspiring early abolitionist movements.

Major slave rebellions occurring during the early Republic scared many southern masters and limited missionary opportunities where slave populations were the largest. Indeed, slave rebels such as Gabriel in Virginia and Denmark Vesey in South Carolina derived their millenarian beliefs in part from evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, missionary work continued in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Beginning in 1824, for instance, Methodists sponsored new missions to enslaved people on southern plantations. The Second Great Awakening, which peaked during the 1820s, prompted a new generation of Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries to not only work among enslaved people in the American South but also establish missions to Africa, Haiti, and other foreign locales.

Rise of Autonomous Black Churches

Perhaps the most interesting part of early American missionary work was the activity of African churches. Missionary work first became associated with African American preachers during the eighteenth century, with the First Great Awakening spawning the inaugural generation of black exhorters and itinerants. By the Revolutionary era there existed an impressive group of black itinerants and ministers. These “black messiahs” not only began to preach among their enslaved brethren, gaining Christian converts, but also sought to form independent black churches.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, one “Moses” began ministering to slaves against the will of local authorities. Whipped by colonial officials and disavowed by white Virginia Baptists, Moses's movement survived and even grew; by the 1790s Virginia Baptists had come to recognize the status of what became an “African church” of five hundred members. Another prominent colonial black preacher was George Liele, a Virginia-born slave who probably received religious mentoring from either his Baptist master or his own father. In 1773 Liele was baptized in Georgia; by 1775 he had been ordained as a preacher. Liele then established the First African Church of Savannah and went on to work as a missionary in the Caribbean. Ironically, while white missionaries may have hoped to use Christianity to pacify slaves, evangelical activity may also have served to connect blacks across lines of language and ethnic background; that is, Christianity created a sort of lingua franca for enslaved people. The result was a more profound challenge to slavery.

The rise of independent black churches continued in the early Republic. Steeped in itinerant activity themselves, black churchmen like George Liele, Richard Allen, and John Jea sponsored missions among free blacks and slaves alike. Allen became one of the most visible traveling black preachers, working Methodist circuits in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey before settling in Philadelphia. Even after he founded the AME Church in the early 1790s, Allen loved to hold revivals and missions in Delaware, Maryland, and New York. He also dreamed of sending black missionaries throughout the Atlantic basin, introducing African Methodism to black people in Africa, Haiti, and Canada. A similar sense of mission developed among other early black leaders: the Quaker sea captain Paul Cuffe and the Baltimore Methodist preacher Daniel T. Coker were two of the most prominent spokesmen of black missionary work during the 1810s and 1820s. Each man traveled to West African settlements to preach the Christian Gospel.

As scholars of early American culture and African American religion alike have continually made clear, the expansion of evangelical Christianity between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, through both black and white missionary work, did not eradicate other forms of worship among African Americans. Those of Islamic faith, for example, continued to operate in antebellum American society; likewise, indigenous African traditions remained a prominent part of Gullah communities in South Carolina. Nevertheless, the rise of African Christianity formed a lasting and ramifying part of African American identity. As Albert Raboteau, the dean of African American religious scholars, has put it, black Christians' piety and faith helped challenge Americans to live up to their cherished ideal of creating “a city on the hill”—one open to all people regardless of race. Ironically, then, echoes of missionary work—which had been initiated with the intent to pacify enslaved people—could be found in the appeals of even the most radical black reformers of the early Republic, from slave rebels like Gabriel to pamphleteers like David Walker.

Missionary Movements after 1830

There were two major missionary efforts for and by African Americans in the nineteenth century: the American Colonization Society (ACS), established in 1817, and the American Missionary Association (AMA), created in 1841. The ACS had a checkered career among African Americans. Despite the antipathy that most northern black intellectuals felt toward the American Colonization Movement in the 1830s, some blacks regarded emigration to Liberia as positive. John Russwurm, one of the first black college graduates and editor of Freedom's Journal, the nation's first African American newspaper, shocked free blacks when he resigned his post in New York City to take the post of education minister in Liberia. Disenchantment with the ACS was strongest in the northern states. Reports came back of the poor soil of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, of devastating illnesses, and the corrupt aims of the ACS. Nonetheless a trickle of black migrants arrived. The inhospitable legal and social climate in the southern states toward free blacks after the Nat Turner Rebellion pushed nearly one thousand African Americans to immigrate to Liberia in 1832. Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, David Walker, and David Ruggles decried the ACS as little more than a safety valve to rid the U.S. of free blacks. Their dislike of the ACS went so far as to provoke the rejection of an African identity by blacks, in favor of calling themselves “people of color” or “colored Americans” to remind their white brethren that they, too, were Americans.

Attitudes toward Liberia among African Americans changed after it relinquished its colonial status as the ward of a private philanthropy to establish a constitution; designed a flag based on America's; and elected blacks as president and congress in 1847. The ACS became more an emigration agency than a governing body. Despite the backing of nearly every major white political figure, blacks did not accept the ACS until vents in the United States forced a change. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and the harsh racial climate of the United States made free blacks reconsider their earlier hostility to Liberia. During the 1850s more than 13,000 American free blacks left for Africa. They went to Liberia armed with a conviction that their new country was a public symbol of black nationalism and that they would bring Christianity to an African world bereft of its benefits. While many in the United States still regarded Liberia with suspicion, every year more blacks gave up on America and applied for passage to Africa.

Renewed interest in emigration to Africa plummeted with the start of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and the postwar constitutional amendments that seemed to guarantee black rights and a brighter future. The ACS declined into a shadow of a movement, headed by a single, energetic figure, William Coppinger. He edited the African Repository, the movement's magazine, and aroused interest in his organization from impoverished black farmers in the southern states. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and with the advent of Jim Crow laws and a segregated America in the late 1800s, black Americans cast their eyes to Liberia as a symbol of racial pride. Liberia's black government offered black Americans free land and the chance for a new beginning. Letters sent to Coppinger in the 1880s indicated that black Americans despaired over access to civil rights and equal opportunities, of the chance to break free of poverty and live well in the United States, just as they had before the Civil War. Coppinger failed to seize any advantage, so other blacks created the Liberian Joint Stock Steamship Company to support their own ship lines for emigrants. The vessel made one voyage from Boston before financial failure doomed the effort. African American ministers from across the southern states met in 1875 to petition President Rutherford B. Hayes, but the plan went nowhere and by 1880 African American plans for migration had shifted to Kansas. Even still, in the 1890s black farmers from Arkansas left the country for Liberia.

The American Missionary Movement

The American Missionary Association (AMA) and its predecessors, the Amistad Committee and the Union Missionary Society (UMS), active between 1839 and 1878, were unusual in that they were biracial in membership and leadership. The AMA was widely popular. Twenty thousand people read American Missionary, the organ of the AMA.

White and black leaders founded the AMA; they had much in common. All were political abolitionists, members of the Liberty and the Free Soil parties; all were opposed to colonization and the return of blacks to Africa; and all were church members of liberal communions. Most of the whites were Congregationalists. The blacks were Congregational or Presbyterian ministers. All believed in the equality of the races and insisted on integration in their activities. The AMA stemmed largely from the combined efforts of Lewis Tappan, a New York merchant and transplanted New Englander, and James William Charles Pennington, pastor of the black Talcott Street Congregational Church, in Hartford, Connecticut, who, powerfully influenced by the Amistad trial, issued a call for a missionary convention of black persons to consider the needs of Africa. The convention that followed resulted in the creation of the Union Missionary Society (UMS) in Hartford on 18 August 1841. It was composed chiefly of “people of color” from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania. Pennington was chosen president; the Reverend Amos Gerry Beman of New Haven, corresponding secretary; the Reverend Theodore Sedgwick Wright of New York, treasurer; and the Reverend Josiah Brewer (who was white) of Wethersfield, Connecticut, chairman of the executive committee. Lewis Tappan was elected to an office in absentia but declined because he was still convinced that the means for defeating slavery lay in the institutions of evangelical Protestantism. Slavery could not stand for one hour, they said, if the churches denounced it. The action that finally prompted evangelical abolitionists to found a missionary society of the “whole gospel” took place two weeks before the Liberty Party convention in 1845. After an initial meeting in Albany, part of the so-called burnt-over district and birthplace of so many nineteenthcentury enthusiasms, the AMA was born in 1846.

Of the twelve men who served on the first board of the AMA four were African Americans: Theodore S. Wright, Samuel Ringgold Ward, James Pennington, and Charles Bennett Ray. In later years Samuel E. Cornish, Henry Highland Garnet, Amos N. Freeman, and Sella Martin also served as officers. They were educated activists; many edited newspapers at some period of their lives; and all contributed widely to black and abolitionist publications. Among female AMA missionaries was Mary Ann Shadd Cary. She eventually became one of the first black women lawyers in North America and later worked for the association at the Lincoln School, in Washington, D.C.

The coming of the Civil War found the AMA ready after fifteen years of experience as a missionary society. AMA missionaries and teachers followed Union armies, establishing schools wherever and as soon as the military situation permitted. Despite illness and extraordinary hostility from southern whites, the AMA successfully founded high schools and colleges across the south. During Reconstruction, the AMA played a major role in the founding of innumerable black colleges in the American south. It aided the creation of Howard University, Berea College, Hampton Institute, Atlanta University, and Fisk University. In his classic work, Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois credited the AMA teachers as missionaries who

"came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the places of defilement where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and hearkened in the dawning light."

Due to the need of AMA “universities” to sometimes begin students' educations with the teaching of the alphabet, the schools originally contained everything from the first grade through graduate studies in law, medicine, and theology. The AMA also sponsored the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group that popularized the African American spiritual. The AMA also played a role in the spread of black churches throughout the south.

See also Abolitionism; Antislavery Movement; American Colonization Society; American Missionary Association; Burnt-Over District; Cary, Mary Ann Shadd; Civil War; Colonization; Congregationalism and African Americans; Education; Emigration to Africa; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Liberia; Religion; Russwurm, John; and Spirituals.

processed xml | source xml