Maria C. Moore, a wealthy woman of color from Charleston, South Carolina, heard a voice one winter’s night in 1848 while she was trying to sleep. Published accounts are not clear about whether she thought the voice was from God or from her deceased husband, but the effect was the same. Moore’s husband, Richard Moore, had been a faithful member of the city’s Second Presbyterian Church along with his wife, and he had made her promise before his death that she would continue to support foreign missions. “Are you going to forget the cause?” the voice asked. In good conscience, Moore could have insisted—before God and her deceased husband—that she had not forgotten the cause, for she routinely contributed the substantial sum of $30 per year to foreign missions. Convicted by the otherworldly intervention that she must not be doing enough for lost souls the world over, however, Moore immediately sent for her minister, the renowned Thomas Smyth. She then endowed with donations of real estate and bank stock two substantial funds for foreign missions, the “Moore Fund,” and a separate, smaller fund designated specifically for Africa.1
Maria Moore had more resources than most black Southerners and enjoyed a privileged status as a member of Charleston’s colored elite, but she was far from unique in her willingness to sacrifice to extend her church’s global reach—or in the racial consciousness that she revealed by designating a portion of her gift specifically for Africa. In March 1853, the Presbyterian Church’s Foreign Missions Board recorded several other gifts from “colored members” marked for Africa in addition to a contribution of $114.44 from “The Moore Fund for African Mission.” In Washington, North Carolina, for example, black Presbyterians scraped together $15.58 for the “African Mission,” and the Mobile, Alabama, “Colored Missionary Society for Liberia” added $10—each significant donations from communities with characteristically lower incomes than their white counterparts.2
The proportion of enslaved donors in each of these instances is impossible to determine, but there is every indication that bondpeople gave from their small, personal accounts for special and regular offerings just as elite women like Moore did.3 Robert Ryland, pastor of the enormous First African Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, estimated that “a congregation of a thousand, worshipping twice on the Lord’s Day, will raise a thousand dollars a year without any conscious sacrifice,” a standard which his own flock, composed primarily of enslaved persons, met during the 1850s.4 Black Southerners cooperated with their white coreligionists in supporting both local and international missions.
Historians in recent years have rediscovered modern elements within Southern evangelicalism, particularly in the extent and nature of white Southerners’ participation in benevolent work—of which a more rationalized, internationally focused mission movement was the cornerstone. Until the 1990s, scholars had contrasted traditional Southern Protestantism with progressive Northern Protestantism. This earlier scholarship concluded that white Southerners refused, because of their commitment to slavery, to participate in social-reform movements, at least after the 1840s, and that what reform there was aimed to improve individuals rather than society at large.5 Recently, however, John W. Quist and Beth Barton Schweiger have shown that white Southern evangelicals participated in efforts to transform society as well. They have described religious Southerners, at least those in the region’s towns and cities, as both more modern and more like their Northern counterparts.6
Even though scholars are learning to appreciate the vibrancy of Southern reform and missionary initiatives, they have thus far concentrated largely on the benevolent work of Southern whites. But black men and women were also sponsors of and participants in reform activity, and interracial interaction characterized Southern evangelical reform as it did other facets of Southern religion, as some recent works have shown.7 Greater attention to African Americans’ cooperation with whites in three key ministries—colonization, the “Mission to the Slaves,” and international (African) missions—both adds weight to the emerging redefinition of antebellum Southern Protestantism as modern and reveals new lines of influence that blacks exerted on the development of Southern evangelicalism. Furthermore, it provides another view of the difficult trade-offs that black Southerners were forced to make within biracial churches as they balanced sometimes-competing desires for racial uplift, personal fulfillment, and the redemption of corrupt social systems.
Nineteenth-century evangelicals in Great Britain and the United States helped to define the concept of modernity when they launched a range of missionary and reform activities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In recent years, anthropologists, scholars of religious studies, and historians have explored how missionaries refined in their encounter with “others” at home and abroad a new understanding of civilization and religion’s place in it. Indeed, they have shown that even the twenty-first-century concept of secularism is an artifact from Protestant missions of the nineteenth century.8 There were emancipatory impulses within the “moral narrative of modernity” which these missionaries told and which scholars have elaborated. As anthropologist Webb Keane put it, modernity was “not only a matter of improvements in technology, economic well-being, or health but [was] also, and perhaps above all, about human emancipation and self-mastery.”9 But a commitment to immediate antislavery was not an essential characteristic of the missionaries’ modernity, and some evangelicals used the sliding scale of civilization that avatars of modernity elaborated to justify the indefinite subordination of “backward” peoples.
Maria Moore and other black Southerners who cooperated with whites on religious initiatives confound placement on any continuum of resistance to accommodation. As Erskine Clarke has pointed out, highly churched individuals like Moore were simultaneously “among the most eager to be acculturated” and among the leaders “in the long struggle against the forces of oppression.”10 In a similar vein, scholars of antebellum black nationalism have noted the extent to which (mainly elite Northern) black leaders shared Anglo-Americans’ sense of cultural superiority in their attitudes to “uplift” or to the proselytization of enslaved Americans and African natives, even as they proposed schemes to alleviate or eliminate racial oppression.11 Attention to Southern blacks’ mission work, especially to the contributions of enslaved men and women, is important because it shows very real points of shared interest between Southern blacks and whites, interests no less powerful because they were spiritual rather than material in nature. Both Southern black and Southern white evangelicals wanted to rescue others from sin and to bring them within the fold of the church. Both also believed that African Americans would be the key agents in the conversion and redemption of Africa.12 Despite sharing beliefs and interests with whites, though, black evangelicals did differentiate their participation in benevolent enterprises from that of their white coreligionists. They tended, like Moore, to direct their offerings to their own congregations or to work in Africa.
White evangelicals, of course, also advanced a distinctive racial agenda through benevolent work, both in their sponsorship of programs that they thought proved slavery’s righteousness and in the self-serving ways in which they interpreted the contributions of their black coreligionists. White Southern Methodists in 1848 demonstrated the proslavery function of the Mission to the Slaves, for example, when they cited black converts as a sufficient defense against the slings and arrows of Northern abolitionists. “If our unprovoked accusers think that we could do a better part than this, for our slave population, consistently with our obligations as citizens and christians,” they challenged, “we shall be most happy to hear from them on the subject.”13
In 1859, white Presbyterians betrayed in their opportunistic commemoration of Maria Moore’s gift the rhetorical value that they placed on black participation in benevolent work. Like other white evangelicals, they considered black cooperation in ministry even more persuasive than black conversion as evidence that black Americans were thriving spiritually in the slave South. For white Presbyterians, Moore’s generous gift was too-outstanding an example of black cooperation with whites to allow the world to forget it, and they continued to commemorate it in denominational papers over a decade after she had responded to the voice in the night. In the context of an intensifying sectional crisis, Moore had become a statistic—a data point that Southern whites referenced in order to discredit Northern abolitionist accusations that blacks suffered unjust treatment in Southern churches.
In an attempt to bolster their claims of spiritual equanimity towards black Southerners, the contributors of the 1859 story about Moore added another vignette from Charleston’s Second Presbyterian Church that unintentionally highlighted the limits of antebellum interracialism. Second Presbyterian Church had gained prominence in the Mission to the Slaves by sponsoring a flourishing semi-independent Presbyterian congregation for black Charlestonians.14 The church’s representatives boasted in print that out of twenty-four ministers coming out of the church since 1832, “two of these were colored persons.” The white writers doubtlessly intended the nurture of two black ministers to be further evidence of black flourishing within Southern evangelicalism, but their boast actually underscored the paucity of outlets for black spiritual leadership under slavery. One of the two black ministers was “settled in Philadelphia and the other [was] abroad.” In other words, the same men whom Charleston whites wanted to group with Maria Moore as proof that slavery enhanced the progress of the Gospel among black Americans ultimately needed to leave the South and slavery in order to fulfill their callings!15 Black participation in three benevolent enterprises—colonization, the Mission to the Slaves, and international missions—thus occupied a complex, sometimes contradictory position at the nexus of interracialism, modernity, and evangelicalism.
Colonization
Black Southern evangelicals’ participation in international and domestic missions peaked in the late antebellum period, but blacks and whites in the upper South collaborated on an important international project as early as the 1810s: African colonization. From the first evangelical stirrings in the eighteenth century, both black and white evangelicals had plied the Atlantic with their message. After the War of 1812, residents of the United States began to shift the religious currents of the Atlantic eastward.16 Colonization was part of this outward thrust, as well as an attempt to address the place of black Americans in the republic. Despite the withering criticism that Northern blacks, abolitionists, and many Southern blacks ultimately launched against colonization, a significant cohort of upper South African Americans supported the program for several years after the formation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in December 1816.
Richmond blacks, led by former slave Lott Cary, actually preempted the ACS by forming in 1815 the “African Baptist Missionary Society.” Urban, black Baptists in Virginia (Petersburg African Americans also formed a group) had slightly different goals at the outset than did white members of the ACS, because they emphasized sponsoring missionaries rather than sending colonists—and because, as Cary’s correspondence suggests, black Southerners were also much more united in their hope that establishing a settlement in Liberia would provide a route to ending slavery.17 For expediency’s sake, the black-sponsored African Baptist Missionary Society and the white-sponsored ACS merged their agendas in the 1820s, and ministers and families who went out from the commonwealth with the support of both organizations became the most prominent leaders in Liberia.18 The tension between African Americans’ goal of supporting black clerical leaders in Africa and whites’ goal of expatriating free black men and women remained, however, accounting for blacks’ preference in the late antebellum period for funding African missions over colonization.
Lott Cary embodied the modernizing role of American missionaries. Upon his arrival in Liberia, he became a self-taught physician, a military leader, a successful merchant, and a school teacher, in addition to serving as a missionary and a Baptist minister. Cary, his fellow settlers, and his white partners in the ACS promoted material, political, and spiritual progress so enthusiastically that scholars have argued over which motivation was primary.19 This debate obscures the extent to which reform-minded evangelicals in the nineteenth century expected that progress on all three fronts would occur simultaneously and creates an artificial contrast between Cary’s secular and religious goals. For Cary, there was no tension between his effort to prosper financially, his urgent insistence that African Americans needed to learn to “conduct the affairs of [their] own in government,” or his desire to “preach to the poor Africans the way of life and salvation.”20
Cary’s willingness to accept “the kind & Benevolent aid, of the good Colonization Society” set him apart from many other black Americans who either opposed emigration entirely or simply opposed cooperation with the ACS.21 Richard Allen, James Forten, David Walker, and other prominent black Northerners rejected colonization on the grounds that white colonizationists wanted to exclude black Americans from the United States and to perpetuate slavery. Walker pleaded with black colonizationists “that the plot is not for the glory of God, but on the contrary the perpetuation of slavery in this country, which will ruin them and the country forever, unless something is immediately done.”22 In terms of his practical program of redeeming enslaved African Americans by redeeming Africa, Cary may have had much in common with black Northern colonizationists like Alexander Crummell, but he and other Southern-born migrants were looking out from slavery and working with slave owners, something which made their orientation towards colonization distinctive.
Whites across the United States praised Cary’s success and that of others like him, preferring the example of black colonizationists to the more militant voices rising at home. Soon after Cary’s arrival in Liberia, those in the most rarified circles of white Baptist influence began to idealize him as a model African American. At the meeting of the Board of the General Convention in 1825, for example, Baptist leaders passed resolutions praising Cary for his “labors and pious deportment” and rejoiced that “his virtuous deportment has secured to him the high approbation of the American Colonization Society.” Whites snatched up Cary’s letters home and republished them in periodicals or, after his death in 1828, in hagiographical biographies.23
Especially in Virginia, source of over one-third of the migrants to Liberia, white evangelicals remained riveted by the achievements of black men abroad after Cary’s death.24 White evangelicals in the United States continued to lionize individuals such as Joseph Jenkins Roberts, first president of the independent nation from 1848, but they were also attentive to the rank and file. In the fall of 1830, editors of the Religious Herald, the most important Baptist paper in the state and arguably in the region, ran at least fourteen different articles on the colonization cause and featured both domestic boosters and African settlers in their pages. Although by 1830 pro-colonization editors focused more attention on white missionaries to Liberia such as Benjamin Rush Skinner, they continued to praise the strivings of African-American settlers. A “friend of missions” reminded readers in early October, “first, that among these, are men of intelligence, property, character and integrity—and that these give character to the state of society there; secondly, that when these men are translated from the United States to Liberia, they must of necessity feel themselves to be other men. No longer are they crushed and parylyzed [sic] under a sense of the inferiority inseparable from a condition, in which, with the FORM of men, they are of necessity without their rights.”25 In other words, immigrants to Liberia like Lott Cary won some supporters by striving so energetically to succeed in terms recognizable to white Americans—by seeking both prosperity and converts.26
White evangelicals honored the achievements of black settlers such as Cary in part because they interpreted colonists’ achievements as proof of the civilizing and Christianizing effects of slavery. The Maryland Colonization Society was explicit in 1841 about its construction of a narrative of colonization that simultaneously affirmed slavery, honored evangelical blacks, and heralded the progressive (i.e., modernizing) nature of their enterprise. Its officers pledged to keep the story of Liberia’s founding generations in the public eye, asking,
What can be of more intense and thrilling interest in after times, than a detail of the progressive steps by which a degraded and suffering race of bondsmen and slaves from one of these United States, were transported across the Atlantic to the land from which their forefathers sprang, and were established as a nation on a marked and prominent point of that beautiful land, bearing with them the arts, the manners, the government, the religion of the most free and independent nation under heaven, to their friends and kindred on whom has ever rested the pall of ignorance and heathenism?27
Emigrants to Liberia thus affirmed white evangelicals’ belief in the divine purpose of slavery by trying to civilize and Christianize Africa. Black Americans were not blind to this dynamic, which—along with the high mortality rate—might be one reason that more of them did not leave for Liberia (only about 11,000 sailed between 1820 and 1860).28
But thousands of black men and women did emigrate and did cooperate with officials from the ACS or one of the state colonization societies. Even though these men and women did not believe that their success proved slavery’s justice, they celebrated Christian social progress in Africa in terms very similar to those of white colonizationists. When Liberians claimed their independence in 1847, a step that the ACS encouraged because it reduced the society’s financial responsibility for the colony, they declared to the world their achievement of progress along the multiple fronts pursued by Lott Cary. “Our numerous and well-attended schools attest our efforts and our desire for the improvement of our children,” they proclaimed; and perhaps more importantly, “The native African bowing down with us before the altar of the living God, declares that from us, feeble as we are, the light of Christianity has gone forth.”29 Americo-Liberians tended to emphasize the progress that they were bringing to Africa and Africans, while white colonizationists stressed instead the progress that they had brought to enslaved Africans in America.
Mission to the Slaves
White evangelicals in the South made the conversion of enslaved men and women—the “Mission to the Slaves”—one of the most important benevolent initiatives of the late antebellum period. For most whites, this was an explicitly proslavery enterprise, since every convert proved to them the wisdom of evangelism rather than emancipation. As one editor explained after the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church into Northern and Southern branches in 1844, work among enslaved persons was proof of white Southerners’ spiritual integrity: “Query. Which party most strictly conforms to the doctrines and practice of Christ and the Apostles? Those who seek to save the souls of the slave population of the country, or those who strive merely for their freedom?”30 While some white Southern evangelicals may have preferred the mission because of its emphasis on individual conversion rather than social reformation, several historians have argued that white evangelicals in the antebellum period conceived of the mission as part of a broader effort to preserve and reform slavery as a social system.31 In this way, the proslavery mission was not so much the inverse of Northern reform—that is, a way to stifle change altogether—but its Southern analog, a program for social improvement on terms favorable to slavery.
White Southern evangelicals organized the mission according to the modern practices characteristic of other reforms, though the precise shape of the effort to convert enslaved people varied from denomination to denomination. They founded new societies and/or institutions to recruit and pay missionaries, published catechisms and manuals, held regional conventions, and erected new meetinghouses for enslaved worshippers. Baptists, as befits their historic hostility to centralization, formed regional committees to support the conversion of black Southerners but relied upon individual congregations to execute most of the work. Methodists, on the other hand, formed a central committee to direct missionary work in the neediest districts. W. P. Harrison, an early Methodist historian and apologist for the mission, documented the steady growth of this program throughout the late antebellum period. By 1861, there were 329 separate missions supported by $86,359.20 in annual appropriations.32
Black evangelicals faced a dilemma: how could they support the white-run congregations that were an important part of their lives without also supporting the proslavery Mission to the Slaves? In most denominational variations of the mission, white evangelicals subsidized new black congregations until the freshly gathered believers were capable of supporting their churches themselves. Thus, as some blacks recognized, any contribution to the maintenance of an all-black or biracial church was also a de facto contribution to the Mission to the Slaves—because it freed funds for white denominational leaders to subsidize new black congregations.33
Black Baptists could at least be confident that any funds that they raised in church would remain within their congregation, since Baptists tended to work through individual congregations to recruit new enslaved members. Evidence from the region’s largest African-American church, Richmond’s First African Baptist, suggests that most (but not all) worshippers were thus able to overcome their scruples about contributing indirectly to the proslavery mission. In the late 1850s members of the church added to the roughly $1,000 that they collected through offerings another $2,000 from fundraising concerts and rental fees.34 One of First African Baptist’s most famous congregants, Henry “Box” Brown, recognized that white Baptists held the balance of power even in his semi-independent church and therefore questioned the wisdom of giving his allegiance or offering to First African Baptist. There were, in fact, several organic connections between Richmond’s black Baptists and the city’s white Baptists, who—in an arrangement replicated in urban areas across the South—supervised the First African Church’s every worship service, appointed its pastor, and held its sanctuary in trust. This was enough for Brown, who refused in 1848 to sing in any more concerts lest he raise another cent to support pro-slavery Christianity. In the midst of performing in a Christmas-day fundraiser, Brown and a friend “felt reproved by Almighty God for lending his aid to the cause of slave-holding religion; and it was under this impression he closed his book and formed the resolution which he still acts upon, of never singing again or taking part in the services of a pro-slavery church.”35
Enslaved and free black Baptists left enough testimony about their discomfort with biracial worship to show that Brown was not alone. William Troy, who became a prominent Baptist minister, remained for years in a congregation in Essex County, Virginia, despite his conviction that Southern churches basely reinforced racial hierarchy. “It was true that I was a member of the church in name,” he reminisced from the safety of Canada, “but in reality I was no more so than a horse or a mule.”36 It is not clear, however, how many African Americans had no objections to biracial evangelicalism, how many attended biracial churches despite serious reservations, and how many refused to attend ante-bellum churches altogether because of white churchgoers’ complicity in supporting the slave regime. Depending upon the method of calculation, the total percentage of black Southerners who attended church on the eve of the Civil War was somewhere between 41 and 54 percent—so many African Americans appear to have overcome whatever scruples they may have had about fellowship with proslavery whites.37 On the other hand, several hundred thousand African Americans did not join a church until after emancipation and ecclesiastical separation, suggesting that there may have been a significant cohort who refused to join an antebellum church for precisely the reasons cited by Brown and Troy.38
Black Methodists, unlike black Baptists, did not have the luxury of imagining that all of their offerings stayed within their particular congregations. Southern Methodists funded several missionary enterprises, including “Missions among the People of Color” (the Mission to the Slaves) out of a common fund managed by the denominational “Missionary Society.” When black Methodists who worshipped at one of the special “mission churches” put money in the offering plate or basket, their funds either went directly to the society or reduced the amount of support that their congregation could expect to receive from it. Many African Americans therefore helped to fund emissaries for the proslavery Mission to the Slaves simply by contributing to their local churches.
Southern Methodists preserved extensive records of white and black contributions to the Missionary Society, which make it possible to explore in more detail how black Methodists negotiated this balancing act between support for their congregations and support for a proslavery mission program. The Methodist records are not perfect, marred most notably by different accounting conventions in different conferences. Nonetheless, the fact that black Methodists, the vast majority of whom were enslaved, raised funds to support both their local churches and larger denominational enterprises is indisputable. African-American support of individual congregations was so pronounced that Harrison felt compelled to offer an explanation; in those “cases, where the slaves themselves paid their pastors,” he reported, “they were given the opportunity by their owners to earn the money for themselves.”39 Though the extra-congregational receipts indicate a marked lack of enthusiasm among black Methodists for direct contributions to the Mission to the Slaves, some individuals and organizations actively designated their contributions to the general missionary fund.
Black Methodists as a group did not stint on their local congregations (or “missions”) out of concern that the funds might find their way into the Missionary Society’s coffers. In Georgia, officials described several flourishing black congregations in 1848, a few of which had become fully self-supporting. In Savannah, for instance, Andrew Chapel began “paying its own expenses” entirely and was therefore reclassified as a “station” and taken off the Missionary Society’s dole. In Athens, a stunningly well-funded body of black Methodists numbering 176 members (and, presumably, several hundred additional adherents) raised $800 to pay for a new chapel, paid their minister his full salary of $246.25, and gave $8.08 to the Missionary Society to use at its discretion. It is tempting to read the Athens group’s meager contribution to the state’s Missionary Society in contrast to their substantial expenditures at home as a gauge of black Methodists’ disapproval of the work of the society, but there are enough counter-examples to prevent such a straightforward interpretation.
Black Methodists routinely paid more than the maintenance costs of their own missions. In Tennessee, for example, officials recorded substantial contributions to the state Missionary Society from nine “coloured” congregations and one “colored meeting,” totaling $887.10. In all, African Americans in the Volunteer State provided roughly one-sixth of the conference’s total funds for missions in 1846. In Louisiana, L. Campbell reported of five predominantly black congregations that “all these missions support themselves” and that they contributed additional money to the general account.40 In the South Carolina conference (which included portions of North Carolina), Charleston’s wealthy free people of color contributed $60 through the “Free col’d Missionary Society of Charleston,” an amount comparable to contributions from congregations in Fayetteville, Wilmington, and Columbia but dwarfed by $180.50 from the Bethel Church.41
It is not difficult to see why whites supported the Mission to the Slaves. In doing so, they defended themselves against charges of inconsistency by white Northerners, found an outlet for their earnest desire to spread the Gospel, and gained some control over African-American religious expression. Southern Methodist bishops placed the evangelization of enslaved people at the center of their church’s mission in their episcopal address at the 1858 General Conference: “The missions to the slaves of the Southern plantations constitute the most interesting and important field for the missionary operations of the Church, South,” they preached; “We regard these missions as the crowning glory of our church.”42 Southern white divines of every denomination extrapolated from the success of the mission to conclude that the peculiar institution itself was ordained of God. In the most widely circulated defense of slavery, for example, Baptist Thornton Stringfellow argued that slavery was “full of mercy,” because of the way in which it “has brought within the range of gospel influence, millions of Ham’s descendants among ourselves, who but for this institution, would have sunk down to eternal ruin; knowing not God, and strangers to the gospel.”43
Black Southerners may have declined to support the mission as directly as did whites, but—by the most conservative estimates—they annually contributed tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars to support individual churches. Despite the eloquent testimony of dissenters such as Brown and Troy, most African Americans evidently found enough that was rewarding in their local congregations to support them, notwithstanding any ideological benefit that white evangelicals derived from their campaign to Christianize black Southerners. Perhaps, like African-American Methodist David Smith, black contributors recognized the racial inequality present in their churches but found that biracial worship was nonetheless the most egalitarian experience possible in the antebellum South. Smith complained about unjust treatment of black Methodists and was ultimately so put off by white racism that he helped form the Baltimore wing of the AME Church, but he also recalled moments of extraordinary interracial fellowship. On one memorable day, he “saw the slaves and their owners singing, shouting and praising God together. All seemed to be one in Christ Jesus; there was no distinction as to the rich or poor, bond or free, but all were melted into sweet communion with the spirit and united in Christian fellowship.”44
Scholars have generally overlooked the modern elements of slave missions and concentrated instead on white evangelicals’ role in defending traditional Southern mores.45 In fact, white evangelicals not only sought to transform Southern society, but they also did so using the latest techniques, upon which they continuously improved by attending conventions and exchanging advice literature. Moreover, whites were not the only supporters of slave missions; black evangelicals directly or indirectly contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the cause. Even the most fundamental practice that set Southern evangelicals apart from their Northern counterparts was thus more modern and biracial than historians have acknowledged.
International (African) Missions
Black evangelicals demonstrated a greater willingness to sponsor missionaries to Africa than missionaries to enslaved men and women within the United States. There was, to be sure, a close relationship between African colonization and African missions, and some of the most prominent colonists were also missionaries. But there were important institutional and ideological distinctions between colonization and missions as they developed in the final decades of the antebellum period. Most importantly, denominations or denominational missionary societies paid missionaries but not colonists. As a result, missionaries—many of whom did support colonization—were nonetheless insulated against some of the criticism that abolitionists leveled against the American Colonization Society. In addition, sponsoring organizations proved willing to appoint black men as missionaries, in part because whites believed that blacks were better able to endure the African climate. Southern Presbyterians and Southern Baptists hired Southern-born African-American missionaries; Daniel Coker of Maryland went on behalf of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and Methodists and Episcopalians sent Northern blacks.46
White evangelicals cast African missions in the same self-congratulatory light as colonization. They believed that their work represented the culmination of a divine plan that featured chattel slavery as an incubator of Christianity and civilization. Thomas Jefferson Bowen, one of the longest-serving white missionaries for the Southern Baptist Convention, rhapsodized in his influential 1857 account of African missions that an impartial observer would be able to
See millions of civilized negroes in America, better clothed and fed, and more virtuous and happy than the analogous classes of white people in some other countries. He can see tens and hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christians, regenerated men and women, among these blacks, redeemed from the curse of sin in consequence of African slavery. And finally, he can see African colonization and African missions arising from this slavery, and flowing back as a river of light and life upon the African continent.47
Black missionaries in the late antebellum period tried to follow Lott Cary’s earlier example by bringing both the Gospel and progress to Africa. They shared a commitment to enlighten and improve the religious and civil life in what they regarded as a dark and backwards place. For example, John H. Cheeseman, a black missionary on the Southern Baptist Convention’s rolls in Edina, Liberia, believed that education and acculturation were the best ways to open native Africans to the message of the Gospel. Once young Africans learned to live “after American ‘fash,’ as they term it,” then Cheeseman believed that they were “more susceptible of impressions of a religious character.”48 The black Baptist missionaries who served in Liberia embodied in their own lives the tight connection that they perceived between conversion and civilization. John Day, born free in Virginia and the most important black missionary in Liberia from 1830 through 1859, was at various times chief justice in the Liberian courts and lieutenant governor. Other black Baptist missionaries filled the offices of president and attorney general, among other high-ranking posts.49 For both whites and blacks, the spread of the Gospel was integral to the progress of American civilization, and African missions allowed for black men to be in the vanguard of the movement. John Saillant has convincingly shown that black missionaries conceived themselves to be “instruments of liberal progress,” a characterization that meshed smoothly with triumphalist white narratives of African missions.50
Black Southerners supported missions more than colonization in the late antebellum period, probably because their funds went directly to the support of black leaders. From November 1850 through April 1851, the ACS recorded total donations of $13,557.61 (excluding subscriptions to the African Repository and annual pledges). Of this amount, only $40 came from black Southerners. Even more telling of black rejection of the ACS were the conditions that members of the Colored Missionary Society of Mobile, the sole African-American donors to the society, attached to their gift. They stipulated that it “be appropriated in equal proportions to the Methodist, the Baptist, the Presbyterian, and the Episcopal Missions in Liberia.”51 For colonization itself, black Southerners did not contribute a penny.
At the same time, African-American evangelicals in the South did give, however modestly, to support missionary work in Africa. Black Baptists who gave to foreign missions typically designated their gifts to the Baptist missionaries, mostly of African descent, who worked in Africa. “Colored members” of twenty Virginia Baptist churches contributed a combined $123.46 to their state’s foreign missions board for “African missions” in 1850, in increments no larger than $33 per congregation.52 For November 1849 through April 1850, black Presbyterians indicated just as decisive a preference for African missions. There are fewer black Presbyterian contributors in the records, only eleven for the same period, but nine of these were for African missions—mostly for the support of H. W. Ellis. Ellis, though the board soon removed him from his post for “charges involving his Christian character,” was an inspiration for many black Southerners. The synods of Alabama and Mississippi had purchased him and his family members out of slavery before sending him off as a missionary, directly connecting racial uplift at home and abroad.53
Maria Moore may have been unusual for the size of her bequest in late 1848, but she was one of many black evangelicals who desired to contribute to her church’s ministries despite her white coreligionists’ proslavery convictions. In the late antebellum period, black and white evangelicals may not have always worked side by side, but they at least labored in tandem in very modern efforts to spread the blessings of American civilization and evangelicalism to destitute places at home and abroad. Unlike in the North, where free blacks routinely cooperated with whites who opposed slavery, enslaved and free blacks in the South had little choice other than to work with whites who believed their bondage was divinely appointed. Many black evangelicals were aware that their cooperation with whites made them in some way complicit with white, proslavery Christianity, but they participated selectively enough in benevolence (eschewing slave missions and empowering African-American ministers when possible), to satisfy many of them that the compromise was worth it. In the process, they provided another uncomfortable example of the compatibility of slavery and modernity.
NOTES
1. Second Presbyterian Church Records (Charleston, S.C.), Session Minute Book 1837–1852, January 1849, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston; “Second Presbyn Church, Charleston,” Central Presbyterian, June 25, 1859. On Moore’s household, see Larry Kroger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985), 24–25, 50; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifth Census of the United States, South Carolina (M19–170), 132.
2. The Home and Foreign Record of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: [Presbyterian] Publication House, 1853), 153.
3. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 45–78.
4. H. A. Tupper, ed., The First Century of the First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, 1780–1880 (Richmond: Carlton McCarthy, 1880), 272. First African Baptist Church, Minutes 1841–1859, April 17, 1859, February 7, 1858, Library of Virginia, Richmond.
5. John W. Kuykendall, Southern Enterprize: The Work of National Evangelical Societies in the Antebellum South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 162–165; Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 76–78; Anne Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 161–162. For a recent affirmation of this perspective, see Charles Reagan Wilson, Southern Missions: The Religion of the American South in Global Perspective (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006), 11.
6. John W. Quist, “Slaveholding Operatives of the Benevolent Empire,” Journal of Southern History 62:3 (1996): 484; Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4–5; more generally, Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of American, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 1:18.
7. Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Charles Irons, Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
8. For the relation between missions and ostensibly “secular” modernity, see Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, introduction to Secularisms, ed. Jakobsen and Pellegrini (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–38. For more historical approaches, see Ussama Makdisi, “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 680–671; Peter van der Veer, “The Global History of Modernity,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41 (1998): 285–294; Ryan Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 317–325; John Saillant, “Missions in Liberia,” in The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, ed. Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 13–28; Andrew Witmer, “God’s Interpreters: African Missions, Transnational Protestantism, and Race in the United States, 1830–1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2008).
9. Keane, Christian Moderns, 6.
10. Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 130.
11. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in African-American Life (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990); Tunde Adeleke, Unafrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
12. James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Sylvia M. Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, Conn.: Greeenwood Press, 1982).
13. Third Annual Report of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Louisville: Morton and Griswold, 1848), 24.
14. Second Presbyterian’s sponsorship of this congregation began with a resolution in 1847; see Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 190–199.
15. “Second Presbyn Church, Charleston,” Central Presbyterian, June 25, 1859.
16. Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Martha Ward, “Where Circum-Caribbean Afro-Atlantic Creoles Met American Southern Protestant Conjurers,” in Caribbean and Southern: Transnational Perspectives on the U.S. South, ed. Helen A. Regis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 124–138.
17. See Lott Cary, “Circular Addressed to the Colored Brethren and Friends in America,” ed. John Saillant and reprinted in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104 (1996): 481–504.
18. Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 24, 50.
19. For example, Douglas Egerton, “Averting a Crisis,” Civil War History 43 (1997): 142–156 (economic); Marie Tyler-McGraw, “‘The Prize I Mean is the Prize of Liberty,’” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1989): 355–374 (political); Irons, Origins of Proslavery Christianity, 97–132 (spiritual).
20. Ralph R. Gurley, Life of Jehudi Ashman, Late Colonial Agent in Liberia (Washington, D.C.: James C. Dunn, 1835), 148 (appendix); Cary, “Circular Addressed to the Colored Brethren,” 495 (quotation); Saillant, “Missions in Liberia,” 20.
21. Cary, “Circular to the Colored Brethren,” 494.
22. Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829; University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 71.
23. Quotation from James B. Taylor, Biography of Elder Lott Cary, Late Missionary to Africa (1837; repr., Documenting the American South, 2001), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/taylor/taylor.html (accessed September 2010); see also Cary, “Circular to the Colored Brethren,” 504.
24. Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), tables 1–4.
25. Religious Herald, August 6–October 29, 1830, esp. “African Mission,” September 10, and “A Friend to the Missionary Cause,” October 1.
26. See also Bruce Dorsey, “A Gendered History of African Colonization,” Journal of Social History 34 (2000): 77–103.
27. [James Hall,] opening editorial, Maryland Colonization Journal, July 15, 1841.
28. Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, table 2. The total number of migrants, including the postwar period and immigrants to the Maryland Colonization Society’s settlements, probably reached 16,000.
29. The Declaration of Independence, “Liberian Constitutions,” Trustees of Indiana University, http://onliberia.org/con_declaration.htm (accessed September 2010). See also Moses, Wings of Ethiopia, 141–158.
30. “A Crazy Man’s Idea,” Richmond Christian Advocate, June 11, 1846.
31. Drew Gilpin Faust, “Evangelicalism and the Meaning of the Proslavery Argument,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 3–17; Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (Summer 1987): 211–233; Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Clarke, Our Southern Zion.
32. W. P. Harrison, The Gospel among the Slaves: A Short Account of Missionary Operations Among the African Slaves of the Southern States (Nashville: M.E. Church, South, 1893), 325; Milton Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865 (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press and the American Theological Library Association, 1975); Janet D. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).
33. Across denominations, whites recognized by the late 1840s that the most effective way to add black members to their rolls was to sponsor semi-independent churches. Irons, Origins of Proslavery Christianity, 187–189, 200–207.
34. First African Baptist Church, Minutes 1841–1859, September 19, 1858, September 25, 1859, Library of Virginia, Richmond.
35. Henry Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851; repr., Documenting the American South, 1999), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brownbox/brownbox.html (accessed September 2010).
36. William Troy, Hair-breadth Escapes from Slavery to Freedom (1861; repr., Documenting the American South, 1999), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/troy/troy.html (accessed September 2010).
37. Based on the oft-cited figure of 468,000 full members; see Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), 297. The range here reflects the difference between two sets of estimates for the ratios of adherents to members—for the low end, see Henry K. Carroll, Religious Forces of the United States, Enumerated, Classified, and Described on the Basis of the Government Census of 1890 (New York: Christian Literature, 1893), xxxv; for the high end, see Robert Baird, Religion in America, or An Account of the Origin, Progress, Relation to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches in the United States: With Notices of the Unevangelical Denominations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844), 265.
38. Daniel L. Fountain, “Christ in Chains,” in Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan, ed. David J. Libby, Paul Spickard, and Susan Ditto (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 84–104.
39. Harrison, Gospel among the Slaves, 311, 318–324.
40. Third Annual Report of the Missionary Society, 35, 49, 88–89. The total receipts for the Tennessee Conference were $5,580.35.
41. Fourth Annual Report of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Louisville: Morton and Griswold, 1849), 20.
42. Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (May 1858), 389–402. Issues of this journal from 1854 to 1874 are bound in the Methodist Reading Room, Divinity School Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
43. Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery (1856 [4th ed.]; repr., Documenting the American South, 2000), http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/string/string.html (accessed September 2010).
44. David Smith, Biography (1881; repr., Documenting the American South, 1999), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dsmith/dsmith.html#dsmith13 (accessed September 2010).
45. The strongest case for white evangelicals’ aversion to modernity may be found in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); for specific reference to the mission’s role in preserving a traditional social order, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 190.
46. For Coker, see Campbell, Songs of Zion, 67–74. The Northern branch of the Methodist Church retained control of African missions after the 1844 division.
47. T. J. Bowen, Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa from 1849 to 1856 (Charleston, S.C.: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1857), 61.
48. Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention . . . 1855 (Richmond: H. K. Ellyson, 1855), 54.
49. Eddie Stepp, “Interpreting a Forgotten Mission” (Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1999), 151–152.
50. Saillant, “Missions in Liberia,” 14.
51. The African Repository, January–June 1851, sum of contributions. Colored Missionary Society of Mobile appears March 1851, 93.
52. Minutes of the Virginia Baptist Anniversaries . . . 1850 (Richmond: H. K. Ellyson, 1850), 32–37.
53. The Home and Foreign Record of the Presbyterian Church . . . 1850 (Philadelphia: [Presbyterian] Publication House, 1850), first six-monthly lists of contributions; for Ellis’s downfall (in whites’ eyes), Fifteenth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church (New York: For the Board, 1852), 19.