But God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Divine goodness raised me and honoured me as an angel of God.1
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a variety of laws and legislation were passed to subjugate blacks and to enforce the belief that blacks were either less than human or, if human, of an inferior lot.2 For instance, in 1787 the US Constitution declared an enslaved African to count as three-fifths of a person, and between 1830 and 1860, Southern states increasingly prohibited manumission, expelled freed blacks, eliminated black churches, and ignored penalties for hurting or killing blacks.3 Views of black inferiority and black inhumanity were propagated widely and believed by many people across the spectrum of society. Indeed, many who adhered to such understandings taught that Scripture, which was central to the discussion about slavery at the time, upheld these perspectives. As discussed above in the introduction, proponents of slavery employed Paul’s words to justify slavery, but a common belief during this time was that the story of Ham in Genesis 9:18–27 sanctioned slavery as well. Proponents of slavery proclaimed that Ham was the originator of the black race and that the curse Noah pronounced upon Canaan referred to God’s ordination of blacks’ enslavement. In Slavery as It Relates to the Negro or African Race, written in 1843, Josiah Priest, a proslavery advocate, represents well the prevalent sentiments of the time regarding this passage of Scripture. Priest writes:
The appointment of this [Negro] race of men to servitude and slavery was a judicial act of God, or in other words was a divine judgment. There are three evidences of this, which are as follows:
First—The fact of their being created or produced in a lower order of intellectuality than either of the other races … is evidence of the preordination of their fate as slaves on the earth as none but God could have done or determined this thing.
Second—The announcement of God by the mouth of Noah, relative to the whole race of Ham, pointing out in so many words in the clearest and most specific manner, that they were adjudged to slavery … that they were foreordained and appointed to the condition they hold among men by the divine mind, solely on account of the foreseen character they would sustain as a race, who, therefore were thus judicially put beneath the supervision of the other races.
Third—The great and everywhere pervading fact of their degraded condition, both now and in all time … that the negro race as a people, are judicially given over to a state or peculiar liability of being enslaved by the other races.4
Priest captures the white supremacist scriptural hermeneutics of his period in these passages. Because blacks descended from Ham, as this interpretation goes, their slavery was ordained and appointed by God, and the evidence of this preordained status is their intellectual inferiority, the prophetic utterance of Noah’s curse, and their degraded condition, which demonstrates that their enslavement lasts for all time. Priest repeatedly affirms the lasting nature of this curse in his work, writing that the curse “not only covered the person and fortunes of Ham, but that of his whole posterity also, to the very end of time.”5
Priest’s interpretation of this passage also reinforced another prevalent stereotype of the period, which was the inferior and evil character of blacks. He states: “The curse, therefore, against Ham and his race was not sent out on the account of that one sin only. But … was in unison with his whole life, character, and constitutional make prior to that deed, the curse which had slumbered long was let loose upon him and his posterity … placing them under the ban of slavery, on account of his and their foreseen characters.”6 Priest contends that Ham’s character was always deficient and that his act merely brought about the inevitable curse. In an interesting “exegetical” move here, Priest aligns Ham’s character with that of his descendants. Just as Ham’s character was always evil and morally corrupt, so too is the character of all his posterity. According to Priest, Noah uttered this curse through the power of the Holy Spirit, demonstrating God’s knowledge of Ham’s character and that of all his future generations. Therefore, God’s ordination of blacks’ enslavement is just because their character necessitates it. The ramifications for perception of blacks in these interpretations are significant, for such interpretations promote the notions that blacks are unintelligent, evil, and cursed by divine decree to eternal enslavement. Corresponding to this view, many Southern preachers proclaimed that the curse of Canaan was a curse of black skin as well as perpetual slavery. Augustin Calmet related, in his popular dictionary, that Ham’s skin became black upon Noah’s pronouncement of a curse on Canaan and Ham.7
One cannot underestimate the prevalence of such beliefs in society during this time. For example, a group of Southern petitioners wrote in their document that “We of the South understand the Negro character. We know that naturally they are indolent, lazy, improvident, destitute of forethought, and totally incapable of self government.”8 John Saffin, considered today one of the important minor poets in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century who is also well known for his debate with Samuel Sewell over slavery, wrote a poem published in 1701 that captures well the perceptions of blacks that permeated the culture. The poem, entitled “The Negroes Character,” reads as follows:
Cowardly and cruel are those blacks innate,
Prone to revenge, imp of inveterate hate.
He that exasperates them, soon espies
Mischief and murder in their very eyes.
Libidinous, deceitful, false and rude,
The spume issue of ingratitude
The premises consider’d, all may tell
How near good “Joseph” they are parallel.9
Saffin, like Priest, forefronts common beliefs of the period that blacks are inherently vicious, hateful, and full of everything that those traits entail, such as being murderous and prone to lying. Saffin contradicts Sewell, his conversation partner, who had rejected slavery because he believed adhering to slavery was akin to Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery (Gen. 37). Saffin argues against Sewell, sardonically stating that blacks cannot be compared to “good ‘Joseph.’” Their character precludes such an association.
Underlying the scriptural exegesis of people like Priest and the perspectives of the Southern petitioners and Saffin was a deep-seated belief in the inferiority of blacks. Thomas Jefferson shared such views, writing of blacks, “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”10 And again he states, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”11 Consequently, for Jefferson both color and faculty cast doubt on the possibility of freedom for the slaves, as he asserts, “This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”12 As indicated by these quotes, Jefferson adhered to the idea of white superiority. Moreover, the idea of black inferiority coupled with depictions of blacks as dangerous, as seen in the Saffin poem, meant that for whites black movement needed supervision and monitoring. In 1786 a Delaware group petitioned the legislature “to more rigorously regulate the movements of people of color” because “many idle and evil-disposed slaves throughout this County” move throughout the area, “some with and some without passes or Certificates.” These petitioners asked for the creation of a law that forbade blacks from traveling from one county to another without some sort of written or printed pass, or certificate.13 The notions that blacks were not only inferior but also dangerous permeated the body politic. The Democratic Standard, a newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, summed up all these convictions well: “To us, the proposition that the negro is equal by nature, physically and mentally, to the white man, seems to be so absurd and preposterous, that we cannot conceive how it can be entertained by any intelligent and rational white man.”14 These statements of Jefferson, the newspaper quote, along with the words of Priest, the Delaware and Southern petitioners, and Saffin provide salient snapshots into the environment of the time regarding racism and slavery.15 In such an atmosphere, laced with this prevalent type of scriptural exegesis and attitudes about blacks, Paul’s admonition of “Slaves, obey your masters” (Eph. 6:5; Col. 3:22) cohered well. Whites depicted the apostle as merely endorsing what was “evident” from Genesis and sanctioning common beliefs about African Americans’ character and nature.
Slavery advocates’ distorted use of Scripture and the laws they implemented, which they believed to be sanctioned by the Bible, sought to prevent or limit enslaved Africans’ access to Scripture and thereby underscored “one of the greatest fears of slaveholding society: that religion, if taught honestly, was full of revolutionary possibilities.”16 Although sometimes slaveholders permitted black ministers to preach to the enslaved Africans, more often than not white ministers preached to them, and the message they proclaimed was “Slaves, obey your masters.” When black preachers did preach to the slaves, they had to be careful what they proclaimed, as indicated in the following testimonial of Anderson Edwards, an enslaved preacher: “I been preachin’ the Gospel and farmin’ since slavery time…. When I starts preachin’ I couldn’t read or write and had to preach what massa told me and he say tell them [n——] iffen they obeys the massa they goes to Heaven but I knowed there’s something better for them, but daren’t tell them ’cept on the sly. That I done lots. I tell ’em iffen they keeps prayin’ the Lord will set ’em free.”17 This black preacher dared to proclaim the true gospel to his fellow enslaved Africans because he “knowed” there was more to the gospel than what the slave owner wanted him to proclaim. That slaveholders tried to derail and control African Americans’ access to the Bible testifies to the liberating potential of the scriptural text.
Remarkably, despite the repeated attempts of slaveholders to drill into the hearts and minds of enslaved Africans, through Scripture, that God appointed slavery for them, many enslaved Africans refused to believe it. Albert Raboteau writes about enslaved Africans’ resolve regarding this issue: “In opposition to the slaveholder’s belief, the slave believed that slavery was surely contrary to the will of God. John Hunter, a fugitive from slavery in Maryland, attested to this belief: ‘I have heard poor ignorant slaves, that did not know A from B, say that they did not believe the Lord ever intended they should be slaves, and that they did not see how it should be so.’”18
In the midst of Pauline interpretations that repeatedly deemed them as destined for slavery and designed for such a life, blacks resisted by engaging in their own hermeneutical delineations, for “African Americans have struggled for more than two centuries to reinterpret and revise a distorted gospel received from White Christians.”19 Part of this reinterpretation and revision involved snatching Paul from the hands of white slaveholders and employing him in the liberation fight.
In her essay “Paul and the African American Community,” C. Michelle Venable-Ridley states that one of her goals is “not to redeem but to reclaim the writings of Paul as a religious source for the African American community.”20 The present project reveals that historically many African Americans considered Paul’s words to be a redemptive force, and so he became a religious as well as a political resource for them. For these interpreters the religious and the political were intricately linked and could not be separated, and Paul’s words provided spiritual nourishment and the biblical basis to protest unjust laws and to resist the dehumanization of slavery promulgated by the distorted gospel of white Christian slaveholders and preachers. These rich, early interpretive trajectories of African American Pauline hermeneutics provide an important glimpse into Paul’s significance in the black struggle for justice.
As early as 1774, enslaved Africans interpreted Paul to argue their case for freedom and liberty. Below is a petition written to the governor, council, and representatives of Massachusetts, with Pauline references italicized:
The Petition of a Grate Number of Blackes of this Province who by divine permission are held in a state of Slavery within the bowels of a free and christian Country Humbly Shewing
That your Petitioners apprehind we have in common with all other men a naturel right to our freedoms without Being depriv’d of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frinds and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents and from a Populous Pleasant and plentiful country and Brought hither to be made slaves for Life in a Christian land. Thus are we deprived of every thing that hath a tendency to make life even tolerable, the endearing ties of husband and wife we are strangers to for we are no longer man and wife then our masters or mestreses thinkes proper marred or onmarred. Our children are also taken from us by force and sent maney miles from us wear we seldom or ever see them again there to be made slaves of for Life which sumtimes is vere short by Reson of Being dragged from their mothers Breest Thus our Lives are imbittered to us on these accounts By our deplorable situation we are rendered incapable of shewing our obedience to Almighty God how can a slave perform the duties of a husband to a wife or parent to his child How can a husband leave master and work and cleave to his wife How can the wife submit themselves to there husbands in all things. How can the child obey thear parents in all things. There is a grat number of us sencear … members of the Church of Christ how can the master and the slave be said to fulfil that command Live in love let Brotherly Love contuner and abound Beare yea onenothers Bordenes How can the master be said to Beare my Borden when he Beares me down whith the Have chanes of slavery and operson against my will and how can we fulfill our parte of duty to him whilst in this condition and as we cannot searve our God as we ought whilst in this situation Nither can we reap an equal benefet from the laws of the Land which doth not justifi but condemns Slavery or if there had bin aney Law to hold us in Bondege we are Humbely of the Opinon ther never was aney to inslave our children for life when Born in a free Countrey. We therefor Bage your Excellency and Honours will give this its deu weight and consideration and that you will accordingly cause an act of the legislative to be pessed that we may obtain our Natural right our freedoms and our children be set at lebety at the yeare of Twenty one for whoues sekes more petequeley your Petitioners is in Duty ever to Pray.21
The disruptive nature of the gospel is evident in the enslaved Africans’ powerful argument that slavery and Christianity are irreconcilable. How do these enslaved Africans argue for this incompatibility? They utilize Pauline language. Echoing Paul’s call in Galatians 6:2 to believers to “Bear ye one another’s burdens,”22 they forcefully declare that slavery prevents the fulfillment of the apostle’s words. By placing burdens upon enslaved Africans and creating the heavy chains of slavery and oppression, white slaveholders do the opposite of what the apostle commanded. Through their citation and interpretation of Galatians 6:2, these petitioners adamantly decree that slavery counteracts Christian behavior, for whites do not carry the burdens of their black brothers and sisters; instead they create them. Additionally, while slaveholders often begin and end their scriptural exegesis with Ephesians 6:5–6, Colossians 3:22–24, or 1 Timothy 6:1–2, these enslaved Africans maintain that true scriptural exegesis begins in Ephesians 5:22 (cf. Col. 3:18–20) with instructions to wives and continues until 6:4 with instructions to fathers. The practice of slavery, which separates family members from one another, violates all the household admonitions set forth by the apostle. Slavery, these petitioners exclaim, impedes husbands from loving their wives, wives from submitting to their husbands, and children from obeying and being instructed by their parents. The enslaved Africans skillfully raise the question of how they can love their wives and their children if they are taken from them. Slavery prohibits them from obeying almighty God in carrying out their Christian duties to their families. And these petitioners argue that serving God is the priority, not serving the slaveholder. In addition, freedom is a natural right, one they never forfeited. The apostle’s words, these writers reason, condemn slavery and the actions of the white slaveholders; they do not condone them.
As the writers of the petition state, separation of black families was a painful norm for enslaved Africans. Henry “Box” Brown’s account of this event in his own life provides a graphic description of enslaved Africans’ reality. Upon learning that his family has been sold, he relates the following:
I received a message, that if I wished to see my wife and children, and bid them the last farewell, I could do so, by taking my stand on the street where they were all to pass on their way for North Carolina. I quickly availed myself of this information, and placed myself by the side of a street, and soon had the melancholy satisfaction of witnessing the approach of a gang of slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty in number, marching under the direction of a methodist minister, by whom they were purchased, and amongst which slaves were my wife and children…. These beings were marched with ropes about their necks, and staples on their arms, and, although in that respect the scene was no very novel one to me, yet the peculiarity of my own circumstances made it assume the appearance of unusual horror. This train of beings was accompanied by a number of wagons loaded with little children of many different families, which as they appeared rent the air with their shrieks and cries and vain endeavours to resist the separation which was thus forced upon them, and the cords with which they were thus bound; but what should I now see in the very foremost wagon but a little child looking towards me and pitifully calling, father! father! This was my eldest child, and I was obliged to look upon it for the last time that I should, perhaps, ever see it again in life…. Thus passed my child from my presence—it was my own child—I loved it with all the fondness of a father; but things were so ordered that I could only say, farewell, and leave it to pass in its chains while I looked for the approach of another gang in which my wife was also loaded with chains. My eyes soon caught her precious face, but, gracious heavens! that glance of agony may God spare me from ever again enduring! My wife, under the influence of her feelings, jumped aside; I seized hold of her hand while my mind felt unutterable things, and my tongue was only able to say, we shall meet in heaven! I went with her for about four miles hand in hand, but both our hearts were so overpowered with feeling that we could say nothing, and when at last we were obliged to part, the look of mutual love which we exchanged was all the token which we could give each other that we should yet meet in heaven.23
This vivid account of Brown’s forced separation from his family provides a snapshot into what African Americans experienced routinely and provides a backdrop to the petitioners’ use of Pauline family language in Ephesians and Colossians. They believed that this type of separation and dehumanization neither cohered with the apostle’s words regarding family life nor aligned with God’s plan for familial structure. Interestingly, all of this Pauline language occurs after the writers designate this country as “free and Christian.” Such language frames their subsequent use of Paul. If this country is “free and Christian,” then it is neglecting the apostle’s words regarding the family. These writers resisted the prevalent notion that it was God’s will for them to be enslaved and that they had to obey their masters by protesting whites’ interpretation and use of Paul to justify enslaving them. Rather, they interpreted the apostle’s words for themselves. We can extrapolate from both the historical environment of the time and the specific words of Paul that these writers chose to include in their requisition that their act of interpreting Paul on their own terms was an act of resistance and protest; an act that can be delineated for heuristic purposes in three ways: (1) They began their interpretation of Scripture where they wanted to begin (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18–20) and not where their white enslavers chose to begin. This meant they were “seizing hermeneutical control” of Pauline Scripture.24 (2) They engaged in “exegetical reversal,” disputing whites’ ownership of Paul to sanction slavery, and instead proclaimed that Paul condemns slavery with his very words. (3) They appealed to familial language to undercut “slaveholding religion.”25
This familial language resonated in two spheres: in the natural family and in the Christian family. The enslaved Africans insisted that their identity as members of biological families was primary; their identity as husbands, wives, and children negated American slave status. When Paul spoke of families, he included them, and so they insisted that the apostle recognized them as human beings with families that needed nurture and love like any other. Black families mattered, and by insisting on this truth they asserted their personhood and their humanity. In terms of the Christian family, these petitioners cited Hebrews 13:1: “Let brotherly love continue.”26 How can brotherly love coexist with the wretched practice of slavery? The two, these enslaved Africans contended, are mutually exclusive. In a similar vein, these writers recognized that their enslavement prohibited them from having a genuine Christian relationship with the slave owners, asking, “How can we fulfill our parte of duty to him whilst in this condition?” They recognized that slavery destroys natural familial relationships and Christian familial relationships, and this destruction is another dimension of the nullification of the Scripture “Let brotherly love continue.” These authors maintained that the apostle supported their natural right to freedom, upheld their declaration that they should not be enslaved to anyone, and recognized the significance of blacks’ familial relationships, both biological and Christian. To petition the governor and other governmental leaders with the apostle’s words, the same apostle used to justify their enslavement, was a bold move for these early writers to make. It demonstrated that they recognized their agency in interpreting Scripture for themselves and their right to claim and proclaim this Holy Writ.
Similar to the petitioners in 1776, the slaves in Fairfield County, Connecticut, requested freedom from slavery in their state in 1779. The request reads as follows, again with references to Paul italicized:
To the Honbl General Assembly of the State of Connecticut to be held at Hartford on the Second Thursday of Instant May
The Petition of the Negroes in the Towns of Stratford and Fairfield in the County of Fairfield Who are held in a State of Slavery humbly sheweth—
That many of your Petitioners, were (as they verily believe) most unjustly torn, from the Bosoms of their dear Parents, and Friends, and without any Crime, by them committed, doomed, and bound down, to perpetual Slavery; and as if the Perpetrators of this horrid Wickedness, were Conscious (that we poor Ignorant Africans, upon the least Glimmering Light, derived from a Knowledge of the Sense and Practice of civilized Nations) should Convince them of their Sin. they have added another dreadful Evil of holding us in gross Ignorance, so as to render Our Subjection more easy and tolerable. may it please your Honours, we are most grievously affected, under the Consideration of the flagrant Injustice;
Your Honours who are nobly contending, in the Cause of Liberty, whose Conduct excites the Admiration, and Reverence, of all the great Empires of the World, will not resent our thus freely animadverting, on this detestable Practice; altho our Skins are different in Colour, from those who we serve, yet Reason & Revelation join to declare, that we are the Creatures of that God who made of one Blood, and Kindred, all the Nations of the Earth; we perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed, with the same Faculties, with our Masters, and there is nothing, that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us, and the more we Consider of this Matter, the more we are Convinced, of our Right (by the Law’s of Nature and by the whole Tenor, of the Christian Religion, so far as we have been taught) to be free; we have Endeavoured rightly to understand, what is our Right, and what is our Duty, and can never be convinced, that we were made to be slaves Altho God almighty, may justly lay this, and more upon us, yet we deserve it not, from the hands of Men. we are impatient under the grievous Yoke, but our Reason teaches us, that it is not best for us, to use violent measures, to cast if off; we are also Convinced, that we are unable to extricate ourselves, from our abject State; but we think we May with the greatest Propriety, look up to your Honours, (who are the fathers of the People) for Relief. And We not only groan under our own Burden, but with Concern & Horror, look forward & Contemplate, the miserable Condition, of our Children, who are training up, and kept in Preparation, for a like State of Bondage, and Servitude. we beg leave to submit to your Honours serious Consideration, whether it is Consistent with the Present Claims, of the united States to hold so many Thousands, of the Race of Adam, our Common Father, in perpetual Slavery. Can human Nature endure the Shocking Idea? can your Honours any longer Suffer, this great Evil to prevail, under your Government? we entreat your Honours, let no Considerations of Publick Inconvenience, deter your Honours, from interposing in Behalf of your Petitioners; who ask for nothing, but what we are fully persuaded, is ours to Claim. we beseech your Honours, to weigh this Matter, in the Scale of Justice, and in your great Wisdom and Goodness, apply such Remedy, as the Evil does require; and let your Petitioners. rejoice with your Honours, in the Participation, with your Honours, of that inestimable Blessing,
Freedom and your Humble Petitioners, as in Duty bound, shall Ever pray & c. dated in Fairfield the 11th Day of May AD 1779.27
Of the numerous significant insights offered by this powerful petition, several speak to our present purposes. First, the writers state unequivocally that they are “Creatures of that God who made of one Blood, and Kindred, all the Nations of the Earth.” This statement echoes Paul’s words in Acts 17:26, where the apostle declares to his audience the unity in God’s creation of human beings, a declaration that became known as the “one blood doctrine.”28 A common refrain throughout African American protest literature, the apostle’s words make an early appearance here in 1779. Emerson Powery and Rodney Sadler also note the prominence of this Pauline phrase in black literature.29 Unlike modern scholars who make distinctions between the Paul of Acts, the Paul of the undisputed Pauline letters, and the Paul of the disputed Pauline letters, these writers and other black interpreters make no such distinctions. For them, all of these writings, including Hebrews, are legitimately Pauline. Thus, this Pauline passage enables the writers of this petition to claim that since God has made of one blood, and kindred, all the nations of this earth, God stands opposed to any white supremacy contention for black inferiority. Since God has unified all peoples, all blacks of this period could boldly declare, just as these writers did, that they have the “same faculties, with our Masters.” For the enslaved to make such assertions and to place themselves on the same level as their masters was bold and risky.30 Indeed, in contradistinction to Priest, Saffin, and others who held to their racist ideologies, these petitioners insisted that Paul’s words undermined the prevalent claims of black subservience.
Second, the enslaved Africans challenged the predominant ideas that they were ordained to slavery by God, arguing that they “can never be convinced, that we were made to be Slaves.” They maintained that perhaps God could put them into slavery but men could not, for they did not deserve slavery from other men. Here these enslaved Africans demonstrate an important distinction between human and divine will in the slave trade. Although whites were constantly asserting that the slave trade was God’s will, these enslaved Africans insisted that what was happening to them had nothing to do with God but was a system created by human beings, and they “deserve it not, from the hands of Men.” They saw the slave trade as originating from the human realm and not the divine sphere; this hermeneutic rejected the interpretations of proslavery advocates. These African Americans were able to distinguish between a human-made institution and a divine mandate.
Third, the writers appealed to a common Adamic ancestry, for they too were of the “Race of Adam, our Common Father.”31 Whereas whites were intent on emphasizing blacks’ descendancy from Ham, these writers focused on the creation story and Adam as the father of both blacks and whites. Since both races have a common father, one race enslaving the other is illogical. For these writers, shared paternity trumps any interpretive move that made central the supposed subsequent curse by Noah. Noah’s curse cannot negate Adamic origin.
Finally, fourth, the authors of this petition boldly call slavery evil, wicked, and a sin. While many blacks and abolitionists used such language to describe slavery, many whites refused to see slavery and the slave trade in such terms. Rather, they chose to believe that the converse was true. For example, Alexander Stephens, proslavery advocate and vice president of the Confederacy, argued that the Old and New Testaments sanctioned slavery and that “The relation of master and slave, even in a much more abject condition than existed with us, is not founded in sin.”32 In the midst of such sentiments, these early interpreters, as indicated by their use of Paul in the petition, understood that the apostle’s words dismantled the basis for the slave trade. Black and white were made of one blood, one kindred, and descended from one common ancestor, Adam. In the eyes of these interpreters, such truths meant that any basis for slavery and the slave trade was inconsistent with the Pauline message.
These petitions were written during the period of the American Revolution when talk of freedom and liberty abounded. The authors of these documents and other slave petitions believed that this was the time to seize their own right to freedom and to ask for such actions on their behalf. After all, as these writers determined, surely the leaders of a country who argued for and valued freedom to such an extent as to wage war against Great Britain would extend this same value of freedom to those enslaved within its own borders. That this was the case is evident in another petition by the enslaved submitted in Boston, where the authors write, “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them.”33 Similarly, as indicated in the 1779 petition, the writers appeal to the “Honours” “who are nobly contending, in the Cause of Liberty” and whose actions for freedom garnered the admiration of “all the great Empires of the World.” In another petition to the Massachusetts government, the creators employ the language of a “natural and unalienable” right to assert that the freedom the Americans fought for from Britain included the enslaved Africans’ freedom as well.34
Needless to say, such eloquent cries for freedom were denied, and slavery continued. Yet the writers of the 1776 and 1779 petitions discussed in detail here demonstrate the powerful ways in which Paul’s words were used to advocate for justice, freedom, and liberty. These brave writers risked their lives to engage in a counterhermeneutic or a resistance and protest hermeneutic in which they refused to allow the prevalent error-filled ideas about their existence to stand. They were not intellectually inferior, neither were they created to live in slavery, but as children of Adam, with families and the human right to be free, they also had the right to interpret Scripture for themselves and not to rely upon any white supremacist interpretive strategy. Furthermore, such petitions indicate the intricate links between the Bible, theology, and politics in the minds of the originators. The writers’ use of Pauline language in a government document indicates their beliefs that Scripture matters, particularly Pauline Scripture, and that Scripture had ethical and societal implications. It is noteworthy that these writers wrote these petitions prior to the intensification of the modern abolition movement in America, which began to rise in prominence in the early 1830s;35 this makes these writers’ words and use of Paul all the more formidable and impressive. Jupiter Hammon, another early African American figure, employs Paul in revolutionary and controversial ways as well.
Jupiter Hammon,36 a preacher, poet, and bookkeeper for his owners, bears the title of the first published black poet in America.37 An enslaved African his entire life, about eighty years, he became a Christian during the Great Awakening, and his writings are filled with biblical language and echoes indicating his love and passion for the Christian faith.38 Hammon’s owners allowed him to learn to read and write in order to assist them in their business in Long Island, New York. Sondra O’Neale describes Hammon’s work as the “most comprehensive, statement of Black theology as well as the earliest antislavery protests by a Black writer in all of American literature.”39 In her opinion, “Hammon’s dual commitment to Christianity and freedom has been either undervalued or ignored,” and he “has been one of the least understood writers in two hundred years of minority authorial experience.”40 Critics of Hammon believe that he is weak, and that instead of fighting for freedom in the present world, he admonishes his enslaved African audience to look to heaven as their escape and liberation. In the views of these critics, his otherworldly stance did more harm than good.41
Yet O’Neale cautions against the complete dismissal of Hammon’s importance to the legacy of African American writing. For her, Hammon’s work makes significant contributions to black protest literature because he emphasizes blacks’ ancient identities; employs a convincing, subtle challenge to whites’ consciences; provides proof that an enslaved African could write and publish; and becomes an example of enslaved African leadership through public speaking and written works for mixed audiences of enslaved Africans and slaveholders.42 Whichever side of this debate one finds one-self, it will be clear in the subsequent examinations of a few of his writings, “A Winter Piece,” “An Evening’s Improvement,” and “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York,” that Hammon employs Paul a great deal and utilizes the apostle in provocative, albeit subtle, ways to advocate for freedom and justice.43 Although O’Neale does not focus on or analyze Hammon’s use of Paul, the subsequent analysis will demonstrate that the subtlety she identifies as aimed at white consciences appears also in relation to Hammon’s black audience.
One of the causes of Hammon’s subtle antislavery protest message is that enslaved Africans in New York faced general police-state conditions, and so any overt opposition would not have been tolerated.44 Accordingly, Hammon shrewdly employs Paul to speak to his black audiences, his “brethren,” and to address the black desire for liberation. Arien Nydam views this tactic of Hammon’s as “subtextual, encoded resistance.”45 As this discussion of Hammon’s work will reveal, he engages in Pauline interpretation to emphasize divine grace, righteous living, and black agency. Along with these themes, he also takes up Pauline language to reject notions of black appearance as evil and to critique those in power, the wealthy white slaveholders.
Some of the major themes of Hammon’s essay “A Winter Piece,” published in 1782, are the need for repentance before God, allowing Christ to come and transform one’s life, and holy living. Hammon opens the essay by quoting Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.” As O’Neale notes, many enslaved Africans viewed this verse as speaking to their own harsh labor under enslavement and as Christ’s offering of comfort during such oppression. Although Hammon may be pointing to this common understanding, his primary concern is to emphasize that “We are to come with a sense of our own unworthiness to confess our sins before the Most High God, to come by prayer and meditation, and we are to confess Christ to be our Savior and Mighty Redeemer.”46 For Hammon, salvation is central since people should come “laboring and heavy-laden with a sense of our lost and undone state,” and he quotes Paul in Ephesians to emphasize that by grace salvation comes through faith; it is God’s gift (2:8). Philip Richards likewise recognizes that in this, his first homily, Hammon, using the format of an evangelical sermon, attempts to convert his fellow enslaved Africans.47 At the same time that he focuses on salvation and holy living, he also suggests in several places that physical freedom from slavery concerns him as well. He writes:
My brethren, many of us are seeking a temporal freedom and I wish you may obtain it; remember that all power in heaven and on earth belongs to God. If we are slaves, it is by the permission of God; if we are free, it must be by the power of the Most High God. Stand still and see the salvation of God. Cannot that same power that divided the waters from the waters for the children of Israel to pass through make way for your freedom? I pray that God would grant your desire and that he may give you grace to seek that freedom which tendeth to eternal life.48
Hammon states that the same God who freed Israel can also free blacks from the American slave system. He was the first black Christian to link Israel’s bondage to enslaved Africans in writing, but the theme is ubiquitous in subsequent black American literature and theology.49 One sees quite poignantly Hammon’s struggle with the existence of enslavement—is it by divine ordination, as people like Josiah Priest believed, or just permitted by God? Interestingly, Hammon does not adhere to the notion, such as found in Priest’s work, that slavery was ordained by God, but he does use the language of permission, which differentiates his views from slave advocates like Priest and Saffin. Whereas interpreters like Priest believed that slavery was ordained by God for all time, Hammon sees it as permitted, which indicates an expected end whenever God chooses to display divine salvation and make way for the enslaved Africans’ freedom, as God did for Israel. Such a subtle but important distinction in this interpretation makes sense in light of what Hammon writes a few lines later: “This we know, my brethren: ‘… that all things work together for good to them that love God …’” (Rom. 8:28).50 This quote, in light of the context, indicates that Hammon expects God to liberate his fellow Africans just as God liberated Israel. Addressing his fellow enslaved Africans as brethren, Hammon encourages them to trust in God’s power to work out all things for their good, including their spiritual and physical freedom.
Hammon prefaces his statements about Israel and blacks’ salvation from slavery with Peter’s declarations in Acts 10:34–35, in which Peter avers that “God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.”51 Quoting Peter’s comments at this point indicates Hammon’s emphasis on God’s inclusion of blacks in salvation and their inclusion in God’s liberative mission. God’s call is open to all, and so they too are included in God’s story of redemption, for Hammon states unequivocally, “Come my dear fellow servants and brothers, Africans by nation, we are all invited to come.”52 In a society built upon black exclusion, Hammon emphasizes God’s inclusion. Thus, Hammon makes an impressive array of connections in this part of the essay. He acknowledges blacks’ identity as Africans, connects this identity with God’s acceptance of them, links blacks’ plight with that of Israel’s bondage, and links Israel’s deliverance with the enslaved Africans’ own future liberation. Hammon, then, does not totally disregard physical freedom and its importance but associates spiritual freedom with physical freedom. For him spiritual freedom may be more significant in the grand scheme of things, but the need and desire for physical freedom do not go unrecognized. If it is to come, then it must come, in Hammon’s view, from God’s divine hand.
Although at several places in this essay Hammon quotes Paul to speak about the beauty of salvation and to reinforce righteous living,53 he also employs the apostle to counter some of the prevailing views of blacks during this time. In several instances Hammon pointedly calls attention to the enslaved Africans as agents in their own salvific process:
My brethren, it is your duty to strive to make your calling and election sure by a holy life [2 Pet. 1:10], working out your salvation with fear and trembling [Phil. 2:12], for we are invited to come without money and without price.54
We should be always preparing for the will of God, working out our salvation with fear and trembling [Phil. 2:12]. O may we abound in the works of the Lord [1 Cor. 15:58]…. Let us then be pressing forward to the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God is Christ Jesus [Phil. 3:13–14].55
Hammon uses Pauline language here to underscore enslaved Africans’ agency and their ability to work out their salvation. Such a view counters that of many white slave owners and advocates of slavery who declared that enslaved Africans’ salvation rested on their obedience to slaveholders and that only if they did what the slave owners instructed would they experience redemption.
For example, Peter Randolph, in his writing Sketches of Slave Life, narrates an episode in which a Baptist minister, named James L. Goltney, preaches to enslaved Africans using as his text, “Servants, obey your masters.” Randolph describes this episode in a most telling manner: “[Goltney] would try to make it appear that he knew what the slaves were thinking of,—telling them they thought they had a right to be free, but he could tell them better,—referring them to some passages of Scripture. ‘It is the devil,’ he would say, ‘who tells you to try and be free.’ And again he bid them be patient at work, warning them that it would be his duty to whip them, if they appeared dissatisfied,—all which would be pleasing to God! ‘If you run away, you will be turned out of God’s church, until you repent, return, and ask God and your master’s pardon.’ In this way he would continue to preach his slaveholding gospel.”56 The “slaveholding gospel” that Randolph describes puts God on the side of the slaveholder, even sanctioning the cruel beatings that slaves receive at the hands of their enslavers, which Randolph has previously narrated. What is more, instead of liberation originating from God, in the slaveholding gospel freedom is demonic and the desire for it comes from Satan, not God. Accordingly, if enslaved Africans were to pursue freedom by running away, they would in effect be excommunicated from the church, acquiring reinstatement only if and when they returned, asked for, and received forgiveness from God and their masters. This idea that freedom was demonic and that slaves who pursued it by running away were no longer welcomed by God was common, with some enslaved Africans unfortunately believing it.57
Hammon, however, resists this prevalent view and, by using the language “My brethren,” insists to the blacks in his audience that God invites them to come and this invitation does not depend upon the permission of slaveholders. He frames the scriptural citations from Isaiah and Matthew with the Pauline texts of Philippians and 1 Corinthians and employs Paul’s words as divine invitations specifically given to the enslaved Africans. When quoting Romans 10:10, Hammon continues his concentration on enslaved Africans’ agency, writing that “ ‘for with the heart men believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation’ (Rom. 10:10). Here we see that there is something to be done by us as Christians.”58 Enslaved Africans have their own agency and can believe, confess, and act on their own faith.
Furthermore, their social status does not preclude them from salvation; they can come without money and receive God’s good news. Not only do the enslaved Africans have agency but this agency does not depend upon social status or economics. In the midst of a society that denies them agency and the freedom to do and think for themselves, Hammon admonishes his audience to recognize their agency and to use it to abound in good works and to press forward to the mark—all usages of Pauline language to encourage enslaved Africans’ agency and action. This focus on blacks’ agency appears again in Hammon’s statement that God created blacks as “rational creatures,” a statement that contradicts some white perceptions of blacks as animals, intellectually inferior, and nonhuman.59 Hammon refutes such views, reminding his listeners that God created them as people with thinking faculties, and his assertions here align with the enslaved petitioners’ claims above that blacks have the same faculties as their enslavers.
Hammon’s zeroing in on enslaved Africans’ agency is part of a larger conversation taking place in society during this time regarding whether or not blacks could experience salvation and whether or not they had souls. His pointed affirmation of blacks’ rational capability and agency in the salvific process, and his repeated call in the essay to rely upon God’s power and Spirit, indicate Hammon’s desire to empower his audience, to affirm publicly their humanity, and to encourage their agency despite their toxic surroundings.
Equally important is Hammon’s repeated emphasis on the power of sin and its universal effect. He writes: “My brethren, it is not we servants only that are unworthy; but all mankind by the fall of Adam became guilty in the sight of God (Gen. 2:17).”60 Here Hammon implicitly rejects the notion of blacks’ descendancy from Ham and “the curse’s connection to African racial identity, and its implications of God’s preordination of slavery. Certain revelation could thwart white theologians’ attempts to laden Africans with abnormal guilt.”61 Citing Genesis, but no doubt echoing Paul as well (Rom. 5:12–19; 1 Cor. 15:22), Hammon proclaims that it is not just enslaved Africans that are unworthy but whites also, since Adam’s sin affects everyone. Hammon makes a stark distinction between the so-called inherited sinful nature of Ham peculiar to blacks and sin that affects all persons, regardless of color. Scripture, from Hammon’s perspective, pronounces the nonexistence of the Hamic curse upon blacks, since all fell in Adam and all suffer because of him. Hammon, therefore, grasps Paul’s emphasis on the deep power of sin and its effects upon the entire human race.
Hammon understands the universal nature of sin as well as the universal nature of Christ’s power to rescue and redeem all, for he quotes Paul, who declares that “since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21–22).62 Just as sin’s power affects all, both white and black, so too Christ’s redemptive power delivers all, both black and white. Blacks cannot only experience spiritual salvation and physical liberation in the here and now, which affirms their personhood, including the fact that they possess souls, but they can also experience God’s resurrecting power in the future.
In his essay “An Evening’s Improvement,” published in 1783, Hammon returns to some of the themes of “A Winter Piece,” such as repentance, receiving God’s gift of salvation through Christ, and the agency of the enslaved Africans. In regard to this last theme, he repeats his use of Pauline language from Philippians 2:12, 1 Corinthians 15:58, and Romans 8:28. Although Pauline citations and expressions permeate the essay, several distinct uses of the apostle’s words appear in this document and will focus the present discussion. Hammon emphatically directs his audience’s attention to their new identity in Christ as children of God led by the Spirit of God. He empowers his hearers by reminding them of their transformed identity:
There is such a depravity in our natures that we are not willing to suffer any reproach that
may be cast on us for the sake of our religion; this, my brethren, is because we have not the love of God shed abroad in our hearts [Rom. 5:5]; but our hearts are set too much on the pleasures of this life, forgetting that they are passing away [1 Cor. 7:31]; but the children of God are led by the Spirit of God. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God (Rom. 8:12–14). Here, my brethren, we see that it is our indispensable duty to conform to the will of God in all things, not having our hearts set upon the pleasures of this life; but we must prepare for death, our great and last change.63
A few pages later he returns to Romans 8: “But there must be a saving change wrought in our hearts, and we must become as new in Christ Jesus. We must not live after the flesh but after the Spirit [Rom. 8:1, 4]. ‘For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God’” (Rom. 8:14).64 Hammon urges his audience to look beyond the pleasures of this life and to allow the Spirit within them to lead them, for their new identity means a new focus. His comments illustrate to the enslaved Africans that God’s Spirit grants them a new way of being and that they are not children of Ham but children of God. What is more, their identity does not derive from whom they belong to on earth but originates from their heavenly Father. Hammon establishes divine sonship for African Americans, refuting beliefs that they were beasts, nonhumans, or inferior human beings. The presence of God’s Spirit affirms their humanity and God’s divine call upon their lives, thereby negating any views that would relegate them to subordinate status. In addition, Hammon’s use of Paul encourages his audience to live a Christian life that surpasses that of their white enslavers. This emphasis by Hammon is an early example of the tendency among blacks to counter the racist behavior of their white owners by living a superior moral life.
Earlier in the essay Hammon echoes 1 Thessalonians 5:22, writing, “And we should put our whole trust in the Lord at all times; we should strive to live a religious life, to avoid the very appearance of evil, lest we incur the wrath of God.”65 Hammon asserts here that the religious life avoids the appearance of evil, and he employs Pauline language to establish that evil is not found in blackness or enslaved Africans’ black skin but in how one lives. Hammon’s interpretive move is important in light of the views of the time. Josiah Priest recapitulates the beliefs of the period regarding black skin: “As to the intrinsic superiority of a white complexion over that of black, there is no question; for by the common consent of all ages among men, and even of God himself in heaven, there has been bestowed on white the most honorable distinction. White has become the emblem of moral purity and truth, not only on earth, but in eternity also.”66 He continues, writing, “Black, in all ages, has been the sign of every hateful thing.”67
Priest sums up the prevalent views about black bodies and black skin that permeated the culture in this period. For black slaves, “skin color alone was enough to identify them as that which has no value.”68 That Hammon is aware of such views can be seen most poignantly in his remark, “For if we love God, Black as we be and despised as we are, God will love us.”69 These words illustrate Hammon’s somber acquaintance with the painful reality of black bodies and black lives in America. His adoption and adaptation of Paul’s words about the religious life avoiding the appearance of evil contest the idea of black skin being evil and black bodies being wicked. Instead, what is evil is how one lives. Hammon protests erroneous views of black bodies and simultaneously launches a critique against white slave owners, who attempt to attach evil solely to black bodies while living lives that betray the Christianity they confess. In Hammon’s view, these slave owners are the ones who have an appearance of evil because they are not living a moral religious life. Such a reading corresponds to Hammon’s repeated terminology in this essay regarding punishment for the wicked and impending judgment.
Hammon returns to the judgment theme at the end of the essay by quoting Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:10 (cf. Rom. 14:10). He writes, “My brethren, we know not how soon God may send the cold hand of death to summon us out of this life to a neverending eternity, there to appear before the judgment seat of Christ. ‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.’”70 Affirming the universality of judgment, noting that all must appear before God, both black and white, Hammon closes the essay with one explicit Pauline citation and one Pauline echo. He encourages his audience regarding judgment by citing all of 1 Corinthians 15:51–53, including the apostle’s words that “we shall all be changed.” These words recall Hammon’s earlier insistence that death is the final great change.71 Hammon’s appeal to an apocalyptic transformation of the body, a body that in the case of an enslaved African had endured so much, underscored that black bodies belonged to God, not the white slaveholder, and that the bodily transformation prophesied by the apostle included black bodies too. Although one may construe Hammon’s words as pie-in-the-sky language that is so otherworldly as to have no earthly significance, one can also maintain that this language both denied whites ownership of black bodies and affirmed the existence of black souls, two important statements to make in this time period.
Written in 1787 near the end of his life, “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York” is Hammon’s final essay and perhaps his most controversial publication.72 It is also, according to some, his most published work. Hammon begins the essay by taking on the persona of the apostle Paul, who in Romans 9 lamented over his fellows Jews and their rejection of the gospel. Similarly, Hammon grieves over the plight of his fellow enslaved Africans, mourning over their current existence. He states in his opening salvo:
When I am writing to you with a design to say something to you for your good and with a view to promoting your happiness, I can with truth and sincerity join with the Apostle Paul, speaking in his own nation, the Jews, and say: “That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart … for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:2–3) [cf. Rom. 10:1]. Yes, my dear brethren, when I think of you, which is very often, and of the poor, despised, and miserable state you are in as to the things of this world, and when I think of your ignorance and stupidity and the great wickedness of the most of you, I am pained to the heart. It is at times almost too much for human nature to bear, and I am obliged to turn my thoughts from the subject or endeavor to still my mind by considering that it is permitted thus to be by that God who governs all things, who setteth up one and pulleth down another.73
Hammon’s words here are interesting on several levels. First, in an ironic move, he takes on the mantle of the apostle Paul, as it were, the one whose words are used during this time to justify his enslavement. Yet, despite this reality, he connects with the apostle’s love for his Jewish contemporaries and perceives in Paul’s writings a way to express his own care for his fellow enslaved Africans. Paul assists him in telling his story regarding his deep longing for his people and his recognition of their “poor,” “despised,” and “miserable” state. The apostle’s lament, then, becomes a means by which Hammon demonstrates concern and distress over his fellow Africans, for he sees in Paul a companion in sorrow and “joins with the Apostle” in mourning over his own kinsmen according to the flesh.
Second, as Hammon’s statements reveal, his distress derives from slavery’s effects upon his fellow blacks: “ignorance,” “stupidity,” and “wickedness.” Hammon fleshes out in the body of the essay what he means by these harsh descriptors. The enslaved Africans’ “ignorance” and “stupidity” stem from not being permitted to learn and to read for themselves, especially not being able to read the Bible, and their “wickedness” derives from not following the commands of the Bible and not living a religious life superior to that of their masters. Each of these descriptors, then, describes a reality that is the fault not of the enslaved Africans but of their current predicament, a recognition that leads Hammon to resort to the language of permission, in which God permits all of this to be. At the same time, Hammon tacitly concedes that even the language of divine permission does not mollify the condition of blacks’ enslavement for him, for he continues, “While I have been thinking on this subject, I have frequently had great struggles in my own mind and have been at a loss to know what to do.”74 Like Paul, who wrestled in anguish about what to do regarding his people because their lack of response to the gospel seemed to defy his human logic, Hammon wrestles with the complex competing realities of an almighty God and the horrid existence of slavery. With utmost honesty and transparency, he admits his frequent loss at what to do about this complicated and horrendous situation.
Admitting that his own ignorance and inadequacy in teaching had often prohibited him from speaking to his fellow enslaved Africans, he nevertheless decides in this final essay to speak to them, writing, “I have wanted exceedingly to say something to you, to call upon you with the tenderness of a father and friend, and to give you the last and, I may say dying, advice of an old man who wishes your best good in this world and in the world to come.” Hammon believes that this essay will transmit his final wishes to those he cares about so much, promising that he will tell the enslaved Africans “what he really thinks is in your best interest and is your duty to comply with.”75 These declarations make Hammon’s first piece of advice all the more controversial, for he dwells on the enslaved’s duty to obey the slaveholder. Hammon quotes all of Ephesians 6:5–8 to remind his fellow enslaved Africans that they are to obey their masters according to the flesh. After citing Ephesians, he writes, “Here is God’s plain command for us to obey our masters. It may seem hard for us, if we think our masters wrong in holding us slaves, to obey in all things, but who of us dares dispute with God! He has commanded us to obey, and we ought to do it cheerfully and freely.”76 Hammon’s adoption of proslavery advocates’ use of Paul earned him the title of “Uncle Tom” and the castigation of many black scholars, for in their view Hammon becomes the black version of the white minister in Nancy Ambrose’s narrative.
He goes on to state that enslaved Africans should obey their masters not just because God commands it but because the enslaved Africans’ “own peace and comfort depend upon it. As we depend upon our masters for what we eat and drink and wear and for all our comfortable things in this world, we cannot be happy unless we please them…. If a servant strives to please his master and studies and takes pains to do it, I believe there are but few masters who would use such a servant cruelly. Good servants frequently make good masters.”77 Hammon then admonishes his fellow enslaved Africans to refrain from stealing from their masters and from swearing by taking the Lord’s name in vain.
On one level, one can argue that Hammon’s advice to enslaved Africans to follow the apostle’s words of obedience to their masters was advice aimed at the enslaved Africans’ survival, to make their harsh lives easier. This is, in fact, what O’Neale argues, writing that “Hammon readers today assume that he was delivering Tommish advice in support of the slave system…. Yet history shows that he was not merely calling for Christian submissiveness; he was trying to keep slaves alive and out of jail. All of the seemingly petty societal infringements that Hammon warns of in this essay were serious crimes for which slaves were flogged, jailed, put in stocks, otherwise abused, and sometimes executed.”78 Moreover, the existence of general police-state conditions in New York for enslaved Africans may have facilitated Hammon’s comments, in that obeying the slave owner may be difficult but increases chances of survival.79 For them to obey increased the likelihood of their “best good in this world.”
Not only is it feasible to argue the possibility of survival as Hammon’s reasoning here, it is also feasible to say that Hammon firmly believed that good enslaved Africans could change the character of their enslavers, even if their enslavers were cruel and wicked. He writes, “If you are humble and meek and bear all things patiently, your master may think he is wrong: if he does not, his neighbors will be apt to see it and will befriend you and try to alter his conduct.”80 Hammon, therefore, believes that enslaved Africans, through their submissive actions, have the ability to transform slaveholders’ hearts, a belief, however, that is not substantiated by the historical evidence. Nonetheless, he admits that if this does not work, the enslaved African must resort to prayer and to divine intervention.
Though Hammon adopts proslavery uses of Paul that reinforce the status quo, in these essays he employs the apostle in some subtle, subversive ways. For instance, in his admonition to enslaved Africans to cease swearing and taking God’s name in vain, he says those who do such things are under the power of Satan, who “as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8), and who is also “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” According to Hammon, Satan takes captive people who swear and take the Lord’s name in vain because they are being “taken captive by him at his will” (Eph. 2:2; 2 Tim. 2:26). At first Hammon directs this language to the enslaved Africans in his audience, but he implicitly aims this censure to the white masters too, since he openly acknowledges that they swear and take God’s name in vain. He writes further on that the enslaved Africans’ excuse that because their masters swear they can do it also does not legitimate the action. In this censure he tacitly chastises his white addressees who do swear and so underscores his own argument that they are under the power of the devil and that Satan has taken them captive, since all “who are profane are serving the devil.”81 This “all,” Hammon declares, includes the white slave owners. In fact, then, it is not blacks who are de facto children of the devil, as some in the proslavery camp believed, but whites themselves who, through their actions, demonstrate their own captivity to this inimical being. Hammon urges his fellow Africans to resist following in the slaveowners’ footsteps and to demonstrate a higher religious life. That Hammon views the white owners as under the power of the devil is clearly seen in his appeal to an eschatological judgment by which he encourages his audience, both black and white, to take heed to his words:
To [God] we must give an account for every idle word that we speak. He will bring us all, rich and poor, white and black, to his judgment seat [Rom. 14:10; 2 Cor. 5:10]…. Our slavery will be at an end, and though ever so mean, low, and despised in this world, we shall sit with God in his kingdom, as kings and priests, and rejoice forever and ever. Do not then, my dear friends, take God’s holy name in vain or speak profanely in any way. Let not the example of others lead you into sin, but reverence and fear that great and fearful name, the Lord our God.82
Again Hammon advises his fellow enslaved Africans not to follow the example of the slaveholders (“Let not the example of others lead you into sin”) but to adhere to a higher ethic of being. In a sense, Hammon encourages his fellow enslaved Africans once again to use their agency. They should act and live a different way of life than the slave owners do. Philip Richards correctly observes that “Hammon’s disapproval of whites carries over into a number of implicit criticisms of their morality as well as into explicit exhortations for blacks to act independently of their ‘superiors,’ their white masters. Hammon exhorts his black audience not to use profanity although the white masters may do so…. The upshot of this criticism is that blacks must strive for moral regeneration despite what may be the bad example of their white masters.”83 Paul’s words enable Hammon to introduce a cosmic element of satanic influence and dominion, a subversive notion of whites being under the control of Satan, and the picture of an eschatological reckoning in which all, regardless of race and societal status, stand equal before God.
Furthermore, in his repeated recommendations in this essay that enslaved Africans, if given the chance, learn to read, Hammon insists that the purpose of acquiring this skill is to be able to read the Bible.84 For him, the Bible is the most important book and the only book worth reading. In it enslaved Africans find comfort, assurance, happiness, and encouragement in the midst of their own dire circumstances. Janet Duitsman Cornelius notes this desire to read by the enslaved: “A desire to read the Bible was a powerful motive for slaves to gain literacy; in New York and in the Carolinas, Huguenot missionaries described the eagerness with which slaves embraced the few opportunities they had to learn to read Bibles and hymn books.”85 In one portion of his essay, Hammon’s advocacy for reading the Bible utilizes a Pauline passage, 1 Corinthians 1:26–29. His argument at this point, with Pauline echoes and references italicized, is worth quoting at length:
Now, my dear friends, seeing that the Bible is the word of God and everything in it is true and that it reveals such awful and glorious things, what can be more important than that you should learn to read it? And when you have learned to read, that you should study it day and night? There are some things very encouraging in God’s word for such ignorant persons as we are. For God hath not chosen the rich of this world. Not many rich, not many noble are called, but God hath chosen the weak things of the world, and things which are not, to confound the things that are [1 Cor. 1:26–28]. And when the great and rich refused to come to the gospel feast, the servant was told to go into the highways and hedges, and compel those poor creatures that he found there to come in. Now, my brethren, it seems to me that there are no people that ought to attend to the hope of happiness in another world so much as we. Most of us are cut off from comfort and happiness here in this world and can expect nothing from it. Now seeing this is the case why should we not take care to be happy after death? … We cannot plead so great a temptation to neglect religion as others. Riches and honours, which drown the greater part of mankind, who have the gospel, in perdition, can be little or no temptation to us.86
Prior to this passage, Hammon has already censured the rich (white slave owners) in his audience by stating that the “rich and great gentlemen swear and talk profanely” and that all those who swear are under satanic power, which implicitly includes the slave owners. In addition, he has also earlier reminded whites and the enslaved Africans that all, rich and poor, will stand before God’s judgment seat and that the rich will be saved not by their wealth but by a holy life lived before God and others. When Hammon returns to a critique of the rich whites in his audience by utilizing Paul, he transforms the apostle’s words to state that God does not choose the rich of this world but the weak. Paul speaks of the wise and how not many wise men after the flesh are called, but where “mighty” appears in the original Pauline text, Hammon substitutes “rich” to continue his biting critique of the white slave owners, who were rich and profiting by forced labor.87 Riches, he declares, drown a large part of humanity, even though they may have the gospel.
Here one sees Hammon’s veiled attack upon whites in his audience who are rich and have the gospel but remain lost. The alteration that Hammon makes to Paul’s words cannot be overstated, for this change coheres with the gospel parable (Luke 14:15–24) he echoes right after this Pauline passage. In Hammon’s reading of this parable, the wealthy that God invited to the feast refused the invitation, so others were called in their stead. Hammon views his current situation as similar to that of the parable: God does not choose the rich but the weak, an affirmation that aligns with the enslaved Africans’ own poor and miserable status to which he referred in the beginning of the essay. Though poor and weak, they are invited to come share in God’s divine feast. Such revelations as these are why Hammon encourages his fellow enslaved Africans to learn to read. By doing so, they will be able to discover for themselves the truth about who they are, that God chooses them, and that they are loved by the Divine. By reading for themselves, they will see that there is more in Pauline Scripture than “Slaves, obey your master.”
A complex, enigmatic figure in many respects, Jupiter Hammon uses Pauline texts in ways that are both controversial and innovative, conventional and subversive. He employs the apostle to critique those in power and, at the same time, falls in line with the powers that be, proslavery advocates who see in Paul a companion in their own thirst for power and continued subjugation of black bodies. To focus only on Hammon’s statements of acquiescence to slavery does not do him justice, however, for as our examination of his essays reveals, especially his last writing, Hammon is a struggling human being attempting to make sense of his world. In this last essay he relates his unfulfilled hopes that God would open the eyes of whites as they fought for their own liberty in the Revolutionary War, and that they would have remembered the blacks and granted them freedom as well.88 Of course, this did not happen, and it seems Hammon resigned the situation to God’s hands, writing that “If God designs to set us free, he will do it in his own time and way.”89 At the same time, to focus only on Hammon’s subversive uses of Paul does not tell the whole story either, since his use of Paul is both conventional for Hammon’s time and resistance oriented. Though Hammon is not as radical in his use of Paul as some other black writers, he does employ the apostle in a number of important, subversive ways: (1) to underscore black agency, (2) to critique the white wealthy and powerful, (3) to make the charge that whites were under satanic influence, (4) to assert blacks as rational human beings, (5) to proclaim blacks’ humanity and identity as sons of God, not Ham, and (6) to lament over his fellow enslaved Africans. To dare to interpret Paul in such ways in public places and spaces secures Hammon’s position as one of the important starting points for African American Pauline hermeneutics.
Another important early black Pauline exegete is Lemuel Haynes. Haynes, a child of a white mother and black father, both of whom abandoned him, grew up as an indentured servant in a Christian foster home.90 His indenture ended near the time of the American Revolution, and he joined the Minutemen and served with the Continental army.91 After his war service, Haynes studied for the ministry, learning Latin and Greek, and became licensed to preach on November 29, 1780.92 After preaching and pastoring for five years, Haynes was officially ordained on November 9, 1785, becoming the “first black to be ordained by any religious organization in America.”93 Haynes was a pastor and a popular and wellknown preacher, speaker, and writer. He became the pastor of a Congregational church in Rutland, Vermont, in 1788, and many of his publications were sermons or speeches he gave there.94 Although he pastored a white congregation in Rutland for thirty years, it was ultimately prejudice against his race that terminated his pastorship there: “The people in Rutland, where he preached thirty years, at length began to think they would appear more respectable with a white pastor than a black one, and therefore, or at least measurably on that account, dismissed him.”95
Yet, long before he was dismissed, a young Haynes, writing around 1776, penned an essay entitled “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping; Wherein those arguments that Are useed [sic] in its vindication Are plainly confuted. Together with an humble Address to such as are Concearned in the practise,” in which he argues insightfully against slavery, utilizing political, theological, and moral arguments.96 As the essay’s title intimates, Haynes contends that the idea of liberty fomented by the American Revolution should be extended to black enslaved Africans within the United States.97 He emphasizes the “hypocrisy of Americans who complained of English oppression while they tolerated slavery in their own land.”98 Like the enslaved African writers of the petitions discussed above, Haynes attempts to seize this moment in American history to launch a comprehensive attack against the reasons for approval of and participation in slavery and the slave trade. Haynes critiques the use of the Ham story in Genesis by white Christian proslavery proponents, who used it extensively to justify slavery. Katie Cannon observes that the belief that enslaving blacks was a “judicial act of God” and “necessary to the veracity of God Himself” enabled whites to see blacks as nonhuman property.99 With this basic belief system in place, it became easy to portray “people with Black skin as demonic, unholy, infectious progenitors of sin, full of animality and matriarchal proclivities.”100 As Cannon indicates, the Ham story provided biblical sanction for blacks’ slavery, and for some whites it even provided the idea that part of the curse was a curse of blackness. Enslaved Africans’ black skin proved that they were evil descendants of Ham deserving subjugation.
Haynes, however, was skeptical of whites’ use of the Ham passage, stating that “Whethear the Negros are of Canaans posterity or not, perhaps is not known By any mortal under Heaven. But allowing they were actually of Canaans posterity, yet we have no reason to think that this Curs Lasted any Longer than the comeing of Christ: when that Sun of riteousness arose this wall of partition was Broken Down [Eph. 2:14].”101 And again, he declares that “Our glorious hygh preist hath visably appear’d in the flesh, and hath Establish’d a more glorious Oeconomy…. It is plain Beyond all Doubt, that at the comeing of Christ, this curse that was upon Canaan [Gal. 3:13], was taken off.”102 As illustrated by these quotations, part of Haynes’s critique of this story’s interpretation lies in recognizing the improbability of knowing the identity of Canaan’s descendants.103 Yet his resistance to this interpretation of the narrative also rests upon echoing Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:14 and Galatians 3:13. In Ephesians 2:14, where Paul discusses Christ’s destruction of the wall between Jew and gentile, Haynes understands the partition as the one prevalent in his day, the wall erected between black and white, slave and free, and insists that Christ destroyed these humanly instituted barriers also. Moreover, in Galatians 3:13 the apostle states, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree.” Using the apostle’s language, Haynes grants that even if blacks were descendants of Canaan, Christ’s death removes this curse and therefore delegitimizes the use of the Ham narrative. By employing both of these Pauline passages, Haynes maintains that the “curse” and, as a result, slavery were eradicated by Christ’s advent.
Haynes also confronts those who applied Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7:21 (“Art thou called, being a servant? care not for it; but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather”) to sanction the slave trade and slavery. He believes that although slaves existed in the apostle’s day, in this verse Paul advocates for their freedom if at all possible:
So that the Apostle seems to recommend freedom if attainable, q.d. “if it is thy unhappy Lot to be a slave, yet if thou art Spiritually free Let the former appear so minute a thing when compared with the Latter that it is comparitively unworthy of notice; yet Since freedom is so Exelent a Jewel, which none have a right to Extirpate, and if there is any hope of attaining it, use all Lawfull measures for that purpose.” So that however Extant or preval[e]nt it mite Be in that or this age; yet it does not in the Least reverse the unchangeable Laws of God, or of nature; or make that Become Lawfull which is in itself unlawfull.104
Here Haynes claims that spiritual freedom is more important than physical freedom, but that does not mean that physical freedom is insignificant or unnecessary, for the apostle urged those in his audience to acquire it. As John Saillant correctly observes, “the proslavery interpretation of this verse was inverted by Haynes,” who argues that this verse does not condone slavery but rather emphasizes the direct opposite, the right of every person to be free.105 Furthermore, Haynes insists that just because slavery existed in Paul’s day does not mean that slavery is right; its existence in Paul’s time and in Haynes’s society does not change the “unchangeable Laws of God,” since people in all ages have deviated from God’s laws due to their sinful natures.
Haynes believes that every African has “an undeniable right to his … Liberty,” and that “Consequently, the practise of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit.”106 Haynes views liberty as a gift given by God to every human being, and if anyone attempts to destroy that gift, he or she violates a God-given right. “Every privilege that mankind Enjoy have their Origen from god; and whatever acts are passed in any Earthly Court, which are Derogatory to those Edicts that are passed in the Court of Heaven, the act is void. If I have a perticular previledg granted to me by god, and the act is not revoked nor the power that granted the benefit vacated, (as it is imposable but that god should Ever remain immutable) then he that would infringe upon my Benifit, assumes an unreasonable, and tyrannic power.” For Haynes, the court of heaven’s declaration of liberty to every human being supersedes any earthly court or laws that would deny a human being’s divine rights of freedom. No human court can overthrow what the divine tribunal has put in place. In addition, God’s immutability means that the benefits enacted by the Divine will not be revoked by the God who granted them. Therefore, anyone who would presume to nullify a divine gift becomes a tyrant and presumes to stand in God’s place.
Haynes quotes Acts 17:26, arguing that since God makes of one blood all nations of men, the same laws and the same “aspiring principles” exist in every nation. Paul’s statements in Acts underscore the unity of the human race in its creation, including its innate desire and love for liberty. “Therefore we may reasonably Conclude, that Liberty is Equally as pre[c]ious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage Equally as intollarable to the one as it is to the other: Seeing it Effects the Laws of nature Equally as much in the one as it Does in the other.”107 God’s creation of humanity from one blood means that all human beings share a common existence, a common bond, and a common divine privilege of freedom. No race has a monopoly on liberty, and no race has the right to withhold it from another. Haynes also argues that color cannot be a decisive factor in determining whether or not someone deserves to be free. The one blood the apostle declares negates color as a criterion. The Englishman has no “hygher Descent” compared to the African and is not above the African in “Natural privilege.” In fact, Haynes, echoing Paul’s language regarding Adam’s sin, insists that the Fall is the source of this “insatiable thurst after Superorety one over another” and that the ubiquity of this practice does not mean it is legitimate or approved by God.108
In addition to quoting Paul in this portion of the essay, Haynes reminds his audience of the words of Jesus, “As you would that men should do unto you, do you Even so to them.” Paul’s words and Jesus’s words, Haynes declares, should convict the slave traders and all who participate in this enterprise, since they make clear that what a person does not want imposed upon himself or herself should not be executed upon someone else.
Haynes’s work also protested the idea of the slave trade as an action of divine providence, for it was argued that through enslavement Africans were “Christianized” and “civilized.” Some whites contended that the slave trade really was a blessing to the Africans because it allowed them to be freed from their savage lands and customs in order to experience “civilization.” Most of all, slavery permitted them to live in a “Christian” nation. Nehemiah Adams, a proslavery minister, believed that God used whites “as the chief instruments of good to the African race.”109 And Joseph Lovejoy wrote in a letter to his brother, that “American slavery is a redemption, a deliverance from African heathenism,”110 and that “The best thing that could be done for Africa, if they could live there, would be to send [to Africa] a hundred thousand American Slaveholders, to work [the Africans] up to some degree of civilization.”111
Not only was this view preached and advocated from American pulpits but it appeared in media outlets as well. Eugene Berwanger captures the prevailing spirit of such views in newspapers at the time: “John Van Evrie, editor of the New York Day-Book, was so convinced of slavery’s Divine Mission that he accused abolitionists of ‘impiety to God’ for opposing the institution. ‘Christian slavery,’ claimed the New York Morning Express, brought ‘the redemption of the African from Heathenism, Idolatry and Savagery,’ and thus became his ‘blessing not his curse.’ In Ohio, the Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer characterized American slavery as a ‘Godsend to the African Race’ for it had raised Negroes ‘morally, socially, and religiously far above what they would have been had they been left in their native wilds.’”112
Despite the ubiquitous nature of this perspective, the brutality of slavery belied the view of slavery as a “Divine Mission.” A couple of citations make this clear. David Walker states:
But Christian Americans not only hinder their fellow creatures, the Africans, but thousands of them will absolutely beat a coloured person nearly to death, if they catch him on his knees, supplicating the throne of grace…. Yes, I have known small collections of coloured people to have convened together for no other purpose than to worship God Almighty, in spirit and in truth, to the best of their knowledge; when tyrants, calling themselves patrols … would burst in upon them and drag them out and commence beating them as they would rattle-snakes—many of whom, they would beat so unmercifully, that they would hardly be able to crawl for weeks and sometimes for months.113
Also, Frederick Douglass relates the following:
For between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.114
The unspeakable horrors captured in these passages and endured by many enslaved Africans contradict any notion of slavery as a blessing to the enslaved. Walker underscores the hypocrisy of the idea of a Christian nation when enslaved Africans were not even permitted to pray, and if they were caught doing so, suffered egregiously. Anderson Edwards, a former enslaved African, also speaks about the danger enslaved persons faced when they prayed: “When the darkies prayed in slavery they darsn’t let the white fo’ks know ’bout it or they beat them to death. When we prayed we turned a wash pot down to the ground to catch the voice. We prayed lots in slavery to be free and the Lord heard our prayer.”115
Similarly, the Douglass quote underscores the preposterous idea of slavery as a blessing to enslaved Africans, for he contends that the Christianity practiced in this country does not correspond at all with the Christianity of Christ. He vehemently declares that if one holds to the Christianity of this country, one cannot hold to the Christianity of Christ, and if one holds to the Christianity of Christ, one cannot follow the Christianity of this country, for the two are diametrically opposed. Furthermore, in his writings Douglass laments the hypocrisy of ministers who whip and steal; who preach about purity yet prostitute their slaves; who proclaim family values yet destroy black families without hesitation, separating mothers from fathers and children from parents. Both Walker and Douglass deny the beneficence of slavery or any notion of its “Divine Mission.”
The belief that divine providence approved of the slave trade so that enslaved Africans could find salvation is ludicrous to Haynes as well. To refute the notion of slavery’s benefit, Haynes uses the apostle’s words in Romans 3:8 and 6:1–2 that declare, respectively, “And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just,” and “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.” By drawing on these texts, Haynes demonstrates that, just as in Paul’s day when some were exclaiming, “Let us do evil so that good may come,” some whites want to commit evil in promoting the slave trade so that “good” (civilizing Africans and causing them to become Christians) may result.116 Haynes avers that the apostle’s answer to his readers in the first century is the same answer the apostle gives to Haynes’s audience: μὴ γένοιτο (God forbid!). In his use of Paul here to condemn whites’ view of slavery, Haynes calls slavery sin (“Shall we continue in sin?”), a move that many white Christians at the time could not and would not make.117 Haynes asserts that instead of slavery being a blessing to the African, it is the exact opposite. It is sin that God through Paul forbids continuing. For those who do engage in it, their damnation is a righteous one, as evidenced by the apostle’s words.
Haynes closes the essay by appealing to Romans 2:21–23 (“Thou therefore which teacheth another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God?”). Here Paul critiques those in his audience who engage in the very actions they teach against. Haynes once again sees a parallel between Paul’s audience and those in his own audience. Whereas Americans have a magnanimous spirit regarding their own natural right for freedom and will not tolerate despotism and tyranny from Britain, they in turn take on these characteristics, which they seem to loathe, when it comes to the enslaved Africans in their own country. Thus, Haynes sees white Americans as similar to those in Paul’s audience who participate in the very sins they teach others not to commit. Using the apostle’s words, Haynes admonishes his readers to undo the “heavy burdens” of their black brothers and sisters and “let the oppressed go free.” If they fail to do so, he predicts judgment, for “god will not hold you guiltless.”118 Paul becomes a way for Haynes to hold up a mirror to his audience so that they may see their reflections in the apostle’s words, beholding their own hypocritical mask that cries out liberty at the same time it withholds freedom from others and systematically destroys bodies and lives.
John Saillant calls Haynes “a founding father of Black Theology” and states that “Haynes demonstrates the uniquely American source of Black Theology, which, by the late twentieth century, is clearly part of a worldwide liberation theology.”119 Haynes’s hermeneutical audacity in his use of Paul is both penetrating and ingenious and grants insight into Saillant’s epithet, making Haynes a worthy recipient of the title “a founding father of black theology.” Utilizing the apostle, he proclaimed that Christ destroyed any curse (if there ever was one) that white believers maintained existed upon the black race and abolished every dividing wall. He also argued that God bestowed upon every human being in creation the universal law and right to freedom. Furthermore, the practice of slavery in the apostle’s day did not legitimate the practice, since human beings throughout time deviate from the mandates in God’s heavenly court system. The existence of a practice does not mean God sanctions it. The apostle’s advice to enslaved Africans to pursue liberty if possible suggests that Paul recognized slavery’s existence but also understood physical freedom to be the preferred state. Additionally, Paul exposes the double standard of white Americans who advocate “justice and liberty for all” but in reality limit it to whites only. And, in response to the argument that the slave trade blessed blacks, Haynes reversed the whites’ practice of having the apostle preach to the enslaved Africans (“Slaves, obey your masters”). Rather, Haynes depicts the apostle as preaching to the white slave owner and minister, “Shall you continue in sin, that is, participate in slavery and the slave trade? μὴ γένοιτο (God forbid)!”
In the beginning of his narrative The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher. Compiled and Written by Himself, which was published in 1811, John Jea reveals that he was born in 1773 in Old Callabar in Africa and that he and his family were stolen, shipped to America, and sold as enslaved Africans in New York to a Dutch couple, Oliver and Angelika Triebuen.120 He describes the treatment that he and the other enslaved Africans received:
Our labour was extremely hard, being obliged to work in the summer from about two o’clock in the morning, till about ten or eleven o’clock at night, and in the winter from four in the morning, till ten at night. The horses usually rested about five hours in the day, while we were at work; thus, did the beasts enjoy greater privileges than we did. We dared not murmur, for if we did we were corrected with a weapon an inch and-a-half thick, and that without mercy, striking us in the most tender parts … often they treated the slaves in such a manner as caused their death, shooting them with a gun, or beating their brains out with some weapon, in order to appease their wrath, and thought no more of it than if they had been brutes: this was the general treatment which slaves experienced. After our master had been treating us in this cruel manner, we were obliged to thank him for the punishment he had been inflicting on us, quoting that Scripture which saith, “Bless the rod, and him that appointed it.” But, though he was a professor of religion, he forgot that passage which saith, “God is love, and whoso dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” … Conscience, that faithful monitor, (which either excuses or accuses) caused us to groan, cry, and sigh, in a manner which cannot be uttered [Rom. 8:22–23, 26].121
As this excerpt indicates, early on in his narrative Jea lays out three significant motifs that appear in the rest of his story: (1) his connection of Scripture to his horrible experiences as an enslaved person, (2) his identification of the stark contrast between the Christianity professed and practiced by his enslavers and the Christianity espoused by Scripture, and (3) the importance of Paul to his narrative. From the beginning of his exposition, Jea links Scripture to his atrocious existence as an enslaved African. He recounts how he and the other enslaved Africans had to cite Scripture in response to the harsh treatment they received from their owner, a Scripture the slave owner selected that, in his view, condoned his behavior in afflicting such cruelty upon them. They, in taking up Scripture’s voice, had to bless the rod and the slaveholder who used it. In reflecting upon this treatment, Jea realizes the slaveholder’s perverse tendency—utilizing Scriptures that sanction the despicable treatment of the enslaved and omitting Scriptures that would prohibit such behavior. Although his enslaver professes Christianity, he does not act or live in love as God is love. The stark dichotomy between his owner’s actions and the Christianity his owner professes to follow is a distressing issue for Jea, as indicated in several places in his autobiography.
In addition, in these opening paragraphs Jea echoes Paul, signifying the importance of the apostle to his own narrative. The brutality he describes causes enslaved Africans to groan, cry, and sigh in a manner that cannot be uttered. Echoing Romans 8:22–23, where creation groans and is in travail and in pain, and Romans 8:26, where the Spirit makes intercessions with groanings that cannot be uttered, Jea merges the groanings of the enslaved Africans with those of creation and the Spirit. In doing so, he unites the enslaved’s woeful cries with creation’s travail and the Spirit’s speech, suggesting a fused discourse of pain that incorporates creation, the enslaved, and the Spirit. Thus, the enslaved Africans’ voices are not lost but taken up into the language of Scripture, indeed, into a Pauline passage that recognizes the existence of anguish in the world.
Despite professing Christianity, Jea’s enslaver taught him and other enslaved Africans that “when we died, we should be like the beasts that perish; not informing us of God, heaven, or eternal punishments” (5), and that “we poor slaves had no God” (7). In addition, Jea reports that “Frequently did they [masters] tell us we were made by, and like the devil, and commonly called us black devils” (9).122 Due to the violent treatment Jea receives, he despises Christianity, writing, “From my observations of the conduct and conversation of my master and his sons, I was led to hate those who professed themselves christians, and to look upon them as devils; which made me neglect my work, and I told them what I thought of their ways. On this they did beat me in a most dreadful manner; but instead of making me obedient, it made me the more stubborn, not caring whether I lived or died” (9–10).123
Yolanda Pierce insightfully observes the “powerful rhetorical reversal” present in Jea’s language here. Though told that he and other enslaved Africans were devils and made by the devil, Jea “appropriates the devil figure from whites for his own use. Through appropriation and reversal, Jea illustrates how slavery inverts given meanings: the ‘black devil’ figure is really an enactment of white devilry.”124 To Jea, his enslavers’ actions demonstrate that they are devils and belong to the devil, not Jea and the other enslaved Africans. Jea rejects any notion that links his existence to the demonic. It is not the color of one’s skin that suggests satanic ties but rather one’s actions and beliefs, as indicated by his owners’ behaviors.
Because Jea despises religion so greatly, his enslaver sends him to church every Sabbath as a punishment, and Jea abhors every minute of it. Nonetheless, Jea, upon hearing the minister one Sabbath urging the congregation to pray for God’s presence, decides to do so, by frequently retiring to secret places to pray. When he does not get an answer from God, Jea believes that he is too wicked to receive salvation. Because of his repeated prayers and no answer from God, Jea experiences such distress that even the slaveholder and the slaveholder’s wife notice the change in his behavior. When he relates to them the sinful state of his soul and his fear of being killed by God on account of his sin, they respond that the minister had put the devil in Jea and they were going to beat the devil out of him. They, in fact, do beat Jea, and from then on refuse to let him attend church. Yet Jea continues to attend church despite the floggings he receives. What had at one time been a punishment became for him a necessity so that he could “hear the word of God and seek instruction for my soul” (16). In addition to going to church, Jea divulges that he would often sneak out at night to talk and pray with the minister, that he may be saved (14).
After five or six weeks of this, Jea experiences conversion; he describes the event: “During five or six weeks of my distress, I did not sleep six hours in each week, neither did I care to eat any victuals, for I had no appetite, and thought myself unworthy of the least blessing that God had bestowed on me…. And while I was thus crying, and begging God to have mercy on me, and confessing my sins unto him, it pleased God to hear my supplications and cries, and came down in his Spirit’s power and blessed my soul” (17). Jea’s conversion does not lessen or stop the beatings he receives from his owners, but the Spirit comforts him and enables him to endure. He describes his state before and after conversion with the words of Paul as found in 1 Corinthians 12:3: “Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (24). Before receiving salvation, Jea called Jesus and Christians accursed, but now, by God’s Spirit, he calls Jesus Lord, a confession only possible through divine enablement.
Jea is only fifteen when he receives conversion, and after his conversion he commences to preach to his enslaver, his enslaver’s wife, and his own family members, declaring to them that they could “be saved by grace, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 2:8–9) (25). All of them reject Jea’s preaching, believing him to have lost his mind, and his enslaver continues to persecute him. Jea’s response to their reaction to him contains several Pauline echoes and citations.
But being taught and directed by the Spirit of God, I told my master, mistress, mother, sisters, and brothers, that there was nothing too hard for the Almighty God to do, for he would deliver me from their hands, and from their tyrannical power; for he had began the work of grace in my heart, and he would not leave it unfinished, for whatsoever grace had begun, glory would end [Phil. 1:6] … and he gave me power over my beseting sins [Heb. 12:1], to cast them from me, and to despise them as deadly poison. He armed me with the whole armour of divine grace, whereby I quenched all the fiery darts of the wicked [Eph. 6:16], and compelled Satan to retreat; and put him to flight by faithful and fervent prayer. In addition to these he gave me power over the last enemy, which is death [1 Cor. 15:26]; that is, I could look at it without any fear or dread. (25)
Jea prophesies boldly his future freedom with the language of Philippians, for the grace that God began in him that God will complete includes deliverance from “their hands, and from their tyrannical power.” Jea links the liberation of his soul that God began with grace to the liberation of his physical body; the two for him are intricately connected. Thus, his words align with what so many African Americans believed during this time—that spiritual salvation includes physical liberation. In addition, utilizing Pauline language, Jea fights a battle with physical people, such as the slave owner, and a battle with sin, which God grants him power over. Fitted with battle armor, Jea goes up against Satan and triumphs through prayer, and so Jea bears witness to a two-tiered understanding of spiritual struggle—believers contend with spiritual forces as well as with physical people.125 The power with which Jea fights against these entities comes from God and enables him to gain power over death, the last enemy, through his refusal to fear it. To support this contention, Jea quotes Paul, writing, “And St. Paul expresses himself, ‘Through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage’” (Heb. 2:15), indicating that he interprets Paul as citing fear as part of death’s ability to keep people in bondage. But Jea, refusing to be afraid of death, triumphs over it.
In Jea’s case, the fear of death would be monumental, because he was an enslaved African, and death came frequently for enslaved Africans at the hand of their owners. But also now he was a converted enslaved African, which some church laws prohibited during this time. As Pierce notes, Jea’s owners were members of the conservative Dutch Reformed Church, which opposed slave conversion during this period. In 1792, however, the church changed this prohibition, but as she states, the change did not always affect actual practice.126 Many slave owners considered conversion dangerous, for it could encourage insubordination and disobedience, as it did in Jea’s case—Jea continues to go to church even though his owner forbade it. Jea’s enslaver punishes him severely for church attendance, praying, and preaching to him as well as to other enslaved Africans. Some white slave owners knew that conversion had the potential to limit a slaveholder’s rule and authority, as the following episode from Jea’s autobiography demonstrates.
At other times when kept without victuals, in order to punish me, I felt the love of God in me, that I did not regard the food…. At other times when they gave me any refreshment, I acknowledged that it came from the immediate hand of God, and rendered unto him humble and hearty thanks in the best manner I could, as the Spirit gave me utterance [Acts 2:4], which provoked my master greatly, for his desire was that I should render him thanks, and not God, for he said that he gave me the things, but I said, no, it all came from God, for all was his; that the Spirit of God taught me so; for I was led, guided, and directed by the Spirit [Rom. 8:14], who taught me all things which are of God, and opened them unto my understanding. (20)
This episode reveals the desire of Jea’s owner to be viewed as the sole cause of Jea’s provision; the owner did not want God to take his place as Jea’s source. This incident illustrates that one of the essential foundations of slavery was that enslaved Africans believe in their owners’ total claim to their bodies, minds, and souls and believe that their existence rested upon the slaveholders alone. Conversion, however, disrupts this totalizing claim, demonstrating that enslaved Africans do not belong to the slaveholders but to God, whose Spirit transforms them and, by extension, affirms their existence as human beings.127 The Spirit bestows agency upon them, including the power to resist slave owners’ totalizing claims. Indeed, Jea takes hold of the Spirit’s teaching him, which is an act of resistance to the doctrine taught to him by his enslaver that he had no god. God’s Spirit instructs him, and in doing so reveals the falsehood of his enslaver’s words. In addition, Jea becomes another example of the Spirit becoming a resource for resistance.128 Despite his enslaver’s teaching him and the other enslaved Africans a slave-holding gospel, the Spirit grants Jea insight into God’s liberating purpose for him.
The reaction that Jea’s enslaver exhibits toward Jea giving God thanks aligns with the statements Jea makes early in his narrative about how some enslaved Africans, including himself, were at one time led to “look up unto him as our god” (4), and that enslaved Africans “were often led away with the idea that our masters were our gods” (5). Although to modern ears such thoughts may seem absurd, the absolute control many slaveholders had over the enslaved Africans, often a control parsed out through floggings and torture, with no accountability for such actions, made owners appear godlike, able to do what they wanted, when they wanted, and how they wanted.129 Conversion, however, meant that slaveholders’ authority was not all-encompassing and that they too had to answer for their deeds. Equally significant, conversion meant that God cared about the enslaved Africans’ plight and they had not been forgotten.
But Jea was not just a converted slave but a converted slave who preached, which caused his afflictions to increase, afflictions so harsh they could easily have led to death. But Jea’s divine encounter empowers him to such an extent that he says, “From the fear of death it pleased the Lord to deliver me by his blessed Spirit; and gave me the witness of his Spirit to bear witness with my spirit [Rom. 8:16], that I was passed from death unto life, and caused me to love the brethren. At the time I received this full evidence and witness within me, I was about seventeen years of age, then I began to love all men, women, and children, and began to speak boldly in the name of the living God, and to preach as the oracles of God, as the Spirit and love of God constrained me [2 Cor. 5:14]” (31). Jea takes up Paul’s understanding of the power of Christ’s love to generate unwavering devotion to service and to living for God. Jea’s bold preaching compelled by the Spirit and God’s love cannot be impeded. Here a distinct juxtaposition appears in Jea’s narrative. Before his conversion he did not care whether he lived or died, because the harsh treatment by his masters facilitated a sort of fearlessness on his part. But after his conversion, not fearing death derived from his faith and the freedom it bestowed.
His release from fear of death enables Jea to preach boldly and leads to his sale by three different slaveholders who believe he is harming other enslaved Africans with his preaching and talking (32). While with the last slaveholder, Jea runs to the church and receives baptism. Upon learning of this matter, the slave owner becomes irate, beats Jea, and threatens to beat the minister for performing the exercise. The slaveholder then has Jea examined by the magistrates, who, upon examination, perceive that he is a believer and inform him that he is “free from [his] master, and at liberty to leave him” (33). At this time, Jea writes, “It was a law of the state of the city of New York, that if any slave could give a satisfactorily [sic] account of what he knew of the work of the Lord on his soul he was free from slavery, by the Act of Congress, that was governed by the good people the Quakers, who were made the happy instruments, in the hands of God, of releasing some thousands of us poor black slaves from the galling chains of slavery” (39).130 Refusing to let him leave, however, his enslaver and his enslavers’ sons tell Jea that the Bible commands slaves to obey their masters in everything, whether the master is right or wrong, and that Jea had to submit to these words. Their use of the Bible makes a profound impact upon Jea, whose description of these discussions is worth quoting in its entirety:
But my master strove to baffle me, and to prevent me from understanding the Scriptures: so he used to tell me that there was a time to every purpose under the sun, to do all manner of work, that slaves were in duty bound to do whatever their masters commanded them, whether it was right or wrong; so that they must be obedient to a hard spiteful master as to a good one. He then took the bible and showed it to me, and said that the book talked with him. Thus he talked with me endeavouring to convince me that I ought not to leave him, although I had received my full liberty from the magistrates, and was fully determined, by the grace of God, to leave him…. My master’s sons also endeavoured to convince me, by their reading in the behalf of their father; but I could not comprehend their dark sayings, for it surprised me much, how they could take that blessed book into their hands, and to be so superstitious as to want to make me believe that the book did talk with them; so that every opportunity when they were out of the way, I took the book, and held it up to my ears, to try whether the book would talk with me or not, but it proved to be all in vain, for I could not hear it speak one word, which caused me to grieve and lament, that after God had done so much for me as he had in pardoning my sins, and blotting out my iniquities and transgressions, and making me a new creature [2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15], the book would not talk with me; but the Spirit of the Lord brought this passage of Scripture to my mind, where Jesus Christ says, “Whatever ye shall ask the Father in my name, ye shall receive. Ask in faith nothing doubting: for according unto your faith it shall be unto you. For unto him that believeth, all things are possible.” (33–34)
Jea’s enslaver attempts to utilize Scripture to continue his authority over Jea, echoing Pauline words that servants have to obey their masters in everything. He asserts that the Bible communicates with him, which he contends grants him ultimate control over Jea, although Jea is legally and spiritually free. As this excerpt shows, Jea believes that the Bible does talk with the slave-holder, and he desires the same access. Since God had forgiven his sins and made him a new creature, Jea is bitterly disappointed when the book does not speak to him.131 He asks God to give him the ability to read the Bible for himself and to “speak it in the Dutch and English languages, that I might convince my master that he and his sons had not spoken to me as they ought, when I was their slave” (34). Although the book would not talk, the Spirit would and did (“the Spirit of the Lord brought this passage of Scripture to my mind”), bringing to Jea’s mind an important passage of Scripture that facilitates his prayer request to God. After five or six weeks of prayer, God miraculously grants Jea’s petition by sending him an angel “with a large bible in his hands” (35):
Thus the Lord was pleased in his in finite mercy, to send an angel, in a vision, in shining raiment, and his countenance shining as the sun, with a large bible in his hands, and brought it unto me, and said, “I am come to bless thee, and to grant thee thy request,” as you read in the Scriptures. Thus my eyes were opened at the end of six weeks, while I was praying, in the place where I slept; although the place was as dark as a dungeon, I awoke, as the Scripture saith, and found it illuminated with the light of the glory of God, and the angel standing by me, with the large book open, which was the Holy Bible, and said unto me, “Thou has desired to read and understand this book, and to speak the language of it both in English and in Dutch; I will therefore teach thee, and now read”; and then he taught me to read the first chapter of the gospel according to St. John; and when I had read the whole chapter, the angel and the book were both gone in the twinkling of an eye, which astonished me very much, for the place was dark immediately; being about four o’clock in the morning in the winter season. (35)
The angel teaches Jea to read the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and when the angel disappears, Jea is not sure whether the event is real or not. Nevertheless, the Spirit speaks to him and assures him that he is able to read. Jea proceeds to praise God for this supernatural deliverance and speaks to his minister about this miracle, proclaiming to the minister that he can read. Refusing to believe him, the minister brings him a Bible, and Jea reads the Scripture to him, prompting the minister to ask Jea how he learned to read. Jea remarks that the Lord taught him. Since Jea could not read any other books the minister presented to him and could not spell, the minister and his wife become convinced that the Lord had indeed taught Jea to read only the Bible.132
News of this miraculous deed spread, and Jea was once again brought before the magistrates, who ask him if he can read. After answering affirmatively, they give him a Bible, and upon hearing him read, they ask how he learned to do so. As he had answered his minister, so Jea answers the magistrates, “The Lord had taught me” (37). Believing that this occurrence was a work of the Lord, the magistrates declare that Jea should be free indisputably, for as Jea recounts, “they believed that I was of God, for they were persuaded that no man could read in such a manner, unless he was taught of God. From that hour, in which the Lord taught me to read, until the present, I have not been able to read in any book, nor any reading whatever, but such as contain the word of God” (38).133
Recall that earlier in Jea’s autobiography he says the Bible talks and tells Jea’s enslavers that he should remain a slave. Yet one of the striking features of the narrative is that the Lord teaches Jea to read the very book his enslavers use to try to convince him of his permanent enslavement. Jea recognizes his former enslaver’s role in attempting to prevent him from understanding Scripture and to keep him in bondage; therefore, the prevention of understanding Scripture is linked with slavery. The actions of the slaveholder demonstrate that one of the important elements of slavery was to control enslaved Africans’ access to Scripture by keeping them illiterate, by making them believe that the book only talked to whites, and that God had no concern for them except for creating them for slavery. Jea’s ability to read the Bible, however, overcomes all these obstacles established by slavocracy, solidifies his freedom once and for all, and enables him to travel around preaching the good news to enslaved Africans and to all who would listen. As Henry Louis Gates observes, Jea “literally reads his way out of slavery.”134 Through Jea’s miraculous experience of literacy the liberating power of Scripture is given physical expression through Jea’s physical liberation from slavery. This extraordinary occurrence provides the impetus for Jea’s preaching “from house to house, and from plantation to plantation” (38).135 Eventually Jea joins another black preacher and some white friends to erect a meetinghouse where blacks could worship.
God’s divine intervention on Jea’s behalf bestows agency upon Jea, who now has power over his own body. As the use of his Pauline language of “new creation” signifies, Jea experiences a total transformation, that is, spiritual freedom, physical freedom, and, with the ability to read, mental freedom. As he reflects upon his converted state, Jea remarks, “It pleased God to send the Spirit of his Son into my heart [Gal. 4:6], to bear witness with my spirit that I was a child of God [Rom. 8:16]” (74). Jea saw his life as transformed, in which God’s Spirit resided in him and affirmed his humanity, thereby establishing that, contrary to what his former owner taught him, he was neither created by the devil nor a devil himself but was a child of God, his Creator. Jea’s use of Paul’s words resists the distorted ideology of the slaveholders and asserts that the apostle’s language gave him the words to communicate his personhood and dignity. Moreover, whereas before he experienced beatings whenever he went to church, now Jea becomes part of a “church-planting team,” as it were, that opens a church for African Americans. And, contrary to the earlier part of his life where he needed to sneak out at night to pray and talk with the minister, Jea is a minister free to proclaim the gospel. After continuing to serve as a preacher in this church for four years, Jea leaves for Boston to preach there and travels elsewhere in the United States and the world to proclaim the gospel, including New Orleans, the East Indies, Holland, France, Germany, Ireland, England, and Asia.136 In his narration of his reasons for embarking upon these preaching tours around the world, he declares that the love of God has constrained him, and so he invokes Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 5:14 to indicate that God’s love is foundational to his gospel proclamation.137 In addition, in describing his reasons for traveling to the East Indies, he cites in full 1 Corinthians 10:24–33, focusing upon Paul’s statements in these verses that believers ought not to seek their own wealth but the wealth of others (10:24), believers are to do all things for the glory of God (10:31), and they are to seek the salvation of all (10:33). His powerful interpretation of these verses appears in what follows:
This was my motive in going to the East Indies, that whatsoever I did, to do it for the honour and glory of God [10:31]; not to seek mine own interest [10:24, 33], but the interest of my Lord and Master Jesus Christ; not for the honour and riches of the world, but the riches and honours of that which is to come: I say, not for the riches of this world, which fadeth away; neither for the glory of man; nor for golden treasure; but my motive and concern was for the sake of my Lord and Master, who went about doing good, in order to save poor wicked and sinful creatures. (77)
As indicated by this citation, proclaiming the gospel’s transformative power became Jea’s life and focus. Although during his travels he experiences a great deal of suffering, ranging from illness to gross racist mistreatment from the staff onboard the ships, he presses on. Utilizing the language of James, Acts, Romans, 2 Thessalonians, and 2 Corinthians, Jea describes his response to the suffering he endures: “I counted it all joy [ James 1:2] that I was worthy to suffer for the glory of God [Acts 5:41; 2 Thess. 1:5]; for our trials and tribulations which are but for a moment [2 Cor. 4:17] are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be given us hereafter [Rom. 8:18]” (65). Moreover, Jea believed that the words of the apostle Paul and Barnabas, that it is through many trials and tribulations that believers enter into the kingdom of God, characterize his life story as well (Acts 14:22) (75). Yet Jea’s sufferings do not diminish his desire to spread the gospel but only increase his eschatological expectations. While his sufferings are great, his heavenly reward is much greater. When he is threatened by a sea captain who would not pay him his earned wages, Jea describes the victory he receives over this situation as a divine deliverance that comes to him because “There is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit [Rom. 8:1]” (79). Jea understands God to be on the side of the oppressed, and thus on his side. And so every victory comes about because God delivers those who follow after the divine call.
That Jea views himself and his travels in Pauline terms comes to the fore in the way he portrays his preaching ministry. Like Paul, he proclaims Jesus and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2) (79), sees his labor as not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58) (56, 75), and describes his preaching as weak, though God’s power manifests miracles for those who hear him (1 Cor. 1:27, 2:1–4) (82).138 Even when he faces opposition to his preaching, he characterizes those that oppose him with Pauline language. For example, when he preaches in Sunderland, two preachers contest his presence and one attempts to berate him before the congregation, chastising the people for coming out to hear Jea speak. In his autobiography, Jea describes this man as not being “led by the Spirit of God [Rom. 8:14]” and as operating in the “works of the flesh” and not in the “fruit of the Spirit” (62).139
Furthermore, he deliberately patterns his itinerant ministry after Paul by seeking employment when traveling in order to earn his own money. He writes, “I had engaged myself on board of the above ship [The Prince of Boston], as cook, for seventeen Spanish dollars per month, in order that I should not be burdensome to the church of God; and this was the way I acted whenever I travelled; for, as St. Paul saith, ‘I would rather labour with my hands than be burdensome to the church’” (79).140 Jea models himself after the apostle, working with his own hands so that he may not cause the church undue stress.
Jea’s extraordinary encounters with the divine realm lead to a preaching career that spans several countries. He employs Pauline passages in a number of ways in his narrative, to describe suffering, salvation, his ministry, the Spirit, and those in opposition to him. To be sure, Jea incorporates a number of other biblical passages in his narrative, for Scripture itself is central to his story. Yet Paul and his words take on special roles in Jea’s book, for he sees himself, like Paul, engaged in spiritual battle and laboring in behalf of the church.
At first Jea rebels against Christianity, at least the version practiced by his enslavers, but yet ultimately ends up embracing the faith because he encounters a God who embraces him and makes God’s self real to him through conversion. He eventually recognizes that the Christianity adhered to by his enslavers was not real Christianity, describing their misuse of the faith in Pauline terms: “Their hearts being carnal, as the Scriptures saith, were at enmity with God, not subject to the law of God, neither indeed could be [Rom. 8:7], for they gave themselves up to the works of the flesh, to fulfil it in the lusts thereof [Rom. 13:14; Gal. 5:19]” (8). His enslavers’ carnal hearts revealed that although they attended church, their hearts were not subject to God but instead were focused on their own desires, which led them to act in destructive ways. Moreover, Jea, an enslaved African whom his enslavers declared “had no god,” proves the falsehood of this declaration, for God saves him, teaches him how to read, calls him to preach, and enables him to travel the world proclaiming the gospel.
Jea’s deep desire to read the Bible and the literacy miracle that he receives constitute a miracle that defies everything slavocracy stands for: inferiority of African Americans, the supremacy of white Americans, God’s so-called appointment of black slavery for all time, and the idea that God had no concern for those trapped in slavocracy’s shackles. Henry Louis Gates insightfully remarks, “Jea’s desire, satisfied by divine intervention when all other merely mortal avenues had been closed off by the evils of slavery, was for a bilingual facility with the text of God, a facility that he is able to demonstrate upon demand of the skeptical. It is the mastery of the text of God, alone of all other texts, which leads directly to his legal manumission.”141 As we have seen, this “text of God” flows throughout Jea’s story, shaping his narrative in profound ways.
Significantly, Paul is a means by which Jea interprets his life and the lives of his former enslavers. In regard to the slaveholders, the apostle becomes a way to attempt to explain and to try to understand the incomprehensible—the cruelty they exhibited toward him and the other enslaved Africans. Their “carnal hearts” made it evident that they “did not believe the report God gave of his Son,” which means they could not love, could not see the enslaved Africans as human beings, and so could not rightfully claim and proclaim the title of Christian. In addition, Paul provides the language of judgment, for Jea quotes 2 Corinthians 5:10, “The time is drawing nigh when we must all appear at the bar of God, to give an account of the deeds done in the body” (22). The time of judgment pertains to all who do not repent, including his former enslavers.
As for Jea, Paul enables him to reinterpret his life and demonstrate for the slave “who had no god” the reality of God, the God who comes to him and saves him by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8–9) (25) and makes him a new creature (2 Cor. 5:17) (34). This reinterpretation of his life leads to a reinterpretation of his purpose. He goes forth in an apostolic role with Paul’s language providing the means to describe his apostolic wanderings and sufferings for the sake of the gospel. Jea’s experience provides a stunning move from the Paul used to keep him in slavery to the Paul he reappropriates as a preaching companion and a conveyor of freedom and liberation.
As some enslaved Africans cited Paul in petitions and others, like Hammon, Haynes, and Jea, used the apostle to argue on multiple levels for black identity, black agency, and black liberation, a prominent black woman preacher named Jarena Lee claimed Paul’s voice to validate her call to proclaim the gospel.142
In her narrative The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving An Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript, Written by Herself, Lee relates that she was born free on February 11, 1783, in Cape May, New Jersey, and that at seven years old she separated from her parents and became a servant maid to the Sharp family—being hired out was a common practice among poor blacks—who lived about sixty miles from her birthplace.143 Later she moved to Philadelphia, where she has a dramatic conversion experience, an experience facilitated by a deep sense of her sin and unworthiness. At first, the weight of her sin causes her to contemplate suicide by drowning, but the “unseen arm of God” mysteriously stops her.144 She subsequently hears Pastor Richard Allen of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church preach and decides to join his congregation. Three weeks after this decision she hears another sermon and is “gloriously converted to God.” She describes the event:
Three weeks from that day, my soul was gloriously converted to God, under preaching, at the very outset of the sermon … when there appeared to my view, in the centre of the heart one sin; and this was malice, against one particular individual, who had strove deeply to injure me…. At this discovery I said, Lord I forgive every creature. That instant, it appeared to me, as if a garment, which had entirely enveloped my whole person, even to my fingers ends, split at the crown of my head, and was stripped away from me, passing like a shadow, from my sight—when the glory of God seemed to cover me in its stead…. That moment, though hundreds were present, I did leap to my feet and declare that God, for Christ’s sake, had pardoned the sins of my soul. Great was the ecstasy of my mind, for I felt that not only the sin of malice was pardoned, but all other sins were swept away together. That day was the first when my heart had believed, and my tongue had made confession unto salvation [Rom. 10:9–10]…. For a few moments I had power to exhort sinners, and to tell of the wonders and of the goodness of him who had clothed me with his salvation. During this, the minister was silent, until my soul felt its duty had been performed, when he declared another witness of the power of Christ to forgive sins on earth, was manifest in my conversion. (29)
In her narration of her conversion, Lee portrays an ecstatic encounter with God and employs Pauline language to depict a fusion of divine and human wills. The glory of God covers her and empowers her, as demonstrated by her physical response. She physically leaps and proclaims publicly her salvation, illustrating an empowerment of her own agency in the salvific process, a process that involves both an inner and an outer transformation, for she believes in her heart and confesses with her mouth. God removes the sin of malice that once covered her like a garment and transforms her life.
Three months after her conversion, Lee learns about the gift of sanctification, which she understands as the “entire sanctification of the soul to God” (33). This “special sense of empowerment” was called the second blessing in the Methodist tradition.145 According to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, once an individual repented, conversion happened.146 After conversion or justification, then the believer received the gift of sanctification, which included “cleansing, empowerment, and habitation” of the Spirit.147 Desiring this beautiful gift, Lee begins to call upon the Lord to show her all that was in her heart that was not right with God, for she wants to “know more of the right way of the Lord” (33). After seeking God in prayer for almost three months, Lee receives the gift of sanctification, despite what she believes is Satan’s attempt to stop her from receiving it. The following citation illustrates the spiritual struggle Lee undergoes to experience this new level of intimacy with God.
But when this voice whispered in my heart, saying, “Pray for sanctification,” I again bowed in the same place, at the same time, and said, “Lord sanctify my soul for Christ’s sake?” That very instant, as if lightning had darted through me, I sprang to my feet, and cried, “The Lord has sanctified my soul!” There was none to hear this but the angels who stood around to witness my joy—and Satan, whose malice raged the more. That Satan was there, I knew; for no sooner had I cried out, “The Lord has sanctified my soul,” than there seemed another voice behind me, saying, “No, it is too great a work to be done.” But another spirit said, “Bow down for the witness—I received it—thou art sanctified!” The first I knew of myself after that, I was standing in the yard with my hands spread out, and looking with my face toward heaven. I now ran into the house and told them what had happened to me, when, as it were, a new rush of the same ecstasy came upon me, and caused me to feel as if I were in an ocean of light and bliss. During this, I stood perfectly still, the tears rolling in a flood from my eyes. So great was the joy, that it is past description. There is no language that can describe it, except that which was heard by St. Paul, when he was caught up to the third heaven, and heard words which it was not lawful to utter [2 Cor. 12:4]. (34)
Lee’s reception of the gift of sanctification is such a powerful experience for her that she describes it in cosmic and supernatural terms. The divine power felt like lightning going through her body, and her sensitivity to the spirit world is evident in that she experiences this divine engagement in the presence of angels as well as Satan. Supernatural forces, both good and evil, witness her divine episode. Moreover, although she tries to describe the ecstatic encounter as an ocean of light and bliss, she recognizes the limitations of human words to depict this foray into the divine realm. In fact, she recognizes that her experience parallels that of Paul, who, when he traveled to the third heaven, heard things that were not lawful to speak. Similar to the apostle, Lee’s journey into the divine intimates a chasm between human and divine speech, a chasm that cannot be completely overcome, for the language of the holy realm cannot be fully expressed in the earthly sphere. Nevertheless, Paul’s language functions as a way for Lee to attempt to articulate her conversion and sanctification experiences, episodes that demonstrate a transport to another realm where human and divine meet and the human being is forever transformed. Part of this transformation is, as Joy Bostic notes, indicated in the imagery of lightning in Lee’s mystical experience, for the lightning signifies the “intensity and pervasiveness of divine illumination” that Lee experiences. Additionally, the mystical event bestows a new consciousness of herself that is not “bound by the controlling images or narrow constructs generated out of the matrix of domination,” for now Lee views herself and her life as directed by God’s purpose and mission.148
After narrating her conversion and sanctification, Lee relates another divine encounter that transforms her life and provides the basis for her call to preach. She hears a voice that says, “Go preach the Gospel!” and she replies, “No one will believe me.” The voice then responds, “Preach the Gospel; I will put words in your mouth, and will turn your enemies to become your friends” (35). Interestingly, Lee believes that this voice may have come from Satan, because she had read that “[Satan] could transform himself into an angel of light, for the purpose of deception” (35). This Pauline text, 2 Corinthians 11:14, becomes the basis for her doubt that the call she receives is real and from God. The apostle’s recognition that Satan disguises himself as an angel of God compels Lee to guard against any type of deceit and to seek confirmation of what she hears.
Consequently, she goes into a secret place and asks God whether or not she is being deceived. God answers by giving her a vision of a pulpit and a Bible laying upon it being presented to her. This confirmation causes Lee to speak to Richard Allen, the aforementioned pastor in charge of the Methodist African Society, regarding her experience, and he tells her that the Methodist discipline “did not call for women preachers” (36). At his words she felt relief for a moment and then realized that the “holy energy which burned within [her] as a fire, began to be smothered.” She then proceeds to chastise church government and bylaws that do not correspond to the divine will or the divine word, for Lee declares:
O how careful ought we to be, lest through our by-laws of church government and discipline, we bring into disrepute even the word of life. For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God. And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper, for a woman to preach? seeing the Saviour died for the woman as well as the man. If a man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one? as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear. (36)
Lee echoes Scripture to proclaim that although God does the impossible, a woman preaching should be considered a natural phenomenon since Christ died for both women and men, and as a result both should be able to proclaim the good news. If one holds that only men can preach, then Christ must have died only for men, which contradicts Holy Scripture. Thus, she speaks out against church tradition that contradicts the Word of God and lifts up Mary as the first preacher: “Did not Mary first preach the risen Saviour, and is not the doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity—hangs not all our hope on this, as argued by St. Paul [1 Cor. 15:12–22]? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel? for she preached the resurrection of the crucified Son of God” (36).149 Lee argues here that Mary is the first preacher, since Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 contends that the resurrection is central to the Christian faith and that believers’ hope rests upon this fact. Since this is the case, Mary, a woman, becomes the first proclaimer of the gospel because she declares Jesus’s resurrection. In an ironic twist, Lee utilizes the apostle, often employed to disavow a woman’s right to preach, to condone and sanction women preaching, for Mary proclaims what is in the apostle’s eyes the very heart of the gospel. Lee argues that God can inspire a female to preach the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus just as well as God can inspire a man. In fact, that God calls women is evidenced in Lee’s own ministry, for when she proclaims the gospel, sinners are awakened and converted. She reveals that many families have come to her and professed that through her they came to receive the gospel, and she confesses that God speaks through her, a “poor coloured female instrument” (37).
Despite these powerful affirmations of her ministry, Lee describes a time in her life when she was afflicted by an inner turmoil that consisted of the fear of losing her soul and falling from grace (37). She constantly prayed about this torment and finally received a vision from God that set her at ease about the state of her soul:
There appeared a form of fire, about the size of a man’s hand, as I was on my knees; at the same moment, there appeared to the eye of faith a man robed in a white garment, from the shoulders down to the feet; from him a voice proceeded, saying: “Thou shalt never return from the cross.” Since that time I have never doubted, but believe that god will keep me until the day of redemption. Now I could adopt the very language of St. Paul, and say that nothing could have separated my soul from the love of god, which is in Christ Jesus [Rom. 8:35–39]. From that time, 1807, until the present, 1833, I have not yet doubted the power and goodness of God to keep me from falling, through sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth. (37–38)
The cross, which is central to Paul’s understanding of the gospel, becomes the means by which Lee’s assurance regarding her soul takes place; she can “never return from the cross.” The cross is God’s power for her salvation and her deliverance from her tormenting fears, and it solidifies her stance before God, enabling her to proclaim that now she “could adopt the very language of St. Paul,” to declare the inability of her soul to become separated from God’s love. The apostle’s words, then, become her own, empowering her to articulate the depth of God’s love for her, a love that removes her fears, silences her doubts, and refuses to let her go.
Eight years after her first request to preach, Lee makes another appeal to Richard Allen, who had in the meantime become Bishop Allen. She writes, “It was now eight years since I had made application to be permitted to preach the gospel, during which time I had only been allowed to exhort, and even this privilege but seldom” (42). Lee describes a significant moment in her life that changes her ministerial status. During a service at Bethel church in which Rev. Richard Williams was the designated preacher, Lee ends up preaching the sermon because, when Williams begins to speak from Jonah 2:9,
he seemed to have lost the spirit; when in the same instant, I sprang, as by an altogether supernatural impulse, to my feet, when I was aided from above to give an exhortation on the very text which my brother Williams had taken. I told them that I was like Jonah; for it had been then nearly eight years since the Lord had called me to preach his gospel to the fallen sons and daughters of Adam’s race [Rom. 5:14–19; 1 Cor. 15:22], but that I had lingered like him, and delayed to go at the bidding of the Lord, and warn those who are as deeply guilty as were the people of Nineveh. During the exhortation, God made manifest his power in a manner sufficient to show the world that I was called to labour according to my ability, and the grace given unto me [Rom. 12:3; 15:15; cf. 1 Cor. 3:10; Eph. 3:2, 7], in the vineyard of the good husbandman. I now sat down, scarcely knowing what I had done, being frightened. I imagined, that for this indecorum, as I feared it might be called, I should be expelled from the church. But instead of this, the Bishop rose up in the assembly, and related that I had called upon him eight years before, asking to be permitted to preach, and that he had put me off; but that he now as much believed that I was called to that work, as any of the preachers present. These remarks greatly strengthened me. (44–45)
The “supernatural impulse” that empowers Lee to speak during this service is the same supernatural impulse that enabled her to speak publicly years earlier about her conversion. In that earlier instance, during Lee’s proclamation, “the [male] minister was silent” (29), and here again, Lee’s divine empowerment mutes the male minister, which represents a divine interruption of the status quo.150 Echoing Paul’s belief in the universal effect of Adam’s action (“the fallen sons and daughters of Adam’s race”), Lee believes that her ministry is universal as well; God calls her to preach to all people, black, white, male, and female. Here Lee connects her calling to Jonah as well as to Paul, demonstrating that for her both figures help to depict her preaching mission. As God bestowed grace upon Paul, now this grace rests upon Lee to proclaim the good news to “the fallen sons and daughters of Adam’s race” who are similar to the guilty “people of Nineveh.” After this incident Allen permits Lee to preach and hold prayer meetings in her home, and in other homes upon invitation, yet interestingly enough he never ordains her.151 Lee’s ministry, however, expands from meetings in homes to more public places, such as schools, and she preaches to racially mixed audiences with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Throughout her autobiography, along with narration of divine encounters, Lee discloses a life filled with chronic illness and battles with various sicknesses. In addition, tragedy permeates her story for, in a span of six years, five members of her family die, including her husband, which leaves her widowed with two small children to support. However, she writes of her dependence upon God, who said, “I will be the widow’s God, and a father to the fatherless” (Ps. 68:5) (41). In the midst of such hardships, she proclaims the gospel and travels as far as Canada and the Northwest Territory and becomes well known for her powerful sermons.152 In 1835 she confesses that she has “traveled over seven hundred miles and preached almost the same number of sermons.”153
In the final pages of her autobiography, Lee discloses how, after fourteen years, she desires to return to Cape May, the place of her birth. She compares her return to Cape May to Paul, writing that “the Lord sent me, as Saul of Tarsus was sent to Jerusalem, to preach the same gospel which he had neglected and despised before his conversion” (46). Her ministry in Cape May, though meeting with some opposition, flourishes, and lives are transformed by her preaching. People come with “curiosity to hear the coloured woman preacher” (46), and she preaches to mixed congregations consisting of “both coloured and white” (47). In fact, she encounters a man, a slaveholder, who believes that black people do not have souls, but through her preaching his mind is changed, although “whether he became a converted man or not” she did not know (47). In her closing remarks, Lee recognizes that her narrative is filled with supernatural encounters and “operations of the Spirit,” and that such narrations may seem improper or incredulous to some who read her story (48). Yet she maintains that just as a blind person is able to use other senses more acutely than can a person with sight, so has Lee developed her “Spirit” sense, if you will, and is able to discern and feel the Spirit’s leading in a way that differs from those who do not develop this capacity. She develops this ability by watching “the more closely the operations of the Spirit” and consequently learns how the Spirit leads. The Spirit, she insists, always leads her in concert with the Scriptures, as she understands them. She concludes this section with Pauline language, declaring that “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God—Rom. viii.14” (48). Her inclusion of this passage proclaims that this Pauline language describes her identity: she is a child of God to whom and through whom the Spirit speaks. The Spirit of God leads her, authorizes her, and demonstrates that she belongs to God.
William L. Andrews writes that Jarena Lee’s autobiography argued for women’s spiritual authority that challenged the conventional female roles of her day in slave and free states, among blacks and whites.154 In fact, the “American ‘cult of true womanhood’” defined a woman’s place as in the home, and activity outside of that realm that could interfere with her duties to her husband and children was considered dangerous.155 The idea of a woman’s place carried over to the organization of the church, and women were given specific positions considered “suitable” for them. For example, when Lee first approached Allen about her call to preach, he informed her that “women had done much good by way of exhortation,” which meant that he saw her in the role of an exhorter, a position given to women because it was not empowered with the authority of ordination. Exhorters held the lowest status in the church’s hierarchical structure, and led Sunday school and prayer meetings, but in church services they only spoke in response to the biblical text chosen that day by the presiding minister. Consequently, “as exhorters women remained dependent on the male leadership of the church for access to the ears of a congregation and to the Bible itself.”156 Yet Lee’s autobiography demonstrates that her ministry expanded beyond this imposed status.
Lee’s narrative, therefore, is significant because it contends for women’s spiritual authority and challenges conventional ideas about womanhood, but also because it is the “earliest and most detailed firsthand information we have about the traditional roles of women in organized black religious life in the United States and about the ways in which resistance to those roles began to manifest itself.”157 This earliest and most detailed account, as we have seen, is fertile ground in ascertaining how Paul’s language early on becomes a tool to resist these conventional female roles as well as racist beliefs and stereotypes. Exploring Lee’s groundbreaking autobiography provides a glimpse into how she faced resistance to her noncompliance of traditional women roles and how she employed Paul’s language to resist the resistance.
For Jarena Lee, Pauline language allows her to narrate her divine encounters and her life as a Spirit-filled woman whose life and call God orchestrates and ordains. The apostle’s language becomes her own, for she claims it and transforms it through her experiences as a black woman daring to proclaim the gospel in the midst of a society that opposes her. The Spirit’s work in her ministry allowed her to change minds, such as that of the slave-holder who believed that blacks had no souls, and the Spirit, through her, demonstrated that colored females spoke for the Divine as well. That she, a black woman, could have an ecstatic experience similar to Paul’s meant that such experiences were not limited to Paul alone, or by extension, to men alone, but women, including black women, were admitted to the divine realm, and not just admitted but welcomed. God’s words ring loud and clear to Lee’s readers, “Thou art sanctified!” Lee’s use of the apostle’s words signify the reality of divine interruptions that can take place in the midst of human oppression.
Like Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw is a black woman preacher who appears on the American landscape during this period.158 Elaw was born free around 1790 near Philadelphia but became a servant to a Quaker couple and endured “harsh fieldwork on an early nineteenth-century farm.”159 She was one of the few black women during her time to proclaim the gospel in the midst of great adversity from both women and men because of her gender and race. Elaw appeared with her fellow sister preacher, Jarena Lee, at least on one occasion,160 and although she preached numerous sermons, unfortunately none of them survive. In her autobiography, Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour: Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America [Written By Herself], in which she details her conversion, her call to preach, and her subsequent ministry, she extensively adopts and adapts Paul’s language.161 Throughout her narrative she describes various supernatural encounters with God, what some today would call mystical experiences.
From the beginning of her autobiography until the end, Elaw consistently employs Pauline language to describe her life and her profound supernatural episodes, and repeatedly depicts her call and her ministry in terms of Paul and his ministry. Indeed, the verse displayed on the cover of her autobiography, 2 Corinthians 3:5 (“Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God”), presages the extensive use of Pauline language that follows.162 That she views herself in relationship to the apostle appears prominently in the way she writes the dedication of her narrative. She dedicates her autobiography to her friends in England and writes the prefatory dedication in the form of a Pauline epistle. She begins the dedicatory letter with a Pauline greeting and closes it with a complete quotation of 2 Corinthians 13:14. In addition, the content of the letter employs several significant Pauline Scriptures. Elaw describes herself as an example of power in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9), and, as one called by God, she takes on the mantle of the apostle to exhort her English friends to “walk worthy of the high vocation wherewith you are called” (Eph. 4:1) (51), to “renounce the love of money, for it is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10), and to build their foundation upon Jesus, “the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20) (51–52). This prefatory letter, along with her choice of 2 Corinthians 3:5 for the title page verse, indicates the importance of the apostle to Elaw’s understanding of her life and call.
Elaw’s autobiography begins with an account of her conversion. At the beginning of her conversion experience she suffers from an acute sense of her own sinfulness. Echoing Pauline language, she relates that she felt a “godly sorrow [2 Cor. 7:10] for sin in having grieved my God by a course of disobedience to His commands” (55). At the beginning of this deep sense of agony, Elaw has a dream of judgment that disturbs her so much that she discusses it with her mistress, who advises her to forget about it. After this event, she begins attending Methodist meetings, from which she “derived great satisfaction,” and she also attends Quaker meetings, at which she “often found comfort from the word ministered by them” (55). She prays daily to God regarding the assurance of the forgiveness of her sins, and God responds to her prayer by bestowing upon her a vision. Elaw describes the experience in the following way:
One evening, whilst singing one of the songs of Zion, I distinctly saw the Lord Jesus approach me with open arms, and a most divine and heavenly smile upon his countenance. As he advanced towards me, I felt that his very looks spoke, and said, “Thy prayer is accepted, I own thy name.” From that day to the present I have never entertained a doubt of the manifestation of his love to my soul. Yea, I may say further than this; because, at the time when this occurrence took place, I was milking in the cow stall; and the manifestation of his presence was so clearly apparent, that even the beast of the stall turned her head and bowed herself upon the ground. Oh, never, never shall I forget the scene…. I might have tried to imagine, or persuade myself, perhaps that it had been a vision presented merely to the eye of my mind; but, the beast of the stall gave forth her evidence to the reality of the heavenly appearance; for she turned her head and looked round as I did; and when she saw, she bowed her knees and cowered down upon the ground. I was overwhelmed with astonishment at the sight, but the thing was certain and beyond all doubt. I write as before God and Christ, and declare, as I shall give an account to my Judge at the great day, that every thing I have written in this little book, has been written with conscientious veracity and scrupulous adherence to truth. After this wonderful manifestation of my condescending Saviour, the peace of God which passeth understanding [Phil. 4:7] was communicated to my heart; and joy in the Holy Ghost [Rom. 14:17], to a degree, at the last, unutterable by my tongue [2 Cor. 12:4] and indescribable by my pen; it was beyond my comprehension; but, from that happy hour, my soul was set at glorious liberty [Rom. 8:21]; and, like the Ethiopic eunuch, I went on my way rejoicing in the blooming prospects of a better inheritance with the saints in light. This, my dear reader, was the manner of my soul’s conversion to God. (56–57)
Elaw’s dramatic conversion experience is so extraordinary that nature bears witness to her divine encounter, and the previous torment that characterized her existence lifts, resulting in an indescribable peace and joy. Paul’s language enables Elaw to depict her conversion as one of divine origin, divine experience, and divine transformation. Like Paul in Acts, who has a personal encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, Elaw has a personal encounter with Jesus, who opens his arms and receives her as his own.163 The experience has such a profound impact upon her that she further writes about the experience in the language of the apostle, “The love of God being shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit [Rom. 5:5], and my soul transported with heavenly peace and joy in God, all the former hardships which pertained to my circumstances and situation vanished” (57).
For Elaw, her conversion bestows upon her peace, joy, love, liberty, and a new identity as one adopted by God, with whom she communes intimately and habitually. This deep intimacy with God, which she describes as “habitual communion,” is intricately connected to her identity as an adopted child (58): “My delights were to follow the leadings and obey the dictates of the Holy Spirit, and glorify with my body and spirit my Father who is in heaven. I enjoyed richly the spirit of adoption [Rom. 8:15]: knowing myself to be an adopted child of divine love, I claimed God as my Father, and his Son Jesus as my dear friend, who adhered to me more faithfully in goodness than a brother: and with my blessed Saviour, Redeemer, Intercessor, and Patron, I enjoyed a delightsome heavenly communion, such as the world has never conceived of” (60).
Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit as the spirit of adoption enables Elaw to describe her new identity and to own this new identity as completely hers. Elaw is part of the divine family, for she is God’s child, Jesus’s friend, and with the Holy Spirit’s guidance she gains access to divine realms that surpass worldly existence.
In 1817 Elaw attends a camp meeting, where she has another profound encounter with God, which propels her into public religious life. Utilizing Pauline language, Elaw describes the encounter:
It was at one of these meetings that God was pleased to separate my soul unto Himself, to sanctify me as a vessel designed for honour, made meet for the master’s use [2 Tim. 2:21]. Whether I was in the body, or whether I was out of the body, on that auspicious day, I cannot say [2 Cor. 12:2–3]; but this I do know, that at the conclusion of a most powerful sermon delivered by one of the ministers from the platform, and while the congregation were in prayer, I became so overpowered with the presence of God, that I sank down upon the ground, and laid there for a considerable time; and while I was thus prostrate on the earth, my spirit seemed to ascend [2 Cor. 12:2, 4] up into the clear circle of the sun’s disc; and surrounded and engulphed in the glorious effulgence of his rays, I distinctly heard a voice speak unto me, which said, “Now thou art sanctified; and I will show thee what thou must do.” … For the space of several hours I appeared not to be on earth, but far above all earthly things. I had not at this time offered up public prayer on the camp ground; but when the prayer meeting afterwards commenced, the Lord opened my mouth in public prayer…. I was after this very frequently requested to present my petitions to the throne of grace [Heb. 4:16] in the public meetings at the camp … and before the meeting at this camp closed, it was revealed to me by the Holy Spirit [1 Cor. 2:10; Eph. 3:5], that like another Phoebe [Rom. 16:1], or the matrons of the apostolic societies, I must employ myself in visiting families, and in speaking personally to the members thereof, of the salvation and eternal interests of their souls, visit the sick, and attend upon other of the errands and services of the Lord; which I afterwards cheerfully did, not confining my visits to the poor only, but extending them to the rich also, and even to those who sit in high places in the state; and the Lord was with me in the work to own and bless my labours. Like Enoch, I walked and talked with God. (66–67)
As God did with Paul, God separates Elaw and sanctifies her for divine use. In addition, her own revelatory experience echoes that of the apostle, for she too does not know whether she was in or out of the body when she had her divine encounter.164 Similar to the apostle who ascends to the third heaven, Elaw experiences rapture into the divine sphere and receives the ability to pray publicly in such a powerful way that this first public display results in frequent invitations to pray publicly thereafter. Elaw’s close communion with the Spirit appears again when she relates the Spirit’s disclosure that she, like Phoebe, to whom Paul refers in Romans 16:1 as a minister, has work to do. Her subsequent ministry, she informs her readers, extends to the poor, the wealthy, and the renown. Her experience of heavenly transport facilitates her ensuing identifications with Paul, Phoebe, and Enoch. God’s sanctification of her and her revelatory encounter make it possible for her to be like Phoebe and grant her the ability to see herself, not only as a Paul figure, but also as similar to Enoch, another biblical figure who experiences divine transport. This particular Pauline experience becomes an opportunity for her to identify with other biblical persons.
Significantly, the Pauline experience gives her public voice and public recognition. In a time when women were expected to follow conventional roles, and black women especially were denied public forums in which to speak, Elaw’s Pauline-like experience authorizes her and empowers her with voice and witness. As a result of her first public prayer ministry, people at subsequent camp meetings approach her and ask her to pray for them, which demonstrates a public recognition of her new identity and status. In a society that often refused to recognize the humanity of blacks and denied that they possessed souls, Elaw becomes a disruptive figure who breaks societal rules of what is proper for women and African Americans. Thus, her ministry mirrors that of her divine encounter. As in her divine experience where she contravened the boundaries between earthly and heavenly, so too her ministry breaks boundaries, those between male and female, black and white.
Another extraordinary event Elaw describes in her narrative is her visit to her dying sister, who, on her deathbed, informs Elaw that God has called Elaw to preach the gospel. Upon hearing her ill sister’s statement, Elaw is overwhelmed and confused. Even after her sister’s death, Elaw struggles to accept the call, and she narrates the great trial this call to preach inflicted upon her. “Notwithstanding the plain and pointed declaration of my sister, and though the Scriptures assert that not many wise, rich, and noble are called; but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty [1 Cor. 1:27], I could not at the time imagine it possible that God should select and appoint so poor and ignorant a creature as myself to be his messenger” (75).
Finding Paul’s words as a way to characterize herself as unprepared for ministry, Elaw questions God’s call upon her to proclaim the gospel, since she believes herself to be unqualified for the vocation. As a result, she does not preach and becomes ill for two years. Viewing this illness as God’s way of chastising her for disobedience, she enters into deep prayer. God grants her another vision, promises her healing, and informs her that she will visit another camp meeting, at which she will know God’s will for her life (76–79). Elaw miraculously recovers, and during her visit to the camp meeting she is overcome by the presence of God again, but this time she begins proclaiming the gospel:
I immediately went outside and stood at the door of the tent; and in an instant I began as it were involuntarily, or from an internal prompting, with a loud voice to exhort the people who yet were remaining near the preacher’s stand; and in the presence of a more numerous assemblage of ministers than I had ever seen together before; as if God had called forth witnesses from heaven, and witnesses on earth … to witness on this day to my commission, and the qualifications He bestowed on me to preach his holy Gospel. How appropriate to me was the text which had been preached from just before, “Now, then, we are ambassadors for Christ” [2 Cor. 5:20]. Our dear ministers stood gazing and listening with wonder and astonishment; and the tears flowed abundantly down their cheeks while they witnessed the wonderful works of God. After I had finished my exhortation, I sat down and closed my eyes; and there appeared a light shining round about me [Acts 9:3] as well as within me … and out of that light, the same identical voice which had spoken to me on the bed of sickness many months before, spoke again to me on the camp ground, and said, “Now thou knowest the will of God concerning thee; thou must preach the gospel; and must travel far and wide.” This is my commission for the work of the ministry, which I received, not from mortal man [Gal. 1:11–12], but from the voice of an invisible and heavenly personage sent from God. (82)
Elaw’s inauguration into her formal preaching ministry begins at this camp meeting, where she preaches the gospel before ministers who gaze at her in wonder and amazement. Like Paul, upon whom a light shined in his dramatic call in Acts, a light shines around Elaw, designating her as God’s chosen vessel for this time and place.165 Furthermore, similar to the apostle, who declared that his apostleship and gospel did not come from human beings but from God, she too contends the divine origin of her call and ministry. Her exhortation before these crowds demonstrates her appointment as God’s ambassador for Christ.
Just as her call mirrors Paul, so does the opposition she endures. In depicting how her friends treated her once she accepted her preaching mission, Elaw writes, “Like Joseph, I was hated for my dreams; and like Paul, none stood with me [2 Tim. 4:16]” (83). However, despite opposition from her friends and her husband, Elaw perseveres and continues to proclaim the gospel, even traveling to the slaveholding states where at any moment she could have been captured and enslaved: “When I arrived in the slave states, Satan much worried and distressed my soul with the fear of being arrested and sold for a slave, which their laws would have warranted, on account of my complexion and features” (91). William Andrews notes the particular danger Elaw faced, for in the South it was lawful to jail and sell any “free Negro who could not prove his or her free status.”166 For example, in 1840 the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that “In the case of a person visibly appearing to be a negro, the presumption is that he is a slave.”167 Along with such laws that had the potential to seriously hurt Elaw’s ministry in the slave states, some states like Virginia had additional regulations that forbade any black person, free or slave, to conduct religious meetings.168 Elaw could have received a public beating of thirty-nine lashes for her ministerial activity.169 Despite her fears and the real dangers she faced, Elaw continued to preach among the enslaved Africans and the slaveholders, and her ministry was quite successful, for many people turned to God and were converted. Using Pauline language to depict her ministry in these states, Elaw declares that just as the apostle is an earthen vessel, so too is she (2 Cor. 4:7), and as an effectual door was opened for Paul, God likewise opened the door for her to preach when she traveled (1 Cor. 16:9).170 In addition, Paul’s weakness that displays the excellency of God’s power is similar to Elaw’s weakness carried in her “poor coloured” frame that allows God’s strength to prevail in her (2 Cor. 4:7) (92).
Elaw chronicles the astonishment among whites of seeing a black woman teaching and preaching with words from 1 Corinthians 1:27: “Many of the slave holders … thought it surpassingly strange that a person (and a female) belonging to the same family stock with their poor debased, uneducated, coloured slaves, should come into their territories and teach the enlightened proprietors the knowledge of God [Rom. 11:33; 1 Cor. 15:34; 2 Cor. 10:5; Col. 1:10]…. But God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty [1 Cor. 1:27]” (92). She recognizes that her words are not eloquent but, in the words of the apostle, are in demonstration of the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:4), for the “spirit and power of Christ” enable her to “[make] manifest the secrets of [her audience’s] hearts” and to tell them “all things that ever they did” (92). Andrews insightfully observes that Elaw compares herself to Jesus in Samaria when he told the woman at the well “all the things that ever [she] did” in the Gospel of John ( John 4:7–30). Elaw, Andrews says, identifies herself with Christ’s saving mission to the Samaritans.171
While this is likely, it is also likely that here, in light of her extensive use of Paul, Elaw views herself as operating in one of the gifts of the Spirit, prophecy, that Paul outlines in 1 Corinthians 14. Prophecy is one of the supernatural χάρισμα (charisma) Paul describes as happening in the Corinthian congregation. Paul says a person on the receiving end of this gift experiences the following: “And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face, he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth” (1 Cor. 14:25). Thus, Elaw, by reporting what is happening in her ministry with the language “[make] manifest the secrets of their hearts,” depicts herself as a prophet who through the Spirit of God can reveal the secrets of those to whom she preaches. What is more, in the Corinthian context in which Paul writes, those who hear the prophecy will believe that the prophet comes from God, since the person can reveal someone’s inner thoughts. This context also fits Elaw’s situation, since as a black woman in a slave state, divine operation of the Spirit in the form of prophecy validates that “God is in [her] of a truth.” Indeed, Elaw relates the triumph of her ministry in Pauline terms: “I became such a prodigy to this people that I was watched wherever I went…. The people became increasingly earnest in their inquiries after truth; and great was the number of those who were translated out of the empire of darkness into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son [Col. 1:13]” (92–93). More than likely, Elaw merges the Samaritan narrative with that of the Pauline words on the gift of prophecy. Hence, she portrays herself following in the footsteps of Christ, in that just as he embarked on a salvific mission to the Samaritans, she undertakes a mission to those in the slave states.172 Equally significant is that, like the preacher from Tarsus, the Spirit endows her with an authority and legitimacy given by the Spirit’s powerful presence.
Along with the Spirit-led ability to proclaim the gospel, Elaw relates that miracles occurred in her ministry. On one particular occasion, a woman named Mrs. Adams became very ill and requested to see her. Interestingly, when Elaw goes to visit her, she herself is very sick and faints once she arrives at Mrs. Adams’s home. Once Elaw recovers from her fainting spell, she enters Mrs. Adams’s chamber, where all her family are gathered around her expecting her to die at any moment. Elaw prays and describes the time of prayer as one “of much power; and all the family were bathed in tears” (110). As she leaves the home, Mrs. Adams’s sister asks Elaw whether her sister will live or die, and Elaw replies, “No, I think she will recover, for God showed me this in the time of prayer.” Miraculously, Mrs. Adams does recover, and Elaw describes how this event strengthened the veracity of her ministry: “Mrs. Adams was vastly better…. This circumstance made a great impression on the inhabitants of the city, who thought it strange, indeed, that God, in answer to my prayer, should heal the sick: the intelligence flew from street to street, that Mrs. Adams was recovered; and those reverend gentleman, who had so strenuously exerted themselves to silence my ministry, were themselves completely disconcerted, and their objections silenced” (110–11). Here Elaw relates the ironic outcome of the miracle—those who attempted to silence her are now silenced.
Such miraculous events as well as her own divine encounters with God enable Elaw to resist the arguments that women should not preach and that Paul taught that women should be silent in church. In several places in her autobiography, Elaw addresses such interpretations, for she often encountered them in opposition to her ministry. She writes, “It is true that in the ordinary course of Church arrangement and order, the Apostle Paul laid it down as a rule, that females should not speak in the church, nor be suffered to teach [1 Cor. 14:34–35; 1 Tim. 2:12]; but the Scriptures make it evident that this rule was not intended to limit the extraordinary directions of the Holy Ghost, in reference to female Evangelists, or oracular sisters; nor to be rigidly observed in peculiar circumstances” (124). For Elaw, the Spirit’s profound presence and operation in the lives of women indicated that the rule Paul enacted was not eternally binding. In fact, Elaw believes that “Scriptures make it evident” that this rule is not binding since women preachers and ministers appear throughout the New Testament. In regard to Phoebe, Elaw states, “St. Paul himself attests that Phoebe was a servant or deaconess of the Church at Cenchrea; and as such was employed by the Church to manage some of their affairs; and it was strange indeed, if she was required to receive the commissions of the church in mute silence” (124).
Elaw lists other women in ministry in Scripture, such as the four daughters of Philip who were prophets and women that Paul says labored with him in the gospel, such as Priscilla, Tryphena, sisters of Nereus, and the mother of Rufus. For Elaw, the apostle’s words of silence in 1 Corinthians 14:34 were given to “a church” that, because of its “disorders and excesses,” needed “stringent rules for its proper regulation” (124–25). However, those who think these regulations given to a church apply to the church are gravely mistaken, for “those brethren certainly err, who fetter all and every ecclesiastical circumstance, and even the extraordinary inspirations of the Holy Spirit with the regulations given by the apostle to a church” (124; cf. 108–10, 147–48, 155). For Elaw, ascertaining the historical context of the congregation to which Paul wrote these injunctions is significant for understanding the rule’s proper place. Paul wrote these words to a particular church experiencing particular issues. Indeed, the fact that God pours out the Spirit upon women and men and that the Spirit’s presence and power appear in women’s preaching ministry, including hers, indicates that the apostle’s words were not binding for all women, for all churches, and in all times and places.
In addition to her multifaceted identification with Paul, Elaw adopts the Pauline understanding of a two-tier conflict in which a spiritual battle is taking place and strongholds need to be destroyed so that the gospel may reach many (2 Cor. 10:4).173 This spiritual conflict manifests itself in a variety of ways in her life, but particularly in opposition to Elaw’s preaching ministry. Utilizing a number of Pauline references in the following passage, Elaw embraces Paul’s perspective on the spirit world:
The principalities and powers of evil spirits, (Ephes. vi. 12) which Christians have to contend against, which Christ despoiled, (Colos. ii. 15) and which constitute the strength of the empire of darkness, the world of evil spirits, the right hand of the prince of the power of the air, (Ephes. ii. 2) who is the god or deity of this world, (2 Cor. iv. 4); these principalities occasionally obstructed me much; and, by blinding [2 Cor. 4:4] and infatuating the sons of men, inspired them with a hostile zeal against me. This was particularly the case at Hartford; in which city some of the most influential ministers of the Presbyterian body greatly opposed me; and one of them, a Mr. House, resolutely declared that he would have my preaching stopped … but he … imagined a vain thing; for the work was of God, who made bare his arm for the salvation of men by my ministry. Thanks be unto God who always caused me to triumph in Christ; and made manifest the savour of his knowledge by me in every place [2 Cor. 2:14]. (104).
From Paul’s perspective, all believers contend against evil spirits in the spirit world, and Elaw views herself as no exception. According to her, the god of this world blinds people and makes them hostile to her ministry. As the Holy Spirit operates in and through her, so too evil spirits work against her through other people. However, even when opponents like Mr. House try to stop her, they cannot because God makes Elaw victorious over her enemies. Like Paul, through whom God made the divine known in the midst of opposition, so too through Elaw and her ministry God manifests divine knowledge, despite the difficult reality that in “being both black and female, Elaw [was] subject to the petty and profound tyrannies of many groups: black men, white men, and even white women.”174 Although the hostility Elaw experiences comes from different quarters, she nevertheless, through the Spirit, perseveres and prevails.
On one particular preaching occasion, a young man in the audience, upon seeing Elaw ascend the pulpit, acted unseemly. Elaw describes his behavior as indecorous, and “as the people came in he pointed with his finger to me, tittering and laughing” (100). Yet she notes that before the meeting ended, “his laughter was turned to weeping.” After the service, during a dinner conversation with her hosts, she learns that the young man is a renowned slave driver who is also a wellknown drunk, and that “he had never been previously known to evince so much serious attention to a sermon as he had paid to [Elaw’s] discourse … and that his kneeling during the concluding prayer was a matter of surprise to them” (100). Upon hearing this information, Elaw explains how she felt in Pauline terms: “My mind was greatly moved with evangelic interest for this young man: and, like Paul for the Galatians, I travailed in birth for him (Gal. 4:19)” (100–101). The significance of this maternal imagery by Paul in Galatians 4:19 has been noted, most ardently, by female biblical scholars, for Paul employs this language to signify an apocalyptic transformation, the in-breaking of God’s divine invasion of liberation.175 Paul’s intense labor for the Galatians generates Elaw’s own intense labor for the young man, whom she believes needs salvation. Ironically, Elaw labors for his freedom from sin although he, as a slave driver, denies freedom to her own people. Elaw’s adoption of Pauline language here points to a “travail for transformation.” Her life and ministry demonstrate that not only do blacks have souls, but black women have spiritual wombs with which they give birth to apocalyptic realities, such as the conversion of an oppressor whose slavery to sin enables participation in the sin of slavery. Elaw’s travail for this man signals black women’s significant role in bringing about physical and spiritual freedom to all in need of liberation.
That Elaw sees herself akin to Paul is evident in the numerous citations already given above as well as in the following quote where she describes the care and concern shown to her by her friend, Miss Sarah M. Coffin, during an illness: “Her affection for me was as great as that of Aquila and Priscilla for St. Paul, who would have laid down their own necks upon the block for him” (129). This comment demonstrates that Elaw sees herself as not only similar to the apostle in divine encounters, in the divine origin of her ministry, in curing the sick, in facing opposition to the gospel, and in giving birth to believers, but, like the apostle, she also participates in deep friendships formed by the bond of God’s love. Elaw, therefore, portrays herself in an apostolic role, for she declares that in her ministry people are “turned from darkness to light” and from the “power of Satan to the power of God,” which are words God speaks to Paul in Acts 26:18. Elaw’s ministry is affirmed because what God promised would happen through Paul’s ministry is now happening through her ministry. In addition, like the apostle, who journeyed extensively to preach the gospel, Elaw travels extensively as well, proclaiming nothing but “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2) in the middle Atlantic and Northeast states, including in Maryland; Washington, DC; Virginia; New York; Connecticut; and internationally in England.
Along with using Paul to characterize her call and to show that her ministry has authenticated authority, Elaw also employs the apostle’s language to resist racism and to castigate the “pride of a white skin,” which she says is “of great value with many in some parts of the United States, who readily sacrifice their intelligence to their prejudices” (85). Despite the value that many place upon white skin,176 Elaw declares, “The Almighty accounts not the black races of man either in the order of nature or spiritual capacity as inferior to the white; for He bestows his Holy Spirit on, and dwells in them as readily as in persons of whiter complexion…. Oh! that men would outgrow their nursery prejudices and learn that ‘God hath made of one blood all the nations of men that dwell upon all the face on the earth.’ Acts xvii.26” (85–86).177 Recalling Acts, Elaw appeals to the experience of the Spirit in which the Spirit falls upon gentiles as well as Jews, indicating gentile inclusion in God’s salvific plan. Similarly, Elaw proclaims that just as God’s Spirit makes no distinction between whites and blacks, having been granted to both races, human beings should not employ such differences either. Furthermore, her use of Paul’s speech in Acts here underscores the illegitimate claims of white supremacy, including the value placed upon white skin, and disavows that any racial difference authorizes superiority or inferiority. The outpouring of God’s Spirit upon black and white and the one blood that flows through humanity indicate that God created all people as one.
In her article “Prophesying Daughters,” Chanta Haywood calls Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and Julia Foote the prophesying daughters of Joel 2:28–29, who in the midst of great opposition from both women and men, black and white, continued to preach and prophesy.178 Elaw herself cites this Joel passage to support her right to proclaim the gospel and as an indication that the times of which Joel spoke began in Acts and continue with her ministry (124). Haywood writes that when these women used their pens to record their journeys as black women preachers, they were “writing themselves into existence.”179 As illustrated in Elaw’s recounting of her life, she was indeed “writing herself into existence,” and it is noteworthy, for our purposes, that she utilized Pauline language to do so. She saw her existence as intricately connected to the apostle: as he was chosen by God, so was she (2 Tim. 2:21; cf. Gal. 1:15);180 her call was tied to his call; his mandate from God became her mandate from God; and the gospel he proclaimed became hers as well. In the act of writing herself into existence, Elaw laid claim upon the apostle’s words and his experiences, and by doing so she demonstrated that these were not limited to him alone but transcended time, space, and gender. What is more, Elaw offered alternative readings of Paul that challenged and resisted the dominant oppressive interpretations of him, particularly those that promoted black and female inferiority.
Like the expositors discussed above, David Walker, a renowned abolitionist, utilized Paul in subversive ways as well. He was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1785 or 1796,181 but as Herbert Marbury notes, “From his birth, Walker was out of place; he was a free black man in the antebellum South where slavery defined black life. Despite his legal status, the fundamental inequities and injustices of North Carolina’s slave society shaped his formative environment.”182 Though free, Walker was haunted and horrified by the wrongs promoted and sustained by the slave system, as is evident in his writings. In 1825 Walker moved to Boston, a city at that time with a large politically active black citizenry deeply involved in abolition.183 There Walker opened a clothing shop and became very active in abolitionist causes.184 Donald Jacobs writes of Walker, “Those who knew him well said that he also ‘possessed a noble and courageous spirit’ and that he was ‘ardently attached to the cause of liberty.’ … He was an unabashed abolitionist who, having grown up in the South, knew slavery; and knowing it, he had built up a powerful hatred of it.”185 Walker’s courage, detestation of slavery, and commitment to liberation show through most vividly in the appeal he wrote.
Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles; Together with A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, To Those of The United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829, is filled with scriptural language, scriptural echoes, and detailed descriptions of slavery’s atrocities.186 Within this document Walker also refutes the racist ideology of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, and other prominent figures of his time. Writing with passion and a sense of purpose to inform his fellow blacks of the tragic nature of their condition, Walker aims to inspire them to do something about it. He also writes to apprise the world of the real events occurring in slave America and the degraded conditions suffered by blacks under white Christians. He states in the beginning of his final imprint, “All I ask is, for a candid and careful perusal of this the third and last edition of my Appeal, where the world may see that we, the Blacks or Coloured People, are treated more cruel by the white Christians of America, than devils themselves ever treated a set of men, women and children on this earth.”187 In candid, forthright language bathed in scriptural vocabulary, Walker paints a graphic, multilayered portrait for his audiences. This multifaceted picture consists of the horrors of slavery, a distinction between the religion of Jesus and the Christianity practiced by white slaveholders, and impending judgment upon America. His Appeal is known for its anger, its bold advocacy of Christian ideals, its instructions to free blacks, and its call for an immediate response to overthrow slavery.188 What is less known and discussed is that within this multilayered portrait Walker incorporates Pauline language.
Walker makes it a point to demonstrate that the slavery practiced in America is worse than that practiced in Egypt, for Egyptians did not convey to Israel that they were nonhuman. He declares,
I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs? O! my God! (10)189
This denial of blacks’ humanity, Walker maintains, encouraged the prohibition of educating them. Several excerpts demonstrate Walker’s outrage at this reality for his fellow blacks.
It is a fact, that in our Southern and Western States, there are millions who hold us in chains or in slavery, whose greatest object and glory, is centered in keeping us sunk in the most profound ignorance and stupidity, to make us work without remunerations for our services. Many of whom if they catch a coloured person, whom they hold in unjust ignorance, slavery, and degradation, to them and their children, with a book in his hand, will beat him nearly to death … another law has passed the republican House of Delegates, (but not the Senate) in Virginia, to prohibit all persons of colour, (free and slave) from learning to read or write, and even to hinder them from meeting together in order to worship our Maker!!!!!! (53)
See the inconsistency of the assertions of those wretches—they beat us inhumanely, sometimes almost to death, for attempting to inform ourselves, by reading the Word of our Maker, and at the same time tell us, that we are beings void of intellect!!!! … Let me cry shame upon you Americans, for such outrages upon human nature!!! If it were possible for the whites always to keep us ignorant and miserable, and make us work to enrich them and their children, and insult our feelings by representing us as talking Apes, what would they do? But glory, honour and praise to Heaven’s King, that the sons and daughters of Africa, will, in spite of all the opposition of their enemies, stand forth in all the dignity and glory that is granted by the Lord to his creature man. (62)
In these two excerpts, one sees Walker’s focus upon the prohibition of education for blacks, and in the last passage Walker highlights the irony of whites’ claims that blacks are ignorant and whites’ injunction regarding blacks’ education.190 Janet Duitsman Cornelius states that slaveholders had a “fear of a literate black population. Despite the protestations of the small group who would teach slaves that ‘Bible literacy’ would uphold the social order, the majority of white southerners knew better: they knew that knowledge was a two-edged sword which ‘could defend the social fabric or cut it to shreds.’”191 Because many whites saw black literacy as a dangerous proposition, “opposition to those who would teach slaves never ceased in the antebellum period,” and for many African Americans, learning to read and write was not an option.192 In the second excerpt above, Walker also links whites’ beliefs that blacks were apes to whites’ justification for withholding education from enslaved Africans. But Walker counters this depiction of blacks by claiming their African heritage and by affirming that they are human beings, God’s “creature man” adorned with dignity and glory. Whites’ denial of enslaved Africans’ humanity resulted in not only withholding education from them but also treating them in gruesome ways. The following account by Walker details such behavior:
I will give here a very imperfect list of the cruelties inflicted on us by the enlightened Christians of America…. They brand us with hot iron—they cram bolts of fire down our throats—they cut us as they do horses, bulls, or hogs—they crop our ears and sometimes cut off bits of our tongues—they chain and hand-cuff us, and while in that miserable and wretched condition, beat us with cow-hides and clubs—they keep us half naked and starve us sometimes nearly to death under their infernal whips or lashes (which some of them shall have enough of yet)—They put on us fifty-sixes and chains, and make us work in that cruel situation, and in sickness, under lashes to support them and their families.—They keep us three or four hundred feet under ground working in their mines, night and day to dig up gold and silver to enrich them and their children.—They keep us in the most death-like ignorance by keeping us from all source of information, and call us, who are free men and next to the Angels of God, their property !!!!!! … they tell us that we the (blacks) are an inferior race of beings! incapable of self government!!—We would be injurious to society and ourselves, if tyrants should loose their unjust hold on us!!! That if we were free we would not work, but would live on plunder or theft!!!! that we are the meanest and laziest set of beings in the world!!!!! That they are obliged to keep us in bondage to do us good!!!!!!—That we are satisfied to rest in slavery to them and their children!!!!!! … for we ask them for nothing but the rights of man, viz. for them to set us free, and treat us like men, and there will be no danger, for we will love and respect them, and protect our country—but cannot conscientiously do these things until they treat us like men. (65–66)
Against the backdrop of the atrocities heaped upon black bodies and the violent language amassed upon black minds, Walker echoes Psalm 8:5, declaring that African Americans are next to angels, belong to God, and thus are free.193 Walker, therefore, asserts blacks’ humanity and their rightful place in God’s creation. Moreover, this language recapitulates his earlier statements that enslaved Africans “belong to the Holy Ghost” and are the “property of the Holy Ghost,” which debunks white enslavers’ claims to black bodies and black lives (49, 50, 71). Blacks belong to God and the Spirit, Walker argues, not to any white person who clamors after the title of “Master,” for whites are made of dust and ashes and will have to appear before judgment just like everyone else. Walker asks, “What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but [ Jesus Christ] Himself?” (16).
Into this ongoing discourse Walker inserts Pauline language to describe the condition of those who do not see the “inhuman system of slavery” for what it really is; they are blinded by the God of this world (2 Cor. 4:4). Paul uses the expression “god of this world” to refer to Satan, a being he describes to the Corinthian congregation as one who aims to blind the minds of people so that they cannot see and understand the truth of the gospel. Walker adopts this Pauline phrase to describe Satan’s power over those who engage in racism. By contrast, those who do see the “hellish chains of slavery” are not blinded by the God of this world but understand that “God made man to serve Him alone and that man should have no other Lord or Lords but Himself—that God Almighty is the sole proprietor or master of the whole human family,” and that blacks are “men, notwithstanding our improminent noses and woolly heads” (4–5). In addition, those who are not blinded “believe that we feel for our fathers, mothers, wives and children, as well as the whites do for theirs” (4–5). Although Walker utilizes Paul’s notion of the god of this age blinding human beings to describe why some whites engage in oppressive behavior, he does not believe this alleviates them of responsibility for their actions or saves them from impending judgment. Judgment vernacular permeates Walker’s treatise, and for him only repentance and change in action rescue whites and America from certain destruction. He believes that God has ears “continually open to the cries, tears, and groans of his oppressed people; and being a just and holy Being will at one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed, and arrest the progress of the avaricious oppressors; for although the destruction of the oppressors God may not effect by the oppressed, yet the Lord our God will bring other destructions upon them” (3). Without repentance, Walker is sure that judgment will occur upon America because God does not forget the afflicted and God will judge the perverted Christianity practiced in the nation.
Walker maintains that Americans have the Bible but do not believe it, and their unbelief appears in the way they treat African Americans since they disregard the Golden Rule. Walker particularly rails against American preachers, who have a greater responsibility to proclaim the truth but are gravely lacking in taking a stand against slavery. “An American minister, with the Bible in his hand, holds us and our children in the most abject slavery and wretchedness. Now I ask them, would they like for us to hold them and their children in abject slavery and wretchedness? … how far the American preachers are from preaching against slavery and oppression” (38). In fact, Walker criticizes American Christians because they constantly preach against breaking the Sabbath, infidelity, and intemperance but are silent about slavery’s horrors, “compared with which, all those other evils are comparatively nothing” (40).
In article 3 of his document, Walker describes a camp meeting he attended in South Carolina where the minister, utilizing Paul’s words, told the blacks in the audience that “slaves must be obedient to their masters—must do their duty to their masters or be whipped—the whip was made for the backs of fools” (39). Walker’s description of his reaction to this message is invaluable: “Here I pause for a moment to give the world time to consider what was my surprise, to hear such preaching from a minister of my Master, whose very gospel is that of peace [Rom. 10:15; Eph. 6:15] and not of blood and whips, as this pretended preacher tried to make us believe” (39).194 Using Paul’s description of the gospel as a gospel of peace, Walker draws a distinction between the gospel of this “pretended preacher” and the true gospel of Walker’s “Master,” which espouses εἰρήνη (peace), not torture. In fact, early on in the treatise, Walker writes that “white Christians of America, who hold us in slavery, (or more properly speaking, pretenders to Christianity,) treat us more cruel and barbarous than any Heathen nation” (ix). He elaborates upon this idea of “pretenders to Christianity,” and his camp-meeting experience becomes part of this elucidation. The cruelty white Christians inflict upon African Americans causes Walker to assert that they are not really Christians but “pretenders” and provoke him to state vehemently: “I tell you Americans! that unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone!!!!! … This language, perhaps is too harsh for the American’s delicate ears. But Oh Americans! Americans! I warn you in the name of the Lord, (whether you will hear, or forbear,) to repent and reform, or you are ruined!!! Do you think that our blood is hidden from the Lord, because you can hide it from the rest of the world, by sending out missionaries” (39–40). Echoing Genesis, where Abel’s blood cries out to God from the ground, Walker contends that, likewise, the blood of African Americans is not hidden from God despite how white Christians attempt to conceal their behavior through missionary zeal.
The fact that American Christians, including many preachers, are complicit participants in slavery who refuse to see any wrongdoing on their part is incredulous to Walker and prompts him to characterize the situation in Romans 1 language—“they have been nearly given up by the Lord to a hard heart and reprobate mind, in consequence of afflicting their fellow creatures [1:28]” (41). According to Walker, whites’ hard heart and reprobate mind derive from their mistreatment of blacks and will end in their destruction unless they repent. With this Pauline terminology of “giving up” and “reprobate mind,” Walker depicts the dire state of America. In the final section of article 3, Walker again takes up Pauline language to describe American society and its standing before God. The eloquent passage merits full citation:
What can the American preachers and people take God to be? Do they believe his words? If they do, do they believe that he will be mocked [Gal. 6:7]? Or do they believe, because they are whites and we blacks, that God will have respect to them? Did not God make us all as it seemed best to himself? What right, then, has one of us, to despise another, and to treat him cruel, on account of his colour, which none, but the God who made it can alter? Can there be a greater absurdity in nature, and particularly in a free republican country? But the Americans, having introduced slavery among them, their hearts have become almost seared, as with an hot iron, and God has nearly given them up to believe a lie in preference to the truth!!! [1 Tim. 4:2; Rom. 1:25]. And I am awfully afraid that pride, prejudice, avarice and blood, will, before long prove the final ruin of this happy republic, or land of liberty!!!! Can any thing be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which it is conducted by the Americans? … Will the Lord suffer this people to go on much longer, taking his holy name in vain? Will he not stop them, PREACHERS and all? O Americans! Americans!! I call God [2 Cor. 1:23]—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT. (42–43)195
In this passage and in the previous selection, Walker employs Pauline language to speak about the gross deception that has taken place among white Christians. Their concentration on matters such as Sabbath breaking while overlooking the greater evil, the enslavement of human beings, reveals the power of avarice and the extent of their deception. The context of the 1 Timothy passage quoted by Walker focuses on the last days and how many will depart from the faith in the “latter times.” Such a context coheres well with Walker’s contentions that white Americans are “pretenders to Christianity” who employ the gospel for their own greedy gains. Paul warns Timothy about such people who depart from the faith (1 Tim. 4:1). Walker is the Paul of his day, admonishing his readers of the dangerous characteristics embodied by white Christians and that the faith practiced by them is no faith at all. Likewise, Paul’s words in Romans 1:25 enable Walker to expose the lies undergirding slavery, such as Scripture’s ordination of slavery, the nonhumanness of blacks, and black inferiority. Walker censures white Americans for choosing to believe these lies rather than the truth, which is that God created all human beings as equals. Moreover, since many preachers, like the one Walker encounters at the camp meeting, utilize the gospel to sanction slavery, Walker views this practice as taking the Lord’s name in vain. To use God’s name to endorse enslavement of blacks is nothing short of blasphemy.
Because of this pervasive distortion of the gospel and this “mockery of religion,” Walker uses Pauline language to ask his audience if they think God will allow the divine to be mocked. In addition, in typical Pauline fashion, he calls God as a witness that judgment is imminent, yet he also leaves open the possibility of its avoidance through repentance. Yet the reader notices the context of Walker’s notion of repentance. It is not merely about individual salvation or inner repentance, but it is a call to a nation to repent of a societal evil that has physical, mental, and spiritual implications. Walker illustrates one of Frederick Ware’s contentions about how many blacks understand sin. Sin is understood as something that is social and not just personal.196 To call the nation to repent, then, is a major counterattack to the white Protestant theology dominant in Walker’s day, which concentrated on personal sin and salvation. Sin, for Walker, is not merely something an individual does and is not only focused on destruction of individual piety, but sin is systemic in society and permeates every level of the nation’s existence. For Walker, sin is a power that usurps systems, politics, and nations. Such a view of sin coheres with Paul’s own view of sin in Romans, where the apostle depicts sin as an active power whose presence controls and destroys.197 Simply put, Walker contends that slavery is sin, and this reality means that sin’s grasp through slavery affects the nation holistically by the laws it creates, the divisions it sustains, and the cruelties it perpetuates. In a sense, Walker continues the trajectory of the petitioners and of Lemuel Haynes, who asked and answered in the words of Paul, “Shall we continue in sin? God forbid!”
Although Walker calls for repentance, he posits the possibility that some whites may be destroyed because avarice’s powerful hold upon them produces a refusal to repent. He writes, “For I declare to you, whether you believe it or not, that there are some on the continent of America, who will never be able to repent. God will surely destroy them, to show you his disapprobation of the murders they and you have inflicted on us” (69). Despite this probability, Walker makes a profound and powerful declaration to white Americans for their repentance.198
Walker’s prophetic voice with which he boldly chastises white Christians for approval and participation in the slave trade also becomes an instrument to remind free blacks that they are not really free since they continue to face extreme prejudice and are not allowed to obtain vocations other than cleaning and taking care of white folks’ families (29). Blacks should not be content with such “low employment” but should aspire for something greater. In addition, Walker declares that free blacks will never be free until all their brothers and sisters are free. Utilizing Pauline language, Walker depicts coming judgment upon free blacks who join the “tyrants” in oppressing African Americans by stating that “the Lord shall come upon you all like a thief in the night [1 Thess. 5:2]” (29).199 As Paul reminded his Thessalonian audience of Jesus’s sudden return, Walker reminds his audiences as well that Jesus’s soon reappearance will terminate oppression on all levels, that which proceeds from whites and free blacks who aid the whites in their oppression. Moreover, Walker adopts Pauline “body” language to persuade his fellow free blacks that freedom is not real freedom until all gain liberation:
For I believe it is the will of the Lord that our greatest happiness shall consist in working for the salvation of our whole body [1 Cor. 12:13–26]. When this is accomplished a burst of glory will shine upon you, which will indeed astonish you and the world. Do any of you say this never will be done? I assure you that God will accomplish it—if nothing else will answer, he will hurl tyrants and devils into atoms and make way for his people. But O my brethren! I say unto you again, you must go to work and prepare the way of the Lord. (29–30)
Here, Walker adopts and adapts a Pauline motif, body imagery, in the phrase “the salvation of our whole body.” For Walker the “whole body” refers to all blacks, and their salvation consists of their spiritual, mental, and physical freedom from slavery. Just as he did earlier in characterizing sin as not merely individualistic but social and national (where sin manifests in social and national divisions), here again Walker broadens the notion of salvation from salvation for individual souls to include physical liberation from enslavement. Free blacks cannot relish their own liberation but must also work to advance the freedom of their enslaved sisters and brothers; they, both free and enslaved, form one body. Thus, Pauline terminology underscores a unified black body, where black people stand as one collective, unified for the purpose of bringing about liberation and life for each other. Furthermore, Walker advocates divine and human agency, for although “God will accomplish it,” African Americans “must go to work” and, in the language of the prophets, “prepare the way of the Lord.” According to Walker, God and human beings work together for liberation and freedom; it is never only a divine project nor only a human endeavor.
As we have seen, at important points in his work, Walker employs Pauline language to speak about white deception, the gospel as a gospel of peace, the distorted Christianity practiced by white believers, American judgment, and unity of the black community. The last significant place Walker takes up the apostle’s words occurs in reference to himself and his own impending death. Walker understood that his prophetic voice, his exposure of the hypocritical nature of white American Christianity, and his repeated calls for judgment upon America could come at the price of his life. In the final article of his treatise, article 4, Walker prognosticates about his demise with the terminology of the apostle.
If any are anxious to ascertain who I am, know the world, that I am one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa, rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful, among the whites.—If any wish to plunge me into the wretched incapacity of a slave, or murder me for the truth, know ye, that I am in the hand of God, and at your disposal. I count my life not dear unto me [Acts 20:24], but I am ready to be offered at any moment [2 Tim. 4:6]. For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead. (71–72)
Walker uses two of Paul’s most touching farewell discourses to create his own powerful farewell speech. In Acts 20:17–37, Paul says goodbye to the Ephesian church, informing them that he must go to Jerusalem and that he does not know what will await him there, but the Spirit reveals that affliction will be his lot in that city. Despite the Spirit’s warnings, however, Paul declares, “None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself.” That Walker would choose to echo this portion of Paul’s speech in Acts speaks volumes. Like the apostle, he could not ascertain fully what was about to happen to him, but he knew that because of his missive affliction was inevitable, death even possible. Yet similar to the apostle, he could not abandon his mission, even if it cost him his life. In an analogous fashion in 2 Timothy 4:6, Paul prepares Timothy, whom he calls his “beloved son” (2 Tim. 1:2), for his death, writing that he is ready to be offered and the time of his departure is at hand. Walker, at peace with his life and with his work, declares to his audience that he too is ready to be offered up if and when the time arrives. Sadly, his prediction of his death in Pauline terms proved true. In 1830, Walker was found dead in his clothing store under conditions suggesting foul play.200 The cause of his death remains a mystery, although some believe he died of poisoning.201
At pivotal moments in the Appeal, Walker clothes himself in the garb of the apostle Paul, depicting himself as an apostolic figure whom God calls to proclaim the “pure religion of Jesus.” This “pure religion of Jesus,” however, includes Pauline language to describe America’s sin, its deception, and future judgment. Furthermore, Paul’s image of the body is a useful one for Walker’s emphasis on black unity. Additionally, the apostle’s words provide Walker with the language to state that life is not dear to him, for he perceives something greater than life, the liberation of his people. Walker chooses Pauline vernacular to speak about his own death in divine terms, for he is being offered up, language that echoes sacrificial terminology and indicates a sacrifice offered to the divine on behalf of his people. Walker, then, in an evocative hermeneutical gesture, depicts his willingness to die for the cause of black salvation.202
Each of the black hermeneuts examined in this chapter engages Paul in multidimensional ways, all of which have the aim of resisting and countering slavery, racism, white supremacy, and rejection of woman ministers. In their uses of Paul, these black exegetes were no longer objects at which Scripture was directed but subjects through whom Scripture spoke to the world. The petitioners claim Paul’s voice as their own to make anthropological assertions for their humanity, the importance of the black family, the Christian family’s obligation to bear one another’s burdens, and the unity of all human beings, since God from one blood created all the nations of the earth.
Although not always as subversive as modern readers would like, Jupiter Hammon does use Paul in some revolutionary ways for his time and place; he uses Paul in his call for repentance and in his affirmation of enslaved Africans’ agency and new identity granted through the Spirit. Soteriologically speaking, Hammon argues that blacks have souls, can receive salvation, and are worthy of divine care. Like the petition writers, he maintains that blacks are rational creatures, a statement that relates to anthropology as well as epistemology and soteriology. He also takes on Paul’s language to highlight enslaved Africans’ moral behavior, which should surpass that of the slaveholder. In addition, Paul’s demonic language describes the satanic influence over white slave owners, and his words regarding God choosing the weak instead of the rich enable Hammon to critique the white elite.
This chapter also analyzed other subversive uses of Paul by Lemuel Haynes, John Jea, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and David Walker. Haynes employs Paul to refute directly the Ham myth and whites’ use of 1 Corinthians 7:21 to justify slavery. For him, Christ becoming a curse (Gal. 3:13) removes the so-called curse of Ham, if it ever existed, and he maintains that the apostle advocated freedom, not enslavement, in 1 Corinthians 7:21. Furthermore, the notion that slavery was beneficial to Africans was not true; slavery, in fact, was sin, as identified by the apostle himself. For Jea, the miracle of literacy and Paul’s language of new creation and grace through faith grants him the ability to reinterpret and renarrate his life story. Like Paul, he works with his own hands, traveling throughout the world proclaiming the gospel to the enslaved and to the free. Both Lee and Elaw view Paul as a companion in their struggle for recognition of their call. In many ways, their own mystical experiences paralleled those of Paul, demonstrating their apostolic role and call in the church. Women were not inferior to Paul or to male ministers but stood equal to them in every way.
The final African American hermeneut of this chapter, David Walker, provides a fitting end to this section as he recalls earlier themes like black agency from Hammon, judgment from Haynes, and the importance and presence of the Spirit for black existence as indicated in the writings of Hammon, Jea, Lee, and Elaw. Slavery as sin as pronounced by the petitioners and Haynes comes to heightened expression in Walker, where slavery is not only sin but deserving of harsh judgment, a theme that permeates Walker’s appeal.
Each of the interpreters demonstrates that there are many ways to resist, protest, and be subversive, and all of them share the outcome of having Paul speak to and for female and black identity, not against it. Thus, these writers engage in an African American Pauline hermeneutic that is resistance and protest oriented. They engage Paul in a deep, intellectual manner. For example, as discussed above, Elaw considers the historical context of Paul’s injunction against women. When interpreting Scripture, she understands that historical context matters as well as other scriptural witnesses, including Paul himself, and that if one evaluates the historical situation of the apostle’s words, then one recognizes the temporal and situational mandate of Paul’s statement and realizes that his words regarding women’s silence do not function as an eternal mandate for all churches and for all time.
These interpreters raise another important aspect of African American Pauline hermeneutics, which will reappear in the subsequent chapters, that is, the significance of the body to this hermeneutical stance. Said differently, two of the underlying questions of these interpreters’ view of Paul are how my body becomes a way to interpret Paul and whether Paul can interpret my body. Often this body-contextual hermeneutic is a competing one. Slave owners constantly declared to African Americans that their bodies belonged to the slaveholder. Many blacks, however, refused to believe this message, choosing instead to cling to the apostle’s words in Acts 17:26: God has “made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” While slave owners insisted to enslaved Africans that “You are my property,” and whites declared black inferiority, African Americans in interpreting Paul rejected this idea and contended that their bodies belonged to God and the Spirit.
This body hermeneutic is an oppositional hermeneutic and a power move where blacks insist that the authority to determine their bodily status does not belong to whites but to God. This element, while appearing in various ways in the texts above, is seen most pointedly in Walker’s declaration that enslaved Africans belong to the Holy Spirit and in Hammon’s declaration of future transformation of black bodies in the eschaton. John Jea sees his spiritual deliverance as indicative of his future bodily liberation from slavery, asserting that the grace that saves him will also free him from “tyrannical power.” Likewise, women hermeneuts like Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw allow Paul to interpret their female bodies, and they in turn utilize their female bodies to interpret Paul. Lee and Elaw find in Paul affirmation of their bodies as black women preachers whose bodies and lives belong to God and whose mystical experience, with its tangible effects upon their bodies, empowers them to stand in full authority in public spaces. The Spirit of adoption (Rom. 8:15) meant that black bodies belonged to God and the Spirit, not to the slaveholder or to the male leadership of the church hierarchy, for the Spirit’s presence illustrates their worth and value and enables these interpreters to grab hold of their humanization, which is an important outcome of an African American Pauline hermeneutic. In their use of Paul, these writers were, to paraphrase Chanta Haywood, “writing their humanization into existence.”203 We will see in the next chapter, through the writings of Maria Stewart, James Pennington, Daniel Payne, Julia Foote, and Harriet Jacobs, that the black tradition of utilizing Paul to “write their humanization into existence” continues.
1. Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour: Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America [Written By Herself] (London: Published by the authoress, 1846) (hereafter Elaw, Memoirs), reprinted in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William L. Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 92.
2. Portions of this chapter appear in Lisa Bowens, “Liberating Paul: African Americans’ Use of Paul in Resistance and Protest,” in Practicing with Paul: Reflections on Paul and the Practices of Ministry in Honor of Susan G. Eastman, ed. Presian Burroughs (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 57–73.
3. Yuval Taylor, introduction to I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, vol. 1, 1772–1849, ed. Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), xxvi.
4. Josiah Priest, Slavery as It Relates to the Negro or African Race (Albany, NY: C. Van Benthuysen & Co., 1843), 83.
5. Priest, Slavery as It Relates, 78.
6. Priest, Slavery as It Relates, 79.
7. Augustin Calmet, Calmet’s Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible, vol. 4 (Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge, 1812), 21. An earlier edition, 1797, of this dictionary is quoted in Emerson Powery and Rodney Sadler, The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 86. Another common interpretation of this period was the belief that the mark God placed upon Cain in Gen. 4:15 was black skin. This belief was so common that Priest, Slavery as It Relates, refers to it in his book: “Others have imagined that the mark set upon Cain by the Divine Power, for the crime of homicide, was that of jet, which not only changed the color of his body, but extended to the blood and the whole of his physical being, thus originating the negro race” (iv).
8. Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks petition, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina, https://library.uncg.edu/slavery/petitions/details.aspx?pid=1645.
9. John Saffin, A Brief and Candid Answer, http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/fdscontent/uscompanion/us/static/companion.websites/9780199338863/whittington_updata/ch_2_saffin_a_brief_and_candid_answer.pdf. Also quoted in Sondra O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon and the Biblical Beginnings of African-American Literature (Metuchen, NJ: ATLA and Scarecrow Press, 1993), 25.
10. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Pritchard & Hall, 1787), 149, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html#p138.
11. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 153.
12. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 154. At the same time that Jefferson believed in the superiority of whites and the differences between the two races, he also believed that if blacks were freed, they would have to be colonized “to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper” (147).
13. Loren Schweninger and Robert Shelton, eds., Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks: Series I, Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1777–1867, microfilm project of University Publications of America (Bethesda, MD). Petition cited is from Reel 1.0014.
14. Democratic Standard (Concord, NH), September 8, 1860, quoted by Eugene H. Berwanger, “Negrophobia in Northern Proslavery and Antislavery Thought,” Phylon 33, no. 3 (Fall 1972): 268.
15. The idea of black inferiority was not limited to Southern white society but was shared by many white Northerners as well, even among those who advocated the abolishment of slavery. See the discussion in James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “The Affirmation of Manhood: Black Garrisonians in Antebellum Boston,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 137–38, and Berwanger, “Negrophobia,” 266–75.
16. Yolanda Pierce, Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 41.
17. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), part 2, vol. 4:9; also quoted in Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 232.
18. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 309.
19. C. Michelle Venable-Ridley, “Paul and the African American Community,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 214.
20. Venable-Ridley, “Paul and the African American Community,” 214. See also Abraham Smith’s insightful essay on Paul and African Americans in “Paul and African American Biblical Interpretation,” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian Blount et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 31–42; Abraham Smith, “Putting ‘Paul’ Back Together Again: William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Black Abolitionist Approaches to Paul,” Semeia 83–84 (1998): 251–62.
21. Founders’ Constitution, Slave Petition, 3:432–33. Portions of this petition are also cited by Raboteau (Slave Religion, 290–91) and discussed in Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 34–35. See also A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 3 vols. (New York: Citadel, 1951), 1:8–9. Pauline language appears in italics in this petition and in subsequent citations from primary texts.
22. Biblical quotations in this book come from the King James Version, unless otherwise indicated. This is the version used by all the interpreters in this book.
23. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, ed. John Ernest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008; original Manchester: Lee & Glynn, 1851), 80–81. Henry “Box” Brown received that nomenclature because of his extraordinary escape from slavery in a box that was shipped to the North. His riveting escape is recounted in his autobiography.
24. Brad Braxton, No Longer Slaves: Galatians and African American Experience (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 12.
25. This phrase comes from Frederick Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in I Was Born a Slave, 1:592, who makes a profound distinction between the Christianity of Christ and “slaveholding religion.”
26. During this time Paul was believed to be the author of Hebrews. Paul will be assumed to be the author of Hebrews throughout the book.
27. Petition of 1779 by Slaves of Fairfield County, Revolutionary War Papers, Connecticut State Library, 1:37:232.
28. Callahan, The Talking Book, 115–16; Emerson Powery, “ ‘Rise Up, Ye Women’: Harriet Jacobs and the Bible,” Postscripts 5, no. 2 (2009): 176; Demetrius Williams, “The Acts of the Apostles,” in Blount, True to Our Native Land, 236–38.
29. Powery and Sadler, The Genesis of Liberation, 140–42.
30. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), in her brief discussion of this petition notes that the writers link “freedom and knowledge” and that they see one of the horrors of slavery as “the master’s deliberate withholding of knowledge from them” (23–24).
31. This language could also echo Paul’s statements in Rom. 5:14 and 1 Cor. 15:22, 45.
32. Quoted by John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay, introduction to Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, ed. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 2.
33. Slave Petition for Freedom during the Revolution, 1773–1779, Petition (b), Boston, April 20, 1773.
34. Slave Petition for Freedom during the Revolution, 1773–1779, Petition (d), January 13, 1777.
35. McKivigan and Snay, introduction to Religion and the Antebellum Debate, 6; Berwanger, “Negrophobia,” 273.
36. Jupiter Hammon’s death date is difficult to determine. Historians estimate his death took place between 1790 and 1806. See Margaret Brucia, “The African-American Poet, Jupiter Hammon: A Home-Born Slave and His Classical Name,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 7, no. 4 (2001): 515–17; O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 1; Philip Richards, “Nationalist Themes in the Preaching of Jupiter Hammon,” Early American Literature 25, no. 2 (1990): 123.
37. Brucia, “The African-American Poet,” 515; O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 1; Richards, “Nationalist Themes,” 123.
38. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 2.
39. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 1.
40. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 1.
41. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 1–39.
42. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 2–3. See also Arien Nydam, “Numerological Tradition in the Works of Jupiter Hammon,” African American Review 40, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 207–20.
43. Additional works by Hammon include “An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (poem), “An Address to Phyllis Wheatley Ethiopian Poetess in Boston” (poem), “An Essay on the Ten Virgins” (nonextant), “A Poem for Children with Thoughts on Death,” “The Kind Master and Dutiful Servant” (poem). In 2011, Julie McCown, a graduate student, discovered a previously unpublished and unknown poem by Hammon entitled “An Essay on Slavery, with Submission to Divine Providence, Knowing That God Rules over All Things,” dated November 10, 1786, which means it was written around the same time as “Address to the Negroes in the State of New York.” See Cedrick May and Julie McCown, “ ‘An Essay on Slavery’: An Unpublished Poem by Jupiter Hammon,” Early American Literature 48, no. 2 (2013): 457–71, who call this latest discovery “the most outspoken antislavery statement by this often-neglected eighteenth century writer” (457).
44. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 8.
45. Nydam, “Numerological Tradition,” 209. See also O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 3–4.
46. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” in O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 97. All of Hammon’s essays cited in this volume appear in O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, and the page references are to O’Neale.
47. Richards, “Nationalist Themes,” 125.
48. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 102–3.
49. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 85. Scholars have long noted the prominence of the exodus motif in black writings. Among them are Callahan, The Talking Book; Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Herbert Marbury, Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Albert Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 17–36, 57–76.
50. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 103.
51. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 102.
52. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 102. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, insightfully writes as follows regarding Hammon’s use of the phrase “Africans by nation”: “In addition to ‘my brethren,’ Hammon calls his fellow slaves ‘Africans by nation’ or ‘Ethiopians.’ Although born in America, Hammon was the first African to leave printed evidence that slaves recognized the treachery of cultural alienation. He refers to his brethren as ‘ancient’ in order to uplift his fellow servants with a sense of inclusion in a history older than that of their British masters” (86). Hammon uses these phrases throughout the essay.
53. Hammon’s utilization of Paul to encourage a moral life include the following passages: 1 Cor. 10:31 (p. 101); 2 Cor. 5:17 (p. 103); Acts 24:16 (p. 104); Rom. 6:22, 23 (p. 105); 2 Cor. 7:10 (p. 111). In addition, Hammon echoes Paul’s language in Rom. 5:8, writing, “My brethren, here we see the love of God plainly set before us: that while we were yet sinners, he sent his Son to die for all those that come unto him” (“A Winter Piece,” 109 [emphasis added]).
54. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 101; scriptural citations that appear in brackets in direct quotations in this monograph are my authorial insertions; these references do not appear in the actual quotations.
55. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 108.
56. Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life; or, Illustrations of the “Peculiar Institution” by Peter Randolph, An Emancipated Slave (Boston: Published for the author, 1855), reprinted in “Sketches of Slave Life” and “From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit,” ed. Katherine Clay Bassard (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2016), 62.
57. Occasionally, slave owners hired a preacher who did not preach these types of sermons but more liberative ones. These ministers, however, did not last long, as Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life, indicates: “Mr. L. Hanner was a Christian preacher, selecting texts like the following: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach deliverance to the captives, he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted.’ But Hanner was soon mobbed out of Prince George’s County, and had to flee for his life, and all for preaching a true Gospel to colored people” (62).
58. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 107.
59. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 106. See such comments by proslavery advocates in the previous section.
60. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 106.
61. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 94.
62. Hammon, “A Winter Piece,” 108–9.
63. Hammon, “An Evening’s Improvement,” 163.
64. Hammon, “An Evening’s Improvement,” 169–70.
65. Hammon, “An Evening’s Improvement,” 167.
66. Priest, Slavery as It Relates, 136.
67. Priest, Slavery as It Relates, 138.
68. Shanell T. Smith, The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire: Reading Revelation with a Postcolonial Womanist Hermeneutics of Ambivalence, Emerging Scholars (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 165.
69. Hammon, “An Evening’s Improvement,” 171.
70. Hammon, “An Evening’s Improvement,” 173.
71. Hammon, “An Evening’s Improvement,” 163.
72. This writing is his final prose address. However, in 2011 a graduate student, Julie McCown, found an unpublished poem by Hammon, which she dates at the same time of this essay, speculating that Hammon probably intended the poem to circulate along with “An Address.” It was Hammon’s practice to append poems to his written essays. See above, n. 43.
73. Hammon, “An Address,” 230–31.
74. Hammon, “An Address,” 231.
75. Hammon, “An Address,” 231.
76. Hammon, “An Address,” 232.
77. Hammon, “An Address,” 232. Hammon’s statements can be considered rather naïve because enslaved autobiographies and narratives document that it was a common practice for masters to treat enslaved Africans cruelly, no matter how “good” the enslaved Africans behaved.
78. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 249.
79. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon, 8. O’Neale’s observations about the reasoning behind Hammon’s statements resonate with Shively Smith’s Strangers to Family: Diaspora and 1 Peter’s Invention of God’s Household (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016) interpretation of the author of 1 Peter, whose language is often interpreted as ordaining slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Yet Smith writes, “The author of 1 Peter was not persuading his Christian sisters and brothers to see their plight as domestic slaves, inferior people, and subjects of imperial control as God’s created order…. The author commands submission not because it was God’s way but because it was his way of mitigating the conspicuousness of his community and keeping members alive. The writer of 1 Peter did not want Christian sisters and brothers to die any more than he wanted them to abandon the faithful community altogether. Yet he recognized that they were targets for verbal assault, social ostracism, and even susceptible to random or systematic acts of capital punishment. Even if it could not be entirely remedied or avoided, the intention of the letter is to lessen the suffering the communities experienced” (165 [emphasis added]).
80. Hammon, “An Address,” 233.
81. Hammon, “An Address,” 235.
82. Hammon, “An Address,” 235–36.
83. Richards, “Nationalist Themes,” 133.
84. See the discussion in Callahan, The Talking Book, on the deep desire many African Americans had for learning to read during this time, particularly so that they could read Scripture for themselves (1–20).
85. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 17.
86. Hammon, “An Address,” 239.
87. Hammon’s substitution gets to the point that Paul makes in this passage. Paul draws a distinction between the powerful, mighty, and those of noble birth and those who have no or little power in society. In other words, Paul makes a distinction between the wealthy and the poor in the Corinthian congregation to underscore the radical nature of the new creation in which God often chooses those whom society frequently rejects. See the classic study, Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth, edited and translated with an introduction by John H. Schütz (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982). See also my discussion of Paul and the poor in “Spirit-Shift: Paul, the Poor, and the Holy Spirit’s Ethic of Love and Impartiality in the Eucharist Celebration,” in The Holy Spirit and Social Justice Interdisciplinary Global Perspectives: Scripture and Theology, ed. Antipas Harris and Michael Palmer (Lanham, MD: Seymour, 2019), 218–38.
88. Hammon, “An Address,” 236. He writes, “That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white people in the late war. How much money has been spent and how many lives have been lost to defend their liberty! I must say that I have hoped that God would open their eyes, when they were so much engaged for liberty, to think of the state of the poor blacks and to pity us” (236).
89. Hammon, “An Address,” 240.
90. Helen MacLam, “Introduction: Black Puritan on the Northern Frontier; The Vermont Ministry of Lemuel Haynes,” in Black Preacher to White America: The Collected Writings of Lemuel Haynes, 1774–1833, ed. Richard Newman (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990), xix; Richard Newman, “Preface: The Paradox of Lemuel Haynes,” in Black Preacher to White America, xi; portions of this section appear in Bowens, “Liberating Paul,” 57–73.
91. Newman, “Preface,” xii; MacLam, “Introduction,” xx.
92. MacLam, “Introduction,” xxi.
93. MacLam, “Introduction,” xxi.
94. John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3; John Saillant, “ ‘Remarkably Emancipated from Bondage, Slavery, and Death’: An African American Retelling of the Puritan Captivity Narrative, 1820,” Early American Literature 29 (1994), notes the popularity of Haynes’s writing: “Haynes was a noted figure in New England Congregationalism, since he was a veteran of the Revolution, the first ordained black American, the leader of several successful revivals, the first black American to receive a college degree (Middlebury College, honorary, 1804), and a champion of orthodoxy in theological disputes. Haynes’s renown is indicated in the extravagant success of his 1805 sermon pamphlet, Universal Salvation … which appeared in over seventy editions, more than fifty of them within Haynes’s lifetime, as well as in his invitation in 1814 to offer a sermon in Timothy Dwight’s Yale College chapel, the epicenter of New England theology” (123).
95. MacLam, “Introduction,” xxxiv.
96. MacLam, “Introduction,” xxv.
97. Newman, “Preface,” xii. Mark Noll’s observation that this essay draws as much upon the Declaration of Independence as upon the Scriptures is important, especially in light of the enslaved petitioners above who seek to connect their desire for freedom with the American Revolution. It also important to note that even though this essay was not published while Haynes was alive, Saillant states that it “should not be considered private. His manuscripts were preserved by white people with whom he studied, to whom he preached” (Black Puritan, Black Republican, 15).
98. John Saillant, “Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776–1801,” Religion and American Culture 2, no. 1 (1992): 79.
99. Katie Cannon, “Slave Ideology and Biblical Interpretation,” Semeia 47 (1989): 12.
100. Cannon, “Slave Ideology and Biblical Interpretation,” 12.
101. Lemuel Haynes, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping; Wherein those arguments that Are useed [sic] in its vindication Are plainly confuted. Together with an humble Address to such as are Concearned in the practise,” in Newman, Black Preacher to White America, 24. All of Haynes’s essays cited in this volume appear in Newman, Black Preacher to White America, and the page references are to Newman. See John Saillant’s important discussion of Haynes and other early black exegetes in “Origins of African American Biblical Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century Black Opposition to the Slave Trade and Slavery,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Structures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2000), 236–50.
102. Haynes, “Liberty,” 25.
103. Saillant, “Origins,” 238.
104. Haynes, “Liberty,” 25–26.
105. Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican, 34; Saillant, “Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins,” 83–84.
106. Haynes, “Liberty,” 19.
107. Haynes, “Liberty,” 19.
108. Haynes, “Liberty,” 20.
109. Nehemiah Adams, A South-Side View of Slavery, or Three Months at the South in 1854 (Boston: T. R. Marvin and B. B. Mussey & Co., 1854), 209. Also quoted by Berwanger, “Negrophobia,” 269. In another part of his book, Adams, A South-Side View of Slavery, argues that the South should be left alone, should be defended “against interference” and left “to manage their institution,” and as a result “American slavery will cease to be any thing but a means of good to the African race” (201).
110. Joseph C. Lovejoy, The North and the South! Letter from J. C. Lovejoy, Esq to His Brother, Hon. Owen Lovejoy, M. C., with remarks by the Editor of the Washington Union (Washington, DC, 1859), 5. Also quoted by Berwanger, “Negrophobia,” 270.
111. Lovejoy, The North and the South!, 6.
112. Berwanger, “Negrophobia,” 269.
113. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles, Together with A Preamble To The Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular and Very Expressly, to Those of The United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (Boston: Revised and published by David Walker, 1830), reprinted in David Walker’s Appeal: In Four Articles (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), 37. See the discussion of Walker in the final section of this chapter.
114. Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” 1:592.
115. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), supplement 2, vol. 4:1262.
116. Haynes, “Liberty,” 26.
117. Even leading academics of the day did not believe that slavery was sinful. Samuel Miller, Princeton Seminary’s second professor, did not consider the practice sinful, as his son wrote of Miller, “But greatly as he disliked the institution [of slavery], he did not, we have seen, consider slaveholding in itself, of necessity, a sin; and even during the earlier part of his residence in New Jersey, at different times, held several slaves under the laws providing in that state for the gradual abolition of human bondage.” Samuel Miller, The Life of Samuel Miller, D.D. LL.D., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1869), 2:300. At other times Miller, The Life of Samuel Miller, criticized slavery, such as in his 1797 speech for the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves, in which he states, “In this country, from which has been proclaimed to distant lands, as the basis of our political existence, the noble principle, that ‘ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL,’—in this country there are slaves!—men are bought and sold! Strange, indeed! that the bosom which glows at the name of liberty … should yet be found leagued on the side of oppression” (1:92). A few years later he called slavery an “evil,” but an evil that could not be ended at once, but its termination “must be a work of time” (Samuel Miller, A Sermon Preached at March 13th, 1808, For the Benefit of the Society Instituted In The City of New York, For The Relief Of Poor Widows With Small Children [New York: Hopkins & Seymour, 1808], 7). For Miller, the American Society for Colonization was the solution for abolitionism, for he believed that if left in the United States, freed blacks could “never … associate with the whites on terms of equality…. They will be treated and they will feel as inferiors” (13). Since whites and blacks could not live together in one society if blacks are freed, “Coloured people must be colonized. In other words, they must be severed from the white population, and sent to some distant part of the world” (15). See also Samuel Miller, A Sermon Preached at Newark, October 22d, 1823 Before the Synod of New Jersey (Trenton, NJ: George Sherman, 1823).
118. Haynes, “Liberty,” 30.
119. Saillant, “Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins,” 80.
120. There is some discussion regarding the date of publication, and nothing is known about the circumstances of Jea’s death. See Graham Russell Hodges, ed., Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 34; Pierce, Hell without Fires, 38–39.
121. All excerpts taken from John Jea, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Digitization Project, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jeajohn/jeajohn.html. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text. Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), writes about the importance of the autobiographies of the enslaved, stating that “Even in the antislavery movement [blacks] were often urged into mere support roles for white activists and discouraged from developing their own powers of speech and thought. The slave narratives fight these forms of oppression too, testifying to the mental capacities of the slave, arguing tirelessly for his humanity, … demanding equal treatment for black people in all areas of public life, and wrestling with the mental devils of self-doubt and despair. And little by little, book by book, they construct the framework of black American literature. Autobiography in their hands became so powerful, so convincing a testimony of human resource, intelligence, endurance, and love in the face of tyranny, that, in a sense, it sets the tone for most subsequent black American writing” (12).
122. See a similar account told in the narrative of Henry “Box” Brown, a former enslaved African, in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 91–92.
123. As Pierce, Hell without Fires, 39, notes, Jea foreshadows Frederick Douglass, who spoke of the great chasm between “slaveholding Christianity” and the Christianity of the Bible.
124. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 40.
125. See also the discussion in Pierce, Hell without Fires, 44–45.
126. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 40.
127. See chap. 4, which discusses in detail some conversion stories of the enslaved.
128. The Holy Spirit is a resource for resistance in Jupiter Hammon’s work. See above discussion.
129. See similar views in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 53–54.
130. It is not certain to which law Jea refers in his narrative, for it is unclear when such a law existed. See discussions in Hodges, Black Itinerants, 19, 22; Pierce, Hell without Fires, 40–41.
131. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), identifies this motif as the “trope of the talking book,” which appears in other narratives of early African American writers such as James Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobo Cugoano (127–69).
132. There are accounts of other miraculous instances of African Americans being taught to read by God, such as Jean McMahon Humez, ed., Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 108.
133. Some historians question the accuracy of Jea’s account regarding his miracle of literacy and subsequent freedom. See discussions in Pierce, Hell without Fires, 59; John Saillant, “Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773–1816,” Journal of American Studies 33 (1999): 488.
134. Gates, Signifying, 163.
135. Jea’s preaching carries over into his narrative. At moments his autobiography becomes a sermon in which he addresses the reader to get saved and receive God’s grace. For example, in one place he writes, “I would, therefore, advise you, my dear reader, to endeavour, if you have not, to seek the Lord” (23). In addition to his various direct addresses of the reader to seek salvation, he exhorts the reader to read certain Scriptures. Once his “minisermons” conclude, he returns to the narrative with a cue to the reader, “But, to resume my narrative …” (25). Even in his autobiography, Jea sees an opportunity to share the gospel, indicating his preacher’s heart and his desire for everyone’s salvation.
136. Saillant, “Traveling in Old and New Worlds,” 476.
137. Jea, Life, writes: “After this the love of God constrained me to travel into other parts to preach the gospel” (49); “The love of God constrained me to preach to the people at Liverpool, as I had done to those in North America” (55); “After that I was constrained by the love of God to take another journey abroad” (66); “I was constrained by the Spirit of God, to take a journey into a foreign country” (75). Paul writes in 2 Cor. 5:14: “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead.” Though Jea substitutes “God” and “Spirit of God” for “Christ” in his recitation of this verse, his inclusion of the phrase demonstrates his view that his ministry originates in divine love.
138. See also Jea’s description of one of his sermons preached in Liverpool taken from 1 Cor. 10:1–15 (71–73), his use of Heb. 4:1–6, 11 (85–86), and his use of 2 Cor. 13:11 to bid farewell to his friends (88).
139. Although Jea cites this as Gal. 4:18–24, it is actually Gal. 5:18–23.
140. Here Jea refers to Paul’s words in 2 Cor. 11:7–10; 12:13–14, where the apostle discusses how he preaches the gospel free of charge to the Corinthians to keep himself from being a burden to the church.
141. Gates, Signifying, 164.
142. Jarena Lee’s specific date of death is unknown, but she is believed to have died in the 1850s. See “Jarena Lee,” in Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas (New York: Norton, 2010), 160; “Jarena Lee,” in Can I Get a Witness? Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women, an Anthology, ed. Marcia Riggs (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 6. See also the discussion of Jarena Lee in Bettye Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
143. Joy Bostic, African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 49.
144. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving An Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript, Written by Herself (Philadelphia: Printed and published for the author, 1836), reprinted in Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 28. Hereafter, page references from the reprinted edition will be given in parentheses in the text.
145. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 14.
146. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 14–15.
147. David D. Daniels III, “ ‘Doing All the Good We Can’: The Political Witness of African American Holiness and Pentecostal Churches in the Post–Civil Rights Era,” in New Day Begun: African American Churches and Civic Culture in Post–Civil Rights America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 167. We will see in chap. 3 that Pentecostals believe in a third grace or blessing—baptism of the Holy Spirit.
148. Bostic, African American Female Mysticism, 70. For a christological reading of Lee’s sanctification experience, see J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 333–39.
149. See also the discussion of this passage in Valerie Cooper, Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 135–36; Carter, Race, 339–42.
150. See also Bostic, African American Female Mysticism, 67.
151. “Jarena Lee,” in Preaching with Sacred Fire, 161–62.
152. “Jarena Lee,” in Preaching with Sacred Fire, 162.
153. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 6.
154. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 2.
155. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 13.
156. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 14.
157. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit, 2.
158. Elaw’s death date is difficult to determine since information about her after 1846 is not known. See “Zilpha Elaw,” in Simmons and Thomas, Preaching with Sacred Fire, 168.
159. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 90; cf. 89; “Zilpha Elaw,” in Simmons and Thomas, Preaching with Sacred Fire, 167.
160. “Zilpha Elaw,” in Riggs, Can I Get A Witness?, 11. According to Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, “Lee met Zilpha Elaw while both were proselytizing in western Pennsylvania. Lee recalls that they ‘enjoyed good seasons together’ as a temporary preaching team” (6).
161. Elaw includes over one hundred Pauline citations and echoes in her autobiography.
162. Elaw, Memoirs, reprinted in Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 49. Hereafter, page numbers from this work, as found in the Andrews volume, will be given in parentheses in the text.
163. Elaw, like the other interpreters in this volume, does not distinguish between the Paul of Acts, the Paul of the undisputed epistles, and the Paul of the deutero-Pauline epistles, all of which are distinctions prevalent in modern biblical studies.
164. See also Mitzi Smith, “ ‘Unbossed and Unbought’: Zilpha Elaw and Old Elizabeth and a Political Discourse of Origins,” Black Theology: An International Journal 9, no. 3 (2011): 298. My thanks to Emerson Powery for pointing me to this source.
165. See also Pierce, Hell without Fires, 101.
166. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 241n19.
167. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 241n19.
168. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 241n19; Pierce, Hell without Fires, 93.
169. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 241n19.
170. Elaw, Memoirs, 92, remarks, “A great and effectual door of utterance opened to me by the Lord. After laboring there for some weeks, I proceeded to the City of Washington, the capital of the United States … here also I laboured with much success; many souls obtaining the knowledge of salvation by the remission of their sins, with the gift of the Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of so feeble an earthen vessel. I continued my travels southward into the State of Virginia…. I abode there two months, and was an humble agent, in the Lord’s hand, of arousing many of His heritage to a great revival; and the weakness and incompetency of the poor coloured female but the more displayed the excellency of the power to be of God.”
171. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 241n20.
172. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 241n20.
173. She explains, “For my speech and my preaching were not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit, and in power; it was mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds; and became the power of God to the salvation of many” (Elaw, Memoirs, 98).
174. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 107.
175. See, for example, Susan Eastman, “Galatians 4:19: A Labor of Divine Love,” in Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 89–126; Beverly Gaventa, “The Maternity of Paul,” in Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 29–39; Mitzi Smith, “ Unbossed and Unbought,” 301–5.
176. See the statement by Josiah Priest regarding the superiority of white skin above.
177. This quote of Acts 17:26 appears above in one of the petitions for freedom and in the discussion of Lemuel Haynes.
178. Maria Stewart and Julia Foote are discussed in chap. 2.
179. Chanta Haywood, “Prophesying Daughters: Nineteenth-Century Black Religious Women, the Bible, and Black Literary History,” in Wimbush, African Americans and the Bible, 356; Pierce, Hell without Fires, also calls Zilpha a prophesying daughter (87). Mitzi J. Smith, “ ‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), characterizes Elaw, Lee, Stewart, Foote, and other black women interpreters during this time period as “proto-womanists interpreters” (109).
180. Elaw, Memoirs, 66, writes, “It was at one of these meetings that God was pleased to separate my soul unto Himself, to sanctify me as a vessel designed for honour, made meet for the master’s use” (2 Tim. 2:21).
181. Donald M. Jacobs, “David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison,” in Jacobs, Courage and Conscience, 8; Marbury, Pillars, 34, 214.
182. Marbury, Pillars, 34.
183. Jacobs, “David Walker,” 8; Marbury, Pillars, 36.
184. This statement does not mean to suggest that Walker was not active in liberation causes before Boston. See Marbury’s discussion of Walker’s time in South Carolina: Pillars, 35–36.
185. Jacobs, “David Walker,” 9.
186. Walker published three editions of his Appeal during 1829 and 1830. The quotes included here are from his third edition.
187. Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles; Together with A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, To Those of The United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (Boston: Revised and published by David Walker, 1830), reprinted as David Walker’s Appeal: In Four Articles (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), ix. Hereafter, page references to the reprint edition will be given in parentheses in the text.
188. James Brewer Stewart, “Boston, Abolition, and the Atlantic World, 1820–1861,” in Jacobs, Courage and Conscience, 109.
189. On page 13 he writes in reference to this same concept: “Have you not, Americans, having subjected us under you, added to these miseries, by insulting us in telling us to our face, because we are helpless, that we are not of the human family?”
190. For discussions regarding literacy among enslaved Africans, see Antonio Bly, “ ‘Pretends He Can Read’: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730–1776,” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 261–94; Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear.
191. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 6.
192. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 6.
193. Ps. 8:5: “For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”
194. Note the interesting contrast between Walker’s language, “the minister of my Master,” and Nancy Ambrose’s language, “the master’s minister.” The distinction is telling. Because of the message this camp-meeting preacher proffers, he is similar to Ambrose’s “master’s minister”; he is not, in Walker’s terms, a “minister of my Master.”
195. The last line of this passage echoes Isa. 13:6: “Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand; it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty,” and Joel 1:15: “Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.” In this quote Walker refers to skin color and argues that this is no basis for enslavement. In another passage in his treatise he addresses the “mark of Cain” theory prevalent during this time, which stated that the mark God put on Cain was black skin. Walker writes, “And [I] have never seen a verse which testifies whether we are the seed of Cain or of Abel. Yet those men tell us that we are the seed of Cain, and that God put a dark stain on us, that we might be known as their slaves!!! Now, I ask those avaricious and ignorant wretches, who act more like the seed of Cain, by murdering the whites or the blacks? How many vessel load of human beings, have the blacks thrown into the seas? How many thousand souls have the blacks murdered in cold blood, to make them work in wretchedness and ignorance, to support them and their families?” (60-61). See also the brief discussion of the mark of Cain in n. 7, above.
196. Frederick L. Ware, African American Theology: An Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 141.
197. Scholars note that “sin” and “death” are subjects of verbs in Romans, indicating that Paul views these entities as actors on the cosmic landscape: “Sin came into the world through one man” (Rom. 5:12), “Death exercised dominion” (5:14, 17; cf. 6:9), and “Sin exercised dominion in death” (5:21; cf. 6:14) (all NRSV). For example, see Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul, 125–36; Robert Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 374–75; Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 139–58.
198. Roy E. Finkenbine, “Boston’s Black Churches: Institutional Centers of the Antislavery Movement,” in Jacobs, Courage and Conscience, 185, views the appeal in this way: “The Appeal was first and foremost a call to repentance. Walker did not desire that slaveholders be destroyed, but rather that the institution of slavery be overthrown. Only if whites failed to repent, he warned, would God free the slaves through physical force. Yet, if compulsion was needed, Walker predicted, blacks would be God’s willing instruments.”
199. It is possible that Walker echoes 2 Pet. 3:10 here. However, Walker’s use of “body” language in this context makes the allusion to Paul more likely.
200. Stewart, “Boston,” 110; Marbury, Pillars, 36.
201. Marbury, Pillars, 36.
202. This interpretation is even more compelling in light of how Walker depicts salvation as liberation from slavery and how he encourages his fellow free blacks to work for “salvation of the whole body.” Walker sees himself doing just that by giving up his life for the cause, the salvation of the black body made up of both enslaved and free.
203. Haywood, “Prophesying Daughters,” 356.