In most of British America—especially the plantation colonies of the Chesapeake, the Lower South, and the West Indies—the Protestant revival included Africans and creoles, most of whom were enslaved. The hundreds of thousands of Africans transported to the colonies after the mid-seventeenth century came from societies with their own belief systems, some based on Islam, others on religions indigenous to West Africa. Unlike Indians, whose religions persisted and, in some cases, flourished after European contact, Africans found the Middle Passage profoundly disruptive, sundering families, destroying religious hierarchies, and mixing language and ethnic groups. The details of this ‘spiritual holocaust’ varied considerably from place to place. In parts of North America and the West Indies, the existence of substantial populations of ‘Coromantees’ (the English name for the Akan peoples of present-day Ghana) enabled slaves to re-create West African obeah communities, replete with priests (‘obeahmen’), coronation rituals (ikem), and military leaders, or ‘captains’. As John Thornton has shown, all three featured prominently in acts of slave resistance, including slave conspiracies in New York (1712) and Antigua (1736), and Jamaica’s long- running Maroon War (1665-1739). Yet, even among apparently stable communities, slavery distorted African religion, and in Virginia and South Carolina, where black majorities were smaller and the possibilities for autonomy fewer, the transformation ‘forever destroyed traditional African religious systems as systems.
Despite the possibilities for evangelization, Protestant religious leaders and slave owners responded ambivalently to this crisis. In part, this reluctance to proselytize reflected the assumption that ‘slavery was unlawfull for any Christian’—as the SPG’s Anthony Gavin wrote in 1738—and that slaves who converted automatically became free. Although colonial legislatures passed laws barring faith-based manumissions from the mid-seventeenth century onward, the association of salvation with freedom continued to worry slaveholders, a group that included George Whiteheld and the SPG. Not surprisingly, there were few Christian slaves on the SPG’s own estate on Barbados. The Scottish traveller Janet Schaw found a Christmas spent on Antigua in 1774 unsettling for two reasons. The first was the ‘universal Jubilee’ occasioned by the popular belief that ‘the good Buccara God’ (i.e. white man’s god) would hurt any master who used ‘the inhuman whip’ against the island’s slaves during the festivities; the second was the resulting danger of insurrection. ‘It is necessary to keep a lookout during this season of unbounded freedom; and every [white] man on the Island is in arms and patrols go all round the different plantations as well as keep guard in the town.
Although such tensions remained a conspicuous feature of the Caribbean and North American landscape, two developments helped produce an upsurge in slave Christianization, starting in Virginia during the 1740s and proceeding several decades later in South Carolina and the West Indies. The first was the SPG’s repudiation of Christian liberty for the doctrine that slaves owed their masters ‘absolute obedience’. As Thomas Bacon observed during the 1740s, slaves were obligated to do whatever their owners commanded as if they ‘did it for God himself’. Although not all Anglicans accepted this harsh principle, the SPG's emphasis on slave obedience set the dominant tone both for its own clergy and for the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who inundated the region from the eighteenth century's middle decades. Despite their emphasis on the spiritual equality of all humanity, even Moravians preached submission for the Christian slaves who worked on their settlements in North Carolina. Consequently, slave conversion came to seem much less threatening to colonial planters. Only in the West Indies (and only at the century’s end) did evangelicals become an abolitionist phalanx. Yet on the eve of slavery’s abolition, the humanitarianism of evangelicals like William Knibb of Jamaica and Antigua’s Anne and Elizabeth Hart remained suspect in the eyes of many Protestants, including evangelical missionary societies in Britain and the islands’ Anglican clergy.
The second development was the growing receptivity to Protestant Christianity among British American blacks, especially second- and third- generation creoles, who were more likely to speak English, live in families, and have ties to local communities. Although their numbers defy precise measurement, Philip Morgan has estimated that during the final quarter of the eighteenth century blacks accounted for a third of Virginia’s Baptists and a quarter of Nova Scotia’s Methodists; by the century’s end nearly a third of the Leeward Islands’ slaves were Christian. Because African Americans worshipped with whites into the early nineteenth century, the religion that grew out of this expansion was less distinctive than would later be the case, yet, even during these early years, blacks in both North America and the Caribbean accepted Christianity selectively. Because of their roles as ‘religious specialists’ in African traditions, women often assumed important leadership roles, ministering to the sick, maintaining church discipline, and encouraging revivals. The distinctiveness of African American Protestantism was also evident in attitudes to death. Not only did slaves retain African notions of the funeral as ‘the true climax of life’, celebrating burials with dancing, singing, drumming, and feasting, but they adapted Christian notions of the afterlife to their own. Some thought the dead returned to Africa; others envisioned an ascent to heaven accompanied by African-style spirit guides. According to Mechal Sobel, African death rituals and reverence for ancestors even influenced white religion, encouraging Southern Baptists and Methodists to reconceptualize heaven as a place of reunion ‘with those we love’ and to make deathbeds into scenes of ecstatic happiness and joy.
During the early nineteenth century black Christianity increasingly diverged from its white counterparts. In the United States the Baptist and Methodist churches eventually split along racial lines, with African Americans seceding from the latter denomination to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1816. With the exception of Barbados, where slaves and freedmen and women remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Church of England, the British West Indies followed a similar trajectory. Like their counterparts to the north, black evangelical congregations in the West Indies achieved a measure of freedom from white control. In Jamaica there were two Baptist Churches by the early nineteenth century, one led by white ministers from England and affiliated with the Baptist Missionary Society in Britain, the other a ‘native’ denomination inspired by African American Baptists who came to Jamaica following the American Revolution. The latter Church played a key role in the Jamaican slave revolt of 1831, which, together with the rebellions on Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), helped swing evangelicals in Britain solidly towards emancipation.