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Ritual Time in British Plantation Colonies, 1650-1780

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

Nicholas M. Beasley
Nicholas M. Beasley*
Affiliation:
Church of the Resurrection, Greenwood, South Carolina
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Extract

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 541 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2007

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References

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45. William Gordon, St. Michael's, Fulham Papers, 15:206.

46. Joseph Holt, St. Joseph's, Fulham Papers, 15:207.

47. Charles Irvine, St. Philip's, Fulham Papers, 15:209-10.

48. Alexander Deuchar, St. Thomas's, Fulham Papers, 15:205, 208.

49. By John Orderson, Parish Clerk, St. Michael's Parish Register, 1771-94, 253-56, 10 October 1780, Barbados Archives (hereafter BA), Black Rock, Barbados.

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53. John Scott, St. Catherine's, Spanish Town, Fulham Papers, 17:230-31.

54. While the town parishes of the plantation colonies had two services every Sunday, it is likely that relatively few of the rural parishes did with any regularity. The vestry of St. Michael in Barbados complained to the governor when their rector stopped preaching during the afternoon service, a duty that many ministers found difficult in th heat: Meeting of August 26, 1677, in “Records of the Vestry of St. Michael,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 16:1 and 16:2 (1948-49): 59.Google Scholar Carolina minister noted the difficulty of preaching in the heat, in Williams, George W., St. Michael's, Charleston, 1751-1791 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 23Google Scholar; and Fulham Papers, 9:160.

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61. Charles Leslie, New History of Jamaica, 34. See also Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica (London: 1774; reprint New York: Arno, 1972), 2:267.Google Scholar

62. South Carolina Gazette, 19 February 1732.

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64. Memorial of Thomas Harrison, St. Michael's Church, Bridgetown, Barbados, author's visit, October 2005. Harrison died in 1746.

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67. Renunciation of the Roman Church by Christopher Gilmor, Fulham Papers, 16:56-57

68. The Council of Barbados carefully guarded its right to control political speec in churches. It ordered that no minister “presume to publish in any church … any writing or writings … unless it be by order or Command from ye Governor or Governor and Council”: see Minutes of the Council, Lucas Transcripts, Reel 1 196, 26 February 1656, Public Library of Barbados (hereafter PLB), Bridgetown, Barbados.

69. Legislation passed March 22, 1666, in Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados from 1643 to 1762, ed. Hall, Richard (London: Richard Hall, 1764), 1.Google Scholar

70. See “An Act for the good governing of Servants, and ordaining the Rights betwee Masters and Servants” from 1661. So “that no person may pretend ignorance in this Act or Statute… . It is lastly enacted and ordained .. . that the Minister of every Parish-church within this Island, twice every year, that is to say, the Sunda next before Christmas-day and the Sunday next before the five and twentieth day of June, distinctly read, and publish this Act, in their respective Parish-churches, upo pain of forfeiting five hundred pounds of Sugar“: Hall, ed., Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 42.

71. Legislation passed August 8, 1688, in Hall, ed., Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 112-21. By the mid-eighteenth century, the reading of acts in church was not having its intended effect. “An Act for the better regulating of publishing all Laws an other Papers appointed to be read in Parochial Churches of this Island” allowed fo more abbreviated summaries of legislation to be read instead: Legislation passed Decembe 27, 1744, in Hall, ed., Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 336-37.

72. See “An Act to keep inviolate, and preserve the freedom of Elections,” which directed that “the said Minister shall publish the said Writ or cause the same to be published as in the like cases hath been usual, in the Church of Chapel, of the said Parish, th three next succeeding Sundays”: Legislation passed July 18, 1721, in Hall, ed. Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 257. For churchwardens' management of elections in parish churches in Carolina, see Bolton, S. Charles, Southern Anglicanism: The Church of England in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 148-49Google Scholar; an Olwell, Robert, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 104.Google Scholar See the South Carolina Gazette, 10 March 1733, for an Assembly election “on Tuesday the 20t Inst. at 10 o'clock in the Forenoon, in the Parish Church,” in Charles Town.

73. See the successive articles of Mabel L., Webber, ed., “Abstracts of Records of the Proceedings in the Court of Ordinary, 1764-1771,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 26:2 (1925): 124-27; 27:2 (1926): 91-94; 31:1 (1930): 63–66; 31: (1930): 154-57.Google Scholar Administrations were to be announced in the churches of St. Michael's St. Andrew's, and St. Bartholomew's in these records.

74. Trott, Laws, 360-61.

75. Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 170.

76. Legislation passed in 1668, in Hall, ed. Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 63-64.

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86. Port Royal Vestry Minutes, 1735-41, 3 May 1736, JA. Kingston paid an attorne for “drawg the Articles of Agreement between John Hacker and the Vestry to make a Negro Markett place” in 1730: Kingston Churchwarden's Accounts, 1722-59 21 July 1730, JA.

87. J. W. Orderson, Creoleana, 43.

88. On black marketing in Jamaica, see Mintz, Sidney and Hall, Douglas, “The Origin of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System,” Yale University Publications in Anthropology 57 (1960): 3–36Google Scholar; and Sheridan, Richard, The Development of the Plantations to 1750 [and] An Era of West Indian Prosperity, 1750-1775 ([Barbados]: Caribbean Universitie Press, 1970), 43Google Scholar. On black women and marketing in Barbados, see Beckles, Hilary McD.Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 72–89.Google Scholar

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90. Hadden, Sally, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 13.Google Scholar

91. Port Royal Vestry Minutes, 1735-41, 3 May 1736, JA.

92. South Carolina Gazette, 9 March 1737. This was a failure to enforce the 1696 law that “enjoined town constables to organize white men into groups which would capture, whip, and jail slaves from the countryside found in town on Sundays“: see Hadden, Slave Patrols, 18.

93. “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves, 1740, printed in Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt, ed. Smith, Mar M. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 23.Google Scholar

94. Bolzius, Johann Martin, “Reliable Answers to Some Submitted Questions Concernin the Land Carolina,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 14:2 (1957): 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Yet th Grand Jury there presented “the neglect of carrying arms to church and other place of worship, and against the bad custom of delivering their arms to negroes or othe slaves to keep while they are at divine worship“: South Carolina Gazette, 1 May 1756 Fines for “no arms in Church,” ca. 1757, can be found in Salley, ed., Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena's Parish, 89.

95. See the South Carolina Gazette, 11 August 1739, for the text of the legislation, originally passed in 1736.

96. Craton, Testing the Chains, 123.

97. Wood, Black Majority, 313-14. The 1683 plot in Barbados was to have begun o Sunday: see Craton, Testing the Chains, 110.

98. In celebrating the major feasts and other holy days, some plantation parishes compare favorably with metropolitan practice: see Yates, Nigel, Buildings, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches, 1600—1900, rev. ed. (New York Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–65.Google Scholar

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100. Kingston Churchwarden's Accounts, 1722-59, 5 February 1723, JA.

101. Port Royal Vestry Minutes, 1735-41, 2 February 1736, JA.

102. See Port Royal Churchwarden's Accounts, 1766-93, 6 June 1786, JA, for a 3.9 charge “for Bushes and Bread for the Church,” at Whitsuntide; St. Catherine's Vestr Minutes, 1759-68, with minutes of 28 January 1760, JA., for payments “To Dressing th Church at Xtmas,” and “To Dressing the Church at Easter and Whitsuntide“; St Michael's Church Records, Records of the Treasurer, Treasurer's Receipts/Vouchers 1792, for payments “To Drayage for Christmas bushes and Negro hire,” and “For Easte bushes to dress the church.“

103. Gordon of St. Michael's, Fulham Papers, 15:206. They were entertained at th vestry's expense. Meeting of February 6,1733, in “Records of the Vestry of St. Michael, , journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 21:3 (1954): 111Google Scholar: “Ordered that th churchwarden pay to the Rev. Mr. Wm. Johnson £35. current money for accommodatin the Lent preachers this ensuing season of Lent.” Similar notes can be found throughou the minutes.

104. William May, Kingston, Fulham Papers, 17:224-25.

105. Fulham Papers, 9:161,171. A bad poem for Good Friday appeared in the South Carolina Gazette, 1 April 1751, noting that “this is a Week set apart for serious Contemplation.

106. Fulham Papers, 15:203-14.

107. Sloane, Hans, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (London: Printed by B. M. for the author, 1707), 2:liiGoogle Scholar. On slaves’ celebration at Christmas, see Dirks, Robert, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida 1987), 1–8Google Scholar.

108. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:491, n. x.

109. Taylor, Multum in Parvo, 542.

110. James White to Bishop Gibson, Vere Parish, 23 April 1724, Fulham Papers 17:185-88.

111. Craton, Testing the Chains, 129, 133. Bussa's Rebellion in Barbados in 1816 also began on Easter Sunday. Planning took place at Sunday dances and at a final dance on Good Friday: Craton, Testing the Chains, 261.

112. Order of November 24, 1766, in “Roger Hope Elletson's Letter Book,” The Jamaica Historical Review 1:3 (1948): 351.Google Scholar

113. Gaspar, David Barry, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, With Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkin University Press, 1985), 185-86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This Samuel Martin was father of the author of th Essay on Plantership cited above. The 1831 Baptist War in Jamaica was also partially precipitate by attempts to shorten the Christmas holidays: Mullin, Michael, African in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 254.Google Scholar

114. Minutes of the Council, Lucas Transcripts, Reel 1, 43, 1 August 1654, PLB. On indentured servitude in Barbados, see Beckles, Hilary McD., White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).Google Scholar

115. Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 250.

116. Early 1759, in Pinckney ed., Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 105.

117. South Carolina Gazette, 27 May 1751.

118. Salley, A. S., “Letter from Dr. Tucker Harris to His Children,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 27:1 (1926): 30–35.Google Scholar

119. Curtis Brett Letters, Summary of and extracts from, 1775-80, 19, JA.

120. Gordon to Gov. Lowther, 26 April 1717, Fulham Papers, 15:143-48. On the dail office and calendar in early Christianity, see Bradshaw, Paul F., The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 171-91.Google Scholar

121. Joseph Napleton, Gordon's curate at St. Michael's, Fulham Papers, 15:211.

122. William Johnson to Bishop Gibson, 17 June 1732, Fulham Papers, 16:27-28.

123. Adam Justice, St. Peter's Parish, Fulham Papers, 15:210.

124. Alexander Garden, St. Philip's, Charles Town, Fulham Papers, 9:160.

125. Hooker, Richard J., ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 70–71Google Scholar. From Woodmason's “Account of South Carolina in the Fulham material, 1766.

126. Calvin Galpine of Port Royal, Fulham Papers, 17:215-16.

127. William May, Kingston, Fulham Papers, 17:224-25.

128. Richard Marsden, St. John's, Fulham Papers, 17:222-23.

129. John Scott, St. Catherine's, Spanish Town, Fulham Papers, 17:230-31.

130. See Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 283, for notes on the death of James Hay Chief Justice of the island, who never “neglected his Family Devotions.” The lack of weekday and holy day services in the rural parishes of the plantation world is simila to contemporary rural English practice, where distance and the nature of agricultura work also resulted in less frequent corporate worship than was to be found in towns and cities: see Gregory, Jeremy, “The Church of England,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Dickinson, H. T. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 237.Google Scholar

131. See Fulham Papers, 15:203-14.

132. Joseph Napleton, curate of St. Michael's, Fulham Papers, 15: 211.

133. Meeting of November 5,1684, Minutes of the Council, Lucas Transcripts, reel 2, section 2, 15, PLB.

134. See Fulham Papers, 17:211-35.

135. See Fulham Papers, 9:160-71. St. Michael's in Charles Town would have hol day worship after its opening in 1761.

136. Letter to the Secretary, 9 February 1711, in The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706-1717, ed. Klingberg, Frank J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 86.Google Scholar

137. Smith, Mark M., “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Ston Rebellion,” The Journal of Southern History 67:3 (2001): 521-30Google Scholar. See also Thornton, John K. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96: (1991): 1101-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

138. Craton, Testing the Chains, 121.

139. In 1767: Hooker, ed., Carolina Backcountry, 30.

140. In 1768: Ibid., 33.

141. In 1767: Ibid., 30.

142. First Consistory Book, St. John the Baptist Lutheran Church, 2, SCHS. This wa joined to a recommendation that “the minister should also take care not to refute the Anglican Church in public sermons.” Presumably he continued to do so in private. O Lutherans in Carolina and elsewhere, see Roeber, A. G., Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in British Colonial America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

143. Kingston Vestry Minutes, 1750-52, 159, 14 January 1750, JA; Meeting of Januar 14, 1737, in “Records of the Vestry of St. Michael,” journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 22:1 (1954): 48Google Scholar; St. Philip's Parish Vestry Minutes, 1756-74, 20, 26 July 1746, SCDAH. On church music, see Williams, George W., “Charleston Church Music, 1562-1833,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 7:1 (1954): 35–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

144. South Carolina Gazette, 27 January 1733.

145. Ibid., 16 November 1753.

146. Ibid., 25 December 1740. For a similar celebration in Dorchester with sermo and entertainment, see South Carolina Gazette, 15 May 1755. For Beaufort, see South Carolina Gazette, 10 January 1752.

147. Meeting of March 26, 1726, in “Records of the Vestry of St. Michael,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 20:3 (1953): 139Google Scholar. They were rung on Sunda as well. On festive bell ringing in early modern England, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 68-80. For bells in early America, see Rath, Richard Cullen, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 43–50.Google Scholar

148. William May's answers as commissary to the bishop's queries. He also noted tha his wife “was kill'd in my Arms in the Hurricane,” Fulham Papers, 17:207-8.

149. Barham, Henry, Account of Jamaica (London, 1722), 271Google Scholar, West Indies Collection University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Reproduction of British Librar Sloane ms. 3918.

150. John Scott, St. Catherine's, Spanish Town, Fulham Papers, 17:230-31.

151. Nicholas McCalman, St. Thomas in the East, Fulham Papers, 17:221.

152. Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 274. Writing in the 1770s, Edward Lon wrote that the June 7 fast “still continues“: see Long, History of Jamaica, 2:143. See A form of prayer for a perpetual fast in the Island of Jamaica, on the seventh of June (London: R Smith and E. Symon, 1718)Google Scholar. One thanksgiving sermon from Jamaica can be read in Castelfranc, Gideo, A Sermon, Preached at the Parish Church of St. Andrew, on Friday the Second of September, 1763, Being the Day Appointed by His Excellency the Governor, for a General Thanksgiving, on Account of the Peace (Kingston, Jamaica: Bennett and Woolhead 1763)Google Scholar.

153. William T. Bull to Robinson, 19 December 1720, Fulham Papers, 9:98-99

154. South Carolina Gazette, 29 June 1738.

155. Ibid., 31 May 1740.

156. Ibid., 20 November 1740.

157. Ibid., 20 January 1746.

158. Ibid., 1 May 1756. A fast “to implore the Divine Being to send us Rain” was declare in 1733: see the South Carolina Gazette, 1 September 1733. Another was declared i 1743 on receiving news of war with France: see the South Carolina Gazette, 14 Marc 1743.

159. William Hutson Diary, 1757-61, SCHS.

160. The Barbados Mercury, 19 April 1783, PLB. A St. George's Society convened for similar purposes in Charles Town in 1733: see Bowes, Frederick P., The Culture of Early Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 120.Google Scholar

161. The South Carolina Gazette, 29 November 1738. Alexander Skene was the president

162. The South Carolina Gazette, 13 March 1749. Qunicy, Josiah also “feasted with the Sons of St. Patrick” on March 17,1773: see “Journal of Josiah Quincy, Junior, 1773,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 49 (1916): 451.Google Scholar

163. Meeting of April 11, 1728, in “Records of the Vestry of St. Michael,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 20:4 (1953): 198.Google Scholar

164. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 34.

165. See Smith, Jonathan Z., To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 94–95Google Scholar. Here he cites Stefan Czarnowski's work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland, showing that “in the processes of forming a national community the celebrations of those heroes whose feast days are marked out in time, rather tha being distributed in different places, supply the unifying occasions. It is through structures of temporality, as ritualized, that the divisiveness and particularity of spac are overcome“: Czarnowski, Stefan, Le Culte des héros et ses conditions sociales; saint Patrick, héros national de l'Ireland (Paris: F. Alcan, 1919).Google Scholar

166. Biases in early American historiography in favor of New England and evangelica traditions can thus be corrected in a ritual approach. John K. Nelson point to an evangelical synthesis in which “worship is equated with preaching; spiritualit with individual conversion; and institutional authenticity with voluntary associatio and congregational autonomy“: see Nelson, John K., A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 9Google Scholar. On efforts to undermine that evangelical synthesis tha has marginalized the study of religion in the plantation regions of British America, see the “Preface to the Updated Edition,” in Bonomi, Patricia U., Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, updated ed. (New York: Oxfor University Press, 2003), xvi-xx.Google Scholar