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Anglicanism, Catholicism and the Negro Slave*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Herbert S. Klein
Herbert S. Klein
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

In recent years, American scholars have begun to search for the uniqueness of the American institution of Negro slavery, by contrasting it with the experience of the other colonizing nations of Europe in the New World. Even as far back as the 17th century, a sharp difference in slave institutions was noted between English, French and Spanish possessions, yet few historians until recently have attempted to analyze the causes and consequences of these distinctions.

Type
Slavery
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , April 1966 , pp. 295 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1966

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References

1 Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas (New York, A. A. Knopf, 1947)Google Scholar.

2 Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

3 Sio, Arnold A., “Interpretations of Slavery: The Slave Status in the Americas”, CSSH, VII, No. 3 (April, 1965), 289–308Google Scholar.

4 4 The evangelizing mission of the Catholic Church in the New World was in fact a truly novel and powerful departure from previous experience. While the wars of reconquista against the Moors had brought the expansion of the faith, this had been through means of the fire and sword. Only in rare instances were attempts made to convert Mohammedans and Jews to Christianity peacefully, and thus despite the religious overtones of the centuries-long reconquista, the whole concept of evangelization was practically non-existent. Even when the opening up of virgin territories suddenly brought this great movement to life within Spanish Catholic circles, it was an entirely unique phenomenon, with no parallel in Europe. Thus while the New World church was pacifically preaching a gentle Christ to the Indians, the peninsular church during these same three centuries of colonial rule, waged an unrelenting war against Jews, Moors, mudejares, moriscos, conversos, judaizers, Lutherans and Calvinists. Intolerant defender of the faith at home, it proved to be unusually tolerant, patient and intelligently assimilationist in its encounters with the New World pagans. As one scholar concluded, “Militant Spain guarded its religious purity in the metropolitan territory with the sword, and turned itself into a missionary at the service of the same faith in the New World.” León, Antonio Ybot, La iglesia y los eclesiasticos españoles en la empresa de indias, 2 vols. (Barcelona, Salvat Editores, 1954–1963), I, 347–50Google Scholar.

5 See e.g., Ricard, Robert, La “conquête spirituelle” du Mexique (Paris, Institut d'ethnologie, 1933)Google Scholar.

6 On the role of the African Negro in medieval Spain, see Lévi-Provençal, E., Histoire de I'espagne musulmane, 3 vols. (Paris, G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1950–1953), III, 72, 74–75, 177–78; 208ffGoogle Scholar; Verlinden, Charles, L'esclavage dans I'europe médiévale, péninsule ibérique - France (Bruges, “De Temper”, 1955), pp. 225–26, 358–62Google Scholar; Saco, Jose Antonio, Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos mas remotos hasta nuestra dias, 3 vols. (Barcelona, Jaime Jepus, 1875–77), JJ, 140–41Google Scholar. - African Negro slaves were still a known and recognized element within Iberia's small slave population right up to the opening up of the modern slave trade with West Africa by Portugal in the 15th century. Ibid., Ill, 36; Donnan, Elizabeth, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935), I, 1Google Scholar.

7 Las siete partidas del rey Alfonso el sabio, cotejadas con varios codices antiguos, por la Real Academia de Historia, 3 vols. (Madrid, Imprenta Real, 1807), III, 117Google Scholar, Partida IV, titulo XXI, ley 1.

8 Ibid., 30, Partida IV, titulo v, introdución.

9 Ibid., 31–32, Partida IV, titulo v, ley 2.

10 Ibid., ley 1.

11 Among the numerous laws on manumission see Ibid., 121–22, Partida IV, titulo xxii, ley 1.

12 Ortiz, Fernando, Hampa afro-cubana: los negros esclavos, estudio sociologico y de derecho público (La Habana, Revista Bimestre Cubana, 1916), p. 343 nGoogle Scholar; also Saco, Jose Antonio, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el nuevo mundo y en especial en los paises americo-hispanos, 2 vols. (Barcelona, Jaime Jepus, 1879), I, 69Google Scholar.

13 Zavala, Silvio, La filosofía político en la conquista de América (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1947)Google Scholar, chap. iv. For the ending of Indian slavery in Cuba, see Wright, Irene Aloha, The Early History of Cuba, 1492–1586 (New York, Macmillan Co., 1916), pp. 229, 232Google Scholar.

14 Las Casas, who had stood at first for the introduction of Negro slaves, later held that the Negroes were unjustly enslaved, “for the same reasoning,” he claimed, “applies to them as to the Indians.” Alonso de Montufar, archbishop of Mexico, in 1560 questioned the enslavement of the Negroes, while Fray Tomas de Mercado in his work Tratos y contractos de mercaderes (1569) attacked the right of procuring and enslaving Negroes in Africa itself. Bartolome de Albornoz in his Arte de contratos (1573) approved of the slave trade in Moors from Berber, Tripoli and Cyrenaica, but rejected entirely the trade in Negroes from Ethiopia and the Portuguese traffic in it. Perhaps the most outstanding figures in the evangelical mission to the African Negro slave in the New World were two 17th-century friars: Pedro Claver, who worked among the Negro slaves arriving at Cartagena, for which he was later canonized, and the American Jesuit, Alonso de Sandoval who wrote the famous evangelical tract, De instaurada aethiopum salute (1627). Zavala, Silvio, New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943), p. 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zavala, , “Relaciones historicas entre indios y negros en Iberoamerica”, Revista de las lndias, Vol. XXVIII, No. 88 (1946), pp. 55–65Google Scholar; Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana, I, 252–55; Altamira, Rafael, Historia de Espaáa y de la civilizatión española, 5 vols. (Barcelona, Juan Gili, 1900–1930), III, 242Google Scholar.

15 “We order that in each one of the towns of Christians a determined hour each day, be designated by the prelate in which all the Indians, Negroes and Mulattoes, free as well as slave, that there are within the towns, are brought together to hear the Christian Doctrine.” This same law also provided a similar arrangement for those who worked and lived in the countryside. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 3 vols. (Madrid, D. Joaquin Ibara, 1791), I, 4–5Google Scholar, Libro I, titulo i, ley 12.

16 Ibid., 5, Libro I, titulo i, ley 13.

17 Ortiz, op. cit., p. 348.

18 Ybot León, op. cit., II, 55.

19 Utrera, Fr. Cipriano de, “El Concilio Dominicano de 1622, con una introdución historica”, Boletín eclesiastico de la arquidiócesis de Santo Domingo (1938–1939), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

20 The original Latin ordinances, or Sanctiones Concilii Dominicani, are reprinted in Ibid., pp. 23–81.

21 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

22 Sanctiones Concilii Dominicani, Sessio Secunda, Caput I, Sectio vii.

23 Sessio Secunda, Caput I, Sectio vii.

24 Sessio Secunda, Caput I, Sectio ix.

25 Sessio Secunda, Caput I, Sectio x.

26 Sessio Secunda, Caput I, Sectio ix.

27 Sessio Secunda, Caput II, Sectio iii.

28 Sessio Secunda, Caput IV, Sectio iii.

29 Sessio Secunda, Caput IV, Sectio vii.

30 Sessio Secunda, Caput V, Sectio i.

31 Sessio Secunda, Caput V, Sectio vi.

32 Sessio Secunda, Caput VII, Sectio iv.

33 Sessio Tertia, Caput I, Sectio iv.

34 Sessio Tertia, Caput I, Sectio v.

35 Sessio Quarta, Caput VII, Sectio ii.

36 Ortiz, Fernando, Hampa afro-cubana: los negros brujos (Madrid, Librería de Fernando Fe, 1906), p. 304Google Scholar. This same command was also contained in the very first chapter of the 1789 Slave Code, see “Real Cedula de Su Magestad sobre la educación, trato y ocupaciones de los esclavos en todos sus dominios de Indias …”, reprinted in Revista de Historia de America, No. 3 (September, 1938), pp. 50–51Google Scholar.

37 Constitución III, quoted in F. Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos …, p. 348.

38 Ibid., pp. 349–50.

39 Ibid., p. 349.

40 Sagra, Ramón de la, Historia economico-politica y estadistica de la isla de Cuba (Habana, Imprenta de las viudas de Arazoza y Soler, 1831), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., p. 20. The free colored, who made up 15% of the total population in 1827, had 4,826 baptisms.

42 Archivo General de Indias [hereafter cited as AGI], Sevilla, Audiencia de Santo Domingo, legajo 516, no. 30, June 14, 1758.

43 Sagra, op. cit., p. 3.

44 AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 223, February 15, 1824.

45 Sagra, op. cit., pp. 20, 24. In France at this time, the figure was one married couple for each 134 persons. Ibid., p. 24 n.

46 Ibid., p. 65.

47 For the 1778 census breakdown, see AGI, Indiferente General, leg. 1527, December 31, 1778. For a clerical census of the Americas in 1959, see Castro, Donald S., et al., Statistical Abstract of Latin America, 1963 (U.C.L.A., Center of Latin American Studies, 1964), p. 22Google Scholar. The lowest figure for any contemporary Latin American country was Chile, with one priest for every 2,750 Catholics. The United States figure in 1965, is J priest to 778 practicing Catholics. The Official Catholic Directory, 1965, General Summary, pp. 1–2.

48 Tannenbaum, op. cit., pp. 53ff.

49 Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana, I, 221.

50 For the history of the first company of pardos libres (free mulattoes) of Havana see, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 418, no. 7, 1714.

51 AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 419, no. 8, 1715.

52 Sagra, op. cit., p. 3.

53 The figures for the census from 1774–1827 can be found in Ibid., pp. 3–6; and for those for the census from 1841–1861 are calculated by Le Riverend Brusone, Julio J., in Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, et al., Historia de la nation cubana, 10 vols. (La Habana, Editorial Historia de la Nacion Cubana, 1950), IV, 170Google Scholar.

54 For a complete discussion of this system, see Aimes, Herbert H. S., “Coartacion: A Spanish Institution for the Advancement of Slaves into Freedmen”, Yale Review, XVII (February, 1909), 412–31Google Scholar; and Ortiz, Los negros esclavos, pp. 313ff.

55 AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 152, ramo 2, no. 39, September 24, 1680.

56 Such for example was the experience of the parish priest of the copper mining town of Santiago del Cobre in the 17th century with his 500 free and slave Negro communicants. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 417, no. 15, December, 1709.

57 AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 151, ramo 2, no. 22, February 22, 1682.

58 AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 515, no. 51, 1755.

59 An excellent study of these cabildos is Fernando Ortiz, “Los cabildos afro-cubanos”, Revista Bimestre Cubana, XVI (1921), 5–39.

60 Ortiz, Fernando, “La fiesta afro-cubana del ‘dia de reyes’”, Revista Bimestre Cubana, XV (1920), 5–26Google Scholar.

61 AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 1455, no. 5, 1760.

62 For example, see the petition of the mulatto Auditor of War of Cuba, who was a law graduate of the University, in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 2236, October 1, 1791.

63 Quoted in Cross, Arthur Lyon, The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 10Google Scholar.

64 Brydon, George Maclaren, Virginia's Mother Church and the Political Conditions Under Which it Grew, 2 vols. (Richmond, Virginia Historical Society, 1947–1952), I, 40–42Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

66 Ibid., pp. 42–44.

67 Ibid., p. 67; Cross, op. dt., p. 2.

68 Brydon, op. cit., I, 67–68; 86ff.

69 Hening, William Waller, The Statutes at Large, being a Collection of the Laws of Virginia, 13 vols. (New York, R and W and G. Bartlow, 1823), I, 241–42Google Scholar.

70 Brydon, op. cit., I, 92.

71 Ibid., p. 93.

72 Hening, Statutes, II, 44–45.

73 One of the major reforms of Bacon's rebellion was the call for vestry elections every three years. Brydon, op. cit., I, 97.

74 Bruce, Philip Alexander, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), I, 136–39Google Scholar.

75 Godwyn, Morgan, The Negro's and Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church (London, J. D., 1680), p. 168Google Scholar.

76 Hartwell, Henry, James Blair and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia, 2d ed. (Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1940), p. 66Google Scholar.

77 Ibid., p. 67.

78 Godwyn, op. cit., Preface, p. i. According to Godwyn the Virginia colonists chafed at the cost of Church tithes, and quickly lost their interest in the Anglican creed, because, he charged, Virginians “for the most part do know no other God but Money, nor Religion but Profit”.

79 Hartwell, Blair and Chilton, loc. cit.

80 Godwyn, op. cit., p. 170.

81 Jones, Hugh, The Present State of Virginia, 2d ed. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1956), p. 96Google Scholar.

82 Ibid., p. 98.

83 Quoted in Cross, op. cit., p. 26.

84 Ibid., pp. 3–4, 44.

85 Ibid., pp. 78–80.

86 For the history of this struggle, see Cross, loc. cit., and Bridenbaugh, Carl, Mitre and Sceptre, Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

87 87 In his famous denunciation of West Indian Slavery, for example, the Reverend James Ramsay constantly contrasted the British to the French treatment of slaves. “In the French colonies,” he declared, “the public pays an immediate attention to the treatment and instruction of slaves. The intendants [gov't administrative officers] are charged with their protection, proper missionaries are appointed for the purpose of training them up to a certain degree of religious knowledge; and ample estates and funds are allotted for their maintenance of these ecclesiastics.” “The respect in which marriage is held, brings a farther advantage to French slaves. The ceremony is solemnized by the priest, and the tie continues for life. This gives them an attachment to their families, … that is seldom seen among English slaves; where the connection between the sexes is arbitrary, and too frequently casual.” Rev. Ramsay, James, An Essay on the Treatment of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, James Philipps, 1784), pp. 52, 54Google Scholar.

88 The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXVIII (1920), 43–44.

89 Thompson, H. P., Into All Lands, The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1950 (London, S. P. C. K., 1951), chap. 1Google Scholar.

90 This sermon is reprinted in its entirety in Klingberg, Frank J., Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia, Church Historical Society, 1940), pp. 203–204Google Scholar.

91 Ibid., p. 211.

92 Ibid., p. 217.

93 William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Series, IX (1901), 225.

94 Thompson, op. cit., chap. 3.

95 The Virginia legislature itself seriously accepted the thesis that Christianity was incompatible with slavery, and in its early definitions actually defined slaves as those who were not Christians. Thus in 1670 it enacted a statute which declared that “all servants not being Christians imported into this country by shipping shalbe slaves for life.” Henings, Statutes, II , 283. This was finally rectified in 1682 when the Assembly decreed that: “all servants except Turks and Moores … which shall be brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, … Mulattoes or Indians, who and whose parentage and native country are not Christian, although afterwards, and before such their importation … they shall be converted to the Christian faith; … shall be judged, deemed and taken to be slaves” Ibid., 490–91.

96 Jones, op. cit., p. 99.

97 Perry, William Stevens (ed.), Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 5 vols. (Hartford, Church Press Company, 1870–1878), I, 267Google Scholar.

98 Ibid., p. 269.

99 Ibid., p. 289.

100 Ibid., p. 295.

101 Ibid., pp. 304, 306.

102 Ibid., pp. 277–278. Interestingly, the few records which survive of slave education and conversion carried out by masters, come not from Church of England slave owners, but from Presbyterians and Quakers. Thus Roberts Pleasants, one of the wealthiest planters of Virginia in the 18th century, and a Quaker, not only converted his slaves, but even educated and eventually freed them. Archer, Adair P., “The Quakers’ Attitude towards the Revolution”, William and Mary Quarterly, 2d Series, I (1921), 168Google Scholar. For his part, the Presbyterian planter Colonel James Gordon, in his journal in 1761 noted that “Several strange negroes come to Mr. Criswell [the local presbyterian teacher] to be instructed, in which he takes great pains.” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Series, XI (1903), 223. Nevertheless, despite these and other efforts, the consensus of historical opinion is best summed up by Marcus W. Jernegan who declared that throughout the colonial period, “most of the slaves lived and died strangers to Christianity” and that “with comparatively few exceptions the conversion of negro slaves was not seriously undertaken by their masters. On the contrary many of them strenuously and persistently opposed the Church of England, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts…” Jernegan, Marcus W., “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies”, American Historical Review, XXI, no. 3 (April, 1916), 504CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Jones, Jerome W., “The Established Virginia Church and the Conversion of Negroes and Indians, 1620–1760”, Journal of Negro History, XLVI, no. 1 (January, 1961), 12–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Leland, John, The Virginia Chronicle (Norfolk, Prentis and Baxter, 190), p. 8Google Scholar.

104 Ibid., pp. 21ff; also see Gewehr, Wesley M., The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740–1790 (Durham, Duke University Press, 1930)Google Scholar.

105 Leland, op. cit., p. 13.

106 Ibid., p. 9.

107 Woodson, C. G., The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915)Google Scholar, chaps, VII, VIII.

108 On the failure of the Methodists, see Gewehr, op. cit., pp. 242–49; and for the Quakers see Drake, Thomas E., Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950)Google Scholar.

109 Though the Anglican church consecrated native candidates between 1784 and 1790, which enabled the Americans to establish the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, the new bishops were subservient to local interests and Vestry government was in no way changed. See Cross, op. cit., pp. 263ff; Loveland, Clara O., The Critical Years, The Reconstruction of the Anglican Church in the United States of America: 1780–1789 (Greenwich, Seabury Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Goodwin, Edward Lewis, The Colonial Church in Virginia (Milwaukee, Morehouse Pub. Co., 1927)Google Scholar, pp. 127ff. for the early bishops of the Diocese of Virginia.

110 Hening, Statutes, III, 87–88.

111 Ibid., IV, 132.

112 Russell, John H., The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619–1865 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1913), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

113 Hening, op. cit., XI, 39–40.

114 Bureau, U.S. of the Census, Negro Population 1790–1915 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1918), p. 57Google Scholar, table 6. It should be noted that Virginia had the largest number and percentage of freedmen in its colored population in 1860 of any slave state in the Union except Maryland, which was a unique border state.

115 Thompson, op. cit., pp. 9–19, 42–43.

116 Goodwin, Mary F., “Christianizing and Educating the Negro in Colonial Virginia”, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, I, no. 3 (September, 1932), 148–51Google Scholar.

117 William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Series, VII (1899), 13.

118 Thompson, op. cit., chap. 4.

119 William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Series, V (1897), 219; also see the case of Robert, son of the free Negro woman Cuba, who was bound out in Lancaster County in 1719 till his twenty-first birthday. William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Series, VIII (1899), 82.

120 In 1800 the General Assembly specifically prohibited the local parishes from requiring he masters to teach the indentured free colored children to read or write, and by the 1830's the state legislature was prohibiting all types of schooling and education for even free Negroes who were willing to pay the costs. Russell, op. cit., pp. 140, 144–45.

121 Brydon, op. cit., II, 608–614.

122 Greene, Evarts B. and Harrington, Virginia D., American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 141Google Scholar.

123 Ramsay, op. cit., pp. 265–66.

124 For the history of this struggle see Coupland, Reginald, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 2d ed. (London, Frank Cass and Co., 1964)Google Scholar, along with Klingberg, Frank, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England, A Study in English Humanitarianism (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1926)Google Scholar.