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“Heathens and Infidels”? African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700–1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Annette Laing
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Extract

In early 1710, a small group of parishioners approached Francis Le Jau, the Anglican missionary to St. James Parish in South Carolina. He recognized them all as regular churchgoers, and he was pleased when they asked him to admit them to Holy Communion. Yet he hesitated, because the men admitted that, having been “born and baptized among the Portuguese,” they were Roman Catholics. Le Jau was always cautious in such cases, he assured church authorities in London. He told the men that he would need them first to renounce “the errors of the Popish Church” before he would allow them the sacrament. He then suggested that they give the matter some thought over the next few months.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 197 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2002

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References

Notes

Many people kindly took the time to read and comment on earlier versions of this manuscript, which has appeared in earlier incarnations as conference papers at a Joint session of the 1998 American Historical Associa-tion and American Society for Church History annual meetings in Seattle, and also at the Southeastern Regional Seminar in African Studies Fall Conference, 1999. I would especially like to thank Patricia Bonomi, Ray Kea, Robert Olwell, Erik Seeman (who first suggested that I write about the relationship between Anglican missionaries and Africans in the Low Country), Jon Sensbach, John Thornton, and Betty Wood. Most of all, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Cathy Skidmore-Hess, who encouraged my first tentative steps into African history, helped me navigate an unfamiliar historiography, and generally offered encouragement, advice, and insight.

1. Francis Le Jau to the Secretary, February 1, 1710, February 19, 1710, September 18, 1711, in Klingberg, Frank J., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Frances Le Jau, 1706-1717 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 69, 77, 102Google Scholar. The men's origins are unclear, although Le Jau speculated that they were from Madeira. Le Jau later recorded that another slave, this time a woman whom he said was from “Guadalupe,” had decided to abjure Catholicism. See ibid.,133. Finally shortly before he died, in 1717, Le Jau spoke of planning to allow “some papists” to recant and be admitted to communion. However, it is not at all clear these were Africans.

2. Wood, Peter H., Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1974)Google Scholar. Wood did not discuss African resistance but held the missionaries responsible for excluding Africans from Anglican Christianization while recognizing the obstacles that they faced in promoting African Christianization (see 133-42). Raboteau, Albert, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 3. Raboteau also did not emphasize African “rejection” of Anglicanism and recognized the formidable cultural and environmental pressures that operated on missionaries who attempted to proselytize Africans. He further suggested that similarities between Christianity and African religions would have allowed Africans “to find some common ground between the beliefs of their ancestors and those of the white Christians” (127). While Ira Berlin in Many Thousands Gone accepted the existence of Kongolese Catholics in South Carolina, his concern with them was as a distinct ethno-political group who used the Stono Rebellion to flee to the Spanish at St. Augustine rather than with their place in popular religious culture in the Low Country. Later in the book, again writing of South Carolina, he asserted that “the planters’ raw power and the missionaries’ zeal to convert tested the slaves’ efforts to maintain their African ways.” He depicted the efforts to convert slaves in the Low Country as a “struggle” between a monolith of dedicated missionaries, on the one hand, and a monolith of African nationalists, on the other, likening their “refusal to accept Christian baptism” to their “rejection of the planters’ task” (172).

Similarly, Jon Butler, wrote that “most slaves still rejected Christianity before 1760” in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Creel, Margaret Washington, in “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, wrote of South Carolina spe-cifically that “most Africans no more welcomed the colonial missionary than they did their masters…. There were few immediate redeeming qualities in the new religion that warranted acceptance” (101). See also Sobel, Mechal, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 1979), 64 Google Scholar; Mullin, Michael, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 187-88Google Scholar; Morgan, Philip D., Slave Counter-point: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 420-22Google Scholar; and Frey, Sylvia R. and Wood, Betty, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 63–79 Google Scholar.

3. Olwell, Robert, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 103-39Google Scholar.

4. Thornton, John, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1101-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thornton, John, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatrix Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hilton, Anne, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), esp. 90–103, 190-205Google Scholar; and MacGaffey, Wyatt, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 191–211 Google Scholar.

5. Smith, Mark M., “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67, no. 3 (August 2001): 513-34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. See Frank J. Klingberg's work from the 1940s, still widely cited, which pursued the theme of “Anglican humanitarianism” toward African slaves, for example. An Appraisal of the Negro in Colonial South Carolina: A Study in Americanization (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1941). Among more recent Anglican scholars, S. Charles Bolton conceded that missionaries’ “attitudes toward the blacks were similar to those of the laity,” yet concluded, nonetheless, that slave owners remained unconvinced of the benefits of African Christianization “despite the best efforts of the clergy” (120). In short, Bolton's analysis of missionaries’ enthusiasm for converting Africans is somewhat ambivalent. See Bolton, S. Charles, Southern Anglicanism: The Church of England in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Other historians of Anglicanism have continued to stress the missionaries’ enthusiasm: see, for example, Armentrout, Donald S., “The Liturgical Traditions I: Episcopalians,” in Religion in South Carolina, ed. Lippy, Charles H. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993) 47 Google Scholar; and Van Horne, John C., ed., Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

7. Le Jau lived in Ireland c. 1690 until c. 1699, when he moved to England. In both countries, he shared the experience of Celtic Anglican clerics, who found preferment difficult to achieve. See Robert S. Matteson, “Francis Le Jau in Ireland,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 78, no. 2 (1977): 83-91. Most of the few missionaries in British America who prioritized African Christianization, such as Le Jau and Elias Neau of New York, were former Huguenots, and their empathy with Africans perhaps derived in part from their own extensive experience of marginality as French representatives of the Church of England. Frances Le Jau to Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), June 30, 1707, March 22, 1709, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 26, 55. See also 35.

8. Of the forty-three SPG missionaries who began serving in South Carolina between 1701 and 1750, only fourteen served more than ten years. Of the twenty-nine who served for less than a decade, twenty were in South Carolina for fewer than five years. I have only counted SPG missionaries, who leftbehind much more correspondence than did ministers appointed di-rectly by the Bishop of London. Appendix, “Ministers of the Established Church of South Carolina, 1796-1775,” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism 165-75.

9. See, especially, Bishop Fleetwood's widely distributed sermon (1711) and the “Pastoral Letter to the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations Abroad; Exhorting them to encourage and promote the Instruction of their Negroes in the Christian Faith,” May 19, 1727, sent by Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, to all missionaries in America, in Dalcho, Frederick, An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South-Carolina (1820; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

10. In 1713, the clergy of South Carolina submitted a memorandum to the SPG on the state of the colony's church, in which the ministers defended their failure to proselytize slaves. The reasons they gave emphasized their own lack of time, masters’ refusal to cooperate, and their fear of gathering together large numbers of slaves. See Klingberg, An Appraisal ofthe Negro in Colonial South Carolina, 6-7.

11. For detailed discussion of white and African population statistics in South Carolina, most of which are drawn from the SPG missionaries' correspondence, see Wood, Black Majority, 142-66.

12. See William Guy to SPG, Charleston, S.C., September 20, 1715, SPG Letter Books, B/4/25; W. Tredwell Bull to SPG, St. Paul's Parish, S.C., [October?] 31, 1715, SPG Letter Books, B/4/31; also the letters of Frances Le Jau in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 151-68. Le Jau was away from his parish for five months. The long-term impact of such attacks and the steady growth of the enslaved population can be seen, for example, in a letter from South Carolina missionary Richard Ludlam. Writing in 1725, he noted settlers’ engrossment of land and the resultant massive size of plantations. He lamented that this was causing the proportions of white settlers to Africans and Indians to shrink. He believed that whites’ security was contingent upon making “the Indians and Negroes a check upon each other, least [sie] by their vastly superior numbers we should be crushed by one or the other.” Richard Ludlam to SPG, St. James Parish, Goose Creek, S.C., n.d., 1725, SPG Letter Books A/19/66 (microfilm). Almost a decade before the Stono Rebellion, John Fulton, missionary to Christ Church Parish, South Carolina, wrote “a great many Negro slaves who make insurrections sometimes that the people are forced to come to Church with guns loaded.” John Fulton to SPG, Christ Church Parish, S.C., December 4, 1730, SPG Letter Books, A/23/221. While the concern here is speeifieally with the impact of missionaries’ fear of slaves on their efforts toward African Christianization, for discussion of white South Carolinians’ fears of Africans in general before 1740, see Wood, Black Majority, chap. 8.

13. See, for example, Thomas Hasell to SPG, St. Thomas Parish, S.C., April 25,1710, SPG Letter Books, A/5/CX; ibid. to ibid., March 12,1713, SPG Letter Books, A/7/401-2; ibid. to ibid., St. Thomas Parish, S.C., August 18, 1712, SPG Letter Books, A/7/435; ibid. to ibid., St. Thomas, S.C., June 4,1728, SPG Letter Books, A/21/10816. For Hasell's account of the impact of the Yamasee War, see ibid. to ibid., St. Thomas Parish, S.C., [December 1?], 1715, SPG Letter Books, B/4/133. After the war, Hasell rarely made references to Africans.

14. See, for example, Gideon Johns ton to SPG, Charleston, S.C., July 5, 1710, SPG Letter Books, A/5/438. Brian Hunt to SPG, St. John's Parish, S.C., May 25, 1724, SPG Letter Books, A/18/80; William Cotes to SPG, St. Georges, Dorchester, S.C., January 4, 1749, SPG Letter Books, B/16/147; Penuel Bowen to Col. Joseph Ward, Savannah, October 18, 1786, 27-31, in Bowen-Cooke Papers: Letter Book of Penuel Bowen, 1786-1788, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, 11/78/3.

15. Francis Le Jau to SPG, November 15,1708, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 48. See also ibid. to ibid., October 20, 1709, in ibid., 60.

16. Francis Le Jau to SPG, December 5, 1711, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 98.

17. Ibid.

18. Francis Varnod to SPG, S.C., April 1, 1724, SPG Letter Books, B/4/173; ibid. to ibid., Dorchester, S.C., June 14, 1726, SPG Letter Books, B/4/203.

19. Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects, 113-14.

20. Francis Le Jau to SPG, September 18,1711, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 102; ibid., August 30, 1712, 121; ibid., February 9,1711, 86.

21. See Laing, Annette, “‘A Very Immoral and Offensive Man’: Religious Culture, Gentility, and the Strange Case of Brian Hunt, South Carolina, 1727,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 103, no. 1 (January 2002): 6–29 Google Scholar.

22. Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects, 113. Charles Boschi to SPG, n.d., St. Bartholomew's Parish, S.C., SPG Letter Books, B/12/112. See also Brian Hunt to SPG, St. John's Parish, S.C., October 30,1723, SPG Letter Books, B/4/167; Josia Dupre to James Dupre, August 27, 1708, SPG Letter Books, A/5/24; Klingberg, Appraisal of the Negro, 89.

23. Charles Boschi to SPG, St. Bartholomew's Parish, S.C., April 1, 1746, SPG Letter Books, B/12/111.

24. Francis Le Jau to SPG, July 14, 1710, in Klingberg, Appraisal of the Negro, 81.

25. Robert Stone to SPG, St. James Parish, Goose Creek, S.C., March 22, 1750, SPG Letter Books, B/18/186.

26. Alexander Garden, Jr., to SPG, St. Thomas Parish, S.C., May 6, 1765, SPG Letter Books B/5/220.

27. Richard Ludlam to SPG, St. James, Goose Creek, July 2, 1724, SPG Letter Books, A/18/83. Thomas Hasell prepared his own young slaves for baptism and they attended church, together with his adult slaves “who understand a sufficiency of the English tongue.” He hoped to catechize them by means of what he termed “some short and fitting method of instruction.” But as for slaves he did not own, who comprised the vast majority of the more than one thousand Africans in the parish, Hasell wrote simply that “it is not practicable nor in my power to do them the like service.” Thomas Hasell to SPG, St. Thomas Parish, S.C., December 2, 1731, SPG Letter Books, B/4/257. See also, for example, Levi Durand to SPG, June 3, 1743, Christ Church Parish, S.C., SPG Letter Books, B/9/231; John Fordyce to SPG, Prince Frederick's Parish, October 3,1744, SPG Letter Books, B/12/90; Lewis Jones to SPG, September 25, 1741, St. Helen's Parish, S.C., SPG Letter Books, B/9/137. In 1746, William Orr, in his Notitia Parochialis (a quantitative report on the religious state of the parish) substituted in place of the SPG's religious category “heathen and infidels” a racial categorization, “Negroes and Indians,” perhaps indicating the extent to which he regarded most slaves as beyond the pale of Christianity. See William Orr to SPG, St. Paul's Church, March 31, 1746, B/ 14/233.

28. The Negro school founded at Charleston in 1742 might at first seem to prove an exception to this theory, since it was established to train black catechists. However, it was promoted through the efforts of Alexander Garden, who, as Commissary, was the Bishop of London's representative in South Carolina and, thus, far more concerned than were his junior colleagues with appearing to follow Church of England policy in most matters.

29. There was Christian influence in West and Central Africa long before the nineteenth Century. See, for example, Hair, P. E. H., “Christian Influences in Sierra Leone before 1787,” Journal of Religion in Africa, 27 (1997): 3–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thornton, John, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The Americas 44 (1988): 265-66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of work specifically on the Kingdom of Kongo, see below.

30. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 199.

31. Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo, 157,161.

32. Ibid., 161.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 203.

35. Ibid., 186.

36. Ibid., 192.

37. “Christianity, as opposed to Central African religion, assigns primacy to a systematic body of beliefs.” Willy de Craemer, Jan Vansina, and Renee C. Fox, “Religious Movements in Central Africa: A Theoretical Study,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (October 1976): 458-75, quote is on 471. There is room here for comparison to popular religious culture among many Europeans in America, who, while they shared an attachment to Christianity, were far less invested than were their clergy in denominational distinctions and loyalty. See Annette Laing, “All Things to All Men: Popular Religious Culture and the Anglican Mission in Colonial America, 1701-1750” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1995).

38. For more on Kongolese Christianity, see Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, esp. chap. 1; Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo”; and Thornton, , “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750,” Journal of African History 25 (1984): 147-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thornton has challenged a previous conception of Kongolese Catholicism as superficial, ephemeral, and generally of limited impact and rejected arguments that posit Christianity as an alien faith that was imposed on the Kongolese. He emphasized that Christianization in Kongo was voluntary and widely adopted. Further, he argued that, despite the withdrawal of European Catholic missionaries in the mid-eighteenth Century, Christian observance continued into the nineteenth Century, nurtured by lay catechists. Nineteenth-century Christian missionaries, he contended, denied that Christianity was present in Kongo because they held a narrower conception of what constituted valid Christianity than had their predecessors, and so, again unlike earlier missionaries, refused to acknowledge Kongolese Christianity, even though Kongolese certainly considered themselves Christians. See also Thornton, , Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 9Google Scholar; “African Religions and Christianity in the Atlantic World”; and Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo.

39. Quoted in MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 206.

40. Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo, 195.

41. On countermagic in Salem, see Godbeer, Richard, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 213-15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. For other examples of the Capuchins’ arrogance, see MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 204. The Kongolese conception of the Capuchins as “healers rather than teachers” may have contributed to this resistance to the friar's imposing the destruction of talismans (203). On resistance to Anglican missionaries’ authority in America, see Laing, “‘A Very Immoral and Offensive Man.’”

43. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 192.

44. Pollitzer, William S., “The Relationship of the Gullah-Speaking People of Coastal South Carolina and Georgia to Their African Ancestors,” Historical Methods 25 (Spring 1993): 53–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The word “Gullah” may well have been a corruption of “Angola.” It may also have derived from the Gola people of the Windward Coast, who were expert in rice cultivation. Peter Wood has suggested that it originated from both sources. See Wood, Black Majority, 172n.

45. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” 1101— 13; Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, chap. 9, esp. 210-14. Both Thornton and Ray Kea have sought to demonstrate that certain events in America were rooted in African politics and religion. See also Thornton, John, “‘I am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Ideology in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993): 181–214 Google Scholar; Kea, Ray, “‘When I die, I shall return to my own land’: An ‘Amina’ Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733-34,” in The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society Ghanian and Islamic in Honor of Ivor Wilks, ed. Hunwick, John and Lawler, Nancy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 159-93Google Scholar.

46. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 126-27. Raboteau is correct in asserting that “the meaning which the missionary wished the slaves to receive and the meaning which the slaves actually found (or, better, made) were not the same.” His argument that “the theory that African acceptance of Christianity required the adoption of a totally alien world view needs… to be modified” is particularly convincing for the Low Country, all the more so in light of John Thornton's subsequent revelation of the extent of Kongolese Christianity.

47. It should be noted that, given the lack of specific information about the details of public worship in colonial churches, and the latitudinarian tendencies and considerable influence of the laity, it may be too easy to imagine a plainer, less Catholic style of worship than perhaps was the case. See Mather, F. C., “Georgian Churchmanship Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Public Worship, 1714-1830,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26, no. 2 (April 1985): 255-83Google Scholar. Note that Richard Ludlam described the church at Goose Creek, which was completed shortly after Le Jau's death, as having “an altarpiece decently beautified with paintings and gildings grave and commendable.” He also reported that another chapel in the parish was built in the shape of a cross. See Richard Ludlam to SPG, S.C., December 12, 1727, SPG Letter Books, A/20/98. William Guy also reported that his church in St. Andrew's Parish was cruciform. William Guy to SPG, St. Andrew's Parish, S.C., January 22, 1728, SPG Letter Books, A/20/110. Crosses were powerful symbols in African spirituality, and it is hard to believe that at least some enslaved people did not attribute significance to cruciform architecture.

48. Gideon Johnston to SPG, January 27, 1711, in Frank Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707-1716, 75.

49. See Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo, 217.

50. Thomas Hasell to SPG, August 18, 1712, St. Thomas Parish, S.C., A/7/435.

51. Monica Schuler, in her study of Kongolese indentured servants in nineteenth-century Jamaica, argued that “literacy could be used as a powerful incentive to persuade Africans to convert.” See Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 85.

52. See Robert Maule to SPG, S.C., October 20, 1710, SPG Letter Books, A/5/133; Thomas Hasell to SPG, at Sir Nathaniel Johnson's, St. Thomas Parish, S.C., March 12, 1712/13, SPG Letter Books, A/7/401-2; SPG Letter Books, A/10/84.

53. See, for example, Ebenezer Taylor to SPG, n.d., c. 1715, SPG Letter Books, A/10/84.

54. See Francis Le Jau to SPG, Goose Creek, S.C., February 18, 1709; ibid to ibid., August 5, 1709; February 19, 1710, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 50, 52, 57, 76.

55. Ibid. to ibid., Goose Creek, February 19,1710, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 76.

56. Ibid. to ibid., Goose Creek, S.C., August 30,1712, in ibid., 120.

57. Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 86. Mary C. Karasch's study of enslaved Africans in nineteenth-century Brazil, another area that received large numbers of enslaved people from Angola, further reveals the complexities of slaves’ relationship with Christianity in the Americas. She argues that Africans in Rio de Janeiro may have been attracted to baptism more than to other sacraments because it “washed away sins (sorcery) and the devil (evil spirits) and brought them under the protection of the Holy Spirit.” Baptism may also have been “an initiation ceremony in the sense of integration into a black Community,” a function that it also served among Europeans (257). Despite noting that “many” of those slaves baptized as Catholics were men who rarely participated actively in church rites, Karasch goes on to argue that, al-though priests and masters barred them from most of the sacraments other than baptism, and thus from many of the practices of the religion to which they were supposed to have been converted, “slaves who were able to do so participated in Catholic religious processions, observed feast days, attended Mass, and said prayers” (258). Karasch, Mary C., Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Unlike the clergy, whose interests were vested in controlling access to Catholic rites, lay fraternities among enslaved African Catholics cheerfully absorbed non-Catholics into their ranks. Funeral processions organized by the brotherhoods, for example, included non-Catholics as well as Catholics. The non-Catholics waited outside the church while mass was held.

58. Francis Le Jau to SPG, July 10,1711, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 93-94.

59. Ibid. to ibid., August 30,1712, in ibid., 120-21; ibid. to ibid., February 10, 1710, in ibid., 77.

60. Ibid. to ibid., February 1, 1710, in ibid., 70. On Le Jau and slave literacy, see also ibid., 77. Among other examples of Le Jau's “gatekeeper” role, see ibid., 86, in which Le Jau noted that he always delayed baptizing African children, “except in case of danger,” in order to be sure that the master had consented, which strongly suggests that the child's parents had requested baptism.

61. For an intriguing comparative case of Indians who visibly adopted Christian ideas and yet who did so by incorporating them into existing beliefs and practices, see James Ronda, “Generations of Faith: the Christian Indians of Martha's Vineyard,” in William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (1981): 369-94.

62. Francis Le Jau to SPG, Goose Creek, S.C., October 3, 1715, in Klingberg Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 167.

63. Ibid. to ibid., St. James Parish, Goose Creek, S.C., March 22, 1709, in ibid., 52. See also Le Jau to SPG, May 25, 1712, in ibid., 112-13. Le Jau had advised that he would baptize slave children whose parents were both baptized. The parents of a child had asked him to christen the infant, even though only one parent was baptized.

64. Brian Hunt to SPG, St. John's Parish, S.C., October 30,1723, SPG Letter Books, B/4/167.

65. William Orr to SPG, March 30, 1743, St. Paul's Parish, S.C., SPG Letter Books, B/11/219. See also ibid. to ibid., St. Paul's Parish, S.C., September 30, 1748, SPG Letter Books, B/16/142; Charles Martyn to SPG, St. Andrew's, S.C., December 28, 1752, SPG Letter Books, B/20/138.

66. Robert Stone to SPG, St. James Goose Creek, S.C., March 22, 1750, SPG Letter Books, B/18/186. A chicken was a traditional present for a nganga, or spiritual leader, in Africa. There, it was intended as the subject of ritual sacrifice, or simply as a tribute.

67. See, for example, Thomas Hasell to SPG, at Sir Nathaniel Johnson's, St. Thomas Parish, S.C., March 12, 1712/13, SPG Letter Books, A/7/401-02. Hasell described having baptized a child whose parents, both slaves, were Christians. The child's godparents owned both the baby and his parents.

68. Francis Le Jau to SPG, St. James, Goose Creek, S.C., February 20, 1712.

69. Charles Martyn to SPG, St. Andrew's, S.C., June 23, 1752, SPG Letter Books, B/20/137. Decades earlier, Francis Le Jau had complained that masters would not allow slaves to attend church under “the old pretext that Baptism makes the slaves proud and undutiful.” See Le Jau to SPG, December 11, 1712, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle ofDr. Francis Le Jau, 124-25. See also Richard Ludlam to SPG, St. James Goose Creek, S.C., July 2, 1724, SPG Letter Books, B/4/181; and ibid. to ibid., St. James Goose Creek, S.C., March 22, 1725, SPG Letter Books A/19/62-3, in which Ludlam spoke of Indians’ resistance to Christianity, but did not make the same observation in his discussion of Africans.

70. Ebenezer Taylor to SPG, N.C., April 23, 1719, SPG Letter Books, A/13/218. See also, for example, William Dunn to SPG, Charleston, S.C., September 20, 1708, SPG Letter Books, A/4/384; Gideon Johnston to SPG, Charleston, S.C., July 5, 1710, SPG Letter Books, A/5/438.

71. Mrs. Haig to SPG, S.C., recd. July 15, 1715, SPG Letter Books, A/10/81-3.

72. Klingberg, Appraisal of the Negro, 7.

73. James Gignilliat to SPG, S.C., May 28, 1710, SPG Letter Books, A/5/119.

74. Francis Le Jau to SPG, St. James Parish, Goose Creek, S.C., March 19, 1716, in Klingberg, Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 174.

75. William Cotes to SPG, St. George's Parish, Dorchester, January 4, 1749, SPG Letter Books, B/16/147.

76. If Whitefield's emotionalism was a key to his success among Africans, the same was certainly true of his appeal to whites. Additionally, the warm response of Africans to emotional worship has apparently supported the supposition that they were hostile to liturgically based worship, although the two are by no means exclusive. As three eminent scholars of Central African religion have pointed out, people in the region have been attracted to Catholicism for its sacraments, special prayers for misfortune, and its hierarchy. Yet they have also appreciated the Protestant emphases on hymns and “the collective interpretation of the Bible.” De Craemer, et al., “Religious Movements in Central Africa,” 471.

77. Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 38.

78. Ibid., 39.

79. Ibid., 34-35.

80. Ibid., 44-46.

81. Ibid., 52.

82. Ibid., 53.

83. See also Morgan, David T. Jr., “The Consequences of George Whitefield's Ministry in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1739-1740,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 55, no. 1 (1971): 62–80 Google Scholar.