In a few exceptional cases, such as the Congregational church in Natick, Massachusetts, during the 1730s, Indians and whites participated in churches on relatively equal terms. Because the church at Natick was financially supported as an Indian mission, whites showed a greater willingness to have an Indian serve in the leadership role of deacon along with two white deacons. Natick was part of a long history of Indian engagement with Christianity. It was established in 1650 as the first of fourteen Indian praying towns in which the colony guaranteed Indians land in exchange for their pursuit of Christian and “civilized” reforms under the guidance of missionary John Eliot. Indians also used the town as a means of maintaining some traditional cultural practices, Indian leadership, and control of land while under colonial pressure. Both white and Indian ministers led this congregation between 1660 and 1719. Meanwhile, more and more whites acquired land in Natick, both legally and illegally. A new Congregational church was organized in Natick in 1729 by the white minister Oliver Peabody, who was employed by the NEC. Although Peabody had a condescending attitude toward the Natick Indians, some Indians were members and participants in his church. Three Indian men and five white men, including Peabody, were the original members of the new church. Joseph Ephraim Sr., an Indian, was elected to the office of deacon soon thereafter, “by a fair Majority of Written Votes.” Peabody noted that “every English man in the Church Voted for him,” but the Indian members “Voted for English men not unanimously.” At this point, Natick’s white Christians seemed to acknowledge the primacy of the Indian identity of this church and accepted some Indian leadership therein, but such cooperation did not last. Between 1729 and his death in 1752, Peabody “Baptised about 161 Indians and 413 White persons.” The ratio of Indian members declined, and by 1749 only 25 Indians had been admitted to membership compared to 120 whites.66 The Natick church was a unique case in that whites and blacks gradually displaced a Christian Indian community.
Scores of blacks and Indians were regular participants in the Congregational and Anglican churches of New England in the 1730s and 1740s. As such, the colonial religious experiences of New England were influenced by the continual and active presence of people of African and Indian descent. They attended these churches, but, more significantly, many of them were baptized and took communion. They did so in a wide range of New England churches. Historians have long been aware of black and Indian affiliation in the “New Light” congregations that were most affected by the 1740s revival, in part, because of the types of sources they have privileged. The itinerant ministers and sympathetic pastors, such as George Whitefield, Daniel Rogers, Jonathan Edwards, and Eleazar Wheelock, deliberately sought out blacks and Indians and wrote about their participation in revivals.67 Relying heavily on the sources produced by revival participants, however, has led historians to neglect the black and Indian people who affiliated with churches before Whitefield’s arrival in New England and with churches who opposed the religious innovations of the early 1740s. When the full range of New England churches is considered over two decades, a more complex view of black and Indian peoples’ participation in churches and Christian sacraments emerges. Blacks and Indians participated in a broad range of church types and in most churches across New England.
Mid-Atlantic Anglicans, Lutherans, and Moravians
The Mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had greater religious diversity than most of New England, but the churches of these colonies did not uniformly baptize black or Indian peoples. Anglican parishes were the most commonly interracial, followed by some Lutheran and Moravian congregations. Presbyterian and Reformed churches rarely baptized blacks before the Revolutionary era. The educational programs, pietism, and missional worldviews held by Anglicans, Lutherans, and Moravians help explain why they often sought out black congregants. The rules governing these denominations also made baptism relatively accessible to adult converts. The presence of blacks and Indians in worship services of these types of churches and their participation in the rituals of baptism, communion, and marriage were not directly tied to the revivalism of the Great Awakening.
Church of England clergy and congregations generally distrusted the awakenings as eccentric, leveling, and even devilish, though George Whitefield was an ordained Church of England clergyman. Although there were some evangelical-leaning Anglicans, they were in the minority. Some Anglican clergy campaigned passionately against revivalism.68 Black people valued the educational opportunities that Anglican churches offered, and Church of England parishes, including New York City’s Trinity Church, Staten Island’s Saint Andrew’s Church, Christ Church of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, Christ Church of Philadelphia, and Trinity Church of Oxford, Philadelphia, baptized numerous black people between 1730 and 1749.69
In addition to being baptized, some blacks and Indians took communion, were married by priests, and were buried under the auspices of the church. Their presence, as well as their selective adoption of Anglican Christianity, should not be underestimated because this affiliation was an important origin of African American Christianity, especially in New York City and Philadelphia, where separate black Anglican/Episcopal churches were formed after 1790. Black people who had been baptized and instructed in catechism classes could take communion in Anglican churches. Thomas Thompson, SPG missionary to Monmouth County, New Jersey, from 1745 to 1750, described ministering to black people: “I catechized them in the Church on certain Sundays, and sometimes at Home: and after due Instruction, those whom I had good Assurances of I received to Baptism, and such as afterwards behaved well I admitted to the Communion.” In attendance at services, through the sacraments, and in catechism classes, blacks and Indians became a significant minority in the Church of England.70
Trinity Church in New York City was a model of the ways that Anglicans in northern colonies sought to minister to black people through education and sacraments, and hundreds of black people were baptized at this parish. Reverend Elias Neau began work in 1704 as a catechist, and he held school sessions that included enslaved blacks, free blacks, and a small number of Indians.71 In 1726, Trinity Church sent a letter to the SPG requesting a new catechist to minister to blacks and Indians. Since “about One Thousand and four hundred Indian and Negro Slaves” were in New York, they wrote, the need for a catechist was great. “A Considerable number of those Negroes by the Society’s charity have been already instructed in the principles of Christianity, have received Holy Baptism, are Communicants of our Church and frequently Approach the Altars,” but many more needed instruction.72 Reverend Richard Charleton operated Trinity Church’s school for blacks from 1733 to 1747, and from his school, fifteen to twenty black people were baptized annually. According to missionary reports, approximately 24 black adults and 195 black children were baptized at Trinity Church between 1732 and 1740.73 Sermons and letters from members of the SPG attest to a widely held desire, especially among Anglican clergymen, to baptize blacks and Indians.
Church of England clergymen, like almost all colonial clergy, claimed that baptism did not alter the bondage of enslaved blacks. Reverend George Berkeley, while in Newport, Rhode Island, in October 1729, preached a sermon on baptism, arguing that “Our Saviour commandeth his disciples to go & baptize all nations,” and he specifically stated that this included baptizing enslaved black people. He also insisted that children and slaves should be baptized under the authority of the head of Christian households, and that “Christianity maketh no alteration in civil rights,” that is, in the right to own slaves. New York’s legislature in 1706, at the request of Anglican missionaries, passed “An Act to Encourage the Baptizing of Negro, Indian and Mulatto Slaves.” It decreed “That the Baptizing of any Negro, Indian or Mulatto Slave shall not be any Cause of reason for the setting them or any of them at Liberty.” Since the 1660s, English colonists had to keep insisting that baptism did not free slaves because the “heathenism” of Africans was an early justification for their enslavement and because enslaved people kept trying to use Christianity to obtain freedom.74
By meeting with slaves directly and by encouraging masters to promote religion among their slaves, Anglican clergy successfully laid the foundation for interracial church life in northern colonies, but little information about individual black Anglicans has survived in archives. Although autobiographical accounts by black and Indian Anglicans are scarce, some telling demographic characteristics can be extracted from church records. Many blacks and Indians were baptized as adults, and there was a