6.2. Reformed and Presbyterian churches with multiple black baptisms and/or black members, 1821–1850
Phillis Wheatley was stolen from her family in Senegambia, and, in 1761, slave traders transported her to Boston, Massachusetts, to be sold. The Wheatley family, who purchased her, treated Phillis far better than almost all slaves in the eighteenth century, and she received a thorough education, but she still longed for freedom. Wheatley began writing poetry in 1765 that frequently contained religious themes. In 1771, she was baptized and became a member of a predominantly white Congregational church in Boston. Two years later, some of her poetry was published in London, England, as a book titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. This book and the engraving of her likeness that appeared as the frontispiece are evidence that her experience of enslavement was exceptional.
Wheatley remains today the most famous black Christian from the colonial era.1 Despite the uniqueness of her experiences and accomplishments, Phillis Wheatley’s religious affiliation with a predominantly white church was quite ordinary. Thousands of African Americans and hundreds of American Indians publicly participated in and affiliated with predominantly white churches in New England and Mid-Atlantic regions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The history of these churches and our perspective on them, however, have been whitewashed.
Most Americans today usually think of northern colonial churches as being entirely “white” institutions, but black and Indian peoples regularly affiliated with these churches. Historians have known about Phillis Wheatley and some other black church members, but for a long time, they were treated as outliers in the narratives of American religious history.2 The old Congregational churches of New England, often situated on public green spaces in quaint town centers, are iconic symbols of New England, and for many Americans, of colonial America and early American religious history as a whole. However, no broad, comparative study of black and Indian affiliation in northern churches exists that treats both changes over time and denominational differences.3 This neglect obscures the history of interracial churches in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions, where northerners typically worshipped in interracial but not integrated congregations from the 1730s to the 1820s.4
FIGURE I.1. Title page and frontispiece of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, NYPL, “Title page and frontispiece,” Image ID 485600, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/.
Take the First Parish Congregational Church of Hingham, Massachusetts, for instance. Although colonial Hingham had a relatively small black and Indian population in the eighteenth century, black and Indian people were active participants in this town’s churches. There were eight people of African descent and three Indians baptized at the First Parish between 1730 and 1749, including “Emme George an Indian woman,” “Francis a Molattoe woman,” and “Jack a Negroe.” Jack was also admitted to membership in the church. Black children and adults continued to be baptized there periodically into the 1770s.5 And Hingham was hardly alone. Indeed, it was the norm. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most northern churches of various denominations baptized and admitted some blacks or Indians into their church congregations.6
Dividing the Faith builds on the works of a growing number of scholars who have been describing, with greater levels of sophistication, the lives of blacks and Indians in the colonial era and nineteenth century.7 Building on this scholarship, this book furthers the conversation by demonstrating that dynamic interracial interactions in northern churches were more common and persisted longer than has generally been acknowledged. Protestant churches helped define the institution of slavery and later were on the frontline of creating the first segregated society in American history during the early nineteenth century. Much attention has been given to the remarkable story of the rise of separate black churches after the Revolution, especially the dramatic departure of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones from St. George’s Methodist Church. The attention on that turning point toward racial separatism in American Christianity, however, has partially obscured the extent and depth of the long history of interracial churches that persisted even decades after Allen and Jones founded their churches.8 During the religiously vibrant Early American Republic, both separate African American congregations and interracial churches expanded alongside one another.
The extent of interracial religious activity during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in northern churches has been obscured because historians have not fully utilized the church records where congregants of color are documented and because American Christians themselves have forgotten or glossed over this history. In general, scholars of American religious history have neglected black and Indian people in northern churches, and historians studying northern black and Indian people have underutilized church records as essential sources for studying the experiences of these groups in northern society. Blacks and Indians in northern colonial churches were long understudied because of the “whitening” of New England’s history that persisted until quite recently. Blacks in northern churches have also been neglected in part because many scholars of church history have tended to dismiss early conversion and church participation of enslaved Africans as nothing more than forms of oppression.9 Only in the past decade or so have some northern congregations begun to examine the diversity of their eighteenth-century predecessors and the ways that they supported and benefited from the enslavement and displacement of African and Indian peoples.10
The work of later Christians who sought to integrate American churches, years after the proliferation of separate African American churches, also sometimes obscured the complicated history of racial interactions in northern churches. For example, in downtown Boston sits the Tremont Temple Baptist Church. The current edifice was completed in 1896, and above one of the church’s doorways is a plaque announcing, “First Integrated Church in America—Organized 1838.”11 This congregation was founded on the principle of inclusion, as neither race nor class nor gender determined who could worship there or where people sat in the sanctuary. One of the leading founders, Timothy Gilbert, was a white abolitionist who left the Charles Street Baptist Church because African Americans were not permitted to sit in ground-floor church pews. However, this statement that Tremont Temple was the first integrated church in America can erroneously be read as implying that black, white, and Indian peoples never worshipped together in early American churches. In 1738, one hundred years before Tremont Temple was founded, nearly every church in Boston included black congregants, sometimes in large numbers. A few Boston churches of the eighteenth century also included American Indians. The sentiment behind Tremont Temple’s “first” claim reflects a blind spot common in the historical memory of most Americans. Many people today assume, incorrectly, that American churches have always been firmly divided along perceived racial lines.
Tremont Temple was not the first northern church to include racially diverse members and congregants, but it was exceptional in antebellum Boston because northern churches became less interracial as the nineteenth century wore on, contrary to the narrative of racial progress sometimes associated with northern states. Americans’ sense of their racial past and present is at stake in understanding the presence and influences of blacks and Indians in northern churches. The extent of interracial interactions in northern churches challenges two truisms about northern states that have fed into Americans’ racial consciousness. The first is that colonial New England was fundamentally a white region with only a sprinkling of blacks in the cities and Indians along the frontier. It is no coincidence that “the North,” particularly New England, has often been held up as the most “American” of regions in a country that has long associated whiteness and national identity.12 In popular memory of the past, the North is also commonly held up as being racially progressive in contrast to the South, which is epitomized historically by plantations and Jim Crow segregation. Racism was and