African-American
Religion: A Documentary History Project
About the Project
Copyright notice:
Excerpted from African-American Religion: A Historical Interpretation
with Representative Documents, edited by David W. Wills and Albert J. Raboteau
(emeritus), to be published by the University of Chicago
Press. ©2006 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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Our goal in this work is to provide a comprehensive history of African-American religion, set firmly within the broad context of racial and religious encounter of which it is so fateful and consequential a part. The story we propose to tell begins with the earliest African-European encounters along the West Coast of Africa in the mid-fifteenth century and continues to the present day. We will present this history in a tripartite, multi-volume series that will include representative documents and interpretive commentary, woven together in a sustained, ongoing narrative. Though intended primarily to advance the understanding of African-American religious history, this work is also offered as a contribution to the ongoing reinterpretation of American religious history as a wholeand indeed to the reassessment of early modern and modern religious history generally. Like many other contemporary scholars, our aim is to move beyond narrowly nationalistic, racial, or confessional interpretations of human history and religion toward views that emphasize the global encounter of diverse peoples and cultures. One of the central stories these volumes will trace, the emergence and development of African-American Christianity, is here understood, for example, not as a minor subplot in the history of European-American religion, but as a centrally important thread in a larger narrative of Christianitys steady transformation into a religion that is no longer to be identified primarily with Europeans or persons of exclusively European descent. But this work is by no means simply a study in the history of Christianity.
The Origins and Development of the Project
The origins of this work,
formally begun in 1987, lie in the shared concerns of a group
of scholars who initially gathered in the 1970s around the Northeastern
Seminar on Black Religion and the Afro-American Religious History
Group of the American Academy of Religionand who in the
mid-1980s twice collaboratively taught an NEH Summer Institute
on Afro-American Religion and its place in the teaching of American
religious history. Several of us came to believe that certain
limitations in the existing scholarly literature on African-American
religious history could best be addressed not by individual efforts,
but by collaborative research and publication. Two major problems
were at the center of our concerns. We were troubled first by
the lack of any adequate general interpretive history of the field
as a whole. Our second concern was the widespread lack of awareness,
even among persons working in the field, of the breadth, depth,
and diversity of documentary sources for the study of African-American
religious history. To address both problems simultaneously, we
resolved to undertake a work roughly comparable to H. Shelton
Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetschers American
Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative
Documents,1
a two-volume work published in the early 1960s which was for many
years a classic within the field of American religious history.
Producing something like it for African-American religious history
seemed the most direct way to address the fields pressing
needs for both a comprehensive, current, and judicious interpretive
overview and a useful introduction to the fields rich documentary
bases. With this goal, Afro-American Religion: A Documentary History
Project was formally launched on July 1, 1987. We soon discovered
that we had set out on a far longer and more difficult scholarly
journey than we had expected.
Our first step was to
take stock of what we had in hand as the result of two decades
of work in the field, work that had taken us collectively to some
125 archives searching for neglected primary sources. By the fall
of 1987, we had assembled a pilot documentary containing some
160 documentsalready close to the total contained in the
Smith, Handy, and Loetscher volumes. This initial compilation
revealed several areas where our previous work was insufficient
for our present purpose, but the most serious gap was chronological.
The bulk of our past research had fallen primarily in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and we were accordingly short on documents
from the period before that era. Smith, Handy, and Loetscher began
their volumes with a long section on the period 1607 to 1690 and
had already presented some fifty documents before they arrived
at the mid-eighteenth century. Our pilot version, however, contained
scarcely a document in its opening section on the pre-1740
period and initially we supposed that it would only grow
to perhaps a half-dozen or so documents. Together with headnotes
and a narrative introduction contrasting African traditional religion
to European Christianity, these few documents would serve simply
to set the stage for a story that would effectively begin only
with the evangelical awakenings of the mid-to-late eighteenth
century, when the development of the black conversion narrative
and the creation of the earliest black churches created a type
of documentary record unavailable for the earlier years. Reflecting
anew, however, on the roughly three hundred years between 1740
and the 1440s, when the Portuguese and subsaharan black Africans
began the prolonged contact that would fatefully influence the
New World history of Europeans and Africans alike, we realized
that six or seven documents would be woefully inadequate. Such
a vast and complex story could not be treated so summarily. Just
as the story of European-American religion, as it has sometime
been told, has an extended prologue based in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, so the story of African-American
religion must have an equally extended prologue in the fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century encounter of Africans and Europeans on the
Atlantic islands and along the coast of West and West Central
Africa. Indeed, we came to see with new clarity that African-American
religion originates in that encounterand it is a historical
encounter, an encounter in time and space. Beginning, as we had
initially planned, with a static picture of generic African
traditional religion and juxtaposing that with some equally
static picture of European Christianity would not
suffice. We had to begin concretely and keep clear from the outset
the enormous diversity and complexity of the African-European
religious encounterand of the African-American religion
(and European-American religion) that eventually emerged from
it.
In pursuit of this goal, we began
imaginatively to travel territory unfamiliar to most historians
of American religionthe coasts and states of West Africa
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Names, dates, and events
far removed from the world of American Christianity became
centrally important to our narrative. Mbemba Nzinga, who reigned
from 1506 to the early 1540s as Afonso I, Christian ruler of Kongo,
took his place beside Henry VIII as a powerful sixteenth-century
monarch whose piety and politics were intimately related. As we
began to draw selections from such documents as the fifteenth-century
Portuguese court chronicle of Zurara, papal bulls granting Portugal
the monopoly of all Guinea, Venetian trader Cada
Mostos account of his dealings in the 1450s with a Muslim
Wolof ruler in the Senegambia, the correspondence between the
kings of Kongo and Portugal, and photographic representations
of early West African artifacts showing a clear blending of European
and African motifs, we quickly realized that it would take many
documents to cover the early African-Portuguese encounter alone.
At the same time we were immersing
ourselves in the specific historical reality of the African-Portuguese
religious encounter, we were also trying to think through the
implications of this new point of departure for the shape of our
entire project. We soon realized that we would have to move beyond
the two-volume model provided by Smith, Handy, and Loetscher.
In part, this was simply a matter of needing more space. To get
from West and West Central Africa in the mid-fifteenth century
to British mainland North America in the mid-eighteenth century,
we would have to deal with the meeting of many African and European
peoples at many points across the entire Atlantic basin, and this
would require many pages of both documents and editorial commentary.
This shift was also a matter, however, of how we had come to conceptualize
our subject. We came to think of African-American religious history
as divisible into three periods, each defined by a geographical
image that is both literal and metaphorical. The first period,
reaching from 1441 to 1808, we termed the Atlantic world
phase of African-American religious history. The second era, from
1808 to 1906, we called the continental phase, and
the third, from 1906 to the present, the global phase
of our story. Initially, in our earliest steps away from the Smith,
Handy, and Loetscher model, we imagined that three volumes might
provide adequate space and also clearly replicate this tripartite
intellectual structure. Although more than a decade of research
has pushed us well past three volumes to our present plans for
thirteen, we have retained this tripartite periodization as the
structural backbone of the entire project. Its logic therefore
requires further explanation.2
The Tripartite Periodization
Why begin in 1441? The year 1619,
when Dutch traders brought the first recorded black slaves to
Virginia, might seem a more appropriate choice. It would nearly
match Smith, Handy, and Loetschers 1607 beginning point
and would be broadly consistent with a common pattern among historians
of religion in the United States, who often start their stories
with the first enduring British settlements in North America.3
Winthrop S. Hudson and John Corrigan, Religion in America:
An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious
Life, one of the most durable textbook surveys of American
religious history, terms England the bridge
from the Old World to the New and (through its first five
editions) effectively begins its narrative in 1607 with the English
settlement of Virginia. Hudson and Corrigans Virginia beginning,
however, looks forward not to the arrival of black slaves in 1619,
but to the coming of the Pilgrims in 1620and to the subsequent
history of New England Puritanism. The tendency in popular
mythology to stress the priority of Plymouth at the expense of
Jamestown is not historically accurate, they observe, but
in a deeper sense it is a true recognition that the American people
have had their fundamental rootage in a Puritanism that they have
found most easy to identify in terms of New England.4
Certainly the Puritan legacy, with its strong emphasis on collective
discipline and common purpose, provides one of the early and enduring
themes of American religious history. So too does the American
tradition of ethnoreligious diversity as both fact and norm, a
phenomenon whose colonial roots lie more prominently in the Middle
Colonies than in New England. Virginia and the other southern
colonies, however, also supply one of the major motifs of American
religious historya theme as tenacious and enduring as the
ongoing legacy of Puritanism or the changing dimensions of religious
pluralism. This theme is the encounter of blacks and whitesthe
struggle of Africans and Europeans to engage one another religiously
across a deep divide created not only by cultural differences
but even more by the brutal realities of the slave system. Yet
even historians of American religion who begin their stories at
Jamestown seldom make this motif more than a secondary theme of
their narrativesperhaps because everything connected with
the distinctive racial realities of the American South seems to
them atypical and therefore marginal to the mainstream of the
United States national story. It is worth recalling, however,
that the bridge that England provided to the New World
ran not only to the North American continent, but also to the
islands of the Caribbean, where plantation agriculture and black
slavery were early and enduring features of the English colonies.
By 1760, considering the British Atlantic empire as a whole, i.e.,
taking into account everything from Nova Scotia to the Leeward
Islands, Africans or persons of African descent represented one-third
of the population. If their religious life has seemed a marginal
feature of that empires history, it cannot be because their
numbers were so few. To understand the full implications of the
arrival of black slaves at Jamestown in 1619, on a Dutch ship,
that event must be seen not only in relation to the story of British
mainland North America, but in relation to the larger history
of the early Atlantic world.5
Prefacing the early religious history of British North America with a survey of the prior New World efforts of Spain and France is of course not an unfamiliar alternative beginning to narrative histories of American religion. Another of the standard surveys, Edwin Scott Gaustads A Religious History of America opens with the age of exploration.6 After a brief and somewhat atemporal glance at the religion of the pre-European population, Gaustad begins his story with Christopher Columbus.7 If 1492 is a preferable beginning to 1607, it also has, in our view, serious limitations. Beginning with Columbus tends once more to marginalize blacks because it presents American history as beginning with an encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, with Africans entering only belatedly and as secondary players in the central drama. To speak of the European settlement of the New World is, however, to misspeak, for it was not until well into the nineteenth century that the total number of Africans who had crossed to the Americas was exceeded by the total number of Europeans. The history of the Atlantic world, including its religious history, truly begins with the European-African encounter of the mid-fifteenth century. If the Atlantic world is understood as an interrelated set of sustained human interactions mediatedwith the assistance of developing technologies of transportation and communicationby the Atlantic Ocean, then it does not come into existence with Columbuss transatlantic voyage. The Atlantic world is first of all a world of the eastern Atlantica world in which Europeans and Africans together forged a new social reality which in the wake of Columbuss voyage was transported westward, where it broke upon the world of the American Indian with devastating consequences. Starting with the Portuguese initiative rather than with Columbus helps make this clear.8
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, in A Religious History of the American Peoplewhich we find still the best one-volume history of American religionopens his narrative with a lengthy European Prologue, beginning with the Council of Constance (141418). Ahlstrom also suggested, however, that [t]he basic paradigm for a renovation of American church history is the black religious experience,9 and it seems to us that the renovation of Ahlstroms own narrative appropriately starts by recasting its beginning as an African-European Prologue. While the Council of Constance was in session, a Portuguese expedition captured the North African city of Ceutathe first step in a series of initiatives that would take the Portuguese down the entire Atlantic coast of Africa by the end of the fifteenth century. The century between Constance and the Reformation was not simply a time of devotional piety, Renaissance humanism, and movements for church reformthe themes highlighted by Ahlstrom. It was also the period in which the African-European world of the Atlantic took its initial shape. By October 1517, when Martin Luther affixed his Ninety-Five Theses to the castle door at Wittenberg (and before the arrival of Cortés in Mexico in 1519), Lisbon had a substantial African and African-Iberian population, the son of the Christian king of Kongo was soon to be designated a bishop, there were more ladinos (Iberian blacks) than whites in Hispaniola, and the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, among others, was importuning the Spanish crown to abandon Indian slavery in favor of African slavery in the New World.
Already in the early-nineteenth century, the importance of the pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic world was acknowledged, if somewhat obliquely, by George Bancroft, whose classic, multi-volume History of the United States stands at the very origin of narrative surveys of American history. Bancrofts attention to this early period was driven by his concern to understand what he thought one of the strange contradictions in human affairsthat the Virginia colony should have been from its early days both the asylum of liberty and the abode of hereditary bondsmen.10 Bancroft could make sense of this seeming contradiction only by placing it in a much larger context than that provided by the English colonization of North Americaor even of the history that began in 1492. His monumental history did begin, literally, with Columbus and moved in its opening chapters through the other voyages of exploration and then the French and Spanish settlements in North America before narrowing its focus to the planting of the English colonies. When he came to discuss the presence of slavery in Virginia, however, Bancroft felt obliged to step back from this narrowed focus and again take a more panoramic view of his subject. Already in the first edition of 1834, Bancroft connected slavery in Virginia not only to the institutions prior existence in the Afro-Iberian Atlantic, but also to the slave-trading practices of the medieval Mediterranean, where the Venetians in their commerce with the ports of unbelieving nations, purchased Christians and infidels in every market . . . and sold them again to the Arabs . . . .11 For the second edition, published three years later, he added both a sweeping account of the place of slavery in human history generally and a more extended discussion of its troubling persistence within Christendom. For Bancroft, the key point of reference was the hostility between the Christian Church and the followers of Mahomet. Slavery and the slave-trade are older than the records of human history, he argued, but they would have long since been decisively undermined by the spirit of the Christian religion had it not been for Christianitys confrontation with Islam. [F]or more than seven centuries . . . , he observed, the two religions were arrayed against each other; and bondage was the reciprocal doom of the captive. When the Portuguese moved down the Atlantic coast of Africa, they took their hatred of the Moorish dominion with them andtreating Africans as Moorsthey felt no remorse at dooming the sons of Africa to bondage. Spain too entered the traffic and negro slavery . . . was established in Andalusia and abounded in the city of Seville, before the enterprise of Columbus was conceived. Not surprisingly, he thought, the institution was quickly extended to the New World. Initially, Bancroft noted, the Spanish forbade the transporting of blacks who had been bred in Moorish families, . . . allowing only those who were said to have been instructed in the Christian faith . . . that they might assist in converting the infidel nations. But soon, he observed, this idle pretence was abandoned and Africans in general were brought to work in the mines and plantations of the New World.12
Bancrofts telling of this story had of course its own special motivations. Convinced that Christianity was antithetical to slavery and persuaded that the history of the United States was above all a narrative of the providential advance of liberty, Bancroft was obliged to explain the seeming anomaly of slaverys persistence among Christians in the United States. Calling attention to the long-term effects of the contest with Islam supplied a cover story for the antislavery delinquency of Christianity generally. Emphasizing the role of the Spanish in fastening slavery on the post-Columbian Americas at the start of their development made it easier to see slavery in the United States as an externally imposed fate rather than a choice willingly made. Such motivations no doubt had something to do with his storys limitationse.g., its oversimplifying assertion that for the Portuguese [a]ll Africans were esteemed as Moors and its hasty focusing on the Spanish to the neglect of the Portuguese role in Europes early Atlantic world encounter with Africa and Africans.13 Bancroft was, nonetheless, correct in seeingas many subsequent historians of American religion have notthat to read the history of the United States aright, one must trace the encounter of blacks and whites back to the beginnings of the Atlantic world, and read that encounter at its origins against the background of the centuries-old Mediterranean-world encounter between Christians and Muslims.14
In the year 1441, Antão Gonçalves, a member of the Order of Christ, a Portuguese military order of the kind first produced by the crusades, brought home to Portugal a black Mooress he had captured on the West coast of Africa. This is the first recorded instance of a black slave being taken to Europe via the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean and in our view signals the beginning of the Atlantic world. Other members of the Order of Christ, despatched by its head, Prince Henry the Navigator, soon followed in Gonçalvess wake. Landing along the coast, they invoked St. James, the patron saint of the Iberian Reconquista (Reconquest), as they descended on groups of unsuspecting Africans, capturing them and carrying them back to Portugal. Yet the Portuguese crusaders of the early Atlantic, like their Mediterranean predecessors, were soon accompanied by merchants (some of them Italian) who sought to gain by trade, even with Muslims, the commoditiesincluding slavesthat the brothers of the Order of Christ took by force. Like other Europeans, the Portuguese of the mid-fifteenth century also looked hopefully to black Africa for Christian alliesin particular the legendary priest-king Prester John. The looming power of the Ottoman Turks, to whom Constantinople itself would fall in 1453, rendered increasingly urgent Latin Christendoms concern to shore up its eastern front. Through the Council of Ferrara-Florence-Rome (143845), Pope Eugenius IV effected a notable, if ultimately ephemeral, reunion with the Orthodox Christians of the Greek East, and sought to forge ties to other Eastern Christians as well. In 1441, the same year Antão Gonçalves brought the black Mooress to Portugal, an Ethiopian monk came to Florencehome not only to many of the most notable figures of the Italian Renaissance, but also a heterogeneous population of slavesto address the popes council and to converse with Latin Christian leaders. African-American religious history, in our view, begins at the moment the Portuguese initiative extends to Atlantic Africa the complex racial and religious relationships of the Mediterranean world. We believe this is also an appropriate starting point for American religious history generally.15
If we begin our first period in 1441, why end it in 1808? This too is an uncommon date for historians of American religion to use in periodizing their narratives. Typically, it is the emergence of the American nation state that in one way or another supplies their stories with a defining transition. Hudson and Corrigan, for example, use 1789 to separate the Formative Years, 16071789, from the New Nation, 17891865, while Ahlstrom and Gaustadalbeit less starklytreat the adoption of the Constitution (178788) and the Treaty of Paris (1783) respectively as the breakpoints for their narratives. (Smith, Handy, and Loetscher diverge from this path, treating the years 1765 to 1820 as a coherent era of Freedom and Renewala periodization nicely consistent with accounts of African-American religious history which see the founding of the nations earliest major independent black denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in the early 1820s, as a major historical turning point.) To mark the end of the Atlantic-world era in African-American religion, we have chosen instead the date on which the Atlantic slave trade to the United States was legally closed. Of course, at the very least several thousand African slaves were brought into this country illegally after 1808 and, in the following half century, the French imported close to a million African slaves into Guyana and their Caribbean possessions, while the legal slave trade under Portuguese and Spanish auspices brought more than two million Africans to Brazil and Cuba. Of critical importance, however, was the withdrawal from the trade of Great Britain, the worlds major maritime power, at approximately the same time the United States outlawed the importation of slaves. Thistogether with the subsequent withdrawal of the other northern European sea powers and the growing British pressure against the slave trade generallyprofoundly transformed the nature of the Atlantic world, as the Atlantic gradually became for the first time a highway primarily for European immigrants. At the same time, the age of revolutions in the New Worldand here one must think not only of the American revolution, but also the Haitian revolution, the revolutions throughout Spanish America, and the independence of Brazilmeant that transatlantic political links were profoundly weakened. The communities of the New World now became inward looking in a way they previously had not been. The land, it might be said, became for the first time since the fifteenth century more decisive than the sea. In the history of the United States, this change is marked by Jeffersons purchase of the vast territory of Louisiana from France in 1803. It is also associated with the exploratory expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (18036). As Columbuss voyage turned the nascent world of the eastern Atlantic into a transatlantic reality, Lewis and Clark for the first time gave to the fledgling republic of eastern America a transcontinental reach. Like Columbus, they were also pioneering agents for the projection westward of a world in which African slavery was a defining reality. Both of the captains were themselves slaveowners, and Clarks slave York accompanied his master on his epic journey.
Pursuing this geographical image, we have designated the period from 1808 to 1906 as the continental phase of African-American religious history. This is a century during which the social and cultural ties binding North American peoples of African descent to Africa became significantly attenuated, and African-American religious history develops not primarily in the context of a sustained and interrelated set of human interactions mediated by the Atlantic Ocean, but in the context of interactions mediated by North American space. We will not attempt here to spell out in any detail the defining features of this period as we understand them, deferring that task to a later volume. A few salient features, however, may be noted. This period is the heyday of African-American evangelicalism, a form of African-American piety more rooted in the interactions of North American life than the forms of African-American piety that predominated in the previous era. This is also a period when a major theme of African-American religious history is the religious organization of North American space, i.e., the institutional development and extension of the major black evangelical denominations, beginning with the founding of the independent black Methodist denominations toward the beginning of the century and culminating in the creation of the National Baptist Convention in 1895. Given the religiously repressive aspects of the laws regulating slave life (a subject curiously omitted from most discussions of the history of religious liberty in America), the independent black churches of the antebellum period were largely limited to the free states or the cities of the border South. Only through the politically centralizing events of the Civil War and Reconstruction did they too become fully national organizations.16 North American space meanwhile presented more than an organizational challenge to African-American evangelicalism. It also raised pressing questions of religious meaning, as is evident from the centrality of such biblical images as Egypt, Exodus, and the Promised Land in nineteenth-century African-American piety and theology.17
The continental phase of African-American religious history extends, we suggest, from 1808 to 1906, when it gives way to what we call the global phase. By speaking of the global phase in African-American religious history, we mean to call attention to the increasing web of interconnections that bind African-American religious life to the religious life of diverse peoples around the globeboth as senders and receivers of religious influence. For this period, too, we can here offer only hints about what we see as its defining features. In part, we refer to the reconnection of African-American religion in North America to the wider Atlantic world, exemplified by the increasingly important role played in modern African-American religious life by immigrants from the Caribbeanas well as by the ever-thickening network of links by which African Americans have reconnected themselves to Africa in the twentieth century. One vivid example of the reconnection of black America to the African-Portuguese Atlantic is to be found in the career of Bishop Charles Manuel (also known as Emmanuel) Daddy Grace, an early twentieth-century immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands who gained prominence in the interwar period as the charismatic founder of the United House of Prayer for All People. Even more striking is the growing practice in North America of such African-Caribbean religions as Santería and Vodou. But we mean something more here than simply a reconnection with the Atlantic world. We are also talking about the deepening ties between African Americans and the world of Islamties created both by the emergence of indigenous Islamicizing movements such as the Nation of Islam and by the increased participation of African Americans in forms of Islam brought to the United States by immigrant Muslims. And this is not all: we refer as well to African-American interest in Gandhianisman influence that preceded by many years the period of the civil rights movementand African-American appropriation of those harmonial currents in American religion which themselves often carry the mark, in however altered form, of eastern religion. Consider too the statement of Francis Grimké, the biracial nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and prominent Presbyterian pastor, who said of the influential Japanese Christian and social activist Toyohiko Kagawa: There is no man in all the world today . . . that shows more of what Christianity can do for humanity . . . . I thank God, he added, that he is not of this great white race, that thinks that it alone is the favorite of heaven . . . .18 The image of East German Protestants, singing We Shall Overcome as part of their effort to bring down the Berlin Wall and all it stood for, further suggests the appropriateness of the term global phase for this part of our story.
Admittedly, our use of this phrase
is rather less literal and more metaphorical than our use of the
terms Atlantic world and continental phase.
It is arguable that we have in fact not yet fully entered into
this global phaseor that we only did so in the 1960s. But
here we confess that the aesthetics of periodization has intervened.
For our purposes, it makes sense to have a break point around
1900a time when at the very least the foreshadowing of the
global phase seems to us clearly evident. The specific date we
have selected is 1906a date determined by the Azusa Street
meetings in Los Angeles, an event of critical importance to the
history of Pentecostalismand an event presided over by a
black preacher, William J. Seymour. It is, of course, entirely
in keeping with the organizing geographical images of our volumes
to select an event occurring in California, at the western edge
of the North American continent, to mark a critical transition.
The global era begins to emerge, it might be said, when the maturation
of the United States as a fully transcontinental nation binds
together in a new way the Atlantic world and the Pacific world.
(The building of the Panama Canalit opened in 1914is
a further indication of this turn-of-the-century globalization
process. So too is the growing American preoccupation, after the
accession of the Philippine Islands, with the geopolitics of East
Asia, and the mounting transpacific tension surrounding Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean immigration into the western United States.)
But there is also within the consciousness of early black Pentecostals
themselves grounds for seeing the movement as representing a new
level of global connectedness in African-American religion. Seymour,
for example, said of the Azusa Street revival that it was a time
when [p]eople of all nations came and got their cup full.
Some came from Africa, some came from India, China, Japan, and
England.19
Rhetoric such as this, which reaches both eastward back to Africa
and Europe and westward to Asia, and connects the whole world
to a spiritual event occurring in a largely black context, seems
to us an appropriate note on which to open the third part of our
documentary history.
The Structure and Scope of the Three Parts
and Individual Volumes
The tripartite periodization
outlined above provides the organizing structure for the series
as a whole, which will be published in three distinct parts. Part
One, stretching over three and a half centuries, will consist
of six volumes. Parts Two and Three, covering roughly a century
each, are now planned at three and four volumes respectivelythough
it is possible there will be some adjustment as our work proceeds.
The individual volumes now planned are as follows, thoughparticularly
for the later periodsthis list should be taken as the blueprint
we are following, not the certain shape of completed work:
Part One: African-American Religion in the Atlantic World, 14411808
Volume 1: The African-Iberian Atlantic, 14411518
Volume 2: The African-Iberian Atlantic, 15181600
Volume 3: The Atlantic World (African-Iberian, African-Dutch, African-French, African-British), 16001670
Volume 4: The Atlantic World, 16701735
Volume 5: A World of Revivals and Revolutions, 17351770
Volume 6: A World of Revivals and Revolutions, 17701808
Part Two: African-American ReligionThe Continental Phase, 18081906
Volume 7: The Antebellum EraEgypt and the Hope of Exodus, 18081850
Volume 8: Civil War and ReconstructionExodus and the Hope of a Promised Land, 18501877
Volume 9: Post-ReconstructionReturn to Egypt?, 18771906
Part Three: African-American ReligionThe Global Phase, 1906Present
Volume 10: Azusa Street/A Global Hope, 19061925
Volume 11: Interwar Era, 19251940
Volume 12: Civil Rights Struggle in a Global Era, 19401955
Volume 13: Hope Achieved and Hope Deferred, 1955Present
It is important to note that the tripartite periodization provides not only a general structure into which the individual volumes will be grouped, but also defines the changing geographical scope of the project. We begin, it might be said, with a very wide camera angle, taking in allor nearly allof the Atlantic world. Initially attending in our first two volumes to what we term the African-Iberian Atlanticthe world resulting from African interaction on both sides of the Atlantic with the expanding empires of Portugal and Spain, we will trace in volumes three and four the complexifying patterns that emerge as an increasing number of European powers and African peoples are drawn into a rapidly developing transatlantic world. Beginning with volumes five and six, however, our focus will increasingly narrow to the African-British Atlantic and, in the volumes of Part Two, to the United States. While we will not entirely omit material pertaining to Africa and Central and South America in these later volumes, we will be able to include it only as an occasional point of reference, not as an ongoing story. In Part Three, there will be some reversal of this process, as our camera angle once again widens to place the religious life of North American blacks in its global context. This changing geographical scope conforms, we believe, to the logic of our periodization and to the relatively self-contained character of African-American religious life in the nineteenth century. Admittedly, however, it is also an attempt to set practical limits to an already vast undertaking.
Special note also needs to be taken here of the limits implied, even within the very broad scope of Part One, by our concentration on the Atlantic world. In both the Portuguese and Spanish empires, the Atlantic world was from a relatively early point tied, however loosely, to the Pacific. The southward movement of the Portuguese into the eastern Atlantic led, after the celebrated voyage of Vasco da Gama in 149798, to the creation of a vast Asian trading-post empire which stretched across the Indian Ocean and westward to the Asian Pacific. The New World empire of the Spanish, moreover, soon faced westward as well as eastward. Expeditions from the Pacific coast of Mexico sailed to the Philippines as early as 1542 and by the time Manila was founded in 1571 the process of taking political control of the islands was well under way. Africans were from the outset an integral part of the Asian and Pacific empires of the Iberian powers. The sixteenth century saw a growing Portuguese commercial presence along the East as well as the West coast of Africa, and though the Indian Ocean slave trade apparently did not rival that of the Atlantic or reach its peak until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, blacks from West as well as East Africa were taken eastward where they became one component among many in the poly-ethnic slave population of Portugals sprawling Asian empire. Here, too, the encounter between Christianity and Islam shaped the environment in which they found themselves. The Muslims of the Swahili coast of Africa and the Muslims of India used the word kafirtheir term for an unbelieverto designate pagan Africans. The Portuguese in the east adopted the word, calling East African blacks cafreskaffirs eventually becoming the comparable term in English. While black slaves in Portuguese India were apparently mostly domestic servants or laborers, Christianized Africans also provided sorely needed manpower for Portugals overextended Asian military. (They did not, however, rise to the kind of political prominence enjoyed by some of the habshi, Islamicized African slaves who had served in the armies of late-medieval Islamic India.) Black soldiers were eventually found serving in Portuguese garrisons as far east as Macaoand these were no means the only Africans to reach the Pacific rim. When the Portuguese went to Japan, they took black slaves with them (some accompanied the celebrated Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano at his appearance in Kyoto in 1591) and blacks were included in the heterogenous supply of slaves that the Portuguese shipped through Macao to the Spanish Philippines. Reluctantly, we have for the most part omitted these stories from our volumes, as outside the boundaries of the Atlantic world.
We have also, with even
greater reluctance, given only quite limited attention to the
important African presence in the Andean region of South America,
which presents a very special case geographically. Bordering on
the Pacific and in that sense outside the scope of our work, colonial
Peru (which included modern-day Ecuador, Bolivia, and portions
of western Brazil and northern Chile) was nevertheless closely
integrated into the African-Iberian Atlantic. Peruvian silver
and gold, carried by mule train across the Isthmus of Panama or
by oxcart to the Río de la Plata, were critical to the
growth of Spains Atlantic economyand blacks helped
to mine and transport them. They also provided most of the labor
for Perus ranches and plantations, and supplied many of
the colonys artisans and craftsmen. Peru was, in fact, a
major New World site for the meeting of Europeans, Africans, and
indigenous Americans. Slaves of African descent accompanied the
first Spaniards into Peru in the sixteenth century and for most
of the seventeenth century, Africans and African Peruvians made
up half the population of its capital, Lima. We keenly regret
that the need to set manageable boundaries for our labors has
required us to slight this very important story. As a further
grudging concession to finitude, we have also found it necessary,
even within the Atlantic world itself, to restrict and focus our
coverage. We have accordingly seldom ventured further south than
Angola and Brazil. Rather than spread ourselves uniformly but
thinly over the entire Atlantic world we have chosen in each volume
to provide deeper coverage of specific geographical sites that
seem to us particularly important or exceptionally well-documented
for the period in question. We have, for example, devoted considerable
attention in volume one to the religious history of the kingdom
of Kongo, while in volume two Mexico becomes a main focal point
for our story. Areas emphasized in one volume may be treated more
marginally in another. Our first volume, for example, attemptsspecially
at the outsetto relate the racial and religious encounters
of the earliest Atlantic world to contemporary patterns of interaction
in the Mediterranean, but this is not a history we mean to pursue
throughout succeeding volumes. Similarly, we have in this volume
briefly juxtaposed the arrival of Christianity in coastal West
Africa with the contemporary spread of Islam further inlandprocesses
that display striking parallelsbut this is not a comparison
we will be able to trace through later periods.
Gathering, Selecting, and Interpreting the
Documents
[This section is omitted from the current text.]
Establishing, Translating, Editing, and Presenting
the Documents
[This section is omitted from the current text.]
Electronic Publication
[This section is omitted from the current text.]
1. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T.
Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher, American Christianity: An
Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, 2
vols. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1960, 1963). [return to text]
2. For a more complete account
of the earliest stages of the project, together with our initial
statement of the tripartite periodization, see Albert J. Raboteau
and David W. Wills, Rethinking American Religious History:
A Progress Report on Afro-American Religious History: A
Documentary History Project, Bulletin of the Council
of Societies for the Study of Religion 20, no. 3 (September
1991): 5761. This article is a revised version of a presentation
originally made at the annual meeting of the American Academy
of Religion in November 1990.
[return to text]
3. American Christianity actually
opens its documentary sequence with five documents from the mid-1600s,
touching on early Catholic missions in various parts of North
America and the rise and fall of religious toleration in Maryland,
before arriving at its chronologically earliest document: Dales
Laws of 1610 from Virginia. The year 1607 (marking the beginning
of successful English colonization in Virginia) appears, however,
on the title page, table of contents, and heading for Period
I as the works announced starting point. [return to text]
4. Winthrop S. Hudson and John
Corrigan, Religion in America: An Historical Account of the
Development of American Religious Life, 5th ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1992), 11, 13. This approach is at least as old as
Robert Baird, Religion in America; or An Account of the Origin,
Progress, Relation to the State, and Present Condition of the
Evangelical Churches in the United States. With Notices of the
Unevangelical Churches (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844)a
path-breaking survey that laid down lines of interpretation followed
by many subsequent historians of American religion. For Baird,
to understand the religious life of the United States, we
must study the history of religion in England first (31).
He saw in English history a struggle between the Anglo-Saxon and
Norman races that was exported to America in the spiritual contrast
between the northern and southern colonies. A studied impartiality
of tone did not disguise his sympathies. God had deflected Catholic
Spain from North America in order to preserve the continent for
a great Protestant empire (15) and no one had been
more important in bringing the spirit of the Reformation to America
than the settlers of New England. Bairds comments on religion
among African Americans are few and do not inform the main structure
of his narrative. [return to text]
5. For a more extended discussion
of the idea that there are three major themes in American religious
history, each of which emerges most sharply, though not exclusively,
in one of the three distinct regions of colonial American (New
England, the Middle Colonies, and the South), see David W. Wills,
The Central Themes of American Religious History: Pluralism,
Puritanism, and the Encounter of Black and White, Religion
and Intellectual Life 5, no. 1 (fall 1987): 3041 and
Forum: The Decade Ahead in Scholarship, Religion
and American Culture 3, no. 1 (winter 1993): 1522. The
former has also been reprinted in Timothy E. Fulop and Albert
J. Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive
Essays in History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997),
720. [return
to text]
6. Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious
History of America, new rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1990), 1. [return
to text]
7. A 1492 beginning date has also
been adopted in the most recent edition of Hudson and Corrigans
survey: Winthrop S. Hudson and John Corrigan, Religion in America:
An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious
Life, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1999).
The first of the classic nineteenth-century surveys of American
religious history to begin with Columbus was Daniel Dorchester,
Christianity in the United States, from the First Settlement
Down to the Present Time (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1888).
Dorchester, who saw his story as one of three-way competition
among Protestantism, Romanism, and a variety of Divergent
Elements (4), had almost nothing to say about religion among
African Americans. Throughout, he treated slavery and anti-slavery
as one among several areas exemplifying religions influence
on morality, finding in the progress made in nineteenth- century
America against the three mammoth evils of slavery,
dueling, and intemperance evidence of the transforming power of
voluntary moral agencies, operating under the regimen of
public opinion (773). It seems likely that Dorchesters
beginning his work with the religious history of the Spanish New
World (and including as well a broad review of early Catholic
history in the areas of North American controlled by Spain and
France) was at least in part a response to the work of the American
Catholic historian John Gilmary Shea.
[return to text]
8. There have been numerous attempts
to establish a pre-Columbian beginning for the history of the
Atlantic world. Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus
(New York: Random House, 1976) argues, for example, that pre-Columbian
contacts between Africa and America included not merely the accidental
crossing of an occasional African boat swept westward by the transatlantic
currents, but also such things as a major fleet led by the ruler
of the West African kingdom of Mali in 1311. Parallel claims of
forgotten voyagers have also long been advanced on behalf of a
variety of European-American peoples. From the earliest years
of English exploration in the New World, to mention one, the story
was circulated that Prince Madoc of Wales had sailed to America
in 1170, and that blond, blue-eyed, Welsh-speaking Indians were
still to be found in North America. President Thomas Jefferson
thought the story sufficiently credible to ask Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark to be on the lookout for such persons on their
way up the Missouri River in 1804. Far more credible to most historians
is the claim that, around the year 1000, Vikings led by Leif Erickson
sailed to and briefly colonized a part of North America they called
Vinland. The first major survey of American religious history
to address the possibility of a pre-Columbian history of Christianity
in the New World was Leonard Woolsey Bacon, A History of American
Christianity (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1897), the
concluding summary work in the thirteen-volume, denomination-by-denomination
American Church History Series published under the auspices of
the American Society of Church History. Bacon briefly noted the
medieval Viking voyages and settlements and the missionary efforts
that were alleged to have been associated with them, but correctly
saw that these earlier contacts, whatever they may have been,
were essentially discontinuous with the history of the Atlantic
world as it emerges in the early modern period. The pre-Columbian
history of the African-Portuguese Atlantic is, by contrast, directly
continuous with this post-Columbian history. [return to text]
9. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious
History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1972), 12. [return to text]
10. George Bancroft, A History
of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent
to the Present Time, vol. 1 (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1834),
177. [return
to text]
11. Bancroft, A History of
the United States, vol. 1, 177.
[return to text]
12. George Bancroft, A History
of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent,
2d ed., vol.1 (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1837), 163, 159, 163, 164,
167, 169. From the publication of the first edition of the first
volume in 1834 to The Authors Last Revision,
appearing in the years 1883 to 1885, Bancrofts history went
through many editions with some variation in its title. Once the
material discussed and cited in the text above had been revised
for the second edition, however, it remained unchanged at least
for the dozen following editions. See George Bancroft, History
of the Discovery of the United States, from the Discovery of the
American Continent,15th ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1854), 159, 163, 164, 167, 169. The phrase abounded in the
city of Seville was adapted by Bancroft from Diego Ortiz
de Zúñiga, Annales eclesiásticos y seculares
de la . . . ciudad de Sevilla . . .
desde . . . 1246 . . . hasta . . .
1671 (Ecclesiastical and secular annals of the . . .
city of Seville . . . from . . .
1246 . . . to . . . 1671) (Madrid:
Imprenta Real, por I. García Infançon, 1677), 373. [return to text]
13. Bancroft, History of the
United States, 2d ed., vol. 1, 164. David Brion Davis, The
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1966), sees Bancroft as above all concerned to argue that
slavery was essentially foreign to America (23) and
alien to the true nature of the New World (24). Edgar
Hutchinson Johnson, III, George Bancroft, Slavery, and the
American Union (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1983), emphasizes
the importance of Bancrofts treatment of slavery throughout
his multi-volume History of the United States, seeing it as an
important somber counterpoint to the Historys prevailing
emphasis on Americas providential destiny to lead the world
into a bright, democratic future.
[return to text]
14. Bancroft was not the only
member of his scholarly and literary generation to emphasize the
importance of the Iberian Atlantic to the understanding of American
historyor to underscore the significance of the Christian-Muslim
encounter in shaping the Iberian Atlantic. At least since the
publication of James Franklin Jamesons The History of
Historical Writing in America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,
1891), it has been common to distinguish the literary figures
from other writers of history during the classical period
in American historical scholarship. It is among these literary
historians that interest in the Iberian Atlanticand
indeed the Atlantic world generallywas most noteworthy.
During three and a half years in Spain (182629), where he
was attached to the American legation, Washington Irving not only
completed his enormously influential A History of the Life
and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: John Murray,
1828; New York: G. & C. Carvill, 1828), which emphasizes Columbuss
religious motivation and crusading zeal, but also began a series
of works on Islam in Spainof which The Alhambra (London:
H. Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1832) is only the best known.
In the late 1830s, he also began a book on the Spanish conquest
of Mexico, but abandoned it when he discovered that William Hickling
Prescott was at work on the same subject. Prescotts landmark
History of the Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View
of the Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror,
Hernando Cortés (London: Richard Bentley, 1843; New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), had been preceded by History
of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic (Boston:
American Stationers Company, 1838; London: John B. Russell,
1838) and followed by A History of the Conquest of Peru, with
a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas (London:
Richard Bentley, 1847; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847). Neither
Irving nor Prescott, however, gave to the Portuguese sphere of
the early Atlantic world the same attention accorded to the Spanish.
It is here worth recalling that the work which established in
the English-speaking world the image of Prince Henry the
Navigator as a mythic Portuguese counterweight to the figure
of ColumbusRichard Henry Majors The Life of Prince
Henry of Portugal, Surnamed the Navigator; and Its Results: The
Discovery, within One Century, of Half the World (London:
A. Asher, 1868)was written by an Englishman and did not
appear until much later in the century. In the United States in
the 1820s and 1830s, it appears that where Portugals early
role in the Atlantic world was acknowledged, it was typically
in connection with a brief statement about the origins of the
Atlantic slave trade. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor
of that Class of Americans Called Africans ( Boston: Allen
& Ticknor, 1833), for example, begins where this volume doesin
the 1440s, with Antão Gonçalves and the origins
of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. [return to text]
15. By implication, we are also
proposing an Atlantic world beginning point for African-American
history generally. From their emergence in the nineteenth century,
survey accounts of black history have most often begun in Africa.
The landmark work of George Washington Williams, who was sometimes
called the black Bancroft, exemplifies the pattern.
As its prolix title page makes clear, Williamss History
of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves,
as Soldiers, and as Citizens, Together with a Preliminary Consideration
of the Unity of the Human Family, an Historical Sketch of Africa,
and an Account of the Negro Governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia
(New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1883), prefaces a story that
effectively begins with the arrival of blacks in Virginia with
a long introductory section on Africa, past and present. These
quite heterogeneous pages are less a narrative than an argument,
intended to overturn a variety of racist stereotypes about the
black past. Williams made no serious effort to connect Africa
to America by setting the emergence of slavery in British North
America in an Atlantic-world context. For an analysis of the religious
and racial concerns that shaped the narratives of Williamss
generation, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Mapping the World,
Mapping the Race: The Negro Race History, 18741915,
Church History 64, no. 4 (December 1995): 610626.
The durable survey authored by the father of Negro history,
Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington,
D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1922) also begins in Africa, devoting
the first of its twenty chapters to a brief account emphasizing
African cultural accomplishments. Unlike Williams, however, Woodson
supplies a second chapter on the early history of black slavery
in the Atlantic world before concentrating on his main storyblacks
in the United States. By contrast, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The
Negro (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1915) is primarily
a history of Africa, with the slave trade, the Atlantic world
generally, and the United States appearing only in the last two-fifths
of the book. It is thus not a survey of African-American history,
but the history of Africans and people of African descent in a
more inclusive sense, and represents a different genre. Our Atlantic
world beginning is, of course, far removed from classicizing Afrocentric
accounts preoccupied with the accomplishments and influence of
ancient Egypt. But by placing the Atlantic world against the background
of the antecedent Mediterranean world, we acknowledge the ongoing
importance of a history of racial encounter reaching back to classical
antiquity. [return
to text]
16. For a discussion of the continuing
need for careful study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black
church history, and an analysis of some of the archival sources
to support such work, see Albert J. Raboteau and David W. Wills,
with Randall K. Burkett, Will B. Gravely, and James Melvin Washington,
Retelling Carter Woodsons
Story: Archival Sources for Afro-American Church History,
Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (June 1990): 183199,
reprinted in Religious Diversity and American Religious History,
ed. Walter H. Conser, Jr. and Sumner B. Twiss (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1997), 5271. This essays takes as its
point of departure Carter G. Woodsons pioneering survey,
The History of the Negro Church (Washington, D.C.: Associated
Publishers, 1921), which like the rest of Woodsons earliest
work focused almost entirely on continental North America and
gave only glancing attention to the Atlantic world context of
black church history. As in a slightly earlier work, The Education
of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the
Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery
to the Civil War (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1915),
Woodson devoted only a few early pages to the experience of blacks
in the Spanish- and French-controlled areas of the New World,
contending that the noble example set by the Latins
(6) had shamed English Protestants into a greater willingness
to instruct their slaves. Woodsons later work, particularly
in the 1930s, was increasingly attentive to Africa and the Atlantic
world and much more emphatic about continuities in African and
African-American cultureincluding religion. See, for example,
Carter G. Woodson, The African Background Outlined; or Handbook
for the Study of the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers,
1936). Woodsons near contemporary and sometimes rival, the
Caribbean-born book collector and self-taught historian Arthur
Alfonso Schomburg, was deeply interested in the African-Iberian
Atlantic and hoped to produce a major study on blacks in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Spain, which among other things would
have discussed the history of black confraternities. Though he
was an important early contributor to the history of blacks in
the Atlantic world, W. E. B. Du Boiss single work devoted
entirely to the study of African-American religion was not historical,
but sociological: The Negro Church: Report of a Social Study
made under the direction of Atlanta University; together with
the Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for the Study of Negro
Problems, held at Atlanta University, May 26th, 1903 (Atlanta:
Atlanta University Press, 1903). Though it included a short historical
introduction connecting African-American religion to the religions
of Africa and, very briefly, to the early history of the Atlantic
world, it was primarily an examination of the turn-of-the-century
black Protestant churches in the United Statesat the end
of the continental phase of African-American religious
history. [return
to text]
17. On the Exodus theme in African
American Religious history, see Albert J. Raboteau, African-Americans,
Exodus, and the American Israel, in African-American
Christianity: Essays in History, ed. Paul Johnson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 117, reprinted in
Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American
Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 1736,
198200; and David W. Wills, Exodus Piety: African
American Religion in an Age of Immigration, in Minority
Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Jonathan
D. Sarna (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 136188. [return to text]
18. Francis J. Grimk[é],
Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa [Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1936], 1,
2. [return
to text]
19. W[illiam] J. Seymour, The
Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission
of Los Angeles, Cal., with Scripture Readings (n.p., 1915),
12. [return
to text]