Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South by Paul E. Teed

Author:Paul E. Teed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2019-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Christianity and Conversion

While African traditions, including Islam, remained a key element in the daily spiritual experiences of enslaved people, Christianity played an increasingly important role as well. Beginning with intense revival movements of the mid-1700s, what later generations called the First Great Awakening, evangelical forms of Protestant Christianity spread quickly among African American slaves and became a critical element of Southern black culture by the beginning of the antebellum period. During much of the colonial era, white planters had resisted the attempts of missionaries to preach to their slaves, concerned that it would be difficult to justify the enslavement of fellow Christians. For their part, slaves had been reluctant to abandon their own African spiritual traditions, and they found the catechisms and formal liturgical practices of the Church of England unappealing. Evangelical preaching, however, with its emphasis on the equally sinful character of all people and the necessity for everyone to undergo a miraculous “conversion” experience proved far more compelling. The physical, emotionally charged nature of evangelical conversions, which was consistent in some ways with West African traditions, not only spoke to the needs of oppressed people but also encouraged them to form new, tight-knit communities of like-minded believers.

As it was for white evangelicals, slaves regarded conversion as a powerful, transformative experience that involved more than just an acceptance of basic Christian doctrines. Enslaved Virginian Peter Randolph, for example, remembered his own youthful conversion as an agonizing emotional ordeal that began with despair over the sinful condition of his life. “I prayed that [God] would kill me, for I did not want to live to sin against him anymore,” he recalled. But in the moment of his deepest anguish, he recalled, “I felt my guilt give way, and thought that I was a new being … the eyes of my mind were open, and I saw things as I never did before” (Randolph 1855, 25–26). An enslaved Maryland woman named Elizabeth told of an even more intense experience that occurred when she was just thirteen years old. Told by her mother that she “had none in the world to look to but God,” she spent nearly six months in abject misery about the state of her soul, stealing away to lonely places in order to pray and to beseech God for mercy. In ways that would have been at least partially recognizable to her West African ancestors whose spiritual experiences included trances, visions, and spirit possessions, Elizabeth explained that her religious conversion resulted from a direct interaction with the risen Christ. “He led me down a long journey to a fiery gulf and left me standing upon the brink of this awful pit,” she recalled more than half a century later. “I began to scream for mercy, thinking I was about to sink to endless ruin,” but rather than condemn her, in the vision Christ offered his hand as a sign “that my sins were forgiven me, and the time of my deliverance was at hand” (Elizabeth 1889, 3–4).

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