God of Liberty by Thomas S Kidd

Author:Thomas S Kidd [Kidd, Thomas S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465022779
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

Evangelical faith held great potential as a source of radical antislavery thought. In the most extraordinary case during the Great Awakening, the South Carolina planter Hugh Bryan, a convert of George Whitefield’s, came temporarily to believe that he was a prophet of God destined to deliver South Carolina’s slaves from their bondage. In 1742 Bryan sent a book of prophecies to the South Carolina legislature that predicted that the slaves would destroy Charleston. The colony’s authorities, worried that Bryan was communicating his prophecies to the slaves themselves, went to arrest the planter but found him repentant. He had tested his calling by trying, like a latter-day Moses, to part the waters of a local river. One account reported that the Holy Spirit “directed him to go and take him a rod, of such a certain shape and dimensions, from such a tree, in such a place as he told him of; and therewith to go and smite the waters of a river, which should thereby be divided, so as he might go over, on dry ground.” He did as he was told, and after cutting the rod he drove “full tilt with it into the river, and falls a smiting, splashing and spluttering the water about with it, till he was quite up to the chin; and his brother, who had pursued him as fast as he could had enough to do to save him from being drowned.” Bryan, humiliated, followed the example of his mentor Whitefield and soon reconciled himself to the notion that faithful Christians could also own slaves.3

Evangelicals, white or black, did not typically entertain notions about slavery as subversive as those of the prophet Hugh Bryan. Nevertheless, as the Revolution approached, some slaves began to speculate that the time of their deliverance was near, thanks to their conviction that the Bible’s prophecies of liberty for the captives applied to them. In 1775, as the struggle between the Americans and the British broke out into armed conflict, reports of slave insurrections in the South were rampant, with many slaves apparently believing that the British forces would rescue them from their American oppressors. One slave preacher named David reportedly told an audience in Charleston that “God would send deliverance to the negroes, from the power of their masters, as he freed the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage.” At almost exactly the same time, a slave preacher named George was sentenced and hanged for fomenting rebellion southwest of Charleston. He reportedly told followers that King George III had received a divine mandate to “alter the world and set the negroes free.”4

African Americans widely viewed the arrival of British forces in America as an opportunity for freedom, and droves of them fled to British lines when they had the chance. The British made halting efforts to encourage slaves to run away from their masters and thus disrupt American business and agriculture. Most notably, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered in late 1775 to free slaves who joined his army and fought against the Patriots.

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