LITMIR.BIZ

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be regarded as personal property.” In essence, Indians who professed belief were to be baptized, and Indian children raised in Christian households as slaves or servants were to be baptized under the authority of their master’s faith. The letter also implied that baptism did not change the enslaved status of bondsmen and bondswomen. While the Consistory did not discuss enslaved blacks, it is reasonable to assume that Lutheran pastors would have treated them similarly because both groups were held as servants or slaves and because Europeans believed both unconverted Indians and blacks were heathens. Berkenmeyer believed that blacks and Indians in Lutheran households should be baptized, and he baptized his three enslaved people.84

      The 1735 constitution for New York and New Jersey Lutheran congregations, written by Berkenmeyer, instructed pastors to admit enslaved people to the church as long as they seemed sincerely interested in abiding by Christian morality and promised to continue serving their masters. When baptizing black people, the constitution says that “preachers should be careful that they [enslaved people] promise not to abuse their Christianity or break the bond of submission.” This concern reinforced the practice that dated from at least 1708 of requiring enslaved people to promise not to use baptism or church membership as arguments for emancipation.85

      Black people were theoretically allowed to become communicants in Lutheran churches by the 1730s, and they certainly became communicants in later decades. At the Lutheran church in Hackensack, New Jersey, the church council, headed by Reverend Michael C. Knoll, in 1733 decided that, “If, by the grace of God, some Negroes would also be willing to come to catechetical instruction,” then they would be instructed with white children and white young adults in preparation to “be admitted to the Lord’s Supper.”86 The possibility of learning to read, as part of catechism lessons, likely appealed to black northerners.

      The Lutheran churches in New York, according to Graham R. Hodges, were “sufficiently open to black membership as to be considered interracial communities,” and they seemed to attract free blacks particularly.87 At the Lutheran church in New York City, there were at least nineteen blacks baptized in the 1730s and 1740s. Among the individuals baptized were “Peter Jaksen, a free negro, about 20 years old”; “David, a negro slave of Niclaes Walther”; Abraham, the son of “Joseph Matthyeen and Annatje, free negreoes,” and Eva, the illegitimate child of “Maria Poppelsdorf, white and an unknown negro.” Some consensual sexual relations and even marriages between Germans and free black people occurred in the eighteenth century. These black individuals, some free and some enslaved, requested baptism at the Lutheran church and likely attended services there.88

      The Moravian Church (Renewed Unity of Brethren), a mission-driven and pietistic Protestant sect from central Europe, also ministered to some blacks and Indians during the 1740s. The Moravians promoted emotional piety and focused on semi-communal living, heartfelt devotion to Christ, and worldwide missionary efforts. Moravians were engaged in missionary work to thousands of African slaves on the Danish Caribbean Island of St. Thomas by 1740.89 A group of Moravians from Saxony settled in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1740 to practice their religion without state harassment and to minister to Pennsylvania Indians. Eventually, by the 1760s, Moravians established five communities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut for Delaware, Mohican, and other Indians interested in Christianity. Missionary work at Indian villages, such as Shekomeko, New York, was a central component of the faith of these Christians. Like Anglicans, Moravians sometimes offered educational opportunities to enslaved people. Moravians also did not demand that their converts possess a high degree of religious knowledge or memorize doctrines before baptism, and Moravians sought to learn Indian languages and could be more accepting of traditional Indian practices than most English Protestants. All that was required of adults seeking baptism was a simple profession of faith, and as such, Moravians made this sacrament relatively accessible to blacks and Indians.90

      In addition to the small number of black Moravians, including Andreas and Magdalene, Indians affiliated with Moravian Christianity in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, usually in Indian towns that were visited by missionaries. Several families of Delawares decided to be baptized by Moravians in the late 1740s and 1750s, and roughly sixty-six Delaware or Mohican women were baptized in 1749 alone. Delawares often felt pressures from growing white settlements and the more powerful Six Nations Iroquois (Haudenosaunee). Consequently, for some Delawares, Christian affiliation and missionaries were seen as means of maintaining community cohesion and local autonomy. The Moravian missionary town of Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, became an important site of Indian Christianity, but other Delawares were skeptical and disinterested in Moravian Christianity and white alliances.91

      Moravian women played central roles in many of the spiritual interactions with Indians. Several eighteenth-century female Moravian missionaries in New York and Pennsylvania became close friends with Indian believers, and both Europeans and Indians found mutual support in these relationships. Moravian women such as Jeannette Mack met individually with Indian women, discussed religious beliefs with them, and encouraged their spiritual growth. When Indians were baptized in the Moravian church during the 1740s, white Moravians served as sponsors or godparents for Indian children, and correspondingly, Indians sometimes served as sponsors or godparents for white children. These relationships facilitated spiritual as well as physical support among the Indians and Europeans at the Moravian missions. The central role played by Moravian women in missionary work among Indians in the 1740s and 1750s was one of the key factors that made these missions successful examples of interracial Christianity.92

      The Moravian missionaries who created personal friendships with Indians in Pennsylvania and elsewhere show one way in which interracial religious activities flourished in the 1740s, but such experiences were fragile and not shared by all whites and Indians in Pennsylvania and New York. New York officials persecuted the white Moravian missionaries at Shekomeko in 1744 by charging that they were in league with French Catholics and by expelling white Moravians. The migration of the white and some Indian Moravians effectively ended this Moravian interracial religious community in New York. Some religious societies that were interracial and that practiced some measure of equality occasionally existed in the early eighteenth century, but these endeavors came into conflict with the inequality and injustice that more often characterized relations between whites and Indians.93

      In contrast to the other Mid-Atlantic churches, most Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and Presbyterian churches did not baptize or admit to membership black or Indian peoples during most of the eighteenth century. Graham Russell Hodges, who examined baptismal records from more than fifty Reformed churches from 1680 to 1776, was able to find only “scattered black baptisms.” The Dutch Reformed Church of Albany, New York, baptized at least ten black people between 1733 and 1745, but those baptisms appear to be the largest concentration of black baptism in a Reformed church before the 1780s. The Old Tennent Presbyterian Church of Manalapan (formerly Freeport), New Jersey, baptized five black adults upon their professions of faith and four black children, whose parents had been baptized previously, between 1740 and 1749. Few other Presbyterian churches followed their lead. Albany’s Dutch Reformed Church and the Old Tennent Presbyterian Church were exceptions.94

      Most Reformed and Presbyterian churches did not baptize blacks or Indians because of parishioners’ direct opposition to doing so and because church policies made these sacraments relatively inaccessible, even for enslaved people in Christian homes. Writing in February 1728, James Wetmore, Anglican missionary at Rye, New York, noted that “some Presbyterians will allow their servants to be taught, but are unwilling they should be baptized.”95 Reformed and Presbyterian churches would baptize only children of members (not other household members such as servant children), and they required adults who wanted to be baptized to be admitted as communicants at the same time, which made baptism more difficult to obtain. Presbyterian and Reformed churches did not have the equivalent of the Congregationalists’ Halfway Covenant, which separated adult baptisms from the requirements of full membership. More so than among English colonists, Dutch slaveholders feared that baptism would imply equality or undermine their ownership of slaves. Reformed churches also lacked missionary activities directed toward blacks and Indians, which played such a central role in the number of black baptisms in other churches.96 After the American Revolution, however, Reformed and Presbyterian churches changed their baptismal policies, and African Americans joined these churches, sometimes in substantial numbers

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