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6 Quaker Evangelization in Early Barbados Forging a Path toward the Unknowable Kristen Block Many historians of the Society of Friends are now aware that the island of Barbados was the Quakers’ first American “Cradle of Truth.” Beginning in 1656, and throughout the 1660s, missionaries such as Mary Fisher, Anne Austin, Henry Fell, and Richard Pinder brought their simple faith in the Truth and Inward Light to the island, where significant numbers of wealthy slaveholding planters and merchants were “convinced,” lending the Society legitimacy and status in Barbados.1 We also know that Friends first began to engage with the moral problems of slavery in Barbados, as George Fox initiated a serious challenge to patriarchs on the island to think of the enslaved Africans and Indians among them as members of a universal spiritual family, reminding them that “Christ dyed for the Tawne[y]s and for the Blacks, as well as for you that are called whites.”2 Certainly, Fox’s call marks an important moment in the history of Quakers and slavery. Scholars have often judged the subsequent campaign for evangelization a Quaker success story.3 However, this effort was clearly a secondary issue. Only sparse references remain of missionaries holding meetings with “the negroes in several plantations”; only three instances are recorded of leading planters being prosecuted for including slaves in religious gatherings.4 Might there have actually been a complete lack of enthusiasm for this mission ? Certainly, it would stimulate fear and unease among local slaveholders. I hoped that wills—the one body of evidence that still exists in fairly complete form for this time period—would offer some more indirect clues that some enslaved individuals may have been considered converts by their ostensible masters. Even after a broad prosopographical investigation of nearly eight hundred Quakers who had lived in or visited Barbados (including roughly 150 wills from the island’s registers), however, I could not find any “smoking gun,” no references to blacks as “Christians” or “Friends.” In the end, only a handful of examples seemed to suggest—and by no means conclusively—that some Barbadian Friends felt compelled to follow Fox’s suggestion to evangelization. Nonetheless, something happened beyond that great void of evidence, and 90 kristen block I felt compelled to draw from the deep well of imagination, waters that can stagnate when historians only trust in strict empirical mirrors of the past. To conjure up the past, and to inhabit, however imperfectly, those spaces rendereddarkbythepassageoftime,Ifirstdrawonhistoricalcontexttoexplore how the nascent evangelization movement would have connected to Quakerism ’s evolving trends in theology and spiritual symbolism: from personal revelation to communal consensus, from the supremacy of the Inward Light to the supremacy of scriptures. Such context next considers a general overview of Africanist literature on religious and communal life, an exploration of the shared cultural constructs that might have drawn potential converts to their masters’ society. Finally, I put this knowledge to practice by imagining the circumstances that would have led to everyday spiritual interactions between enslaved members of Quaker households and their masters. First, examining the debates and subtle shifts in Quaker ideals and practice during the decades just prior to and after Fox’s call for evangelization suggests ways in which identifying a new target group for conversion might have played into ongoing theological discussions. Fox, Penn, Whitefield, and others who had emerged as leaders of the movement worked ceaselessly throughout the latter decades of the seventeenth century to counter charges that members of the Society did not believe in the Bible, or were immoral, “disorderly” people.5 Various schismatic movements also forced leaders to “purify” the movement from within and force greater conformity on the Society’s members. These two efforts led to a tempering of the mystical and visionary tone that marked the movement’s early days—and would have been reflected in evangelization efforts. Before the conservatism, however, there was idealism, best embodied by the missionary activity of those who traveled to the furthest reaches of the English world and beyond: to Constantinople, to Catholic strongholds such as Rome, and to the West Indies. Early converts spoke of spiritual authority as emanating from an Inward Light, a basic and universal human impulse that could be sparked by personal interaction between those who had discovered their own Light and those still languishing in the darkness of wrong teaching or ignorance. Spiritual Truth could be held by men or women, educated and “plain” folks alike, and was not limited to those...

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