Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866

4. From Spiritual Liberty to Sexual License

{ 100 } From Spiritual Liberty to Sexual License In May 1850, a black Jamaican named Thomas Livingston wrote to George Whipple, the foreign corresponding secretary of the American Missionary Association, to inform him of the changes that had recently taken place at the Eliot Station’s school. The forty-seven-year-old Livingston had become a shopkeeper after emancipation in 1838, and he had belonged to the Jamaica Mission’s Eliot Church since the early 1840s. He reported to Whipple that the newest teacher at Eliot School, an American woman named Urania Hunt, “was not the person for this place,” and Livingston told Whipple that the board had hired a black Jamaican man to take her place. In his letter, Livingston reflected on the larger context for the trustees’ decision. In the past, he recounted, “The school was intierly under the control of the Minister and we had no voise in the school.” While apprehensive at first, by July 1850, the minister at Eliot, Loren Thompson, 4 from spiritual liberty to sexual license { 101 } fully supported the actions of the Eliot trustees. Thompson told George Whipple that the recent events were “a very important step in the advance of freedom” and remarked, “The people at Brainerd and Hermitage have taken the same stand.” For Thompson, these events signaled the advance of “Manhood under the genial influences of a pure Christianity,” and he proclaimed, “Let pure freedom be preached, the freedom that the Son of God gives” so that the “signs of life” might emerge from the “dry and crushed ruins of Slavery.”1 What made Loren Thompson, the same man who once declared that very few freed people were “able to judge what a good school is,” decide that he should hand over Eliot to them?2 Why did Thomas Livingston choose this particular moment to seize control over the school when he and other Jamaican men had a long list of grievances against Thompson’s way of doing things? For the entirety of 1850, the white members of the Jamaica Mission battled over the meaning of Christian liberty and its place in a missionary context, and their disputes created a power vacuum that allowed black Jamaicans to step in and take on leadership roles so that the mission’s schools and churches would not collapse. The mission stations in Jamaica were more than a space for encounters between black Jamaicans and white Americans, and this chapter examines how internecine disputes over theology and the place of white women erupted in the mission context to almost bring down the civilizing mission . In 1849, a missionary named John Hyde began to float ideas that had become popular in the postrevival burned-over district in New York. Hyde believed that the outward practices of Christianity, such as rituals and church discipline, distracted God’s people from true spirituality.3 He asserted that men and women, blacks and whites were all equally endowed with God’s spirit, and he preached to anyone who would listen that God resided within each individual’s soul. In other words, when Christians followed their instincts, they followed God’s will and achieved spiritual liberty. Hyde believed that the hierarchies and rules of the mission were impediments to salvation, and he managed to convince most of the other missionaries that he was on the right path. For the missionaries to try to “civilize” black Jamaicans was pointless if black Jamaicans, like white Americans, had God within them. According to Hyde, true Christians and free Christians, the all-important factor in this particular abolitionist { 102 } chapter four civilizing mission, followed the dictates of their inner conscience, and for the missionaries to impose their lifestyles on the Jamaicans was working against Christianity and against the principles of abolitionism. Hyde’s biggest critic was one of the mission’s single women schoolteachers , Mary Dean. She questioned Hyde’s theology and morals, and emphasized that men like him had absolutely no place in a mission. How would the “civilized” white Americans ever convince black Jamaicans to adopt the right kind of Christianity if they espoused unorthodox ideas themselves? The mission’s men rebuffed Dean’s critiques of Hyde and instead defended his rights to religion and speech. In doing so, the American ministers maintained gender hierarchies even as their support for religious liberty directed them to see the racial dimensions of the civilizing mission in a new light...