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

Part Two

{ 69 } Part Two The first Oberlin missionary to Jamaica came to the island in 183, at the end of the apprenticeship period. After finishing seminary at Oberlin, the one-time Lane Rebel, David S. Ingraham, arrived in Jamaica with the intention of ministering to the island’s apprentices. Over the next several years, Ingraham moved back and forth between Jamaica and the United States, trying to establish a mission church on the island while also raising funds and awareness, and recruiting new missionaries in the United States. During this time, he married a fellow Oberlin graduate, Elizabeth Hartson, and the couple had a daughter, Sarah, born in Jamaica in 1839. Writing a few days after the first anniversary of emancipation in 1839, Ingraham drew a direct connection between his Jamaican congregation and the slaves in the United States. On Emancipation Day, his “chapel was well filled, and as one after another prayer for the poor slaves and for the { 0 } part two cruel masters of America, I almost felt sure that God would hear and that while we were yet speaking the . . . chains of some at least of our brethren in bondage would fall.”1 During their trips to the United States, Ingraham spoke before antislavery meetings in Boston and New York, and made the rounds to visit nodes in the abolitionist network like Gerrit Smith and the Weld family.2 Ingraham recruited five of his fellow Oberlin graduates, several of whom had been working as traveling agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society , to join him in Jamaica. Spread out in villages in the mountains between Kingston and Annotto Bay, the Oberlin ministers and their wives established a tentative American presence in Jamaica. What little we can glean of these early years of the Jamaica Mission comes from the missionaries ’ letters to their hometown Oberlin Evangelist newspaper and from the Evangelist’s frequent updates about their work. From the scant evidence available, one thing is clear: Jamaica proved a more complex and frustrating emancipated society than the Americans anticipated, or than Ingraham had told them in his letters and speeches. American missionary Henry Evarts summed up the state of affairs in 184: “It is hard for the human mind to give up high hopes and fond anticipations, and take hold cheerfully of labors in which much more is to be endured, and less brilliant hopes can be indulged.”3 Initially, primed with abolitionist propaganda about the happy results of West Indian emancipation, and their own experiences working with black northerners, the missionaries had little reason to doubt that black Jamaicans would quickly seek out their churches. Moreover, they had no reason to doubt that they would find eager collaborators in the black churches proliferating on the island. Indeed, having read Emancipation in the West Indies and other pamphlets and books on emancipation, the Oberlin ministers imagined that ex-slaves wanted to throw out all of the culture of slavery, including ignorant superstition and its constant companion , sexual licentiousness. Yet in the 1840s, a Myal revival and blackled Native Baptist churches grew out of the growing frustration that black Jamaicans had with white English missionaries. When the Americans figured out that many Jamaicans adamantly preferred “ignorant” black-led Native Baptist churches to their “orthodox” American congregations, the missionaries were crestfallen. That the black ministers working in their neighborhood did not enforce church discipline, and even welcomed dis- part two { 1 } graced ex-members of the mission churches into their fold, perplexed the American missionaries. As during Shipherd’s days in the Valley of Moral Death, it was very difficult to evangelize a population to whom excommunication meant little. Almost as disheartening to the missionaries was that black Jamaican men and women had not adopted the gender ideology of domesticity. Sexually active teenagers, unwed mothers, womanizing and abusive husbands , and other forms of sexual licentiousness filled the pages of missionary letters as proof that the purported Jamaican Christianity was nothing but a collection of spurious superstitions. Unlike most varieties of licentious Americans—the members of the Oneida Commune, for example, or even sinful slaveholders—morally suspect black Jamaicans actively sought membership in the mission churches. Patrolling church membership and punishing sinful church members who had somehow slipped into their congregations became as important a part of the Jamaica Mission as trying to recruit new converts away from the Native Baptists and other competing churches. In addition to...