A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (review)

A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840. By Jon F. Sensbach (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 342 pp. $45.00 cloth $17.95 paper.

This carefully crafted study places the story of a settlement of Moravians in western North Carolina in the context of two of the most important and dynamic forces in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world--slavery and evangelical Christianity. It explores how enslaved Africans created a community in America, in a time and place when their deeply religious German captors were intent on creating their own community of God. The heart of Sensbach's book is the interaction between those two processes of community building. Drawing on an extraordinary, and little-known, body of German-language documents, Sensbach argues that the origins of the black church in North America were intertwined with the origins of African-American family life. Sensbach reminds us that it was hardly a foregone conclusion that American churches would be segregated by race, or that African-Americans would use churches as a basis for communal and individual identity.

Chapters on eighteenth-century West Africa and early-modern Europe set the stage for the meeting of Africans and Germans in North America. Moravian missionaries founded the small town of Wachovia, in western North Carolina, in 1753, as a religious community, where they would "live in the service of the Lord" (47). Like Quakerism, Moravianism's roots in early-modern Europe included ideas about social and economic leveling. Sensbach's lucid explanation of Moravian doctrine helps to link religious and social history in illuminating ways. Sensbach argues that in the 1780s, Wachovia's social order was not dominated solely by race, but by a complex mix of factors, especially the line between church members and non-members. Black and white congregants, for example, exchanged the "kiss of peace" and sang in choirs that were segregated by gender, not race (120-126).

Yet, from the beginning, white Moravians hired and bought African slaves for their settlement. For Africans and African-Americans, writes Sensbach, membership in the Moravian community was riddled with ambiguities and uncertainties. The church's symbols of spiritual community symbolized not only a welcome but also "the erasure of the slave's former existence" and the master's power over the slave (115). Sensbach argues that in the 1790s, white Moravians turned their backs on the complex social order of the 1770s and 1780s and began to treat all black people--Moravian or not--as outsiders. The settlement's growing demand for cheap labor was one reason for the shift. In addition, as Sensbach points out, Moravian doctrine had never acknowledged any contradiction between earthly bondage and spiritual freedom; slaves had "freedom in Christ, the only kind of freedom that really mattered" (81). Whites completed the break in the 1820s by pushing black Moravians into a separate church. Extending the arguments of Wood and other historians of colonial North America, Sensbach persuasively illuminates a shift in Wachovia, from relatively "elastic race relations" to "more rigid and divisive racial boundaries" (274). ¹

Although it gives a detailed picture of central Europe, and includes sections on West Africa, this book is primarily about African-Americans. Sensbach uses German-language records of the Moravian Church in Winston-Salem to argue that the Africans and African-Americans who joined the Moravian church "appropriated" its forms, rituals, and tightly knit social order, maneuvering within the limits of whites' power to build a vibrant community. This interpretation of "community" brings together the histories of the black church and the black family, two important themes in African-American history that are not usually discussed together. Building on Gutman's analysis of the role of "fictive kin" among African-Americans, Sensbach skillfully argues that black Moravians turned the institution of godparenthood, or baptismal sponsorship...