“One Militant Saint”: The Much Traveled Life of Mary Perth

In 1772 in Norfolk Virginia, when the moon provided just enough light, a young slave woman called Mary would strap her baby on her back and slip out of the sleeping household of John Willoughby. Cautiously making her way out of the town, she would walk for about ten miles to the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp.¹

Here, in the woods, she would exhort her fellow sufferers to open their hearts to salvation, so that their spirits could be freed from bondage.² At some time in her life Mary had gained some literacy, so she knew the Book of Exodus, with its promise to deliver the enslaved from bondage, and could read St. Paul’s advice to the Galatians: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” In her arbor meetings Mary may have sung a version of the hymn of Charles Wesley:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eyes diffused a quickening ray — I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free…

She would then make the trek back to the Willoughby house in time for the morning labor. I know this because a quarter of a century later in Sierra Leone, when Mary Perth was a prominent member of the black settler community, she told this story to the Sierra Leone Company chaplain who described her slave proselytizing in a letter published in the Evangelical Magazine.³ The letter does not indicate when Mary fell under the sway of John Wesley’s radical ideology, but circumstantial evidence points to the year 1772, when her youngest child was a baby small enough to strap to her back for a twenty mile hike.

In all probability Mary owed her conversion to Robert Williams, a self-funded Wesleyan itinerant who arrived at Norfolk in the summer of 1769, en route from Ireland to New York. Barely a soul noticed this fierce proselytizer on his brief stopover, but he made a dramatic impact on his return in February 1772. Standing on the steps of the Norfolk County courthouse he burst into the hymn “Come Sinners to the Gospel Feast” and as soon as he had drawn a crowd began an impassioned discourse on sin and salvation. The curious onlookers, including many of the town’s enslaved, had never witnessed such uninhibited evocation of Satan, nor such emotional plea for God’s mercy. They were inclined to consider him a lunatic, but the mayor detected a more sinister purpose. He was overheard to observe, “If we permit such a fellow as this to come here we shall have an insurrection of the Negroes.”⁴ The mayor had reason to be alarmed. Early Methodist emissaries to America like Williams were passionately opponents of slavery.⁵

If Mary did not hear Williams preach at Norfolk on that day, she had numerous opportunities in the weeks that followed. Williams, unwelcome in Norfolk, was invited to stay with a prominent merchant in Portsmouth where he preached in a converted warehouse to large biracial meetings.⁶ For about a month Williams travelled around Norfolk County, spreading the word about God’s infinite capacity for redemption. Everywhere he went enslaved people proved receptive to his powerful evocation of the liberation to be found in God’s grace. Methodist conversion was an unmediated process whereby the individual freely chose salvation and was personally accountable to God. Being born anew in God’s grace implied a profound separation between the spiritual and the physical self. This promise of a spiritual autonomy hit a highly responsive cord among for people who were defined as property: the insignificant body could be compelled to labor for others, yet the untrammelled spirit could soar free.

Williams left Portsmouth in the Spring of 1772, having created the core of a Methodist meeting at Portsmouth and formed several classes at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, about seven miles from Portsmouth and ten miles from Norfolk, between Great Bridge and New Mill Creek...