Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier by James Van Horn Melton (review)

This carefully researched book is both more focused and more expansive than the title suggests. The “colonial southern frontier” is Georgia. “Community” specifically means Ebenezer, the settlement founded in 1734 by Lutheran religious exiles, a minute portion of the larger masses expelled from the Catholic territory of Salzburg beginning in 1731. “Religion” refers most directly to Franckean Lutheran Pietism embodied in Johann Martin Boltzius, the pastor appointed from Halle to lead the emigres from Europe to America and in Ebenezer. But the scope of this work by James Van Horn Melton, Professor of History at Emory University, extends far beyond the geographic and thematic boundaries of the title. It encompasses the entire story of Ebenezer, reaching back into Salzburg’s Alps where the story begins to post-Revolutionary America and the inevitable denouement of Ebenezer. By the end, the reader may wonder if the point has been to illuminate the history of slavery in colonial America through the story of Ebenezer, or to illuminate the story of Ebenezer through the history of slavery. Either is a welcome outcome of this lucidly written and insightful study.

The Salzburger story in Europe dominates the first half. Melton’s discussion of a “clandestine print culture” (25ff.), along with the traits of alpine miners, helps explain the existence of a surreptitious but vibrant religious life among Salzburg Lutherans despite the absence of pastoral leadership and the presence of Catholic repression and scrutiny. While these issues may seem somewhat removed from the themes of the book’s title, critical points from them emerge later in the story, for example, in accounting for the compatibility between the Salzburger’s religious sensibilities and Boltzius’ own pietistic outlook, or the leadership provided by Salzburg miners in Ebenezer. Moreover, this background puts in relief the community’s later interpretation of their own experience of persecution, expulsion, and re-settlement through the lens of the biblical Exodus and post-Exodus accounts (to which Melton refers as “postexilic”).

The story shifts in the second part to the founding of Ebenezer, its growth and expansion through later arrivals of Salzburgers and other South German immigrants, Boltzius’ attempt to create a “pietist utopia,” and the subsequent fate of the community through the American Revolution and beyond. With the issue of slavery as the guiding thread, Melton compellingly argues that the initial opposition of Boltzius and Ebenezer to slavery was not specifically built on religious or moral grounds but based on practical reasons that mirrored those of the founding trustees who had banned slavery from Georgia. Since Georgia served as a strategic buffer between Spanish Florida to the south and slave-holding South Carolina to the north, the trustees hoped, by keeping Georgia slave free, to minimize the threat to British security from the potential for Spanish-inspired slave rebellions. Boltzius, Melton argues, became aware of the danger immediately upon arriving in Charleston, and continued with the rest of Ebenezer to exhibit “an antagonism not so much to slavery as they did antipathy toward slaves” (212, emphasis in original). Compounding this fear of rebellion and violence was the concern that the introduction of slave labor would threaten the economic survival of Ebenezer’s low-wage labor force.

This stance prevailed until the introduction of slavery into Georgia in 1751, when Boltzius, already battered from his public opposition to slavery, relented and allowed the practice into Ebenezer. Though initially optimistic that slavery might lead to slave conversions, Boltzius later regretted his change of position. But by then the practice already had been established in Ebenezer, though at a far lower level than practiced elsewhere in Georgia, due in part, Melton proposes, to the wide-ranging handcraft and agricultural skills brought from Germany and Salzburg that made Ebenezer more self-reliant (255f.).

Melton’s work is impressive, and his use of previously underused archival sources brings important new insights. His conclusions occasionally approach the speculative, for example, that fears of...