The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race

6 The Children of Israel

138 chapter six The Children of Israel In late summer 1723, one or more anonymous enslaved people from Virginia wrote a letter to Edmund Gibson, the newly consecrated bishop of London. The letter writers implored the bishop, who oversaw Anglican affairs in the colonies, for assistance. “[T]here is in this Land of verJennia a Sort of people that is Calld molatters [mulattos] which are Baptised and brouaht [brought] up in the way of the Christian faith and followes the wayes and Rulles of the Chrch of England and sum of them has white fathars and sum white mothers and there is in this Land a Law or act which keeps and makes them and there seed Slaves forever.” Had the letter been written a generation earlier, it might have expressed the thoughts and beliefs of people such as William Catillah and Hannah Banks. These enslaved people began their letter by proclaiming their white, Christian, and English ancestry as the basis for their complaint. They sought recognition of their Christianity and their freedom based on English parentage, a strategy used by enslaved people in the seventeenth century. They also proclaimed their allegiance to the Church of England. The letter begged the bishop to “Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg” and explained that they were commanded to keep the Sabbath holy. They wrote that “wee doo hardly know when it comes for our task mastrs are has hard with us as the Egypttions was with the Chilldann of Issarall [Children of Israel],” a biblical reference that could hardly have been lost on Gibson. It might even be the first instance of enslaved people in the New World referencing the book of Exodus and the Israelites’ struggle for freedom from the Egyptians, a trope later popular in the antebellum United States. The letter writer also noted that slaves were kept from attending church and from Christian marriage, and that in freedom they wished to see their “childarn may be broatt up in the way of the Christtian faith . . . and wee desire that our childarn be putt to Scool and and [sic] Larnd to Reed through the Bybell.” The plea established their own Christian credentials and pressed their desire to raise their children as Christians, which planters thwarted. The letter writer ended by claiming The Children of Israel 139 “wee dare nott Subscribe any mans name to this for feare of our masters for if they knew that wee have Sent home to your honour wee Should goo neare to Swing upon the gallass [gallows] tree.”1 It was a clever letter, and it opens a window into the world of enslaved people that historians are seldom able to glimpse, since there are few first-person accounts from the eighteenth century. The letter suggests that enslaved people challenged their status from within the institution of slavery and that Christianity shaped their understanding of race and freedom. These letter writers understood what was at stake in getting their masters to recognize their Christianity—their freedom. They even knew to whom they should write their letter; Gibson, as bishop of London, oversaw Church of England affairs in all British colonies. They had written straight to the top, bypassing hostile planters and Anglican ministers who were at the mercy of planter-dominated vestries and antagonistic colonial legislatures. The letter, written on probably pilfered scraps of good paper with faded homemade ink, made its way across the Atlantic to London, possibly in the hold of a tobacco ship. For centuries it was misfiled with the bishop of London’s Jamaica papers; there is no evidence that Gibson took any action based upon the letter. The letter writers were victims of the ideology of hereditary heathenism , which by 1700 was fully entrenched in Britain’s American colonies. Planters and their colonial allies had successfully defined Indians and blacks as essentially unable to become Christian, a belief that both justi fied and bolstered the legal underpinnings of slavery. Even the letter writers, who claimed visible English ancestry and Anglican Christianity (the letter’s scribe claimed “my selfe I am my brothers Slave but my name is Secrett”), were excluded from the Christian community.2 It was easy for planters to discount the beliefs and claims of black Christians. White colonial Americans had successfully dismantled older ideas about the unity of mankind in favor of a racial ideology in which they harnessed Christianity to racialize human difference. Christianity had become strongly equated with whiteness—at least among...