Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (review)

With admirable narrative clarity and analysis, Jon Sensbach takes us into the tremendously varied world of a mixed-race woman who lived for twenty-three years in both freedom and slavery in the West Indies, then moved to central Europe to join her fellow Moravians for over two decades, and ended her life with fifteen years in and around a Danish fort on the West African Gold Coast. This book exemplifies and makes an important contribution to the continuing emergence of an Atlantic paradigm for understanding early America.

Sensbach skillfully uses this altogether extraordinary life to explain key complexities of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Rebecca, her later Roman Catholic baptismal name, was born around 1718 in the English colony of Antigua. As a young girl in the mid-1720s she was sold into slavery in Dutch-Creole-speaking Danish St. Thomas, where she did domestic work for an elite family who probably taught her to read and write and some of their Dutch Reformed beliefs. She achieved freedom and became a Christian sometime around 1730. Although presumably related to one another, the exact relationship and timing of these key events in her life are not known. Once free, she remained a household servant and pursued a life of Christian devotion and teaching that moved forward in dramatic ways with the support of German-speaking Moravian missionaries whom she met on St. Thomas in 1736. Rebecca played a vital role at the center of a rapidly growing black Moravian congregation there in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Her efforts to "take up the cross with all my heart," as explained in a 1737 letter signed in her name, allows a rich examination of black leadership in creating a substantial black congregation that clearly had radical implications in a slave society (63). Sensbach aptly judges this work the most significant achievement of Rebecca's life, since the creation of black Christianity would become "one of the greatest social and religious movements in modern history" (3). This book, especially Chapter 4, presents one of the most detailed examinations of eighteenth-century black Protestantism in the New World yet published.

Six of the book's eight chapters focus on the Caribbean, yet Rebecca's life beyond St. Thomas remains just as fascinating. After living in central Europe for three years, she married Christian Protten, a mixed-race person born in Africa and educated largely in Europe, who had just returned from an unsuccessful eight-year mission on the Gold Coast. They would work together there from 1765 until his death in 1769, and Rebecca remained on the Gold Coast until she died in 1780, declining an opportunity to return to St. Thomas. Her life in Europe and West Africa is overshadowed by her conflict-prone and much better documented husband (276n2), yet Sensbach nicely contrasts the two to present a range of Afro-Christian spirituality and self-understanding. Rebecca's resignation to the will of God is a persistent feature of her portrayal, while Christian "constantly struggled and failed to reconcile his African and European identities" (201).

The small number of documents in Rebecca's own voice prevents her being presented as an isolated individual, a classic pitfall of biography, so that we see her connections to a wide range of people from her slavemaster's family, with whom she likely identified strongly, to her close work with Africans and creoles, to deep ties with white Moravians and other black missionaries. In all of these relationships we see moments of both cooperation and conflict. Sensbach contextualizes Rebecca among a small but vital cohort of early Protestant activists of African descent whose commitments were overwhelmingly spiritual, yet whose work was an important precursor to the better known black abolitionists of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. A similar emphasis informs his stress on the "paradox" of the Moravian church in this era, which made an intense commitment to convert...