The Making of African America (14 page)

The Christian church quickly became the center of free black life. While most slaves remained strangers to Christianity, free black churchmen and women began the process of bending the biblical narrative to their own purposes, identifying themselves with the Israelites of the Old Testament and the story of their deliverance from bondage. Exodus became the central text of African American Christianity, just as the Declaration of Independence had become the central text of African American politics.
⁷⁸
But as free people of color embraced Christianity, the absence of the influence of African nationality in black religious life was especially striking. Most African churches were the denominational offspring of European American organizations and followed the polity and the liturgy of their denominational root. Rather than drawing upon particular African nationalities, be they Efik or Igbo, denominational affiliations appeared to follow regional differences in the development of American religious life with black Christians adhering to Protestantism in the English colonies and to Catholicism in the colonies of France and Spain. Within this framework, even more specific connections developed, as black people joined Methodists in the areas where this denomination had a strong following, and they joined Baptists in places where that church predominated. Much the same was true of the host of fraternal and benevolent societies that appeared in cities along the Atlantic seaboard. The “Union” in the African Union Society of Newport referred not to the joining together of Angolans and Wolofs and their descendants, but rather to the uneasy alliance between black Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists.
⁷⁹

The African churches and the allied institutions affirmed the invention of a new nationality. It represented the place black people had made for themselves in the difficult circumstances of slavery and unequal freedom in the United States. The phalanx of African churches, Masonic temples, and benevolent associations that could be found in the cities that stretched along the periphery of North America from Boston to New Orleans revealed how people of African descent gave institutional form to their American experience. These buildings and meeting halls were not simply places to gather but geographical pinpoints that marked transformation of black life during the nearly two centuries of American captivity. The charismatic leaders, cadres of officers, finely crafted qualifications for membership, diverse constituencies, evolving political agendas, and music emanating from these institutions provided evidence that black people had taken root on the west side of the Atlantic.
⁸⁰

African institutions also revealed the complexity of African American society, none more so than the church. In 1801, Richard Allen, the leader of Philadelphia's newly established African Methodist Episcopal Church, published a hymnal for his congregation. While it drew on many standard Methodist hymns, it contained many of Allen's own compositions, which he distinguished from the shouts or hollers that had become identified with black people. There would be no “groaning and shouting” in the African church, as such religion was “only a dream.”
⁸¹

Allen's disdain for the music of the slave quarter revealed the growing division within black society that emerged as some black people gained their freedom and sought respectability in the eyes of white Americans. Enslaved African Americans continued to elaborate just the music that Allen would suppress. The field shouts, with their forceful delivery and their individualized and improvisatory forms, mixed the sounds of Africa with those of America, sometimes chanting, sometimes moaning, and sometimes screaming the pain of bondage. In 1817, John Watson, a white Philadelphia minister, taking his cues from Allen's
Hymnal,
launched his own assault on the “practice of singing in our places of worship, merry airs ... most frequently composed and sung by the illiterate Blacks of the society.” Most disturbing to Watson, they “visibly affected the religious manners of some Whites.” Yet even as white congregants embraced the new music, the infectious “merry air,” often accompanied by rhythmic clapping, was becoming the basis of a new African American genre, the spiritual.
⁸²

Having successfully—if unwillingly—transplanted Africa to the coast of mainland North America, people of African descent now returned to the larger Atlantic world, initiating an African American diaspora that equaled in significance, although not in numbers, the earlier exodus from Africa. Ironically this movement back to the Atlantic demonstrated how deeply attached to mainland North America people of African descent had become, for the migrants took their language, religion, politics, and music with them.

Many of the immigrants, perhaps a majority, left in chains. Following the Revolution, Loyalist slave masters forced thousands of slaves to follow them to the British West Indies, Spanish Louisiana, the Atlantic islands, and Central America. Betraying the promise of freedom, British soldiers sold others to Barbados, Jamaica, and other sugar islands. In the states that had begun the abolition of slavery, slaveholders—determined to squeeze the last bit of profit from their human property—followed suit, selling slaves to distant places before the emancipationist legislation took effect. Post-Revolutionary movement ironically reinvigorated the slave trade.

But other black men and women traveled as a free people. While individual British officers and soldiers violated the promise of freedom, British commanders honored the commitments made by Lord Dunmore in 1775 and General Henry Clinton in 1779 to exchange military services for liberty. At war's end, some 1,200 former slaves and free blacks retreated with British soldiers from St. Augustine, Charleston, and Savannah to New York, where they joined an additional 1,500 black Loyalists—making the total roughly 3,000—in a mass exodus to the maritime provinces of Canada. Other “Loyal Blacks”—as they soon came to call themselves—followed British troops back to England, adding substantially to the black population of Liverpool, Bristol, and especially London. Still others found homes in such disparate places as Prussia and Bohemia. From there they spread—literally—to the ends of the earth. A few landed in the Australian outback.

Many of the migrants—whose numbers may have totaled some 10,000—did not stop at their first destination. After a short sojourn, these Exodusters set out again, moving in yet new directions, cutting their own path around the Atlantic. Mired in dismal poverty and facing rank discrimination in maritime Canada, some of the Loyal Black refugees migrated to London. Confronted by the same discrimination in England, they left for Africa, where the various streams of migrants—most from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—merged in Sierra Leone, an enclave for former slaves on the west coast of Africa established by British abolitionists.
⁸³

As they recrossed the Atlantic, African Americans retraced as free men and women the path their ancestors' had first trod as slaves. In so doing, they transported ideas that had taken root in the Americas into the larger Atlantic world. George Liele carried Afro-Christianity to Jamaica, just as the blind Virginia preacher Moses Wilkerson took it to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone. Thomas Peters and Harry Washington conveyed American political ideas along the same path, while others transported the commonplaces of everyday life.
⁸⁴

The encounter with the Atlantic in the maritime provinces of Canada, the islands of the Caribbean, England, and Africa revealed in particularly telling ways the self-defining preferences that distinguished African Americans from those whose ancestors had never left Africa. From the perspective of the greater Atlantic, they saw—perhaps for the first time—the full measure of how their American nativity and experience distinguished them from other peoples, especially peoples who shared their ancestry and their color, but not their culture.
⁸⁵

Differences manifested themselves in the most mundane aspects of daily life. The language they spoke, the clothes they wore, and the food they ate—or at least that they preferred to eat—set them apart from the peoples among whom they now resided. African Americans bore European American names and spoke English or occasionally Spanish, French, or Dutch, rarely voicing the language that their forebears had carried to mainland North America. Indeed, few spoke the creole tongue that had become much of the Atlantic's lingua franca. Sporting beaver hats, wearing trousers, carrying umbrellas, and demanding wheaten—rather than corned—bread, they proclaimed their American nationality.
⁸⁶

In the townships of Nova Scotia, the plantations of Barbados, the streets of London, and the new settlement of Sierra Leone, other touchstones of American identity could be found. Arriving in Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone, black refugees built houses much like the ones they had left along the Chesapeake and in the Carolinas, often with appointments that bespoke more an American farm or plantation than the African dwellings in which their ancestors had resided. Generally their houses lined a street, rather than taking the form of an African compound or village. Their furnishings would be likewise familiar to other Americans. On the coast of Africa, transplanted black Americans lived, in one estimation, “according to a pattern that owed its characteristics not only to European or even African models but also to the unique experience they shared since their days as slaves in the American colonies.”
⁸⁷

While some white Americans saw the society that transplanted African Americans carried with them as merely a darker reflection of their own society—one observer declared it “a burlesqued reflection of white society”—African American returnees, however, wanted no simple imitation of white America. They picked and chose what they borrowed from the larger American culture of which they themselves had been a part, embracing only what they deemed admirable or useful. The language of liberty proved to be both. Just as their petitions for freedom in the United States were loaded with assertions that “the divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every humane breast” and with appeals for “equity and justice,” so their petitions to British administrators in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere spoke of natural rights, liberty, and the promise of equality.
⁸⁸

From their own experience—as well as the Revolution, in which they had been full participants—black people placed great emphasis on matters of rights. The settlers took great offense at any attempt to limit their liberties, and they were not above stretching them beyond the bonds that British authorities found acceptable. According to the governor of Sierra Leone, the settlers “have a great idea that their freedom gives them equality.” While claiming the protection due His Majesty's subjects, the Loyal Blacks encased themselves in the rhetoric of American republican liberty.
⁸⁹

Like their political sensibility, the settlers' sacred world also derived from their American experience. As in the United States and Nova Scotia, the Black Loyalists' most important institution was the African church and the leading figures were preachers. Indeed, during the first years of settlement, African Americans like David George and Thomas Peters, both refugees from South Carolina through Nova Scotia, were among the dominant figures in Sierra Leone. The settlers not only drew upon the Christian Bible, but also chanted Christian hymns and organized their churches in a manner most Americans would recognize. African American society in Sierra Leone rested upon the diverse denominational allegiances of the immigrants, with the division between Baptists and Methodists being most prominent. Difference between them grew as each struggled for land and power in the new settlement, but the solidarity of African Americans soon asserted itself with the arrival of black people of a different stripe— Jamaican maroons—who had no tradition of Christian pietism and little interest in attending church. Their presence reminded African Americans—even when they divided among themselves into warring factions—of their common heritage and their shared mission as bearers of civilization. They soon joined together in tutoring native Africans—with no small sense of condescension—in the importance of trousers and frocks, the sin of polygamy, and the sanctity of the Sabbath.
⁹⁰

The post-Revolutionary African American diaspora and the transplantation of the African American culture around the Atlantic demonstrated the deep roots black people had established in what had become the United States of America. This sense of place was represented in every aspect of African American life. The region between the Atlantic and the Alleghenies had become home. When white Americans suggested otherwise, they stated forthrightly, “Here we were born.”
⁹¹
All that, however, would change with the arrival of a new century.

CHAPTER THREE

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, people of African descent—having survived the trauma of enslavement, the horror of the Atlantic crossing, and the nightmare of American slavery—had rooted themselves on the west side of the Atlantic. Most were American born. Many had American-born parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Black life took a variety of forms—slave and free, rural and urban, and plantation and farm—and it differed from place to place. But, for the most part, African Americans were confined to the long arc along the North American coast reaching from New England to the Mississippi Valley, with the majority crowded into a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic tidewater and the Appalachian Mountains. There, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, distinctive African American cultures had emerged, a confluence of the diverse heritage of Africa, the American experience, and the unique status of peoples of African descent. Following the American Revolution, African Americans incorporated as many as 100,000 newly arrived Africans into their ranks and challenged slavery directly, often employing the new ideology of American nationality. Those who gained their freedom constructed scores of “African” institutions. Some moved back into the larger Atlantic world as missionaries for their own way of life: republicanism, Christianity, and commercial capitalism. But, for the vast majority still locked in bondage, the world of transplanted Africans and their African American descendants underwent a change of cataclysmic proportions, in a transformation that would ultimately propel millions of African Americans across the continent.