Abstract
The narratives of John Jea and George White, reprinted here for the first time since the early nineteenth century, speak to us in many different ways.1 They amplify our knowledge of a threefold intellectual transformation sweeping the Atlantic basin during the revolutionary era. The autobiographies inform us of the Methodist evangelicalism that overwhelmed orthodoxy and ignited a democratic revolution in American religion. In the late eighteenth century, Methodism hit America at the point of its greatest vigor. Evangelists and itinerants, aided by lay ministers and enthusiastic converts, proselytized throughout the country. As Nathan O. Hatch has indicated, early American religion deeply affected American revolutionary ideals. These narratives illuminate the radical republicanism that charged the American, French, and Haitian revolutions.2 Both Jea’s and White’s stories reveal evidence of a third revolution, the creation of African-American Protestant denominations and theologies, spurred by Methodist evangelicalism, revolutionary egalitarianism, and a nascent black nationalism. Radical black denominations appeared in the United States, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, England, and the West Indies. Black preachers, who combined political and spiritual leadership, shared this transformation with their parishioners. Like their better-known counterparts, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and John Marrant, Jea and White were members of the first generation of free African-American ministers who harvested souls in the early decades of the American republic.3
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Notes
[John Jea], The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (Portsea, England, c.1815). Copies are in the collections of the British Library, Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and Columbia University. For excerpts from Jea, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Criticism (New York, 1988), 158–69 and
Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen, Black Writers in Britain 1760–1890 (Edinburg, 1991), 117–27. [George White], A Brief Account of the Life, Experience, Travels and Gospel Labours of George White, An African Written by Himself and Revised by a Friend (New York, 1810). Copies of White’s narrative are at Columbia University, the NewYork Historical Society, Howard University Library, and the United Library of Garrett-Evangelical and Seabury-Western Theological Seminaries in Evanston, Illinois. White’s narrative was reprinted on microfilm in 1980.
For transformation of American republicanism, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn., 1989) as well as
Roger Finke and Rodney Starke, “How the Upstart Sects Won America: 1776–1850,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28 (1989), 27–44. For the latest summary of republicanism, see
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992). The work of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh has influenced my understanding of Atlantic basin radicalism. See Rediker, “Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America,” and Linebaugh, ‘All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,’ both in Labour/Le Travialleut, 10 (1982), 87–144 and
Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (1990), 225–52. For an earlier period, see
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York, 1992). For the impact of the Haitian Revolution on black Methodism, see
Bishop William J. Walls, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: Reality of the Black Church (Charlotte, N.C., 1974), 42. For a general treatment, see
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988), 161–265.
For coverage of Jones and Allen, see Carol V George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of Independent Black Churches, 1760–1840 (New York, 1973);
Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 100–34, 192–99; for Marrant, see
Margaret Washington Creel,“A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988), 104–06.
For revision of historical attitudes towards slavery in the North, see Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, Ga., 1991), 24–56.
Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), 146–52;
Rhoda Golden Freeman, “The Free Negro in Antebellum New York” (PhD. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 17–21.
“Register of Marriages,” Trinity Church Archives, I, 104, 107, 149–295. Charles W. Andrews, History of the New-York African Free Schools (New York, 1830), 8–9, 31; “African Free School Records,” 4 vols., Manuscripts, New-York Historical Society, 1:4–10; Raymond A. Mohl, “Education as Social Control in New York City, 1784–1825,” New York History, 51 (1970), 219–38.
Point made by comparison of church memberships with census listings and with Alice Eicholtz and James M. Rose, Free Black Heads of Households in the New York State Federal Census, 1790–1830 (Detroit, 1981).
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 193–94, 245–46 and
Frank Baker, “The Origins, Character, and Influence of John Wesley’s ‘Thoughts on Slavery,’” Methodist History 22 (1984), 75–86.
For Wesley’s poems, see S. T. Kimbrough and Oliver Beckerlegge, The Unpublished Poems of Charles Wesley, 3 vols. (Nashville, 1988–1992), 1:59–167; and
Frank Baker, Representative Verse of Charles Wesley (Nashville, 1962), 310–40. For Methodism as alternative to American slavery, see Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 96–101.
For accounts of the black identification with the British and Methodism, see Ellen Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York, 1976), 82–83, 120–30;
James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone (New York, 1976), 65–74; and
Lamont D. Thomas, Rise to Be a People: Paul Cuffe Black Entrepreneur and Pan-Africanist (Urbana, Ill. 1986), 77–78, 104–10.
Reverend J. B. Wakeley, Lost Chapters Recovered in the Early History of American Methodism (New York, 1858), 440–83. For black women, see Doris Elizabeth Andrews, “Popular Religion and the Revolution in the Middle Atlantic Ports: The Rise of the Methodists, 1770–1800” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 227.
For Rankin quote and comments, see James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia, 1982), 33–38.
For the most recent discussions of itinerancy in America, see Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986), 193–94.
William Henry Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769–1820 (Wilmington, Del., 1984), 25–40; Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity;
Stephen A. Marini, “Evangelical Itinerancy in Rural New England: New Gloucester, Maine, 1754–1807,” in Peter Benes, ed., Itinerancy in New England and New York (Boston, 1986), 65–76; and
Timothy David Hall, “Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1991). For itinerancy in England, see
Deryck W. Lovegrove, Established Church, Sectarian People: Itinerancy and the Transformation of English Dissent, 1780–1830 (New York, 1988).
For a description of Harry Hosier at camp meetings, see Reverend G. A. Raybold, Reminiscences of Methodism in West Jersey (New York, 1849), 165–68; History of American Methodism, 3 vols. (New York, 1964), 2:601–5; for comments on Hosier, see Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 10;
Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845 (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 5, 9–10;
Richard R. Wright, Jr., The Centennial Encyclopedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia, 1916), 13–15; and
Lewis V Baldwin, “Invisible Strands in African Methodism”: A History of the African Union Methodist Protestant and Union American Methodist Episcopal Churches, 1805–1980 (Metuchen, N.J., 1983), 24, 27.
William L. Andrews, To Tell a Tree Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 52–56. For similar comments on White’s mission, see
Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Washington, D.C., 1988, reprint edition), 87–88.
See for example the prescient points in Carter G. Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (Washington, D.C., 1921), 78–83. For an update on these ideas, see Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 103–10.
Gary B. Nash, “Forging Freedom: The Emancipation Experience in the Northern Seaport Cities, 1775–1820,” in Ronald Hoffman and Ira Berlin, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 3–48;
Timothy L. Smith, “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” Church History, 41 (1972), 497–98.
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1983), 180–81; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 242–45.
For shouts, see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987), 12, 24, 36, 43, 79, 89, 96; Creel, “A Peculiar People,” 297–302. For example of cultural adaptation in the New World, see the essays in
Sandra T. Barnes, Africa’s Ogun, Old World and New (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).
For discussion of shoemaking in this period, see R. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Making of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 124–27; and
Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979), 248–68.
Daniel A. Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville, 1891), 31–34, 38.
Daryll Forde, ed., Efik Traders of Old Callabar (London, 1956), 5–7.
For postwar staffing problems see Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 107–8.
For discussion of European religions and Pentecost, see Francis X. Weiser, Handbook of Christian hasts and Customs: The Year of the Lord in Liturgy and Folklore (New York, 1974) and
Bob Bushaway, By Rite Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, 1700–1880 (London, 1982), 16–18, 37–47, 260–64. For folklore background of Pinkster, see Joel Munsell, Annals of Albany, 10 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1855), V: 232–33.
See Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 362–66;
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the World: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986), 56, 59 and
Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 59–85.
For New Jersey seamen in Philadelphia, see Ira Dye, “Early American Merchant Seafarers,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (1976), 351;
Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort” Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y, 1990), 156–59. For black life in Boston and other New England ports, see
William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 14–25.
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History, 76 (1990), 1173–99.
For comments on the relationships between white and black sailors, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992), 352–56.
Herskovits quoted in Stuckey, Slave Culture, 34. See also Rosalind I. J. Hackett, Religion in Calabar: The Religious Life and History of a Nigerian Town (Berlin, Germany, 1989), 26–30.
For sailor’s irreligion, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, England, 1987), 173–79, 185, 189, 201.
Angelo Costanzo, Surprizing Narrative Olaudah Eauiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1987), 94–109. See p. 63 for Equiano’s similar problems with antagonistic sailors.
Charles G. Herbermann, et al., The Catholic Encyclopedia, 16 vols. (New York, 1907–14), IX: 96.
For social death, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 44–47; and for acculturation, see
Frank Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia, 1940).
William F. Allen, ed., Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1867), 98.
Dewey E. Mosby, ed., Henry Ossawa Tanner (Philadelphia, 1991), 135–39. See also Henry Osawa Tanner’s fascinating article on Lazarus in A.M.E. Church Review (1898), 359–61. My thanks to Dewey Mosby for this reference.
Laurence Isherwood, Christianity Comes to Portsmouth (Havant, England, 1975), 35–38.
Keith Sandiford, Measuring the Moment Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1988), 38–42.
For review of the scholarship about black narratives, see William L. Andrews, “African-American Autobiography Criticism: Retrospect and Prospect” in Paul John Eakin, American Autobiography Retrospect and Prospect (Madison, Wis., 1991), 195–216. The major new synthesis of the African-American intellectual tradition is Stuckey, Slave Culture.
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Hodges, G.R. (1993). Introduction. In: Hodges, G.R. (eds) Black Itinerants of the Gospel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09907-5_1
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