Christian Slavery

Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

Katharine Gerbner

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812294903
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy, " which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion.When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery, " arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal.Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

Chapter 1

Christian Slaves in the Atlantic World

In 1657, the English traveler Richard Ligon published an account of his visit to Barbados during the late 1640s. In one anecdote, Ligon described an encounter with an enslaved man who told him that he wanted to become a Christian. Ligon promised his companion to “do [his] best endeavor” and when he returned, he “spoke to the Master of the Plantation.” To his surprise, Ligon was told that “the people of that Iland were governed by the Lawes of England, and by those Lawes, we could not make a Christian a Slave.” Realizing that the slave owner had misunderstood his intentions, Ligon pointed out that his “request was far different from that,” and that he “desired him to make a Slave a Christian,” not to make a Christian a slave. The master, at last comprehending the issue at hand, responded that “being once a Christian, he could no more account him a Slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as Slaves, by making them Christians; and by that means should open such a gap, as all the Planters in the Iland would curse him.”¹

Despite the planter’s protestations, Christian slaves were easy to find in the Atlantic world. From Algiers to Mexico City, enslaved Christians labored on plantations, in workshops and in households, in cities and on rural plantations.² In the Americas, Christian slaves were of African or Native American descent, while in North Africa, Europeans were regularly captured and enslaved on the Barbary Coast, where they encountered strong pressures to embrace Islam.³ Christianity—and specifically, Protestantism—would eventually come to play a central role in the lives of enslaved men and women in North America and the Caribbean. In the antebellum United States, Protestantism was a core feature of proslavery ideology and Southern planters claimed that their plantations were modeled on the slave-owning households of the Old Testament. But even in the seventeenth century, evangelization was touted as a central justification for slavery. Both Protestants and Catholics argued that enslavement benefited Africans because it saved them from their “heathen” past. Given the overwhelming evidence for Christian slavery, why did this seventeenth-century English planter object when Richard Ligon asked him to introduce one enslaved man to Christianity?

While Christians had been enslaving their coreligionists for over a millennium, there was also a long history of discomfort with owning fellow Christians. The enslavement of Christians was uncontroversial during Roman times, but the decline of slavery in northwestern Europe, combined with the threat of Islam in Iberia and the Mediterranean, gradually led to a consensus within Christendom that Christians should not enslave other Christians. The medieval conventions for enslavement, however, were challenged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Reconquista fueled Portuguese and Spanish expansion into the Atlantic world. As Europeans encountered new religious “others,” they needed new justifications for enslavement. In Latin America, the Iberian monarchs encouraged slave conversion in order to legitimize slavery, control slave behavior, and check the power of their colonists. While some Catholic slave owners resisted evangelizing to their slaves, slave baptism eventually became pro forma.

When Protestant nations expanded across the Atlantic a century later, they adopted Iberian practices of enslavement but redefined the relationship between slavery and Protestantism. Dutch, Danish, and English laws were unclear about the effect of Protestant baptism on slave status and Protestant theologians disagreed about if and when baptized slaves should be manumitted. Without missionary orders or strong centralized churches, Protestant nations also lacked the infrastructure to implement evangelization policies. Thus while imperial authorities frequently exhorted Protestant planters to convert their slaves, most refused to do so. Instead, Protestant colonists created religious institutions that restricted the religious opportunities for enslaved and free Africans in the Dutch, English, and Danish colonies. With a small number of notable exceptions, they refused to recognize their slaves as potential Christians.⁴ Understanding the long and complicated relationship between Christianity and slavery—as well as the diversity of legal and theological beliefs about slave baptism in the Atlantic world—helps to explain why most Protestant planters resisted slave conversion in the mid-seventeenth century.

Slavery and Early Christianity

The early Church not only accepted slavery, but also preached that enslavement could be spiritually advantageous.⁵ Believers described themselves as “slaves of Christ” and while masters were urged to treat their slaves humanely, there was no ban on enslaving other Christians. The Roman Church itself owned numerous Christian slaves, particularly on monastery lands, and early Christian theologians consistently reconciled slavery and Christianity.⁶ St. Augustine used slavery as a metaphor for sin and described true freedom as spiritual, rather than material. For Augustine, slavery was both a consequence of and a remedy for origin sin. Similar connections between sin and slavery could be found in the writings of Saint Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, Saint Isidore of Seville, and Philo of Alexandria.⁷

Freeing one’s slaves was considered a pious act, but it was neither expected nor common. Still, by viewing manumission as a religious performance, the Roman Church connected the ideas of freedom and Christianity. Constantine, who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, allowed priests to manumit slaves in churches, suggesting that some slave owners viewed manumission as a spiritual act.⁸ But while manumission was associated with Christian charity, there was no question that slavery itself was compatible with Christian life and that Christians could own their coreligionists.⁹

During the early medieval period, it remained possible for Christians to own other Christians, but it was generally prohibited to sell a Christian to a non-Christian.¹⁰ In Justinian’s Code, compiled in the sixth century, Jews, pagans, or heretics who were found in possession of a Christian would be fined and their slave would be freed.¹¹ While Justinian’s Code was intended to be universal, several local councils sought to clarify the relationship between Christianity and slavery. A Church Council at Clichy in 626/7 decreed that Christians who sold their slaves to Jews or pagans would be excommunicated.¹² In 743, the Church Council at Estinnes denounced the sale of Christians to pagans and in the late eighth century, the Church Council at Meaux suggested that Christians should be sold to other Christians instead.¹³ The repeated attempts to prohibit the trade in Christian slaves suggest that the practice continued throughout the early medieval period. With traders offering good prices for Christian slaves, neither the Church nor the Christian kingdoms of Europe were able to fully abolish the trade.¹⁴

While the Church sought to prohibit the sale of Christians to non-Christians, Christians continued to own their coreligionists.¹⁵ Over time, however, two developments challenged the accepted notion that Christians could keep other Christians as slaves. First, the rise of the manorial system in northwestern Europe led to a decline in chattel slavery and a concurrent shift in the ethic of slaveholding. While various forms of unfreeness persisted, chattel slavery and the enslavement of Christians largely disappeared from northwestern Europe.¹⁶ Second, the rise of Islam in Iberia and the subsequent Reconquest led to a gradual ban on the enslavement of Christians in southern Europe, where chattel slavery persisted.¹⁷

Enslaving non-Christians, whether Muslims or pagans, was intended to expand and defend Christendom.¹⁸ Yet questions remained about the relationship between conversion and manumission. If Christians could not be enslaved, then what was the status of formerly non-Christian slaves who embraced Christianity? In the thirteenth century, King Alfonso X of Castile issued the famous law code, Las Siete Partidas, which sought to alleviate conditions for the enslaved and provide routes for manumission for slaves who led Christian lives. Baptism did not lead to freedom, but it was an important step on the path to manumission.

Las Siete Partidas aimed to Christianize slaveholding. In practice, however, some slave owners prevented Muslim slaves from accepting baptism and refused to allow their converted slaves to attend Christian services. Pope Innocent III had acknowledged this reticence in 1206 and blamed it on the fear that baptism would result in a loss of profit. By the late medieval period, then, the enslavement of Christians was taboo and military conquest on the frontiers of Christendom, which provided new sources for slaves, was intimately tied to the ideal of conversion. Yet the actual conversion and integration of religious others into Christendom remained a subject of controversy. Some slave owners prevented the conversion of their non-Christian slaves, while others viewed the conversion of their household as an important Christian duty. In Iberia, converted Muslims, known as moriscos, were viewed with suspicion and eventually expelled in the early seventeenth century. Their expulsion, along with the expulsion of the conversos (converted Jews) demonstrated the difficulty of defining and policing Christian orthodoxy within Christendom.¹⁹

Iberian Expansion and African Slavery

The relationship between Christianity and slavery continued to evolve as Iberian nations expanded into the Atlantic and encountered new religions. In the mid-fifteenth century, Europeans looked west to establish trade routes for new sources of spices and slaves. The Portuguese settled the Atlantic islands of Madeira (1419), the Azores (1427), and the Cape Verde Islands (1450), and established trading posts along the African coast.²⁰ Portuguese merchants were most interested in gold, but they found African slaves easier to acquire, due to a well-established trans-Saharan slave trade.²¹ In the 1440s and 1450s, the Portuguese sought approval from the Pope for their slave trading. Beginning in 1442, Portuguese activities in Africa were deemed a crusade and, in 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the Brief Dum Diversas, which granted King Alfonso V of Portugal “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be . . . and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.”²² Dum Diversas regarded the enslavement of Africans to be part of the Holy War of Reconquest.²³ It also granted the Portuguese Crown the authority to act as the head of the Church in Africa and, later, in Brazil, a right known as the padroado real.²⁴ In 1454, Nicholas V reconfirmed his support for Portuguese expansion in the brief Romanus Pontifex. Later Popes reiterated the grants in 1456, 1481, and 1514.²⁵

As trade on the African coast became more established, Portuguese monarchs sought to maintain their religious claims in Africa. In 1490, King João II sent priests, along with European goods, to the Kingdom of Kongo, where several nobles accepted Christian baptism. In the early sixteenth century, the King of Kongo, Afonso I, declared Christianity the official religion of the realm. Elites were sent to Portugal for education and in 1518, Afonso I’s son Henrique was consecrated as a bishop. Elsewhere, Portuguese attempts to create joint religious/commercial partnerships were less successful. And even in Kongo, tensions developed between African Christian rulers and Portuguese traders who enslaved indiscriminately. As Afonso I wrote to João III in 1526, the Portuguese merchants “bring ruin to the country” and enslave “nobles and even royal kinsmen.”²⁶

While Christianity expanded in the Kingdom of Kongo and elsewhere, questions remained about how slave trading could be deemed a legitimate Christian enterprise. While such matters were less troubling to individual merchants and traders, royal and ecclesiastical officials took an active interest in the religious implications of the growing African slave trade. In 1513, Manuel I was granted papal permission to erect a font in Lisbon for the baptism of slaves and between 1514 and 1521, he developed a set of O...