religion

What is the Exodus story about? How did John Winthrop interpret the Exodus story in relation to settling in North America?  Later, during the struggle over slavery, how did white vs. Black Christians interpret the story?  In what way did the story inspire Denmark Vesey? (Hint: pay close attention to the film to help you answer this last question!)

As you formulate  your answer, refer directly to the readings by Winthrop and Raboteau, as well as the film, “There is a River.” However, be sure to complete the other readings and lectures in order to develop the strongest possible answer.

Due to the brevity of the assignment, introduction and conclusion paragraphs are not needed. However, answers must be composed using complete sentences and paragraphs, using clearly developed topic sentences.

If you use quotations in your essay, keep them brief (no more than 20% of your answer). Quotations should be formatted in accordance with the following example:

According to Gill, initiation into the kachina cult “is the formal introduction into the religious life of the Hopi” (Gill,  66).

Grades will be based on:

Level of engagement with class materials: (5 points)

            Depth and originality of analysis: (5 points)

            Writing quality (grammar, punctuation, organization, etc): (5 points)

videos to watch :- https://player.mediaamp.io/p/U8-EDC/qQivF4esrENw/embed/select/media/T635kIx8vreC?form=html

– https://player.mediaamp.io/p/U8-EDC/qQivF4esrENw/embed/select/media/Uc4UxnioCVdg?form=html

-https://youtu.be/w7IrX3gqmXw (watch Start at 12:16 and watch until about 32:40.)

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– https://player.mediaamp.io/p/U8-EDC/qQivF4esrENw/embed/select/media/0YK66zCP_yo9?form=html

read instructions carefully and watch the videos with reading the files uploaded . keep attention while using the quotation . 

“A Model of Christian Charity” was a sermon given by John Winthrop (1588-1640), the first governor of the Massachusettls Bay Colony. He spoke these words to his fellow ship passengers as they set out to establish a new colony in North America. Winthrop and his companions were Puritans, or English Calvinists, who sought to reform or “purify” religious practices within the Church of England. The excerpt below is adapted from the larger text:

http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html

. – L.S.

GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.

The Reason hereof:

First, to hold conformity with the rest of His world, being delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures, and the glory of His power in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole, and the glory of His greatness, that as it is the glory of princes to have many officers, so this great king will have many stewards, counting himself more honored in dispensing his gifts to man by man, than if he did it by his own immediate hands.

Secondly, that He might have the more occasion to manifest the work of his Spirit: first upon the wicked in moderating and restraining them, so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke. Secondly, in the regenerate, in exercising His graces in them, as in the great ones, their love, mercy, gentleness, temperance etc., and in the poor and inferior sort, their faith, patience, obedience etc.

Thirdly, that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection. From hence it appears plainly that no man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy etc., out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his Creator and the common good of the creature, man. Therefore God still reserves the property of these gifts to Himself as Ezek. 16:17, He there calls wealth, His gold and His silver, and Prov. 3:9, He claims their service as His due, “Honor the Lord with thy riches,” etc. — All men being thus (by divine providence) ranked into two sorts, rich and poor; under the first are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by their own means duly improved; and all others are poor according to the former distribution.

There are two rules whereby we are to walk one towards another: Justice and Mercy. These are always distinguished in their act and in their object, yet may they both concur in the same subject in each respect; as sometimes there may be an occasion of showing mercy to a rich man in some sudden danger or distress, and also doing of mere justice to a poor man in regard of some particular contract, etc.

There is likewise a double Law by which we are regulated in our conversation towards another. In both the former respects, the Law of Nature and the Law of Grace (that is, the moral law or the law of the gospel) to omit the rule of justice as not properly belonging to this purpose otherwise than it may fall into consideration in some particular cases. By the first of these laws, man as he was enabled so withal is commanded to love his neighbor as himself. Upon this ground stands all the precepts of the moral law, which concerns our dealings with men. To apply this to the works of mercy, this law requires two things. First, that every man afford his help to another in every want or distress.

Secondly, that he perform this out of the same affection which makes him careful of his own goods, according to the words of our Savior (from Matthew 7:12), whatsoever ye would that men should do to you. This was practiced by Abraham and Lot in entertaining the angels and the old man of Gibea. The law of Grace or of the Gospel hath some difference from the former (the law of nature), as in these respects: First, the law of nature was given to man in the estate of innocence. This of the Gospel in the estate of regeneracy. Secondly, the former propounds one man to another, as the same flesh and image of God. This as a brother in Christ also, and in the communion of the same Spirit, and so teacheth to put a difference between Christians and others. Do good to all, especially to the household of faith. Upon this ground the Israelites were to put a difference between the brethren of such as were strangers, though not of the Canaanites.

Thirdly, the Law of Nature would give no rules for dealing with enemies, for all are to be considered as friends in the state of innocence, but the Gospel commands love to an enemy. Proof: If thine enemy hunger, feed him; “Love your enemies… Do good to them that hate you” (Matt. 5:44).

This law of the Gospel propounds likewise a difference of seasons and occasions. There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles’ times. There is a time also when Christians (though they give not all yet) must give beyond their ability, as they of Macedonia (2 Cor. 8). Likewise, community of perils calls for extraordinary liberality, and so doth community in some special service for the church. Lastly, when there is no other means whereby our Christian brother may be relieved in his distress, we must help him beyond our ability rather than tempt God in putting him upon help by miraculous or extraordinary means. . . .

First, for the persons. We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ, in which respect only, though we were absent from each other many miles, and had our employments as far distant, yet we ought to account ourselves knit together by this bond of love and live in the exercise of it, if we would have comfort of our being in Christ. This was notorious in the practice of the Christians in former times; as is testified of the Waldenses, from the mouth of one of the adversaries Aeneas Sylvius “mutuo ament pene antequam norunt” — they use to love any of their own religion even before they were acquainted with them.

Secondly for the work we have in hand. It is by a mutual consent, through a special overvaluing providence and a more than an ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ, to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases as this, the care of the public must oversway all private respects, by which, not only conscience, but mere civil policy, doth bind us. For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.

Thirdly, the end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord; the comfort and increase of the body of Christ, whereof we are members, that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world, to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances.

Fourthly, for the means whereby this must be effected. They are twofold, a conformity with the work and end we aim at. These we see are extraordinary, therefore we must not content ourselves with usual ordinary means. Whatsoever we did, or ought to have done, when we lived in England, the same must we do, and more also, where we go. That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren. Neither must we think that the Lord will bear with such failings at our hands as he doth from those among whom we have lived. . .

Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Therefore let us choose life,

that we and our seed may live,

by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,

for He is our life and our prosperity.

RELIGION
AND
AMERICAN
CULTURE

A Reader
Second Edition

David G. Hackett

Editor

Routledge
New York and London

Canaan land is the land for me,
And let God’s saints come in.
There was a wicked man,
He kept them children in Egypt land.
Canaan land is the land for me,
And let God’s saints come in.
God did say to Moses one day,
Say, Moses, go to Egypt land,
And tell him to let my people go.
Canaan land is the land forme,
And let God’s saints come in.

-Slave Spiritual

4
AFRICAN AMERICANS, EXODUS,
AND THE AMERICAN ISRAEL

Albert J. Raboteau

IN THE encounter with European Christianity in its Protestant form in North America,
enslaved Africans and their descendants encountered something new: a fully articulated
ritual relationship with the Supreme Being, who was pictured in the book that the Chris­
tians called the Bible not just as the Creator and Ruler of the Cosmos, but also as the God
of History, a God who lifted up and cast down nations and peoples, a God whose sovereign
will was directing all things toward an ultimate end, drawing good out of evil. As the trans­
planted Africans reflected upon the evil that had befallen them and their parents, they in­
creasingly turned to the language, symbols, and worldview of the Christian holy book.
There they found a theology of histo “y that helped them to make sense of their enslave­
ment. One story in particular caught their attention and fascinated them with its implica­
tions and potential applications to their own situation: the story of Exodus. What they did
with that ancient story of the Near East is the topic of this essay. 1 begin by surveying the
history of evangelization among the slaves in order to situate and define the Christianity
that confronted them in North America. Then I describe what slaves and free blacks made
of Christianity by focusing on their interpretation of the Exodus story, an interpretation
which differed drastically, as we shall see, from that of white Americans.

CONVERSION
from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans claimed that the conversion of
slaves to Christianity justified the enslavement of Africans. Yet the conversion of slaves was
not a high priority for colonial planters. British colonists in North America proved espe-
dally indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the conversion of their slaves. At first, opposi-
hon Was based on the suspicion that English law forbade the enslavement of Christians
and so would require slaveholders to emancipate any slave who received baptism. Masters
^spected that slaves would therefore seek to be baptized in order to gain freedom. These

ars were quickly allayed by colonial legislation declaring that baptism did not alter slave
status.

^Vith the legal obstacles aside, slaveowners for the most part still demonstrated scant in-
tew •

L m converting their slaves. According to the common wisdom, Christianity spoiled

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

slaves. Christian slaves thought too highly of themselves, became impudent, and even
turned rebellious. Moreover, Anglo-Americans were troubled by a deep-seated uneasiness
at the prospect that slaves would claim Christian fellowship with white people. Africans
were foreign; to convert them was to make them more like the English and therefore de­
serving of better treatment. In fact religion, like language and skin color, constituted the
colonists’ identity. To Christianize black-skinned Africans, therefore, would confuse the
distinctiveness of the races and threaten the social order based upon that distinctiveness.
Finally, the labor, not the souls of the slaves, concerned most slaveholders. Peter Kalra, a
Swedish traveler in America from 1748 to 1750, perceptively described the colonists’ objec­

tions to religious instruction for slaves:

It is … to be pitied, that the masters of these negroes in most of the English colonies take little
care of their spiritual welfare, and let them live on in their Pagan darkness. There are even
some, who would be very ill pleased at, and would by all means hinder their negroes from
being instructed in the doctrines of Christianity; to this they are partly led by the conceit of its
being shameful, to have a spiritual brother or sister among so despicable a people; partly by
thinking that they should not be able to keep their negroes so meanly afterwards; and partly
through fear of the negroes growing too proud, on seeing themselves upon a level with their

masters in religious matters.1

A concerted attack on these obstacles to slave conversion was mounted by the Church of
England in 1701 when it established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in For­
eign Parts to support missionaries to the colonies. The first task was to convince masters
that they had a duty to instruct their slaves in the truths of the gospel. In tract after tract,
widely distributed in the colonies, officers of the Society stressed the compatibility of
Christianity with slavery. Masters need not fear that religion would ruin their slaves. On
the contrary, Christianity would make them better slaves by convincing them to obey their
owners out of a sense of moral duty instead of out of fear. After all, Society pamphlets ex­
plained, Christianity does not upset the social order, but supports it: “Scripture, far from
making an alteration in Civil Rights, expressly directs that every man abide in the condi­
tion wherein he is called, with great indifference of mind concerning outward circum­
stances.”2 To prove the point, they reiterated ad nauseam tire verse from Ephesians (6:5):
“Slaves be obedient to your masters.” The missionaries thus denied that spiritual equality
implied worldly equality; they restricted the egalitarian impulse of Christianity to the
realm of die spirit. So, in effect, they built a religious foundation to support slavery. As the
historian Winthrop Jordan aptly put it, “These clergymen had been forced by the circum­
stance of racial slavery in America into propagating the Gospel by presenting it as an at­

tractive device for slave control.”3The success of missions to the slaves depended largely on circumstances beyond the
missionaries’ control: the proportion of African-born to Creole slaves, the geographic lo­
cation and work patterns of the slaves, and the ratio of blacks to whites in a given locale-
Blacks in the North and in the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia, for exaffll’^’
experienced more frequent and closer contact with whites than did those of the lowk’11 ^
coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, where large gangs of African slaves toiled on isolate1
rice plantations with only limited and infrequent exposure to whites or their religion.
if a missionary gained regular access to slaves, the slaves did not invariably accept

Albert J. Raboteau African Americans, exodus, and the American Israel 77

Christian gospel. Some rejected it, according to missionary accounts, because of “the
Fondness they have for their old Heathenish Rites, and the strong Prejudice they must have
against Teachers from among those, whom they serve so unwillingly.”4 Others accepted
Christianity because they hoped—colonial legislation and missionary pronouncements
notwithstanding—that baptism would raise their status and ensure eventual freedom for
their children, if not for themselves. One missionary in South Carolina required slaves
seeking baptism to swear an oath that they did not request the sacrament out of a desire for
freedom.5 (Apparently he missed the irony.) Missionaries complained that, even after in­
struction and baptism, slaves still mixed Christian beliefs with the traditional practices of
their African homelands.

Discouraging though the prospects were, colonial clergymen had established a few suc­
cessful missions among the slaves by the early eighteenth century. When the Bishop of
London distributed a list of questions in 1724 requiring ministers to describe their work
among the slaves, several respondents reported impressive numbers of baptisms. The great
majority, however, stated vague intentions instead of concrete achievements. During the
first 120 years of black slavery in British North America, Christianity made little headway
in the slave population.

Slaves were first converted in large numbers in the wake of the religious revivals that pe­
riodically swept parts of the colonies beginning in the 1740s. Accounts by George White-
field, Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Edwards, and other revivalists made special mention of
the fact that blacks were flocking to hear the message of salvation in hitherto unseen num­
bers. Not only were free blacks and slaves attending revivals, but they were also taking ac­
tive part in the services as exhorters and preachers. For a variety of reasons evangelical
revivalists succeeded where Anglican missionaries had failed. Whereas the Anglicans had
depended upon a slow process of indoctrination, the evangelicals preached the immediate
experience of conversion as the primary requirement for baptism, thereby making Chris­
tianity more quickly accessible. Because of the centrality of the conversion experience in
their piety, evangelicals also tended to de-emphasize instruction and downplay learning as
prerequisites of Christian life. As a result, all classes of society were welcome to participate
actively in prayer meetings and revival services, in which the poor, the illiterate, and even
the enslaved prayed, exhorted, and preached.

After the Revolution, revival fervor continued to flare up sporadically in the South.
More and more slaves converted to Christianity under the dramatic preaching of evangeli­
cal revivalists, especially Methodists and Baptists. The emotionalism of the revivals en­
couraged the outward expression of religious feeling, and the sight of black and white
converts weeping, shouting, fainting, and moving in ecstatic trance became a familiar, if
sensationalized, feature of the sacramental and camp meeting seasons. In this heated at-
mosphere slaves found a form of Christian worship that resembled the religious celebra-
tl0ns of their African heritage. The analogy between African and evangelical styles of
‘v°>’ship enabled the slaves to reinterpret the new religion by reference to the old, and so
“Wle this brand of Christianity seem less foreign than that of the more liturgically sedate

*lurch of England.
^ ne rise of the evangelical denominations, particularly the Methodists and the Baptists,

a,cned the established Anglican church in the South. Because they appealed to the
lj. cr Sorl,” the evangelicals suffered persecution at the hands of the Anglican authorities.

s Preachers were jailed, their services were disrupted, and they were even roughed up

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE *

by rowdies such as those in Virginia who thought it humorous to immerse the Baptists in
mud. They were thought of as different in an unsettling sort of way. “There was a company
of them in the back part of our town, and an outlandish set of people they certainly were,”
remarked one woman to the early Baptist historian David Benedict. “You yourself would
say so if you had seen them…. You could hardly find one among them hut was deformed
in some way or other.”6 The evangelicals seemed to threaten the social as well as the reli­
gious order by accepting slaves into their societies. An anti-Baptist petition warned the
Virginia assembly in 1777 that “there have been nightly meetings of slaves to receive the in­
struction of these teachers without the consent of their masters, which have produced very

bad consequences.”7
In the 1780s the evangelicals’ implied challenge to the social order became explicit.

Methodist conferences in 1780, in 1783, and again in 1784 strongly condemned slavery
and tried “to extirpate this abomination,” first from the ministry and then from the mem­
bership as a whole, by passing increasingly stringent regulations against slave-owning,
slave-buying, and slave-selling.8 Several Baptist leaders freed their slaves, and in 1789 the
General Committee of Virginia Baptists condemned slavery as “a violent deprivation of
the rights of nature.”1′ In the South, these antislavery moves met with strong, immediate,
and, as the leadership quickly realized, irreversible opposition. In 1785, the Baltimore Con­
ference of the Methodist Church suspended the rules passed in 1784 by the Methodist
General Conference. Methodist leader Thomas Coke explained, “We thought it prudent to
suspend the minute concerning slavery, on account of the great opposition that had been
given it, our work being in too infantile a state to push things to extremity.” Local Baptist
associations in Virginia responded to the General Committee’s attack on slavery by declar­
ing that the subject was “so abstruse” that no religious society had the right to concern it­
self with the issue; instead, each individual should be left “to act at discretion in order to
keep a good conscience before God, as far as the laws of our land will admit.”10 As for the
slaves, the goal of the Church should be the amelioration of their treatment, not their

emancipation.
Thus, thtj evangelical challenge to slavery in the late eighteenth century failed. The in­

transigence of slavery once again set the limits of the Christian egalitarian impulse, just as
it had in colonial days for the Anglican mission. Rapid growth of the Baptist and
Methodist churches forced an ineluctable accommodation to slaveholding principles
rather than the overthrow of slavery. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Robert
Semple, another Baptist historian, described the change that came over the “outlandish”
Baptists after 1790: “Their preachers became much more correct in their manner of
preaching. A great many odd tones, disgusting whoops and awkward gestures were dis­
used. … Their zeal was less mixed with enthusiasm, and their piety became more rational.
They were much more numerous, and, of course, in the eyes of the world, more re­
spectable. Besides, they were joined by persons of much greater weight in civil society:
their congregations became more numerous…. This could not but influence their man­
ners and spirit more or less.”11 Though both Methodists and Baptists rapidly retreated
from antislavery pronouncements, their struggle with the established order and their nn
easiness about slavery gave slaves, at least initially, the impression that they were “friend y
toward freedom.” For a short time, revivalist evangelicalism breached the wall that colon
missionaries had built between spiritual and temporal equality. Converting slaves
Christianity could have implications beyond the spiritual, a possibility slaves were eagel

explore.

Alter,,. SaiMu apr.can am.r.ca™, and t„, American „na,d /9

Methodists and Baptists backed away from these implications in the 1790s, but they had
already taken a momentous step, and it proved irreversible. The spread of Baptist and
Methodist evangelicalism between 1770 and 1820 changed the religious complexion of the
South by bringing unprecedented numbers of slaves into membership in the church and
by introducing even larger numbers to at least the rudiments of Christianity. During the
antebellum decades, Christianity diffused throughout the slave quarters, though most
slaves did not hold membership in regular churches. Those slaves who did attend church
generally attended with whites, but some—in greater numbers than historians have real­
ized—attended separate black churches, even in the antebellum South.

Thanks to the willingness of the evangelical churches to license black men to exhort and
preach, during the 1770s and 1780s a significant group of black preachers had begun to
pastor their own people. Mainly Baptist, since the congregational independence of the
Baptists gave them more leeway to preach than any other denomination, the black preach­
ers exercised a ministry that was mostly informal and extra-ecclesial. It would be difficult
to overestimate the importance of these early black preachers for the development of an
African-American Christianity. In effect, they mediated between Christianity and the ex­
perience of the slaves (and free blacks), interpreting the stories, symbols, and events of the
Bible to fit the day-to-day lives of those held in bondage. And whites—try as they might—
could not control this interpretation or determine its “accuracy.” Slave preachers, exhort-
ers, and church-appointed watchmen instructed their fellow slaves, nurtured their
religious development, and brought them to conversion—in some cases without any active
involvement of white missionaries or masters whatsoever. By nurturing Christian commu­
nities among slaves and free blacks, the pioneer black preachers began to build an indepen­
dent black church.

We tend to identify the development of the independent black church with free blacks
in the North, but the spirit of religious independence also created separate black churches
in the South. Several “African” churches, as they were called, sprang up before 1800. Some
of these black congregations were independent to the extent that they called their own pas-

. tors and officers, joined local associations with white churches, and sent their own dele­
gates to associational meetings. However, this early independence of black preachers and
churches was curtailed during the antebellum period when, in reaction to slave conspira­
cies, all gatherings of blacks for whatever purpose were viewed with alarm. For slaves to
participate in the organization, leadership, and governance of church structures was per­
ceived as dangerous. Nevertheless, unlikely as it may seem, black churches continued to
grow in size and number in the slave South. Though nominally controlled by whites, these
separate congregations were frequently led by black ministers, some free and some slaves.
Often the black congregations outnumbered the largest white churches in the local church
ass°ciations. Although never numerous in the South, the separate black churches were ex­

tremely important, if limited, institutional expressions of black religious independencefroilr°m white control.

ftr the North, the abolition of slavery after the Revolution gave black congregations and
r8y much more leeway to assert control over their religious lives. Federal and state dis-

ftftrlishment of religion created an environment of voluntarism in which church organi-
pt,0n flourished. Between 1790 and 1820, black Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, and
^Vterians founded

churches, exercised congregational control where possible, and
^gled with white elders, bishops, and associations to gain autonomy. Among the first to

in doing so was Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

80 RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE %

Founded in 1794 by Richard Allen, a former slave who had become a licensed Methodist
preacher, Bethel was organized after discriminatory treatment drove black Methodists to
abandon St. George’s, the white church they had supported for years. When the white el­
ders of St. George’s tried to take control of the Bethel church property, the black congrega­
tion went to court to retain their rights to the church they had built themselves. They won.

Conflicts elsewhere between black Methodists and white elders prompted Allen to call
for a convention of African Methodists to meet in Philadelphia in 1816. There, delegates
organized an independent black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.)
Church, and elected Richard Allen its first bishop. Two other African Methodist denomi­
nations had organized by 1821. Though the black Methodists were the first to take inde­
pendent control of their church property, finances, and governance on the denominational
level, northern blacks in other churches also demonstrated their spirit of independence. In
all denominations, the black churches formed the institutional core for the development of
free black communities. Moreover, they gave black Christians the opportunity to articulate
publicly their own vision of Christianity, which stood in eloquent testimony to the exis­

tence of two Christian Americas.
Of course, independent religious institutions were out of the question for the vast ma­

jority of black Americans, who were suffering the system of slavery in the southern states.
If they attended church at all, they did so with whites or under white supervision. Never­
theless, slaves developed their own, extra-ecclesial “invisible institution” of religious life. In
the slave quarters and brush arbors, they held their own religious meetings, where they in­
terpreted Christianity according to their experience. Conversely, they also interpreted their
experience by means of the myths, stories, and symbols of Christianity. They were even
willing to risk severe punishment to attend forbidden prayer meetings in order to worship
God free of white control. A former slave, Lucretia Alexander, explained why:

The preacher came and .. . he’d just say, “Serve your masters. Don’t steal your master’s turkey.
Don’t steal your master’s chickens. Don’t steal your master’s hawgs. Don’t steal your master’s
meat. Do whatsomever your master tell you to do.” Same old thing all the time. My father
would have church in dwelling houses and they had to whisper.. .. Sometimes they would
have church at his house. That would be when they want a real meetin’ with some real
preachin’… . They used to sing their songs in a whisper. That was a prayer meeting from

house to house .. . once or twice a week.12

Inevitably the slaves’ Christianity contradicted that of their masters. For the slaves knew
that no matter how sincerely religious the slaveowners might be, their Christianity was
compatible with slavery, and the slaves’ was not. The division went deep; it extended to the
fundamental interpretation of the Bible. The dichotomy between the faiths of black ana
white Christians was described by a white Methodist minister who pastored a black con­

gregation in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862:

There were near fourteen hundred colored communications.. .. [Their] service was always
thronged—galleries, lower floor, chancel, pulpit, steps and all…. The preacher could no
complain of any deadly space between himself and his congregation. He was positively brea*1
up to his people, with no possible loss of… rapport. Though ignorant of it at the time, herL’
members now the cause of the enthusiasm under his deliverances [about| the “law of Iihcl

and “freedom from Egyptian bondage.” What was figurative they interpreted literally. He
thought of but one ending of the war; they quite another. He remembers the sixty-eighth
Psalm as affording numerous texts for their delectation, e.g., “Let God arise, let his enemies be
scattered”; His “march through the wilderness”; “The Chariots of God are twenty thousand”;,
“The hill of God is as the hill of Basham”; and especially, “Though ye have lain among the
pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow!
gold.” … It is mortifying now to think that his comprehension was not equal to the African
intellect. All he thought about was relief from the servitude of sin, and freedom from the
bondage of the devil…. But they interpreted it literally in the good time coming, which of
course could not but make their ebony complexion attractive, very.13

What the preacher is describing is the end of a long process, spanning almost two hundred
and fifty years, by which slaves came to accept the gospel of Christianity. But the slaves did
not simply become Christians; they fashioned Christianity to fit their own peculiar experi­
ence of enslavement in America. The preacher, like many white Christians before and
since, thought there was no distance between him and “his people,” no possible loss of rap­
port. He learned belatedly that the chasm was wide and deep. As one freedman succinctly
stated, “We couldn’t tell NO PREACHER NEBER how we suffer all dese long years. He
know’d nothin’ bout we.”14

EXODUS

No single symbol captures more clearly the distinctiveness of Afro-American Christianity
than the symbol of Exodus. From the earliest days of colonization, white Christians had
represented their journey across the Atlantic to America as the exodus of a New Israel from
the bondage of Egypt into the Promised Land of milk and honey. For black Christians, the
imagery was reversed: the Middle Passage had brought them to Egypt land, where they suf­
fered bondage under a new Pharaoh. White Christians saw themselves as the New Israel;
slaves identified themselves as the Old. This is, as Vincent Harding remarked, one of the
abiding and tragic ironies of our history: the nation’s claim to be the New Israel was con­
tradicted by the Old Israel still enslaved in her midst.15

American preachers, politicians, and other orators found in the story of Exodus a rich
source of metaphors to explicate the unfolding history of the nation. Each section of the
narrative—the bondage in Egypt, the rescue at the Red Sea, the wandering in the wilder­
ness, and the entrance into the Promised Hind—provided a typological map to reconnoi-
,er the moral terrain of American society, lohn Winthrop. the leader of the great Puritan
Expedition to Massachusetts Bay, set the pattern in Iris famous “A Modell of Christian
Charity” sermon composed on his ship in 1630. Having elaborated the covenantal obliga-
hons that the settlers had contracted with God, echoing the Sinai covenant of Israel with
^hweh, Winthrop concluded his discourse with a close paraphrase of Moses’ farewell in­
duction to Israel (Deuteronomy 30):

cloved there is now sett before use life, and good, deathe and evil in that wee are Commaun-
l’cd this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walke in his wayes and to

ePe his Commaundements and his Ordinance, and his lawes, and the Articles of our
-‘”‘enant with him that wee may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God mayblesse

lr> the land whither we goe to poses it: But if our heartes shall turne away soe that wee will
°uey, but shall be seduced and worship … other Gods, our pleasures, and proffitts, and

Albert J. Raboteau African Americans, exodus, and the American Israel 8i

82 RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE *

serve them; it is propounded unto this day, wee shall surely perishe out of the good Land

whither wee passe over this vast Sea to possesse it….14

Notice the particular application that Winthrop draws from the Exodus story: possession
of the land is contingent upon observing the moral obligations of the covenant with God.
It is a mark of the greatness of Winthrop’s address that the obligations he emphasizes are
justice, mercy, affection, meekness, gentleness, patience, generosity, and unity—not the
qualities usually associated with taking or keeping possession of a land. Later and lesser
sermons would extol much more active and aggressive virtues for the nation to observe.

Already in Winthrop’s address there is an explicit notion of reciprocity between God’s
Will and America’s Destiny: God has made a contract with us; if we live up to our part of
the bargain, so will He. This pattern of reciprocity between Divine Providence and Ameri­
can Destiny had tremendous hortative power, which Puritan preachers exploited to the full
over the next century and more in the jeremiad. In sermon after sermon, a succession of
New England divines deciphered droughts, epidemics, Indian attacks, and other misfor­
tunes as tokens of God’s displeasure over the sins of the nation. Unless listeners took the
opportunity to humble themselves, repent, and reform, they might expect much more of

the same.Implicit in this relationship of reciprocity there lay a danger: the danger of converting
God’s Will into America’s Density. Winthrop was too good a Puritan to succumb to this
temptation. Protected by his belief in the total sovereignty of God, he knew that the rela­
tionship between God’s Will and human action was one-sided and that the proper human
attitude was trust in God, not confidence in man. God’s Will was the measure of America’s
deeds, not vice versa. Of course, no American preacher or politician would have disagreed,
but as time went on the salient features of the American Exodus story changed. As the
tual experience of migration with all its fear and tenuousness receded, Americans tendedj’
to lose sight of their radical dependence upon God and to celebrate their own achieve2 j

ments as a nation.We can catch sight of the change by comparing the tone of Winthrop’s “A Modell of
Christian Charity” with the mood of an election sermon entitled “The United States Ele­
vated to Glory and Honor,” preached by Ezra Stiles in 1783. Flush with excitement over the
success of the Revolution, Stiles dwelled at length on the unfolding destiny of the new na­
tion. Quoting, like Winthrop, from the book of Deuteronomy, Stiles struck a celebratory

rather than a hortatory note:

“And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in
honour; and that thou rnayest be an holy people unto the Lord thy God . . . ” I have assumed
[this] text as introductory to a discourse upon the political welfare of God’s American Israel,
and as allusively prophetic of the future prosperity and splendour of the United States. Al­
ready does the new constellation of the United States begin to realize this glory. It has already
risen to an acknowledged sovereignty among the repubticks and kingdoms of the world. And
we have reason to hope, and 1 believe to expect, that God has still greater blessings in store for
this vine which his own right hand hath planted, to make us “high among the nations »’

praise, and in name, and in honour.”17

Stiles went on at great length to identify the reasons for his optimism about Ann’r’^
present and future preeminence, including the fact that “in our civil constitutions.

AU,m,Rab°m“

impediments are removed which obstruct the progress of society towards perfection.”18 It’s
a long away from Winthrop’s caution to Stiles’ confidence, from an “Errand in the Wilder­
ness” to “progress towards perfection.” In Stiles’ election sermon we can perceive God’s
New Israel becoming the Redeemer Nation. The destiny of the New Israel was to reach the
pinnacle of perfection and to carry liberty and the gospel around the globe.

In tandem with this exaggerated vision of America’s Destiny went an exaggerated vision
of human capacity. In an increasingly confident and prosperous nation, it was difficult to
avoid shifting the emphasis from divine sovereignty to human ability. Historian Conrad
Cherry has succinctly summarized the change in perception of America’s destiny: “Believ­
ing that she had escaped the wickedness of the Old World and the guilt of the past, God’s
New Israel would find it all too easy to ignore her vices and all too difficult to admit a loss of innocence.”19

Among the realities this optimistic vision ignored was the presence of another, darker Israel:

America, America, foul and indelible is thy stain! Dark and dismal is the cloud that hangs over
thee, for thy cruel wrongs and injuries to the fallen sons of Africa. The blood of her murdered
ones cries to heaven for vengeance against Thee…. You may kill, tyrannize, and oppress as
much as you choose, until cry shall come up before the throne of God; for I am firmly per­
suaded, that he will not suffer you to quell the proud, fearless and undaunted spirits of the
Africans forever; for in his own time, he is able to plead our cause against you, and to pour out
upon you the ten plagues of Egypt.20

So wrote Maria Stewart, a free black reform activist in Boston, in 1831. Her words were ad­
dressed to an America that projected itself as the probable site of the coming Millennium,
Christ’s thousand-year reign of peace and justice. From the perspective of slaves, and of
free blacks like Maria Stewart, America was Egypt, and as long as she continued to enslave
and oppress Black Israel, her destiny was in jeopardy. America stood under the judgment
of God, and unless she repented, the death and destruction visited upon Biblical Egypt
would be repeated here. The retribution envisaged was quite literal, as Mary Livermore, a
white governess, discovered when she overheard a prayer uttered by Aggy, the slave house­
keeper, whose daughter had just been brutally whipped by her master:

Thar’s a day a cornin’! Thar’s a day a cornin’… I hear de rumblin’ ob de chariots! I see de
flashin’ ob de guns! White folks’ blood is a-runnin’ on de ground like a riber, an’ de dead’s
heaped up dal high!… Oh, Lor’! hasten de day when de blows, an’ de bruises, an’ de aches, an’
de pains, shall come to de white folks, an’ de buzzards shall cat ’em as dey’s dead in de streets.
^h, Lor’! roll on de chariots, an’ gib de black people rest an’ peace.21

‘[i’ r ^ slaves share the exaggerated optimism of white Americans about human ability.
‘‘Pped in a system from which there seemed little, if any, possibility of deliverance by
,f ^an actions, they emphasized trusting in the Lord instead of trusting in man. Sermon
‘he 561:111011 aiu’ PraYer after prayer echoed the words that Moses spoke on the banks of

Pfin • ^6a: “***and still and see the salvation of the Lord.” Although the leaders of the three
ClPal slave revolts—Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, and Nat Turner

84 RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

in 1831—all depended upon the Bible to justify and motivate rebellion, the Exodus story
was used mainly to nurture internal resistance not external revolution among the slaves.

The story of Exodus contradicted the claim made by white Christians that God in­
tended Africans to be slaves. It seemed to prove thatfglavery was against God’s will and that
slavery would inevitably endjlalthough the when and the how remained hidden in Divine
Providence. Christian slaves thus applied the Exodus story, whose end they knew, to their
own experience of slavery, which had not yet ended, and so gave meaning and purpose to
lives threatened by senseless and demeaning brutality. Exodus functioned as an archetypal
myth for the slaves. The sacred history of God’s liberation of his people would be or was
being reenacted in the American South. A white Union Army chaplain working among
freedmen in Decatur, Alabama, commented disapprovingly on the slaves’ fascination with
Exodus: “There is no part of the Bible with which they are so familiar as the story of the de­
liverance of Israel. Moses is their ideal of all that is high, and noble, and perfect, in man. 1
think they have been accustomed to regard Christ not so much in the light of a spiritual
Deliverer, as that of a second Moses who would eventually lead them out of their prison-

house of bondage.”22
Thus, in the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, the slaves envisioned a future radically

different from their present. In times of despair, they remembered Exodus and found hope
enough to endure the enormity of their suffering. As a slave named Polly eloquently ex­
plained to her mistress, “We poor creatures have need to believe in God, for if God
Almighty will not be good to us some day, why were we born? When I heard of his deliver­
ing his people from bondage, I know it means the poor Africans.”23

By appropriating the story of Exodus as their own story, black Christians articulated
their own sense of peoplehood. Exodus symbolized their common history and common
destiny. It would be hard to exaggerate the intensity of their identification with the chil­
dren of Israel. A.M.E. pastor William Paul Quinn demonstrated how literal the metaphor
of Exodus could become when he exhorted black Christians, “Let us comfort and encour­
age one another, and keep singing and shouting, great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst
of us. Come thou Great Deliverer, once more awake thine almighty arm, and set thy
African captives free.”24 As Quinn’s exhortation reveals, it was prayer and worship that
made the identification seem so real. Sermons, prayers, and songs recreated in the imagi­
nation of successive generations the travail and triumph of Israel. Exodus became dramat­
ically real, especially in the songs and prayer meetings of the slaves, who reenacted the
story as they shuffled in the ring dance they called “the shout.” In the ecstasy of worship,
time and distance collapsed, .and the slaves literally became the children of Israel. With the
Hebrews, they traveled dry-shod through the Red Sea; they, too, saw Pharaoh’s army“get
drownded”; they stood beside Moses on Mount Pisgah and gazed out over the Promised
Land; they crossed Jordan under Joshua and marched with him around the walls of Jeri­
cho. Their prayers for deliverance resonated with the experiential power of these liturgical

dramas.Identification with Israel, then, gave the slaves a communal identity as a special, d’
vinely favored people. This identity stood in stark contrast with racist propaganda, which
depicted them as inferior to whites, as destined by nature and providence to the status
slaves. Exodus, the Promised Land, and Canaan were inextricably linked in the slay*-*
minds with the idea of freedom. Canaan referred not only to the condition of
also to the territory of freedom—the North or Canada. As Frederick Douglas:

keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan,/I
am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We
meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”25 Slave owners, too, were well
aware that the Exodus story could be a source of unflattering and even subversive analo­
gies. It took no genius to identify Pharaoh’s army in the slave song, “My army cross ober,
My army cross ober/O Pharaoh’s army drownded.”

The slaves’ faith that God would free them just as he had freed Israel of old was vali­
dated by Emancipation. “Shout the glad tidings o’er Egypt’s dark sea/Jehovah has tri­
umphed, his people are free!” the ex-slaves sang in celebration of freedom. But it did not
take long for the freedmen to realize that Canaan Land still lay somewhere in the distance.
“There must be no looking back to Egypt,” a band of refugee slaves behind Union lines
were instructed by a slave preacher in 1862. “Israel passed forty years in the wildnerness,
because of their unbelief. What if we cannot see right off the green fields of Canaan, Moses
could not. He could not even see how to cross the Red Sea. If we would have greater free­
dom of body, we must free ourselves from the shackles of sin…. We must snap the chain
of Satan, and educate ourselves and our children.”26

But as time went on and slavery was succeeded by other forms of racial oppression, black
Americans seemed trapped in the wilderness no matter how hard they tried to escape. For­
mer slave Charles Davenport voiced the despair of many when he recalled, “De preachers
would exhort us dat us was de chillen o’ Israel in de wilderness an’ de Lord done sent us to
take dis land o’ milk and honey. But how us gwine-a take land what’s already been took?”27
When race relations reached a new low in the 1880s and 1890s, several black leaders turned
to Africa as the black Promised Land. Proponents of emigration, such as Henry McNeal
Turner, urged Afro-Americans to abandon the American wilderness for an African Zion.
Few black Americans, however, heeded the call to emigrate to Africa; most continued to
search for their Promised Land here. And as decade succeeded decade they repeated the
story of Exodus, which for so many years had kept their hopes alive. It was, then, a very old
and evocative tradition that Martin Luther King, Jr., echoed in his last sermon:

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve
been to the mountaintop. Like anybody I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.
But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go
up to the mountain. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you. But I
want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised land.28

A period of over three hundred years stretches between John Winthrop’s vision of an
American Promised Land and that of Martin Luther King, Jr. The people whom Winthrop
addressed long ago took possession of their Promised Land; the people whom King ad­
dressed still wait to enter theirs. For three centuries, white and black Americans have dwelt

’he same land. For at least two of those centuries, they have shared the same religion.
I Vet> during all those years, their national and religious identities have been radically j
opposed. It need not have been so. After all, Winthrop’s version of Exodus and King’s were /
p so far apart. Both men understood that charity is the charter that gives title to the
;>n>rn’SeC* hand. Both taught that mercy, gentleness, and justice are the terms for occu-
,\t C^’ h°th believed that the conditions of the contract had been set by God, not by man.

’”nes in our history, the two visions have nearly coincided, as they did in the antislavery

Albert J. Raboteau African Americans, exodus, and the American Israel 85

86 RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE “S

stance of the early evangelicals, or in the abolitionist movement, or in Lincoln’s profound
realization that Americans were an “almost chosen people,” or in the civil rights movement
of our own era. Yet, despite these moments of coherence, the meaning of the Exodus story
for America has remained fundamentally ambiguous. Is America Israel, or is she Egypt?

NOTES
1. Peter Kalm, Travels into North America, 2d

cd. (London: 1772), reprinted in vol. 13 of A Gen­
eral Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voy­
ages and Travels, ed. John Pinkerton (London:
1812), 503.

2. Thomas Seeker, Bishop of London, A Ser­
mon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. .. Feb­
ruary 20, 1740-1 (London: 1741), reprinted in
Frank J. Klingberg, Anglican Humanitariamsm in
Colonial New York (Philadelphia: Church Historical
Society, 1940), 223.

3. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black:
American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 191.

4. Seeker, “A Sermon Preached,” 217.
5. Edgard Legare Pennington, Thomas Bray’s

Associates and Their Work among the Negroes
(Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society,
1939), 25.

6. David Benedict, Fifty Years among the Bap­
tists (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1860), 93-94.

7. Charles F. James, ed., Documentary History
of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia
(Lynchburg, Va.: J. P. Bell, 1900), 84-85.

8. Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Method­
ism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845
(Princeton, N.J.: 1965), 293-99.

9. David Barrow, Circular Letter (Norfolk, Va.,
11798]), 4-5; Robert B. Semple, A History of the
Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia, ed.
George W. Beale (Philadelphia: American Baptist
Publication Society, 1894), 105.

10. Francis Asbury, The Journal and Letters of
Francis Asbury, ed. Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning
Potts, and Jacob S. Payton, 3 volt. (Nashville, Tenn.:
Abingdon, 1958), 2: 284; Wesley M. Gcwehr, The
Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-1790 (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930), 240-41, 244-
48.

11. Semple, History of Baptists in Virginia, 59.
12. George P. Hawick, ed„ The American Slave:

A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols. (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), vol. 8, Arkansas Narra­
tives, pt. 1, p. 35.

13. Abel McGee Chreitzbcrg, Early Methodism
in the Carolinas (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House
of the M|ethodist] E[piscopal] C[hurch], South,
1897), 158-59.

14. Austa Melinda French, Slavery in South
Carolina and the Ex-Slaves; or, The Port Royal Mis­
sion (New York: W.M. French, 1862), 127.,

15. Vincent Harding, “The Uses of the Afro-
American Past,” in The Religious Situation, 1969,
ed. Donald R. Cutter (Boston: Beacon, 1969),
829-40.

16. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian
Charity,” in Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachu­
setts Historical Society, 1931), 2: 282-84, 292-95.
Reprinted in Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Reli­
gious Interpretations of American Destiny (Engle­
wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-llall, 1971), 43.

17. Ezra Stiles, “The United States Elevated to
Glory and Honor,” in A Sermon Preached before
Gov. Jonathan Trumbull and the General Assem­
bly . . . May 8th, 1783, 2d. ed. (Worcester, Mass.:
Isaiah Thomas, 1785), 5-9, 58-75, 88-92, 95-98.
Reprinted in Cherry, God’s New Israel, 82-84.

18. Ibid., in Cherry, God’s New Israel, 84.
19. Cherry, God’s New Israel, 66.
20. Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart,

American’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Es­
says and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana Univer­
sity Press, 1987), 39-40.

21. Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A
Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experi­
ence. .. (Hartford,Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1889),
260-61.

22. William G. Kephart to L. Tappan, May 9,
1864, American Missionary Association Archives,
Decatur, Ala., Reel 2; also in American Missionary 8,
no. 7 (July 1864), 179.

23. As cited in diary entry of 12 December
1857 by her mistress: Barbara Leigh Smith Both’
chon, An American Diary, 1857-1858, ed. losepj1
W. Reed, Jr. (London: Rout ledge & Kegan l,Jl11
1972), 65.

24. W. Paul Quinn, The Sword of Truth
“Forth Conquering and to Conquer”; The
Horrors, and Results of Slavery Faithfullyt,n<*

Albert]. Raboteau
RICAN amer,cans, exqdus, and THE AM

ND the AMERICAN ISRAELnutely Described…. (1834); reprinted in Early Negro
Writing, 1760-1837, ed. Dorothy Porter (Boston:
Beacon, 1971), 635.

25. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Fred­
erick Douglass: Written by Himself (1892; reprint,
New York: Crowell-Collier, 1969), 159-60.

26. American Missionary 6, no. 2 (February 1862): 33.

27. Norman R. Yetman, ed., Voices from Slavery
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 75.

28. Martin Luther King, Jr., sermon of April 3,
1968, delivered at Mason Temple, Memphis, Tenn.,

reprinted in A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James
Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper 8t Row,
1986), 286.