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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [02:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Enslaved people packed into the holds of Atlantic slave ships. Plantation owners determined to extract profit at any cost. And Protestant ministers wrestling with a troubling question. If Christianity was meant for everyone, what did that mean for a society built on human bondage? The history of Protestantism and slavery is full of uncomfortable contradictions. Many slaveholders feared that baptized enslaved Africans might undermine the institution itself, raising difficult questions about freedom, equality and Christian brotherhood. Yet over time, Protestant missionaries became some of the most important agents in spreading Christianity throughout the Atlantic world. In this episode, we explore how slavery unexpectedly became a vehicle for the expansion of Protestantism across the Caribbean and North America. We encounter figures such as Elias Ngo, a French Huguenot refugee in New York whose mission to enslaved Africans faced fierce resistance from masters who worried that Christian instruction might threaten their authority. The story takes us from plantation societies and missionary schools to debates over race, conversion and the meaning of Christian duty and Christian liberty. Far from being a straightforward tale of religious expansion, it is one most by conflict, compromise and profound moral tensions, enslaved people were of course, not merely passive recipients of missionary efforts. They reshaped Protestant Christianity in ways that its promoters never anticipated. I'm delighted to say that joining me is Professor Alec Ryrie, professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, a fellow of the British Academy and author of numerous and prize winning books. His latest is the World's How Protestantism Became a Global Religion. And in it he explores how the growth of Protestantism in the Atlantic world was deeply entangled with the history of slavery and how that relationship transformed both religion and empire, which we'll explore today. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from History Hit. Alec. Professor Ryrie, it is an absolute pleasure to talk to you as ever. Welcome back to the podcast.
- [05:33]
Professor Alec Ryrie
It's lovely to be back with you.
- [05:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for coming to talk to us about this latest research of yours. I suppose we should start by thinking about the beginnings of the slave trade from the 16th into the 18th centuries. What did early Protestant missionaries think about it?
- [05:54]
Professor Alec Ryrie
So it's important, I think, to realize that this is a trade that is already, at least in its bare bones in place when Protestants start to make their way out into the wider Atlantic. The root of it lies in the Iberian empires, the Spanish Portuguese imperial projects of the of the 15th century and afterwards. So that pattern of using plantations worked by enslaved labor is one which the first Protestants who are trying to find their way into that world are conscious of competing with. And when they contemplate it from a religious point of view as an ethical problem, they generally find it repugnant. And we find quite a lot of commentary about this pretty early on in the 16th into the early 17th centuries, usually with a strong level of anti Spanish and anti Catholic condescension built into this. This is the sort of barbaric way that the Spaniards behave. We're not like this, we'll be better. You know, you find this kind of comment quite widespread early on, essentially when it costs them nothing to make it. And then they actually start trying to build empires to. They don't think of them as empires of course, to, to pursue commercial ventures in these sorts of territories. And you quite, I mean repeatedly in these contexts you see the pattern of Protestants arriving in Caribbean island or a plantation on the mainland of the one or other of the American continents and thinking, well, we're going to do this a different way. We're going to ensure that whoever works our land will be paid freely. The forms of labor they're hoping to use tend to be things like indentured labor. So not, this is not free wage labor in the way that we would understand it in the modern world. But the idea that this is something like joining the military. It's a contract that you enter into for a fixed period of time with fixed compensation. During that period your rights as a worker are pretty constrained. You're something not too different from a slave, although you do have certain legal rights underpinning it in the way that a slave doesn't. But it's kind of semi free labour if you like. Not too different of course from serfdom and indeed apprenticeship, the many other forms of semi free labour that people are familiar with in European society. Society. So there are all these attempts to run plantation economies on this basis and they all fail. One of the most prominent is Providence Island. This is a little island colony on an island off the coast of what's now Honduras. It's part, it's Honduran territory nowadays which is occupied by an English company in I think 1631. And their ambition is that this should not run on slavery. That's partly because they disapprove of enslavement. It's also because they don't want to fill their new godly colony with pagans. You know, they'd rather have a nice population of godly English people. But they can't do it. It's simply impossible to make the sums add up to compete economically with the other plantations. And this pattern repeats itself again and again when the Dutch take over a portion of Brazil from the Portuguese during the significant chunk of eastern Brazil is ruled by the Dutch West India company from the 1620s through to the 1650s. And there's aspiration certainly amongst some of the Dutch coming from their Calvinist perspective, to move away from the patterns of enslavement that they've inherited. They quickly come to the conclusion that it can't be done. And that, you know, the first or the most prominent of the, of the governors of the Dutch colony says, you know, anybody who disapproves of slavery is, is displaying a useless scruple. You know, it's a nice idea, but you cannot make it work. And this is a pattern which they, a story which they tell repeatedly in different settings. The last of these is the. The colony of Georgia on the American mainland, of course, ultimately becomes a. Becomes an American state which is founded in the 1730s explicitly with the intention that this should be a slavery free colony into which the people they called Negroes should not be allowed to come. So, you know, it's not as if it's a. As if it's a refuge for otherwise enslaved people. You know, they want, they want to keep this as a religiously, racially and economically pure colony. And this comes under immense pressure from landholders of various kinds who regard it essentially as a restriction on their trade, that they're trying to make this system work, they're trying to make their business cover its costs. And essentially they are competing against folks who are able to have a labor force which doesn't need to be paid and which can literally be worked to death. You know, it's quite hard to make money under those circumstances. So they find themselves in a situation, I think of slavery in the plantation economies as like oil in the modern economy in the sense that it's easy to imagine an economy that runs without oil. Lots of people have imagined it, have projected the possibility. It's just that nobody has ever yet actually managed to do it. It's got something of that quality. So they find themselves, as it seems to them, drawn into this. That they've had. It feels as if there is no alternative. It's a reality with which they have to work.
- [12:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is there any profound difference between their view and that of their Catholic contemporaries
- [12:13]
Professor Alec Ryrie
in the economic sense? Not at all. And so in those fundamental realities of how the plantation economy works, they're dealing with the same reality. And of course they're directly competing with each other, which is one of the things that drives this. But of course the way they think about this religiously is very different. They both maintain the theologians, and I mean not just the theologians in the narrow sense, people with any level of religious seriousness on both sides of the Catholic Protestant divide are, are very clear that human is human and that these people, regardless of their difference in appearance and ethnicity and origin, are still descended from Adam and Eve. So we all share an ancestor 4000 and some years ago, in fact, because we're all descended from the sons of Noah, we share an ancestor much more recently than that. So that sense of equal human status is generally accepted and that's important. Although as I imagine we may come back to the question the issue about the sons of Noah carries, there's one set of problems which is put there, but in terms of what your religious responsibilities are to these people, to the people who've been enslaved, that's very different. Again, both Catholic and Protestant tend to assume that slavery as such, the phenomenon of forced labor is, you know, it's like poverty in the sense that it's a regrettable fact of life, it's just there. And that enslavement, you know, may not be ideal and it would be a virtuous thing for a slaveholder to emancipate the people whom they've enslaved. But it's an acceptable part of life in this world to enslave people to hold slaves as long as that slavery is legitimate. And we can talk about what constitutes legitimate slavery is not a sin that under some circumstances and in some forms at least, slavery can be morally acceptable. At least. Catholics tend to lean much more into a sense of religious responsibility for those who have been enslaved. There are cases of entire shiploads of Africans being loaded into these, the cargo ships that you mentioned at the beginning on the African coast before the so called Middle Passage, the journey across the Atlantic, in which something like a quarter to a fifth of those who boarded don't reach the other side of the Atlantic alive. There are cases of the entire shipload of people being baptized pretty much with buckets of water simply being sloshed around a proper mass baptism so that they are formally classed as Christians. Even when that doesn't happen in Catholic hells territories in the Americas. The idea of that kind of mass superficial Christianization is fairly normal. And in Catholic terms it kind of makes sense to do that because if you're a Catholic, you believe that the sacrament of baptism is itself an efficacious means of grace. And so it really does offer the prospect of. Of doing good to these people's souls for them to go through that sacrament, even if their level of understanding of what's happening is, let's say, low. You do the sacrament, and that's your starting point, and you work up from there. Whereas Protestants, because they tend to emphasize. Well, they do emphasize salvation by faith, they tend to insist that baptism has to follow a serious profession of faith. So they've got good theological reasons for being much more reticent about the formal process and insisting that, therefore, Christian instruction must come first. And you will find if you read almost any of the clergy who are thinking about this problem on the Protestant side during the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, they will emphasize the duty that the Christian society in the plantation colonies as a whole has and that slaveholders themselves in particular have to instruct the people whom they have enslaved in Christianity so that they can attain to saving faith. And they will often couch it in terms of. This is part of the recompense that we owe to these people. We've enslaved them. They've been taken from their homes. The way to pay them back for this is to save their souls. And, you know, that's often described as a. As, you know, as a good deal for them to have received. The difficulty is. Well, there are many difficulties, but the most obvious difficulty is that in general, the slaveholders themselves are pretty hostile to this process. And you mentioned some of this at the. At the. At the beginning. So one of the determining dramas of this whole story is that you have clergy and missionary enthusiasts of various kinds wanting to press programs of trying to Christianize enslaved people within the slave system. And the primary obstacle that they feel they're facing is a wall of opposition from slaveholders.
- [18:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, you. I mentioned the character. One person who comes up in your book. Ellis. No. Who offers an interesting entry point into this history. A former enslaved person who becomes a missionary to enslaved Africans. Can you tell me a bit more about his life and mission and the sort of resistance he faces from slaveholders and why they're so hostile.
- [18:35]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Sorry, I should say that's spelled N, E, A, U, you know, the French way. Because he's a Frenchman. So he's a. He's a French Huguenot, a French Protestant who, like many others, is forced into exile when the Duke of Nantes is revoked in 16 that hundreds of thousands of French Protestants had driven overseas. He ends up in New York City, where he establishes a practice as a merchant, and then in 1692, is captured during the War of the League of Augsburg, one of this sort of endless round of wars between Louis XIV France and his neighbours. But because he is a French citizen, he's treated not as a prisoner of war, but as a renegade. And he is imprisoned in pretty brutal conditions in France. He's sentenced to galley slavery originally, which, you know, he's often a death sentence. I mean, that's a nasty business. And in the galleys becomes notorious. He becomes known to his fellow prisoners as the Preacher, because a number of the. Of those who are sentenced to this galley slavery are Protestants like himself. And he becomes famous for encouraging them, leading them in psalm singing, this kind of thing. And eventually, after two years of this, he's taken out of the galleys and sent to the Chateau d' if off the coast of Marseille, the place that was later going to become famous as the prison in the Count of Monte Cristo. And I mean, you have to say, reading his account, do you think Dumas kind of underplayed it? He's kept in solitary imprisonment for many months. He's imprisoned in total darkness for many months. After his period of solitary is over, he's put in with another fellow who dies not long afterwards, and he's left in the prison with his corpse for a length of time. So, I mean, this is pretty unpleasant. By the time he's eventually released, when the war is over, there's an exchange of prisoners and his sufferings have become known by this point. And so he comes out to find himself a minor celebrity. On his way back home through New York, he has an audience with King William III in London in order to raise the case of those Protestants who are still imprisoned. Eventually gets back to New York to meet his wife, his children, including a daughter who was born after his imprisonment. Now six years old and settles back down, his health is never quite the same again, as you might imagine. So, yes, formerly enslaved, although of French extraction. So a white former slave, in a way that kind of slightly complicates the categories which are already becoming established in the era as a celebrity. The newly founded spg, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Church of England organization for trying to establish the Church of England more firmly in the American colonies, approaches him and asks him, would he be willing to be involved in a mission to Native Americans? And he says, no. Native Americans are savages. They're ghastly people. You don't want anything to do with them. But he says, in this city, in New York, City there are upwards of a thousand people who live, as he says, you know, without God in this world, who are, as you know, the term he and all of them use. These are Negro slaves. And he says somebody needs to do something for them. And so he accepts a post as the society's Catechist to the Negroes is his title, which is a part time job, although it seems quickly to become almost a full time responsibility for him. He opens a school, running evening classes to which he rapidly has a shifting attendance of in the order of 150 to 200 people. So it's a minority of the thousand or so enslaved people in New York City, but it's a fair chunk. And he's met, as you mentioned, with a degree of unease even from the beginning, partly because he's French and although he conforms to the Church of England in order to take this job, there's always a sense that this fellow is both nationally and religiously suspect. And the fact that he himself is a former slave means that the slaveholding establishment of the city, I think, are never quite sure whose side he's on. He has a long on and off relationship, let's say, with the rector of the main Anglican church in the city, Trinity Church, who initially offers him a degree of support. This is a man who wants to think of himself as a kind master to his own slaves, preaches in support of what he's doing, but never feels that he has enough support and is pushing for the governor to press slaveholders to send their people for instruction, for education. And this bumbles on until, in, what is it, 1711, 1712. There's what happens in most slaveholding societies every generation or so, which is rebellion. It's a fairly small scale rebellion. The, I mean, as usual, around twice as many enslaved people die as, as white folks. The total death toll is around 30. So I mean it's not, it's not a huge event, but it's the sort of thing that slaveholding societies absolutely live in fear of. And no is for some people the scapegoat. There's a claim that some of his pupils are involved in the rebellion, which as it's investigated, appears not to have been the case, or only at the most peripheral level. But nevertheless, the idea that he has been encouraging enslaved people, giving them ideas above their station, is a very easy one for them to latch onto. And his old frenemy, the rector absolutely casts him off at this point, refuses to have anything to do with him, even briefly manages to get him removed from his post. And the two of them fall out pretty badly. But the governor backs him up. The governor of the colony, he's able to resume his position, persuades the SPG that actually he hasn't done anything wrong. And by the time of his death in the early 1720s, the school is still flourishing. The SPG then appoints a new man, and the enrolment at the school within a couple of years has dropped from around 200 to 203. And the new man says, the only explanation I can give is that these people, he means enslaved Africans, are so vicious that nobody cares to trust them in companies. And you think, well, yeah, okay, I can see why people stopped coming to your school. So, I mean, Noe is still remembered by the Episcopal Church in the United States as he's sort of honoured in its calendar for his work. In some ways, he's, I think, a remarkable man, trying to work within this system, to push against it as best he's able to. Did he believe in the abolition of slavery? We have no way of knowing whether he ever even considered that as a possibility. He never, certainly never seems to have been asked the question. It wasn't a category that would have been applied. It's not something that seems at that stage like a realistic possibility. So like everybody else in this story, almost everybody else in this story, he's compromised. But it shows you one path that can have been taken through it.
- [26:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In terms of his approach to faith, what was his place on that spectrum of baptism, then belief, or belief, then baptism? What was he trying to teach enslaved people? And how satisfied would he have been in calling his converts Protestant Christians?
- [26:45]
Professor Alec Ryrie
We can track that quite carefully because that's one of the issues that he pays a lot of attention to. And he's very clear that he wants to see a pretty good basis not just of Christian knowledge, but of personal conviction, of real faith as he sees it before. He is willing to recommend his candidates for baptism. So if you were to join knows school as an enslaved person, then baptism is very much the end of the journey, not the beginning. I mean, of course, you would still be welcome at it afterwards, but that's almost the qualification at which, as a student, you are aiming. One of the repeated problems that he ran up against was when an enslaved person would come to him as a student and might study with him for a couple of years, and they would be, you know, not simply drilled in reciting the catechism, which was sort of was the center of it, but also in singing the psalms, in patterns of prayer. So the kind of Christian education that's not very different from what you might find in a European setting at the time. The problem he would hit is when he wants to recommend someone for baptism. And it is then up to the parish priest, whether that's the planet Trinity, who he has the on off relationship with or a different parish priest to decide whether to do it. And also up to the slaveholder whether they are willing to permit their people to be baptized. There are cases when a slave is baptized despite misgivings or opposition from slaveholders, but that kind of thing is pretty rare and it causes trouble. So on the whole, the slaveholders have a veto on this process. And that's one of the things that no and many, many others like him feel as a, you know, as a really serious problem. I mean, they're Protestants, so they don't believe that baptism is essential for salvation. They can comfort themselves with, you know, these people's souls can still be saved regardless of this.
- [29:00]
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- [29:00]
Professor Alec Ryrie
But baptism is about there being granted full membership of the church. One of the weird consequences of this, and you find similar things in other Protestant missionary settings, is the emergence of a periphery of people around the churches who are, as it seems to everybody, believers and sincere in their faith and yet who are not able to access the sacraments of the church. So it's kind of a negative image of what's happening in the Catholic world where you have people who have received the sacraments but no instruction. You hear of people who've received instruction but no sacraments.
- [29:47]
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- [32:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So no dies in the 1720s and at around that point in time we have Bishop Gibson of London, who also passionately wrote about the duty of slaveholders to allow Christian teaching. Yes, what argument is he making and how effectively?
- [32:39]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Well, the argument is a pretty straightforward one, and it hinges on two points, I think one of which has aged better than the other. And, you know, the first one is simple moral exhortation. He says, you know, this whole thing, his book, published in 1727, is addressed to the plantation owners. So this is he's talking to slaveholders. So it's important to realize that this entire discussion is happening above the heads of the enslaved people, as it were. Nobody is thinking about addressing them directly, and their agency, or lack of it, in this story is just one of the things to keep an eye on. So when he's talking to slaveholders, the first thing he says is, this is a simple moral duty. You are Christians, or you claim to be Christians, in which case you simply must allow these people who are descendants of Adam and Eve and Noah, like yourselves, you know, created in the image of God, you must allow them to be instructed and their souls to be saved. That's the. In some ways, that's the easy part. He then goes on to say, and it is also in your interests to do that, because at the moment he's saying these people are pagans and they are therefore morally depraved. They're lazy, they're inclined to rebellion. You can't trust them. But if they become Christians, obviously Christianity goes with virtue. And so if they become Christians, they will learn that obedience to Christian masters is one of the things that the Gospel requires. And therefore they will become loyal, they will become hard working. They will, instead of being inclined to rebellion, they will obey you as a matter of conscience. So it is, you know, the argument is that of course a Christian slave will be a better slave. So purely as a matter of self interest, you ought to permit it. I mean, this is one of those arguments that is endlessly repeated by Gibson and others like him from the period. And it's, I think, obvious to anyone with any experience of plantation slavery at the time, or indeed really anybody who stops to think about it, that this is nonsense. You know, not, not in the sense that, that Christianity is going to have no effect on, on these people's outlook and character. Very often it will quite a profound effect. But, but if it is teaching them virtues, it's also teaching them something about themselves, teaching them that in the eyes of the Gospel that their supposed owners profess they are all equal in the eyes of God, that they have a shared humanity and a shared dignity. So the response from slaveholders, and is very often no, in fact, when slaves become Christians, they start standing on their dignity. They start trying to assert their rights and claiming equal status of a kind in a way that we simply cannot tolerate. So, I mean, in this debate, I think you have to say from a modern perspective, the slaveholders are correct that Christianity really does undermine the system of slavery. You can see why Gibson, Bishop Gibson and those like him want to believe this, because it's their way of saying, well, this way I have the missionary outcome that we want to see these people Christianized without disruption, without threatening the system. And they dearly wish to believe that this was true. There's an awful lot of wishful thinking in these sorts of stories, but in some ways, the whole drama across the middle of the 18th century is this back and forth between these pious, spiritualizing missionaries trying to work within the slave system, repeatedly insisting on this, to them attractive, but I think obviously untrue notion that you can produce the pious, obedient slave within this kind of slave system, and slaveholders who are well aware that this is nonsense, simply refusing to be persuaded by it.
- [37:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, interestingly, the slave owners in this case have a position that is more honest about their perspective on these people, which is that they are seeing enslaved Africans as less than human. And by becoming Christian, there's the possibility that they become more human. So I think we do need to talk about how racial ideas were influencing Protestant missionary approaches.
- [37:32]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Because, I mean, this, you know, we're right in the crucible of modern racism here. You know, this is the. Is the point at which it takes the form that we have come to know it in over the past few centuries. And it's, I mean, this is a tricky subject. Tricky in all sorts of ways, but tricky not least to work out what, what was actually going on. I think it's fairly clear that the modern system of racism that has emerged by, say, the beginning of the 19th century is more a consequence than a cause of the Atlantic slave trade. That enslavers come to regard Africans as less than themselves because they have been enslaved, rather than choosing to enslave Africans because they regard them as lesser. There are all kinds of reasons why they've chosen to enslave Africans, but these are thoroughly pragmatic. These are the people who are available for purchase within the Atlantic economy and who have a degree of resistance to tropical disease which neither the indigenous peoples of the Americas nor many Europeans do. So, I mean, that's, I think, a reasonably straightforward story. But during the course of the 17th and into the 18th century, as this pattern of enslaving large numbers of Africans emerges, and I should say, I mean, it plays very differently in somewhere like New York City, where you have hundreds of enslaved Africans and on an island like, say, Barbados, where you have hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans who outnumber the white population, you know, 20 to 1 or more. Those different social environments, whether you're talking about domestic slavery or, you know, mass scale plantation labor, these are very different systems. And initially the way that, that most of these societies, I mean, you see this really clearly on Barbados, distinguish between the two populations on the island is by defining them as Christian and heathen. And then you can use the fact that they are heathen to justify their enslavement. That's what makes them lesser. It's one of the reasons why they're uneasy about converting them. Because if you start tying their enslavement to their non Christian status, then if they convert, what do you do? And it's one of the things that gives rise to the persistent notion and fear that if an enslaved person converts to Christianity, that should, if not lead directly to their emancipation, at least alter the terms of their enslavement. And so it's during the very end of the 17th into the 18th century, Catherine Joiner has a brilliant book on this called Christian Slavery, that you start to see a shift Away from defining these people not religiously, but ethnically. And so the longstanding interest in human ethnic difference, the idea that the notion that human beings are different from one another is something that people have been very interested in for a long time, you know, as well they might be. And there's a lot of discussion about, you know, difference in appearance between people of different nations. And the assumption up to this point has usually been these differences are interesting, but they're pretty superficial. And because we know that we were all Descended from Noah 4,000 years ago, these differences must be quite shallowly rooted. And the common assumption, at least to begin with, is that the reason Africans have darker skin than Europeans is because they live in a hot country. And there's some surprise when it becomes clear that people of European descent who are born in tropical clines come out the same color as their parents. And some discussion of so quite how is it that this happens? The idea of a kind of deeply ingrained, a kind of biologically ingrained racial difference, as the so called scientific racists of the 19th century would say, is, you know, we're still quite a long way away from that. But you progressively get a sense emerging that there is a profound difference here and that this racial difference, as it's not quite yet called, is less superficial than it might appear. And this very much comes out of the context of the slaveholding plantations, where you can see that both at one level, that slaveholders are trying to dehumanise the people whom they hold in slavery, or to make out that their humanity is of a lesser kind as a way of justifying the slavery in which they're continuing to hold them. You know, if they're not quite fully human or fully human in the same way as we are, then they need not be, they should not be granted the same privileges that we are. So that's one way in which it can work. But there's a kind of vicious circular logic to this too, because if you are running a slave system, one of whose purposes is systematically to dehumanize the people who are held within it, then one of the consequences of it is that you will genuinely make them appear to you as less than human. And so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in which it becomes almost a truism in the middle of the 18th century that anybody who has had any dealings with Africans knows from experience that they're not the same as us, they're lesser than us. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, famously these terms, although as one of his opponents said, it'd be Interesting to see what kind of philosopher David Hume would have turned into if he'd been born on a plantation in Jamaica. But so it's during this period and through this process that move away from categorizing people by religion so that the fundamental distinction is between Christian and heathen into categorizing them by the more indelible category of race, a category that cannot be changed by a profession of faith and is therefore, from the slaveholders point view of you, much more secure that that really starts to become ingrained.
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I mean, it feels, from our perspective, very hard to understand how missionaries were reconciling their religious ideals with the brutal realities of colonialism and slavery. How did they.
- [46:13]
Professor Alec Ryrie
It's hard to talk about this without sounding as if. As if I'm justifying it. But from their perspective, they would say, first of all, they have no choice. Yeah, the system is just there. Slavery is this vast, terrible fact. And to rail against it, to imagine that it could be abolished or that they could withdraw from it, is luxury. Thinking this is a kind of fantasy. There are a handful of people, some Quakers and others, who are opposed to the slave system as a whole. But you know, I mean, I was comparing it earlier to the use of fossil fuels today. It does have something of that quality to it. Lots of people don't like the use of fossil fuels, but the idea that you could simply abolish them seems an inconceivable economic possibility. Everybody is implicated in this in some ways, especially in the. In slave plantations themselves. But the other reason they think that it's possible to work with this system is because they don't have the same rigid division between slave and free labor that seems natural to us. Partly because, as I mentioned earlier, there are all these forms of semi free bonded labor that are normal within European life. So the idea of forced labor of some sort of. Doesn't seem particularly shocking. They're also well aware that within the biblical tradition, both Old and New Testament, obviously these are texts that arose out of societies in which slavery was common. And the witness of the biblical texts is the way to work with slavery is to make it better, to Christianize it, to accept that slaveholder and slave are spiritual brethren, but that they should each accept their status in this world and embrace it honestly and treat one another rightly. So there is this kind of model, the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis, who has slaves in his household. And when Abraham adopts his covenant with God, he's circumcised, his sons are circumcised, and all his male slaves are circumcised too. That sense that they are part of his extended family and that he should take responsibility for them. This kind of patriarchal view of what slavery should be, that's the ideal that these 18th century, 17th and 18th century Protestants have in their mind that they want this kind of godly, happy household, you know, headed by a father with children and servants and slaves all united in one big happy family. And I mean, obviously this is a fantasy. And it's a fantasy even in somewhere like New York where you're dealing with a system of domestic slavery. It's an even more perverse fantasy in the plantations where you've got these vast groups of enslaved people, many of whom would never lay eyes on their supposed owners, on the, on their slaveholders, they're dealing entirely through, through overseers and so forth. But this fantasy of a true Christian slavery to try to work within the system and make it better, both because they think the system can be legitimate in some way, and also because they think it's inconceivable to abolish it. That. That seems like the way to go to an awful lot of People for an awfully long time.
- [49:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Eventually, of course, in the late 18th century, we get the major turning point of the abolition movement which starts to challenge this. What's the narrative there? What's the argument made and what changes does it bring about?
- [50:03]
Professor Alec Ryrie
So it's quite sudden, the emergence of abolitionism in the early 1780s. Why it Bubbles up at that moment is a really deep and interesting question. There have been all kinds of slow burn changes happening. You've begun to see, you know, so there, there are some legal changes, growing minority, but still a pretty small minority of people pushing against it. You do crucially begin to get the emergence of a new voice in this debate, which is of formerly enslaved Africans who have now both been freed and converted to Christianity themselves. Aladdo Equiano is the, that is the most famous. I spent some time in the book talking about another, another fellow man named Philip Kwaku, who's the first African ordained in the Church of England. And, and these people are a very vivid witness against the kind of myth of the African as the dehumanized or lesser class of human that the slaveholders have wanted to maintain. You know, when you meet these, seriously, you know, when I say they're impressive and articulate, I mean they're impressive and articulate in the ways that 18th century English society respects and recognizes. These are people who are able to speak their own language directly to them and model an African Christianity in a way that really challenges it. But what I don't think there's any doubt that what brings all this to the boil is the American Revolution. Both because it's, it floods the Atlantic world with all this radical talk of liberty, also because it removes a serious restraint on anyone wanting to mess with the slave system within the British empire during the 1760s, early 70s. Anybody trying to question the slave system within the British empire is going to be met with the response of, you cannot do that. It'll upset the American colonists. But now that ship has sailed and the Caribbean plantations aren't going to like it either. But they are so dependent on British military and financial support that they're not in a position to complain nearly so much. And also they're the ones who are much more dependent on the regular import of slavery. The enslaved population in the American colonies is largely self supporting. Death rates for the enslaved are not as high, whereas the only way that Caribbean slavery is being maintained is through regular imports of the, of freshly enslaved people from the African continent. And so that becomes a particular evil on which it's possible for people to focus. But also, as the historian John Coffey has argued, I think really persuasively, the fact of defeat in the American war is a tremendous moral shock to people in Britain. And this is still a deeply Christianized country. It's quite an evangelical country in which your response to a national calamity is to think, what sin are we being judged for? And it seems all too obvious at that moment that the sin for which Britain is being judged is the sin of slavery. And so the petition to abolish the slave trade, and it's very important, this is about abolishing the trade, not the slave system itself. So it's conceivable. And it also focuses on what seems to them the most indefensible part of the entire system that goes from being a quirky minority movement to being something which is able to amass a petition signed by a sixth of the whole of Britain's population. Nothing like this has ever happened before, for during the course of the 1780s. And one of the key drivers of that is the witness from a series of Protestant missionaries who have reached the point of saying the only way to Christianize these people is to tackle the slave system itself, that we can't reform slavery by making them Christians. We have to reform slavery in order to be able to make them Christians, still wanting to work within the system. But they're saying if we can stop importing all these fresh heathens into the colonies and simply Christianize the people who are there, as well as forcing the existing slaveholders to treat them better because they know they can't just replace the ones who die, then it will be possible to build the kind of Christian slavery that we still imagine can be built. So they're still holding onto that myth. And it's going to be another half century more in some places before they're finally forced to admit that even that's not going to work.
- [55:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So to conclude, then, how do you think we should understand the legacy of these early missions? Were they failures, or did they lay important groundwork for future changes?
- [55:21]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Both. They plainly were failures in their own terms. That. I mean, it's not that there's no progress made in Christianizing the enslaved population. There is some, especially in some regions. There's some. Some regional variation as far as they are concerned. I mean, I think we also have to regard it as a. As an immense moral failure, that the determination to hold on to this myth of a Christianized slavery means that really they're stuck in this cycle in which very little really happens for 50, 60 odd years between the 1720s and the 1780s. And that's a period in which another 2 or 3 million people are shipped across the Atlantic. And I mean, I think you could make a case that what these missionaries achieve is less than nothing, that they actually provide moral coverage for the continuation of the slave trade during this period. Nevertheless, I mean, I think you have to say, you know, looking at historically, it's hard to see how you could have got to the point of deciding that this vast economic system had to be taken on directly without going through something like this kind of process. The destination, I mean, in the end is a remarkable one. And it's clear, I think, that when you look at the process by which the slave system is brought down across the Atlantic world between the 1780s and the 1880s, it does take a full century. Brazil is the last place where in the Atlantic world where slavery is formally abolished. It is the presence of Christianized, enslaved and formerly enslaved people are the crucial vectors in making this happen. Both in terms of demonstrating to enslavers that these people truly are as fully human as themselves and that they can't be denied the same, same dignity. The fact that they are able to demonstrably share the same religious experience is vital to that, but also because of the mobilizing quality of Christianity itself, at least in some forms. You know, if, if you look ahead to Jamaica in the early 1830s, when the key precipitating event in the so called Baptist war in Jamaica in 1832, which was the key event that leads to the eventual abolition of slavery across the British Empire, is precipitated and led by the black churches on the island, they are able to, to, to mount a moral case which not only makes sense to the enslavers, but it's able to mobilize their own community. So it's, it's difficult to see how you could have got to that point, at least in anything like the way we did, without that sense of Christian mobilization.
- [58:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you for introducing us to some difficult and interesting ideas to think about the nature of the relationship between these people committed to spreading their faith and the juggernaut of the slave trade and slave plantations. Your book, Alec Rory, is the World's How Protestantism Became a Global Religion. So if anyone wants to know more, that's the place to look. But thank you so much for taking the time to come and speak to the ME about it.
- [58:53]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Oh, always a pleasure. Thanks Suzanne.
- [58:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors. From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg and to Amy Haddo who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and notjusthetudors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History hit.
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