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2010 "Chosen Race": Baptist Missions and Mission Churches in the East and West Indies, 1795-1875 Kelly R. (Kelly Rebecca) Elliott

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

“CHOSEN RACE:” BAPTIST MISSIONS AND MISSION CHURCHES IN

THE EAST AND WEST INDIES, 1795-1875

By

KELLY R. ELLIOTT

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010

Copyright © 2010 Kelly R. Elliott All Rights Reserved

The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Kelly Elliott defended on April 6, 2010.

______Charles Upchurch Professor Directing Dissertation

______Sarah Irving University Representative

______Bawa Singh Committee Member

______Darrin McMahon Committee Member

______Matt Childs Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

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for my parents

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The criticism, support, and encouragement of my committee members— Professors Charles Upchurch, Bawa Singh, Darrin McMahon, Matt Childs, and Sarah Irving—have greatly improved this project, and I am grateful to all of them. As professors and as critics, they have made me a better historian. I especially appreciate the willingness of Professors Singh and Childs to serve on the committee despite their absence from campus. Most particularly, I thank Professor Upchurch, who supervised all of my graduate work with a depth of knowledge, enthusiasm, and personal encouragement that knew no bounds.

Funding and study opportunities provided by the Florida State University London Study Centre and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives helped make possible the research necessary for this project. I would like to acknowledge the encouragement of Professor Kathleen Paul, and again, I thank Professor Upchurch for the many manifestations of his support in London. At the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville, Tennessee, Director Bill Sumners and Archivist Taffey Hall were helpful and kind.

The Heath Street Baptist church in Hampstead, London gave me an opportunity to become an English Baptist myself. Most especially, I would like to thank Sir Godfray and Susan LeQuesne, members at Heath Street, who befriended me and revealed some interesting connections between my research and that church.

My family, Crosses, Harmons, and Elliotts, have all supported me during research and writing. Michael and Pam and Karie Cross and Jeremy Elliott have also patiently listened to ideas, approaches, research frustrations, and a great deal of nonsense. I appreciate their forbearance. My husband Jeremy has probably borne the brunt of both the elation and the aggravation of this project, all while working on a dissertation of his own. Thanks, friend. Finally, my parents‟ work ethic and believing lives had much to do with making me the person who wrote this, and so I dedicate it to them.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on names vi

Abstract vii

1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. BAPTIST AND IDENTITY 27 3. THE COLONIAL RESPONSE TO MISSIONS 58 4. INDIGENOUS RESPONSES TO MISSIONS 88 5. CONVERTS AND MISSION CHURCHES 121 6. CHANGES IN MISSION POLICY157 7. “CHOSEN RACE:” ENGAGEMENT WITH DIFFERENCE193

BIBLIOGRAPHY 224

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 239

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NOTE ON NAMES

From source to source, the spellings of names—particularly non-English names—are often inconsistent. For clarification in this manuscript, I use only one spelling of each name. Krishnu Pall is only spelled “Krishnu Pall,” even though in the sources the name appears variously as Kristno, Krishna, Krishna-palla, and Krishnoo-Powl. The same is true for the spelling and capitalization of Indian words such as “Brahman,” which appears in contemporary accounts with and without capitalization, and often as “Brahmin” or “Brahmun.”

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ABSTRACT

In 1792, a group of preachers and artisans from the north of responded to contemporary currents of revivalist religion by founding the Baptist Missionary Society to preach the gospel to the “heathen” abroad. These young , whose identity was deeply marked by a persecuted past and an ambivalent relationship with state power, carried their free church tradition with them into the mission field, where their belief in divine providence and their commitment to biblical primitivism deeply informed their work. Baptist identity and approach to missions changed over the nineteenth century as Dissenters gained socioeconomic status and political power, and independent voluntarism gave way to the organization and bureaucracy of the modern humanitarian movement. These shifts affected missionary identity and approaches, as well as the way the society leadership and its viewed converts and the possibility of independent mission churches.

In South Asia and the Caribbean, secular colonials and officials viewed mission work warily, suspecting with reason that proselytization would undermine the racial and social hierarchies necessary to imperial success. Missionaries therefore faced significant political persecution in both spheres of empire, where they were viewed as subversive and undermining of colonial authority. Indigenous peoples in South Asia, particularly Bengali brahmans, also often looked upon missionaries with hostility; some, such as Brahmo Somaj founder Rammohun Roy, altered the they preached to serve their own needs and purposes. Converts lost caste as well as employment, and were often forced to cut all social ties upon professing Christ. was more successful in the Caribbean, where slaves who converted often gained literacy, political advocacy, and a sense of community. Overall, convert decisions and experiences show that when colonized peoples chose to adopt Christianity, they built distinctly Asian or West Indian Christian communities which they increasingly led and supported themselves. Despite the fracturing and self-examination occasioned by changes within Baptist identity over the course of the century, the missionary society's commitment to a family of Christ that razed the boundaries of race, caste, and nation did make independent indigenous churches possible.

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Current historiography frequently links British missions to imperialism, viewing missionaries as importers—and constructors—of Englishness and converts as passive receivers of a colonizing Christianity. I hope to redirect our understanding of the missionary enterprise towards a greater sensitivity to the multivalent nature of missionary identity and, most importantly, the crucial contributions of indigenous converts and the communities they forged in the Empire. Baptist emphasis on native Christian church leadership and involvement, as well as missionary children‟s intermarriage with converts, help underline that, for the Baptists, the “chosen race” referred not to skin color or the burden of empire, but to election and sanctification by God.

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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1792: The Founding Vision of the Baptist Missionary Society In 1792, a Northamptonshire shoemaker and sometime-preacher wrote a tract that, he hoped, would stir his brethren into godly action. The work of evangelism, the author contended, was being neglected and Christ‟s commission to his disciples to carry the gospel to the world remained unfulfilled: The work has not been taken up, or prosecuted of late years…with that zeal and perseverance with which the primitive Christians went about it. It seems as if many thought the commission was sufficiently put in execution by what the apostles and others have done; that we have enough to do to attend to the salvation of our own countrymen; and that, if God intends the salvation of the heathen, he will some way or other bring them to the gospel, or the gospel to them. It is thus that multitudes sit at ease, and give themselves no concern about the far greater part of their fellow- sinners, who to this day, are lost in ignorance and idolatry.1

This missiological call to arms, William Carey‟s Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen, made manifest a rising spirit of religious enthusiasm and revival that swept British churches, both Established and Dissenting, in the late eighteenth century. Among the Particular Baptists—William Carey‟s denomination—this flowering of Christian commitment compounded and accelerated the modern Protestant missionary movement, which had begun first among the Germans, whose heart religion touched off eighteenth-century European revivalism and missionary work. Continental Moravians and Pietists first took up the missionary cause, and they were soon followed by Britons like Carey, whose persistence led to the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society at Kettering in 1792.2 Baptist during the flowering of religious enthusiasm in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries departed significantly, in some respects, from

1 William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, in which the religious state of different nations of the world, the success of former undertakings, and the practicability of further undertakings are considered (Leicester: Ann Ireland, 1792), 8 2 Historian Andrew F. Walls questions the conventional approach to Carey as the founder of the modern missionary movement. He emphasizes the fact that German Pietist revival, as well as Moravian missionary spirit, preceded and inspired movements farther west. See Andrew Walls, “The Eighteenth-century Protestant Missionary Awakening in Its European Context” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 24-26. See also W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) on the Continental origins of Anglo-American revivalism. Carey and his colleagues in , and William Ward, modeled their mission family after the Moravians. See Periodical Accounts vol. 2, Clipstone, 1801. No. VII, 5, in which Ward writes, after reading Moravian missionary journals, “Thank you, Moravians! Ye have done me good. If I am ever a missionary worth a straw, I shall owe it to you, under our Saviour.” 1

previous nonconformist belief. Carey‟s Enquiry pointed to something new in Baptist Christianity: an emphasis on and commitment to evangelism abroad. For most of the eighteenth century, the Particular Baptists and Dissenters in general had been very inward looking. Though Baptist insularity may be seen as a natural outgrowth of Calvinist theology, with its emphasis on providential election and personal piety, as well as a defensive response to persecution by Established religion, this mentality made Baptists “pastors of the chosen few rather than preachers to the many.” As Brian Stanley asserts, “if mission at home had become theologically suspect to some English dissenters, mission overseas remained unthinkable to all except the most visionary.”3 Eighteenth- century Dissenters were more concerned with issues within their own churches than with extending their belief to others. Indeed, when William Carey first began in the 1780s to urge his brethren towards overseas missions, his elders and betters rebuked his audacity. His proposal at a ministers‟ meeting in Northampton to discuss “the duty of Christians to attempt the spread of the Gospel among heathen nations” met with astonishment and denunciation; the senior minister ordered Carey to sit down, declaring that, “when God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.”4 Thus William Carey‟s Enquiry and the new outward focus it represented was a major departure from previous theology, which assumed that God would save the elect whether Christians spread the gospel abroad or not. Carey‟s Enquiry points to a deep concern for people believed to be lost worldwide; the document contains pages of charts listing the various nations of the world, their population, and their religion: “pagan,” “papist,” “Mahometan,” “Greek Christians,” and other denominations. There is little doubt that Carey and his colleagues viewed the members of at least two of these categories as lost and in danger of damnation. Carey‟s Enquiry also contains another significant and relatively new element of theology: an increasingly moderate heavily influenced by writings from outside Britain. Jonathan Edwards and his colleagues in North America, as well as Pietist

3 Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792-1992 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), 3. Hereafter Stanley, BMS. The more Arminian already practiced an inclusive and evangelistic theology by this time; the shift discussed here occurs in the Particular Baptist community. 4 John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward. Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859) vol. 1, 10 2

and Moravian Christians in Central Europe, contributed to a new evangelicalism in Britain. Besides Carey, whose strength lay less in theological reasoning and more in passion, several other young Northamptonshire ministers supported this new moderate Calvinism, including , John Sutcliff, and . All read Jonathan Edwards and eagerly accepted his “finely-struck balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility,” a view that differed greatly from their elders‟ understanding of original sin and the fate of the lost as unchangeable.5 A Bristol pastor, Robert Hall, also influenced the new generation. Carey‟s reading of Hall‟s tract, Help to Zion’s Travellers: Being An Attempt to Remove Various Stumbling Blocks Out of the Way, had convinced him to leave the Established church he had been raised in and accept as a Dissenter. Hall‟s tract reassured those convicted of sin, including Carey himself, that Christ was ready and willing to welcome every penitent, placing less emphasis on fears regarding election by God: “If any should ask, have I a right to apply to as the Saviour, simply as a poor undone perishing sinner, in whom there appears no good thing? I answer yes, the gospel proclamation is, Whosoever will, let him come.” Hall‟s optimistic and universal call to all sinners to repent and be saved was echoed by his protégés, who believed with Hall that “the way to Jesus is graciously laid open for every one who chooses to come to him.”6 Though these works did not yet make explicit the call to evangelism beyond the borders of race and nation, their moderation of strict Calvinism laid the theological groundwork that made such a project possible. Ultimately, it was the young pastor at Kettering, Andrew Fuller, who “dealt the mortal blow to the system which held that it was impossible for any but the elect to embrace the Gospel and that it was therefore useless to invite the unconverted to put their trust in Christ.”7 He published The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation in 1785, refuting the notion that the unconverted sinner had no need to repent, since he was unable to do so because of his total depravity. Rather, Fuller insisted on the moral obligation of those who heard the gospel to respond to it. In fact, he subtitled his book The Duty of Sinners

5 Stanley, BMS, 4-5 6 Robert Hall, Help to Zion’s Travellers: Being An Attempt to Remove Various Stumbling Blocks Out of the Way, Relating to Doctrinal, Experimental, and Practical Religion (Bristol: William Pine, 1781), 117 7A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London: The Baptists Union Publication Dept., 1947), 161 3

to Believe in Jesus Christ. Though Fuller‟s work spoke only of all those (election aside) who had heard the message, he opened up the way for the consideration, by William Carey, of those who had not heard it at all.8 Carey, Fuller, Ryland, Sutcliff, and the other young tradesmen and ministers who formed the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 shared a unique vision for missionary work, which arose from their nonconformist roots as members of autonomous churches in an embattled and despised denomination. As Dissenters, the BMS founders refused to pledge loyalty to the Established Church of England and were, therefore, barred from public office by the Test and Corporation Acts. They counted seventeenth-century radicals—, Anabaptists, Diggers, Levellers—among their forefathers, and knew that previous generations of nonconformists had died for their faith. They were poor, and most earned their living by manual labor, preaching for free. This tradition of pragmatism and independence deeply informed their vision of the missionary enterprise and the early workings of their missionary society. The BMS founders and their first missionaries to India, William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward, adopted the Moravian vision of brotherly community and cooperation in their joint enterprise.9 As the first secretary of the society, Andrew Fuller acted as the missionaries‟ confidante, friend, and intercessor. Fuller viewed foreign missionary work as a task that could be accomplished only through brotherly cooperation among equals and had no desire to control the actions of missionaries abroad. He saw his colleagues in the mission field as an autonomous body who, though aided by his prayers and his efforts to raise money and awareness of their cause in Britain, carried forward the gospel under their own direction and, largely, their own financial support. “We have never pretended to govern [the missionaries] for two reasons,” Fuller wrote in 1813. “One is, we think them better able to govern themselves than we are to govern them. Another is, they are at too great a distance to wait for our direction.”10 Carey and his

8Alan P.F. Sell, “The Gospel Its Own Witness: Deism, Thomas Paine, and Andrew Fuller” in Enlightenment, Ecumenism, Evangel: Theological Themes and Thinkers 1550-2000 (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2005), 111; Stanley, BMS, 5 9 Carey and a man named John Thomas sailed first in 1793 as BMS missionaries; Ward and Marshman joined Carey in 1799. The longevity and joint work of these three at Serampore, India made them the great representatives of their generation for the BMS. 10 Angus Library copy, Andrew Fuller to Ward, London, 5 March 1813, quoted in E. Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793-1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 25 4

colleagues at Serampore, the first Baptist station in India, were deeply grateful for Fuller‟s practical view of their situation. When the missionaries sent their 1809 report to the Society, they stressed Fuller's part in their success. "God has done great things, not only by us, but through you," Ward wrote to Fuller. "We can never separate ourselves from you for a moment in thinking what God has done for the Baptist mission in India."11 The missionaries‟ attachment to Fuller stemmed largely from their shared vision of how the missionary enterprise should work. As long as Fuller stood at the helm of the BMS, the society dealt with its missionaries as friends or colleagues, not as employees.12 In their own self-governance, the missionaries pursued a course of action that stressed unity within an independent missionary community. When Carey, Marshman, Ward, and their families set up their mission station at Serampore in 1799, their plan of governance and property was communal in style. Agreeing to a plan of “family government,” the missionary group constituted themselves as a religious community bound by Christian brotherhood; all would be ruled by all. Each Saturday, the mission family met together for prayer, to re-devote themselves “to one another in love,” and to adjust any differences that might have arisen between them during the week. Further, all property, money, and supplies were to be held in common: “it was resolved that no one should engage in any private trade; but that whatever was done by any member of the family, should be done for the benefit of the mission.”13 It was in keeping with this covenant that William Carey, when he obtained a post at the College of Fort William in Calcutta, devoted his salary to the mission coffers, and that Joshua and Hannah Marshman gave the proceeds of their school to the mission effort.14 Paradoxically, this vision for missionary work required great self-sacrifice by individual missionaries for the larger family, while the mission itself remained independent and self-directed. Their personal sacrifices made it possible for them to remain free of BMS funds, and to manage their mission work on the spot. In the early days of the society, both the committee of leaders in Northamptonshire and the mission family in Serampore saw this arrangement

11 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 424 12 Fuller to Ward, 15 July/9 Aug. 1812, cited in Stanley, History of the BMS, 30 13 Baptist Missionary Society, Brief Narrative of the Baptist Mission in India. Including an account of translations of the Scriptures, into the various languages of the East (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1811), 17. Such an arrangement also reflected the Baptists‟ commitment to the example of the first century apostles and church, who gave to one another freely and held everything in common. See Acts 2. 14 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 144-9, 131 5

as practical, Biblical, and best suited to achieve their mutual aim—the evangelization of India. The founding generation‟s approach to missions reflected their ideas about church autonomy and individual religious liberty at home. The society had provincial origins; it was rooted in the soil of Northamptonshire, and planted by men whose deep commitment to the freedom of individual Christians and churches had made them reluctant, at first, to agree to any kind of church or missionary association which might threaten congregational autonomy.15 Traditionally, nonconformist churches acted independently in all things. Individual congregations directed and supported their chosen good works alone, rather than pledging their funds to a larger association. Even the Northamptonshire association of churches, from which the BMS had sprung, was a relatively new development. In 1792, no organization or means of raising money to support the society existed. , a young Birmingham pastor and friend of Carey‟s, took the first step towards creating a supportive base when he collected seventy pounds from his own church and formed an auxiliary society in Birmingham to raise funds and awareness for the work of the new missionary society.16 Other funds were acquired through appeals to individual churches. Fuller wrote personal letters to influential pastors requesting support. For instance, preserved in the vestry of St. Mary‟s church in Norfolk is a letter from Fuller to Joseph Kinghorn, one of the best-known pastors of Norfolk, requesting aid to pay Carey‟s passage to India in 1793. Funds acquired in this unpretentious and rather disorganized fashion sufficed to send the first BMS missionaries to India that summer, though with no guarantee of future support. As the mission continued, collections taken up periodically from individual congregations continued to forward the effort. In 1812, after fire destroyed the printing press at Serampore, the Baptist church at Norwich raised 700 pounds to help replace it, and a deacon of that church carried the news to a smaller congregation at Ingham, which immediately contributed 19 pounds.17 Organization was informal, contributions

15 No Baptist Union, encompassing multiple churches outside of a single region, existed prior to the formation of the BMS. The need to better organize funding and information for missions ultimately led to the creation of the Union in 1813. Stanley, History of the BMS, 29 16 E.A. Payne, The First Generation: Early Leaders of the Baptist Missionary Society in England and India (London, Carey Press, 1936), 48-50 17 Charles Boardman Jewson, The Baptists in Norfolk (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1957), 66-67 6

spontaneous, and every donation gratefully received. Such funds supplemented the money the missionaries themselves earned and raised in India. Extensive organization and bureaucracy did not at all characterize either the Baptist churches of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or the early missionary vision of the BMS. The founding generation deeply mistrusted not only bureaucracy and organization, but “respectability.” Fuller, Carey, and their contemporaries were artisans and impoverished preachers, political and social outsiders who were unashamed of their mean origins. As such, they were innately suspicious of wealth, respectability, and urban culture, particularly London culture. Fuller—who had played the leading role in moving the Baptist churches of northern England away from hyper-Calvinism—viewed London‟s Baptist churches and ministers as still “fatally compromised” by such views; indeed, the London churches‟ initial aloofness towards foreign missions confirmed their lack of enthusiasm for the object closest to his heart.18 As well, the rather provincial men who began the society eschewed any kind of public display. Fuller and his colleagues heartily disapproved, for example, of the London Missionary Society‟s annual public meetings, which they viewed as ostentatious, and refused to consider such meetings for their own society. Such displays, “presided over by wealthy notables and full of „speechifying,‟ would be a dangerous concession to worldliness,” they believed.19 The early leaders‟ aversion to wealth and consequence is further enshrined in a series of resolutions, passed at a general meeting of the society held at Kettering in 1812. Unanimously, the members of the BMS declared, “That the Society approves of the proceedings of its committee, and recommends a perseverance in the same unostentatious and prudent course in which things have hitherto been conducted.” Further, the society offered its cordial approval of “the disinterested, laborious, patient, and prudent conduct” of its senior missionaries, and recommended that the younger brethren emulate them.20

18 Stanley, History of the BMS, 27. Dr. Stennett, the most influential London minister in 1792, advised his London colleagues not to commit themselves to the BMS at first. For this reason, London Baptist churches had nothing to do with BMS during its earliest years. See J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 17. 19 Stanley, History of the BMS, 27. See also Catherine Hall, “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s” in White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). John Tosh also notes the common association of respectability with middle class character, which this generation of Baptists would have perceived as worldly. Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 2007). 20 Periodical Accounts II, 456-7 7

These views aligned with provincial nonconformity‟s self-denying, independent bent. In their quest to keep their missionary society prudent, hard-working, and plain, the early leadership also strove to keep the seat of the BMS in Northamptonshire. At all costs, they believed “the ark of the mission” must not be transferred to London. Fuller‟s colleague John Ryland wrote with concern in 1813 that he feared the mission, if headquartered in the capital, would “fall into the hands of mere counting-house men.”21 On the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the BMS, the committee therefore wrote to its missionaries and churches in the East: Considering that several of us are drawing towards the period of the close of our labours, we have, at this meeting, taken measures which we hope may, with the divine blessing, provide for futurity. The seat of the Society will, it is hoped, continue in the association where it originated [in the Northamptonshire association], and where we trust it will be conducted in the same quiet and harmonious way which it has hitherto been; but we have agreed to enlarge the committee by adding to it some of our brethren from different parts of the kingdom, who appear best suited for the work, and to have had their hearts most interested in it.22

This 1812 resolution kept the seat of the society in Northamptonshire, and in line with the simplicity, self-reliance, and provinciality that had characterized it since a shoemaker first proposed its creation in 1792, while still broadening the base of its leadership into other parts of England and Scotland.23 Some members of the early society did support further organization and public meetings, however. Carey‟s co-laborer Joshua Marshman was among those who believed annual meetings might raise money and stir up missionary zeal. These opposing opinions represented a significant tension in the Baptist fellowship between the more traditional Dissenting position that church work should be propagated and supported by individual congregations, and the rising power of the more bureaucratic and respectable world of evangelical philanthropy—a realm in which monetary concerns increasingly influenced the fate of missionaries and mission churches.24 Fuller‟s fear of the latter

21 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 190 22 Periodical Accounts II, 458-9 23 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, II, 78-79. Alan Everitt notes that even in the mid-nineteenth century, “there were probably few counties where the Old Dissent as a whole was more powerful or more deeply entrenched than in Northamptonshire.” Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: The Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1972), 51 24 Stanley, History of the BMS, 27-28. See also Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonemen:The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Evangelical philanthropy and the humanitarian movement worked frequently alongside missions at mid- century. Baptist willingness to adopt humanitarian causes and strategies at this time may be contrasted 8

arose from his stringent opposition to ostentatious associationism. He rejected the worldliness and hyper-Calvinism of London philanthropy, but he also believed that, if the BMS conceded to reformers, the bond of love and brotherhood between prayerful leaders in Britain and their independent, self-supporting coworkers in the mission field would be broken, and replaced by a relationship between bureaucracy and employees. In 1813, Fuller wrote to Carey, Marshman, and Ward to warn them against a “speechifying committee” who would delight in “multiplying rules and regulations” rather than privileging their mission work in India.25 Despite the tensions present in the early society, though, Fuller‟s concerns were, in the first twenty-five years of the mission, only that. The early image and goals of the society persisted. From 1792 until well into the nineteenth century, this pragmatic and independent vision carried missionaries and their families into the field with little more than the promise of prayer behind them. The society leadership viewed them—and they viewed themselves—as tools in the hands of God. Through them, they believed, the providential purpose of global evangelism would be realized. The society‟s initial understanding of the way missions should be carried out also significantly affected the way missionaries viewed their converts. The society and its missionaries immediately saw native Christians, like the missionaries themselves, as instruments in the hands of God and as independent agents who, with appropriate teaching, could carry the gospel to their neighbors far more effectively than white missionaries. Thus a vital part of the early missionary vision of the BMS demanded that missionaries respect and love converts as brothers and sisters, and use them as God‟s emissaries for his ultimate purpose of worldwide evangelization.26 Evidence from the society‟s first mission to Serampore shows that the missionaries early attempted to diminish racial distinctions within their body. In 1804, the missionaries of Serampore laid hands upon two of their first converts, Krishnu and Petumber, setting them apart for the ministry. On this occasion William Ward joyfully

with their reluctance, forty or fifty years before, to have anything to do with what might be perceived as secular causes. This conundrum will be further explored in chapters two and six. 25Angus Library copy, Andrew Fuller to Ward, Kettering, 15 July 1812, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 25 26 Much recent literature takes a different view of the missionary-convert relationship, as discussed later in this chapter. 9

observed, “Now we may reckon on two heathens being ministers of the Gospel.”27 In subsequent records, “heathen” appears less frequently than “native Christian” or “native preacher” as a reference to Indian converts, and the Baptists clearly desired to relinquish many of their teaching, preaching, and governing duties to them as the future leaders of the Indian church. The society leadership approved of their action, as Fuller wrote to the missionaries at Serampore in April 1802. “The godly simplicity of the believing natives, delights us, and binds our hearts to them in Christian love. Your intention of bringing forward every hopeful gift amongst them we entirely approve…Greet them all by name; and assure them of our tender sympathy, and prayers on their behalf.”28 Fuller‟s reference to the missionaries‟ bringing forward “every hopeful gift” in their converts approves the training of Indian Christians as teachers and preachers of the gospel. The Serampore missionaries made their intentions regarding the status and role of their converts plain in their Form of agreement respecting the great principles on which the brethren of the mission at Serampore think it their duty to act in the work of instructing the heathen, which they collectively wrote and signed in 1805. Here, the independent mission communion agreed “that in planting separate churches, native pastors shall be chosen, and native deacons.” Further, the missionaries considered it their “duty as soon as possible, to advise the native brethren, who may be formed into separate churches, to choose their pastors and deacons from amongst their own countrymen, that the word may be statedly preached, and the ordinances of Christ administered, in each church, by the native minister, as much as possible…without the interference of the missionary of the district.” Under this agreement, both BMS missionaries and society leadership affirmed that converts would form themselves into independent churches, choosing their leaders from among themselves. By this means, the missionaries hoped, “the whole administration will assume a native aspect; by which means the inhabitants will more readily identify the cause as belonging to their own nation.” Finally, the Agreement reiterated the society and missionaries‟ hope that converts, not European missionaries, would be the primary carriers of the gospel throughout India. 29 For the first generation of the society, it was imperative that Indian Christians share in the

27 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 192 28Periodical Accounts II, 202 29Periodical Accounts II, 182 10

brotherhood of believers and in the burden of preaching Christ. The society viewed its Indian converts as evangelists alongside its British missionaries. All took part in the self- governing, independent mission family, and all shared the responsibility to extend their faith to the rest of India. These ideals—missionary independence, mutual love, Christian community, and native Christian participation and leadership—characterized the actions of the first generation of BMS leaders and missionaries at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was the Baptist vision in 1792, which carried the gospel into India, and later to other parts of the world. 1871-2: A Vision Abandoned? If, eighty years after their founding meeting in Kettering, William Carey and Andrew Fuller had been able to attend a meeting of the directing committee of the Baptist Missionary Society, they would have likely been pleased to see that their small association had grown significantly, and now boasted thousands of subscribers throughout the British Isles, Europe, and North America, supporting hundreds of missionaries in Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Australia. Carey and Fuller would have also found some 220 native Christian preachers, pastors, and missionaries, and 140 native schoolmasters spreading the gospel throughout the world as agents of the BMS. Their insistence on convert leadership and agency had apparently been honored by their successors.30 In some respects, though, the BMS of 1872 looked very different from the Northamptonshire brotherhood Carey and Fuller had known in 1792. The seat of the society had moved, long before, to London, and had seen members of Parliament and baronets sit in the chairman‟s seat. Annual meetings and fundraisers were usual, replete with the ceremony and speech-making Fuller had abhorred. The society‟s members met frequently in their own mission house in Holborn, where they might sit on any number of committees and subcommittees. By 1870, besides the executive committee which met quarterly to discuss major society business, the Eastern Committee, Western Committee, Finance Committee, New Mission House Committee, Candidates Committee, and Indian Special Committee also met, discussed, and wrote and brought reports on a regular

30 “The Society has now in its employment, or under its direction, 63 missionaries, about 220 native preachers and pastors, and 140 schoolmasters—a staff of 423 persons.” Annual Report 1872, 2 11

basis.31 Bureaucracy, organization, and “respectability” had mushroomed since the days of Kettering. The relationship between the society and its missionaries had changed, as well; the independent mission family model of Serampore had been forsaken for a relationship that, while still founded on Christian filial feeling, now looked more like a business partnership. Persons interested in serving the BMS as missionaries wrote to the society, were referred to the “Candidates Committee,” and, if selected, traveled to their chosen field as employees of the BMS, paid by and answerable in all things to the leadership in London. Perhaps the founding generation would have been most surprised to discern significant differences in their successors‟ approach to native Christian agency. If Carey and Fuller had chanced to walk into a committee meeting in April 1871, they would have found their successors debating a particularly vexing question: why does the gospel make so little progress in India despite all of the money the society has spent there? Why are Indian churches and converts so dependent upon British churches for funds and leadership? In 1869, in order to examine this issue and others, the committee of the society had begun a special inquiry into the workings of the Indian mission, sending a list of sixty-seven questions to each of its twenty-one mission stations in India. The questionnaire indicates concerns regarding the usefulness of native preachers, church growth, the spending of the society‟s money, and native postures toward Christianity after the 1857 mutiny.32 Most relevant to the society‟s view of native agency was question sixty-seven, directed to each missionary who headed a mission station: “In your experience is the payment, by missionaries or by societies, of native preachers prejudicial to their reception among the people, and to the spread of Divine Truth?”33 The responses to these questions, as recorded in the society‟s printed report on the inquiry, varied widely. Some missionaries suggested that Indian Christians had become too dependent on the society, and that it would benefit the spread of the gospel to cease payment of indigenous ministers; others suggested that native preachers be paid 100 rupees as

31 BMS MSS., Baptist Missionary Society Minutes 1792-1914, Committee Meeting 3rd May 1870, 190-1 32Reports and Documents on the Indian Mission, Prepared for the Use of the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society, by the Special Committee, appointed December 7th, 1869, (London: Baptist Mission House, 1872), 1-7 33 Reports and Documents., 3-7 12

severance and then released. A few missionaries unequivocally supported the continued payment of Indian ministers. One of the overseeing missionaries who responded to the questionnaire was Gogun Chunder Dutt, himself an Indian Christian working in Khoolnea district. Dutt, who was responsible at the time for five churches and four native pastors, responded vehemently to this question. He warned the BMS in a rather desperate tone that “if the English Societies were to withdraw the salaries of the native preachers, then ignorance and sin would darken the country, which would be thicker than Egyptian darkness.” Though it was the duty of the Indian churches to support their own pastors and itinerant preachers, Dutt argued, the churches were far too poor under present circumstances to maintain these ministers. Since Indian churches were currently unable to pay the native ministry who were so essential for the propagation of the gospel, British Baptists must continue to support them. If they did not, who, Dutt asked, would preach the gospel to Indians? Invoking the New Testament precedent of congregations financing the work of the apostle Paul, Dutt firmly declared that, in the brotherhood of believers, no difference of nation or blood should prevent Christians from helping each other and preaching the gospel. “There was no nationality among them to divide Christians from Christians,” the Indian missionary insisted, “but it was an universal brotherhood, to unite them, and help each other for the great work in which they were engaged. As long as our Churches are unable to support the native evangelists, you should support them.”34 Gogun Chunder Dutt himself was an apt representation of the ideal Carey, Marshman, and Ward were looking towards in their 1805 Agreement. An Indian Christian, he oversaw multiple churches as pastor and, like the early BMS missionaries, invoked apostolic example to defend his position. Dutt‟s plea that society funds continue to support Indian preachers should, for this reason, have carried great weight with the committee in London. The overall tone of the society‟s report indicates that the BMS, facing financial difficulty and dissatisfied with the state of the mission in India, felt that much of the fault lay with Indian ministers. The committee apparently wished to cease their financial support of native preachers. In the end, despite the well-argued pleas of Indian missionaries like Dutt, that seems to have been precisely what they did. In their final

34Reports and Documents, 63 13

report, the committee stated “with much regret that the result, as a whole, is not favourable to the qualifications and efficiency of the native preachers.” Though the replies, taken all together, did not indicate that a native preacher‟s stipend decreased his usefulness, “on the other hand,” the committee reported, “it is held by some of our brethren…that the stipendiary position of the native preacher, is most injurious in its effects on himself. They believe that it lessens his zeal; it creates a mercenary spirit; it destroys spontaneous exertion both on the part of the native agent and of the native churches.” Thus in 1871, the Baptist Missionary Society resolved that it was “expedient, as soon as practicable, to cease the support of the present native agents by the funds of the Society.”35 This decision seems incongruous in light of earlier emphasis on converts as brothers and sisters in Christ and coworkers in the mission field. The traditional Baptist insistence on the brotherhood of all believers had, to all appearances, been sacrificed for the financial convenience of the Baptist Missionary Society. The society, by the early 1870s, had achieved many of the goals its founders had treasured—most significantly, their commitment to native agency for evangelization had added over 350 native Christian agents to BMS payrolls. Why, then, was the committee of the society contemplating the severance of these Indian preachers from BMS support? This seeming paradox presents several questions to the historian and points to larger problems and questions in the historiography of missions, the relation between empire and religion, and the experiences of Christian converts in British colonies. Historiography: Missions and Empire In the last ten years, such eminent historians as Catherine Hall, Susan Thorne, and Kathleen Wilson have taken up the subject of British foreign missions as part of a larger project to understand the ways in which Englishness itself was constructed. Their books have received deserved attention for their insistence on placing colony and metropole in a single analytic frame, for their deft handling of the mutually constitutive relationship between Britain and its empire, and for pointing to vital questions of identity. They ask how the colonial experience informed British understandings of race, gender, and class in

35Reports and Documents 251-252. The criticisms that those in favor of ceasing Indian preacher pay offer here are similar to criticisms offered, in the same period, by evangelical philanthropists who argued that poor relief only corrupted the poor, rather than helping them. See Hilton, Age of Atonement, 16, 93; see also Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? An Historical Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 82-6. 14

both imperial and domestic settings. A student of British or British Empire history is most likely to encounter the history of the modern missionary movement through one of these studies. In Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830- 1867, Catherine Hall declares herself a “historian of Britain who is convinced that, in order to understand the specificity of the national formation, we have to look outside it.”36 Hall‟s search beyond the boundaries of the nation leads her to nineteenth-century , where she examines the Baptist Missionary Society‟s work among the black peasantry as a test case for English national identity formation. It is here, in the colonial encounter, she says, that Englishness and whiteness were constituted, because they had to be set off against what they were not—Africanness, blackness, and the uncivilized. She also stresses the relations of power inherent in the connections between Jamaica and Britain, colony and metropole, missionary and convert, and argues that these relations were “mutually constitutive, in which both coloniser and colonised were made.”37 Like Hall, Susan Thorne in Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England argues that imperialism was not a “one- way street,” where power and ideas flowed only from Britain to the colonies. She rather posits that metropole and colony deeply influenced one another. Thorne is particularly interested in the way missionary experience in the colonial setting informed social and political formulations at home, and therefore insists that, in the nineteenth century, empire “loomed large” in the minds of many Britons. She finds that the provincial middle class as well as a working class minority found meaning in their relation to the Empire.38 Ordinary Britons, daily inundated with missionary stories and images of, as Thorne stresses, idolatrous heathens and grateful converts, were able to produce counter- images of themselves in relation to these colonized peoples. Ultimately, “the imaginative relationship to the empire encouraged by missions contributed …to …central

36 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9 37 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 8 38 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 4 15

developments of British social history in this period: class formation, gender relations, the rise and demise of English liberalism, and the role of organized religion therein.”39 Thorne and Hall place great weight on the role played by missionary literature in creating Britons‟ knowledge of their empire. Thorne notes that “the quantity, regularity, and duration of the missionary movement‟s output of propaganda on its metropolitan home front exceeded that of any other lobby with colonial interests to promote.” The channels and means of communication about mission efforts were such that, she contends, even small tradesmen knew about African and Polynesian life.40 Hall likewise foregrounds the ways in which “representations of empire…shape[d] political and other discourses.”41 For both Hall and Thorne, the notions of representation and imagination are key; they argue that missionary publications deeply affected Britain‟s self-knowledge by producing Englishness in contrast to a colonized Other. Kathleen Wilson, in The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century pursues a similar line of thought for an earlier period. Island Race likewise sees English identity as constructed largely in the colonial setting, and explores the process of national identity formation in the eighteenth century through English responses to various colonial encounters and literatures.42 Wilson attempts to interrogate the ways in which colonization informed and constituted Britain‟s view of itself as a chosen nation whose religion and culture would civilize and educate the colonized. She explores these concepts by looking at a wide range of case studies, among them the late eighteenth century mission to Tahiti, undertaken by the London Missionary Society. Missionaries and the literature they produced from the field, she argues, contrasted rational with both Catholic idolatry and Tahitian barbarism, “thus secur[ing] to Britons the certainty of their own excellence and entitlement.”43 For Wilson, as for Hall and Thorne, the missionary movement‟s significance lies in what it reveals about Englishness and the imperial project.

39 Thorne, Congregational Missions, 7 40 Thorne, Congregational Missions, 6-7 41 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 12 42 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003) 43 Wilson, Island Race, 80 16

Hall, Thorne, and Wilson all focus on the making of English identity, and on how Englishmen‟s and women‟s colonial experiences and representations influenced British politics and society. They are interested in how the Empire—as produced in missionary experiences and literature—helped Englishmen and women to imagine themselves. English identity, they rightfully say, cannot be understood outside of its relation to empire. Their project is a valuable one. Thanks to the work of these historians, as well as others such as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, the idea that metropole and colony constructed one another, that the two must be understood in tandem, and that colonial relations along race, class, and gender lines deeply informed such identities at home, are now taken as a matter of course.44 Their approach has made the parochialism that once characterized otherwise strong work on British class, gender, and race formations in the period of empire a thing of the past. The Empire can no longer be ignored when examining domestic British history.45 Yet we must also ask whether, in their effort to unpack the ways that Englishness was imagined, these projects ultimately place too much weight on the power of British missionaries to construct and colonize their converts. Their interest in the making of English identity leads scholars like Hall, Thorne, and Wilson to lay aside other key components of both missionary and convert experience and self-understanding. It is true that, ultimately, these histories are less interested in mission converts and churches than in understanding how missionaries‟ encounters with colonized peoples influenced social relations and identifications at home. However, we must ask if, by selecting missionaries and their supporters as our window into “the making of colonizing subjects, of racialised and gendered selves, both in the empire and at home,”46 we have eroded the visibility of the imperatives that missionaries themselves responded to when they felt the call of the mission field.

44 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1 45 Thorne makes this argument very effectively by referencing E.P. Thompson‟s The Making of the English Working Class. She notes that though Thompson himself was born to Methodist missionaries in India, he limits his work on the formation of working class consciousness to the British Isles and Europe. Thorne, Congregational Missions, 3 46 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 13 17

Such a project, of unpacking missionaries‟ Englishness while laying aside their religious motivations and experiences, limits our understanding of their identity. These authors correctly call attention to the shifting, historical, and performative nature of missionary identity, arguing that the self is made over time, through the processes of daily life, and in dialogue with others. They also fittingly insist that identity is “multiple and contingent.”47 If it is true that identity is multiple, contested, and performative, what are the consequeces of placing interpretive emphasis on the missionaries‟ Englishness to the exclusion of other identities? Does not such an approach foreclose the multiplicity of selves that historical actors might have chosen, and even ignore their own self- identifications? As the first part of this chapter has made clear, the founders and agents of the Baptist Missionary Society were part of a distinctive religious community whose understanding of their own history, as well as of God‟s providential plan, deeply marked their imaginings of themselves. Thomas Holt has written that history plays a significant role in both individual and collective self-knowledge: “to think „I am‟ requires „I was‟ which in turn needs a narrative of „they‟ and/or „we.”48 Memory of seventeenth-century forebears martyred at the hands of an intolerant government lingered in the collective history of Dissent. Because of this past, nonconformists, even in the nineteenth century, were associated with radical religion and radical politics. Dissenters, and Baptists in particular, constantly faced suspicion both at home and abroad, where missionaries were repeatedly accused of fomenting rebellion and mutiny. Bearing in mind the historical nature of identity, it is certain that, for nonconformist missionaries, a past of radical religion and politics constantly colored the present, and prevented, in many ways, their associating themselves fully with Britain‟s government or its Empire.49 Dissenters‟

47 Wilson, Island Race, 3 48Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100 (Feb. 1995), 9. Troelstch argues that this is particularly the case for Christian institutions: “The churches and Christianity, which are pre-eminently historic forces, are at all points conditioned by their past, by the Gospel which, together with the Bible, exerts its influence ever anew, and by the dogmas which concern social life and the whole of civilization.” E. Troelstch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. O. Wyon (London, 1931), I, 25, quoted in David M. Thompson, “The Nonconformist Social Gospel” in Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c. 1750-1950 Essays in Honor of W.R. Ward, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 256 49 It should be noted, however, that as Evangelical Anglicans gained influence in British politics in the nineteenth century, Dissenters and Evangelicals often put aside past differences to work together for common humanitarian causes. For example, the abolitionist movement and the battle to open India to 18

outsider status as laboring “mechanics” and nonconformists likewise created social and political relationships that bound them to one another but barred them, in many ways, from the very “Englishness” that Hall, Thorne, and Wilson emphasize. They were neither participants in the political nation nor congregants of the sanctioned state church. If identity results at least partially from “where one is placed,” as Wilson states, British officials, in the Empire and at home, rarely placed missionaries in a category of unreserved Englishness.50 These authors also see identity as performative; in other words, the actions and decisions of an individual, as they are repeatedly enacted, constitute the self. This leads to the conclusion that, in order to understand missionary identity, one must evaluate the larger pattern of missionary choices and acts. Here, the weight of historical examples, rather than an interest in the making of Englishness, should determine the final understanding of the missionary character and its relationship to both colonized and colonizer. Finally, identity is multiple.51 Hall, Thorne, and Wilson all explore missions as part of an admirable attempt to deconstruct Englishness. But Englishness is only one aspect of the missionary self, and furthermore, it is an aspect that contemporaries questioned, and the missionaries themselves rarely stressed. Instead, by their own declaration, they viewed themselves primarily as Christians, and as such, part of a larger religious family that, far from limiting itself to any identifier so parochial and temporal as “English,” rejected boundaries of nation, race, and even time. All Christians participated in a collective identity as the chosen people of God. If this was the case—and missionary writings verify it repeatedly—does not the privileging of missionary Englishness and whiteness obfuscate their much more complex and multiple understandings of themselves, including the one identity—Christian—to which they most often ascribed? Ultimately, Hall, Thorne, and Wilson seek to examine how British missionaries constituted their own ethnic and racial identities against the colonized Other in the context of empire. As Hall argues of the Baptists in 1830s Jamaica, “the savagery and barbarism, as they constructed it, of the societies they went to justified their intervention.

missions brought Evangelicals and along with , Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and other groups. This evangelical alliance will be discussed further in chapters two and six. 50 Wilson, Island Race, 3 51 Wilson, Island Race, 3 19

In bringing Christianity, they were bringing civilisation, for the two were linked in their discourse.”52 Similarly, Thorne in her study of Congregational missions argues that in evangelical rhetoric, “sin was certainly a great equalizer” of both foreign and domestic “heathen” peoples, but “in such a way as to reinforce rather than subvert imperial as well as domestic social hierarchies. This was a profoundly and consistently negative equality, from which neither „heathen‟ grouping derived moral or political benefit.”53 By this reading, the goal of missionary rhetoric and evangelism is domination through the construction of difference. It is no doubt true that terms such as “heathen,” “civilization,” and “idolatrous” often appear in missionary discourse, and Hall and Thorne both take such language as evidence of the missionaries‟ desire to exercise power over their converts and impose their own English and Protestant culture on them. In this view, the power differential inherent in the relationship between colonized and colonizer stands out as the primary characteristic of mission work. However, historian Brian Stanley has recently offered a different interpretation of missionary discourse. The terms missionaries used to describe the peoples and lands they visited aligned with their understanding of their vocation. They were, they believed, bringing the saving gospel to lands in thrall to Satan and illuminating the darkness with the light of Christ. As Stanley emphasizes, Protestant missionaries were totally convinced of the exclusivity and efficacy of their religion; anything else was folly and led to damnation. It is important to note, however, that this terminology applied to native peoples jostled alongside a set of ideas that were both new and significant. Stanley argues that early nineteenth century missionary thought was unique in that it effectively paired extreme caricatures of “heathen idolatry” and “barbarism” with an insistence on the humanity of those “heathen” peoples and thus, on their ability to accept the gospel and be made perfect in Christ. In fact, this offensive terminology was intentionally employed to “magnify the capacity of the gospel to emancipate the „heathen‟ from their

52 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 93 53 Susan Thorne, “„The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable‟ Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 248 20

barbarism.”54 As Stanley shows, Baptists of the early nineteenth century urgently felt the call to minister to the souls of the lost in foreign countries, and they used extreme rhetoric to give greater weight to their cause. The contrasting approaches practiced by Hall and Thorne, on the one hand, and Stanley, on the other, to the same historical phenomena point to a limitation in the current historiography: a failure to give proper weight to the theology and religious worldview of religious people. British Empire historian Andrew Porter detects a similar disconnect in the recent literature on the role of missions in the Empire. In his landmark study Religion versus Empire, he suggests that historians who study the missions movement in the colonial context “should perhaps be prepared to take not only theology but a good many other things as seriously as did most missionaries of the day.”55 Porter‟s book discusses missionary beliefs and how they played out in their engagement with empire and the world at large. As he notes in his own questioning of Catherine Hall‟s approach, historians must recognize “that Nonconformists, evangelicals and others took their theology and religion seriously and applied them to considerable practical effect.”56 Further, he rejects the notion that “conversion, subjugation, and possession” were “necessarily linked in missionary minds, and to suggest so is surely to confuse much evangelical thought and motive with entirely different and distinct forms of imperial activity.”57 Brian Stanley‟s strong analysis of missionary rhetoric offers one such example of an interpretation of historical phenomena that accounts for theology‟s role in missionary action. In a similar vein, Andrew Porter takes care to explain the religious doctrine of divine providence and its implications for missionary action. This clarifies what might otherwise appear as inconsistent political behavior on the part of nonconformist missionaries, who frequently eschewed earthly political concerns as outside the imperatives of Christianity and its work. When government served to further the gospel, however, missionaries readily used it, invoking civil and religious liberty against planters

54Brian Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization in English Evangelical Mission Thought, 1792-1857,” in Christian Missions and the Englightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 170 55Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700- 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 11 56 Porter, Religion versus empire, 10-11 57 Porter, Religion versus empire, 9 21

who kept slaves out of worship, or urging Parliament to allow all British subjects in India, including Christian converts, to worship God as they chose. Porter reconciles this seeming contradiction—admonitions against political “meddling” versus demands for British liberty—by placing it within the context of the Christian worldview. Dissenters understood their lives as regulated and moved not by temporal governments, but by the mysterious workings of divine providence, he says. This aspect of their worldview helps explain why it was so easy for them to ignore or dismiss government or, conversely, to use it when it served their purposes. If providence moved history, government was merely a vehicle that either opposed or extended the will of God.58 Overall, then, missions, as depicted in much of the recent literature—despite notable exceptions like the work of Porter and Stanley—share the political, economic, and coercive goals of empire.59 Such a view conflates the imperial project with the missionary one despite clear evidence that colonial officials frequently obstructed evangelization, and missionaries regularly defended the human rights and religious liberty of colonized peoples against both indigenous and colonial authorities. This approach also rigidly circumscribes the possibilities of missionary-convert relationships, assuming that differences of race, gender, and national interest precluded the filial love that missionaries and converts claimed to share. This historiography‟s emphasis on the missionary project as constitutive of English identity raises another concern—the erasure of the presence and agency of converts and mission churches. By focusing primarily on “the making of colonizing subjects, of racialised and gendered selves, both in the empire and at home,”60 this approach lays aside the motivations and experiences of men and women in the colonies who accepted the missionary message and chose to become Christians. This interpretation of the missionary enterprise as a locus for the creation of colonized subjects creates a historiography in which converts rarely appear, and seldom speak. Individual Christians who played a vital role in church formation, leadership, and evangelization

58Andrew Porter, “An Overview, 1700-1914” in Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 51 59 Though most notable in Hall, Thorne, and Wilson, the assumption that missions and empire went hand in hand is by no means limited to them, appearing also in the work of such historians as Lawrence James, Bernard Porter, and Trevor Loyd. 60 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 13 22

within their own nations become passive receivers of cultural imperialism, while their own religious lives, institutions, and testimony remain unexplored. Against an approach that foregrounds the colonizing power of Protestant missions, then, it is argued here that the motivations, experiences, and decisions of missionary hearers should crucially shape any history of the missionary project in the imperial context. When we look at the missionary movement primarily as a venue for exploring British colonization, we obscure the lives and agency of the men and women who heard—and rejected, received, or altered—the missionary message. When South Asian and Caribbean individuals did choose to adopt the Baptist message, they did so for reasons of their own. Their decision to become Christians does not indicate submission to colonization. Rather, as Andrew Walls has aptly put it, “Africans, Asians, and Australasians became Christians for African, Asian, and Australasian reasons.”61 In order to fully understand the ambiguous history of Britain‟s missionary movement and its empire, we must carefully examine, not just the complex and multiple ways in which missionaries imagined themselves, but the responses of their hearers. While emphasizing the theology, religious worldview and motivations of both missionaries and converts, this approach does not preclude engagement with a broader historiography. When considering Baptist efforts in the Caribbean, the vast existing literature on creolization and religious syncretism in the context of New-World and emancipation offers vital insights into reasons why Caribbean slaves responded to the Baptist gospel as they did.62 Likewise, the subaltern studies collective may provide

61Walls, “Protestant Missionary Awakening,” in Stanley, Missions and the Enlightenment, 23. Robert Eric Frykenberg also calls for greater attention to the primacy of Indian leadership in both Christianity and educational initiatives in nineteenth-century British India. See Frykenberg, “Introduction: Dealing with Contested Definitions and Controversial Perspectives,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross- Cultural Communication since 1500 with special reference to caste, conversion, and colonialism, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 1-5 62See for example Jean Besson, “Free Villagers, Rastafarians and Modern Maroons. From Resistance to Identity” in Born Out of Resistance: On Caribbean Cultural Creativity, ed. Wim Hoogbergen, 301-314, (Utrecht: Isor Publications, 1995), Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Juanita de Barros, “„Setting Things Right:‟ Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803-38.” Slavery and Abolition 25 (2004): 28-50, Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), J.S. Handler and K.M. Bilby. “Notes and Documents On the Early Use and Origin of the Term „Obeah‟ in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean.” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001): 87- 100, Monica Schuler, “Myalism and the African Religious Tradition in Jamaica” in Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link, ed. Margaret E. Crahan and Franklin W. Knight, 65-79 (Baltimore: 23

alternative ways to think about Indian conversion in the context of colonial dominance. In his introduction to A Subaltern Studies Reader, Ranajit Guha notes that, though political initiatives such as non-cooperation, civil disobedience, and the Quit India movement were inaugurated by the elites of the Indian National Congress, “in region after region the initiative of such campaigns passed from elite leaderships to the mass of subaltern participants, who defied high command and headquarters to make these struggles their own by framing them in codes specific to traditions of popular resistance and phrasing them in idioms derived from the communitarian experience of working and living together.”63 Guha is concerned with political action; however, his elite versus subaltern formulation may be fruitfully cast in a religious context, as well. The elite religions of nineteenth-century India were Brahminical Hinduism and the faith of the colonizers, Christianity. As Guha argues for the political realm, Indian conversions to Christianity in the context of the Baptist mission may represent both a rejection and a reappropriation of these “elite” belief systems. Many converts renounced Hinduism for Christianity, but their conversion did not indicate submission to colonization. Rather, Indian Christians stressed the community and brotherhood, as well as peace of conscience, they found in their new belief, and then propagated it in idioms, and lived it in communities, that were familiar to them. Ultimately, it is the primary sources themselves that make the most convincing case for a tempered view of the missionary enterprise and the missionary-convert relationship. The work of the Baptist Missionary Society between 1795 and 1875 should be viewed, not as yet another manifestation of the British imperial impulse, but as the carrying out of religious mission by a group of people whose message was heard, accepted, or rejected in the East and West Indies by men and women who believed or doubted for reasons of their own. Baptist converts often played an immediately critical role in further evangelism and leadership of their own churches, and their visibility in the missionary enterprise must be given more attention in scholarly conversations about missionary identity, as well as the ambiguous connection between missions and empire.

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Chapter four explores the implications of this literature for conversion in the Caribbean. 63Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” in A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xviii-xix 24

In order to illuminate the pathway through history from late eighteenth-century Kettering and its band of artisan ministers to 1870s London, where the respectable committee of a large organization earnestly weighs the payment—or severance—of Indian preachers, it is important to examine Baptist identity, motivations, and worldview, and how these changed over time. Changes in the BMS approach to missions are significant; for example, the Serampore missionaries of the early nineteenth century were wholly self-supporting and independent, while later missionaries in India viewed themselves as salaried employees who must answer directly to the committee of the society. This change of approach also, significantly, affected the society‟s ideas about convert leadership and native Christian independence. Finally, missionary views of race and caste deeply influenced their evangelism and relationship with converts. Protestant missionaries, and Baptists in particular, condemned slavery, caste, and various systems of colonial exploitation well ahead of their government, and sought to combat these evils within and beyond their churches. Also critical are the responses, both positive and negative, of missionary hearers. Brahmins shouted Baptists down in the streets of Calcutta; Caribbean converts left their churches to follow a more syncretic belief in Jamaica, and Rammohun Roy, with many intelligent Bengalis of his day, drew from Protestant preaching not a belief in Trinitarian Christianity, but a revival of monotheistic Hinduism. The stories of missionary failure are just as important as those of successful conversion, and both sides will be considered here. Most importantly, as far as possible the lives, motivations, and struggles of missionary converts and mission churches themselves must be brought to light and considered. Missionary sources frequently record the experiences of converts in their own words, revealing the reasons behind their adoption of Christianity. Andrew Porter has suggested, “Even the occurrence of explicit conversions to Christianity is now recognized by historians to represent far more than a simple surrender to white power or an accommodation to the enlargement of scale and outlook introduced by colonial contacts…Christian beliefs were evidently attractive because they addressed important aspects of everyday life inadequately dealt with by traditional religions.”64 It is facile to view conversion simply as a corollary of empire; people who took up the Baptist faith

64Porter, Religion versus Empire, 320 25

chose to do so for some reason. Native Christian speeches in missionary meetings, letters written to fellow Baptists in Britain, baptismal testimonies, sermons, prayers, and mission reports illustrate an active faith which, though grown out of British missionary work, thrived and sustained itself in South Asian and Caribbean soil. These believers created Christian communities that were distinctively South Asian or Caribbean, spiritually fed and financially supported from within, and highly evangelistic and missiological. Recent scholarship on missions in the imperial context would benefit from greater sensitivity to the multivalent nature of missionary identity and, most importantly, the crucial contributions of converts and the communities they forged in the Empire. As the British Baptist missionaries of the Jamaica Association wrote to the thousands of converts who filled their chapels in 1836, “Christians are a chosen race, separated from the world, and dedicated to God as a distinguished people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a kind of first fruit of his creatures; and thus they present themselves as living sacrifices unto God.” Baptist emphasis on native Christian church leadership and involvement, and missionary children‟s intermarriage with converts—both of which have been played down or unnoticed by many scholars—help underline that, for the Baptists, the “chosen race” referred not to skin color, but to election and sanctification by God.65 Both missionaries and converts saw themselves as part of something much larger and more important than a political empire, something more significant than visible difference.

65On Conversion. The First Circular Letter of the Baptist Missionaries, to the Churches in Jamaica, forming the Baptist Association, Assembled at East Queen Street (Kingston, Jamaica: Jordon and Osborn, 1836), 7

26

CHAPTER TWO BAPTIST AND MISSIONARY IDENTITY

This chapter addresses the role that history, theology, social and economic change, and political engagement played in the formation of Baptist and missionary identity. All of these factors informed missionary practice in the field, and circumscribed missionary engagement with imperial officials, native hearers, and converts. Changes in these characteristics over time revealed some of the tensions within that identity, and these uncertainties likewise affected missionary experience and practice. The collective memory of the Baptist faith, and Dissent in general, informed the terms under which missionaries engaged their domestic and imperial governments, as well as the people they preached to and hoped to convert.66 It is, therefore, important to understand the background of Dissenting Christianity in Britain, in order to comprehend the ways that missionary identity played out in colonial settings. The British Baptist tradition that gave birth in the 1790s to the Baptist Missionary Society shared, with other denominations, a heritage called at various times Dissenting, nonconformist, or Free Church. , Methodists, Quakers, Congregationalists, and other groups also identified themselves, alongside Baptists, as unwilling to submit to the dictates of the national church. Their joint genealogy extended back to the period of the Protestant Reformation, and they took many of their basic doctrines from the reformers of the sixteenth century. “From Luther himself they had learned the great doctrine of justification by faith; from the Reformers generally they had learned to appeal to Scripture and to base themselves on the careful study of its text.” John Calvin taught them that they were an army of God, and Ulrich Zwingli and the Anabaptists contributed “strong democratic sympathies” and their ideas about “the real nature of the Church.”67 Historian Michael R. Watts, tracing the history of Dissent, notes that such ideas prompted the formation, in the sixteenth century, of both the English Separatists and the

66 Chapter one discusses missionaries‟ acting out of their identities as part of a larger community with a shared past. The landmark work on the construction of such a community as a nation is Benedict Anderson‟s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 67 Ernest A. Payne, The Free Church Tradition in the Life of England (London: S.C.M. Press, 1944), 30 27

Anabaptists, the two groups generally seen by Baptist historians as the forebears of the modern denomination in Britain. Just as these groups shared the doctrinal heritage of the century of Reform, they likewise jointly partook, in the following century, of a period of civil war, struggle, and persecution. In this century, the nonconformist tradition crystallized into several denominations, including Baptist, Independent (Congregationalist), Quaker, and Presbyterian, according to Watts, with the important addition of the Methodists in the following century.68 Though most bodies of British Dissent enjoyed toleration during the English Civil War, they found themselves on the wrong side after the Restoration, and many paid dearly for it. In particular, “Baptists were commonly regarded as most dangerous plotters and sectaries.”69 Despite Charles II‟s own tendencies toward religious toleration, the majority of Parliament believed “that every Presbyterian was a potential rebel and every Independent a regicide at heart.” It would be Commons‟ “calculated and often malicious persecution of Dissent” that would set the tone for the new regime‟s relations with subjects outside the Established Church.70 A rising of Fifth Monarchy Men in 1661 confirmed Parliamentary suspicion, and the government forbade meetings of Dissenters, jailed thousands of congregants, and hanged ministers, including the Baptist pastor John James of Whitechapel.71 Parliament codified official mistrust of the Free Churches by creating the Clarendon Code, named for Charles‟s Lord Chancellor. This body of law included the 1661 Corporation Act, which kept those who refused to take the Anglican Eucharist out of public office, the 1673 Test Act, which closed civil and military offices to Dissenters, and the 1664 Conventicle Act, which made attendance at nonconformist services subject to harsh penalties, and aimed at the suppression of all

68 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I, viii 69 William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith. (Chicago: The Judson Press, 1959), 220; see also A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists. (London: The Baptists Union Publication Dept., 1947), 66, 82 70 Watts, I, 222 71 Watts, I, 223. Thomas Crosby, an eighteenth-century Baptist historian, records the arrest and sentencing of James. Charged with speaking “treasonable words against his Majesty‟s royal person,” James received the sentence of death despite his wife‟s pleas to the king. When asked what he had to say for himself, James quoted Scripture against his prosecutors. According to Crosby his last words declared “that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of all the kingdoms of the world.” See Thomas Crosby, The History of the English Baptists, From the Reformation to the Beginning of the Reign of King George I. 4 vol. (London, 1738), vol. III, 171 28

deviation from Established belief.72 The refusal of most Baptists and Quakers to take any oaths—including the oath of allegiance to the king as the head of the church—only heightened their reputation for radicalism, and further legislation made it increasingly easy to imprison and execute Dissenters for treason. Many Baptist leaders spent much of the Restoration period in English gaols; John Bunyan, author of Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress, was the most famous of these.73 During the height of the persecution in the 1680s, the Broadmead Baptist Church in Bristol determined to meet privately to avoid further notice, but were chastised by their pastor, who enjoined them from prison not to give up meeting publicly until they “were made to cease by force.”74 When Dissenters were duly elected to Parliament despite the regulations, Parliament refused to seat them because their supporters rejected Anglican Eucharist, and thus violated the Corporation Act.75 Compared with the tension of the Restoration, the first part of the eighteenth century was a period of toleration and ease for the Free Churches, particularly after the accession of George I and the triumph of the Whigs, who were better disposed towards religious toleration than the Anglican Tories had been. During this period, congregations turned inward for retrenchment and self-critique, largely abandoning the imperatives of evangelization. Church membership, clerical intellectual standards, and religious enthusiasm fell before the advance of the Enlightenment‟s science and reason.76 During these years, the General and Particular Baptist churches suffered from doctrinal differences, mostly respecting the Trinity, and many churches divided. The General Baptist churches, who tended to resist needed changes (such as education for the pastorate), suffered most, and by 1700, most congregations had died out or turned to Unitarianism.77 Evangelism, which had been such a vital part of Baptist practice in

72 Many of these laws were aimed as much at Catholics as Protestant Dissenters. See D Mervyn Himbury, The British Baptists: A Short History (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1962), 59, Underwood, 100-5, and Watts, I, 223ff 73 Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists: Traced by their Vital Principles and Practices: from the time of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the year 1886 (New York: Bryan, Taylor, & Co, 1887), 476- 7. Bunyan was originally sentenced for only three months, but his continuing refusal to conform stretched his confinement to twelve years. Watts, I, 224 74 Watts, I, 228 75 Watts, I, 252 76 See Himbury, 63-4; Underwood, chapter VI 77 Underwood, 125-7 29

earlier years, received almost no attention. Among the Particular Baptists, antinomianism—the hyper-Calvinistic doctrine that, since only the elect would be saved, preaching served no purpose—grew increasingly common.78 This period of complacency gave way at mid-century to revival, and it was this wave of zeal and piety that produced the work of men like Robert Hall, whose Help for Zion’s Travellers led William Carey to Dissent, Andrew Fuller, who insisted—against antinomian complacency—on the universality of Christ‟s message, and Carey himself, whose concern for the unsaved abroad spurred the creation of the Baptist Missionary Society as the eighteenth century drew to a close. Carey‟s idea for foreign missions was not original within Protestantism. The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Moravians, and Wesleyan missionaries had already begun to evangelize, particularly in North America. However, as Andrew Porter illustrates, the late eighteenth century saw rising dissatisfaction with previous missionary efforts, which had focused largely on white settler populations and, often tied to parish responsibilities and colonial governments, failed to make more than isolated impact. Evangelicals in this period also became increasingly aware of the vast opportunities that were opening for missionary work abroad. Churches watched for the workings of providence and, believing that the time was now ripe for taking their message abroad, began to plan their attack on “heathenism” and apostasy. It was this upwelling of missionary zeal within the body of evangelical British Christianity that produced, at the turn of the nineteenth century, not only the BMS, but the non-denominational London Missionary Society, the Anglican Church Missionary Society, the Edinburgh and Glasgow Missionary Societies, and other groups.79 Among the Particular Baptists, Andrew Fuller‟s barrage had battered the old antinomianism down, and William Carey‟s enthusiasm won the support of other young

78 Antinomianism would be one of Andrew Fuller‟s primary targets. It had to be combated to make way for the evangelical views of Carey and the new BMS. See Underwood, 133-4 79Porter, Religion versus Empire, chapter two. Significantly, these efforts were usually characterized by a new commitment to ecumenism, as well. In light of the great task that lay before them, groups that had once opposed one another began to put aside their denominational differences. The London Missionary Society founders in particular declared “that our design is not to send Presbyterianism, Independency, Episcopacy, or any other form of Church Order and Government…but the Glorious Gospel of the blessed God to the Heathen: and that it shall be left (as it ever ought to be left) to the minds of the Persons whom God may call into the fellowship of His Son from among them to assume for themselves such form of Church Government, as to them shall appear most agreeable to the Word of God.” Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895, 2 vols. (London, 1895), Vol. 1, 49-50, quoted in Porter, Religion versus Empire, 49 30

ministers to the cause of foreign missions. From 1792, Baptist identity would be enacted on a global stage, as missionaries became actors in the metanarrative of divine providence. Theology: Providence, Biblical Primitivism, and Apostolic Example Among the doctrines which connected the missionary societies of the 1790s was the doctrine of providence—the belief that God acted in history, carrying out his plan for the salvation of the world in part by mysteriously bringing Christians into situations where they could further that end. Andrew Porter notes a “mounting general preoccupation” in the late eighteenth century with God‟s providential activity, which often centered on a belief in the coming of the millennium and apocalypse.80 Though Baptists generally avoided overly eschatological language in their writings, missionary records indicate that the doctrine of providence, perhaps more than any other teaching, helped them to explain their own role in universal history.81 The belief that God worked in the world to extend his kingdom, using his followers as instruments to that end, informed every missionary decision, and retrospectively revealed the hand of God in events that, at the time, might have seemed disastrous. Providence also helped missionaries to process and address uncomfortable realities, like the failure of evangelistic efforts to produce significant fruit in India, or the lack of significant contributions during a fiscal year. Providence could even explain why a new missionary was struck down just days after reaching his field of labor. Significantly, the providential worldview also allowed missionaries to look at institutions and individuals in terms of God‟s will. Thus government, though worthy of respect and obedience at times, could be seen simply as a vehicle of the larger providential plan, and therefore an institution that could be defied, or utilized, to further religious ends. The providential worldview is key to understanding Baptists‟ view of themselves in the context of God‟s cosmic story, as well as their responses to the people, institutions, and often difficult experiences they encountered in the mission field.82

80Porter, Religion versus Empire, 33. 81On millenialism in early nonconformity, see Watts, I, 129-133 82 Russell E. Richey has argued similarly regarding the Methodist Episcopal Church that a providential “historical understanding of the movement functioned as an essential, if not the essential, mode of self- understanding…for much of the nineteenth century those purposes placed Providence at the heart of Methodist history.” Richey, “Methodism and Providence: A Study in Secularization,” in Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c. 1750-c.1950, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 54. On providence‟s role in nineteenth century history, see also Brian Stanley, 31

In 1779, thirteen years before the founding of the BMS, the assembled ministers of Northamptonshire wrote their annual circular letter to all of the churches in the region. This year‟s letter addressed the nature and reality of divine providence. The pastors defined the doctrine as “God‟s exercise of his divine perfections over all the works of his hands, displayed in the preserving of them, and directing all their affairs to his sovereign will, in order, ultimately, to manifest his own glory.”83 Citing evidence from the Bible, the ministers insisted that God was the “preserver, governor, and director of all things.” This belief, of God‟s ultimate sovereignty over all temporal authorities, and his involvement in directing history, would powerfully influence the missionary approach to their work and their secular rulers, for, as they believed, “all the changes which affect individuals or societies, kingdoms or empires, are equally under [God‟s] inspection and influence.” Kingdoms, empires, and individuals all fell under divine authority, and “those that are good, he graciously influences; all that are evil, he sovereignly permits.” Baptists believed that God used all created things, people, powers, and institutions, whether good or evil, to advance his plan. This again clarifies how missionaries‟ providential worldview allowed them to use multiple means to the divine end of global evangelization. Further, this eighteenth century understanding of providence insisted on God‟s personal awareness of, and concern about, the work of those who followed him. The pastors wrote that God “deeply interests himself in the cares and concerns of his people, and engages in all their circumstances to support and supply them.” Belief in this aspect of providence helps explain missionary intransigence despite disease, death, persecution, or lack of converts. Whatever happened, Baptists believed that God did care about his people and their work, and he would never allow them to fail. “We shall look back and see,” the Northampton ministers promised, “that the heaviest of our afflictions were among the richest of our mercies. We shall discern unity and harmony where we once

“„Commerce and Christianity‟: Providence Theory, the Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism of Free Trade, 1842-1860” The Historical Journal 26 (1983), 71-94 and Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (1988) 83A View of the Doctrine of Divine Providence Represented in a Circular Letter from the Baptist Ministers and Messengers, Assembled at Northampton, May 25 and 26, 1779, (Northampton, 1779), 2. This document is signed by John Sutcliff as moderator, who was minister at Olney at the time. Sutcliff would later be a friend of William Carey‟s and one of the founding members of the BMS. John Ryland and Andrew Fuller also participated in the ministers‟ meeting that produced this document, 14. 32

imagined nothing but contradiction and disorder.”84 In 1806, the Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionary Society opened with a discussion of the providential nature of the first mission‟s establishment at Serampore, in Bengal. William Carey had originally settled in British territory, purchasing a share in an indigo works at Malda to support himself, starting a small printing press, and even building huts for his future colleagues. However, when his coworkers Joshua Marshman and William Ward arrived with their families, the British government refused to let them enter British territory and even threatened to expel them. Despite all of his previous work, Carey reluctantly abandoned his carefully laid plans in Malda and instead joined his colleagues at the Danish settlement of Serampore, where they received the encouragement and protection of the Danish governor.85 Looking back on this event, at the time seen as a significant setback, the authors of the Periodical Accounts discerned the hand of God: “We may reckon amongst the greatest of providential blessings which have attended this mission, the settlement at Serampore. This event was so far from being the result of human wisdom, that everything was done that could be done, to avoid it...Yet this was the way in which it pleased the Lord to lead them into a sphere of much greater usefulness.”86 Their belief in providence led the Baptists to see God‟s hand in even the negative events of their lives, and also kept them faithful when their work appeared to be failing. Felix Carey, the son of William Carey, and his missionary colleague James Chater began a station in Rangoon, in Burma, in 1809. Circumstances had forced them to plan their mission outside of the city, and when much of Rangoon burned as a result of local warfare in that year, their station remained safe on the outskirts of town. Felix Carey and Chater immediately attributed their escape to God‟s watch over them and their work, citing this event as a “reason for thankfulness for so kind and distinguishing a providence.”87 The BMS responded similarly to the persecution and humiliation their

84Divine Providence, 3, 8, 9; see also Porter, “An Overview,” 51 85J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 90-2, 109-15 86Periodical Accounts III, iii-iv. The settlement at Serampore allowed the missionaries to set up a remunerative school and press, and to avoid further British persecution, as the Danish governor remained their staunch ally. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 121-3. A very similar situation occurred in 1847, when the mission to West Africa, which had originally settled at Clarence on the Island of Fernando Po, was expelled by the Spanish government. Settling instead at Bimbia and Cameroons, the missionaries experienced much greater success than before, and understood the previous painful events as a working out of God‟s larger plan. Annual Report 1847, 187 87Periodical Accounts IV, 133 33

missionaries faced in Jamaica after the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, a slave uprising that many planters attributed to the pernicious influence of Baptist preaching. The society opened their annual meeting in 1832 with a resolution that “gratefully acknowledges the watchful superintending care of Divine Providence, in preserving the lives of the Missionaries amidst imminent danger, and in rescuing their characters from the base accusations with which they were loaded.”88 Despite the trials of 1831, God had not allowed his servants to fall into disrepute or death. The Baptists believed that, though God always worked to the good of his people and his cause, sometimes the ways of providence were mysterious and difficult to understand. When missionaries were struck down at the height of their labors, Baptists and their converts reconciled themselves to the apparent will of God, even if they failed to understand it. The Annual Report of the BMS for 1821 relayed the state of the mission in Chittagong, India. “Mr. Peacock, who had resided some time among [the Chittagong Christians]…visited Calcutta in the course of last year, when, just as he was about to return, he was attacked by fever, and in the mysterious Providence of God, removed, after an illness of eight days. The same Providence, however, has kindly interfered to furnish a successor in the person of a young man, named Johannes, who was educated in the Benevolent Institution and who, with his wife, had been for some time united with the church at Calcutta.”89 The death of Peacock was a blow, but apparently God‟s will, and providence had quickly replaced him. Other disasters could also be understood and borne in the light of divine, if mysterious, intervention. When he heard that his home had burned while he was away preaching in Eastern Bengal, the Indian convert Krishnu-pall wrote stoically to his brethren: “I have heard that my house is burnt down in Calcutta. I was a little grieved: but the Lord gave; the Lord hath taken away.”90 Krishnu‟s testimony to belief in this doctrine is particularly significant; clearly, the providential worldview was shared by missionaries and converts alike. The doctrine of providence also greatly affected the extension of missionary labor. The BMS leaders prayed for more missionaries, and assumed that the men they received were sent by God. All watched for providential openings in the mission field,

88Annual Report 1832, 3 89Annual Report 1821, 18-9 90Periodical Accounts V, 226-7 34

and the belief that God had prepared the way for evangelization in a certain country or region usually led to the establishment of a missionary station there.91 Joshua Marshman viewed the success of Krishnu‟s preaching tour in eastern Bengal, where he baptized seven new Christians over a six-month period, as indicative of God‟s will for the extension of the mission. “This opening we cannot but regard as a gracious leading in Providence,” Marshman wrote in 1813 to John Ryland, back in Britain. “To Pandooa, where Krishnoo now lives, is about six days' journey from Serampore, and brother Carey thinks with me, that with a horse or horses, we might go from thence to Munipore in about a week, and thence into China in a week more.”92 Providence informed BMS strategies in the West, as well. In 1822, the committee of the society noted that a new sphere for evangelism had intruded upon their notice “under circumstances so plainly indicating the hand of Providence, as to lead to the unanimous conclusion that it was their duty to embrace it.” The committee accordingly sent a new missionary into British Honduras that year, where he would be able to preach to both African slaves and Mosquito Indians.93 A belief in providential design also spurred the creation of the Calabar Institution, for the education of Jamaican preachers and missionaries, as well as the founding of the first Jamaican mission to western Africa, in 1839.94 The BMS offered the evidence of divine providence when justifying their extension of the work into new lands, and stressed to their supporters that they followed the will of God, rather than preceding it. The society claimed that the expansion of their enterprise arose not from their own purpose and design, but from “successive and remarkable interpositions of the will of God.”95 Ultimately, all of the larger mission family, from the BMS leadership to missionaries and converts in the far corners of the field, believed that they were actors in God‟s design, to be used as God saw fit in order to extend the kingdom. As they worked in their own narrow spheres of action, they remained conscious of their role in the cosmic narrative of salvation and judgment, and eagerly looked for the evidences of God‟s work. Though the doctrine of providence, with

91The Wesleyan movement likewise believed that its extension occurred by the hand of God. “Its revivals preaching, structures, ethos served to renew the Church, so it thought, because they derived from the workings of the Holy Spirit.” Richey, “Methodism and Providence,” 55 92Periodical Accounts V, 232-3 93Annual Report 1822, 25 94Annual Report 1839, 3 95Annual Report 1848, 8 35

its attribution of almost every event to the hand of God, may seem naïve and credulous to modern scholars, historians of missions still must work to understand it, because providence was the organizing principle through which missionaries understood themselves and their work. Providence influenced missionary identity and affected missionary dealings with everyone they met. When the BMS set policy or chose to enter a new field of labor, they believed that they were following the direction of God, and saw that divine will as their primary motive and ultimate goal. 96 If the doctrine of providence was the organizing principle through which Baptists made sense of their own identities and experiences, the doctrines of Biblical primitivism and apostolic example were the beliefs that most informed their daily practice in the mission field. The Baptist churches of Britain, and their missionaries abroad, attempted to follow the example of the primitive churches represented in the New Testament. The pattern provided by Biblical primitivism determined Baptist ideas about church government, discipline, the ordinances of faith such as baptism and the Lord‟s Supper, the process of conversion, and the addition of new members.97 When problems arose among congregants, or questions were asked about leadership, Baptists invariably went to scriptural examples, and compared the decisions of the primitive Christian churches with their own in order to determine the rightness of their actions. In 1799, the annual circular letter of the Northamptonshire Association of churches noted that several congregations lacked peace and unity, and proposed to address these problems. “Let us, brethren, look narrowly into the discipline of the primitive churches,” wrote the Northamptonshire ministers, “and compare our own with it.”98 The Northamptonshire pastorate went on to painstakingly outline the process of church discipline—that is, the exclusion of members

96Nineteenth-century Methodists and Anglicans also understood their experiences through the concept of providence. “They looked within and without expecting to detect God at work. What they found, they shared, confident that God used even humble vessels to bear that which would save others.” Richey, “Methodism and Providence,” 55. On the Church Missionary Society‟s providential rhetoric in the context of Punjabi missions, see Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford UP, 2002), 31-38. 97The Dissenters, like John Calvin, held that “the books of the New Testament contain divine directions in all the most important parts of worship and discipline.” Watts, I, 305, 310 98Discipline of the Primitive Churches Illustrated and Enforced. The Circular Letter from the Ministers and Messengers of the several Baptist Churches of the Northamptonshire Association, assembled at Olney, Bucks, May 21, 22, 23, 1799 (Northampton: Clipstone, 1799), 4. This document was created by, among others, John Sutcliff and Andrew Fuller, both of whom were members of the committee of the BMS at the time. This document was later republished under the authorship of Andrew Fuller as Expository Remarks on the Discipline of the Primitive Churches (New York: Gray, 1818.) 36

who had fallen into unrepentant sin, and the reception of those who were penitent—by citing examples from New Testament churches. This commitment to Biblical primitivism also manifested itself in Baptist understandings of their own history. Baptists cited the origins of their movement not in the Separatists or Anabaptists, but in the first century church, usually claiming the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon the Twelve Apostles and enabled them to speak in tongues and work miracles, as the birth date of their movement.99 Baptists sought the threads of their own history in belief and religious practice that conformed to the pattern of the primitive Christians of the first century. In his 1877 History of the Baptists, pastor-scholar Thomas Armitage claimed to identify the true Baptists throughout Christian history by their “vital principles and practices.”100 In this manner, the Baptists could define themselves against the Catholic and Anglican churches, which asserted unbroken historical succession from the Twelve Apostles, by maintaining a “true lineage from the Apostolic Churches…rest[ing] in present conformity to the apostolic pattern.” Armitage painstakingly argued for a Baptist genealogy that began with John the Baptist and Christ, carried on by Paul, Peter and John, maintained by some who clung to the original pattern through the Middle Ages. The thread of Baptist belief continued through the Waldensians and Lollards, thence to various baptizing Reformation sects like the Anabaptists, and finally to the Baptists themselves in the seventeenth century. “So, likewise, the unity of Christianity is not found by any visible tracing through one set of people,” Armitage concluded. “It has been enwrapped in all who have followed purely apostolic principles through the ages; and thus the purity of Baptist life is found in the essence of their doctrines and practices by whomsoever enforced.”101 When BMS missionaries in South Asia and the Caribbean gathered converts and began to form them into new churches, they followed the examples of primitive

99 See Acts 2 100Armitage, History of the Baptists, title page 101Armitage, 1. Direct appeals to apostolic example may be seen in Anabaptist literature as early as the Waterland Confession of 1580, which declared, “The doctrine which ordained ministers propose to the people ought to be or to agree with that which Jesus Christ brought from heaven, which he taught the people by word and work…and which the apostles of Christ, at the mandate and according to the spirit of Christ, announced. It…is contained in the books of the New Testament to which we join all that which is found in the canonical books of the Old Testament and which is consonant with the doctrine of Christ and his Apostles and in accord with the administration of his spiritual kingdom.” Quoted in Lumpkin, 59 37

Christianity, trying to apply the decisions and actions of the first-century apostles to their own situations. At the same time, they struggled to reconcile the major cultural differences that divided them from their converts, and worked to apply the principles of the primitive churches without attaching British norms to them. Ultimately, missionaries made decisions about church foundation, governance, and discipline based on a combination of New Testament example, attention to God‟s providential will, and simple pragmatism. They tried to establish churches after the apostolic pattern, but they also considered what would most benefit the continuing spread of the gospel in that area. These imperatives should be kept in mind when trying to interpret missionary action; decisions about governance and discipline were not made in a simply colonial or racial context. Though the realities of empire certainly affected the establishment of colonial churches, the primary factors that determined the constitution of indigenous congregations were scriptural, not imperial. In their 1805 Form of Agreement which set up the mission family and laid out methods for evangelism, the Serampore missionaries invoked primitive Christianity to justify the involvement of missionary women in their work. “We see that in the primitive times the apostles were very much assisted in their great work by several pious females,” the missionaries noted, and declared that the women of the mission family should receive as much help in acquiring Indian languages as the men, for only women would be able to speak to Indian women about the gospel.102 Generations later, the BMS missionary James Smith, stationed in Delhi, followed a similar course as he dealt with the problem of Indian church independence at a series of conferences with the Christians in that city. Urging his Indian fellow Christians to liberate themselves from British funding and leadership, Smith wrote that “at some of the meetings the speeches of Native brethren have been exceedingly cheering, and have proved not only their longing for liberty, but their fitness for it.” The group discussed the New Testament model for church independence, “and the examples of the primitive Church [were] cited to show what a small band of Christ's faithful followers may do when trusting in Him alone, and

102Periodical Accounts II, 204-5 38

labouring disinterestedly for Him in His own way.”103 The missionaries followed the pattern of the New Testament when they formed churches among Europeans, as well, and held white men and women just as closely as native converts to the apostolic example. When the missionaries Mr. and Mrs. Robinson began their work for the BMS in Java, several British soldiers heard their message and were baptized. After the baptism, Mr. Robinson administered the Lord's supper to the newly formed church: “I began by explaining the nature of a Christian Church, and stating our form of Christian Government with the manner of admitting members, and the discipline exercised towards offenders, referring to the example of the Apostolic Christians as the rule of our conduct in all these things,” Robinson wrote to the committee in 1813.104 Missionaries and churches in the West Indies followed the same principles, but their application there was more complicated, and shifted significantly as the BMS changed its position on slavery. When the first BMS missionary to Jamaica, John Rowe, sailed in 1813 to join the free black preacher Moses Baker in instructing the slave population there, the committee reminded him of the way the Apostle Paul had handled the uncomfortable question of slavery in the New Testament. The Apostle exhorted slaves “to be obedient to their own master, in singleness of heart, fearing God,” the committee said. “He furnished them with principles that would not only reconcile them to their condition, but render them [faithful] regardless of their privations and hardships, though he allowed them to accept of freedom when it was offered them.” The BMS leadership invoked apostolic example to insure that Rowe would not allow the condition of his hearers to affect his ability to convey the gospel in Jamaica.105 The society‟s opinion about slavery altered by the 1830s, however, when it became clear that the slave system was inherently detrimental to the reception of the gospel and the establishment of Christian churches in the Caribbean. The BMS opposed slavery actively beginning in 1832; Parliament abolished slavery in the Empire in 1833. According to missionary accounts of this shift, it was the

103Annual Report 1869, 307. Smith also implemented the apostolic model of house churches in Delhi. Annual Report 1869, 318 104Annual Report V, 269. Watts notes this same cleaving to apostolic example among seventeenth and eighteenth century Dissenting congregations who, following Paul, required their members to marry “only in the Lord.” Watts, I, 329. See also Watts, I, 332, 335 105Periodical Accounts V, 292 39

legal restrictions imposed on evanglization following the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica in 1831 that ultimately altered the society‟s position. However, the shift also brought the Baptists into line with the political and humanitarian activities of their Evangelical contemporaries, who by the early nineteenth century were using the “moral capital” of abolitionism to gain considerable political leverage for the cause of Evangelical Christianity. Christopher Leslie Brown‟s explanation of Evangelical abolitionism applies as well to the Baptist position: “The Evangelicals...did not set out to become abolitionists. They were concerned about slavery but not, initially, with promoting abolition or emancipation. What mattered to them was the promotion of Evangelical religion, both within the British Isles and across the British Empire. The Evangelicals not only had religious motives. They also had religious objectives.” The Baptists likewise joined the abolitionist movement not only because of the evils of slavery—though they certainly offered considerable testimony to that effect—but because slavery had become a barrier to global evangelization, their end and goal under divine providence. Thus the shift in BMS policy toward slavery is one example of a situation in which practicality and commitment to an ultimate goal, under the perceived direction of divine providence, essentially trumped the example of Paul‟s admonitions to slaves to obey their masters. In fact, missionaries often quoted the apostle against himself on this subject by the 1830s, citing his words that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”106 West Indian slavery forced missionaries to weigh their doctrines and goals in the balance. Apostolic teaching on slavery aside, the BMS, when faced with a choice between the foreclosure of their mission due to slave codes—or the limiting of their gospel to the white population—chose to become politically active in the abolitionist movement. In other cases, missionary writings cited apostolic example when arguing for the importance of indigenous ministry and self-support, and as a way of making a distinction between Baptists and other denominations.107 It is, again, significant that missionaries applied these doctrines to Europeans as well as Africans or South Asians, and that converts clearly adopted this belief in their own practice. Native Christians themselves

106 Galatians 3:28 107Periodical Accounts V, 667; Periodical Accounts VI, vi; Annual Report 1856, 12-3 40

invoked apostolic example, quoted scripture, and held up BMS actions to the primitive pattern when confronting the committee‟s desire to cease payment of Indian preachers in the early 1870s. Indian missionary Babu Goolzar Shah, overseer of the Simla district, wrote to the BMS that, though it was desirable for Indian preachers to be wholly self- supporting, “at the same time, as „the labourer is worthy of his hire,‟ I do not consider that the payment of native preachers…has been hitherto prejudicial to the spread of divine truth.” 108 After quoting Christ himself in support of the continued payment of native preachers, the Reverend Goolzar Shah went on to argue that “it cannot be denied that a greater portion of our native Christians who form the present native Baptist churches in India, have been gathered by the self-denying efforts of our native preachers.” He concluded that the success of indigenous ministry in India followed the pattern of Biblical primitivism. “As we find in the Primitive Churches, the Gospel took deep root in several places only by the instrumentality of the natives of those places.”109 The doctrines of providence, Biblical primitivism, and apostolic example were followed by Europeans and non-Europeans, and missionaries and converts alike. And while missionaries and pastors sought to apply these doctrines to church establishment, conversion, and discipline, they tried to practice such beliefs in a purely Biblical form, without attaching cultural norms to them. For example, the Serampore missionaries cited apostolic precedent to defend their refusal to ask Indian converts to change their names from Hindu to Christian ones after baptism. William Carey argued that “it did not appear to have been usual in the apostolic age to repudiate such names of heathen origin such as Sylvanus, Olympias, Hermes, Nereus, and Fortunatus. Mr. Ward and Mr. Marshman fully concurred in this view of the case, and it was resolved not to impose any new names on the converts at their baptism.”110 Baptist converts from Hinduism kept their names, their Hindu dress, and the cultural connections that those represented, for the missionaries asked them to change only their religious belief and practice.111

108Goolzar Shah quoted from Luke 10, in which Christ sends out disciples and tells them not to take money or supplies with them, but to stay in the homes of the people they meet. The quote is from 10:7: “Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the laborer is worthy of his hire.” 109Reports and Documents, 207. Goolzar Shah‟s colleague, the Reverend Gogun Chunder Dutt, made a similar argument from scripture and apostolic example. See Reports and Documents, 63 110J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 151-2 111Baptist converts from Hinduism continued to dress in the Hindu fashion. William Ward and a new convert preached together in a Serampore marketplace in 1815, and a local man asked the native convert 41

The society also worked to mold missionary practice to those channels that would most effectively reach the lost, despite cultural differences. In 1869, after considering the progress of their mission work in the Delhi region, the committee of the BMS expressed concern “that the preaching, as carried on, is not so efficient as it might be made. After much prayerful consideration, they think that the element most wanting, next to the blessing of God, is a closer identification of the missionary with the interests, feelings, and life of the people.” The committee noted the impediments of caste as well as the colonial relationship “of Englishmen to the conquered race” which had heretofore limited missionary influence. “It is the wish of the Committee that the missionaries of the Society should earnestly endeavour to overcome these obstacles. Not only should they address the people in the market-place and on the road, but also mingle with them in daily life, visit their homes, take part in all their trials and difficulties, and, so far as is practicable, 'become all things to all men.' Where to any extent this has been done, the greatest good has followed.”112 The Baptist mission thus worked to overcome cultural and racial difference, both by, again after the example of the Apostle Paul, “becoming all things to all men,” and by employing indigenous Christians who, like white missionaries, were viewed as actors in the divine plan for global evangelism. The Changing Fortunes of Dissent: Baptist Socioeconomic Advance in the Nineteenth Century Theology deeply influenced Baptists‟ understandings of themselves and their community, and dictated many of their policies and responses in the mission field. A second important factor in Baptist identity formation that likewise powerfully affected missionary policy was the slow alteration in social and economic circumstances that Dissenters experienced during the nineteenth century. In Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson defines class consciousness as a social and cultural formation

why he did not wear European clothes. The convert responded that “he was a Hindoo, and therefore he continued to wear the Hindoo dress.” As this convert obviously was not persisting in Hindu worship and practice, this statement can be interpreted as an affirmation of his continuance in other aspects of Hindu culture. The convert saw no reason to dress as a European after becoming a Christian, and the missionaries did not expect him to do so. Periodical Accounts VI, 186 112Annual Report 1869, 11. This quotation of Paul is from 1 Corinthians 9:22. In its broader context, it reads thus: “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews…To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” 42

arising from historical processes over time. “Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily.”113 In writings from the Northamptonshire association‟s circular letters of the late eighteenth century to the correspondence of 1860s-70s BMS secretary E.B. Underhill, Baptists very rarely use class terminology to describe themselves, and are far more likely to self-identify in religious terms, rather than social or economic categories. Thus, while it is difficult to argue for a Baptist class consciousness based primarily on productive relations, Dissenters no doubt shared experiences, interests, and goals and viewed themselves as a group set apart from the rest of society by their religious belief. It is further clear that, in the long view of the denomination‟s and the missionary society‟s history over the eighty- year period between the 1790s and the 1870s, Baptists in general did advance in socioeconomic status over time. Because such changes in wealth, social status, and respectability influenced missionary funding, policy, and approaches to topics like native ministry and church independence, it is important to explore the changing fortunes of Dissent in this period.114 From the beginning of the Baptist movement in the early seventeenth century, most adherents came from the lower orders of society. Even leadership and ministers were “mechanics” who worked with their hands, and early preachers had little more education than their congregations. Many ministers received no pay or formal training, but earned their living by manual labor and preached for free.115 Throughout the seventeenth century, the typical Baptist was an artisan. In his 1738 history of the denomination, Thomas Crosby listed twelve Baptists who were arrested while worshipping in Ailsbury in 1664. Among them were a minister, a teacher, a glover, a linen-draper, a tallow-chandler, a farmer, a shoemaker, a widow with six children, and a

113E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 9. The terms working class and middle class do not appear in missionary sources. When other sources refer to Baptists, they usually call them artisans or mechanics, or note the profession of that specific individual. 114The implications of the alterations in Baptist fortunes and political engagement in terms of these sorts of policy considerations will be fully explored in chapter six. 115Underwood, 125 43

spinster.116 By the late eighteenth century and the founding of the BMS, some Baptists had climbed into the middle classes, but most seem to have remained artisans, and content to be so. The three Serampore missionaries, William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward, all began life with scant education and simple hand skills. Carey was a shoemaker, Ward a printer‟s apprentice, and Marshman a weaver‟s apprentice. All had received only a cursory formal education until entering the ministry.117 Yet their abilities, carried into the mission field with them, contributed significantly to the security and independence of the mission. A trade often assisted a missionary in self-support, and the ability of individual missionaries to sustain themselves and their families with their hands reinforced the sect‟s emphasis on personal freedom and independence. In India, Carey got around the East India Company‟s anti-missionary policies by registering as a settler and working in an indigo factory during his first years there.118 Later, his knowledge of Bengali won him a post (though not a professorship, since he was a Dissenter) at the new College of Fort William in Calcutta. The five hundred rupees a month he earned this way, added to the Marshmans‟ modest remuneration for their school, allowed the Serampore mission to become independent from the society‟s financial assistance.119 Baptist leadership in Britain came from similar stock, and equally valued individual labor and the independence it could provide. Andrew Fuller, Carey‟s encourager and the first secretary of the BMS, “came of sturdy yeoman stock” and grew up laboring on his father‟s farm in Soham. Samuel Pearce, a young minister and idealist who took up the first collection for the society, worked as a silversmith before entering the ministry.120 Among the Jamaica missionaries who achieved notoriety for their battle against slavery in the 1830s, only one, , came from a middle class background. was apprenticed to a wool-stapler, and , one of the most outspoken defenders of the Jamaican slaves, earned a living as a Sunday

116Crosby, II, 180-3 117J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 5-8, 93-5, 102-5 118J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 65-8, 90-2 119J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 144-9 120 Payne, The First Generation, 25, 47 44

school teacher before becoming a missionary.121 Baptist missionary achievements, attained in spite of their apparent lack of socioeconomic status and education, did not go unnoticed by secular observers. In February of 1809, Robert Southey‟s Quarterly Review surveyed, with admiration and surprise, the work completed by Carey, Marshman, and Ward in Bengal: These low-born and low-bred mechanics have translated the whole bible into Bengalee, and…printed it. They are printing the new Testament in the Sanscrit, the Orissa, Mahratta, Hindostan, and Guzarat, and translating it into Persic, Telinga, Karnata, Chinese, the language of the Sieks and of the Burmans, and in four of these languages they are going on with the Bible. Extraordinary as this is, it will appear more so, when it is remembered, that of these men one was originally a shoemaker, another a printer at Hull, and a third the master of a charity-school…in fourteen years these low-born, low-bred mechanics have done more towards spreading the knowledge of the Scriptures among the heathen, than has been accomplished, or even attempted by all the world besides.122

The humble nature of the Baptist denomination and its missionary society in the late eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries appears to have been to the advantage of the missionary project. Artisan skills and experience as schoolmasters promoted missionary and mission church independence of British funds while maintaining the unity of the mission family, and their mean origins magnified the significance of their achievements, as Southey‟s comments illustrate. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the fortunes of the denomination seemed to be changing. Michael Watts identifies the period from 1840 to 1859 as particularly characterized by upward social mobility nad respectability for Dissenters in general.123 The rising fortunes of Dissent were illustrated both by the increased expenditures of Free Churches and their organizations, and by mounting respectability of their members. For example, Benjamin Shaw acted as treasurer of the BMS in the 1820s. Shaw, a layman, had formerly served as M.P. for Westbury, and together with the first historian of the BMS, Francis A. Cox, later founded University College, London.124 T.F. Buxton, member of Parliament and a major voice in the humanitarian movement and abolitionism, chaired the annual meeting of the society in

121Hall, Civilising Subjects, xiii-xviii 122Quarterly Review I, (Feb. 1809), 196-225. Quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 190-191 123Watts, II, part V 124Stanley, BMS , 209. Stanley cites the selection of Cox as “evidence of the concern of the Committee to give the Society a more assured social standing than had been the case under Andrew Fuller.” It must be assumed that Shaw either took Anglican communion in order to take his seat, or that his right to sit on a corporation went unchallenged, for the Clarendon Code was still in force. See Watts, I, 348 45

1835.125 Another M.P., Charles Lushington, Esq., chaired the 1838 meeting, and the mayor of Leeds, George Goodman, chaired in 1851.126 Edward Bean Underhill, society secretary from 1849 to 1876, had begun his professional life as a grocer, but gained the title of “Esquire” and a scholarly reputation by the time of his secretaryship. The Leicester General Baptist Thomas Cook, founder of the firm of travel operators, was instrumental in beginning Baptist missions in Rome in the 1870s.127 The Baptists‟ rise was also exemplified by the society‟s increased receipts and expenditures. The nonconformist public had pockets deep enough after the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica to subscribe ₤14,000 to the effort of rebuilding ruined chapels in 1832 and 1833.128 A collection taken up on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the BMS amounted to ₤53,000, raised, as the Annual Report for 1843 noted, “at a season of general and unprecedented commercial depression.”129 In this year, the committee felt confident enough in their finances to purchase a ship for the use of the West African mission, on the advice of such noteworthies as Colonel Nicholls, former governor of the island of Fernando Po, and MacGregor Laird, whose steamship engineering helped ensure British victory in the Opium Wars.130 The following year, the society made another major purchase, of the building at 33 Moorgate Street in the City of London, now to be the permanent mission house. The trust deed for the mission house in itself is representative of the significant strides the Baptists and their missionary society had made in terms of wealth and respectability in recent years; it is also useful because it lists, by name, home, and profession, the trustees of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1844. While a few artisans of the old Baptist stock were represented among the trustees, most of them were men of status. Among the signatories for the deed were a Surrey merchant, a banker from the City, a silk manufacturer, and timber merchant, a gentleman, and a barrister.131 Though accompanied by a maltster and an ironmonger, for the most part

125Annual Report 1835, 1 126Annual Report 1838, 3; Annual Report 1851, xii 127Stanley, BMS, 217 128Annual Report 1835, 24-5 129Annual Report 1843, xi 130Annual Report 1843, 36-7. On Laird, see Daniel Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981), chapters one and two. The ship was named the Dove and engaged exclusively Christian sailors. Annual Report 1845, 32 131Annual Report 1844, 76 46

these were men of professional and social status—men whose lives bore sharp contrast to the hardships of the widows and linen-drapers of the seventeenth century Baptists, or the humble hopes of the shoemakers, schoolmasters, and preachers who started the BMS in the eighteenth century.132 Perhaps the best examplar of this shift is the man who held the post of BMS treasurer from 1850 to 1867. Samuel Morton Peto, Esq. was an entrepreneur, a member of Parliament, and a gentleman of wealth and consequence, whose investments in railroad engineering paid off handsomely when in 1855 he received, at the hand of Queen Victoria, a baronetcy in gratitude for his assistance in moving military supplies via rail in the Crimean Peninsula.133 Sir Peto, now Lord of Somerleyton Hall, also directed various engineering and constructive works on the Victoria Docks, the Houses of Parliament, the Reform Club, and Nelson‟s Column. His firms built railways throughout southern and eastern England, and in Argentina, Algeria, Australia, and Canada.134 In the treasurer‟s chair of the Baptist Missionary Society now sat a railroad baron, a man who was widely known and respected in Britain, and whose achievements had gained him fortune and title. Peto‟s status lifted the respectability of the society generally, and his deep pockets generously and repeatedly funded necessary missionary endeavours. For example, in 1859 the committee deemed it necessary to send a deputation of two men from Britain to Jamaica for a period of several months, in order to obtain more information about the mission there. The cost of such a journey was not insignificant, and the society had little money to spare. The railroad baron came to the committee‟s aid, as the Annual Report recorded: “the course of the Committee has been greatly facilitated by the generous offer of our highly esteemed Treasurer to bear the entire expense of one member of the deputation. In doing this, Sir Morton Peto has further enlarged that measure of obligation

132Watts notes that working-class nonconformists actually complained that Dissenting ministers and churches had grown “too respectable,” citing a series of letters written to the Congregational periodical Nonconformist. These writers complained that through false notions of respectability, the poor members of congregations were despised and ignored, and that workers were repulsed by churches‟ pandering to conventional respectability. See Watts, II, 594-5 133Annual Report 1855, 21-2 134Watts, II, 329. Watts cites Jeremiah Colman, the founder of the Norwich mustard firm, as another Baptist entrepreneur, representative of the rising fortunes of Dissent at mid-century. 47

under which he has, on many previous occasions, laid the Society.”135 The purchasing power of a man like Peto could and did further the society‟s missiological goals. However, it seems that the BMS leadership, while appreciating the influence and pecuniary assistance someone as powerful as Peto could grant them, felt painfully aware of the distance that lay between the 1790s mechanics in whose footsteps they followed and their own body of increasingly wealthy and respectable gentlemen. They chafed uncomfortably at the change. As soon as Peto became a baronet, his Baptist colleagues felt the need to remind him, though in elegant and congratulatory language, of his first priorities and commitments. In 1855, a committee deputation therefore presented to the newly titled Sir Peto a series of laudatory but also pointed remarks about his past and future service to the society. The committee, they wrote, “have often had occasion to admire the consistent manner in which you have acted upon your Christian and non- conformist principles when you occupied a seat in the British Parliament, while you were, at the same time, both in the House of Commons, and in your extensive commercial engagements, promoting the general advancement of the country, and by your unblemished reputation adding lustre to its name.” Apparently, it was to be hoped that Peto would continue to cleave to his nonconformist principles even as a baronet. The deputation continued by suggesting that the railway contractor should take no credit upon himself for his achievements: “You will be the first to attribute, both the position you occupy, and the character which has led to it, to the grace of God,” the BMS leaders assured Peto and themselves, “nor do [we] doubt that every instance of His goodness towards you will be regarded as a fresh incentive to live to his glory. Largely and honourably as you are occupied in public affairs, [we] are persuaded that 'the kingdom of God and His righteousness' will still hold the „first‟ place in your heart, and that they will always find in you a steadfast friend and zealous cooperator in the great work confided to them, alike by the heavenly Master whom they serve, and by the churches of that Christian denomination whose missionary efforts they direct.”136 This document clearly illustrates the BMS leadership‟s discomfort with the rising status of their body. Though

135Annual Report 1859, 5. Peto had also anonymously paid off the debt against the society in 1853 by giving a one-time contribution of ₤1,813. Stanley calls Peto “the most influential Baptist businessman of his day” and gives him partial credit for the society‟s solvency at mid-century. Stanley, History of the BMS, 218 136Annual Report 1855, 21-2 48

they remembered a heritage of hand tools and Stuart gaols, the days of John Bunyan and William Carey were long past by 1855, and society leadership were afraid of what that change might mean for their missionary work. In this case, it is clear that Peto‟s contemporaries feared that his advancement would lead him to neglect the religious causes to which he had previously committed himself, and mission work would no longer be “first” in his heart.137 Despite the increased wealth and respectability of many of its members, in the later 1840s the society‟s receipts did not always equal their expenditures, and the committee were forced to importune the Christian public repeatedly for more liberal contributions. Such difficulties prompted soul-searching and the expression of concerns similar to those provoked by Samuel Morton Peto‟s accession to the baronetcy. The BMS leadership pressed these anxieties upon their readers in the Annual Report for 1845, asking Baptists for a “deeper earnestness in our great work, and a spirit of deeper devotedness to it.” Despite their increased wealth and status—or perhaps because of it— Baptists must not forget their primary allegiance to Christ and perishing souls. “We may have learning, and funds, and worldly respectability—a mighty host and a sound creed;” the committee wrote earnestly, “but if there be wanting that ardour of mingled pity and love, that holy earnestness which agonizes before God and with men, the passion which Paul more than once expressed for the salvation of the Gentiles and of Israel, and which is required to concentrate all our influences upon the conversion of sinners, we shall fail.”138 Baptist fortunes rose steadily in the nineteenth century, but it is clear that with

137 Samuel Morton Peto lost almost everything in the financial downturn of 1866, resigned as BMS treasurer the next year, and died insolvent soon after. Annual Report 1867, xi; Watts, II, 584. He had apparently not fulfilled his colleagues‟ concerns that he might abandon his allegiance to his denomination and the society, though. The committee, on receiving his resignation in 1867, resolved “That the Members and Subscribers of the BMS in Annual General Meeting assembled, have heard with deep regret that their Treasurer, Sir S. Morton Peto, has deemed it proper to resign his office.” It should be noted that Baptist concerns that brethren might become entangled by worldly desires were present in the earlier days of the mission, as well, though Baptist advancement in the mid-nineteenth century made such concerns more prevalent later. As early as 1815, the Periodical Accounts reported that Felix Carey, the eldest son of BMS founder William Carey, had fallen into just such a trap. After losing his wife and children in a shipwreck, Felix received consolation and monetary compensation from the prince of Burma, and then took up a position as the Burmese ambassador to Bengal. In the eyes of the committee, Felix‟s new position represented an abandonment of his missionary calling, and they “expressed [their] deep regret…at finding that the snares of a Heathen court ha[ve] been more injurious to Felix Carey, than all his severe afflictions; and that he had now withdrawn himself from the Mission. May God, in infinite mercy, bring him back to himself.” Periodical Accounts VI, 151-2 138Annual Report 1849, 10 49

this increased respectability came considerable confusion and uncertainty. Alongside the Parliamentary chairmen, the increased funds, and the BMS property in buildings and ships jostled a yearning for the comfort and familiarity of the old Baptist identity—the blunt pragmatism and stubborn independence of Carey, Fuller, and the Kettering sitting room where the society was born. Overall, as Michael Watts has pointed out, evidence suggests that, though the occupational composition of Dissenting congregations in rural England and smaller industrial towns remained largely working class, “nonconformity was becoming increasingly respectable and bourgeois” in urban areas and in market towns. It is certain that many Dissenters were increasingly prosperous in the mid-nineteenth century, but the majority of free church members remained in the semi-skilled and unskilled trades. Thus a gulf began to open between the rising, respectable Christians of metropolitan Britain and their less consequential counterparts.139 Missionaries and BMS leadership voiced discomfort about the rising fortunes of Dissent as they watched it occur; later, they would also deal with the divisions such advancement could create.140 Baptist Political Engagement A third significant element of Baptist identity—the relationship between Dissent and politics, both British and imperial—likewise shifted significantly over the period under study. As Baptists moved into the middling classes, they also increasingly took part in political issues. At home, they elected Dissenting MPs after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and allied with other Christian groups, including Anglican Evangelicals, to oppose slavery and the East India Company's support of Hindu temples. In the mission field, missionaries once determined not to “intermeddle” with politics gave testimony before Parliament on the apprenticeship of former slaves in the Caribbean and called loudly for the abolition of sati in India. As with socioeconomic advance, it is important to understand how the Baptist view of and engagement with politics changed over time, and how these changes affected their missionary project. Also significant are the theological and providential terms under which Baptists understood and engaged with their governments. As Watts points out, “the central Calvinist tenet of the sovereignty of

139Watts, II, 601 140The implications of this gap will be further explored in chapter six. 50

God provided Old Dissenters with a standard with which to judge, and if necessary challenge, the authority of the State.”141 Baptists viewed secular institutions as mere vehicles in the hands of divine will. Government could be used for good, or defied; in any case, engagement with politics occurred within the parameters of sovereign providence. By the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in the 1790s, the religious persecution of several hundred years had eased, and Dissenters could gather and worship without fear of reprisal.142 Yet the Clarendon measures remained in force, and the founding generation of the BMS, like their forebears, were excluded from positions of civil, military, and political power. The Baptists‟ theological views on church and state, which stressed individual and congregational autonomy and condemned the Church of England‟s status as state church, reinforced their fringe position. Dissent was largely a rural phenomenon, and nonconformist communities—comprised of “small freeholders, self-employed craftsmen and tradesmen, or some similarly independent group”—prided themselves on their unusual independence.143 The Baptist Missionary Society‟s early commitment to self-government reflected this provincial heritage. Viewed in the seventeenth century as “dangerous plotters and sectaries,” Baptists‟ close historic association with radical groups such as the Diggers and the Levellers continued to color the popular view of Dissent.144 Northamptonshire, the seat of the BMS, had ties to the radicalism of Old Dissent stretching back to the time of the English Civil War. Into the nineteenth century, government and imperial officials suspected Baptists of political radicalism, and even after legal restrictions on nonconformist political participation were removed, Baptists faced their share of mistrust.

141Watts, II, 347 142 Yet Carey and Fuller‟s generation continued to face opposition from local officials. A famous Baptist minister at Norfolk and a contemporary of Carey‟s and Fuller‟s, Joseph Kinghorn, founded a church at Aylsham in Norfolk in April 1791. Due to “local opposition,” he and his small congregation were forced to meet at the riverside at four o‟ clock in the morning, where “a thick fog hid [them] from observation.” Similarly, in 1800 another Norfolk congregation was obliged by the local magistrate and Anglican churchman to pay heavy fines for breaking a technicality of the Conventicle Act of 1670. Both the errant church and neighboring Baptist congregations took up money to pay the high fees imposed. Jewson, The Baptists in Norfolk, 63, 65 143 Everitt, 44. 144Lumpkin, 220; Underwood, 66, 82. For an interesting discussion of a radical Anabaptist church with Leveller tendencies that subsided into a more tame Baptism, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), chapter three. 51

If identity is informed by memory and history, as Thomas Holt argues, the Dissenting past continued to creep into the present reality of its adherents. The Baptists saw themselves as outsiders in many ways, and, as early missionary clashes with imperial governments proved, most of their contemporaries shared their view.145 However, it should also be noted that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rise of Evangelical political influence, best represented by Claphamite initiatives and the successes of men like William Wilberforce and Thomas Buxton. Though they remained barred from direct political participation, Dissenters increasingly had friends within the Established church and state, and despite their ongoing disagreements about many questions of doctrine and religious practice, Evangelical Anglicans and Dissenters worked together more and more on humanitarian reforms and missionary initiatives. Providence, it seemed, had chosen to put some of God's servants in positions of political power, and Baptists eagerly used Evangelical support to further their mission. In the eighteenth century, Baptists had largely avoided political involvement as potentially harmful to Christian purity and autonomy. Historian Michael Watts argues that Andrew Fuller spoke for evangelical Dissent when he contended in a pamphlet called The Backslider that “a major cause of departing from God was „taking an eager and deep interest in political disputes.‟” Fuller‟s injunction that “Christians should be obedient, peaceable, and loyal subjects” was followed, at least at first, by the missionary society he helped to found.146 When the BMS was formed, the committee were careful to delineate that their agents should under no circumstances become caught up in politics. Before eight men and women sailed for India to join William Carey in 1799, the society leaders instructed them to “beware, both from a principle of conscience, and from a regard to their own interest, and that of the mission, of intermeddling with any political concerns— to be obedient to the laws in all civil affairs—to respect magistrates.”147 Robert Hall, whose Help for Zion’s Travellers converted Carey, Carey himself, and William Ward all shared republican sentiments and expressed early support for the French Revolution in the 1790s, but later repudiated these political interests “for things of greater

145Chapter three discusses the way British colonials and officials in South Asia and the Caribbean responded to missionary incursions. 146Watts, II, 357 quotes Fuller, The Backslider (1801), 25, 28 147Baptist Missionary Society, Brief Narrative of the Baptist Mission in India, 16 52

consequences.”148 The radical politics of the seventeenth century were not wanted here; rather, missionaries should be quiet, obedient, and respectful, and by their good conduct protect their mission. “Do not intermeddle with politics,” the committee similarly admonished its missionaries in Jamaica in the 1820s. “Remember that the object is not to teach the principles and laws of an earthly Kingdom…but the principles and laws of the kingdom of Christ…Political and party discussions avoid as beneath your office.”149 Baptist frequently eschewed earthly political concerns as outside the imperatives of Christianity and its work. Despite the common trope against political involvement, Baptist ministers and congregants were not above signing petitions and going before Parliament when the cause aligned with the work of God as they saw it. For example, in 1811 the Baptist churches of Norfolk circulated and signed petitions opposing a bill that would have made it difficult for them to attain a license to meet and preach by registering their location. After getting 784 signatures, the Norfolk Baptist pastor Joseph Kinghorn rode with the petition to London where, combined with similar petitions from nonconformists across the country, their signatures helped bring down the bill.150 A significant moment in the growth of Baptist political involvement was the repeal, in 1828, of the Test and Corporation Acts. These measures had long “rankled as a badge of their second-class citizenship,” and Dissenters objected to their “profanation of the Lord‟s Supper by making it a mere civil or political test.”151 Lord John Russell proposed the bill for repeal in Commons in 1828, and by the end of the spring, Dissenters could sit in public office without taking the Anglican Eucharist.152 Emboldened by the repeal, many Dissenters took active part in the campaign to reform Parliament leading up to 1832. Baptists in Norfolk publicly demonstrated in favor of the Reform Bill, with churches holding prayer- meetings on behalf of the nation while Parliament debated.153 When the bill passed its second reading the Baptist Magazine cited the slim victory as evidence of “the finger of

148Watts, II, 356 149Baptist Missionary Society, Letter of Instructions, 13, cited in Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 9. 150Jewson, Baptists in Norfolk, 66 151Watts, II, 418. Watts notes that some Dissenters feared to campaign too hard for their own relief lest it lead to Catholic emancipation, as well! Watts II, 420 152Watts, II, 423 153Jewson, 71 53

God.” Watts points out, however, that “few Dissenters had sat in Parliament before 1832 and few were to sit in Parliament after it.” 154 However, by sheer numbers, Dissenters could now wield considerable political clout. Alan Everitt cites the mid-Victorian era as the height of Dissenting power, noting that Free Church members made up nearly half the church-going population of England during this period.155 Ultimately, though there was no influx of Baptists into the House of Commons in the 1830s, “there was evidence of growing Dissenting influence over MPs who were not Dissenters.”156 It is clear that in nineteenth-century domestic politics, despite apostolic admonitions favoring quietness and obedience, Baptists increasingly used their numbers and rhetoric to maintain their religious freedom and support their evangelical goals, often by working with the Evangelical lobby. Frequently, the causes Baptists took up in domestic politics reflected the concerns of their missionaries abroad. In the mission field, Baptists did intervene in the political realm when the interests of their religious project demanded it. The Baptist missionaries at Serampore in the early nineteenth century worked closely with their brethren at home and with contacts in government to pressure Parliament to officially open India to missionaries or to repudiate the notion that missions were responsible for mutiny among the Indian population.157 Carey‟s missionary colleague Joshua Marshman penned a tract specifically to meet the latter purpose following the Vellore Mutiny; in hopes of keeping the government from interfering with the mission work at Serampore, he went so far as to argue that missions would ultimately tie India closer to the Empire.158 In Jamaica after the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, the agents of the Baptist Missionary Society collectively wrote and presented a memorial to the colonial governor protesting against the persecutions they and their converts had faced after the uprising.159

154 Watts, II, 429; II, 432 155Everitt, 5, 14 156Watts, II, 436 157See J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, 82. 158Joshua Marshman, Advantages of Christianity in Promoting the Establishment and Prosperity of the British Government in India; containing remarks occasioned on reading a memoir of the Vellore Mutiny (London: Smith‟s Printing-Office, 1813) 159Baptist Missionaries of Jamaica, Facts and Documents Connected with the late Insurrection in Jamaica, and the violations of civil and religious liberty arising out of it (London: [no pub.], 1832). William Knibb also appeared before Parliament to testify to the cruelty of West Indian slavery and the avarice of the planter class. See Hall, Civilising Subjects, 112-5. Watts‟ history contains this remarkable anecdote: 54

An important element of the Baptists‟ ambivalent political identity was their fierce defense of civil and religious liberty, both for themselves and their converts. John Clark Marshman urged the British government in India to “employ neither force nor fraud to convert its subjects, but…continue to allow them the fullest liberty of conscience, and to permit every man to profess and practice his own religion without any interferences.”160 Religious freedom was important to the Baptists as Dissenters—liberty to worship as they chose had historically been denied their predecessors at home—and as missionaries. In South Asia and in the West Indies, government and local opposition to evangelism arose. Often, officials feared that the Christianizing of the “native” populations would unhinge imperial control; slaveholders in Jamaica feared baptized laborers would demand freedom, while governors-general in Calcutta worried that mission work would offend “native prejudices” and create rebellion. Because of these concerns, Baptist missionaries often had to contend for the freedom to preach, and for their converts‟ freedom to practice, Christianity. Nowhere were Baptist demands for civil and religious liberty louder or bolder than in Jamaica in the 1830s. The memorial presented by the Baptist missionaries to the governor of Jamaica in 1832 provides an example of a moment in which the Baptists were fully willing to invoke political rights and government protection to aid them in their cause. Following the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, which many government officials and planters suspected the Baptists of fomenting, the persons and property of the mission came under attack. Despite their usual approach of avoiding political confrontation, now the evangelists invoked and demanded their rights as Englishmen, demanding “protection they required, and as British subjects are entitled to” by the colonial government following the destruction of church property: Your memorialists submit to your Excellency that it is a case calling for your serious attention, and for the exercise of your High Powers, when, in a British colony, and under a British governor and British laws, British subjects against whom not a single charge can be substantiated, dare not return to their homes and their functions, but with the certain expectation of suffering personal violence.

“Early in June 1832 the Baptist missionary William Knibb returned to England from riot-torn Jamaica. When a pilot came on board his ship in the English Channel Knibb asked him, „Well, pilot, what news?‟ „The Reform Bill has passed,‟ replied the pilot. „Thank God,‟ retorted Knibb. „Now I‟ll have slavery down.‟” J. H. Hinton, Memoir of William Knibb (1849), 140, quoted in Watts, II, 437 160 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, I, xii. Raised in the Serampore mission, John Clark was the son of Hannah and Joshua Marshman. 55

Casting themselves as British subjects under the governance of the sovereign state, the missionaries demanded protection under the law. Further, they added that they would soon return to their destroyed stations and again take up the work of their mission “in the exercise of an indefeasible right belonging to every Briton,” the right to religious freedom.161 Here, then, Baptist missionaries placed themselves under the jurisdiction of the British government rather than dismissing or ignoring it, and invoked rights not only to religious freedom, but to private property. Following this appeal to the governor, the memorial provided a detailed list of each property destroyed, the extent of the damage, and who the perpetrators were. Thus, despite the common rhetoric repudiating any connection with politics, the Baptists willingly interested themselves in any political struggle that had implications for their churches and their work, believing that such ventures into the secular realm were sanctioned by God. As Joshua Marshman‟s Vellore Mutiny pamphlet touting the “advantages of Christianity in promoting the establishment and prosperity of the British government in India” shows, the Baptists were even willing to cast missions in the role of imperial prop if that meant their evangelistic efforts would be left undisturbed. However, as Andrew Porter cautions, missionaries‟ readiness to accommodate temporal authority extended only so far as government served God‟s purposes. For the Baptists, the thread that ran consistently throughout the decisions they made regarding politics was a commitment to their religion and to propagating it. “Early nineteenth-century evangelical views of imperial and indigenous authority [and political authority in general] were distinguished by their sense of self-sufficiency under Divine superintendence,” Porter insists.162 The Baptists could ignore or resist government if it threatened the purposes of God, or they could accept and use political power and rights to further the work of religion. Under their understanding of divine authority and activity in the world, both of these approaches could be made to serve God‟s purpose. Theology, memory of outsider status, social and financial advancement, and increasing political involvement all shaped Baptist identity formation over the nineteenth century. To some extent, the former—a persecuted past—acted as a check on the latter—

161Baptist Missionaries, Facts and Documents, 2-3 162Andrew Porter, “Overview,” 51 56

social and political mobility—when Dissenting fortunes did rise, and as nonconformists found themselves with the ability to wield significant influence in the realm of government. Over the course of the ninteenth century, Baptists struggled with the implications of their engagement with worldly things. When changing ideas about church and missionary independence, convert leadership, and political involvement threatened to fracture Baptist consensus on several occasions during the nineteenth century, their commitment to a providential goal reminded them of their individual insignificance. “The things which we see relative to the spread of the gospel, are such, that we behold them with a kind of sacred awe,” Joshua Marshman confided to John Ryland from Serampore. “We seem as mere instruments, employed to put in motion that to the end of which we are quite unable to penetrate, but which, as it unfolds, we are constrained to view with wonder and gratitude.”163 This shared theology, which changed very little from Carey‟s day to the 1870s, helped mitigate the concerns and disagreements that the Baptist community experienced as fortunes, political ideologies, and missionary approaches rose and fell during the nineteenth century. Through all of these shifts, the Baptists strove to remember and enact an identity whose primary referent was not financial, social, or even national, but divine.

163Periodical Accounts V, 232 57

CHAPTER THREE THE COLONIAL RESPONSE TO MISSIONS

Dissenters and Evangelicals claimed a unified collective identity on religious grounds even while their community experienced self-examination and debate as their political involvement and social respectability increased in the nineteenth century. Whatever their inner concerns and disagreements, the Baptist Missionary Society leadership and missionaries were part of a group of people whose priorities and paradigms were uniquely informed by their religious belief. They viewed themselves as different from many of their contemporaries, because, as they claimed, their first allegiance was to Christ and Christ‟s kingdom.164 It is clear that missionaries viewed secular power as subordinate to the divine purpose. How, then, did official authority view Christian missions? Understandably, the voluntarist and providential worldview the missionaries ascribed to did not endear them to colonial officials. Government servants charged with keeping order in the far-flung domains of the Empire, as well as white colonials who felt the precariousness of their positions and profit, recognized in missionaries a threat to colonial hierarchy. As the agents of the Baptist Missionary Society carried their message into the domain of the British East India Company, and later the Raj, or into the slave colonies of the British Caribbean, they entered environments whose laws, conventions, and social norms were deeply marked by the concerns of imperialism.165 British colonial society in South Asia included East India Company or Raj officials, bureaucrats, and military personnel, as well as indigo and opium planters, traders, and professionals. In the Caribbean, missionaries and their converts mingled with white planter society, whose sugar fortune had long upheld the West Indian interest back in Britain, and with the

164 Historian Jeffrey Cox‟s statement of William Carey‟s approach to dealing with secular state power applies as well to Carey‟s missionary fellows and successors: “Carey had very little concern for issues of state power except insofar as they were an impediment, or a providential help, to the spread of the gospel.” Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 27 165 David Cannadine argues that the British Empire was not primarily concerned with constituting “otherness,” but in creating affinities between metropolitan laws, society and culture and imperial society— “the comprehending and the reordering of the foreign in parallel, analogous, equivalent, resemblant terms.” Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xix. Working from Cannadine‟s portrait of imperial culture, it is hardly surprising that officials viewed Baptist missionaries in their domains as subversive and radical, for this was how they had been viewed in metropolitan culture for hundreds of years. 58

slaves that this planter society depended upon. In both spheres of empire, secular people often viewed missionary work as a direct threat to colonial stability, and treated missionaries and their converts accordingly. Historic preconceptions of Baptists as radical and subversive bled into official views of missionary work in the Empire, and imperial leadership often resisted “the efforts of an independent outside force in the form of dissenting Christian missionaries who threatened to bring with them the state of disorder they were often accused of having inaugurated in Great Britain.”166 In some cases, missionary successes in education, translation, and other fields eventually prompted greater acceptance of their work, but in general, the colonial population in both South Asia and the Caribbean responded to Baptist missions with suspicion and resistance, and sometimes even outright violence. The Colonial and Official Response to Missions in South Asia In South Asia, though many British officials espoused Christianity themselves, the official line towards religious proselytization was nevertheless wary, and with reason. From the earliest days of the East India Company, European missionaries had hindered and endangered British profits. Sir Thomas Roe, the first official English ambassador to the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century, found the Company‟s way blocked by the machinations of Portuguese Jesuits, and despaired of ever obtaining permission to establish a Company factory at Surat for trade.167 As historian of India Stanley Wolpert points out, this early negative experience made the “tough-minded merchants of Leadenhall Street…as loath to admit missionaries to their presidencies as they were to surrender their monopoly of trade.”168 The Company‟s purpose in India was commerce and profit, not civilization or evangelization, and the Company Directors would brook no interference with their financial goals.169

166 Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 169 167 Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619, as narrated in his journal and correspondence, ed. William Foster, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, Bedford Press, 1899). Nur Jahan, the queen of Emperor Jahangir, worked closely with the Portuguese Jesuits at Jahangir‟s court to prevent the establishment of an East India Company factory at Surat. 168 Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2004) 206 169 In his biography of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, John Clark Marshman insists that, as Company authority over India and, therefore, profit grew, Company concern with the well-being of Indians— particularly their spiritual state—shrank. He finds that missions and education were generally greatly encouraged by the Company up until the Battle of Plassey, when “all desire to impart knowledge, secular or divine, to the people of India was at once quenched. Indeed, the repugnance of Government on both sides 59

The political battle over missions in the Empire had begun even before Carey sailed for India. As with later issues like slavery abolition and the abrogation of East India Company support of Hindu temples, the debate over whether Christian missionaries should be allowed to preach in British India brought together a coalition of Anglican Evangelicals, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and other Dissenters who worked together to influence policy in Christianity's favor. In such political battles, Dissenting missionaries often provided the evidence, while Evangelical Anglicans in positions of power provided the oratory.170 On the question of missions in India, influential Evangelicals like William Wilberforce and Charles Grant used the East India Company's charter renewal debates in the House of Commons to highlight the cause they shared with the BMS and other missionary groups. In the 1793 renewal debate, William Wilberforce eloquently pleaded for the missionary cause, advocating “measures…as may gradually tend to [India‟s] advancement in useful knowledge and …religious and moral improvement.” However, any encouragement of missionaries or schoolmasters threw India House into a panic, and the Evangelicals‟ missionary clause was thrown out amid protests that such a measure would be “impolitic and unnecessary.” One member of the Court of Directors declared that allowing “suffering clergymen, under the name of missionaries, or any other name, to overrun India, and penetrate the interior parts of it, would in the first instance be dangerous, and prove utterly destructive of the Company‟s interests, if not wholly annihilate their power in Hindostan.” Ultimately, as the Directors pointed out, nothing could be more detrimental to British rule of India than the admission of Christian missions there. If missionaries did not provoke rebellion by offending Indian beliefs, then their work would still undermine the ruler/ruled relationship necessary to continued British dominion, for, as one Director demanded, “What was more strongly a common cause with mankind than holding one faith and professing the same religion? The moment that event took place in India, there was an end of British supremacy.”171

the water to all missionary or educational exertions seemed to increase as British influence became more extended, and facilities for doing good were multiplied.” J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 39 170As Christopher Leslie Brown shows in Moral Capital, Evangelicals themselves had only recently gained political influence, and they and other Christian groups would continue to use religious causes to gain moral capital to shore up their right to participate in politics. 171Another Director argued that it had been the founding of British schools and seminaries in North America that had led to rebellion there; therefore “sound policy dictated that we should, in the case of 60

Clearly, despite any Christian protestations of support for empire and promises not to become involved in political issues, the governors of British India viewed missionaries as a real threat to their dominion, and did all they could to first keep them out of India altogether, and later, suppress their activities as much as possible. It should be pointed out that such suspicion of missionaries and particularly of Dissenters was neither extraordinary nor unreasonable; political disorder in England had been credited to Dissenters for hundreds of years, and there was little reason to expect better behavior from them in the far more volatile environment of India. Though the rising presence of Evangelical supporters of missions in government aided the missionaries significantly, their backing did not allay broad official suspicion of Dissent. The Company Government, charged with keeping order and maintaining a profit in India, could scarcely be expected to welcome the interference of individuals who openly viewed local beliefs as superstition, dissented from the Established church, and held mildly radical political views.172 Additionally, Robert Eric Frykenberg has noted that fringe missionary groups such as faith societies, nondenominational believers, and Dissenters posed a particular threat because, often coming from the lower strata of their European societies, they were more difficult for government or Established church authorities to control. Indeed, “opposition to the Raj tended to increase in direct proportion to the increase in free, non-denominational and unfettered forms of voluntarism.”173 The Company‟s suspicions of missionary work—and particularly that propagated by Dissent—as dangerous to British rule were, therefore, well-founded, despite Evangelical claims to the contrary. Because of these concerns, any attempt to officially open India to education or evangelism failed until 1813.174 A licensing system for all Europeans residing in India

India, avoid and steer clear of the rock we had split on in America.” J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 44- 47 172See Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 169. Carey himself, while preaching in Leicestershire, “had not hesitated to assist his fellow dissenters in their efforts to secure repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.” Robert G. Torbet, A History of the Baptists, 3rd ed. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1963), 127 173 Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Christians in India: An Historical Overview of Their Complex Origins,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communiciation since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism, ed. Frykenberg (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 60 174The “Pious Clause” was finally successfully inserted into the EIC charter in 1813, only, as Frykenberg notes, “by a sustained campaign in Britain, aided by a converted Company Director, Charles Grant, 61

kept close watch upon non-Company adventurers and their occupations, and anyone coming through Calcutta was closely questioned about his purposes. Thus when William Carey and John Thomas tried to enter India as Baptist missionaries in 1793, they were expelled from a Company vessel as unlicensed, and had to secure passage on a Danish ship instead.175 Joshua Marshman, William Ward, and their families attempted to join Carey at Mudnabatty in Malda in 1799, but were told upon arrival that they would be barred from India as unlicensed missionaries. The British Governor-General, Lord Wellesley, viewed the Baptists as subversive and banned them from Calcutta, and only the protection offered by the Danish governor of Serampore prevented their deportation.176 Of course, licensing regulations were not aimed exclusively at missionaries; the Company was quick to “expel any European, whether public official or missionary, whose activities might endanger „public‟ security or provoke social unrest.”177 Much of the administration‟s discomfort with Christian missionary work in their domain stemmed from the apprehension that proselytization would lead to suspicion and rebellion on the part of the subject population. Even devoutly Christian bureaucrats behaved with caution towards mission work in the volatile subcontinent, where millions of Hindus, Muslims, and proponents of other religions cared deeply for their own ways of life and suspected the British of forcing or tricking their conversion to Christianity.178

powerful friends in Parliament (Wilberforce, Thornton, et. al) and an alliance with the Free Trade lobby.” This was thus an achievement of the broad Evangelical alliance that supported missions. Robert Eric Frykenberg, “India,” in A World History of Christianity, ed. Adrian Hastings (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 180 175The London Missionary Society‟s early efforts met with similar treatment, and their first agent sent to India, a man named Haldane, was turned away and refused a license by the Company. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 53-60, 73 176Wolpert, 206; J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 114-5. As discussed in chapter two, the BMS retrospectively viewed this event as a clear intervention by Divine Providence, for though the removal of Carey from Mudnabatty seemed a setback at the time, the missionaries‟ settlement at Serampore afforded them a long period of protection and allowed them to set up the mission press. 177Frykenberg, “Christians in India,” 57. Frykenberg notes that, when pious civil servants formally protested the Company‟s participation in “idolatrous practices,” the government “reacted with ruthless severity,” expelling even high officials. BMS activity was limited in other locations as well; in 1813, BMS missionary Robinson was ordered to leave his station in Java by the British Indian Government. Periodical Accounts V, 296 178 Missionary journals frequently allude to the ubiquity of this belief among Indians. William Ward writes in 1800: “The Governor advised his Brahmans to send their children to learn English [ostensibly at the Marshmans‟ school]. They replied, that we seemed to take great pains to make the natives Christians, and they were afraid that their children being of tender age would make them a more easy conquest.” 62

Bearing their subjects‟ suspicions in mind, the Court of Directors of the East India Company were eager to demonstrate their religious toleration and sought at every turn to disavow the connection between British rule of India and British Christianization of Indians. As the Directors instructed their new Governor-General Dalhousie in 1847 just before his departure for India, “Our object has been not only that the power and authority of Government should never be exerted or manifested, for the promotion of Missionary Objects but that those officers by whom the Government is represented should practice a similar forbearance.” The British Indian government constantly worked to ensure that its agents, whatever their personal beliefs, would appear wholly objective and tolerant of all religions, and cautioned Dalhousie “against any manifestation of a disposition calculated to excite uneasiness and alarm among the people.”179 The Company‟s desire to avoid offending Indian religious belief extended well beyond concern about Christian proselytization. Since the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of British power in India, the East India Company had actually participated in and supported Indian social and religious custom. The origins of this policy lay in the Company‟s precarious position in eighteenth-century India, when the British were just one among several European trading powers, hundreds of petty indigenous leaders, and several formidable Indian authorities such as the Mughal dynasty and the Marathas. During this time, Europeans and Company servants feared regional warlords like the Maratha leader Shivaji as much as any other small power, and Company officials responded to such threats as any petty Indian prince might—by carefully adhering to local traditions, honoring local deities and establishing relationships with other local powers.180

Periodical Accounts II, 58. Another incident occurred Feb. 18, 1804, when local Muslims mistook a debate at the College of Fort William in Calcutta for a scheme to force conversion: “One of the Theses to be discussed at the college, at the next examination, is, 'The natives of India will embrace the gospel, as soon as they shall be able to compare the christian precepts with those of their own books.” Many of the mussulmans, mistaking this business, and being deceived by a false report, that after this examination they were to be forced to appear at the government house, and become christians, were much alarmed. They presented petitions to some members of the government, and offered money that they might not be forced to become christians.” Periodical Accounts III, 33 179 Dalhousie Papers at the Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, 131. Quoted in Suresh Chandra Ghosh, Dalhousie in India, 1848-56: A Study of his Social Policy as Governor-General (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1975), 34 180 Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” in Missions and Empire, 109-12 63

Once the Company took on the mantle of an Indian sovereign, it also had to accept the religious and social responsibilities that came with being an Indian power. In Madras, Company officials took over the collection of duties for the maintenance of local mosques and pagodas as early as 1689,181 and, in northern India, after the Company‟s occupation of Orissa, Governor-General Wellesley‟s “officers took responsibility for the [Hindu] Jagannath temple” in 1803.182 A promise of religious toleration accompanied British patronage of Indian institutions from the time of the Cornwallis Code, which stated: “The regulations which may be adopted for the internal government of the country, will be calculated to preserve them the laws of the Shaster and the Koran, in matters to which they have been invariably applied—to protect them in the free exercise of their religion.”183 Thus the official policy of the East India Company during the majority of the Baptist Missionary Society‟s tenure in the subcontinent was not only to discourage any official connection between government and Christianity, but to publicly and monetarily maintain Hinduism and Islam. Missionaries and their supporters repeatedly lamented this state of affairs, which they found detrimental to evangelization. William Ward decried the East India Company‟s religious policies in his journal in 1802. “Last week,” he wrote, “a deputation from the Government went in procession to Kalee Ghat, and made a thank offering to this goddess of the Hindoos, in the name of the Company, for the success which the English have lately obtained in this country…Several thousand natives witnessed the English presenting their offerings to this idol. We have been much grieved at this act, in which the natives exult over us.”184 The Baptists could not understand how

181 Chandra Y. Mudaliar, The Secular State and Religious Institutions in India: A Study of the Administration of Hindu Public Religious Trusts in Madras (Wisbaden: Franz Steiner, 1974), 3 182 Nancy Gardner Cassels, Religion and Pilgrim Tax under the Company Raj (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988), 21. One of Wellesley‟s subordinates, who went ahead of the annexation to conciliate local powers, reported that “the Brahmins at the holy Temple had consulted and applied to Juggernaut to inform them what power was now to have his temple under its protection and that he had given a decided answer that in the English Government was in future to be his guardian.” Cassels, 37 See Cassels, 26-32 for a detailed account of the temple, its iconic cult, and its festivals. See also House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, “Regulation IV. A Regulation for levying a tax from pilgrims resorting to the temple of Juggernauth, and for the Superintendence and Management of the Temple (passed 1806)” Papers Related to East India Affairs (printed 12 May 1813), 41 183 Cassels, 1. Cassels quotes Section I of Regulation III of the series of regulations enacted in 1793. 184J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 157. About thirty years later, Alexander Duff, a Presbyterian missionary at Calcutta, expressed similar aversion to the “monstrous idol inside” the “towering temple of Jagat-nath” and noted that, if his readers should ever visit Orissa, they would “soon find that, bad as 64

the East India Company, representing, as they felt, an avowedly Christian nation, could forbid the propagation of Christianity while encouraging the continuation of a system of “heathen superstition” like Hinduism. The campaign to end British collusion in South Asian religious activity would be one of the denomination‟s major political causes in Britain in future decades. Moments of crisis in Indian colonial life were, perhaps, most revealing of the official and secular view of missionary work. The Vellore Mutiny in 1806, and then the much more significant Indian Mutiny of 1857, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, lent strength to the popular view of missionaries as sectarian troublemakers, resulting at times in public accusations against missionaries and official repression of their activities. In July 1806 members of the sepoy military garrison at Vellore, a fortress in Madras, rose against their leaders, killing thirteen white officers and several men. Sir Thomas Munro, later Governor of Madras, ascribed the revolt to “certain regulations recently issued, prohibiting the sepoys from wearing caste marks when in uniform and from wearing beards, and prescribing a head-dress, which…was supposed to have been ordered with the intention of compelling the sepoys to become Christians.”185 The official inquiry of the Court of Directors into the Vellore rebellion also found at fault certain “injudicious orders respecting the dress of the native troops” which generated suspicion “in the minds of the Sepoys, of an intention on the part of our Government to compel them to become Christians.”186 It seemed that, despite all efforts to the contrary, the very image the Company and its servants had always hoped to avoid—as an interfering, intolerant, proselytizing force that meant to destroy native religion and caste—had sparked a massacre in Madras.

Juggernath may be, his temple is only the beginning of horrors.” Alexander Duff, India, and India Missions, Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism, Both in Theory and Practice; Also Notices of Some of the Principal Agencies Employed in Conducting the Process of Indian Evangelization, (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1839), 196-8, 200 185Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart. KCB, Governor of Madras, Selections from his Minutes and Other Official Writings, edited Sir Alexander J. Arbuthnot, 2 vols. (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1881) Quotation is from Arbuthnot‟s memoir in volume I, cxiii-cxv 186House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, “Copy of Letter from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to the Governor and Council of Fort St. George, dated 29th May 1807,”Papers Related to East India Affairs (printed 12 May 1813), 4 65

The only Baptist missionaries in India at the time of the Vellore Mutiny lived and worked not in Madras, but in Bengal.187 However, translations of scripture as well as religious tracts printed at Serampore had, by 1806, begun to circulate throughout India, and it was therefore impossible for the missionaries to avoid the government‟s reaction to Vellore. They felt the ramifications first in August of 1806, when the sitting Governor- General Sir George Barlow, after receiving word of the rebellion, blocked the entry of two new missionaries to Serampore. He further ordered that the existing missionaries “were not to preach to the natives, nor suffer the native converts to preach; they were not to distribute religious tracts, nor suffer the people to distribute them; they were not to send forth converted natives, nor to take any step, by conversation or otherwise, for persuading the natives to embrace Christianity.”188 The missionaries could no longer do any of their intended work except for preaching in their own home, but decided wisely not to antagonize the government at this point, recognizing that such action might provoke their expulsion from India. Instead, they wrote to Andrew Fuller and Charles Grant, asking them to plead their cause at India House. Their way forward would be difficult, however, as the Directors in Leadenhall Street were now convinced of the missionaries‟ role in the mutiny.189 In response to Vellore, the chairman of the Court of Directors, William Fullarton Elphinstone, offered his highly condemnatory opinion of mission work in an 1806 minute presented at India House. Elphinstone clearly believed that it was not British occupation or political turmoil, but missionary activity that had prompted the Vellore sepoys to revolt. As he declared, “the operations of the Missionaries, even admitting them to be well meant, which I very much doubt, & the numerous Translations of the religious books of the Christians, have alarmed the Sepoys…that the Company intend to make

187Christian missionaries of other denominations worked throughout the subcontinent. Portuguese Catholic Jesuits entered India in the sixteenth century, with a Padraodo established at Goa. Catholicism is a constant presence in BMS records. German Evangelicals began preaching in Tranquebar in the Tamil Peninsula in 1706, and many of the Christians in Madras associated themselves with either this Pietist mission, which was largely furthered by Tamil converts, or a much older native Christian tradition dating to the first or second century. These Indians called themselves “Thomas Christians” and refused to recognize papal or Orthodox authority. See Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 172-3. By the time of the Vellore Mutiny, Anglican dioceses had also been established at each presidency. 188Baptist Missionary Society, Brief Narrative of the Baptist Mission in India, 46 189See David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773-1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 136-139 66

them all Christians, they would as soon be converted into as many Devils.” The remainder of his minute abused both missionaries and converts in language seldom seen from Directors or Company officials—such stridence would be more common in Caribbean publications twenty-five years later. “The Missionaries have succeeded in making some Converts, the Scum of the Earth…& these, in their Zeal, have threatened to destroy the Idols & Temples of the Hindoos, should they make such an Attempt, it is to be hoped, they will all be exterminated, and if the Missionaries are treated in the same manner, there will be no harm done.” Elphinstone concluded by accusing the Serampore missionaries of spying on the British Government in India as agents of France.190 Elphinstone‟s response to Baptist missions clearly went beyond the concern and caution expressed by more balanced officials, such as Lord Wellesley, who despite his initial threat to deport Marshman and Ward, decided in time that the Baptists‟ work was no hazard to his government. Wellesley regularly subscribed to publications from the Baptist press, dined privately with Carey on several occasions, and even admitted in confidence that “he was a friend to making men [Christians.]”191 He also came to the missionaries‟ aid during the Vellore Mutiny. While Elphinstone painted the Serampore missionaries as subversive republican spies, Wellesley offered to publicly state his conviction that their involvement in the event was flatly impossible.192 Meanwhile, Evangelical Charles Grant spoke from his seat on the Court of Directors against repression of missionary evangelization.193 Elphinstone‟s tirade did not, therefore, represent the normative position on missions for the British Indian government.

190Commonwealth Relations Office MSS., Mss. Eur. F. 89, Box 2C Pt. 5, minute „On Missionaries,” n.p., [1806], quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 179-180 191BMS MSS., Ward‟s MSS. Journal I, 29 June 1800, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 176. Among Wellesley‟s correspondence during his governor-generalship is a letter from Charles Grant stating, “No accounts from the East have afforded me so much pleasure as those of the countenance your Lordship has given to Religion.” Wellesley testified before Parliament during the Charter Debates of 1813, further encouraging the dissemination of Christianity in India.” The Marquess Wellesley, The Despatches, Minutes, and Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley during his administration in India, ed. Montgomery Martin (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1837),Vol. V, 143 192Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 181 193J.C. Marshman declares that “this view of the question [that is, that missionary activity led to the Vellore Mutiny] was distinctly repudiated by Mr. Charles Grant, Mr. Wilberforce, Lord Teignmouth, Lord Wellesley, Lord William Bentinck, and many others of equal eminence." Marshman, Life and Times I, 264. Teignmouth was on the Board of Control and the Privy Council, and Bentinck was Governor-General when the Vellore outbreak occurred. He was afterwards recalled. Again, the staunch support of officials like Grant and Teignmouth, as opposed to bureaucrats like Elphinstone, underlines the mediating role Anglican Evangelicals played between missionaries and EIC directors and government. 67

However, the strength of his reaction does embody a significant element in official perceptions of mission work as, at bottom, subversive and undermining of British rule. It is noteworthy that missionary activity was Elphinstone‟s immediate scapegoat, in spite of the vast geographical distance separating the Serampore group from the events at Vellore. While the Indian Government‟s orders continued to curtail missionary activity in Bengal following Vellore, another incident occurred which heightened the official impression of the Baptist mission as dangerous.194 Just as the new Governor-General, Lord Minto, arrived in Calcutta, the British Indian government obtained a pamphlet that had been written by a Baptist convert from Islam, and printed on the Serampore press. Declaring the pamphlet, which referred to Mohammad as a tyrant, incendiary and injurious to the public peace, Lord Minto prohibited all preaching in Indian languages at Calcutta, and ordered that the press at Serampore be broken up and moved to Calcutta, where government could oversee all of its publications.195 This event sparked a major official inquiry into the missionaries‟ activities in Calcutta, and several clandestine dispatches on the missionaries‟ doings were sent back and forth between the East India Company in London and the Governor-General in Council at Calcutta on this subject. Particularly when viewed in light of the recent problems at Vellore, the official response to the missionary pamphlet was surprisingly lenient and favorable to the cause of evangelization. In one of their letters to the Governor-General on the matter, the Court of Directors expressed their anxiety that: It should be distinctly understood, that we are very far from being averse to the introduction of Christianity into India, or indifferent to the benefits which would result from the general diffusion of its doctrines; but we have a fixed and settled opinion, that nothing could be more unwise and impolitic, nothing even more likely to frustrate the hopes and endeavours of those who aim at the very object, the introduction of Christianity among the native inhabitants, than any imprudent or

194In December 1806 the Serampore missionaries wrote to the BMS noting that, their way in Bengal being “hedged up,” they considered it incumbent upon them to begin a mission outside of India. They began a new mission to Burma in the following year. Periodical Accounts II, 321 195J.C. Marshman says that the missionaries had printed the pamphlet based on their reading of the original version, which did not contain the epithets against Muhammad. As they told the Governor-General, “although this circumstance did not exonerate them, in the smallest degree, from the responsibility of the publication, yet it might serve to vindicate them from the suspicion of being indifferent to the public peace. Thy stated that the Christian religion expressly disallowed the use of irritating expressions for its propagation, and that if they were to pursue a different course in their missionary labours, they should not only violate the principle of attachment to the British Government, but act contrary to the dictates of common sense, and the genius of Christianity." They then turned all remaining copies of the offensive pamphlet over to the government. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 310-11 68

injudicious attempt to introduce it by means which should irritate and alarm their religious prejudices.196

Due probably to the conciliatory tone adopted by the Directors in London and the missionaries themselves, as well as pressure from the ever-supportive Danish governor of Serampore, Minto and his council rescinded the order for the removal of the press and required that the missionaries instead “submit works intended for circulation in the British dominions to the inspection of the officers of the British Government.”197 Relations between the mission and the government grew less strained after this, and strong supporters in Britain kept those opposed to missions from preventing further work.198 Like the revolt at Vellore, the far more significant Indian Mutiny of 1857 heightened government concern about missionary proselytization, and during the period surrounding the Mutiny, all sorts of people with an interest in India commented on the possible role evangelism had played in stirring up the sepoys. Generally, the event tended to push those who supported the Christianization of India to call for it more emphatically, and to inspire those concerned primarily with maintaining British hegemony to oppose it more stridently. The most vitriolic responses to 1857 came from those who believed that, more than anything, imprudent missionary proselytization had inflamed Indian hatred, resulting in European massacres and the near-loss of British India. Edward Smyth Mercer, a Major in the 94th Regiment of the Indian army, wrote to the Earl of Ellenborough in 1857, offering his analysis of the rebellion and asking for help in advancing his military career. To his mind, key sparks for the Mutiny were the “brash young Indian party” who were “urged on by the Evangelical party who wish to Christianize India all at once,” as well as “THE CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES, [who]

196House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, “No. 167 (Secret Department) Draft Paragraphs proposed by the Court of Directors to be sent to their Presidency at Fort William, In Bengal on the subject of the Proceedings in Bengal, respecting the Missionaries,” Papers Related to East India Affairs (printed 12 May 1813), 88. It is certainly possible that the conciliatory tone of this missive emanated largely from Charles Grant, who was at the helm of the Directors in 1807. Had Elphinstone remained the Chairman, perhaps a different response would have been sent. Again, this highlights how critical Evangelical support for missions was to continuing missionary activity in India. 197J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 326 198Evangelical missionary enthusiasts continued to influence policy towards evangelization in India. Besides Teignmouth, Wellesley, and Grant, Chancellor of the Exchequer Spencer Percival and Director Robert Dundas also backed the missionaries after Vellore and during the Persian pamphlet affair. See Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 191 69

CARING MORE FOR DOGMAS THAN FOR GOD'S WORD, make fanatics!” Mercer felt that most missionaries in India stirred their converts up into denominational fervor, and noted that “Evangelicals of to-day would ruin an empire.” The only way forward in India was to raise the intelligence of the population via secular education; if not antagonized by fanaticism, he suggested, “the Hindoos” were “a naturally obedient people.”199 Non-missionary responses to the Mutiny ranged widely in the strength of their condemnation of previous policy, particularly toward missions. All agreed that native perceptions of interference with religion played a central part in the rebellion. This analysis of the question was, of course, accurate to a great extent. The initial spark for 1857 was Hindu and Muslim sepoys‟ fear of losing their caste and religious purity by tasting either cow or pig grease when they bit their Enfield rifle cartridges. Certainly, policies like the Doctrine of the Lapse and recent annexations of princely states also contributed to the rebellion, but there is no doubt that Indian commitment to their own religious belief, and resistance to Christianity, played a leading role in 1857.200 The Baptist Missionary Society itself had no doubt as to the cause of the Mutiny. “However much parties may differ as to the causes of that fearful outbreak,” the committee wrote in 1858, “we cannot err in the conclusion, that it was a revolt against the changes in the national usages, institutions, and religions of Hindustan, which British dominion and an evangelical Christianity have inevitably brought in their train.”201 Despite their confidence that it was, indeed, the challenge Britain and the Christian religion presented to the core values and beliefs of India that had sparked the massacres of 1857, the Baptists were equally certain about how Christians should respond to the event: not by proceeding with greater caution, but by redoubling their efforts to teach the

199Edward Smyth Mercer, A Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Ellenborough on the Military, Religious, and European Settlement Questions in the East Indies (London: Edward T. Whitfield, 178, Strand, 1861), 4-5, 8. Note that Mercer associates missionary interference in India with Evangelical politics in Britain. 200The historiography of the Mutiny of 1857 and its likely causes is extensive. See, for example, Surendra Nath Sen, Eighteen fifty-seven (Delhi: Govt. of India, 1957); Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C.A. Bayly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Nayanjot Lahiri, “Commemorating and Remembering 1857: The Revolt in Delhi and Its Afterlife” World Archaeology 35 (2003), 35-60; Don Randall, “Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling‟s Jungle Books” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40 (1998), 97-119. 201Annual Report 1858, 2. Jeffrey Cox points out that though the Mutiny generated an enormous martyr literature in Europe, “it had remarkably little effect on missionary narratives when taken as a whole.” Ultimately, the rebellion was viewed “as a kind of natural disaster…which threatened the progress of the church.” Cox, Imperial Fault Lines 30-1 70

gospel to Indians. The committee in 1858 expressed their trust that the work would go on, “through the liberality of the Lord's people—with doubled regularity and success.”202 The Baptist response to the 1857 Mutiny underlines the reasonableness of official and secular misgivings about them and their work. Here was an independent group of people, who, while outwardly maintaining their allegiance to British government, saw themselves as set apart from their contemporaries and claimed duty to a higher, divine government. They admitted readily that their spread of Christianity in India had contributed to the conflagration—yet they planned to continue pouring fuel on the fire. The Christianization of India, it seems, was more important to them than the peace and order of British Indian governance there. As the missionaries asserted, their loyalty to the kingdom of Christ did not necessarily preclude their obedience to the kingdom of Britain, but secular officials were understandably not entirely comfortable with this hierarchy of allegiance.203 A minute written by Sir Thomas Munro during his tenure as Governor of Madras illustrates the government‟s position very effectively. In this case, the governor had to reprimand not a missionary proper, but a lower-level official who attempted to combine his position in revenue collection with his felt duty to spread the gospel by distributing tracts and scriptures. Munro‟s 1822 minute on the “Interference of Government Officials in the Conversion of the Natives” recorded the sub-collector‟s defense of his decision to give out religious tracts while collecting taxes. Munro wrote, “It is sufficiently manifest from Mr. ______'s own plain and candid statement, that his zeal disqualifies him from judging calmly, either of the nature of his own interference or of its probable

202Annual Report 1858, 10. The BMS further used the occasion of the Mutiny to express their hope that “the recent occurrences will lead the Government to put an end to its connexion with the idolatrous systems of religion prevailing in the land—that it will exercise a just impartiality by withdrawing all public patronage from every form of religious belief, whether Mohammedan, Hindu, or Christian.” Annual Report 1858, xii 203David Cannadine again may provide some illumination here. He finds that hierarchy was deeply ingrained in the „vast interconnected world‟ that was Britain and her empire. “For ornamentalism was hierarchy made visible, immanent, and actual. And since the British conceived and understood their metropolis hierarchically, it was scarcely surprising that they conceived and understood their periphery in the same way...hierarchy was the conventional vehicle of organization and perception in both the metropolis and the periphery: it provided the prevailing ideology of empire, and it underpinned the prevailing spectacle of empire.” Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 122. Thus missionaries‟ and Evangelicals‟ bald appeals to a higher duty and power that, they argued, lay beyond or superseded this hierarchy—a hierarchy that, according to Cannadine, was key to the articulation and organization of empire— understandably discomfited officials whose lives and duties were deeply inscribed by it. 71

consequences.” The sub-collector, by combining his official duties with religious ones, was taking up the character of a missionary and placing himself above appropriate authority. Most amazingly, the sub-collector demanded “that his opinions…may stand or fall 'according as they are supported or contradicted by the word of God,' as contained in certain passages of scripture forming the appendix to his letter. This is an extraordinary kind of appeal!” Munro exclaimed with some incredulity: He employs his official authority for missionary purposes, and when he is told by his superior that he is wrong, he justifies his acts by quotation from scripture…and he leaves it to be inferred that Government must either adopt his views, or act contrary to divine authority. A person who can, as a Sub-Collector and Magistrate, bring forward such matters for discussion, and seriously desire that they may be placed on record and examined by the government, is not in a frame of mind to be restrained within the proper limits of his duty by any official rules.

Munro duly removed the sub-collector, whose failure to subordinate his religious allegiance to his official duty made him “dangerous to the peace of the country and the prosperity of the revenue.”204 Similarly, the Governor-in-Council‟s response to the Serampore pamphlet that caused such a furor in Bengal after the Vellore Mutiny well represents the official perception of missionaries‟ divided, and therefore dangerous, loyalties. As the British Indian government at Fort William in Calcutta observed, “Our duty, as guardians of the public welfare, and even a consentaneous solicitude for the diffusion of the blessings of Christianity, merely require us to restrain the efforts of [the missionaries‟] commendable zeal within those limits, the transgression of which would, in our decided judgment, expose to hazard the public safety and tranquility.” Missionaries were zealots whose judgment of the public welfare would be skewed by their religious enthusiasm, commendable though it was. Government must therefore restrain that zeal within proper bounds. The Court of Directors likewise suggested that even the missionaries themselves must appreciate government‟s position on matters that might inflame the “religious prejudices” of the Indians and therefore harm their mission, as well as British dominion. The missionaries “must be aware, that it is quite consistent with doing all justice to the excellency of the motives on which they act, to apprehend that their zeal may sometimes require a check,” the Directors wrote. Therefore, “it may be useful and necessary to

204Munro, Selections from his Minutes II, 301; In similar fashion, the Governor of Madras Lord Tweeddale was censured and recalled because he used the epithet “heathen” in official writings, and openly supported mission schools. Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” in Missions and Empire, 111 72

introduce the control or superintendence of Government, whose responsibility for the public tranquility will force it to direct its views to those political considerations which the zeal of the Missionaries might overlook.”205 The simple position of those who were responsible for governing British India was that missionaries, because of their very character and position, were not always able to discriminate between harmless and incendiary activities. Therefore, government must be given the authority to do this for them. Further, it was clear to officials that, if required to choose between what they perceived as their religious duty and their British subjecthood, missionaries would likely put the exigencies of their mission first. Missionaries openly expressed a loyalty that superseded the empire British secular officials were bound to serve; government could hardly be expected to give them free reign. Despite the British Indian government‟s concerns to limit or at least regulate missionary proselytization, the private writings of many of its agents suggests that some officials did support the spread of Christianity in India, though they could not publicly acknowledge it.206 Also, government officials often patronized missionary activities that were less directly associated with evangelization. For example, Wellesley‟s pet project, the College of Fort William, hired William Carey as a professor of Indian languages, and his salary from that government institution defrayed many of the early mission‟s costs.207 The Marquis of Hastings gave his public sanction as Governor-General to the missionary plan for Serampore College in 1819, and also agreed to become official patron of Carey‟s Agricultural and Horticultural Society in 1821.208 Local professionals not associated with the government likewise sometimes supported missionary efforts. In 1807, the Serampore missionaries presented a petition to the government for permission to erect a chapel in Calcutta. More than one hundred Calcutta residents signed the document,

205House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, “No. 167 (Secret Department) Draft Paragraphs proposed by the Court of Directors to be sent to their Presidency at Fort William, In Bengal on the subject of the Proceedings in Bengal, respecting the Missionaries,” Papers Related to East India Affairs (printed 12 May 1813), 89 206Wellesley‟s support has already been noted; William Bentinck and Henry Hardinge were also devout men who expected and desired the eventual Christianization of India, but at a safe and cautious pace. On Hardinge, see especially The Letters of the first Viscount Hardinge of Lahore to Lady Hardinge and Sir Walter and Lady James, 1844-1847, ed. Bawa Satinder Singh (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986). 207Carey‟s position also allowed him to introduce his Bengali New Testament and other religious publications into the College, and gave him access to indigenous language teachers whom he used as a resource for further Biblical translations. See Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 175 208Annual Report 1819, 57; Annual Report 1820, 13 73

“many of whom were merchants of the first respectability.”209 Finally, as missionary successes in translation and printing grew, officials were able to call positive attention to their literary achievements without appearing to give official sanction to their religious ones. In 1813, at the annual public debate of the students at the College of Fort William, the Governor-General Lord Minto professed “a very sincere pleasure in bringing the literary merits of Mr. Marshman and the other Reverend members of the Serampore Mission, to the notice of the Public.” Minto further expressed his “regard for the exemplary worth of their lives, and the beneficent principle which distinguishes and presides in the various useful establishments which they have formed, and which are conducted by themselves.”210 While Minto‟s comments could not be read as official support for the Baptist mission, they certainly indicate his respect for the missionaries‟ dedication and accomplishments. Later in the nineteenth century, the legislated end of British financial support of Hindu and Muslim religious institutions and festivals, as well as the emancipation of Indian Christian converts, seemed to indicate further official approval of the missionary cause.211 The BMS hailed the latter act as “the Magna Charta of India on liberty of conscience.”212 By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was not at all uncommon for Baptist converts in India to hold government jobs. For instance, the Reverend Goolzar Shah‟s lucrative government post allowed him to take the pastorship of the congregation at Colingah without payment.213 Indeed, secular employers apparently became so eager to hire graduates of Serampore College that missionaries complained that many of their students, who were intended for the preaching profession, took high- paying jobs at government, telegraph, and merchant offices instead.214 Overall, then,

209As recorded in a letter from Carey to Sutcliff, Periodical Accounts II, 350-1 210Periodical Accounts IV, 326 211“British functionaries are now forbidden to interfere in the management of native temples, and the ceremonies and festivals connected with them; the Pilgrim Tax is abolished; fines and offering presented on idolatrous occasions are no longer to form any part of Government revenue...The natives are to be left entirely to themselves in everything relating to their temples, their worship, their festivals, and every thing else of that nature, the Government confining itself to the preservation of public peace. We understand, further, that the unnatural prohibition of all native Christians from stations of public trust and authority, by which a mark of oppressive degradation was fixed on every individual who renounced the idolatry of his fathers, has also been removed.” Annual Report 1834, 16 212Annual Report 1850, 3-4 213Annual Report 1868, 10-11 214Annual Report 1859, 25 74

while government and secular officials in British South Asia viewed missionary labor with a wary eye and often tried to contain it, it seems that many came, in time, to share missionaries‟ belief that the Christian religion could only benefit British India. Secular and Official Response to Missions in the Caribbean Baptist mission work in the Caribbean began in the 1820s and continued throughout the nineteenth century, with missionaries and converts playing a key role in the campaign to end slavery and apprenticeship, the beginning of Caribbean missions to West Africa, and the Morant Bay controversy. Speaking broadly of the colonial population‟s reception of evangelism, missions in the Caribbean had to operate in a decidedly more hostile environment than in South Asia. In the West Indies, as in India, local officials saw missionaries as likely to upset colonial peace and order. However, the tensions between colonial Caribbean society and the metropolitan government during the period of mission work, as well as enormity of Baptist success in the Caribbean, where missionaries influenced political change and won thousands of converts, heightened resistance from the white planter population. The West Indian planters who made their fortunes from slave-grown sugar saw in missionaries a particular threat to plantation slavery, and therefore made every effort to abrogate their work. The missionaries accordingly viewed the planter population with aversion, and traced most of the evils of the slave system and its legal supports to them. The two groups, planters and missionaries, remained bitter adversaries throughout the nineteenth century, and where missionaries and officials in India could at least agree privately on shared goals for the spread of Christianity and education, the mutual animosity between missionaries and planters was implacable.215 Historical context is critical to comprehending the often malicious relations between planters and missionaries, because the pressures the plantocracy were facing during much of the nineteenth century informed and inflamed colonial perception of missions. In the late eighteenth century, the planter community saw a Quaker attack on slavery grow into the widespread moral condemnation of the institution in Britain. By the early nineteenth century, the slave trade had been abolished—another victory for the Evangelical alliance—, and it was clear that antislavery advocates would strike next at

215One exception to this is the way both groups responded to African spiritualism. Missionaries and colonial officials viewed voodoo, Obeah, and other systems with abhorrence, and both spoke of such belief in terms that refused to admit its efficacy by referring to the practices as “pretending” or “deceiving.” 75

slavery itself, condemning with it the planters‟ economic livelihood. The Baptists‟ shift in 1832 from neutrality into the antislavery camp meant that Caribbean missionaries acted as key witnesses to slavery‟s ills during the emancipation debate.216 Influenced both by such testimony and by the significant slave rebellions that had occurred throughout the British Caribbean in recent years, Parliament finally ended slavery in the Empire in 1833, thus depriving the sugar islands of their critical labor force.217 To lessen the blow of emancipation to the plantation complex, Parliament provided for a period of apprenticeship, during which former slaves would continue to work on their estates, but as “free” laborers, for wages. During this period, missionaries again acted as advocates for the black apprentices against the planters, whom they portrayed as exploitive and cruel. In 1838, influenced by the testimony of Caribbean missionaries and converts, Parliament voted to end apprenticeship early, and August 1, 1838 marked the day of total emancipation. These enormous political, social, and economic changes convulsed the British Caribbean during this period and created chronic tensions and uncertainties within plantation society and colonial government. It was this setting—one in which familiar institutions of social control and economic production appeared to be slipping away— that provided the backdrop for colonial reaction against the unwelcome interference of Dissenting missionaries in the islands and Evangelical politicians at home. The very negative colonial response to missions in the Caribbean emanated largely from the planter population, who dominated a highly stratified and racialized society comprised of black slaves, a small number of free people of color and poor whites.218 The plantocracy were committed to a social structure organized around racial

216Again, Dissenting missionaries provided much of the evidence which their Evangelical allies in government used to argue the case against slavery. See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects, 110-115 217Besides the insurrections in Jamaica in 1831 and Guyana in 1823, which will be discussed briefly here, a rebellion in Barbados in 1816 sparked missionary scapegoating. Following this revolt, “it was stated in the House of Commons, that these excesses had arisen from the introduction of Methodist and Baptist missionaries to the West Indian islands. They asserted that the slaves had been taught a song by the Baptist missionaries, which concluded with a chorus, „We will be free—we will be free; Wilberforce for ever!‟ An investigation took place in the House of Commons, and the falsehood of these charges was made manifest.” John Clarke, Memorials of Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica, including a sketch of the labours of early religious instructors in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1869), 73. Mary Turner argues that it was Knibb‟s evidence to Commons on slavery convinced Lord Howick, parliamentary undersecretary at the Colonial Office, that immediate abolition was imperative. Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries,173 218Philip Curtin points out that plantation owners controlled their enslaved workforce beyond their working hours, usually exercising de facto legal jurisdiction over them without reference to a high authority. Philip 76

hierarchy, designed “to protect their own position of economic and social privilege.” Planters forged a collective “outlook and set of values based around the institution of slavery and the advantages that they experienced as white men in a slave society.”219 This distinctive creole identity was antithetical, by its very nature, to Baptist missionary identity and goals. The plantocracy‟s attachment to a racialized social hierarchy clashed resoundingly with the missionary commitment to a family of Christ in which all were sinners worth saving. When missionaries, as white British men, supported the claims of black slave converts against the economic and social interests of the planters—fellows of their own race and nation—they powerfully subverted the racialized society the planters had created, and threatened to destroy the economic system on which their livelihood depended.220 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Caribbean colonists fought missionary efforts in their islands from their very beginnings. The plantocracy wielded considerable economic and political power in the Caribbean, and often in Britain as well, and they used their clout to oppose missionary encroachment upon their domain. As Mary Turner notes of Jamaica, “planters dominated every branch of government. They were members of the Jamaica Assembly, which claimed constitutional parity with the House of Commons,” they largely controlled taxation in the island, and they advised the Crown Governor. Most magistrates and assize judges were planters. Ultimately, this meant that the internal affairs of the island, including regulation of the slave population, rested in the hands “of a small, white squirearchy” whose primary aim was to maintain proprietary profits and privileges. The Caribbean elites also sought to protect their interests by employing agents and lobbyists in London; this “West Indian interest” of absentee landlords and sugar merchants exerted considerable influence in Parliament from the early eighteenth century.221 In the

D. Curtin, “The Tropical Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade,” Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 169, 167 219Christer Petley, “Slavery, Emancipation, and the Creole World View of Jamaican Colonists, 1800-1834,” Slavery and Abolition 26 (2005), 94 220As Mary Turner notes, the attack on slavery, when it came, “threatened both the planters‟ livelihood and the very structure of West Indian society. Throughout the slave colonies the small white minority which controlled the vast black majority assumed that slavery, a system which gave them unlimited power over the black population, was the only method whereby they could maintain law and order. The assumption was based on their definition of blacks as inferiors.” Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 6 221Turner says that between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and 1832, the West Indian interest held twenty-two seats in Commons and eighteen in Lords. Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 2-3, 19 77

Caribbean, the planters were also closely associated with the clergy of the Established church; indeed, some planters were clergymen themselves. The Anglican church ministered exclusively to the white population, and “did not regard the slaves as potential church goers,” but rather “actively engaged in slave management.”222 One distinguished member of this West Indian plantocracy was the Reverend George Wilson Bridges, a planter, slaveowner, and rector of the parish of St. Ann in Jamaica for the Church of England. In his 1823 history of the island, Bridges complained about the recent influx of troublemakers into his society. These “sectarians,” “artful ministers of pious frenzy,” held meetings to organize “rebellion under the shadow of religion.” Bridges claimed that unemployed Baptist and Methodist preachers came to Jamaica expecting to reap “a rich harvest, or a glorious martyrdom in a cause which, though not prepared to die in, they knew would raise them into repute at home.” These schismatics used the pulpit—“that safe and sacred organ of sedition”—to stir up Jamaica‟s slave population into rebellion, putting the safety of all the island at risk.223 Bridges‟ opinion of heterodox missionaries well represents the antipathy that his contemporaries and successors in the planter community commonly espoused. It also illuminates the deep and bitter divide within the Anglican communion between Evangelicalism and High Church belief.224 As the planters viewed it, missionaries—as well as Evangelicals like William Wilberforce and T. F. Buxton, and even American humanitarian groups like the Freedman‟s Aid Society—desired nothing more than to bring about their personal ruin and the destruction of colonial Caribbean society.225 During the first decade of their missionary work in the Caribbean, Baptists tried to allay planter suspicions by carefully avoiding antislavery rhetoric or political speeches.

222Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 10. Such slaveholding Anglican clerics in the islands were, of course, not of the Evangelical persuasion. 223Rev. George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica (London: John Murray, 1823), 294-5. 224A planter and the representative to the House of Assembly from the parish of Saint James also expressed this opinion, saying to BMS missionary Thomas Burchell in the early 1830s: “'You Missionaries are a body of persons whom we (the House of Assembly) do not acknowledge. You have intruded yourselves on the Island, unsolicited and unwelcomed. So long as you proceed on your own resources you are licensed on the ground of toleration; but we have passed this law (The Consolidated Slave Act) that you may receive no assistance here for carrying out your purposes, and to prevent your further increase amongst us.” Quoted in George E. Henderson, Goodness and Mercy: The Tale of A Hundred Years (Kingston, Jamaica: The Gleaner Co., 1931), 10 225Jamaica: Its State and Prospects; with An Exposure of the Proceedings of the Freed-man's Aid Society, and The Baptist Missionary Society (London: William Macintosh, 1867), 8 78

In 1832, Jamaica missionary William Knibb testified before Commons that, “when called to preach on subjects connected with the freedom of the gospel, he was at pains to make [his congregation of about 1,000 slaves] understand that gospel freedom had respect to the soul and not to the body, and that there were slaves in the times of the apostles as well as now.” Knibb argued that the peaceful conduct of his church members during the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 proved that they had understood him on this point.226 However, as Mary Turner points out, Jamaica planters “were always alive to the suspicion that the missionaries, by deed or by default, were subversives, agents to the antislavery party.” The very notion of evangelism among slaves was new, and “no precedents established what the effects would be.”227 Planters in British Guyana held a similar view of mission work, fearing that religious instruction among their slaves would lead to social unrest and, ultimately, rebellion. They also hated the way that nonconformist missionaries—themselves of contemptibly mean social origins—tended to raze social and racial distinctions in their congregations. Such egalitarianism was truly dangerous in a society that depended upon the maintenance of hierarchies and the assumption that black people were inherently inferior.228 Colonial Caribbean society therefore raised significant opposition to missionary work. “Everywhere in the Caribbean,” Emilia Viotti da Costa argues, “nonconformist evangelical missionaries were under attack in the early decades of the nineteenth century.” Colonial newspapers in Guyana, Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica castigated missionaries, and “colonists everywhere raised obstacles” to their work.229 As in South Asia, colonials in the Caribbean had good reason to link missions to social and political unrest. The vituperative colonial response to missionary work stemmed not only from the tensions of the time, but from clear connections between

226Analysis of the Report of a Committee of the House of Commons on the Extinction of Slavery (London: printed for the Society for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions, 1833), 110 227Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 10. The ambiguity of the gospel message itself was certainly grounds for planter discomfort, for “a sermon may mean one thing to a preacher, but quite another to a congregation….the Biblical message itself…can teach subservience, but it can also justify rebellion.” Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8 228Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, 13. A Demerara news article responded to the arrival of two LMS missionaries by condemning “the precarious preachers of a pretended enlightening doctrine, who announced equal rights, universal liberty.” Such preaching could only have fatal consequences, the author concluded. Da Costa, 10 229Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, 11 79

Dissenting missions and slave rebellions. Nowhere was planter hatred of Baptist missionaries more apparent than in 1831, when the so-called “,” a slave rebellion, shattered the Christmastime peace of the lucrative sugar island of Jamaica. , probably the rebellion‟s leading instigator, was a slave and a deacon in the Baptist church at Montego Bay, where BMS missionary Thomas Burchell was pastor. In 1831, after reading about the Parliamentary debates on slavery in English newspapers, hearing his masters discussing the probability of emancipation, and considering the Biblical arguments against slavery, Sam Sharpe devised a plan to organize its overthrow in Jamaica. At the end of the Christmas holidays he and his fellow slaves would simply refuse to return to work unless they received wages as free men, but, as he later claimed, they would harm neither persons nor property.230 Sharpe used Christianity as a political justification for revolt, quoting scripture against slavery, and set up Burchell, who was in England at the time, as an absent leader who would return in Messianic fashion with emancipation papers. Though the missionaries preached peace and obedience once they discovered the plans for rebellion, their congregations grew angry and disappointed at this lack of support, and the uprising went forward anyway. 231 Rebels set the hilltop Kensington Estate in St. James ablaze as a signal beacon on the night of December 27, 1831, and soon most of the estates in the western parishes were on fire. Groups of slaves, armed with guns stolen from their plantations, organized to fight the local militias who were quickly called out against them. However, the rebels were divided—the groups organized in various parishes failed to work together—and short of ammunition and military experience. The revolt was put down by the combined strength of local militias and the military before the second week of January. Planter retribution was swift, and

230John Clark, The Voice of Jubilee: A Narrative of the Baptist Mission, Jamaica, from Its Commencement; with Biographical Notices of Its Fathers and Founders (London: John Snow, 1865), 56-7; Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 150-2. Sharpe‟s followers did collect guns and ammunition, however, so Sharpe‟s claim that he planned only mass passive resistance is probably questionable. Turner, 154 231Mary Reckord, “The Jamaica Slave Rebellion of 1831” Past and Present 40 (July 1968), 115-6; see also Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, Being a Narrative of Facts and Incidents, which occurred in a British Colony, during the two years immediately preceding Negro Emancipation (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1853), 1-5. Though none of the Baptist missionaries encouraged the rebellion, it is certain that “the network of mission stations and their attendant satellites of sectarian groups [native Baptists and others] became the mechanism for…mobilization,” and the Bible class system employed in Baptist churches gave slaves the opportunity for leadership development and meetings for insurrectionary purposes. 80

“hundreds [of slaves] were shot down without mercy, and hung without the form of a trial. Hundreds more who gave themselves up, or were made prisoners—many of whom had had no part in the insurrection, were convicted on evidence that would not bear examination, and executed, simply because they were Methodists or Baptists.”232 Sharpe himself was publicly hung. Before his execution he declared to the assembled crowd that the missionaries had played no part in the rebellion, and urged them to follow their instruction.233 The insurrection had destroyed the sugar harvest and done ₤1 million worth of damage, and the rebels‟ action and the violent reprisals it engendered turned the attention of the world to Jamaica‟s slavery problem.234 Further, the Christmas rebellion had “confirmed the whites‟ oldest and deepest suspicion of the missions, that they undermined the slave system.”235 The planters of the Jamaica Assembly, assessing the damage after the fact, had no question about whom to blame. As reported by the committee appointed to inquire into the source of the event, the “primary and most powerful cause arose from an evil excitement, created in the minds of our Slaves generally, by the unceasing and unconstitutional interference of His Majesty‟s Ministers with our Local Legislature” and “with the intemperate expressions” on the subject of slavery in Parliament and the Anti- Slavery Society.236 A further incitement to revolt came from the preaching and teaching of various heterodox sects, “but more particularly the sect termed Baptists, which had the effect of producing in the minds of the Slaves a belief that they could not serve both a Spiritual and Temporal Master.”237 Thus the Jamaica Assembly and the planters it

232Clark, Voice of Jubilee, 58 233Wesleyan minister Henry Bleby interviewed Sharpe repeatedly in jail before his execution, and reported that Sharpe expressed regret that the revolt had resulted in the destruction of property and lives. “He was not, however, convinced that he had done wrong in endeavouring to assert his claim to freedom. When reminded that the Scriptures teach men to be content with the station allotted to them by Providence, and that even slaves are required patiently to submit to their lot, till the Lord in his providence is pleased to change it,--he was a little staggered, and said, 'If I have done wrong in that, I trust I shall be forgiven; for I cast myself upon the Atonement.'” Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, 117 234Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries 157-8, 148; Clarke, Jubilee, 58 235Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 164 236The enormous tension over the slavery question between the West Indies colonists and the metropolitan government, who were by this time strongly influenced by the antislavery lobby, is here very evident. The reference to the ministerial interference with the colonial legislature presumably alludes to the disallowance, by the imperial government, of several slave codes passed by the Jamaica Assembly in recent years. See Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 15-16 237House of Commons, “Copy of the Report of a Committee of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, appointed to inquire into the Cause of, and Injury sustained by, the recent Rebellion in that Colony, 81

represented held that the fault for the rebellion lay with both the seditious preaching of “sectarian” missionaries, and with the antislavery element in Parliament.238 Militiamen, who were often small proprietors as well, also supported this view. Captain Hugh Ritchie Wallace declared baldly before the Jamaica Assembly that all sectarians, “with heaven in their eyes but hell in their hearts, seek our destruction.” He went on to compare the Baptists first to the ancient Druids and next to the French revolutionary Robespierre, concluding that if these “most bloody” sectarian spies were not expelled from the island, “the cultivation of the soil shall cease to exist.”239 During and after the Christmas Rebellion, colonials struck viciously at the ones they believed had caused the revolt—missionaries and their converts. The colonial newspaper Jamaica Courant, edited by the planter William Bruce, howled in the midst of the revolt that the Methodists and Baptists had laid waste to Jamaica‟s fairest fields and ruined its families. “These indeed must be gratifying reflections to men who pretend to preach and teach the mild and benign doctrine of our Saviour to our slaves; but whose soul is bent upon the destruction of the fairest portion of the British empire; and that merely because they are paid by the Anti-Slavery Society to hasten our ruin.” Laying intentional devastation of the island at the missionaries‟ feet, Bruce went on to note that three Baptist missionaries had been taken into custody, and to look forward hopefully to watching them hang: “Shooting is, however, too honorable a death for men whose conduct has occasioned so much bloodshed, and the loss of so much property. There are fine hanging woods in St. James and Trelawny, and we do sincerely hope that the bodies

together with the Examinations on Oath, Confessions, and other Documents annexed to that Report, Papers Relating to Slave Insurrection, Jamaica (1831-2), 3-4 238The planters themselves clearly recognize an alliance of Evangelicals in the home government with “sectarian” missionaries in the West Indies, ostensibly conspiring together to ruin them. 239House of Commons, “The Examination on Oath of Hugh Ritchie Wallace, of the Parish of St. Elizabeth, Esq., a Captain on Half-Pay of His Majesty‟s Fusileers, and a Considerable Proprietor,” Papers Relating to Slave Insurrection, Jamaica (1831-2), 8. Missionaries and their supporters, on the other hand, laid the revolt at the feet of the planters themselves. “Nothing can be more evident than the fact that neither the Negroes nor the missionaries were the cause of the late insurrection,” asserted the Wesleyan missionary Peter Duncan at a public meeting in 1832 at Exeter Hall. Rather, the event “was brought about by the conduct of the white population. That the colony will not be safe from similar danger in the future any one must be convinced who has watched the course which the colonists are adopting.” Religious Persecution in Jamaica: Report of the Speeches of the Rev. Peter Duncan, Wesleyan Missionary, and the Rev. William Knibb, Baptist Missionary, at a Public Meeting of the Friends of Christian Missions, Held at Exeter-Hall, August 15, 1832 (London: S. Bagster, 1832), 9 82

of all the…preachers who may be convicted of sedition, may diversify the scene.”240 On February 1, Bruce‟s Courant announced the formation of a “Colonial Church Union” to counteract the “curse of Jamaica, the Sectarian Preachers.” The Editor heartily approved the Union and hoped other parishes would follow suit.241 This Colonial Church Union exemplified the alliance between colonial planters and militiamen and Established clergymen against the activities of Dissenting missionaries in Jamaica. The Union was founded by Reverend Bridges, the author of Annals of Jamaica, during the first months of 1832, and by August had branches in most of the parishes whose slaves had rebelled. This organization‟s declared goal was “to drive out of the Island all teaching of religion that did not conform to that of the Colonial State Church, the Established Church of Scotland, or the Church of Rome.” The Unionists agreed to achieve this object by supporting the Established Church, expelling all “sectaries and other incendiaries from the Island,” and refusing employment to any of their converts.242 During the months immediately following the rebellion, Unionists physically attacked Dissenting missionaries and converts and destroyed mission chapels—all despite a proclamation issued by the Crown Governor Lord Belmore against such activity. BMS missionary John Clarke described the destruction after the fact: The first chapel destroyed was the new and substantial one just erected at Salter's Hill. It was set on fire during martial law by the St. James' Militia. On the 7th of February the chapel at Falmouth was demolished by the St. Ann's regiment, the baptistry was filled up with filth…On the same day the chapel at Stewart Town was destroyed, and on the following day the spacious sanctuary at Montego Bay, and the smaller one at Brown's Town, were laid in ruins. The succeeding day the chapel at Savana-la-Mar was pulled down.243

240Jamaica Courant Series 5 (Friday morning, January 6, 1832). The Courant‟s pages drip with an abhorrence of missionaries bordering on the ridiculous. Missionaries are believed to be, variously, the spies of the antislavery society, the leftovers of disbanded army regiments, and the thieves of slave food and clothing. The planters‟ derision for the low social class of the preachers is also evident. The Courant of 6 January screeches against the missionaries as “the very scum of the earth, the Methodist and Baptist Preachers here—DUNCAN THE COBLER—WHITEHOUSE THE TAILOR—KNIBB THE PLAISTERER. THEY are heard and fostered and encouraged, and the whole Colony called liars and oppressors and MURDERERS!!” Note that the phrase “scum of the earth” as applied to missionaries and/or converts appears in both East (Elphinstone) and West (Bruce). 241Jamaica Courant Series 29 Friday Morning, February 3, 1832 (newspaper dated 3 February, dispatch regarding Union dated 1 February) 242Henderson, Goodness and Mercy, 19, 21 243The Union mostly aimed at destruction of property, but also attacked persons. As John Clark records in The Voice of Jubilee, “Some weeks after these occurrences a mob of white men, armed with swords an muskets, made an attack on the mission premises at mount Charles, in St. Andrews, and after treating with barbarous cruelty an unarmed old man, fired in at the windows...They then attempted to set fire to the building; but alarm being given, they fled.” Voice of Jubilee, 61-2 83

Only the arrival and decisive action of the new Governor Lord Mulgrave at the end of 1832 put a stop to the Unionists‟ activities. By this time, Baptist property in the island had sustained over ₤12,000 worth of damage.244 The plantocracy continued to oppose missionary activity as far as possible throughout the 1830s and 1840s, but the rising power of the antislavery party had by this time fully damned slavery in metropolitan politics, and the planters‟ cause was lost. From 1833, the British government repeatedly passed legislation that favored Caribbean slaves and missionaries over planters, ending slavery and then apprenticeship in the 1830s, and removing the protective duties on West Indian sugar in 1845. Yet economic decline in the region in the 1840s and 1850s adversely affected every level of the Caribbean population, from planters to missionaries to black peasantry, and liberal disappointment with the “slow progress” of the black population moderated British rhetoric that had supported former slaves.245 The next significant showdown between missions and colonial authority came in 1865, thirty years after emancipation, when the Jamaican Governor John Eyre reacted with disproportionate violence to a riot at Morant Bay, and then blamed the incident on the writings of the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, Edward Bean Underhill. In 1864, after receiving repeated accounts of the distress, poverty, and sickness rampant in Caribbean Baptist churches, Underhill wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, E. Cardwell, saying that high taxation, the lack of employment, and especially the exploitive actions of the Jamaica Legislature—“their unjust taxation of the coloured population…their refusal of just tribunals…their denial of political rights to the emancipated negroes” were creating conditions of starvation in Jamaica. Underhill

244Knibb‟s words on the Colonial Church Union demonstrate, however, that the planters were not the only ones capable of stinging rhetoric. In his testimony before the House of Commons on the 1831 revolt, Knibb‟s questioners quoted him a passage from a speech attributed to himself: “A colonial Church Union, composed of nearly all the fornicators in the island, has been formed to stop the march of mind and religion, to protect the white rebels from deserved punishment, and to dry up the streams of religious instruction. Infidels, clergymen, slave owners, newspaper editors, high and low, have joined hand and heart.” When asked if these were, in fact, his words, “yes,” replied the missionary without apology, “that is mine.” Thus the antagonism the planters offered the missionaries was returned to them in kind, at least by one missionary firebrand. Analysis of the Report of a Committee of the House of Commons on the Extinction of Slavery (London: printed for the Society for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions, 1833), 114. On the mission's property damage, see Annual Report 1834, 3-4, which discusses the ongoing attempts of the BMS to raise money for rebuilding and repairs. 245 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 202-3; see also Henderson, Goodness and Mercy, 90. 84

concluded his letter in terms of strong condemnation for those—largely planters—who governed the island: “It is more than time that the unwisdom—to use the gentlest term— that has governed Jamaica since emancipation should be brought to an end,” he declared.246 Upon receiving the letter, Cardwell forwarded it on to Eyre and asked him to report on its contents. Eyre responded by circulating the letter widely among the members of the Assembly and other notables, and it soon appeared in most of the island newspapers.247 The publication of the letter sparked a series of debates, largely among the black and colored population in the island; these became known as “Underhill meetings.”248 At all of these, resolutions were passed by the attendees supporting Underhill‟s assessment of the reasons for their distress, and suggesting that the Home Government should investigate.249 Meanwhile, Eyre assured Cardwell that these meetings were not truly representative of the black and colored population, who were not distressed but thriving. Rather, the debates were “got up in many parishes, mostly through the agency of Baptist ministers,” the governor claimed, “and Baptist ministers in many instances took a prominent part in such meetings, addressing the mob, and joining in resolutions” to support Underhill‟s slanderous letter.250 On October 11, a crowd of black citizens of Morant Bay, some of them armed, gathered outside the Court House to demand relief, and the local volunteer militia were called out. The custos emerged and read the riot act, and one of the crowd threw a stone

246Edward Bean Underhill, The Tragedy of Morant Bay. A Narrative of the Disturbances in the Island of Jamaica in 1865 (London: Alexander & Shepheard, 1895), xi-xviii, quotations from xv, xviii 247The letter appeared at a period of volatility in Jamaican politics; during the 1864 legislative session several public meetings had protested the high taxes already imposed, and the Assembly was expected to raise the duties again. Underhill, Morant Bay, 14-5 248 House of Commons, Appendix G, “Jamaica. Copies of a letter from Dr. Underhill, dated 12 February 1866, in reply to a despatch from Governor Eyre, dated 1 January 1866,” Papers relating to Jamaica (1866), 49; Frank Stanley Edmonds, Companion to The Tragedy of Morant Bay, by E.B. Underhill, 4. This unique volume is housed in the British Library along with Underhill‟s book. The Library‟s copy of Underhill‟s Morant Bay originally belonged to Edward Norman Harrison, a militiaman who fought at Morant Bay and attributed the tragedy to Underhill and missionary interference. Harrison made extensive annotations in the Underhill book, and the companion volume, by Edmonds, explicates these and includes an overview of the event itself. Edmonds had an interest in the book because of family connections to the missionary Thomas Burchell. The Companion also contains all the written and oral evidence taken by the 1866 Royal Commission sent to enquire into the tragedy, including Harrison‟s. Also, see Catherine Hall's account of Morant Bay in Civilising Subjects, chapter four. 249The Kingston meeting further called “upon all the descendants of Africa, in every parish throughout the island, to form themselves into societies, and hold public meetings…for the purpose of setting forth their grievances, especially now, when our philanthropic friends in England [are] leading the way.” 250House of Commons, “Jamaica. Copies of a letter from Dr. Underhill, dated 12 February 1866, in reply to a despatch from Governor Eyre, dated 1 January 1866,” Papers relating to Jamaica (1866), 3 85

at the soldiers, who fired upon them. Fighting ensued, and the rebels set the Court House on fire. The riot spread into the countryside, and some estates were looted.251 The Governor responded to the rebellion, which lasted about three days, with reprisals whose violence echoed the retribution visited upon the slave population in 1832. According to the findings of the Royal Commission after the fact, “at least 430 persons were shot or hung in retaliation during the existence of martial law… a thousand dwellings were wantonly and cruelly burnt; and…certainly not fewer than six hundred persons were scourged in a most reckless manner.”252 Eyre blamed Underhill and the Baptist missionaries who had allegedly organized the Underhill meetings for the event, while the missionaries faulted Eyre‟s poor leadership, the unfit courts, and the impotent Jamaica Assembly.253 The Royal Commission who investigated Morant Bay eventually found that Eyre‟s reprisals had been excessive, and he was removed from office. However, he was later cheered as a hero in Britain—an indication of changing racial attitudes in the metropole.254 The missionaries and Underhill, implicated by the governor‟s accusations, were exonerated. Ultimately, the head of the commission expressed his approval of the Baptists‟ conduct by urging them to establish a church in the very region of the outbreak, and contributing from his own funds to that cause after he returned to England.255 During the Morant Bay debacle, the missionaries kept up their previous pattern of appealing to

251Harrison, Companion, 13, 26; Underhill, Tragedy at Morant Bay, 56-61. Underhill quotes the Royal Commission‟s findings on the state of the courts to which the people appealed: “the difficulties in the way of seeking relief by law were very great, and it was not to be expected that, constituted as the bench of magistrates at present is, it would have the confidence of the labourers. The magistrates are principally y planters and persons connected with the management of the estates...Questions are adjudicated upon by those whose interests and feelings are supposed to be hostile to the labourer and the occupier.” Underhill, Tragedy at Morant Bay, 57. Recent treatments of Morant Bay include Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time:” The Morant Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1994), and Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), chapter eight. 252Quoted in Underhill, Tragedy at Morant Bay, 52-3 253House of Commons, “Jamaica. Copies of a letter from Dr. Underhill, dated 12 February 1866, in reply to a despatch from Governor Eyre, dated 1 January 1866,” Papers relating to Jamaica (1866), 6. Frank Stanley Edmonds, one of the Volunteers who fought at the Court House, supported Eyre in everything. In his testimony before the Commission, he declared the event “a preconcerted and cruel [rebellion] and all ought to be thankful to Governor Eyre for his promptness and firmness in putting it down.” Further, the rebellion happened because the black laborers were “too well off. They work for one week and sit down the rest, as they say, the next and you will most likely meet them resting in your pastures, living upon your bread fruit, cocoa-nuts, and mangoes, which they steal.” Edmonds, Companion, 37-8 254See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects, 260-4 255Henderson, Goodness and Mercy, 108-9 86

Home Government over the heads of the planters and colonial governor. This state of affairs persisted throughout the period of mission work in the Caribbean; missionaries routinely clashed with colonial government and society, looking instead to British public opinion and the Home Government for support. Cordial relations between missionaries and a Caribbean government did not occur until London imposed a Crown Governor on Jamaica after Morant Bay.256 In both South Asia and the Caribbean, then, secular colonial society and officials expressed fully warranted concern about the effect missionary proselytization might have on colonized peoples. In India, though many officials supported the slow introduction of Christianity and other reforms, the administration kept a careful check on missionary zeal, knowing that Baptists considered the British Empire secondary to Christ‟s kingdom. In the West Indies, the plantocracy opposed missionary interference with greater vigor and even malice, fearing accurately that evangelization would lead to the breakdown of the slave economy and society that benefited them so greatly. In both spheres of empire, colonial concerns about missionary work reveal how contemporaries perceived the strangeness and significance of what the Baptists were doing. Missionary identity, allegiance, and activities were disruptive in that they tended to challenge the principles that justified colonial relationships. Missionaries entered regions whose societies were built upon hierarchies of difference—of race and socioeconomic status—societies that, to survive, had to maintain at any cost the divide between colonizer and colonized.257 Secular colonials feared and opposed missionaries precisely because they threatened to assault the very foundations of empire by breaking those barriers down.

256In 1869 the new Crown governor, J.P Grant, expressed publicly to the Jamaica missionaries “the obligation which Government and the colony are under to you, Gentlemen, and to other members of your Association, for bringing about” the hearty reception given to his administration‟s measures by the Jamaican people. Annual Report 1869, 15-6 257David Cannadine finds, for example, that following the Mutiny, the British re-envisaged and re- established this part of their empire by “ordering into a single hierarchy all its subjects, British and Indian alike.” Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 41 87

CHAPTER FOUR INDIGENOUS RESPONSES TO MISSIONS

In March of 1802 Krishnu-pall, a shudra carpenter, and Kemol, a brahman from Calcutta—both recent converts to Christianity—walked through the streets of Krishnu‟s hometown. Krishnu had been born and raised in Serampore, and owned a shop there. People recognized him, had known him for years. Yet as he and Kemol made their way through the town, they were accosted by his neighbors. “What will this joiner do?” they shouted. “Will he destroy the caste of us all? Is this brahman going to be a feringah?”258 This exchange illustrates the confusion, anger, and fear that missionary proselytization and success sowed among the people of South Asia. Among Hindus, people from every level of society watched as their fellows relinquished their caste by associating with foreigners and adopted an alien religion, which they were then eager to propagate. Among a subject population already suspicious that British overlords meant to destroy their caste and religion, missionary preaching and conversion provoked a very strong reaction from Hindus and Muslims alike. This chapter explores the ways in which the colonized peoples of South Asia and the Caribbean responded to missionary proselytization. In India, brahmans shouted missionaries down in the streets of Calcutta, openly rejecting or deriding the missionary message, and enforced the social exclusion of Indian converts to Christianity. Others, such as the Bengali intellectual Rammohun Roy, engaged with the Protestant gospel in ways the missionaries did not intend, taking the “precepts of Jesus” and adapting them to their own purposes. Indian Muslims likewise bristled at missionary rejection of Mohammad, and often violently objected to their preaching. Some did welcome the missionary message as another incarnation of or revelation from God. Overall, though, most missionary hearers in South Asia either rejected Christianity outright, or altered it significantly to adapt it to their own needs and desires.

258Periodical Accounts II, 245. Feringah, also rendered feringhi and feringee, means “foreigner.” Indians applied this epithet to both missionaries and native converts. The four major castes are brahman (at the highest level), kshatriya, vaishya, and shudra. Krishnu and Kemol‟s companionship was the more disturbing because Kemol, a brahman, should have been unwilling to pollute himself by associating with a shudra carpenter like Krishnu. 88

In the Caribbean, evangelism seemed to have greater success, as thousands of black slaves adopted the Baptist gospel in the 1820s and 1830s. Association with Baptist churches offered Caribbean slaves and freeholders the chance to be part of a community that provided political advocacy, education, and opportunities for leadership, and many adopted the missionary message eagerly. West Indians were, therefore, generally far more receptive to evangelization than their South Asian counterparts. However, belief in Obeah, Myalism, and other African-derived religious systems often created a more syncretic Christianity than missionaries appreciated, and in the Caribbean as in South Asia, missionaries could not prevent their hearers from altering their message to meet their own needs and purposes. South Asian Responses to Baptist Missions The Baptist Missionary Society sent William Carey and John Thomas to India in 1793; it was the new society‟s first field of labor. Joshua Marshman, William Ward, and their families joined the mission in 1799, and in 1800 Ward lamented the apparent indifference of the Bengali population to their message. “You stand by the side of a street or lane, a man passes, you ask him how he does, or whither he is going. Sometimes he replies, at other times he will go on, taking no notice of you,” the young missionary wrote despairingly. “Tell them they are in the way of everlasting ruin, perhaps one will answer, „Sahib‟s words are very fine; Sahib knows all shasters; these are shaster words.‟ He will then make his salaam and depart. I suppose brother Carey has preached a thousand sermons to congregations such as these.”259 This near-total lack of interest evinced by their hearers proved deeply discouraging to the first BMS missionaries in India. Even when the missionaries were able to excite some response in someone, the hoped-for convert often proved unwilling to resist the conventions of his society in order to accept Christianity.260 Carey‟s Hindu munshi learned and understood Christianity thoroughly, and believed Hinduism to be a false system, but was unwilling to cut his family and social ties in order to profess Christianity. Another man named Fukeer did convert and was even baptized, but when he went home to take leave of his family he never returned.

259 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 135. Shaster (shastra, sastra) refers to Hindu holy writings or teachings. A shastri is a teacher. Wolpert, History of India, 499. Significantly, this Hindu listener judged that Ward was either quoting Hindu texts, or using some other text of clear religious import. 260 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 132, 139 89

Krishnu-pall finally became the first mission convert late in 1800, and even then his family members, who had planned to be baptized with him, lost their courage and hung back. Krishnu was baptized alone with many of his neighbors gathered around to watch in silent disapproval. It would be Krishnu‟s conversion, and later his family‟s, that sparked the first real resistance from the local Indian population, and men who had once ignored the missionaries now actively opposed them.261 As Andrew Porter points out, though Protestant missionaries themselves viewed their message as “anti-imperialist” and their connection to British imperialism as “deeply ambiguous at best,” they probably underestimated the extent to which their hearers associated them “with conquerors and colonisers, damned by proximity.”262 Once a Hindu voluntarily renounced Hinduism, his neighbors seemed to perceive the men who had led him astray in this light—as threatening foreigners who, like the British Raj, meant to destroy their caste, culture, and religion. Brahmans, the Hindu priestly caste, particularly saw Christianity as a threat to their own positions of social and religious power, and they often proved the harshest adversaries to missionary work. For example, in May 1800 Carey attempted to preach in the Buddabarry market in Serampore, and the brahmans there organized local inhabitants, primarily of lower caste, and noisy children to drown out his speech. When Joshua and Hannah Marshman's school opened a month later, neighborhood brahmans discouraged families from allowing their children to attend.263 In August of the same year, Krishnu‟s wife Rasoo, who had also converted to Christianity, was beaten in the marketplace. The missionaries, recording the event in their journals, wrote, “The enmity of the brahmans…is inveterate.” The following February Krishnu‟s landlord, a brahman, ordered him to quit his house.264 Brahmanical

261 A munshi is a language tutor. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 139-42 262 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 13. BMS missionaries certainly faced audiences who linked them to British imperial power. T. Morgan, Pastor of the Haurah and Salkiya church, writes in 1854: “Through visiting large and remote towns, where Englishmen are seldom seen, I have been able to some extent to ascertain the degree of estimation in which the English character is held. I was in a large town…where the inhabitants formerly benefited much through the trade of the Company; the crowd followed, there was no personal violence, but a good deal of disrespect, until an old Brahman asked me, 'Are you belonging to the Company?' 'No.' 'You are then a religious teacher?' 'Yes.' Then ascending a high place he shouted to the mob, 'Not the Company, the Sahib is a guru;' and the next day all the people had a kind word to say to me. The prejudice is not so much against Christianity as it is against us as a conquering race.” Annual Report 1854, 16-7 263 Periodical Accounts II, 62, 70 264 Periodical Accounts II, 174, 184 90

opposition often fell more heavily upon converts than upon the missionaries themselves; it also prevented some members of lower castes from listening to their preaching. An enquirer called Bharrat informed Carey in 1801 that many lower caste Hindus were meeting to discuss the gospel but feared to lose caste or bring down brahmanical retribution upon them. Bharrat believed that brahmans would have to convert first, or everyone else would be afraid to.265 The priestly caste remained staunch adversaries; nearly seventy-five years after Carey‟s first sermon, brahmans at Allahabad “inveighed bitterly against the missionaries, declaring that they were effectually turning away the minds of the people from the religion of their fathers. Several begged the missionaries, most piteously, to desist before they were financially ruined.”266 Missionaries and converts also faced questions and recriminations from other levels of local Hindu society. Following Krishnu‟s baptism, many of his neighbors came to his shop, “enquiring why he had forsaken the old way, and walked in this pernicious path.” Krishnu‟s response to his contemporaries‟ criticism indicates the strength of his new religious commitment; he “prevailed on them to sit down, and then explained to them the sufferings of Christ. Some mocked, some laughed, some listened.”267 Calcutta‟s babus of both brahmanical and other high-level castes actually formed a society to combat missionary proselytization in their city in 1847. This Hindu Society resolved that local leaders “should…take strenuous measures to prevent any person belonging to his caste, sect or party, from educating his son or ward at any of the Missionary Institutions at Calcutta, on pain of excommunication from the said caste, or sect, or party.”268 Such organizations well represented native hostility to mission work,

265 Periodical Accounts II, 63. Brahmans opposed native converts most vociferously, and seemed particularly to resent the fact that people who had been subject to them as Hindus were now preaching to them as Christians. The Indian preacher Kangalee journaled in April 1812: “On Saturday we found a person worshipping an idol, and asked him what he was doing. He replied, he was worshipping God. We then told him that God was almighty, and the maker of all things, but that what he was then worshipping was the work of his own hands. We then declared to the bystanders, that unless they followed the Lord Jesus Christ they could not be saved. A brahman said, 'These fellows, who were our slaves for many generations, are now become our teachers!‟ We plainly told them, that unless they believed the gospel we declared to them, they could not be saved.” Periodical Accounts IV, 100 266 Annual Report 1872, 5-6 267 Periodical Accounts II, 175 268 A member of this Society addressed local boys after its first meeting, saying, “Babas, be a follower of one God [a Vedantist], eat whatever you like, do whatever you like, but be not a Christian.” Bengal Hurkaru September 21, 1847 in The Intolerant and Persecuting Section of the Calcutta Baboos Exposed!!! [Extracts from newspapers referring to a meeting of Hindus opposed to missionary proselytism, letters to 91

and local concern to protect children from missionary ensnarement. Fear and condemnation of the loss of caste that conversion entailed was chief among Hindu audiences‟ objections to Christianity.269 The ancient Hindu system of social division and hierarchy commonly known as caste had existed in India for fifteen hundred years by the time the Baptists arrived at the turn of the nineteenth century. As sociologist Jyotirmoyee Sarma notes for Bengal, caste divided society into groups that shared a consciousness, myths, and caste name, and practiced endogamy. Often, members of one caste also held the same occupation, and did not “generally interdine with members of other castes.” Within this system, codes of ritual purity and impurity governed relations between castes, keeping different groups separate and ranked.270 Ideally, caste hierarchy determined the entire Hindu social order, organizing society in such a way as to benefit all. Thus a rejection of caste by conversion to Christianity could be and was seen as a denial of one‟s family, vocation, and dharma, moral and religious duty. To discard or lose caste was to bring “inferior fruits” to the entire community. Historian Ronald B. Inden further indicates why Hindu audiences might have looked upon loss of caste through conversion with such abhorrence. In his interpretation of caste relationships, caste resides in a Hindu individual‟s “coded substances,” both his bodily substances inherited from his family, and the substances he touches in his vocation—ink for a writer, Vedic words for a Brahman. To mix substances with a person of another caste, or with a foreigner, was to ruin one‟s coded substance and therefore to contribute to community decline and disorder.271 Ultimately, as Inden argues, Bengali Hindus “placed the highest value on the coded substance of Vedic worship as that which provided order, well-being, and prosperity for their society.” Vedic religion itself was preserved in the castes and clans of the Hindu community; to overturn caste was to assault the Hindu way of life.272 It is true that the missionaries intentionally subverted the Hindu caste system

the Bengal Hurkaru on the same subject by Alexander Duff and editorial comment thereon.] (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1847), 1 269 Most contemporary sources spell caste as “cast.” I have left this spelling as is in quotations. 270 Jyotirmoyee Sarma, Caste Dynamics Among the Bengali Hindus (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Limited, 1980), 48, 43, 45 271 Ronald B. Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in Middle Period Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976),15ff, 75 272 Inden, Marriage and Rank, 79 92

when they set up indigenous churches and performed the rites of baptism, marriage, and the Lord‟s Supper within them.273 It is also clear that, when Hindus chose to convert, their first step toward Christ was to eat with existing converts or the mission family, thus destroying their ritual purity.274 Some Brahman converts even indicated their rejection of caste by trampling on the sacred thread of their office, the poita.275 However, it was certainly not the case that, as most of their hearers seemed to believe, the destruction of caste was the missionaries‟ primary goal. William Ward mused in his journal in 1802: “The natives seem everywhere to have the notion, that we are come merely to destroy their cast. Some of them were surprised when I informed them, that we would not give a cowrie for the cast of every Bengalee [sic] in the country, and that we only wanted holy people, of whatever cast.” Despite missionary attempts to disabuse their hearers of the notion that they came simply to abolish caste, the idea persisted. By 1806, people around Serampore widely identified the Baptists as foreign priests who intentionally targeted Hindu caste.276 When Ward preached in the Lal Bazaar in Calcutta, locals pointed at him and called, “that‟s him—that‟s the Hindu Padre—why do you destroy those people‟s castes!” Local suspicion also fell upon converts, whose preaching was seen as a misleading attempt to sully the religious purity of their fellows. One of Krishnu‟s

273 The Baptists believed caste was an affront before God, who loved all equally. The fact that caste divisions in the Dutch Protestant churches on the Coromandel Coast had nearly destroyed the mission there certainly strengthened their resolve to end such distinctions. Thus, they “resolved to exterminate every vestige of caste from the Christian community they were rearing up, and the Brahman received the bread and wine after the carpenter Krishnu.” They placed seniority by order of conversion before caste. In this way, the Baptists broke down what they saw as a debilitating social system and strove for equality among the members of their Christian family. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 177. On the persistence of caste in Christian churches in India, see Frykenberg, “India,” in A World History of Christianity, 184-8. 274 As Inden notes, the preparation and eating of food was closely associated with Vedic worship. The castes “were thought to sustain and transmute their embodied ranks by the exchanges of wealth and food;” such exchanges maintained proper order in the community. Converts‟ mixing with those outside their caste by eating a meal totally subverted the hierarchy of caste and brought disorder into Hindu society. Inden, 87, 91. 275 The first Brahman convert, Krishnu-prisaud, was baptized in 1803. “Before his baptism, he trampled on his poita, or sacred thread, to indicate his rejection of the creed with which it was associated…Mr. Ward gave him money to purchase another…Mr. Carey and his colleagues did not at that time consider it necessary to insist on a Brahmin‟s divesting himself of his thread, which they considered as much a token of social distinction, as of spiritual supremacy. The converts were therefore baptized and preached to their fellow-countrymen with the poita across the shoulder…The missionaries, in their anxiety not to interfere unnecessarily with the national habits and customs of the converts, did not deem it necessary to make any rule on the subject.” J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 176-7. 276 Again, it should be noted that though the missionaries did want to end caste within their Christian community according to their understanding of relationships within the church, they did not seek to interfere with caste outside of their converts. 93

neighbors asked him why he did not wear English clothes. By continuing to dress as a Hindu, the man argued, Krishnu deceived others and took away their caste. Other local Hindus speculated that “there was certainly some power in the papers” the missionaries distributed, that compelled the receivers to reject their caste, and thus “advised one another not to let their children read them.”277 Some of the converts, facing these suspicions as itinerant preachers, handled them very effectively by placing Christian conversion in terms they and their hearers understood best. Deep Chund, a convert from Hinduism who spent most of his life after conversion preaching in Jessore and Cutwa, was one of these. On a preaching trip in 1806, a Brahman asked him about his conversion. He replied, “Sir, you have heard the gospel of God.” The Brahman returned, “I know it, what will come of it cannot be said; what the English will do, whether they are come to destroy our cast, or what, cannot be said.” Deep Chund told him the missionaries had not come to destroy caste, and told him about Christ and why he had come into the world. The brahman was astonished, and “went his way saying nothing.” On another occasion, a Hindu of the writer caste rebuked Deep Chund and his preaching companions, saying, “I will beat down your house. Dost thou come to destroy our cast? Thou hast destroyed the cast of several good men already.” As Deep Chund recorded, the Indian Christians replied, “We know only two casts, that of sin and that of holiness. We account that there is no cast besides these…Our God gave us a holy cast; but we losing it became without cast, and were scattered hither and thither.” Many of his hearers approved of these “good words,” saying, “we are thus without cast!” Deep Chund told them that “Jesus Christ had procured for us a new cast,” and then sang hymns and prayed before going to the next village.278 Though Deep Chund‟s thoughtful approach to the caste problem provoked a positive reaction, most of the time Indian Christians faced epithets and abuse more often than interest and acceptance. Ward reported that in Calcutta, “Multitudes follow our brethren through the streets, clapping their hands, and giving them every kind of abuse.

277 Periodical Accounts II, 352, III, 245, II, 359. J. Sale, missionary at Jessore, wrote in 1856 that local rumors circulated that he placed pig‟s flesh or cow‟s flesh into the mouth of each Muslim or Hindu he baptized. Annual Report 1857, 30 278 Periodical Accounts III, 264-5, 267 94

Some abuse them as feringas, others for losing cast; some call them Yesoo Khreest, and bowing to them, say, 'Salaam Yesoo Khreest;' others say, 'There goes Salla, Yesoo Khreest!'”279 Converts were often called foreigners or viewed as the tools of the English Sahibs because of their adoption of an alien religion. The Hindu convert Krishno Dass noted that, after he preached in a market, a brahman and kaisto (of the writer caste) approached him and his companions, saying “You are become feringhees, then!” The Christians responded, “No: we are neither feringhees nor sahibs: this is a business of quite another nature. We have found and embraced the way of salvation.” This gave rise to a conversation which lasted two hours, a number of people gathering around. Krishno Dass seemed pleased with his overall reception in this case; like Deep Chund, he turned accusations into a basis for discussion, and his neighbors were not uninterested in what he had to say.280 Besides calling converts destroyers of caste and foreigners, sometimes people refused to accept that new Christians truly believed the white man‟s message, and insisted that the sahibs had paid them to join their religion. Joymooni, a female convert, was asked by a neighbor in 1801 “how many rupees she had got for becoming a Christian. She replied that she had obtained very great riches indeed; and then spoke to him of the unsearchable riches of Christ.” The missionaries were very proud of her response, noting that Joymooni was “constantly speaking a good word for Christ to her neighbors.”281 Muthoora, who began preaching in Cutwa after his conversion in 1812, recorded a similar exchange in his itinerant journal. He spoke to a crowd “of Christ, how he came from the Father to die for sinners. They were very attentive till two persons came in, and said, „You are paid by the sahebs, and therefore speak like them.‟ I told them I did not go to the sahebs for riches, but for the truth.” The Hindu converts Narayuna and Kura-ram, both day laborers, also were questioned about what monetary gain they had received by becoming Christians. The men reported this incident to the missionaries: One day as we were sitting at a pool, eating our dinner, a number of people surrounded us, and

279 Periodical Accounts III, 245. Yesoo Kreest refers, of course, to Jesus Christ. The missionaries seem to have experienced some difficulty with the proximity between the names Christ, as pronounced by most of their hearers, and Krishna, one of the incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu. Joshua Marshman, to dispel the confusion of the two, wrote a tract called “The Difference between Kreeshno and Christ.” Periodical Accounts II, 296 280Periodical Accounts II, 273-4 281 Periodical Accounts II, 174 95

asked us what we had gained by embracing the new religion, since we worked as much now as formerly. We told them that we went to the sahebs, not to obtain riches, but everlasting life; and that our new shastra informed us that those who would not work should not eat. Some laughed at us, and others appeared displeased. On our way to Sidia-poora a man accompanied us, to whom we stated our reasons for throwing off our cast, and explained the doctrines of the gospel, and the way of salvation by Christ. One man openly lost cast by eating with us, and we hope he will soon come out from amongst them.282

Narayuna and Kura-ram, like Deep Chund, Muthoora, and Krishno Dass, demonstrated a clear understanding of their new faith, and they used the interrogations and accusations of their contemporaries—that they meant to abolish cast, had become foreigners, or given up their old religion for a white man‟s money—as opportunities to teach them about Christianity. These types of exchanges thus record the widespread opposition of the Hindu population to missionary work, and particularly proselytization carried out by converts. Yet these situations also demonstrate the sincere and active faith of those Hindus who did adopt the Baptist message; converts, once baptized, became missionaries themselves, and they consistently spoke of their beliefs in Indian, not English, terms, referring to the gospel as a “new shastra” that would replace caste with distinctions only of sin or holiness. This type of early commitment and activity indicated the larger role indigenous Christians would play in evangelizing India, surpassing white missionaries in scope and effectiveness. As Robert Eric Frykenberg contends, in the history of Christian conversion in South Asia, “the process by which people turned Christian was primarily a by-product of indigenous rather than foreign agency.” Converts native to the region would be far more successful than European missionaries in convincing their countrymen to embrace the Christian gospel.283 The Baptist mission in India began in Bengal, and most initial hearers and converts were Hindus. A former Muslim appears among the mission converts as early as 1807, however; he penned the tract abusing Mohammad that almost resulted in the removal of the mission press from Serampore during the administration of Lord Minto.284 A letter written by Andrew Fuller in 1813 records that about four hundred Indians had embraced the gospel in the last twelve years, “among whom are a considerable number of

282 Periodical Accounts IV, 104, 105 283 Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” 117. This rule, that indigenous agency was most effective in evangelization, holds true for the Empire in general. Norman Etherington, “Introduction,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8 284 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 310-11. See chapter three on this incident. 96

Brahmans and Mahometans.”285 Later in the nineteenth century, missionary expansion beyond Calcutta and its vicinity brought more frequent contact with Islam. As E. Daniel Potts finds, “Muslims…were often far more hostile towards the missionaries than their Hindu compatriots and were certainly more prone to violence,” and in the early days of the mission, most of the acrimonious exchanges between missionaries and Indians involved Muslims.286 In Orissa in 1821, the missionary Daniel D‟Cruz found that both Hindus and followers of the Prophet flocked to receive his books, but “the Musulmans I have observed read the books merely to find fault and to be able to argue, not from a desire of being profited thereby.”287 In the Delhi region in the 1840s, the itinerant preaching and scripture distribution of the BMS missionary Mr. Thompson provoked a strong reaction from the Muslim population, who published tracts against Christianity at Delhi, Lucknow, and Gya. One local notable paid hundreds of pounds to have the Koran published, lithographed, and distributed among his neighbors.288 The missionary R. Bion, who oversaw the Dacca district in the 1870s, reported that Hindus listened earnestly to preaching while “the Mohammedans are nearly everywhere the same stiffnecked, proud, and self-righteous race.” In Chittagong at the same time, the missionary reported that his church was surrounded by hostile “Mohammedan” elements.289 Muslims particularly objected to the Baptists‟ elevation of Jesus as divine and superior to Mohammed, for the Koran taught that Christ was a man only, though a prophet on par with Moses, and both were superseded by the Prophet himself.290 Muslim hearers also quailed at the notion of the Trinity. Baptists were staunchly Trinitarian, teaching that God, though one, existed in three persons: the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To devoutly monotheistic Muslims in a polytheistic India, this was the

285 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 72-3 286 Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 218 287 Serampore Periodical Accounts new series, VIII (Oct.-Dec. 1821), 28, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 219 288 The committee interpreted this hostile response as a good sign that Thompson‟s work was having some effect in the area. The “impression produced by [Thompson‟s] desultory labours may be gathered from the fact that the votaries of a false religion have been stirred up, by the circulation of Christian publications, to similar measures on their own part.” Annual Report 1841, 16 289Reports and Documents, 68, 73 290 Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 219. See also Annual Report 1852, 35 97

very blackest kind of blasphemy.291 As historian Avril Powell notes, evangelical missionaries entered India full of confidence in their own rightness during a time of Islamic revival, when Muslims likewise were certain “of the finality and truth of their own revelation.” Clashes between the two groups' exclusive claims were hardly avoidable.292 Like their Hindu contemporaries, many Muslims, particularly the religious elite, refused to eat or attend social functions with their British colleagues or employers. Many of those who did interact with Europeans kept themselves apart by “punctiliously observ[ing] the minutiae of Islamic dress and gesture, insisting not only on having leave to say prayers, but also taking care to wash after shaking hands with a European.”293 It was possible, however, for missionaries and Muslims to engage in mutually respectful religious debate, as well, and missionaries believed overall that Islam contained a greater element of truth than Hinduism did.294 Muslim converts remained a minority among Baptist mission churches throughout the nineteenth century, and statistically, lower caste Hindus were most likely to become Christians.295 Mixed race East Asians who had been raised in nominal Catholicism also proved likely candidates for baptism, particularly because until the Baptists began preaching, most had never heard of Christ in a language they could understand.296 The appeal of Christianity to those most ostracized by their own society is unsurprising.

291 In 1802 three “Mussulmen” visited Serampore to enquire about “this new way” the missionaries were teaching. Their key objection to the gospel was the notion of the Trinity and the Sonship of Christ. Periodical Accounts II, 269 292 Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London: Curzon Press, 1993), 1. Powell cites a revival in the first half of the nineteenth century in the old Mughal capital of Delhi of Muslim literary, artistic, and musical traditions. Bahadur Shah, later of Mutiny fame, himself was a great patron of Urdu and Persian poets, 48-9. Lucknow, a “new” Muslim court in this period, likewise saw a vigorous rise in cultural life, 53. During the career of Delhi theologian Shah Wali Allah in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the old Mughal capital also became a great center for religious revival. Shah Wali Allah‟s willingness to study the Koran in vernacular translation was a departure, and perhaps a response to the dissemination of Christian scriptures in Indian languages at the same time, 66. 293 Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 74 294 Annual Report 1832, 16; Annual Report 1859, 34. See Powell on confrontations between the North Indian ulama and evangelical missionaries in pre-Mutiny India, particularly the public debate between the Pietist Reverend Carl Pfander and Maulana Rahmat Allah Kairanawi in Agra in 1854. 295 In 1803 the Serampore church contained twenty-two converts: two brahmans, three kaistos, two Muslims, two East Asians, and the rest lower caste Hindus. Periodical Accounts II, 442. Frykenberg notes that mass conversions in India most often occurred among lower caste fringe communities, especially Untouchables, a phenomenon that would later be a focal point of nationalist criticism. “India,” in World History of Christianity, 187 296 The Serampore missionaries wrote in 1809, “Roman Catholics born in Bengal are often surprised at hearing the scriptures read in Bengalee; for though they have heard of a book called the bible, yet many of them never heard a syllable of it in language which they could understand.” Periodical Accounts IV, 24 98

Lower caste Hindus and East Asians had less to lose and more to gain by converting than did brahmans—who already possessed religious and social authority which they might fear to jeopardize—or Muslims. One religious group that did tend to behave supportively toward missionary work, though they did not convert themselves, were Buddhists. Baptist missionary John Page visited several Buddhist monasteries on his preaching tour in Sikkim in 1872. He frequently found lodging among the lamas, who approved of his endeavor, saying, “You do not come, as some do, to indulge in sport, or see the land, but to make known God to the people; hence we are thankful for your visits, and wish that all the people would attend to your teaching.”297 Overall, it is clear that despite missionary translations, schools, preaching, and praying, Baptist progress towards Christianizing South Asia inched forward painfully slowly, and once the BMS began work in the Caribbean in the 1820s, mass conversions there would quickly overshadow the tiny, though hard-won, successes gained in the East. Why were South Asians generally so unreceptive to not only Baptist belief, but all branches of Christianity, despite the efforts of thousands of missionaries from multiple churches and nations? Some of the reasons may be uncovered by examining the interactions between missionaries and their hearers which, recorded in missionary notes, underline significant barriers to conversion. Ward's journal reports many disputations between missionaries and Bengalis in which the hearers object to the notion of sin or argue that, if sin is in fact a problem, the River Ganga can wash it away. One man argued that he could not sin at all because he was a part of God. Many also contended “that the present life is not a state of probation, but a place of punishment;” and in such a state God did not expect people to be holy. The convert Gokol had a friend tell him that God himself made sin; Gokol rejoined that this could not be, “since God came into the world to die for [sin], and destroy it.” 298 Hearers also struggled with the Baptists‟ insistence on the concept of death and afterlife; Gokol himself at first “could not reconcile himself to our saying that leaving this world was dying: It was [rather] going into union with

297 Annual Report 1872, 4. However, Buddhists in Ceylon were less receptive than in the subcontinent. Annual Report 1863 298 Periodical Accounts II, 52-3, 56, 126 99

God.”299 India already had a powerful, ancient religious culture. Deeply entrenched beliefs in a cyclical universe with thousands of gods in which each person rose or fell in his next life according to previous deeds could make little room for the Baptist worldview in which humans, sinners from birth, had the chance of only one lifetime to accept one God. These broad differences of understanding proved major obstacles to Indian comprehension or acceptance of the missionary message. Among the most significant of these barriers was Christianity‟s claim to exclusive religious truth. Hinduism‟s flexibility and inclusiveness were its great strengths; indeed, it was Hinduism‟s ability to absorb new gods and beliefs that had allowed it to attain such a great age.300 Thus Hindu audiences hardly knew what to make of religious teachers who claimed that there was only one way to God. BMS missionary John Fountain discovered this as he preached in the Serampore marketplace in 1800. Despite his admirable efforts to couch his message in terms his hearers would understand—he called the gospel “a new shaster”—he soon found himself in an awkward position when a brahman responded with typical Hindu inclusiveness: “There are rivers from the east, west, north, and south; but they all meet in the sea: so there are many ways amongst men, but all lead to God.” Fountain replied with the exclusive doctrine he had been taught, that “no way can lead to God, but that which he hath marked out. There is no Saviour but one whom God appointed, even Jesus Christ.”301 Krishnu, who began evangelizing soon after his baptism, faced a similar problem when trying to convince a Hindu byragee, a mendicant holy man, to replace his god Jagganath with Christ. Krishnu told the byragee of Christ‟s love to the point of death for his enemies, and the byragee, very impressed by such sacrifice, was eager to adopt Christ alongside his other debtahs. “Finding he must forsake all for Christ, he was discouraged, but promised to come again to Krishnu‟s house and bring others.”302 The missionaries and their converts would not allow Hindus to simply adopt Jesus into their existing pantheon; their religion required a monogamous commitment. Baptist Christianity‟s insistence on Christ as the only way to

299Periodical Accounts II, 165. This is the Hindu concept of moksha, that after one escapes samsara, the cycle of rebirth, one is absorbed into union with Brahma (God). 300 Hinduism was and remains the oldest of living world religions. 301 Periodical Accounts II, 55-6 302 Periodical Accounts II, 190. Serampore reported in 1815 that “the Hindoos, though they would gladly put Jesus Christ among the gods, do not like the exclusive claims of the Saviour.” Periodical Accounts VI, 186 100

God would continue to perplex and repel their Hindu audiences, and though Muslims could identify easily with the missionaries‟ exclusive position, they claimed a different prophet.303 Social and cultural consequences of conversion also contributed to South Asian reluctance to accept Christianity. As E. Daniel Potts aptly suggests, “open conversion to a new faith and sometimes to a new way of life would and did disrupt normal or established patterns of family, caste, and village life.” When an Indian chose to become a Christian, he or she usually had to cut all social and kinship ties. A convert‟s family could no longer interact with her, for to do so after she had given up her caste would pollute them, as well.304 Converts also often lost their employment when they became Christians, and found themselves living at the mercy of their neighbors or on the generosity of the missionaries themselves. Too, many hearers seemed to be fully aware that few of their countrymen had chosen to convert, and taunted the missionaries because of it. The missionary John Chamberlain wrote to a friend in Bristol in June 1806: The idolatrous heathen often accost me, saying, 'Where is now your God? Let Jesus Christ come among us, and we will believe. Behold, our debtah is before our eyes;' pointing to the river, a brahman, or an image! 'Who have you been able to convert? You have been here, how many years; what have you done? Behold, (says a brahman ) nobody minds what you say: the whole country regard us, and are at our beck.' To those who will hear soberly, it is easy to answer all these vaunting questions; but I am frequently hindered from coolly explaining things to them by the clamour of the deluded multitude.305

By midcentury, BMS missionaries in India expressed feelings of inadequacy and failure, as long looked-for mass conversions remained elusive. They explained their failure to themselves by comparing their situation to that of the Biblical prophets, or by continuing

303 Even groups of people who had rejected Hindu worship of images to seek one God could not understand missionary intransigence on this point. Several of these Hindu fringe groups found the Baptist message very interesting, and sought to learn more. One such group, after a visit from Joshua Marshman, walked to Serampore to demand to know why he had not yet returned to tell them more about Christ. Though this clear interest raised missionary hopes, the missionaries could not provide convincing evidence that their message was true. Periodical Accounts II, 316 304 The experiences of Krishnu-pall‟s family illustrate this aptly. After their conversion, their neighbors had them thrown in jail. Later, Krishnu‟s daughter, who was engaged to a Hindu man, was kidnapped from her home and forced to marry him against her will. She remained a Christian throughout, and later converted her husband. Periodical Accounts II, 125, 176-8; III, 112. In 1854, a brahman in Dacca expressed these same reservations to the missionary R. Bion: “I know you have the true way, but what can I do should I believe in Jesus Christ? I would be quite alone in this village, no one would eat and talk with me; all would walk another way. If I had others who would join me and encourage me to walk in this way, I would at once be ready to accept it.'” Annual Report 1854, 26. See also Inden, 87-91. 305 Periodical Accounts III, 251 101

to look for providential intervention. In 1845 missionary John Smylie wrote from Dinagepore that he was “awfully humbled to see that the Holy Spirit is not yet poured out from on high,” and compared his field of labor to Ezekiel‟s valley of dry bones. “But,” he added hopefully, “the deliverance of man from the bondage of sin may come just as unexpectedly as did that of the Jews from Babylon.”306 Missionary hopes for an Indian Pentecost remained unfulfilled, though the mission continued to grow slowly.307 Of all the men and women they preached to in the nineteenth century, Baptist missionaries probably held out highest hopes for the conversion of Bengali brahman Rammohun Roy.308 A resident of Calcutta, Rammohun was fully aware of missionary activity in his city and at Serampore, and visited Carey, Marshman, and Ward to talk with them about their religion. The exchange between the Baptists and the brahman well illustrates both the aspirations and approach of the missionaries, and the reasons that their gospel did not convince a Calcutta intellectual. Rammohun‟s ultimate response to Baptist teaching was not to accept Christ and join the missionaries on their terms; instead, he used elements of Christianity for his own quest to modernize Hinduism.309 As David Kopf argues, “Rammohun did not succumb to the allurement of alien cultural imports, but devoted much of his time and energy to reinterpreting his own socio-religious tradition.”310 In the process, he even convinced one of the BMS missionaries to leave the Baptist denomination and become a Unitarian.

306 Annual Report 1845, 25-6 307 Concerns about the slowness of progress in India continued. In 1859, a Bengal missionary named Sampson despaired after talking with two Indian preachers who had, despite twenty years of evangelizing, never seen one convert. “Is it not sad! Why is it so? Is the Lord's arm shortened? Is His ear heavy? No, no! Ten thousand times no! Why then is the blessing withheld? Ah! Who can answer that? One thing it teaches us—there must be more prayer, more of that which is really prayer—the earnest wrestling importunity with God—the literally giving Him no rest till the heavens are opened and the blessing given.” Annual Report 1859, 26-7 308 Roy is a major figure in Indian westernization and modernization, often seen as the Father of Modern India. See Kopf, Bengal Renaissance, 196ff; Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. V.C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975). 309 S. Cromwell Crawford, Ram Mohan Roy: Social, Political, and Religious Reform in 19th Century India (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987), 48-64. Crawford notes that the missionaries hoped Roy would adopt Christianity, and while Roy “enjoyed the company of the missionaries, engaged them in discussions, and joined them in worship,” he had trouble reconciling the scriptures themselves with the conversation of the Baptists, 49. 310 Kopf, Bengal Renaissance, 199. Kopf‟s reference to “alien cultural imports” refers to Westernizing impulses generally, not just Christianity. As has been shown, the Serampore missionaries in particular did their best to teach Christ without importing English cultural forms, and their converts continued to dress, eat, and live culturally much as they always had. 102

During the early to mid-nineteenth century, many people in India, and particularly in Bengal, expressed dissatisfaction with contemporary Hinduism.311 Rammohun Roy was one of these, and his name is now most associated with Hindu rejection of image worship as well as practices such as sati, the immolation of Hindu widows, in favor of a purified monotheistic Hinduism based on the Vedic tradition.312 Rammohun visited the Serampore missionaries for the first time in 1816, and began a series of religious discussions that seem to have given mutual pleasure to all. These discussions continued in person and by letter for several years, and, together with his own study, clearly convinced the brahman of the moral and social value of Christian ethics.313 Rammohun wrote to his former employer John Digby in 1817, “The consequence of my long and uninterrupted researches into religious truth has been that I have found the doctrines of Christ more conducive to moral principles, and more adapted for the use of rational beings, than any other which have come to my knowledge.”314 The principles taught by Jesus, he believed, could be an excellent guide for his countrymen‟s moral behavior. He had already translated and abridged the Vedas to reflect his ethical monotheism; now he did the same with the Christian scriptures. In 1820, Rammohun published The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness, in which he presented the moral and ethical teachings of Christ as recorded in the four gospels without reference to his miracles, his divinity, or the atonement. All such supernatural elements Rammohun classified with the unbelievable acts of the Hindu gods represented in the Puranas and Vedic texts; such things would only hurt the credibility of the rational and moral teachings of the pure, monotheistic religions, he believed. As with his presentation of the Vedas, Rammohun

311 The missionaries encountered many of these people, and often hoped for conversions from such groups. Even when they could not convert them, the missionaries viewed these people as having taken a step in the right direction, and viewed their rejection of contemporary Hinduism as indicative of the breakdown of the system in preparation for India‟s acceptance of Christ. Some groups were even expecting some further incarnation or revelation, and took the Baptist message as such. See Periodical Accounts II, 314-5, 344-6. 312 To this end, Roy abridged and translated the Vedas into Bengali in 1815. Rammohun Roy‟s position on traditional polytheistic Hinduism drew considerable fire from his own countrymen, particularly Radhakanta Deva, who published several apologetic tracts defending Hinduism against Roy from 1817 on. Deva classed Roy among “assuming inventors and self-interested moderns” and swore that the honorable man would never swerve from the faith of his fathers. An Apology for the Present System of Hindoo Worship (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1817), 1 313 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times, II, 128-9 314 Sophia Dobson Collett, Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, ed. Hem Chandra Sarkar, M.H. (Calcutta: A.C. Sarkar at the B.M. Press. 1913), 56. Collett was an English Unitarian who greatly admired Rammohun Roy, and she spent much of the latter part of her life collecting his writings. 103

felt that his abridgement of Christianity presented the religion in such a way as to make it most believable and appealing to his fellow Indians, who, he said, were already “sodden with miracles.” Further, Rammohun‟s presentation of Christianity rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, which he viewed as merely another form of polytheism.315 The devoutly Trinitarian Baptist missionaries, whose Christianity centered around the atoning sacrifice of the divine Christ for the sins of the world, reacted with horror to The Precepts of Jesus, which, as they saw it, removed the most integral elements of the gospel, leaving only bare moral teachings by a Jewish rabbi. Rammohun Roy‟s Christ offered social amelioration, but he could not save anyone from sin and death.316 Joshua Marshman therefore reviewed the Precepts in the mission‟s quarterly newspaper, The Friend of India, in order to vindicate the doctrine of atonement. A lengthy public debate followed; Rammphun published two consecutive appeals to the public in defense of the Precepts, and Marshman twice responded in his paper.317 The critical tone of this debate—Marshman called Roy a heathen; Roy retaliated by referencing Marshman‟s unchristian spirit—and the impasse it created between two men sincerely interested in religious truth illuminate the depth of the chasm that, in the eyes of many, lay between Baptist teachings and Indian religious needs and concerns. Rammohun himself harshly but truthfully answered the question all Baptist missionaries in South Asia asked throughout the nineteenth century—why do so few accept the gospel? In an 1824 letter to the Unitarian minister of Harvard College, he attributed Christianity‟s slow advance in

315 Rammohun Roy, The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness; Extracted from the Books of the New Testament, ascribed to the Four Evangelists (Calcutta: Printed at the Baptist Mission Press, Circular Road. 1820. London, Reprinted: 1823), vii-viii, xiii-xiv; Dr. Joshua Marshman. A Defence of the Deity and Atonement of Jesus Christ, in reply to Ram-Mohun Roy of Calcutta (London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1822), iii-iv. In his study of Rammuhon Roy‟s confrontation with the Serampore missionaries, Shyamal K. Chatterjee argues that “both in [Rammohun‟s] conception of a pure monotheism and his ethical views there were irreconcilable differences between him and the Baptists.” Chatterjee, “Rammohun Roy and the Baptists of Serampore: Moralism vs. Faith,” Religious Studies 20 (1984), 669 316 As Chatterjee argues, the key difference between the Serampore missionaries and Rammohun Roy lies in the disjuncture between moralism and faith: “In Rammohun‟s view, man has the paramount duty of using his reason to discriminate between moral good and evil and to choose good and reject evil. Emphasis on moral behaviour as a preparation for the true religious life and essential to salvation is to be found all through Rammohun‟s works, early and late.” The missionaries looked instead to faith in Christ for sanctification and salvation. Chatterjee, 671 317 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 238-9. See also Potts, 234-243; Crawford, 49-64; B.S. Dasgupta, The Life and Times of Rajah Rammohun Roy (New Delhi: Ambika Publications, 1980), 235-263. As Dasgupta writes, “Rammohun stressed the moral teachings of Jesus while discarding the dogmas and doctrines. He therefore attached much importance to those words of Christ which will move human hearts easily and have lasting effect,” 237. 104

India largely to missionary doctrine itself, which was “less conformable with reason than those professed by Moosulmans and in several points…equally absurd with the popular Hindu creed.” Ultimately, Rammohun concluded, “the sincere conversion of the few enlightened Hindus to Trinitarian Christianity is morally impossible,” though Unitarian belief would likely be more successful.318 Another major blow to Baptist hopes and pride came in 1821, when BMS missionary William Adam, who collaborated with Rammohun on a Bengali translation of the four gospels, “began to entertain some doubts respecting the Supreme Deity of Jesus Christ, suggested by frequent discussions with Ram Mohun Roy.” Adam, who had originally hoped to convince the brahman of Trinitarianism, was instead compelled by Rammohun‟s arguments to reject it.319 He resigned his position in the BMS and became a Unitarian, and later helped Rammohun Roy found the Unitarian Society of Calcutta. The famous Bengali brahman went on to establish the Brahmo Somaj, the Society of God, whose members worshiped one God based on the Vedic scriptures. These Brahmos would play an integral part in the Bengal Renaissance and the Hindu revival of the mid- nineteenth century.320 Ultimately, Rammohun Roy used Christianity and the West “syncretically as the proper means for realizing „traditional‟ ends;” he was a modernizer of his own tradition, not a Westernizer.321 He thus exemplifies the response of many South Asians to the missionary message. Those who did not reject the gospel outright modified it to meet indigenous social, religious, and cultural needs and desires. Though Baptists and Anglicans in India hoped to convert him, and Unitarians in Britain claimed him after his death, Rammohun Roy was a Brahmist, not a Christian.322

318 Letter Rammohun Roy to Rev. Henry Ware, February 2, 1824 in Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, 90-1. It should be noted that, in his last response to Marshman, Rammohun wrote regretfully that “this difference of sentiment has already occasioned much coolness towards me in the demeanour of some whose friendship I hold very dear…Notwithstanding these sacrifices, I feel well satisfied with my present engagement, and cannot wish that I had pursued a different course…my own conscience fully approves of my past endeavours to defend what I esteem the cause of truth.” Rammohun Roy, Preface to A Final Appeal to the Christian Public, quoted in Dasgupta, 243. Both missionaries and the Raja regretted their impasse, but neither were willing to move on this issue. 319 Letter, William Adam to Mr. N. Wright, Calcutta, May 7, 1821, in Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, 68. See also Annual Report 1822, 8-9 320Kopf, Bengal Renaissance, 202-13; Dasgupta, 247-9 321 Kopf, Bengal Renaissance, 205 322 See Thomas Rees, Secretary to the Unitarian Society in Britain, Preface to Rammohun Roy, The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness (Calcutta: Printed at the Baptist Mission Press, 105

West Indian Responses to Baptist Missions Though Baptist numerical success in the Caribbean far outweighed conversions in the East, West Indians also proved, in time, to respond to the missionary message in ways the missionaries did not expect or intend. Yet early successes in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s belied later struggles over church discipline and religious syncretism; in the first half of the nineteenth century, the BMS were very pleased with the results of their Caribbean labors.323 Though the West Indian mission started slowly in the second decade of the nineteenth century, with several missionaries dying of disease, the number of converts began to mushroom in the 1820s, and most of these new Baptists were black slaves. Two hundred slaves joined the Kingston church in Jamaica in 1821.324 By 1824, large numbers of conversions necessitated the founding of more churches at Port Royal, , and Montego Bay, and in Kingston a free school served about 150 slave children. Another mission station at Belize, in Honduras, also flourished.325 In 1826, missionaries reported congregations so large in Jamaica that bigger premises were needed to hold the number of slaves who wished to attend worship. As the BMS committee related happily, “such is the eagerness of the negroes to hear the word, that many have travelled repeatedly ten, fifteen, or twenty miles for that purpose; and all in vain, the place of worship being too small to admit them,” and many urgently requested that a missionary visit them.326 In the following year, the Spanish Town congregation doubled, and new chapels were erected in other Jamaican towns, while missionary James Phillippo wrote with considerable understatement, “Jamaica is certainly a very promising field of missionary labour.” The missionaries and their supporters were not the only ones to notice the sudden groundswell of conversions in Jamaica, and the planter-dominated

Circular Road. 1820. London, Reprinted: 1823); see also Lynn Zastoupil, “Defining Christians, Making Britons: Rammohun Roy and the Unitarians” Victorian Studies 44 (2002), 215-243. 323 While missionary documents frequently relate argument or dispute between missionaries and their hearers in South Asia, such experiences almost never appear with reference to work in the West Indies. From the missionary accounts, it appears that evangelization there was virtually unopposed by the non- white population. The enemies in the missionary story of the East are often brahmans or wandering fakirs; in the West, they are white planters. When slaves fall into sin, missionaries attribute their failings to planter oppression and the system of slavery. It therefore appears that the BMS viewed their field in the West as less complex and more open than in the East, and their apparent successes reinforced this view. 324 Annual Report 1821, 26-7 325 Annual Report 1824, 25, 26 326 Annual Report 1826, 19 106

House of Assembly passed a new Consolidated Slave Act in 1827 in an attempt to limit “sectarian” success. 327 Literally thousands of West Indian slaves accepted the Baptist gospel within a decade of the arrival of the first BMS missionaries.328 By 1829, nearly 20,000 had joined Baptist churches in Jamaica, and in 1840 about 25,000 members attended Jamaica churches, and another 21,000 came as enquirers.329 The numerical growth of the Caribbean mission is perhaps most astounding when compared to the slow, painful progress of the older Indian mission. In 1842, all the Baptist churches in India and Ceylon contained together only 1,288 members. Yet in the same year, Baptists in Jamaica alone numbered 32,810. Converts numbered in the hundreds in Belize, and thousands in the Bahamas, as well, and the Jamaican churches had just undertaken a new missionary effort of their own, to West Africa. This significant disparity between East and West in local responses to evangelization requires some explanation. Impediments to conversion among South Asians have already been suggested. Why might black slaves in the Caribbean have been so very receptive to the Baptist message? The historiography of slavery and creolization may begin to suggest an answer to this question. The degree to which African cultural elements were affected by the process of forced migration and slavery is a subject of some debate. Anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price point out the culturally deracinating effects of enslavement, transportation, and plantation life, as well as the cultural and linguistic differences that separated imported slaves. They find that the transmission of African cultural forms intact from the various regions of the continent to the New World was impossible; instead, slaves retained only unconscious assumptions and styles of social

327 Annual Report 1827, 24-27. As the BMS committee reported of this law passed by Jamaica‟s House of Assembly on 22 December 1826, “Among other restrictions, a Missionary, by this law, is prohibited, under pain of fine and imprisonment, from receiving any contributions from the negroes who attend his ministry. It is well known with what honorable liberality that class of the population have seconded the efforts made by this and other Societies for imparting to them the gospel; and if the measure of support they have so cheerfully yielded be withdrawn, much larger sums will be required from this country to maintain the Mission on its present scale.” Annual Report 1827, 27 328 Recall that in Bengal, Carey, later joined by Marshman and Ward, labored for about ten years without seeing any positive response whatsoever from the local populace. Yet ten years‟ work in Jamaica produced tens of thousands of new Christians. 329 Annual Report 1829, 24; Annual Report 1840, 24. In a similar vein, the 1838 Annual Report notes, “the success of missionary labours among the servile population has been general and striking,” and attributes this success to the hand of God, 25-6. 107

interaction.330 Similarly, Monica Schuler argues that Afro-Caribbean religious cultures were not strictly African, but new products of the Atlantic World environment. They represented an amalgamation of multiple African practices, all of which stemmed from a larger African religious heritage and arose out of the “new pluralistic situation” that existed in the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This environment was a direct result of European colonization and, subsequently, the forced migration of Africans.331 Schuler, Mintz, and Price all find that African (or regional) culture, including religious belief, was significantly altered, if not destroyed, by the disruption and violence of the slave system. The cultural and religious practices of people of African descent in the Caribbean were, therefore, creole—a new creation born of the pluralistic Atlantic World. As Mintz and Price suggest, slaves “were not communities of people at first, and they could only become communities by processes of cultural change. What the slaves undeniably shared at the outset was their enslavement; all—or nearly all—else had to be created by them.”332 When viewed in the context of this historiography, the phenomenon of widespread Caribbean slave conversion, compared to the trickle of positive responses to missions in South Asia, becomes comprehensible. It has been shown that in South Asia, conversion tended to demolish the kinship ties, community support, and security that had been provided by local religions and ways of life. Indians who chose baptism had to give all of this up—a price that few were willing to pay. In the West Indies, however, the people who heard Baptists preach often had no such longstanding kinship ties, community support, or security, because slavery had already taken these things away

330 Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976) 331 Monica Schuler, “Myalism and the African Religious Tradition in Jamaica,” in Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link, eds. Margaret Crahan and Franklin W. Knight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) 67-8 332 Mintz and Price, 18. It should be noted that other scholars dispute the contention that African culture did not survive slavery. James Sweet has recently rejected the prevalence of creolization, contending that specific Central African religious rites and kinship networks crossed the Atlantic and entered the Americas without alteration. John Thornton similarly argues for the possibility of great cultural continuity. Thornton points out that, while creolization certainly occurred, many Kongolese slaves were already creoles in Africa, due to the presence of Portuguese Catholic missions in the region since the early modern period. James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially chapters 8 and 9; see also Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas” The Americas 44 (1988), 261-278.

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from them. Baptist churches acted as venues in which slaves could build new communities and support systems to replace what slavery had destroyed; mission churches were often the incubators in which creolization took place.333 Monica Schuler, Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, and James Sidbury have all found that shared religion and experience—whether Christian or not—were essential to the creation of an “African” identity in the New World. Missions and mission churches thus had an undeniable role to play in providing a context or foundation for the making of creole religious culture and the constitution of black identity in the Americas.334 Missionaries in the West Indies seemed to notice that their rapidly growing congregations were extraordinary, and tried to account for their success. William Knibb wrote to the BMS secretary in 1835 that, despite the difficult teachings he laid before his converts, including the notion that true Christianity required holy living, the people continued to come regularly. “To what are we to attribute it, if not to a desire to know the will of God? Many of them have been offered wages to work on the Sabbath, or so late on the Saturday as not to be able to attend their duties on that day; and they have uniformly refused to break the day of rest.” Knibb‟s own explanation for the people‟s receptivity was simple. The slaves converted because they wanted to do God‟s will. However, his letter, continuing, offers insight into additional motives that might also have animated his congregants: “I think I informed you when in England that I did not think fifty of the slaves connected with my congregation could read. I rejoice to say that now, including children, we have full 600; now this has been much brought about by the

333 It is significant that churches brought together people from widely varying regions of Africa, and as missionaries claimed, made them brothers and sisters in Christ. Slaves in Jamaica in the first half of the nineteenth century were drawn, according to Baptist James Phillippo, from such diverse ethnic groups as “the Mandingoes, the Foulahs, and others, from the banks of the Senegal” and “the Whidahs, or Papaws, the Eboes, the Congoes, the Angolas, the Coromantees, and the Mocoes, from Upper and Lower Guinea.” James Mursell Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: Dawsom‟s of Pall Mall, 1843; 1969), 239. 334 Schuler stresses the creation of Myalism in Jamaica to meet new religious needs as constitutive of a pan- African identity in Alas, Alas “Alas, Alas, Kongo” A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, in Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) see black Christianity as key to the making of an African identity in the Americas. Sidbury says the creation of black identity in North America was based on affiliative kinship—shared religion and experience—rather than ethnic or racial bonds. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Also, see James M. Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, : Mercer University Press, 1986). 109

conduct of some of my members, who…devote two or three evenings in the week on many estates to teach the children and adults to read.”335 Membership in a Baptist church offered significant social and political advantages to slaves.336 In the eyes of the BMS, as with many Protestant groups, literacy was essential to Christian life, for the individual Christian should be able to understand and respond to the gospel herself, and then teach it to others. The Baptists therefore placed particular emphasis on literacy and education for their converts, most of whom could not read or write English. Baptist mission churches and schools were some of the only places available to black slaves and free mixed race people where education was offered without charge. In 1838, the Jamaica missionaries established an Education Society for this purpose, and its teachers included both British and Jamaican Baptists, who worked under the superintendence of the missionaries at each station.337 The social support of the Baptist community could also translate to direct assistance in finances or the purchase of property. Following the abolition of apprenticeship in 1838, Jamaica‟s Baptist missionaries began buying up land to ensure that their church members could live independently, without being subject to the retaliations of the planters who owned most of their estate cottages. Black townships proliferated rapidly, often purchased by missionaries with funds from abolitionist supporters in Britain, and soon became known as “.”338 By 1843, between one hundred fifty and two hundred such townships flourished in the mountains of Jamaica, covering 100,000 acres of land.339 These villages ensured the former apprentices‟ economic independence, and gave them the political power that came with freehold status. The missionaries anticipated that the freeholds would give laborers a better bargaining position from which to secure fair wages and treatment from the planters.340 Association with a Baptist church, then, likely meant free education for

335 Annual Report 1836, 33 336 Shirley Gordon in God Almighty Make Me Free: Christianity in Preemancipation Jamaica (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) sees slave conversion as motivated by a desire for literacy, socioeconomic status, and opportunities for better community networks, x-xi. 337 Annual Report 1838, 38-9 338 John Clark, The Voice of Jubilee, 115-6 339 Phillippo, Jamaica, 228 340 Knibb wrote to a friend in England, “My plan is to convey the house and a few acres of land to the mission, and to resell the whole of the rest to the members of the church of Christ who may be oppressed, or who may wish to purchase. It shall be sold in lots of one, two, or three acres, so that on the erection of a 110

oneself and one‟s children, and could even lead to assistance in the purchase of property.341 It is also clear that West Indian laborers were aware of the role missionaries had played in the abolition debate, and in contending for the religious and political liberties of their converts. Knibb, Burchell, Phillippo and their colleagues made themselves visible in the battle against slavery and apprenticeship from the early 1830s, and, particularly once full freedom had been achieved, the black population of Jamaica flocked to them. In 1837, two observers sent to Jamaica by the American Anti-Slavery Society reported that Baptists were “the most numerous body of Christians in the island...The Baptist missionaries, as a body, have been most distinguished for their opposition to slavery. Their boldness in the midst of suffering and persecutions, their denunciations of oppression, though they did for a time arouse the wrath of oppressors and cause their chapels to be torn down and themselves to be hunted, imprisoned, and banished, did more probably than any other cause to hasten the abolition of slavery.”342 Baptist churches also provided opportunities for black people to take an active part in church leadership, teaching, and preaching. The “leader system” or “class system” the Baptists used divided their large churches—many of which numbered in the thousands—into smaller groups. These groups, led by one of their own number, met regularly for prayer and study, and the leader kept watch over his class‟s spiritual welfare and reported on their progress to the missionaries. Such a system was a deviation even from practice in Britain, where only the ordained exercised such responsibility, and the missionaries‟ willingness to give black men so much authority drew considerable criticism.343 Ultimately, the missionaries

house the occupier may have a vote at the elections.” John Howard Hinton, Memoir of William Knibb, Missionary in Jamaica (Bristol: Evans and Abbott, 1849), 305 341 Though they stressed economic independence and hoped freehold status would greatly strengthen their converts‟ political power, the missionaries did not expect the villages to become completely self- supporting. The freeholds would provide safety and security, but not all the necessities of life. As historian Swithin Wilmot argues, the missionaries‟ “intention from the start had nothing to do with the evolution of a peasantry as an alternative to plantation monoculture. Rather, villages were to provide the ex-slave with secure freeholds from which base they could offer their services to the nearby estates, but on terms suitable to him and not influenced by his tenancy at his workplace.” Swithin Wilmot, “The Peacemakers: Baptist Missionaries and Ex-Slaves in Western Jamaica, 1838/40” Jamaican Historical Review 13 (1982), 47. See also Catherine Hall, “White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica” History Workshop Journal 36 (1993), 111ff. 342 James A. Thome and Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica in the Year 1837 (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), 350-1 343 Phillippo wrote of this system: “It is indeed a departure from the custom of the Baptist churches in 111

intended to fully relinquish their pastoral oversight of the churches to local converts. Knibb, especially, always kept this object in view. “The progress the children are making is highly satisfactory, and should God still condescend to be with us, we shall soon have efficient masters for our schools, and pastors for our churches, from among those who, a few years ago, were doomed to all the horrors of slavery,” he wrote in 1839.344 By 1852, this goal saw full realization in the Bahamas, where BMS missionaries intentionally withdrew, leaving the 2,700 Christians there under the pastoral oversight of Bahamian preachers exclusively.345 Finally, Caribbean slaves who converted likely recognized Christianity‟s potential as a weapon of resistance. Though planters employed Christian paternalism to pacify their slaves— scholars such as E.P. Thompson, David Brion Davis, and Eugene Genovese point out the disciplining power of religion to create a docile labor force— Christianity also affirmed slaves‟ humanity and equality before God.346 Converts understood this, and they repeatedly assaulted slavery and other forms of oppression by invoking Christian scriptures, images, and community networks throughout the nineteenth century. Though there was no intrinsic opposition between Christianity and slavery, as Emilia Viotti da Costa argues, “when notions of personal freedom and individual rights that had merged with Christianity to produce what came to be called the Protestant Ethic were infused with a democratic view of the world…people began to think that there was a fundamental contradiction between Christianity and slavery.” In Demerara, Congregationalist missionary John Smith and the slaves he preached to came to this conclusion. Demerara slaves soon wielded Christian teachings in the revolt of 1823, and John Smith died in jail, accused of fomenting the rebellion.347 The Baptist class leader and deacon Sam Sharpe likewise employed Christian teachings and Baptist

England and elsewhere, but was… found essential to a successful prosecution of missionary work.” He noted that these native agents "instructed inquirers, visited the sick, sought after backsliders, superintended funerals, and reported cases of poverty and distress throughout their respective districts. Not only did they share the duties, but in some respects the responsibilities, of the pastor." Phillippo, Jamaica, 395, 435. 344 Hinton, Memoir of Knibb, 277-8 345 Annual Report 1852, 4-5 346 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). Genovese says that though planters used Christian paternalist rhetoric to keep slaves docile, slaves also used Christianity to declare their humanity and rights, 658. 347 Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, 15 112

church networks to rally his contemporaries to insurrection in Jamaica in 1831. In both of these revolts, slaves used ideas they had gleaned from missionary Christianity to meet their own needs and serve their own ends, even when missionaries refused to support them.348 It is clear that converts in the Caribbean often had much to gain from becoming Christians. However, it is also important to note that many of those who heard the Baptist message never accepted their version of Christianity. Many West Indians kept to “native” Christian traditions such as the Native or Black Baptists, the so-called Shouters, or other syncretic traditions.349 Further, creole faith systems such as Obeah, Myalism, Vodun, and Santeria remained prevalent in the islands despite missionary and colonial efforts to eradicate them, and these traditions provided many of the same advantages that Christianity did, without requiring any accommodation of white influence.350 Recent studies agree that such religious traditions “reflected, and perhaps, contributed to, a new and important spirit of cooperation among enslaved Africans,” as well as solidarity against Europeans.351 Scholars further classify these systems within the “medicinal complex” of Afro-Caribbean religion. Myalists were commonly referred to as doctors. Practitioners believed that Myalist doctors had the secret knowledge and capabilities necessary to protect the community from evil forces, including (though not limited to) disease and death. These Myalist doctors, whose healing rituals often combined herbal medicine with sympathetic magic and elements of European medicine, frequently practiced their profession in plantation hospitals in the Caribbean. According to Juanita de Barros, Myalists were leading and respected figures in their slave communities who “seemed to straddle two worlds”—African and European—and they performed multiple

348 Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 155-6 349 Native Baptist churches did sometimes choose to join mission churches. In Kingston, Jamaica, in 1841, ninety-seven Native Baptists requested fellowship with the Hanover Street Church, pastored by missionary Joshua Tinson. He admitted them “after careful examination.” Annual Report 1841, 22 350 African-derived religions, like Christianity, acted as venues for the creation of creole identities and as weapons against slavery. Carolyn Fick has shown that Haitian slaves used voodoo as an organizational tool of resistance. Voodoo created a common identity among slaves via language, religion, and dance, and voodoo rites were closely associated with Haitian marronage and the use of poison against masters in the Makendal revolt. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 44-5. Sweet, Recreating Africa likewise shows that African religion acted as a counter-hegemonic force chipping away at Brazilian slavery. Slaves used their religion to create real fear among their masters, 6, 116. 351 Schuler, “Myalism,” 67-8 113

functions in the slave community.352 W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of these leaders as “Priest or Medicineman…the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, and the supernatural avenger of wrong.” Such individuals practiced a religion that combated the sicknesses and sorrows of plantation slavery and, later, black life in the Americas.353 The community and the good of the society are paramount in the religious tradition to which Obeah and Myalism belong. Monica Schuler points to their emphasis on the collective: sins are not sins against God, but against society, and Myal doctors perform rituals in order to protect society from misfortune or sorcery, termed Obeah in Jamaica. Thus Myalist healing and Obeah charms and fetishes aimed, above all, to minimize misfortune, including anything from disease brought on by sorcery to European oppression, and maximize good fortune for the society as a whole.354 For practitioners, Obeah and Myalism served as a means to police the social and moral health of the community, to the benefit of all. Missionaries, on the other hand, viewed all such belief systems with abhorrence. From the earliest days of their mission in the West Indies, Baptists encountered what they termed “superstition,” elements of African religious practice which they looked upon as residues of “uncivilized” Africa or slavery itself. Missionary writings reflect a deep concern to eradicate such practices and to guard against their possible merging with Christianity. As thousands converted, the missionaries kept constant vigil against the threat of religious syncretism or conversions that might be regarded as insincere. In his

352 Juanita de Barros, “„Setting Things Right:‟ Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803-38” Slavery and Abolition 25 (2004), 32-3. See also Jerome S. Handler and Kenneth M. Bilby, “On the Early Use and Origin of the Term „Obeah‟ in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001); Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, ca. 1650 to 1834,” New West Indian Guide 74 (2000), 57-90; Kenneth M. Bilby, “The Strange Career of „Obeah‟: Defining Magical Power in the West Indies” (General Seminar, 9 November 1993, Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power, & History, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore); Michel Laguerre, Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1987). 353 As Du Bois argues, slavery “was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicine-man…the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism. Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of expediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Project Gutenberg, 1996), 144, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/408. 354 Schuler, “Myalism,” 66 114

1843 account of Jamaica‟s “past and present state,” Baptist missionary James Phillippo devoted an entire chapter to a polemic against African religion and the practices it had inspired among the black population of Jamaica. “Their nightly dances or plays, which were frequent and general, were of a character most licentious,” he wrote, adding that “a band of the most rude and monotonous music” usually accompanied such ceremonies. “On estates these ceremonies were generally performed in a manner which was, if possible, still more revolting. They took place at night by the light of torches, amidst drumming, dancing, singing, drunkenness, and debauchery.” Of all of the missionaries who wrote first-hand accounts of their work in the West Indies, Phillippo offered the most thorough (if exceedingly biased) description of slave religious practices. His explanation of Afro-Jamaican spiritual beliefs reveals both his familiarity with and abhorrence of such practices, which he clearly did not understand. “Not only were the negroes the subjects of great superstitious credulity, but superstition itself in its most disgusting forms prevailed among them to a very great extent,” he wrote. The principal of these was Obeism, Myalism, and Fetishism...Obeism was a species of witchcraft employed to revenge injuries, or as a protection against theft. It consisted in placing a spell or charm near the cottage of the individual intended to be brought under its influence, or when designed to prevent the depredations of thieves, in some conspicuous part of the house or on a tree; it was signified by a calabash or gourd containing, among other ingredients, a combination of different coloured rags, cat‟s teeth, parrot‟s feathers, toad‟s feet, egg-shells, fish-bones, snake‟s teeth, and lizard‟s tails.355

Anglican Reverend George Wilson Bridges‟s 1828 history of Jamaica includes a similar depiction. Bridges focuses on fetishism, or fetiche, as he terms it. A fetiche, Bridges said, “signifies a charm or enchantment; to take a fetiche is to take an oath, and to make a fetiche is to render worship. Every negro carries it about his person, and esteems it so sacred that he abhors the approach of another: although it usually consists of nothing more valuable than a feather, a stone, a piece of cloth, or a bone.” This description is largely accurate, though his following assertion that Africans often practiced human sacrifice to the fetiche is certainly more imaginative.356 White preachers' ignorance of the meaning and function of such practices is clear in their writings; they feared and condemned what they barely understood.

355 Phillippo, Jamaica, 241, 245, 247 356 Bridges, Annals of Jamaica, 404-5 115

Quaker philanthropists John Candler and Joseph John Gurney visited Jamaica to view the experiment of emancipation for themselves in the late 1830s, and both carefully observed cultural and social practices among the former slaves. In their travel journals, Candler and Gurney both recorded, with considerable horror, what appears to have been a single incident witnessed by both men: when a group of philanthropists visited a sugar estate to observe the progress of labor there, they found that all work had ceased. After repeated attempts to discern the cause for this, they discovered that the presence of a Myalist doctor on the property had distracted all of the laborers. As Candler recorded, this man “pretended that he could chase away evil spirits and cure all diseases.” Gurney, too, portrayed him as “one of those persons who hold communion, as is imagined, with departed spirits, and practice medicine under their direction for the cure of the living— the diseases themselves being ascribed to Obeah, or evil witchcraft.” The owner of the estate, at the request of the philanthropists, summoned the doctor and his listeners to the “Great House” to discuss the work stoppage. Candler vividly recounts this interesting clash of cultures: The doctor, a black young man of about twenty, very fashionably attired, came in with the easy manners of a perfect gentleman, and taking his seat, called for a glass of water, which was brought him with haste and reverence by one of the company. At first, he only professed to cure diseases by the administration of simple medicines…but, on being pressed further, told us that he was qualified to hold discourse with good spirits of the dead, who intimated to him all the secret and hidden evils of the human body, such as no human eye could penetrate, and that by this means he could effect curers which no white man could perform. We asked the people whether they believed this; they said, with one voice, “We do believe it,” and seemed astonished at our incredulity.

Both men seem to have been rather shocked by this experience, not less because of the apparent intractability of the black laborers‟ “delusions.” “The evidence was regarded by the people as resistless,” Gurney wrote, “and our plain declarations of disbelief in the myalist were very unwelcome to them. They said it was „no good.‟” Gurney and Candler both believed that, as the gospel spread, God would remove such superstition from Jamaica; yet, the Jamaicans themselves invoked God in their response to the white men. After one of the philanthropists had warned the myalist followers of the “folly of superstition…some of them, in return…hoped that God would open our eyes and make us see clearer.”357 Though neither Candler nor Gurney elaborated further on this incident,

357 John Candler, West Indies. Extracts from the Journal of John Candler whilst travelling in Jamaica, 2 116

the black laborers‟ willingness to pair the Christian God with myalist healing rituals is significant. While their observers from England could not countenance such syncretism because of the threat it posed to colonial order, plantation productivity, and pure Christian belief as they saw it, the black laborers could easily reconcile the two religious worldviews. As the nineteenth century progressed, religious syncretism would remain a very real problem for the Baptist missionaries in the West Indies, though not necessarily for their converts. On some occasions, converts applied Afro-Caribbean beliefs in charms, talismans, and other rituals to their newly adopted Baptist faith. Some viewed Christian sacraments such as the Lord‟s Supper and baptism with reverent awe, believing, the missionaries feared, that such symbolic gestures effected some mystical transformation or conferred spiritual powers.358 Worst of all were problems and misunderstandings surrounding the Baptist churches‟ “tickets” of membership. The missionaries distributed these to “recognized inquirers and church members,” ostensibly to clarify the status of converts and potential converts; yet such tickets could be “regarded as passports to heaven,” convincing a convert with minimal commitment to the Christian life that “if they are baptized by the minister and have a ticket of membership, they are safe.”359 The Baptist converts‟ eagerness to accept these tickets and, apparently, to incorporate them into their understanding of charms used to prevent social evil, illustrates the ease with which converts could move between the two cosmologies. The ticket controversy and its association with ranking and assurance of salvation also reflects the converts‟ own fears and discomforts amidst the uncertainty of emancipation and apprenticship. Missionary fears of syncretism and convert insincerity multiplied when African “superstition” crossed the very thresholds of the churches in the 1840s, creating disorder and division. Edward Bean Underhill, who was visiting Jamaica at the time as an official vols (London: Harvey and Denton, 1840), I, 28-9; Joseph John Gurney, A Winter in the West Indies, Described in Familiar Letters to Henry Clay of Kentucky (London: John Murray, 1840), 98-9 358 As John Thornton notes, African Christianity usually merged African concepts of continuous revelation and spirit mediumship with missionary teachings, and converts sought out elements of Christian teaching that matched or mirrored practices or rituals they already recognized. “In the end,” he argues, “inserting the Holy Spirit into the act of conversion resulted in the dramatic conversion of slaves in Protestant countries. Now, the Afro-Baptist in North America or the Myalist in Jamaica could practice a new form of spirit mediumship and thus accept a set of revelations that was acceptably Christian and yet conformed to their concepts of religious truth.” Thornton, Africa and Africans, 271 359 Phillippo, Jamaica 206-7; Candler, Extracts, II, 21 117

observer for the BMS, reported “an outbreak of wild fanaticism” in the church at Salter‟s Hill in 1842. First spreading through the estates, where the laborers “abandon[ed] themselves to the terrors and practices of witchcraft,” the disturbance soon entered the churches. “One Sunday it reached a most extravagant height. The worship of God was interrupted, and the chapel became the scene of the most ungovernable agitation and excitement…It infected all classes and all ages.”360 While Obeah and Myalism distressed the Baptists in Jamaica, Mr. Gamble, the BMS missionary in Trinidad, complained that his converts were “very ignorant, very impulsive, and fond of excitement, and a somewhat noisy manifestation of feeling in their public assemblies.” Gamble‟s effort “to repress these unseemly exhibitions” led to the defection of several of his church members. These Trinidadian Christians seem to have been Shouters or Spiritual Baptists, and their determined adherence to noisy and “maniacal” Christianity deeply discomfited the missionary. Those who left the church when Gamble tried to enforce a more quiet faith told him frankly, “that they came into the gospel shouting and jumping, and that they would continue so doing as long as breath was in their bodies.” The seceding party formed a church of their own, and met in a house adjacent to Gamble‟s chapel.361 Such situations were not uncommon, and they prove that West Indians often converted and practiced Christianity on terms that were unacceptable to the Baptist missionaries, who attributed their converts‟ intractability to the “pernicious influence” of “barbarism and slavery.” However, the missionaries admitted that Caribbean Christians, despite their “great unwillingness to submit to order in their worship, or discipline in their fellowship,” in all other respects displayed “no inconsiderable amount of Christian knowledge and feeling.”362 Thus, as mission work went forward, Baptists often found it necessary to compromise with the preferences and needs of West Indian Christians. Church revivals in the 1860s and 1870s would often be accompanied by “painful exhibitions” or physical demonstrations of spiritual excitement that deviated significantly from the more reserved Christianity missionaries preferred. However, the BMS learned

360 Edward Bean Underhill, The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition (London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1862), 396-7 361 Annual Report 1857, 4, 54-5. On the Spiritual Baptists of Trinidad, see Stephen D. Glazier, Marchin’ the Pilgrims Home: Leadership and Decision-Making in an Afro-Caribbean Faith (London: Greenwood Press, 1983) 362 Annual Report 1858, 3 118

to take the bad with the good, as they saw it, for such revivals, though “unseemly,” were often accompanied by real increases in membership and spiritual maturity. “We are happy to learn,” the BMS wrote of a recent revival in 1861, “that these painful exhibitions bear but a small proportion to the manifest good, and are rapidly subsiding. Thousands have been added to the inquirers' classes.” Thus, while they remained unhappy that elements of African religious practice continued to affect their congregations, the missionaries learned in time to respond more gracefully, thanking God “for the good bestowed” by revival while gently “correcting evils.”363 In the Caribbean, as in the East, Baptist missionaries contended with broad differences of worldview which separated them from their hearers. Just as Bengali byragees simply adopted Christ for worship along with their other debtahs, West Indians easily reconciled the Baptist message with more familiar beliefs and practices, using the gospel in ways the missionaries did not intend. It seems that in many cases, people attended both Baptist mission churches and Native Baptist churches or Myal groups. Jean Besson sees this phenomenon, in Jamaica, as a “strategy of engaging with and overturning colonial Baptist Christianity through both alliance and subversion.” Besson notes that such parallel allegiance persists in island villages, were Jamaicans adhere both to Revivalism (derived from Obeah, Myal, and Native Baptist traditions) and the orthodox Baptist Church.364 Native responses in both spheres of labor often disappointed missionaries, whose hearers rejected, subverted, or at least reinterpreted their message.365

363 Annual Report 1861, 6, 71. The net increase of converts in Jamaica was, in this year, the highest ever. Annual Report 1862, 57. In 1868 as well revival was accompanied by “fanaticism,” but this was mitigated by church growth and a greater “spirit of hearing.” Annual Report 1868, 66 364 Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, 32 365 Robin Horton‟s findings on the processes of conversion in Africa align with BMS experiences in these two fields. Horton argues that, as traditional African cosmologies increasingly encountered features of the modern world—such as accelerating contact and commerce with the outside world—these cosmologies needed to adapt to social change on a local level. Often, such changes coincided with the introduction of world religions such as Islam or Christianity, and evangelists of both religions were “happy to claim” these changes “as the fruits of their own work.” However, as Horton cautions, the story of Islam and Christianity in Africa is “one of highly conditional and selective acceptance.” These were not so much authoritative new religious systems as catalysts for changes that were coming in any case. Islam has been fairly flexible in Africa, content to allow adherents to choose which doctrines they will follow. “Missionary Christianity, on the other hand, has never been content to play the catalyst. It has been rigid in its insistnece on the individual‟s total acceptance of official doctrines….Hence the orthodox churches find themselves continually discomfitted by a great many of their adherents…the result is the proliferation of dissenting breakaway sects.” Robin Horton, “African Conversion,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41 (1971), 103-5. The similarity between Horton‟s account of conversion among the Yoruba and BMS experiences in the Caribbean is striking. 119

However, in both East and West Indies, some men and women believed the Baptist gospel, and then tried to live the faith the missionaries brought. These converts accepted Christianity and carried it to their contemporaries in terms and images that reflected their own cultures and experiences, creating an active faith which, though grown out of British missionary work, thrived and sustained itself in South Asian and Caribbean soil. Though such converts were relatively few in number compared to the millions of hearers who disregarded or radically changed the missionary message, their experiences are nonetheless intriguing and suggestive. To these we now turn.

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CHAPTER FIVE CONVERTS AND MISSION CHURCHES

Following the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, the Baptist churches of Jamaica suffered as their ministers were jailed or driven away, and their chapels were torn down by the Colonial Church Union. The Reverend Nichols, BMS missionary and pastor of the Brown‟s Town church, fled to England for safety, leaving his congregation alone. During this time of martial law and persecution, James Finlayson, a converted slave and deacon who had learned to read and write through Nichols, recorded his experiences in a copy book, which he hid in a cave. Finlayson wrote in January 1832: “In the time of Martial Law when persecution arises, all the Chapel was pulled down to the ground, and [I] took my Bible and all my Books and put them in a box, and carry it to a cave; and, when I get a little time, I go to the cave and set myself down, and try to read my Bible…When I go into the cave, and set me down, I feel that God is with me there.” After several weeks, as persecution continued and the BMS minister did not return, Finlayson reported that he “sent to the Christians and call them to me, and I say to them: 'My brethren, hear my word. This trial is to try our [faith]. What will we do? Shall we draw back? God forbid! We will see Minister come back again; and, if not, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, He will be our Minister.' We then agree to have the Lord's Supper every three months.” In this way, the slave James Finlayson became pastor of the Brown‟s Town Baptist Church. The members met in the cave, and Finlayson administered the Lord‟s Supper, preached, prayed, and even married a couple. When a BMS missionary returned to the area two years later, he found the church in good order, with every member accounted for.366 When Baptist missionaries traveled to the East and West Indies and spent their lives in preaching, teaching, translating, and publishing their message in hopes of securing the salvation of their hearers, few people listened to them. Even those who did hear willingly often appropriated the gospel for purposes the missionaries did not intend.

366 Finlayson‟s diary is transcribed in Henderson, Goodness and Mercy, 25, 27. In his later years, Finlayson recommended that James Williams speak to the Evangelical agitator about the workings of apprenticeship. Williams‟ famous testimony before Parliament and in publication (as The Narrative of James Williams) helped bring about the early end of apprenticeship. Henderson, 33-4. See also Hall, Civilising Subjects, 320-5. 121

James Finlayson, however, was one of thousands of men and women who did choose to embrace the missionary gospel in the nineteenth century. Converted, Finlayson became a leader in his church and, when the missionary fled, took charge of the congregation himself. Christian converts like Finlayson have received strikingly little attention in the historiography of missions and empire. When converts do appear, they are often presented as passive receivers of an anglicizing, imperial Christianity.367 Historians have studied converts as people against or through which missionaries constructed their own identities, without examining the motivations and experiences of the converts themselves.368 Thousands of West Indians and South Asians did become Christians in response to missionary labor. Conversion was their personal choice, a choice that was made, as Andrew Walls has argued, for reasons of their own.369 This chapter will examine some of the men and women who adopted Baptist Christianity, seeking to understand the circumstances of those who chose to convert and what their motivations may have been. Their experiences of Christian life, persecution, leadership, and evangelization reveal that when colonized peoples chose to adopt Christianity, they built distinctly West Indian or South Asian Christian communities which they increasingly led and supported themselves. Attention to the experiences of such men and women calls into question a view of the missionary enterprise as a tool of imperial control, while underlining convert agency and ownership of their own religious lives and institutions. As Robert Eric Frykenberg argues, the “most important of all reasons not to conflate or

367 Peggy Brock also cites this problem in current historiography, noting that “Any discussions of missions and Empire that ignores the armies of non-European evangelists grossly misrepresents the grass-roots dynamics of Christianization. If, as some assert, the missionary movement was part of a larger imperial project of cultural colonialism, it is important to recognize that the footsoldiers of the advance were the indigenous preachers. Mission statistics affirm their existence but rarely do we hear their voices.” Brock, “New Christians as Evangelists,” in Missions and Empire, 132 368 See particularly Hall, Civilising Subjects; Thorne, Congregational Missions; Wilson, Island Race, and discussion of these in chapter one. 369 “Africans, Asians, and Australasians became Christians for African, Asian, and Australasian reasons.” Walls, “Protestant Missionary Awakening,” in Stanley, Missions and Empire, 23. As will be shown, converts did speak about their experiences and motivations for conversion, and these testimonies should inform our understanding of the missionary project. However, as Joan Scott has pointed out, appeals to “experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation” tend to “reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals.” Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), 777. The problem of possible constraints upon the choices of mission converts, as well as the inherent limitations of mission sources as evidence of convert experience, will be examined here. 122

confuse Christian missions with Western colonialism rests, very self-evidently, in the essential participation, power, and presence of [indigenous] Christians.”370 Christian Communities before Baptist Missions It is important first to recognize that Caribbean and South Asian Christian communities existed well before the arrival of BMS missionaries. The Thomas Christians on India‟s Malabar Coast date their own origins from the first century and the preaching of the Apostle Thomas, and Christian bishops in Kerala still trace their apostolic succession back to Thomas.371 When the first Baptists arrived in Bengal—far distant from the Malabar Coast—they heard about this group, and William Carey wrote rather admiringly of their unwillingness to place themselves under the authority of the Pope.372 Portuguese Catholic missions throughout India after 1498 had also created large Christian communities there well before the arrival of the Baptists, and BMS missionaries viewed Indian Catholics as nearly as deluded as their Hindu counterparts, and considered them fair game for conversion.373 German Pietist missions in Tranquebar beginning in the early eighteenth century likewise sparked a significant number of conversions well before the arrival of BMS preachers, though, as Robert Eric Frykenberg shrewdly notes, Baptist missions in the modern period can be seen as an outgrowth or culmination of these Pietist efforts, with their emphasis on individual education and biblical belief.374 The Baptists were familiar with the labors of Pietists like August Hermann Francke and Christian Friedrich Schwartz, and admired them greatly.375 The mission family at Serampore, led by Carey, Marshman, and Ward, formed their community of mutual support and shared

370 Frykenberg, “Christians in India,” 61 371 Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 148-51 372 A 1799 letter from Carey to John Ryland notes, “That many Christians were found on the Malabar Coast, at the arrival of the Portuguese, whose Bishop was a Syrian and whose whole liturgy was in the Syrian language, and that the Portuguese had an immense deal of trouble to cause them to acknowledge the Supremacy of the Pope, admits of no doubt. They call themselves Thomas Christians to this day, and are said to have been there from the time of the apostles.” Periodical Accounts II, 29 373 Many BMS converts of East Indian mixed blood were nominally Catholic or, sometimes, Orthodox. One Armenian Orthodox convert, John Peter, became one of the mission‟s most active indigenous missionaries. Periodical Accounts V, 125. On the interaction—sometimes friendly alliance, sometimes conflict and competition—between Thomas Christians and the Portuguese Catholic Estado da India and Padroado, see Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 157-165. Frykenberg points out that most successful Catholic conversions were made through Indian Christian agents. 374 Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 173 375 Schwartz‟s Indian converts spread Tamil Christianity throughout the southern Tamil peninsula in the latter half of the eighteenth century, despite unswerving opposition by the British East India Company. Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 176 123

worldly goods based on Moravian examples. Eighteenth-century Tamil Christians like renowned poet Vedenayakam Sastri and teacher H. A. Krishna Pillai, converted by Pietist Evangelical teachings, showed that Christianity could be expressed and contextualized within classical Tamil literature. Sastri‟s poetry and prose presented the Christian gospel through familiar local idioms, tunes, and tempos, while Krishna Pillai reset Bunyan‟s Pilgrim’s Progress within the context of Tamil culture. These successes in the Tamil peninsula—which proved that “conversion to Christianity could occur without doing violence to the hallowed modes of classical Tamil literature” lit a pathway for the BMS missionaries who arrived in Bengal in the 1790s.376 Encouraged by the success of the Moravians in the south, the Baptists now sought to teach Christ in a region of India where their Protestant faith was virtually unknown. In the West Indies, too, Christianity preceded the arrival of BMS missionaries. Anglican Christianity had entered the islands alongside the plantocracy, but the clergy of the Established Church paid little attention to the slave population. However, Moravian and Wesleyan missions did spread the Christian faith in the West Indies before the arrival of BMS agents, and even Baptist belief already thrived in parts of the region.377 In Jamaica, particularly, BMS missionaries found brethren of their own denomination already assembled when they arrived in the 1810s, taught by black Baptists both slave and free. The society respectfully acknowledged the work of in Jamaica fifteen years before they sent missionaries there, and when they did send their first agent to the Caribbean, he sailed at the behest of black Baptist preacher Moses Baker, who had written to the society asking for aid.378 Liele and Baker, along with other black preachers like George Lewis, brought to Jamaica from Guinea as a slave, and George Gibb, who came from the Southern states to preach to Jamaica‟s enslaved population, taught and baptized thousands of men and women before the Jamaica legislature put a stop to their

376 Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 178-9 377 As John Thornton has pointed out, it is also very likely that some West Indian slaves—particularly those taken from the Kongo—were already Catholics before their enslavement. Thornton, Africa and Africans, chapters seven and eight. 378 The first volume of the Periodical Accounts reports approvingly that Wesleyan evangelism in Jamaica is going forward, and also notes that “the labours of brother George Liele, the Baptist Negro in Jamaica, have been greatly blessed among his fellow Africans, both bond and free.” Periodical Accounts I, 20. Both Liele (Lisle) and Baker were originally slaves in the southern . They came to Jamaica when the Revolutionary War ended in 1783. 124

work.379 Later BMS missionaries always spoke with great respect of these men and their labors, defending them against charges of ignorance and superstition. John Clarke was particularly earnest in his defense of Jamaica‟s early black preachers, praising them as men who “took the Word of God for their guide; and who, in giving instruction to others, had much to suffer, and nothing to gain, but souls won to Christ, and the approval of their own conscience, and of God.” Such servants of God should be revered, not criticized, for “they sought to do good in the face of obloquy, scorn, contempt, bitter opposition, persecution, and threatened death.”380 In fact, Clarke insisted, “some of our best people came from the Churches first formed by Lisle, Gibb, and Moses Baker.”381 John Rowe, the first BMS missionary sent to the Caribbean, was appointed explicitly to work alongside Moses Baker, at Baker‟s own request. Rowe sailed with strict orders to treat the aging black preacher with the utmost respect, and to defer to his wisdom and experience. “In those things wherein [Baker‟s] age and experience will naturally give him the precedency, you will, we trust, as naturally yield it,” the committee told their young white missionary, whose recent graduation from preaching college in Bristol apparently meant less to the BMS than Baker‟s field experience.382 Thus in both Eastern and Western spheres of labor, Baptist missionaries encountered preexisting Christian communities that, with the exception of those denominations they generally opposed in England as well (Catholic and High Anglican), they admired and even emulated. The Baptists viewed the German Pietists as brilliant trailblazers, and reverently acknowledged the foundational work of the men—black or

379 BMS missionary John Rowe estimated that between seven and eight thousand Baptists worshipped in the island under the instruction of Baker, Liele, and their contemporaries in the 1810s. Most of them lived in and around Kingston. John Clarke, Memorials of Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica, including a sketch of the labours of early religious instructors in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, Kingston: McCartney and Wood, 1869), 69 380Clarke cites several contemporary sources that describe Liele and his companions as ignorant and superstitious, and vigorously refutes these charges. He argued that “some of them were indeed martyrs at the time of the insurrection of 1832, and after it.” Clarke, Memorials, 9-10, 18 381 Clarke‟s vigorous admiration for and support of these men is at odds with Catherine Hall‟s recent statement that “white Baptist missionaries…were anxious from the start to dissociate themselves from the Black Baptists, since the latter‟s doctrines were at odds with the orthodoxies of English Baptists, their organisation was separate, and they could not be made subject to the regulation of the missions.” Civilising Subjects, 106. Clarke‟s remarks, as well as the early BMS missionaries‟ careful respect of Moses Baker, indicate a relationship of cooperation and respect between the Black Baptists and missionaries, not the jealous acrimony that Hall depicts. 382 Periodical Accounts V, 292. For more discussion of patterns of leadership and compensation in the BMS that suggest the primacy of field experience over race, see chapter six. 125

white—who preceded them in evangelization. The success of these forerunners encouraged the missionaries by showing them that Christianity could thrive in South Asian and Caribbean contexts, and indicated the integral role nonwhite preachers and teachers could and should play in instructing their neighbors. Thus from the beginning of the first Baptist mission at Serampore, new Christians quickly became teachers, preachers, and leaders who spread their new faith in terms and images that were already familiar to them. In Bengal, two of the Serampore mission‟s earliest converts, Petumber Singh and Krishnu-pall, exemplified Christianity lived and preached in an Indian context. Inquiry and Conversion Petumber Singh first appears in William Ward‟s missionary journal in December 1801. A Hindu of the writer caste, Petumber was about fifty years old when he came upon a tract that the Serampore missionaries had written and circulated. As he later testified, Petumber had long been concerned about his own religious state, and in the missionary paper he believed he had found truth. He immediately set out for Serampore, some forty miles away, and arrived declaring his belief in Christ. He ate with the convert Krishnu- pall and his family and with the missionaries, relinquishing his caste. As Ward recorded, “Kristno [Krishnu-pall] was much pleased with Petumber, and found him to be a man after his own heart. We hope to find in him a Christian schoolmaster, which we have long wanted.” Petumber remained at Serampore, participating in worship and prayer meetings as he learned more about Christianity. Ward recorded Petumber‟s prayer of December 22, 1801, in which he confessed his sins and prayed that faith in Christ might be put into the hearts of the whole world.383 He was baptized in January of 1802, and told the missionaries he had now found the salvation he had been seeking for more than thirty years.384 The missionaries appointed him master of their Bengali school, and wrote

383 Periodical Accounts II, 223 384 It is important to recognize that this account of Petumber Singh‟s decision (and many of the other conversion experiences recorded here) comes partly from the missionaries, and partly from Petumber himself. Both stories align in many ways with the typical evangelical conversion narrative of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as described by D. Bruce Hindmarsh in “Patterns of Conversion in Early Evangelical History and Overseas Mission Experience,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 71-98. As Hindmarsh points out, the genre of the conversion narrative “was the preserve not only of the literate, but also of the uneducated and even the illiterate, for it was an oral genre as well,” 75. Baptist records indicate that converts in the mission field from all levels of education and social status resorted to this type of story. However, Hindmarsh also contrasts the ubiquity of the conversion narrative in England with “the appropriation, substantial modification, or even total absence of such narratives…in 126

to the committee of the society that he had “maintained a very consistent and respectable character” since his conversion. Two other new converts took teaching positions at the same time.385 By May of 1802, Petumber had begun to preach alongside the missionaries and other converts. Joshua Marshman admiringly recorded Petumber‟s response to villagers who castigated him for eating with the missionaries. “Nothing which God has made for food is forbidden;” Petumber replied, “and what enters a man defiles him not: anger, rage, and lying make a man sinful.” Reflecting on this exchange, Marshman noted, “Not having taken Petumber with me before, I could not help being pleased and thankful on such an occasion to observe an old venerable Hindoo [sic] defending the truth, with so much propriety and spirit.”386 Petumber Singh and Krishnu-pall also quickly took up leadership positions within the mission family and church. Marshman wrote on June 22, 1802, “After family worship, I took Krishnu and Petumber senior aside, to ask their opinion about young Petumber and his wife whom we hope to bring forward. They thought that their minds were certainly towards Christ.” Marshman‟s journal makes it clear that the missionaries valued and respected Petumber and Krishnu‟s judgment. They not only encouraged them to preach and teach, they trusted their discernment about the sincerity of other new converts.387 In November 1802, the missionaries decided to send Petumber, who had “grown much in knowledge and Christian temper” and was fully prepared to instruct his

some of the non-Western contexts,” 72. This point is also borne out by conversion accounts in missionary sources, which often blend typical evangelical tropes with indigenous images and metaphors. Gareth Griffiths also draws attention to the inherent limitations of texts produced by missionaries about convert experience; however, he finds that “even in the most unfavourable circumstances, the voices of the colonized subjects cannot be suppressed” in conversion narratives. Gareth Griffiths, “„Trained to Tell the Truth‟: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration,” in Missions and Empire, 155 385 Ferguson the Portuguese (East Indian) was appointed English teacher, and Kemol the Brahman, teacher of elementary principles. Periodical Accounts II, 236, 239-40. While this circumstance underlines the missionaries‟ immediate confidence in their new brethren‟s abilities and the role converts quickly played in teaching their faith, it also points to some of the social ramifications of conversion, and early problems of native Christian dependency. As Ward journaled in February 1802, “We find difficulties respecting the employment and support of our new converts, as they can no longer live by idolatry or begging. I hope our Saviour will guide us in it.” Periodical Accounts II, 244 386 Periodical Accounts II, 268. Petumber‟s response, a near quotation of Christ‟s rejoinder to the Pharisees who wondered why he and his disciples did not fast, shows that he had been studying the Christian scriptures and was able to use them to refute his critics. 387 Periodical Accounts II, 273. Petumber also spoke to the next group of new converts on the occasion of their baptism. Periodical Accounts II, 283 127

countrymen himself, to the nearby village of Sookfaugur to live and preach. When William Ward and Felix Carey visited him in December, they “found Petumber going on with his work with some hope of success,” Ward recorded. “He thinks one man has really received the gospel…five or six others are much with him, hearing and enquiring. Petumber is rather weakly, but he says he is happy in his work. I was much pleased with him, and with the prospects at Sookfaugur.”388 Petumber‟s almost immediate and clearly willing immersion in the primary work of the mission—evangelization—is significant. Petumber did not receive the gospel passively. He read about it in a tract and walked forty miles to learn more. Within a year, he was preaching it himself. And most importantly, the missionaries saw in his success “another reason to bless God” and prayed for God to “increase the number of faithful native laborers,” as Ward wrote after hearing Petumber preach in March of 1803. “This,” Ward declared, “is the grand desideratum that is to move the Hindoo nation.”389 The missionaries‟ confidence in Petumber and Krishnu culminated, in 1804, in their being “called out to the work of the ministry” as the “first called of God for this important purpose.” The missionaries prayed over and laid hands upon these two Indian men, setting them apart as ministers of the gospel.390 Both would labor in this vocation for the remainder of their lives. Besides preaching, Petumber also spread his new faith by writing tracts and poetry which the missionaries printed and circulated. William Ward spoke particularly highly of Petumber‟s poem, “The Sure Refuge,” noting that “three persons, who have been baptized, date their convictions of the truth of Christianity from reading it.” Petumber Singh died in 1805, and Ward‟s memoir of him, which appeared in the Periodical Accounts along with an engraving of his profile and dates of birth and death, reveals the missionary‟s great esteem for the elderly convert:

388 Periodical Accounts II, 317, 353-4 389 Ward‟s journal indicates that this was a Sunday evening sermon before the entire Serampore congregation, the first such sermon given by a native preacher. “His text was a small pamphlet of eight pages of his own writing, which we printed for him. After praying for a short time with fervour and consistency, he sat down; and with his hands joined together and stretched out, he craved their attention. He then spoke for an hour with much faithfulness and propriety, and closed the whole with prayer. We were much pleased with this first attempt. He is the first of the Hindoos who has become a preacher.” Periodical Accounts II, 370 390 Chamberlain to Mr. Gray, February 6, 1804, in Periodical Accounts II, 534 and Marshman, Life and Times I, 192. Carey preached at this service from the passage: “As my Father sent me, so I send you,” originally Christ‟s words to his disciples. 128

“Our brother manifested his earnest concern for the peace of the church. In these cases [of disagreement among Christians] he got the parties at variance together, and tried to explain, to soften, and to heal. He had learnt that love was the essence of religion...Hence also he was beloved of his brethren, who frequently consulted him, and treated him with a respect more than bordering on reverence...In his conversation, writings, and sermons, he had a happy talent at forcible reasoning. His understanding was naturally clear, and his judgment solid; and when God opened to him the sources of truth, he was a match for the most subtle of the Hindoo pundits; of this they were aware, and therefore commonly avoided an encounter with him.”391

As this passage makes clear, the missionaries did not view Petumber Singh as in need of civilization; rather, they admired and used his skills as a mediator within the church and a defender of their shared faith. It is also important to note that Petumber‟s decision to become a Christian arose from his own initiative, and his leading role in preaching, teaching, and mediating among the converts after his baptism indicates that he remained deeply committed to his new faith.392 Petumber Singh wrote a letter to the Baptist Missionary Society about eight months after his baptism. In it, he indicated in his own words his reasons for adopting Christianity. “I was born a Hindu, early left home, and became a sinner,” he wrote. “I found no salvation in Hindu ceremonial, but by God‟s grace his true Gospel has brought me cleansing and peace.”393 Petumber Singh‟s preexisting dissatisfaction with the religious tradition in which he had been raised seems to have been common among other Baptist converts and enquirers. The shudra carpenter Krishnu-pall, Petumber‟s contemporary and the first mission convert, seems like Petumber to have struggled with the notion of wrongs within himself that could not be redressed by Hindu worship. After

391 Ward also praised Petumber‟s great care for the reputation of the Christian community: “He would caution his brethren against launching out into those things which though not immoral, yet would prejudice their countrymen against the gospel…He saw that nothing would more stigmatize the cause of Christ, in the eyes of the natives, than a convert's appearing in an English dress; and therefore warned his younger brethren against it, and against every thing which might become a stumbling-block to others." Periodical Accounts III, 357-9 392 Taking Joan Scott‟s “Evidence of Experience” as a point of departure here, it might be suggested that Petumber‟s decision was not fully free, and did not arise totally from his own initiative, but rather was constrained by his position as a colonized Indian confronted by Western religion. However, this argument fails to account for the comparative weakness of the Baptist mission at this time. The EIC‟s opposition to the mission, as well as the evidence that thousands of Indians heard the Baptist message and ignored it, underline that the Serampore missionaries had nothing like the power to compel conversion. Too, Petumber lived several days‟ walk from the mission station in a village—not in Serampore, and not in Calcutta in the shadow of Fort William. What level of constraint could the Western presence have created in this case? Petumber‟s decision to travel forty miles to learn more about Christianity after reading the tract, as well as own his account of previous discontent with Hinduism, points instead to a decision motivated by personal and non-material concerns. 393 BMS MSS., BMS Missionary Correspondence. Petumber Singh. Box IN/10, n. pag. 129

his baptism, Krishnu frequently described his own reasons for conversion when he spoke to his neighbors about Christ. Marshman recorded one of the carpenter‟s conversations that illustrates this: “Amidst all your worship there is no fruit,” Krishnu said. “None of the debtahs died for sinners; but I have heard from English people in my own language, that the Son of God was incarnate, to die for sinners, and that he suffered indescribable agonies in their stead. This is the greatest love of which I ever heard. At the house of the missionaries I have seen such love as I never saw before.” Krishnu‟s sister-in-law Joymooni also cited the love of Christ as the primary draw, for her, to the new religion, and in her testimony before her baptism, said that she had made Christ “her Asroy, which means a house built for the refuge of a jogee who has forsaken his all.”394 Gokol, a friend of Krishnu‟s who was baptized several months after him, said that his consciousness and fear of sin had driven him to accept the missionary message, though he at first disagreed with many of the ideas in the Bible.395 Thus common elements in the first conversions at Serampore indicate that individuals who had already experienced some unease about their existing religious belief or spiritual state—both Petumber and Krishnu had concerns about Hinduism before they heard of Christianity—then read or heard about the missionary message, and responded to it positively because of their consciousness of their own wrongs and their admiration of and desire for the love of Christ. By the converts‟ own testimony, these elements combined to make them believe. It should also be noted that Krishnu and all his relatives were of the shudra caste, and Petumber, a caisto, was also a lower-caste Hindu before

394 Periodical Accounts II, 182; see also Periodical Accounts II, 172-3. William Carey‟s diary 22 December 1800 describes Joymooni‟s testimony, quoted in Eustace Carey, Memoir of William Carey, 292- 4 395 Carey wrote of Gokol‟s conversion: “It may not be improper to remark, that I well remember their frequent visits, and that Gokol‟s ideas were so extravagant on some things, that I had very little hope of him. He was displeased that the Bible did not agree with some of his notions, and discontinued his visits; but says that his mind was so uneasy, that he could scarcely get sleep for two months; that he saw himself a great sinner, and his heart all sinful; that when Krishnu‟s shoulder was dislocated [and set by missionary John Thomas, who preached Christ while he attended to him, with Gokol looking on], what he heard encouraged him; that he then looked to Christ, and has now no other hope; is willing to leave all God forbids, when he knows it, and to do all that is commanded, when he knows it. All this he said with many tears.” William Carey‟s diary 22 December 1800, quoted in Eustace Carey, Memoir of William Carey, 292-4. Again, notice that these conversion accounts do align with the normative evangelical narrative in some respects—consciousness of sin, fear of damnation, joy in the love of Christ—but they also incorporate elements unique to the Indian context. Compare these to Hindmarsh‟s discussion of Native American conversions under David Brainerd‟s ministry, as well as experiences in Sierra Leone, in which converts wove non-Western ideas and stories into their narrative. Hindmarsh, 82-92 130

conversion. They therefore risked less in terms of social position by converting than upper caste Hindus would. However, the next wave of converts did come from the brahman caste. Kemol, who preached with Krishnu in the streets of Serampore, and Krishna Prisaud were both brahmans baptized in 1802. Kemol heard about Christianity from local talk and traveled to Serampore to learn more, eventually moving his family to Serampore so that he could talk with the Christians there. He became an active preacher well known for arguing with his fellow brahmans.396 Krishna Prisaud, also of the highest caste, recorded his reasons for accepting Christianity in a letter to the BMS in 1802. He wrote, along with new converts Ram Mohun, Ram Rotton, and Bydenaut: We are very miserable and wretched sinners; but hearing these glad tidings, that the Lord Jesus Christ, for the sake of sinners suffered in his own body, and gave up his life…we have believed in his name. This news we received through...brother Carey, Marshman, and Ward. Having received the new testament from them, we compared it with our former shasters, and were brought to judge that all our own works, and all our ceremonies, prayers, and worship were nothing; forasmuch as we did not by performing these things receive a new heart, nor the dread of sin.397

In 1803, Krishna Prisaud married the daughter of Krishnu, the shudra carpenter and the mission‟s first convert. The missionaries particularly rejoiced in this marriage as evidence of Christianity‟s ability to overcome caste.398 Krishna Prisaud became an estimable preacher in Bengali, and Ward warmly described his “excellent sermons on the way of salvation” in which he avowed his own conversion.399 Brahman converts, more than their fellows of lower caste, had much to lose by converting, but members of the

396 Periodical Accounts II, 236-7. He also taught in the mission school. See the description of Kemol and Krishnu‟s preaching and their neighbors‟ response to it at the beginning of chapter four. It should be noted that, all told, by far the majority of Indians who converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century were of lower castes, untouchables, or members of various fringe groups. See Frykenberg, “India,” in World History of Christianity, 185, 187; Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” in Missions and Empire, 107, 112-17. This trend was also borne out in the Baptist mission over time, though the Serampore mission converts in the first years of the nineteenth century came from a fairly broad cross section of caste. See chapter four, 12. 397 Periodical Accounts II, 196-7. Notice that the brahman Krishna Prisaud, like his lower-caste contemporaries, cites his sinfulness as reason for conversion. Also recall that Krishna Prisaud trampled on his poita to signal his rejection of his caste, but then was given money by Ward to purchase another, and wore it for several years after his baptism. He was a teenager when he converted, and became a preacher and a deacon in the church before he died at the age of twenty-one. Periodical Accounts II, 367 398 J.C. Marshman, in writing about this marriage after the fact, noted with some acerbity, “when Christians talk of the strength of native prejudices, it would be well to remember how much easier it was found to break through the strongest prejudices in India, and marry a Brahmin to a soodra, than to overcome the Christian prejudices of sectarian caste, and place the pious Dissenting missionary on the same footing with his Episcopal fellow-labourer.” J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 181-2 399 Krishna Prisaud‟s sermon was preceded and followed by prayers, each led by another Bengali convert, and about seventy Hindus, Muslims, and “Portuguese” East Indians stood by to hear them. Periodical Accounts III, 49 131

priestly caste continued to adopt Christianity, particularly when they heard it from their countrymen. In 1867, the Indian missionary Gogun Chunder Dutt reported that a young brahman had become a Christian after reading the parable of the Prodigal Son. As he noted, “The sincerity of his profession is strongly shown in the fact that the convert, a brahman, is willing to become a simple boatman to gain a livelihood.”400 Among those Hindus of all caste levels who adopted the Baptist gospel, a prior discontent with Hinduism or concern about sin or spiritual status seems to have sparked their interest in the new religion. These same characteristics appeared in many of the inquirers who professed a desire to learn more about Christianity, even if they did not ultimately accept it. In many cases, these inquirers came to Serampore as representatives of various religious sects whose members had broken off from Hinduism or Islam to seek a new truth, or a new incarnation of God. In August 1802, Joshua Marshman detailed his conversation with a leader of such a group, who asked “whether [the missionaries] were sent to destroy maya, or delusion, by which he meant hindooism and mahometanism. I told him we were. He then entreated us to do it quickly, and by no means to be idle in the work.” Marshman‟s exchange with this man, who had already rejected image worship in favor of one God before he met the Baptists, illuminates a common starting point for proselytization. Individuals or groups like this man‟s, already unhappy with Indian religious systems, viewed the missionaries‟ gospel as a possible alternative. One such group was actively seeking a further revelation from God, and believed the Baptists‟ preaching to be that revelation.401 Marshman‟s record of the conversation also indicates that missionary and guru often talked at cross-purposes; it is doubtful that the man actually meant to refer to Hinduism and Islam when he spoke of the missionaries destroying maya, which is actually a Vedic concept that holds the present world is an illusory place in which people are tested by the gods. The missionaries seem to have had some difficulty in knowing how to respond to these groups; they taught them about Christ, but found their ideas “dark and confused.” “They all reject the Hindoo system, either wholly or partially, but none of them forsake sin,” Marshman wrote. “Notwithstanding, we cannot but consider this change in their minds as a kind of dawn

400 Annual Report 1867, 12 401 Periodical Accounts II, 344, 314-5 132

preceding the rising of the Sun of Righteousness.”402 In many cases, missionary hopes that the interest expressed by these religious sects would lead to conversion proved unfounded. However, there is no doubt that most converts from Hinduism were, like these groups, already on the watch for something different. For example, the weaver Pran Krishno of Jessore became a Christian after being told by an elderly neighbor that another incarnation had come into the world. Thinking this must be the next incarnation of Vishnu, the weaver asked a brahman about it, who directed him to “some of the believers of this new incarnation in the neighborhood”—native Christian converts of the Serampore mission. Pran Krishno went at once to Serampore, and after learning about not Vishnu but Christ, became a Christian himself.403 Similarly, a Hindu guru who had already abandoned image worship decided to join the Christians after speaking with Joymooni, Rasoo, and Krishnu about their faith. He was most impressed by the converts‟ disdain for caste, which, he said was “not of God. I will, therefore, follow the Lord with you; for with you are all casts, Englishmen, Musulmans, and Hindoos.”404 In smaller numbers, Muslims also sought to learn more of Christianity, and some few converted.405 Carey wrote in 1807 of an Arabian man of the family of Muhammad the Prophet who had recently become a Christian, and was now helping Carey to translate the New Testament into Persian.406 In June 1814 Dr. Carey baptized Muhammad Bakur, a Persian man who renounced Islam for Christianity after reading the gospels and talking with several of the missionaries. After his baptism—achieved with some peril to

402 Joshua Marshman‟s journal 25 October 1802, quoted in Periodical Accounts II, 352 403 Periodical Accounts III, 308 404 Periodical Accounts V, 23-5. Significantly, this guru‟s conversion began with Joymooni speaking to one of her female neighbors about Christ. The neighbor enquired of her guru, but did not understand what he told her. Joymooni then asked if she might speak to the guru. She and Rasoo traveled to visit him, and they preached Christ to him in his home. He later spoke with Krishnu, as well, but ultimately, this conversion of a Hindu guru arose out of the active proselytization of Indian Christian women. 405 Among these, Kureem, baptized in 1814, became a worker in the Serampore printing office, and later a preacher in Allahabad. Likewise Peeroo, a Muslim who lost caste by marrying an East Indian Catholic woman, was taught Christianity by his neighbor Syam Dass, himself a convert from Hinduism. Periodical Accounts V, 427-8, II, 283 406 Carey wrote: “He is of the family of Mahomed. He has a pedigree regularly written out, after the manner of the Arabians, up through Mahomed, to Ishmael and Abraham. He [fled from Arabia] to avoid the sword and doctrine of Wahabee, whom he personally knows. Since then he has been in a high office, in the court of Zeman Shaw, king of Kabool. There he saw one of his companions, who had embraced Christianity, Abdullah by name. This man, whose family name is Sabot, was first brought to think by reading the Koran, in which he found something that appeared to him contradictory. He wrote to a gentleman at Madras on the subject, who sent him an Arabic New Testament, which he carefully read; and the more he read, the more light sprung up in his mind.” Periodical Accounts II, 351 133

himself—he went to Digah to preach in Hindustani.407 The East Indian missionary Fernandez wrote from Dinagepore in 1815 that “a whole Musulman family, consisting of five persons…voluntarily threw off their cast, and came over to us at this place.”408 Shujat Ali, another Muslim convert, was baptized in the 1830s and became a pastor in the Calcutta church, where he baptized many, including Europeans. He later founded the first native missionary society, at Calcutta.409 His contemporary Walayat Ali became an “estimable evangelist” outside Delhi, and was eventually killed during the Mutiny of 1857. In the 1840s, a large group of people living in a village in Indonesia became Christians after reading tracts in Javanese. When the missionary at Java, Mr. Bruckner, discovered this group, he found, “considering the untoward circumstances, they had made tolerable good progress in the knowledge of the Gospel....They said they loved the Lord Jesus, and they would rather die than forsake him...I spent about two days with them, during which I had time to explain the way of salvation to them, for which they appeared very thankful.”410 Thus both the Muslims and the Hindus who intentionally sought further knowledge of Christianity had often experienced doubt about their own religious belief, and then became active in spreading their new faith through translation and preaching. The religious and cultural context for conversion in the Caribbean differed widely from the South Asian environment. Enslaved men and women in the West Indies often had more to gain—literacy, community support, and even weapons against their

407 Periodical Accounts V, 437-8. Muhammad Bakur‟s experience was not unlike that of Ghorachund, discussed below. Both were abducted by some of their acquaintance to prevent their being baptized. 408 Periodical Accounts VI, 81-2. Though caste is a Hindu concept, Muslims in India also practiced careful rituals of purity and pollution, and it was not uncommon for contemporaries to refer to Muslim caste. See Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 74 409 Annual Report 1839, 10; 1844, 27 Shujat Ali baptized a Swiss man in 1843, and in 1849 became pastor of a new church at Colingah, where he appointed deacons and performed all the same functions a white pastor would. Annual Report 1850, 10-11. The native missionary society began in 1851, with Shujat Ali as president. “In the second year of its existence it has opened two chapels or preaching places in the city, supports one native preacher, and spreads, by means of its own members, the knowledge of Christ in various parts of the suburbs.” Annual Report 1852, 6-7. He became the sole pastor of the Intally church in 1859. Annual Report 1859, 18 410 Annual Report 1843, 33-4. Bruckner had printed these tracts about twelve years earlier, and 250 miles from this village, and seems to have accepted this odd mass conversion as a mysterious work of providence. For more discussion of Muslim conversion to Christianity in the nineteenth century, see Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 286-90 134

masters—than their counterparts in India, Ceylon, and Indonesia.411 In addition, where conversion in the East commonly arose out of prior dissatisfaction with Hinduism or Islam, the people of the Caribbean often had already lost their connection to previous systems of community and belief, and needed new structures of support and mechanisms of understanding to help ameliorate the pain of forced migration and enslavement. Among West Indians, conversion and adherence to Christianity often seems to have been connected to a desire for freedom, and a continuing association of Baptist faith with civil and religious liberty. As Mary Turner argues, “converts…had every intellectual incentive to question the social practices of not only the plantation but the society of which it was a part, and were justified in doing so by the missionaries‟ basic message that all men were equally sinners in the sight of God.”412 The Baptist deacon Sam Sharpe, who organized the work stoppage that sparked the 1831 Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica, certainly connected his religion to his personal battle against slavery. He recruited supporters for the insurrection by asserting “the natural equality of man with regard to freedom, and, referring to the holy Scriptures as his authority, denied that the white man had any more right to hold the blacks in bondage than the blacks had to enslave the whites.”413 Sharpe employed the Baptist insistence on slaves‟ humanity and equal opportunity for salvation to justify rebellion against the slave system. Following the Christmas Rebellion, BMS ministers and class leaders openly argued that slavery and Christianity could not coexist. As missionary and pastor John Clarke declared, “the gospel is the everlasting foe of every kind of bondage…and cannot live in the same land with slavery.”414 Such statements reinforced converts‟ association of their faith with their freedom. Thus where conversion in the East often meant social ostracization, conversion in the West provided an ideology of resistance to the slave system, and sometimes

411 In Jamaica, particularly, “the slave saw the Baptist missionaries as his allies against the planters in their fight for freedom.” Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: Granada, 1973), 214, quoted in Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, 100. For further discussion of the differences in the two environments, see chapter four. 412 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 78 413 Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, 111 414 Clark, Voice of Jubilee, 10-1 135

education and other forms of support. This difference accounts, at least partially, for the significant disparity in conversion numbers in the two regions.415 After apprenticeship ended, the Caribbean Baptist churches, peopled overwhelmingly by former slaves, quickly determined to mount a missionary campaign of their own, to send the gospel to Africa. West Indian converts‟ eagerness to spread the religion that they believed had won them freedom underlines their continuing association of Christianity with liberty. At a church meeting in the parish of St. James, Jamaica, in 1839, several members expressed this connection when they spoke in support of a mission to Africa. John Grey, previously a praedial apprentice, told his fellow congregants to “assist in sending missionaries to Africa” and “thus show that you are thankful to God for freedom.” William Gordon, a freed black man, also attributed his freedom to Christianity, and expressed the abolitionist cause in Biblical terms. God “looked down from Heaven and saw a Pharaoh oppressing us,” he declared, “and then he sent Moses to deliver us…Religion gave us this freedom but America and Africa are not yet free…Send the gospel to the very part where they get their slaves, and that will stop slavery.” The last church member to speak had been born in Africa himself. Robert Scott declared that, had Africa been Christian, he would not have become a slave.416 These converts clearly attributed their own liberation to their faith, and their conviction compelled them to carry that belief further. In the West, freedom and conversion appeared to walk hand in hand, and thousands of men and women joined Baptist mission churches because of this. As in India, where converts often inquired about Christianity because of concerns about their own spiritual state, slaves and freedmen in the Caribbean also responded to evangelism because of perceived wrong within themselves. In 1821, James Coultart, one

415 The vast numbers of converts in the Caribbean also had an effect on the amount of information BMS documents provide on individual Christians there. Where Indian reports often detail the lives of men like Krishnu, Petumber, and Goolzar Shah, individual West Indian converts rarely appear in missionary reports (and hence also appear less frequently here). Individual missionaries, with pastorship over thousands of converts, had less personal knowledge of individuals than Carey, Ward, and Marshman did of their brethren. Instead, missionaries in the West usually described general trends and provided numerical indications of their success. 416 History and Proceedings of the Baptist Missionary Stations, Salter’s Hill, Bethephil, Madon and Bethlehem in the Island of Jamaica (London, 1841), quoted in Horace O. Russell, The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church: Jamaican Baptist Missions to West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 72-4 136

of the early BMS missionaries to Jamaica, described a conversation he had with an enslaved man whose recent comprehension of Christianity had deeply troubled him. The man tearfully told the missionary that he felt “too bad for Jesus Christ,” and that his heart was too strong for him, going this way and that, and not to Christ at all. Apparently convicted, the man asked, “will Jesus Christ let me perish?” Coultart reassured him that Christ had died for sinners, and the man replied, “O may be, him die for me.” Coultart cited this exchange as evidence that “God is found of many here who, a little time ago, sought not after him.”417 The Jamaican convert Joseph Merrick, who later became a pastor and missionary to Africa, became a Christian under similar feelings. When his pious sister begged him on her deathbed to consider the state of his soul, Merrick felt convicted and was baptized.418 In his congregation at Montego Bay, Thomas Burchell found a similar spirit of contrition and love for Christ in response to his sacrifice. He wrote in 1828, “yesterday I administered the Lord's Supper to about four hundred communicants...who evinced the interest they felt by their tears and seriousness, whilst commemorating the dying love of their Redeemer.”419 The desire for greater knowledge, both secular and spiritual, also motivated some to accept Christianity, and to continue to desire the teaching of European missionaries. When Edward Bean Underhill visited Jamaica in 1865, he attended a semi-annual meeting of pastors and deacons of the churches in St. Ann‟s parish. One of these church leaders told Underhill, “We who were ignorant in the beginning, have chosen those who love Christ for our leaders.” Another man sitting nearby added, “If it was not for the Baptist society, we would not be what we is now.”420 Persecution of BMS ministers and public criticism of the Baptists revealed converts‟ deep loyalty to their denomination and their preachers. In 1840, after the Jamaica governor made defamatory remarks about the denomination in his first dispatch to the home government, 1,800 Jamaican Baptists assembled to protest. One of the speakers at this meeting declared that he “was once very ignorant, the first light that came into his heart was Baptist light, and should he turn his back on the Baptists? No, he lived a Baptist, and would die a Baptist, and if their minister should suffer death and go to the

417 Annual Report 1821, 26-7 418 John Clarke, Memorials, 206-7. Merrick later became a pastor in Jamaica, and then a missionary to West Africa. 419 Annual Report 1828, 22 420 Underhill, The West Indies, 327 137

grave, he hoped they would all be ready to go with him.”421 As Mary Turner has pointed out, when slaves admitted to sin as Christians, they embraced “their individual spiritual value. The supreme importance the missionaries attached to the convert‟s soul, the strenuous measures they recommended to secure its salvation, ultimately enhanced their converts‟ sense of their own worth.”422 In both East and West, the Baptist message brought peace of mind to the spiritually suffering, provided a community that worked to eradicate differences of caste and race, and allowed converts—shudra and brahman, slave and free—to challenge existing systems of social and religious control. The Baptist emphasis on individual sin and salvation affirmed the value and humanity of every person in societies where entire races and communities were routinely dehumanized and oppressed. The experiences and apparent motivations of converts like Petumber, Krishnu- pall, Joymooni, James Finlayson, and Joseph Merrick are important because they confirm that individuals abandoned old religious allegiances and actively sought to learn about the Baptists‟ message on their own initiative. The people who came to Serampore to ask about this new religion, or simply took up Christianity on their own after reading a tract, or walked twenty miles through the Jamaican mountains to hear preaching had some reason to do so. As Andrew Porter writes, “religious uncertainty was not the prerogative solely of Western societies,” and “alternative answers” to religious questions about the problems of evil and death “were the more persuasive when, as was increasingly the case, they were conveyed by indigenous Christians rather than white missionaries.”423 South Asians who became Baptists found in the missionary message a religious community and a spiritual certainty that they had failed to find in their former belief. In the West Indies, too, thousands of men and women accepted Baptist Christianity for salvation, for freedom, and for identity and community.424 Thus, as Robin Horton argues, conversion was no simple corollary to the colonization process. Rather, people who expressed

421 The Quaker observer John Candler, who observed this meeting, seems to have been a bit shaken by the virulence of the church members‟ anger—“some very indiscreet things were said,” Candler noted. He was nonetheless impressed by the event. Candler, West Indies, II, 3-4 422 Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 71-2 423 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 320 424 Afro-Caribbean Christianity played a key role in constituting black identity and community in the Americas. See Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, and James Sidbury, Becoming African in America, and further discussion in chapter four. 138

interest in mission Christianity sought new systems of explanation and control that, as the world around them changed, their traditional belief systems could no longer give them.425 Conversion did not happen by default; it was a decision that individuals made for reasons of their own.426 The approach of the subaltern studies collective may offer another window into the motivations and processes of conversion. Ranajit Guha and his colleagues have identified two domains or streams of discourse in Indian national politics, noting that the bourgeois Indian National Congress failed to speak for the nation, for the people. The politics of the people were a second stream, an autonomous domain that existed outside elite politics. It has been the goal of the collective to draw attention to this second discourse. As Guha argues, neither the political apparatus of the Raj nor the discourse of the nationalist elites achieved hegemony in India. The people instead appropriated elitist political initiatives—such as civil disobedience and Quit India—and made them their own “by framing them in codes specific to traditions of popular resistance and phrasing them in idioms derived from the communitarian experience of working and living

425 Horton, “Conversion,” 85-105. Nowhere was this shift more apparent than in nineteenth-century India. As the century progressed, missionaries provided more and more evidence of a sea-change in belief, as Brahmism grew and more people altered the faith of their forebears. Rev. W.H. Hobbs, stationed in Northern India, wrote in 1864: 'At present Hindu society, religiously considered, is divided into three classes. First, the bulk—orthodox Hindus, trying to cling to the faith of their fathers, denouncing reformers, but nevertheless so far influenced by them as to make admissions concerning the corruption, wickedness, and moral insufficiency of Hinduism, which their forefathers never would have acknowledged. Second: In advance of these are thousands of young men—the result of Government education—who repudiate idolatry, speak and write about it as a contemptible and degrading thing, glory in the name of Deist or Brahmist, hold meetings for prayer to the God of nature, and also for discussing religious matters; but who, notwithstanding their vauntings, conform to the customs they reprobate, not having the moral courage to offend their friends and relations. Third: In advance of these is a goodly and increasing number, who really seem anxious to know which is the true religion. As the result of research, thought, discussion, and comparison, they are ever and anon shifting their principles, and the careful observer is gratified to discover that each time they change their faith, it becomes more and more like the faith of Christ. This last class are the leaders of reforming thought.” Hobbs‟ favoring of the latter group is hardly surprising; however, he does observe a trend widely acknowledged in the historiography of nineteenth- century India, particularly Bengal. See Kopf, Bengal Renaissance, 81-129; Sources of Indian Tradition, ch. 2. Editor Stephen Hay identifies essentially the same three groups that Rev. Hobbs cited: “A few Hindus became Christians; most remained orthodox; and a third group tried to combine the best features of both religions,” 36. 426 Again, as Joan Scott reminds us, choice is always constrained by knowledge and resources. Doubtless, some chose to adopt Christianity in the hope of material gain. It is worth pointing out, though, that BMS missionaries did the best they could to ensure that converts were baptized because of spiritual concerns; every candidate for baptism was closely questioned as to his or her reasons for converting, how she would conduct herself afterwards, etc. Samuel Green, Baptist Mission in Jamaica. A Review of the Rev. W.G. Barrett's Pamphlet (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1842), 26-7; On Conversion. The First Circular Letter of the Baptist Missionaries, to the Churches in Jamaica; Annual Report 1837, 18 139

together.”427 As the experiences of Baptist mission converts demonstrate, Guha‟s formulation for Indian politics may apply as well to religious life. The men and women who actively sought to learn about Christianity were rejecting the elite discourse of brahmanical Hinduism; converts‟ own words confirm this.428 Krishnu, for example, actively engaged brahmans in debate about Hinduism‟s and Christianity‟s relative merits. He wrote in his preaching journal of an exchange with a group of brahmans: I put into their hands the history of the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven of Jesus Christ. They next inquired if there was no salvation in their own religion. I said, 'O sirs, examine and see, and adhere to that which is right. Among you, sin is not forbidden. In your Pooranas, Ramayana, and Mahabharat, there are no directions for the forgiveness of sin; no excitement to holiness; they are a mere history of the incarnation and prowess of your gods. Can men be saved by them?' They said, 'If a man, in the hour of death, repeats the name of Ram or Krishna, his sins will be forgiven, and he will obtain heaven.' We said, that if this were sufficient for salvation, pilgrimages, gifts to brahmins, alms to the poor, and the daily worship, were useless. Ram and Krishna were mere men; one destroyed the race of King Ravunu; the other his maternal uncle, and a woman. They then cried aloud, 'These men are come here to destroy our caste,' and so left us.429

Though the account of this event is Krishnu‟s own, there seems little doubt that the carpenter had the best of this exchange, with his adversaries at last resorting to the typical protestations about caste, and retreating. Krishnu‟s familiarity with both Hindu and Christian texts and doctrines allowed him, in this exchange, to best men who were his acknowledged social and religious superiors. Converts challenged the elite religious discourse of their day, often quite effectively. Indigenous Christianity and Evangelization Again following Ranajit Guha‟s argument that the subaltern rejected both native and colonial elite discourses, it is important to recognize that men and women who did take up Christianity expressed their belief in ways Western missionaries did not. Native

427 Guha, “Introduction,” in A Subaltern Studies Reader, xviii-xix 428 In India, “the advent of modem forms of Christianity opened possibilities for communities long oppressed and overshadowed by Brahmanical dominance.” Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” in Missions and Empire, 107 429 Annual Report 1823, Appendix I. Brahmanical control of Indian religious life had already been significantly challenged over India‟s long history; Buddhism and Jainism arose in response to brahmanical rigidity. Other converts had similar experiences. Ward‟s admiration for Petumber‟s ability to meet all brahmanical arguments has already been discussed. Several generations later, Koilas Chandra Mittra, an indigenous preacher at Suri in Birbhoom, told in 1854 of a man who came to his defense in a dispute with brahmans. This man, long a Hindu and resident at an ashram, had found inconsistencies in the shastras and, asking about them, was merely rebuked for his inquisitiveness, and by this had come to believe that Hinduism must not be true. He now lived outside of town because no one would associate with him. As Koilas noted, the brahmans complained that this man “steadfastly refused to render them the homage they regard as their due.” Annual Report 1854, 29-30 140

Christians stressed the community and brotherhood, as well as peace of conscience, they found in their new belief, and then propagated it in terms, and lived it in communities, that were familiar to them.430 Gareth Griffiths argues that converts, still active in their communities after conversion, “retained a significant degree of agency….the great majority of converts discarded neither their pre-existing culture, nor the totality of their previous identity.”431 The confluence of Christian conversion and indigenous culture is evident in many of the personal testimonies, sermons, tracts, and fellowship and worship styles produced by converts. Often, native Christians used their knowledge of local religion in order to challenge it. In another of his open-air sermons, Krishnu quoted a verse which, he said, was popular amongst his hearers: “The vedas, the sages, the sects, the law-books /Are all full of contradictions / The way of the Great One, that must be followed.” He then asked his audience—“who is this Great One? Amongst you there are three sects—the Shaktas, the Shivyas, and the Vishnuvus; but in these three sects not a person is to be found, of boundless truth, compassion, and mercy. Yet in our Lord Jesus Christ these three qualities are complete; he is the Great One: and therefore I confess him, and despising cast, family, and honour, him I follow.”432 Similarly, the native preacher Punchanun, preaching in a fisherman‟s hut in Jessore in August 1812, was asked by one of his audience why he had forsaken the worship of Krishna. He answered: “„Examine the works of Krishna: he sought his own pleasure, and never knew the burden of sin; he was a thief and a murderer.‟ The man acknowledged this was true. I then asked him how a murderer could dwell in heaven. 'What then (said he) shall we believe?' I answered, 'Without Christ no one can be saved.'...Meeting with three brahmans and a viragee, one of them earnestly entreated me to forsake Christ, promising to procure me my cast again. I told him that I knew only two casts in the world, saints and sinners. On this the brahmans departed, cursing me; but the viragee regarded the word, and promised to come to my house.”433 Indian preachers often referred to castes of sin and holiness, and converts called Christ their Asroy, a house of refuge in trouble. They also presented the Christian

430 Gauri Viswanathan insists that conversion did not translate to total deculturation, even when it was a massively disruptive event. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), xi, cited in Griffiths, “Trained to Tell the Truth,” 154 431 Griffiths, “Trained to tell the Truth,” 154 432 Krishnu-pall to Mr. Skinner of Bristol, June 1816, quoted in Periodical Accounts VI, 250-1 433 Periodical Accounts V, 114 141

gospel as a new shastra, and used Vedic predictions of religious change to confirm Christianity‟s truth. In 1806, convert and preacher Krishno Dass related a conversation he had with two byragees while walking along a road. He and another Indian Christian “adduc[ed] many proofs from their own shasters to shew that this was the only way in which a sinner could be saved.” One of the byragees responded, “„This shaster will certainly be embraced in the country, and all our shasters will disappear.‟ We replied, „It is already begun at Calcutta; a great number have begun examining and judging between this and the old shasters.‟”434 Converts like Krishnu, Punchanun, Krishno Dass and many others actively brought their new faith to their friends and neighbors, using their familiarity with Hinduism and their personal experience as tools to explain the gospel. They taught Christianity, and challenged their former belief systems, in ways that no white missionary could. Indian Christians also continued to dress and live much as they had before— Krishna Prisaud and other brahmans kept their poitas after baptism, and Krishnu was castigated for continuing to dress like a Hindu, thereby deceiving his unsuspecting neighbors. Significantly, converts stressed that they served not the white missionaries, but Christ. In 1854, an Indian preacher in Chittagong made this distinction quite clear. When a brahman called him “Johannes Sahib‟s golam,” implying that the preacher served the East Indian missionary John Johannes as a servant or slave, the preacher retorted, “I am not Johannes Sahib's golam, and if he heard it he would be displeased, for he himself, as well as myself, is Jesus Christ's golam.” When the brahman then asked him what work Christ had assigned him, if he was indeed his golam, the preacher replied, “I go everywhere and sound abroad his goodness and love—what he has done for me and what he has done for others.”435 Depicting himself as a golam of Christ, and unafraid to dispute with a member of the priestly caste, this man demonstrates a significant commitment to Christianity, and defends it in personal and Indian terms.436

434 Periodical Accounts II, 275 435 Annual Report 1854, 28. Unusually, this Chittagong preacher is unnamed. 436 Keshub Chunder Sen, not a Baptist convert but a member and reformer of the Brahmo Somaj, perhaps most famously and successfully couched Christ and Christianity in distinctively Asian terms, asking “Was not Jesus Christ an Asiatic? Yes, and his disciples were Asiatics, and all the agencies primarily employed for the propagation of the Gospel were Asiatic. In fact, Christianity was founded and developed by Asiatics, and in Asia…And is it not true that an Asiatic can read the imageries and allegories of the Gospel, and its descriptions of natural sceneries, of customs, and manners, with greater interest, and a fuller 142

Caribbean Christians likewise employed familiar modes of speech and metaphors to communicate their belief to others. Robert Graham, a free man of color, was baptized by BMS missionary Joshua Tinson and became a deacon in Tinson‟s church. Tinson valued Graham‟s work very highly, and wanted to instruct him in pronunciation and English grammar so that he might speak “correctly.” Graham, however, maintained that “though he believed Mr. Tinson‟s way of pronouncing words was the way in England, he was sure his method was the Jamaica method, and the way best understood by the people.” Graham taught so effectively in this mode of speech that he was chosen as a pastor in 1845, and took over direction of the church at Yallahs, in Jamaica.437 The sermons preached by converts also set their faith apart from that of the missionaries; indigenous Christians tended to use metaphors to explain the gospel, where the BMS missionaries more frequently resorted to logic and proofs. Indian converts were also more likely to use the shastras themselves to argue against Hindu practices such as image worship. In an 1824 Bengali sermon at Doorgapore, the native preacher Paunchoo imagined his friends and neighbors drowning in an ocean of wickedness, and called for his hearers to look to the ark of salvation that God had prepared, with Christ as pilot, to rescue them from the waves. “Look to this ark, swim to it, and catch with eagerness the ropes of mercy which are thrown out for your salvation,” Paunchoo urged. “Should you refuse the salvation offered to you from this ark, and fly to your gods and goddesses, and other inventions of mankind, you will resemble drowning men catching at straws, and floating upon crazy and leaky barks which can never buoy you up on these mighty

perception of their force and beauty, than Europeans?” Sen was a Westernized Bengali whose grandfather was a contemporary of Rammohun Roy. His early devotion to the Brahmo Somaj grew ultimately to embrace much of Christian doctrine, including direct revelation from God, apostles, sin and salvation, and the divinity of Christ. Ultimately, Sen optimistically expected that the truths contained in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity would merge to form the foundation of a non-sectarian Indian national church. Keshub Chunder Sen, Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India (London: Cassell, 1901), 33-4, 155-60, quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Hay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 44-51. BMS missionary George Kerry visited Sen‟s Brahmist church on several occasions, and was very impressed by its closeness to his own belief. He wrote in 1870: “On each occasion when I was present, Keshub Chunder Sen was there, and preached a sermon in Bengali. From the sermons and prayers I heard, I judge that this interesting sect has not come any nearer the truth during the last four years…One thing struck me as remarkable amongst a people who profess to be simply Theists, and that was the full and object acknowledgment and confession of sin which was again and again made. Whether they have learnt this among the other things they have learnt and appropriated from our Christian Scriptures, or whether it be the heartfelt utterances of their lips, I do not know. If their feeling agree with their words, many of them certainly are not far from the kingdom of God.” Annual Report 1870, 6 437 Clarke, Memorials of Baptist Missionaries, 210 143

waters; but you will be continually subject to innumerable perils in crossing this wide sea.” He followed up this striking metaphor by quoting the Hindu shastras themselves against the logic of image worship, and citing the notorious behavior of many of the Hindu gods. How, he asked, could beings like these cleanse and purify their worshippers? “Such things,” he said, “are opposed to what is true in your Shasters, and likewise to reason. Will the worship of impure gods lead to holiness of life?” He concluded his sermon by quoting from the gospel of Matthew, affirming that salvation came only through Christ.438 Paunchoo‟s use of Christian scripture certainly echoed the methods of the missionaries, but his metaphors and use of the Hindu texts with which he was personally familiar were entirely his own. Finally, the worship and fellowship styles of the mission churches were peculiarly South Asian or West Indian, and differed widely from British practice.439 The young church at Serampore began singing its hymns in Bengali as early as 1801; the first Bengali hymn was written by Krishnu, the first convert.440 They initially sung Bengali hymns to English melodies, but soon took up local styles of music, as well, despite the white missionaries‟ difficulty with the tunes. Ward reported self-deprecatingly in 1804, “Krishnu is our Bengalee hymn-maker. Young Fernandez [a mixed-race East Indian born in Bengal] is the life of our Bengalee singing; the rest of us cannot sing Bengalee hymn-tunes worth a straw.”441 Another convert and preacher, Tarachund, also wrote hymns in Bengali, enough to fill an entire volume, which the missionaries printed on the mission press. Tarachund employed these songs to great effect in his evangelization; as Ward reported after a visit with him, “it is vain to expect time for sleep at Tarachund's, a large part of the night being spent in reading, singing, and pious conversation.”442 Both British and South Asian missionaries often sang hymns in local languages in order to draw a crowd before preaching, and carried vernacular hymn books with them on their

438 Appendix II, Annual Report 1824, 44 439 As did methods of baptism, which were affected not so much by local culture as by the wildlife peculiar to the region. Ward‟s journal on one occasion describes a baptism at Serampore as occurring “in the tank in the garden, on account of an alligator having carried off two or three persons in the river.” Periodical Accounts II, 272-3 440 Periodical Accounts II, 168. This first hymn was sung to Gloucester tune. 441 Periodical Accounts III, 58 442 Periodical Accounts VI, 192., 303-4; elsewhere the missionaries called Tarachund an “excellent poet,” and noted that most of their Bengali hymns were of his composition. Annual Report 1819, 51 144

itinerations.443 In 1857 in Barisal, following a period of great persecution, the local churches cheered themselves by holding large gatherings for hymn-singing. “One village invites another, and each party then sing their favourite hymns in turn; and then follows something like a discussion as to who sang the better. Four or five of the native preachers have been preparing hymns for these occasions.”444 In the West Indies, as well, indigenous musical traditions distinguished Baptist worship there from praise in Britain. Mary Turner notes that “the slaves‟ musical creativity…found a place in mission churches, where the missionaries were pleased to find that the slaves gave old hymns new tunes infused with their own rhythms and harmonies.” Overall, though, the presence in the Caribbean of African-derived belief systems like voodoo and Obeah, and missionaries‟ desire to keep Christianity clearly separate from such systems, made for less harmonious blending of the Baptist faith with indigenous culture and music. Drumming, dancing, and drinking were viewed as “heathenish” practices—though European-style drinking was just as worthy of condemnation as African—and wholly avoided in the mission churches.445 Churches in the East seem to have been much more comfortable with the coexistence of Christianity and local culture, probably because converts in South Asia tended to be cut off from their local communities anyway, thus avoiding the temptation to return to their old ways of life, while West Indian Christians often practiced Baptist belief alongside Obeah, much to missionary dismay.446 Despite the concerns that sometimes arose regarding dual religious allegiances— even in India missionaries and pastors occasionally discovered that church members were quietly persisting in their image worship—it is clear that Caribbean and South Asian

443 Periodical Accounts V, 453. Despite their personal preference for European-style music, the missionaries recognized the power of a more vernacular hymn culture, and accordingly adopted Indian music in their churches. As missionary John Parsons wrote from Benares in 1861, “the predilection of the natives for their national style of music is very strong, and not weakened, so far as I see, by a sincere attachment to Christ and Christianity, and though our own more solemn and majestic psalmody is, to our taste, vastly superior, it has little charms for them…It seems to me, therefore, a very desirable step towards naturalising Christianity in the land, to supply our native brethren with hymns in their own meter, and to the tunes they admire, and when they know them, sing with zest and enjoyment, especially as the Hindoos are a people intensely fond of poetry and music.” Annual Report 1861, 41 444 Annual Report 1857, 38. This period of persecution was related to the zemindari system, not the 1857 Mutiny, which had not yet occurred when the 1857 report went to press. 445 Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 75 446 Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, 32 145

Christianity were quite distinct from British Christianity.447 Worship styles and church gatherings certainly reflected Ranajit Guha‟s “communitarian experience of working and living together” in a way that was distinct from British Christianity. In the 1850s, all of the churches in Bengal began to gather annually for preaching, singing, discussion of church needs and growth, and eating together. In 1853 this meeting was held at Lakhyantipur, and entire families of indigenous Christians from “Khari, Malayapur, Narsigdarchoke, Bishtupur, Colingah, and Intally were there, making, with the people on the spot, a body of very nearly five hundred persons.” Most arrived in flat-bottomed canoes, as the meeting occurred during the rains. Those present discussed the need for adult female education in the churches, better village schools, and a Bengali commentary on the New Testament to assist preachers. Two were baptized, and the entire assembly ate their meals together, in the open air. The few BMS missionaries who attended described the gathering with great admiration: Mat houses had been put up for the accommodation of the strangers, and an awning was spread over a spot convenient for assembling…It was also a very lively and cheering spectacle, when the whole company sat down to dine or sup. With their 'wives apart' they sat in long rows upon the ground; each with a large strip of plantain leaf before him to serve as a platter. Through these rows several self-appointed waiters—by no means the least respectable of the company—rushed, with most hearty zeal, bearing plentiful stores of boiled rice, dal, curry, salt, curds, and sugar, from which they abundantly supplied everyone's wants. Solemn thanksgiving to the bountiful Benefactor of all preceded each repast...The hospitality displayed was the more pleasing in our eyes, because we knew that the members of the Lakhyantipur church have, among themselves, most liberally contributed to provide the requisite funds. The greatest good feeling and, we believe, Christian affection, prevailed throughout.448

Here, Christian concerns and fellowship met Indian communal culture in a setting that native Christians arranged and provided themselves without oversight or interference from British missionaries. Their gathering—marked by separation of males and females, and local foods served in local style—would certainly have looked out of place in Britain; yet the British Baptists who attended looked on with great delight. This was Indian Christianity.

447 In 1862, seventy-five members were excluded from the Delhi church for this reason. The missionaries reported that these “unknown to them, had never entirely renounced their old heathen habits, while others had expected to benefit in their temporal circumstances. Being disappointed, they joined themselves again to idols. Such defections are not new in India, and are not unexpected.” Annual Report 1862, 6-7

448 Annual Report 1853, 20. See also the account of 1854‟s meeting in Annual Report 1854, 20. 146

Persecution The social ostracization and violent persecution that many South Asian converts faced offers the most powerful evidence in support of their true conversion and faith. The Baptist missionaries in India were not conquerors whose relationship to the ruling class compelled conversion. Instead they were often hated by the Indian elite, and suspected by the British Indian government. Converts who joined them risked their place in the Hindu or Muslim community. Sometimes, they risked their property, their families, and their lives. The BMS Annual Reports contain extensive accounts of such persecution, in which the missionaries‟ desire to present Indian Christians as faithful despite opposition is quite clear. It should be noted that such relations of persecution, much like conversion stories, were shaped by evangelical narrative conventions and served the mission‟s need to provide examples of success. However, these incidents also testify to the very real consequences that followed conversion for many people, and though attention must be paid to the constructed nature of such stories, this must not minimize the real suffering converts often faced. 449 Krishnu-pall‟s family, the first converts at Serampore, were beaten and jailed during the weeks following their baptism.450 Krishnu‟s eldest daughter Golok, who was already pledged to marry a Hindu man, was kidnapped by her fiancé and forced to marry him against her will. Her husband Mohun paid fifty rupees to Calcutta brahmans to restore her caste, but Golok persisted in calling herself a Christian.451 Four years later, Mohun himself was baptized.452 In 1806, a Hindu convert called Fotick was physically assaulted by the leaders of his village, “dragged from his house; his face, eyes, and ears clogged with cow-dung, his hands tied—and in this state confined several

449Gareth Griffiths contends that such texts produced by missionaries and missionary societies “provided the principal lens through which home audiences viewed the imperial world beyond colonial homelands and so decisively shaped the attitudes by which colonized cultures were judged. Despite the profound limitations on personal agency involved in their production, they were also among the earliest means by which the subjects of the imperial venture could communicate some of their own views.” Griffiths, “Trained to Tell the Truth,” 153-4 450 The missionaries appealed to the Danish governor of Serampore for their protection, and the governor actually posted guards outside Krishnu‟s home for a time. This is suggestive of the level of protection the missionaries could command as Europeans in India, at least within Danish jurisdiction. Periodical Accounts II, 125-6, 184 451 Periodical Accounts II, 176-8, 180 452 Periodical Accounts III, 112. As Ward journaled at the time, Mohun “talks much of his sin in opposing the religion of Christ. He says he did not know that there was anything really good in the gospel; but having been here some time, he is convinced there is a reality and an excellency in it.” Periodical Accounts III, 156 147

hours,” as Ward reported. Fotick‟s attackers “also tore to pieces all the papers, and the copy of the testament, which they found in Fotick's house.”453 Fotick died two years later, and the missionaries recorded respectfully that he had been “the instrument in bringing Kanaee, Kaunta, Deep Chund, his own mother, his sister Bhanee, and her two sons” to Christ. His experience seems to have increased his zeal.454 One of the most dramatic incidences of persecution and local opposition to an individual‟s interest in Christianity occurred in August 1806, when Ghorachund, a young Hindu man, heard preaching or read a tract and came to Serampore to learn more. His mother walked to Serampore from their village and tearfully demanded that her son return with her. Ghorachund refused to leave, but said he would be baptized and then return home. His distressed mother then threatened to drown herself in the Ganges, and appealed to the Danish magistrate. The magistrate ruled that the young man should “be left wholly to his own will.” Ward vividly recounted the events of the next day: About eleven o'clock this forenoon, while sitting in the printing office, the Hincarrah comes to tell me that some people are carrying off Ghorachund by force. I went out, and saw the boat passing by our house with this lad upon it, held down by several persons, who seemed to be pinching him by the neck. The boy was crying out bitterly. I awakened brother Marshman from his Chinese reverie [apparently, Chinese translation], and in a minute the whole house, school and servants, were on the banks of the river. William Carey [junior] jumped on our boat, which was floating by the side opposite our house: the boatman and other servants put it off, and began to pursue the other in which they were carrying off Ghorachund; we all following by the side, watching the chase. William and the rest rowed as though life and death were depending, and the man-stealers were not less active...We followed the boats as far as the eye could reach; but our friends gained very little distance on them. I obtained a glass, and after looking some time, perceived William come up with the enemy, and rescue the young man. A scuffle ensued, but the idolaters were very much frightened, and especially the poor brahman. Ghorachund was full of joy at his deliverance and he was brought back on our boat in triumph. His mother was in the boat; and when she saw her son carrying back, she struck her head against the floor and was almost distracted.

The young William Carey‟s victory here was likely due both to his own strength—he was probably about sixteen at the time—and his adversaries‟ fear of grappling with a white man. Meanwhile, several native Christians at Serampore who had been with Ghorachund when he was seized had been arrested and jailed for having attempted to defend him and, in the process, having hit a brahman in the struggle. The missionaries intervened with the Danish magistrate, and they were released that evening. Ghorachund was baptized as he

453 Periodical Accounts III, 7. News of Fotick‟s persecution was brought to Serampore by two itinerant preachers, Hawnye and Ram Kaunt. It appears from Ward‟s account that one of the men who attacked Fotick died suddenly afterwards, and because of this, when Hawnye and Ram Kaunt came to the village to preach, no one hurt them, but only insulted them verbally. 454 Periodical Accounts III, 515 148

desired, and eventually became a preacher.455 This delightfully vivid incident reveals several points: first, family members often proved the greatest barrier to conversion. Ghorachund‟s mother did anything she could to prevent his being baptized, even instigating his removal by force. Too, this event shows that though the missionaries were despised by the Bengali elite and mistrusted by British officials, they did carry enough weight in the community, and particularly with the Danish government of Serampore, to oppose and even physically fight a brahman without reprisal.456 Finally, Ghorachund‟s commitment to Christianity seems to have been very sure, despite his mother‟s opposition, and his exciting near-abduction and triumphant escape, aided by the son of the great missionary, likely only increased his determination to become a Christian. Where social and religious consequences most often impeded conversion in South Asia, legal impediments to slaves‟ participation in “sectarian” church activities, particularly in Jamaica, made it difficult for West Indian Baptists to practice their faith. Yet many were determined to do so despite these obstacles. In 1804, Nicholas Swigle, pastor of the Kingston Baptist church and a Jamaica native, wrote to Joseph Gutteridge, BMS secretary, asking for assistance. Because of a law passed by the Jamaica legislature in 1802, the Kingston church had been forced to shut its doors, and could not reopen without a license under the British Toleration Act. Since such a license could be obtained only in Great Britain, Swigle, though “a poor man with a large family” intended “by the blessing and permission of our Lord,” to “use [his] best endeavours to get a passage to London.” “When I arrive there, I trust the professors of the Baptist religion and other religious friends will receive me during my short stay in England, and assist me to obtain the needful certificate,” he wrote confidently.457 Swigle and his congregation were clearly determined to practice their faith, even if Swigle had to brave the Atlantic to make it possible. James Finlayson, the Brown‟s Town deacon who led worship in a cave in

455 Periodical Accounts II, 304-6 456 As Frykenberg points out, “hostility towards India‟s Christians and towards foreign missionaries was palpable, despite local, occasional, and specific contradictions and exceptions.” Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, were sometimes exploited by colonial governments as military chaplains or diplomatic emissaries (Pietist Christian Friedrich Schwartz became an unwilling ambassador to Tipu Sultan). Overall, Frykenberg argues, “Indian Christians and alien missionaries often fared better…in domains which remained outside European control.” “India,” in World History of Christianity, 180 457 BMS MSS., Home Office Correspondence 1792-1914, J. Gutteridge 1804, Papers about persecution arising from the Act of Assembly 1802 Jamaica, Box H/4, n. pag. 149

Jamaica during and after the Christmas Rebellion, faced violent retribution because of his commitment to the Baptist faith. The group‟s secret nighttime meetings were discovered in 1833, and Finlayson‟s master sent him to the House of Correction at St. Ann‟s Bay for punishment. As Finlayson records in his copy book, an unmerciful flogging followed. At intervals he was asked: 'Will you go to Parson Bridges' [Anglican] church? And all I can say is 'O Lord, O Lord!' and he say 'Flog on.' and they flog me most dreadful. Then, after two weeks, the doctor come and see me, and say 'Turn that preacher out: he will die on your hands.' And I come out.”458 Significantly, Finlayson‟s torture seems to have arisen not from his Christianity, but from his adherence particularly to the Baptist tradition; a declaration of allegiance to the Anglican church would have ended the beating. Another Baptist deacon, Sam Swiney, was arrested in 1830 for holding a prayer meeting on his estate without the presence of a missionary, and despite William Knibb‟s defense in court, Swiney was sentenced to twenty lashes and two weeks in jail. His sentence was eventually overturned—eighteen months after it had been carried out.459 Some indigenous Christians died because of their conversion.460 The brutal Indian Mutiny of 1857, which saw atrocities perpetrated by both Europeans and Indians, affected many converts, as well as missionaries and their families. Among others, the missionary widow Mrs. Thompson and her two daughters were decapitated in their Delhi home. The Thompsons had chosen to remain with the Delhi church instead of returning to England after the death of the missionary Mr. Thompson.461 Walayat Ali, a convert from Islam, worked at Chitoura, near Delhi, as a preacher beginning in 1851, and died in the Mutiny. His wife witnessed his death at the hands of local fakirs and Muslim soldiers who demanded that he renounce Christianity before cutting off his head. The BMS

458 Henderson, Goodness and Mercy, 28-9. Recall that Bridges was the founder of the Colonial Church Union and author of the Annals of Jamaica, one of the chief opponents of “sectarianism.” 459 Knibb made his support for Swiney quite clear by walking with him through the town to his place of punishment, taking his hand, and yelling, “Sam, whatever you want, send to me and you shall have it.” Knibb also wrote a full account of the affair in a local newspaper. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 139. Swiney‟s case became widely known, and British Christians soon paid for his freedom. The BMS committee reported that Swiney could “now employ himself in the service of God as conscience may dictate, none daring to make him afraid.” Annual Report 1831, 23 460 As with other missionary publications, stories of convert martyrdoms served a specific purpose for the missionary project, and used such representations to place converts in the context of Christian history and identity. For a strong analysis of such texts on the martyrdoms of Christians in Madagascar in the nineteenth century, see Rachel A. Rakotonirina, “Re-Reading Missionary Publications: The Case of European and Malagasy Martyrologies, 1837-1937,” in Missions and Missionaries, 157-69 461 Annual Report 1858, 5 150

printed her narrative of the martyrdom in the 1858 Annual Report: “I saw a crowd of the city Mohammedans, and my husband in the midst of them,” she wrote. “They were dragging him about on the ground, beating him on the head and in the face with their shoes; some saying, 'Now preach Christ to us.' 'Now, where is the Christ in whom you boast?' And others asking him to forsake Christianity and repeat the Kulma. My husband said, 'No; I never will. My Saviour took up his cross and went to God. I take up my life as a cross, and will follow him to heaven.'...Now a trooper came up, and asked what this was all about. The Mussulmans said, 'Here we have a devil of a Christian who will not recant, so do you kill him.' At this, the sepoy aimed a blow with his sword, which nearly cut off his head.”462 The drama and emotion of this account matches much of the Mutiny literature that the British produced at this time. Certainly, both Walayat Ali‟s wife and the BMS had an interest in presenting him as a martyr, and this account of his death must be read in light of the control the society exercised over the record of converts‟ lives.463 However, it is not insignificant that, at a moment when most British rhetoric on the Mutiny centered around white men‟s defense and rescue of white women from brown men, the victim most honored in the BMS account of 1857 is a native Christian—brown—man.464 The BMS missionary at Delhi, James Mackay, was also killed, but is mentioned only briefly. The BMS treated the fallen Walayat Ali as a Baptist martyr, and honored his death above that of their European missionary, and European missionary wives and daughters. Tensions Understandably, the society seem to have relished recording stories such as Ghorachund‟s and James Finlayson‟s—these were evidences of steadfast faith that could overcome many obstacles. Even the images of Walayat Ali‟s murder impressed upon readers the steadfast commitment of native Christians to Christ, even unto death. Yet the missionaries‟ journals and the society‟s reports also contain evidence of conversion that did not last, and of disputation between missionaries and converts. Krishnu-pall seems to

462 Annual Report 1858, 3-4 463 It should further be borne in mind that European soldiers also killed innocent Indians. 464 On this type of mutiny rhetoric, including its use by Kipling, see Randall, “Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire.” As Jeffrey Cox also points out, such multiracial martyrdoms “fit into neither a master narrative of imperial triumph nor a master narrative of anti-imperial resistance,” and thus make little sense in the larger context of British mutiny stories. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 30-1 151

have been very eager to preach and lead in the church, and—in the missionaries‟ interpretation—he grew angry and perhaps jealous when the missionaries sent Petumber out to evangelize instead. This became clear in January of 1803, when Ward, Felix Carey, Petumber, Ram Dass, and others went to worship at the house Krishnu had built for the purpose opposite his own. Previously, though Krishnu had built the house, one of the missionaries had led worship there. Now, however, when the missionaries arrived Krishnu had already begun leading himself. Ward records his discomfiture: “After singing I expected he would have left the management to me or Felix, but he engaged in prayer, and afterwards began a kind of sermon; observing that as this was the beginning of the year, he intended to begin to preach.” The missionary was “grieved at this irregularity, and withdrew in silence.” Krishnu went further that afternoon by administering the Lord‟s Supper to the native members of the church himself. The missionaries believed Krishnu‟s “zeal” had been “excited by jealousy, from our having sent Petumber to preach at Sookfaugur.”465 Ward, Carey, and Marshman saw Krishnu‟s actions as “irregular” and motivated by an “improper spirit.” He had created a schism among the new church because of his own jealousy, in their judgment. The missionaries seem not to have considered the fact that Krishnu had built the house for worship himself, and might understandably desire to participate in leading worship there.466 They reprimanded the other Indian Christians who “had fellowship with Krishnu in his schism,” and were troubled when they did not seem conscious of their wrong. About a week after this incident, Rasoo, Krishnu‟s wife, and Gokol, his friend, came to the missionaries on Krishnu‟s behalf, protesting that they had not fallen into idolatry, or other such sins. Joshua Marshman responded that Krishnu had done what was irregular, and in an improper spirit.467 At last Gokol “took the testament out of brother Marshman‟s hand, and would have him go to Krishnu‟s. He

465 Periodical Accounts II, 356 466 The first notice of this house in the missionary journals is indicative of the missionaries‟ failure to think about this: “Krishnu of his own accord has built a house for God, immediately opposite his own. We call this the first native meeting-house in Bengal, and intend to give him something towards the expense. Today, Brother Carey preached in it to about twenty natives, besides the family of Krishnu.” Periodical Accounts II, 185 467 In fairness to the missionaries, it should be noted that their tradition‟s emphasis on following the primitive gospel pattern in worship likely influenced their reaction here. Marshman‟s reference is probably to 1 Corinthians 14, in which the Apostle Paul gives instructions for orderly worship. “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace,” 14:33; “But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way,” 14:40. 152

afterwards consented, and found a young brahman there, named Krishno Prisaud, who had come from Dayhotta for instruction.” Thus when the missionaries returned to Krishnu‟s house, they found him entertaining and teaching an inquirer, a brahman who would soon become a convert. Ward‟s journal closes the matter quietly: “In the evening our native brethren came again to our house.” Several days later, “Krishnu and the rest were admonished for their schism, and they acknowledged their fault.” This admonition occurred on the same day that Krishno Prisaud, whom Krishnu himself had taught, received baptism.468 This incident of January 1803 is the first of many accounts of friction between missionaries and converts.469 The Serampore missionaries seem to have been uncomfortable, at this point, with the notion of their convert leading worship and prayer, and disciplined him and all of those who joined with him. Krishnu‟s desire to lead in his own house seems quite reasonable, though in the end he did admit that he had acted from improper motives. The ultimate significance of the event lies in its final outcome: the missionaries seem to have learned something from this. Their disquiet over Krishnu‟s behavior clearly subsided when they saw the carpenter teaching Christ on his own. Further, they became increasingly willing and even eager to send converts out as preachers and teachers, and to plan for an Indian church pastored and supported by Indians, after this event. Only months after the incident, the missionaries decided to pay Krishnu as a preacher and teacher. They also recognized the spontaneous evangelization Krishnu and his family had already been doing by putting a monthly sum towards the expense they incurred from entertaining inquirers. Further, they supported Krishnu, Krishno Prisaud, and the other native Christians in their desire to hold their own worship services on Sunday. The missionaries attended from time to time, but left the preaching and prayers to their Indian brothers.470 Most importantly, within three years of this

468 Periodical Accounts II, 357-8 469 Jeffrey Cox in particular has emphasized the complexity of relationships between missionaries and Indian Christians, finding that problems frequently arose from the inherent inequality of power and wealth between the two groups. Cox‟s study focuses mostly on Anglican and Presbyterian missions, and on friction between missionaries and converts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baptist missions and mission churches seem to have had less difficulty, especially during the era of Serampore. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, chapter four. 470 Periodical Accounts II, 272-3, 376. The missionaries clearly recognized the role played by their native co-evangelists, particularly Krishnu‟s household, in “instilling evangelical ideas” into the minds of enquirers, as they adopted a general policy of first talking with enquirers themselves, and then sending 153

incident the men who had initially opposed the preaching and leadership of Krishnu could admit with pride: "We have availed ourselves of the help of native brethren ever since we had one who dared to speak in the name of Christ, and their exertions have chiefly been the immediate means by which our church has been increased.” It seems that the missionaries now understood God‟s plan for spreading the gospel in India—not through white missionaries like themselves, but through the lives and teaching of native converts. Now convinced of this, the Serampore missionaries threw themselves wholly into the project of training and supporting Indian evangelists, and setting up churches that would be missiological and self-supporting.471 Another interesting moment of tension, this time between European missionaries and South Asian missionaries, appears in the proceedings of an 1855 ecumenical missionary conference. Representatives from each missionary body in Bengal sent delegates to this conference, and among the representatives for the Free Church of Scotland were Rev. Lal Behari De, Rev. Behari Lal Singh, and Rev. J. Bhattacharjya. European or East Asian men attended on behalf of the BMS, the Cathedral Mission, the Church Missionary Society, the Kirk of Scotland, and the London Mission, and the group discussed, over a period of three days, the issues facing Christian missions in Bengal. During the proceedings, the Rev. A.F. Lacroix of the London Mission presented a paper “On the Peculiar Difficulties Encountered by Missions in Bengal.” He found that most of these barriers arose directly from the Bengali character, and, despite the presence of his three Bengali missionary colleagues, made this clear at some length. He castigated “the obsequiousness, plausibility, and apparent sincerity, so easily assumed by natives in this

them to stay with Krishnu for a while. The leading role played by converts in evangelization and church leadership will be discussed further in chapters six and seven. 471 The missionaries set up a new plan for evangelism in 1806 based on sending converts out in pairs, without the oversight of a European missionary. They also held a meeting of all the (mostly Bengali) Christians in Calcutta to declare their views on this matter, and to ask for the church‟s support. “Every one of these ideas our native brethren entered into with the greatest readiness, and the most cordial approbation...We then stated the necessity of a regular plan of itineracy, with regard to the brethren to be engaged…and of a committee to direct and superintend the whole; that this committee should consist not merely of missionaries, but of persons chosen from the church. Krishnu-pall, Ram-rotton and Ram-Kanai, were accordingly added to the committee. We then nominated Krishnu-pall, tried and faithful; Sheetaram, now at Bishoohury; Koovera, at Erinda; Ram Mohun, at Goamalty; Kangalee, at Cutwa; Fotick and Golook, at Dinagepore; Bhagvat, at Goamalty; Krishno Dass, Sebukram, Jaggernaut, Deep Chund, and one or two younger brethren [as evangelists].” Periodical Accounts II, 262-4. The turnaround in the missionaries‟ approach to their converts‟ role in leadership and teaching is complete, with native Christians—including Krishnu—now on the committee to decide how evangelism should proceed. 154

part of India” as a “very unfavourable feature of their character, well known to you all.” Astonishingly, the Rev. Lacroix went further in his general condemnation of the Bengali character, as Bengali missionaries listened politely at his elbow. He cited “their extreme timidity, and their deficiency in nearly all those qualities which constitute manliness, such as moral and physical courage, fortitude, independence of mind, and firmness of purpose...I may add to this, that there is no people on earth so much under the sway of the opinions of others, so easily affected and disconcerted by ridicule, as the people of Bengal.” With this incredible remark, the European missionary concluded and sat down.472 Well into the nineteenth century, it seems, some European missionaries lacked the cultural sensitivity and trust for their native co-evangelists that the Serampore missionaries had learned years before. The Rev. Lal Behari De then rose, in good order and with courtesy, to respond. The missionary protested that “the national character of every people presents some obstacles; but these are probably quite as great in other countries as in this.” He refused to believe “that covetousness is at all peculiar to the Bengalis, and suspects that Englishmen are as covetous as they. The Bengalis are also a timid race, but all these national characteristics have their counterparts in the characters of other natives.” The Bengali missionary thus politely disagreed with his colleague‟s assessment of his countrymen, and went on to point out the many aspects of the Bengali character “which, if sanctified, might raise them to a higher place in the Christian church. He would mention, for instance, their great religiousness. They are undoubtedly the most religious people on the face of the earth. If then through the grace of God they become Christians, we may hope that they will, more than other races, live habitually under the power of their purer faith.”473 Rev. Lal Behari De‟s response lies well within the bounds of Christian brotherhood and collegiality, but he does not allow Lacroix‟s remarks to go

472 Lacroix‟s presentation exemplifies the imperialist rhetoric of the day, as identified by Mrinalini Sinha in Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Missionaries like Lacroix provide ideal material for scholars who see the missionary project as the European missionary imperialist‟s venue for defining the white, English self against the nonwhite, Oriental other. Lacroix is an extreme example, but such rhetoric was not uncommon—though, as shown, BMS missionaries were perhaps most successful in avoiding it. What is so significant about this moment, however, is the Bengali missionary Lal Behari De‟s response. 473 Proceedings of a General Conference of Bengal Protestant Missionaries, Held at Calcutta, September 4-7, 1855 (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1855), 36-7, 40 155

unchallenged. This is the voice of an Indian Christian missionary who, though he shared Lacroix‟s goals for the evangelization of his countrymen, refused to allow Lacroix to make the Bengali into an effeminate, Oriental Other. Instead, he lifted up Bengal‟s religiosity and pure faith as providential foundation for Christian conversion. Notably, several BMS missionaries joined him in his defense. The Baptist missionary J. Wenger of Calcutta drew attention away from the differences between Europeans and South Asians, emphasizing instead their kinship in Christ. He lauded the “fellowship of labour between the European missionary and his native brother…Their hearts and objects are one, and…Christianity constitutes a bond of brotherhood unknown to Hinduism.” He concluded by rejoicing “that we have native brethren, competent for and worthy of the great work…to proclaim the gospel of salvation to their countrymen; and we hope and pray that their numbers, their labours, and their encouragements may be increased a hundred and a thousand fold.”474 As demonstrated here, native Christians have an unambiguous and insistent presence in the primary source material of the Baptist mission. Their voices should command notice. Yet, the historiography of the missionary enterprise has largely ignored them, or presented them as nameless, voiceless, and passive—colonized people who were imprinted like wax by Western missionaries. The lives of Baptist missionaries, laboring in foreign environments where both colonial elites and British officials opposed their presence, yielded few rewards. The lives of the men and women who accepted their message were often much more difficult. Even so, they cast off familiar beliefs to take up this new faith. Some looked to Christ as a liberator, others saw him as the atoning sacrifice for their wrongs. Some simply saw “at the house of the missionaries…such love as I never saw before.” What must be acknowledged is that thousands of men and women chose to live and die in Baptist Christianity. Their faith, though introduced by British Christians, was their own.

474 Proceedings of a General Conference of Bengal Protestant Missionaries, 53. In another notable moment of shared faith superceding racial division, the members of the conference jointly refused to seat a white American Unitarian minister who requested to join them. The members resolved “that, considering the vital differences between the members of this Conference and Mr. Dall, respecting the great evangelical doctrines of the word of God, he cannot be reckoned as a member; and that on this account, being uninvited, his presence here is an unwarrantable intrusion.” Incidentally, the Indian missionary Lal Behari De had opened the meeting that morning by leading singing and prayer. Proceedings, 117 156

CHAPTER SIX CHANGES IN MISSION POLICY AND THE PROBLEM OF NATIVE AGENCY AND INDEPENDENCE

In 1855, when the leaders of the Baptist Missionary Society held their annual London meeting, doubt loomed over the proceedings. Worry hung in the meeting hall like a cloud, and the society‟s Annual Report for 1855 depicted an imminent crisis. Funds and volunteers for mission work had ebbed or remained stationary over the last several years, while the mission field and the obligations of the society grew steadily. The incomes, not only of the BMS, but all missionary societies over the past years had failed to grow. Were the Christian public no longer interested in supporting evangelists abroad? In the flood of self-examination occasioned by such a question, the BMS leadership took a hard look at their most basic practical assumption about the missionary project. “The notion, which, practically at least, has so long prevailed, that the agency for evangelizing the world must be found at home may now be fairly questioned,” they wrote. European missionary societies had, over the last thirty years or so, operated on the supposition that Europeans must be the gospel‟s primary carriers. Even the BMS, despite the example of Carey, Marshman, and Ward at Serampore, had long emphasized the white missionary‟s role to the detriment of indigenous ministry. Now, though, with resources dwindling and much work left to be done, it was time to reconsider their paradigm. “Recent facts and experience seem rather to justify the opinions and practice of the first missionaries, who considered they were pioneers in the great work; and that where churches were formed, the agency for maintaining the truth in the districts around them, should be sought from among [those churches],” the committee admitted, consciously invoking the Serampore example. “This seems also to have been the principle in apostolic times. If this be the case, the sooner missionary societies fully adopt it, and fully act upon it, notwithstanding every difficulty attending its application, and the disappointments which may arise, the better will it be for the cause of missions.”475 This mid-century crisis moment raises several important questions about the history of the BMS and its policy towards converts and mission churches in the larger

475 Annual Report 1855, 12-3 157

context of British religious and cultural change. How did transformations within the Baptist denomination and its missionary society at home affect BMS policy in the field? It is clear that many Baptists saw their fortunes and social status rise as the nineteenth century progressed, and where eighteenth-century Baptists like Andrew Fuller had avoided politics on principle, at mid-century many Dissenters were deeply involved in politics—especially humanitarian issues. To what degree did the currents and political commitments of nineteenth-century evangelical philanthropy affect the course of the Baptist mission? Most importantly, what were the consequences of these changes for Baptist unity and for missionary policy, particularly the society‟s approach to native agency, leadership, and independence? Change in the BMS: Respectability, Humanitarianism, and Missions as Business The 1855 Annual Report makes clear that BMS policy towards evangelism shifted over time; where the society‟s first missionaries—the group at Serampore—quickly looked to their converts to spread the gospel, subsequent generations trusted instead in European men and money, apparently to the cost of the mission, as the society leadership later realized. Other areas of Baptist policy and identity also changed, though basic theology remained the same. Baptists kept their generations-old commitment to biblical primitivism and apostolic example, invoking scripture as their guide on questions of church discipline, leadership, and order of worship. As well, there was no regression to the eighteenth-century strict Calvinism that Andrew Fuller had struck down; Baptists continued to believe that all people should hear the gospel. However, basic understandings of church leadership, congregational independence, fundraising, and associational life in Britain did adjust in response to developments in religious culture and political engagement at home. These changes, in turn, altered the leadership and the policy of the Baptist Missionary Society, and deeply affected mission work abroad. Many of these issues emerged early in the life of the society and arose surrounding the contentious question of leadership. Once the original founders of the society—particularly Fuller—died, who should succeed them, and how far should their authority extend? The letters of Northamptonshire Baptist pastors and society founders during the first few decades of the nineteenth century frequently return to this worrisome question. Fuller even received an anonymous letter in 1812 expressing concern over the

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unsettled future of the mission, and suggesting the formation of corresponding committees in London and Edinburgh to act, first, under the leadership of Fuller and his cabinet colleagues Sutcliff and Ryland, and then to take over the guidance of the society after their deaths. The leadership of the BMS, the letter implied, must not forever be confined to the intimate circle of Northamptonshire pastors who had founded it.476 However, the founders of the society feared that such a change would entail a loss of the brotherly cooperation, humility, and informality that had characterized their early successes. The Serampore missionaries in India also expressed concern regarding the future of the mission, with much riding on the question of succession to Andrew Fuller, who had always dealt with the society‟s missionaries as friends, colleagues, and brethren, not as employees.477 However, in light of agitation for reform—such as the sentiments represented by the anonymous letter Fuller had received—back in Britain, it was by no means clear to either the Northamptonshire leadership or to the missionaries abroad that the future administration of the mission would continue along the path the founders had laid. Tension also arose over the society‟s image and location. Most of the Northamptonshire preachers who had founded the society deeply mistrusted “respectability” and urban culture, and were determined to keep their mission out of the hands of London “counting-house men.”478 Fuller, Carey, and most of their generation hoped to avoid public display and large fundraisers, which they viewed as ostentatious, worldly, and threatening to congregational independence.479 All of these factors combined to produce no little alarm on the part of Fuller, Carey, and many Northamptonshire pastors when reformers suggested that leadership of the BMS should be more evenly spread across the country, and concentrated in the very urban centers its founders so deeply mistrusted. However, this aversion to “respectability” and broader organization did not extend to every member of the Baptist denomination, and as the question of future organization and leadership after the death of the founders grew more pressing, men who admired the London Missionary Society‟s

476 Stanley, History of the BMS, 29 477 Fuller to Ward, 15 July/9 Aug. 1812, cited in Stanley, History of the BMS , 30 478 Stanley, History of the BMS, 27. See also Marshman, Life and Times, I, 17 479 Stanley, History of the BMS, 27 159

organization and financial means made their sentiments known. Even John Ryland, a member of the original committee of the BMS and a close associate of Fuller‟s, supported plans to organize a BMS auxiliary in Bristol to collect money and raise awareness of the mission work. These opposing opinions represented a significant tension in the Baptist fellowship between the more traditional Dissenting position that church work should be propagated and supported by individual churches, and the rising power of the more organized and respectable world of evangelical philanthropy—a realm in which “those who held the purse strings would increasingly hold the power.”480 In 1815, Andrew Fuller died. After much debate, which revealed the deep factions opposing views on the society‟s organization and funding had created, the committee decided to replace Fuller not with Christopher Anderson, his expressly chosen successor, but with John Ryland and James Hinton of Oxford as co-secretaries.481 After Fuller‟s death, the balance swung quickly in favor of the reforming element of the Baptist denomination—those men who favored more control by London and Edinburgh, hoped to expand beyond the provinciality of Northamptonshire, and generally advocated a more urbane and “respectable” course. In 1818, a London office opened at Fen Court, and Londoner John Dyer was appointed full-time, salaried secretary. The Baptist Missionary Society now centered in London, “at the heart of evangelical philanthropy and respectable society.”482 This shift in the society‟s location and image seems to have been very self-conscious and intentional. The July 1820 Missionary Herald included the text of a speech by Reverend James Hinton, who admitted that Fuller had been “so afraid of ostentation…he was afraid of having speeches made” at society meetings. However, Hinton assured his audience that, had Fuller been able to attend the 1820 meeting in London, he would not have opposed the speeches and reports that told of “all the exertions which Christianity is making.” Hinton was “glad to see this first annual meeting of the society in the Metropolis,” and expected increased funds because of it.483 The death of Fuller and the transfer of the BMS headquarters from Kettering to London signaled the rising authority of a new Baptist leadership whose vision and

480 Stanley, History of the BMS, 27-28 481 Hugh Anderson, The Life and Letters of Christopher Anderson (Edinburgh, 1854), 244, quoted in Stanley, History of the BMS, 33 482 Stanley, History of the BMS, 35 483 Missionary Herald No. XIX, July 1820, 51 160

conception of missionary methodology and administration differed significantly from that of their predecessors. In 1813, Fuller had forewarned Carey, Marshman, and Ward against a “speechifying committee” who would delight in “multiplying rules and regulations” rather than privileging their mission work in India.484 His prediction proved prescient. With the turn of the generations and the rise of highly organized, urban evangelical philanthropy, new ideas on how the missionary enterprise should be supported and directed prevailed in the committee of the BMS. These changes led, by 1817, to a major clash between the Serampore missionaries and the leadership of the BMS—a controversy that would continue for twenty years and, ultimately, result in the severance of ties between the society and its former agents. In his retrospective account of the conflict, John Clark Marshman clearly elucidated the two groups‟ very different understandings of missionary administration, a difference which, he felt, lay at the bottom of the long years of controversy: The old economy of missions, under which Dr. Carey and his associates embarked, had passed away. Missions had attained the maturity and organisation of a national enterprise. Missionaries no longer went to India with the understanding that they must depend for the means of their subsistence mainly on their own exertions, which would be eked out by slight or occasional aid from England. The societies were endowed with ample resources, and were enabled to give adequate salaries to their missionaries, and this circumstance brought in its train a new principle of subordination, to which the Serampore missionaries were strangers. This appears to have been the real origin of those differences which subsequently became irreconcilable by the introduction of new elements of irritation.485

The new London leadership of the BMS envisioned an efficient and organized missionary enterprise that would be carefully overseen and directed by themselves. In this new vision, missionaries in the field would answer to the committee, and all property or work connected to any mission would belong to the society. For Carey, Marshman, and Ward at Serampore, this meant that the mission establishment, including schools, printing shop, houses, and church, which they had built with money they had earned or raised themselves, would now be alienated from them and placed under the society‟s control. As John Clark Marshman wrote, the society‟s new policy introduced “a new principle of

484 Angus Library copy, Andrew Fuller to Ward, Kettering, 15 July 1812, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 25 485 Marshman, Life and Times, I, 134-5. The committee of the society related their side of the conflict in full in the Annual Report, 1827, 9-16. The committee rather reasonably protested that they could not vote funds with which they had been entrusted to a body of men who claimed entire independence from the society. 161

subordination” and threatened deeply held Baptist ideals of liberty and independence. Carey‟s response to now-secretary John Ryland‟s protests against Serampore‟s control of their property—“We are your Brethren…not your servants”— communicated his resistance to the society‟s interference. The relationship between the society leadership and missionaries had changed unalterably.486 As Brian Stanley has pointed out, the lingering controversy between the Serampore missionaries and their parent society arose from two different conceptions of the missionary project itself. The younger leadership of the BMS who took the reins after Fuller viewed it as a business enterprise, and they saw the missionaries they trained and sent out as the employees of the society, subject in all things to the direction of that body. Their notions of missionary administration were inspired by the contemporary successes of organized evangelical philanthropy. Carey, Marshman, Ward, Fuller, and many founding members of the BMS, rather understood the society to be a useful agency for missionary recruitment, training, and the raising of funds and support at home. The missionaries themselves were independent agents. The Serampore missionaries had always operated in this autonomous manner, as their personal financial independence of the society reflected.487 To them, allowing the society control of the mission establishment meant relinquishing their Baptist ideals of liberty and independence under the direction of God. Their view of missions oversight reflected older notions of what it meant to be a Baptist, a Baptist church, and a Baptist missionary. Their understanding came from the earliest days of the missionary enterprise, when a few rough Northamptonshire preachers had taken on the Herculean task of global evangelism, funded by collections from individual churches who struggled to give nineteen pounds at a time to their enterprise. British evangelicalism had changed, and the BMS leadership had changed with it; the Serampore missionaries—working half a world away—had not.

486 BMS MSS., Carey to John Ryland, n.p., Sept. 1817, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 25. Ultimately, this difference led Serampore and the BMS to declare their mutual separation in 1827. Both parties in this controversy had some reasonable ground to stand on. The BMS understandably wished to ensure the future of the Serampore mission after the deaths of their missionaries, while the Serampore missionaries saw the society‟s interference as threatening to their independence. The society‟s position is a very nineteenth century one, while the Serampore group speak more like turn of the century Baptists. Later generations of missionaries struggled less with the society‟s oversight, likely because the hierarchy of leadership was understood before they offered themselves for the mission field. 487 Stanley, History of the BMS, 66-7 162

Ultimately, in March 1827, the committee and Joshua Marshman drew up a mutual declaration declaring their separation after a thirty-five year partnership.488 The divide that fractured the Baptist Missionary Society in the 1820s and 1830s was not only between the society leadership and its uncompromising Serampore missionaries; divisions also appeared along generational lines in India, among the missionaries themselves. While the argument regarding Serampore‟s independence and the mission premises continued, the Serampore missionaries‟ relations with their younger colleagues in India also grew strained. Much of this friction arose from the inability or unwillingness on the part of the junior missionaries to meet the demands of Serampore‟s austere lifestyle, which including devoting nearly all personal funds to the work.489 In 1817, four of these junior missionaries broke off from the Serampore community and began a new union at Calcutta, operating on the very principles the BMS leadership were then attempting to enforce upon Serampore: full submission to the society, with the understanding that all mission property belonged to that body.490 This new generation shared the views of most of the new London leadership. They believed missionaries should be dependent upon and answerable to the society, and should act only under direction of that body. The younger missionaries‟ disagreement was, therefore, based to an extent on principle, though Carey and his colleagues deeply resented their dividing the

488 John Clark Marshman, Life and Times II, 340-6 489 See Marshman, Life and Times, I, 462-4; II, 106; Stanley, History of the BMS, 60. The junior missionaries‟ position here was somewhat understandable, for they were required on the one hand to cleave to the mission covenant in which all were equal and all contributed to the common purse, but on the other hand they were expected to answer to the Serampore missionaries for their conduct and expenditures. Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 23 490 Among these missionaries was Eustace Carey, William Carey‟s nephew and biographer. See Stanley, History of the BMS, 60. Despite the part he played against Serampore in this affair, Eustace Carey‟s account of the controversy in his Memoir of Carey shows laudable restraint and generosity: “If I were writing the history of the Baptist Mission, it might be expected that I should trace out the merits of this controversy, and exhibit its facts and events in detail. But I am writing the life of an individual; and, being convinced that neither his character was affected nor his usefulness compromised, by the views he entertained and the course he adopted, I have not thought it incumbent on me to dwell upon circumstances, and renew a dispute calculated to awaken no pleasurable feeling, or serve any useful purpose. Moreover, as, from the very origin of this controversy to its last discussion and throughout all the interests it involved, I, with the brethren with whom I acted, entertained opposite convictions from my honored relative, and committed myself to a different procedure, I should deem it ungenerous and impertinent to make this memoir the vehicle of my own ideas, or the instrument of my vindication. Beyond, therefore, the above very brief notice, I willingly abstain from any analysis even of the controversy.” E. Carey, 363-4. John Clark Marshman goes at length into all the details of the affair and is unequivocally biased in favor of Serampore. For a pro-Society account of the controversy, see F.A. Cox, History of the BMS, I, (London, 1842), 292-6. 163

mission with no attempt at reconciliation. Carey wrote to John Dyer, secretary of the BMS, in 1819, suggesting that the Calcutta Baptists, from their arrival, were “steadily bent on separating from us, for neither of them ever consulted me on a single grievance.” This division grieved Carey greatly, and it produced particularly vituperative rhetoric on both sides. The Calcutta Baptists accused Joshua Marshman of attempting to stockpile a personal fortune, while Carey suspected new missionaries sent out by the society of spying on the work of Serampore and reporting back to the BMS. 491 The divisions between Serampore and London, and between Serampore and Calcutta, underline how context, generation and experience could create very different views of the missionary enterprise. These divides are also suggestive of the ways that Baptist Christianity in Britain was shifting in response to cultural change, while Baptist missionaries abroad remained insulated from such currents. D.W. Bebbington has convincingly demonstrated the connection between alterations in British evangelicalism and shifts in contemporary British culture.492 Eighteenth-century revivalism, he finds, closely mirrored elements of Enlightenment thought and culture. Evangelicals in this period spoke of their faith as “experimental religion,” admired the writings of John Locke, and committed themselves to a tolerant, pragmatic course. When people would not come to their churches, eighteenth-century evangelicals responded with practical determination to take the gospel to them: hence the open-air tent meetings of George Whitefield and John Wesley.493 This type of pragmatic flexibility clearly influenced the BMS founders and the Serampore missionaries, who relied largely upon personal contributions and the missionaries‟ own artisanship to fund the work, and immediately sent converts into the field as evangelists. Brian Stanley likewise connects early missions to the spirit of their age, finding that the Enlightenment frame of mind allowed missionaries to view the “heathen” as nonetheless human, and

491 Carey to John Dyer, Serampore, July 1819, Letter I in Letters Official and Private from the Rev. Dr. Carey relative to certain statements given in these pamphlets lately published by the Rev. John Dyer, Secretary to the Baptist Missionary Society; W. Johns, M.D.; and the Rev. E. Carey and W. Yates (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1828), 5-10, quotation from 9 492 Bebbington‟s definition of “evangelical” certainly incorporates Dissenters, including Baptists. His four descriptors for evangelical belief: conversion, crucicentrism, biblicism, and activism, aptly describe Baptist belief post-Fuller. D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman 1989), 12, 17 493 Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 65 164

therefore able to understand and accept the gospel, and all the improvements it would bring. “To be sustainable,” he writes, “the missionary project could not escape a commitment to…the fundamental unity of humanity.” Missionaries shared this ideal with Enlightenment thinkers whose notion of constant progress towards civilization differed little from their “hope of global conversion.”494 There is therefore no question that British religious culture in general, and Baptist culture in particular, often responded to or aligned with the tenor of their times. Late eighteenth century evangelicalism and the missionary societies that arose from it reflected the intellectual milieu and cultural characteristics of their day. Carey, Marshman, Ward, and Fuller built the first Baptist mission upon several foundations, many of which—theology, history, brotherhood— remained unchanged. Other influences aroses out of contemporary culture and proved more transient. The second generation of BMS missionaries and leadership came of age in a different world. Bebbington notices a shift in evangelicalism in the 1820s and 1830s, evidenced by “fresh attitudes towards the church and the world, towards public issues and even towards the purposes of God. A different mood was abroad.” This change arose partly from the turn of the generations; Robert Hall, William Wilberforce, and Hannah More all died in the 1830s, and their successors grew up “within an Evangelicalism whose place in the world was assured. They were much less inclined towards a careful pragmatism that would recommend the movement to suspicious onlookers. Rather they expected their views to be given a hearing. They were more confident, more outspoken, more assertive.”495 This type of evangelical Christianity greatly influenced the spirit of the early nineteenth century, as believers, including Baptists, found that they could use

494 Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization,” 172 495 Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 75. Bebbington sees this change as strongly influenced by Romanticism, and finds that 1820s-40s evangelicalism placed much more emphasis on body as well as spirit. As Boyd Hilton points out, this newly confident evangelicalism (primarily Anglican, in Hilton‟s analysis) deeply influenced social and economic thought in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The evangelical take on Free Trade was “static (or cyclical), nationalist, retributive, and purgative, employing competition as a means to education rather than to growth.” Thus evangelical philanthropy emphasized that charity must discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor, and opposed Poor Law relief, which “made recipients resentful and dependent.” Hilton, Age of Atonement, 69, 101. Anna Clark also argues, “poor law officials, social reformers and philanthropists therefore aimed to instill the values of self- sufficiency into both men and women of the working class.” Anna Clark, “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage: Contrasting Assumptions,” Journal of Social History 34 (2000), 262. The influence of such ideas on BMS policy is evident in the Indian Special Committee Questionnaire‟s concerns about the payment of preachers, discussed further below. 165

political issues to gain moral capital that extended the reach of their faith.496 Though ventures such as slavery abolition, municipal legislation, and the opening of India to missionaries and philanthropists were usually spearheaded by Evangelical Anglicans in positions of power, Baptists—and particularly missionaries—had a key role to play in these moments, often convincing parliamentarians to support the causes of God and humanity by providing evidence from personal experience in the mission field. Thus a Baptist tradition that had been proud, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of its provinciality and outsider status, now found itself at the leading edge of many cultural and political initiatives of their day.497 As Andrew Porter has pointed out, by the mid- 1830s the missionary societies, including the BMS, were clearly “riding high on the back of the humanitarian tide.” Beginning with the antislavery movement, in which Baptist missionaries like William Knibb joined with Evangelicals like William Wilberforce and T.F. Buxton, “regard at home for the missionary movement…continued to grow, as a consequence of the victimisation of its activists overseas and its alignment with the humanitarians and their influential leaders. Missionary organisers in Britain were well aware of this, however much they still stressed the priority of their religious concerns.”498 The debates over the succession to Andrew Fuller, the transfer of the mission headquarters to London, and the proper relation of the society to its missionaries all occurred against the backdrop of the missionary movement‟s increasing—and very fruitful—engagement with humanitarian politics. While the older Serampore group clung to an eighteenth-century approach that privileged self-reliance and pragmatic evangelism over politics and respectability, this new connection between missions and evangelical philanthropy deeply affected the vision of the next generation and ultimately contributed to the rift.

496 And extension of that faith remained their primary animating force. As Christopher Leslie Brown argues of the Evangelicals who took up the antislavery cause in the late eighteenth century, they “had not only religious motives. They also had religious objectives.” Brown, Moral Capital, 335 497 The founding of the BMS itself offers an early suggestion of Baptists‟ avant garde position, for the creation of the BMS was followed, in the next twenty years, by the LMS, the CMS, and the Edinburgh and Glasgow Societies. See Porter, Religion versus Empire, chapter two. These other great nineteenth-century missionary societies acknowledged their debt to Baptist initiative; one of the LMS founders noted gracefully that “the torch of this Society…was lighted at the altar which the Baptists had raised.” J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 71 498 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 137-8 166

Yet the two periods of evangelical and missionary history, one Enlightened and one Romantic, and the two generations, one stern, practical and self-reliant, the other more inclined to publicity and fundraising, remained much alike in essentials. Both generations turned the ideals and culture of their time into tools for divine providence. Bebbington argues that “the gospel and humanitarianism…were not seen as rivals but as complementary,” and Porter similarly finds that the missionary societies essentially rode the humanitarian wave in order to build up public support and funds for their primary project—global evangelization—until it ebbed, and then continued on with their mission.499 Baptist engagement with contemporary culture and politics throughout the nineteenth century should be viewed in this light.500 Just as missionaries viewed government merely as a vehicle that either opposed or extended the will of God, the missionary societies followed the zeitgeist when and if they thought it would serve their gospel-driven aims to do so. BMS Approaches to Native Agency and Independence, 1790s-1840s How, then, did the Baptist Missionary Society‟s engagement with humanitarian politics and its adoption of the organization and respectability of evangelical philanthropy affect its most crucial policies? How would such changes at home affect the mission‟s perceptions of converts and their confidence in native agency? First, it is important to reiterate that the first mission at Serampore, begun in the 1790s, almost immediately viewed converts as independent evangelists. William Carey and his colleagues saw men like Krishnu, Deep Chund, and Petumber Singh as representing “the grand desideratum

499 Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 120; Porter notes the significance of the missionary movement‟s continuing success in the late 1830s and 1840s despite the decline of humanitarian enthusiasm following the failure of Buxton‟s Niger expedition. The missionary societies had certainly used evangelical philanthropy to build up their cause, but they were clearly not dependent upon it. Porter, Religion versus Empire, 152. Bebbington further supports this view—of missions‟ connection to humanitarian politics without diminution of their major goal—by interpreting humanitarianism itself as not so much a force for social improvement, but a battle against sin of every kind. Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 133 500 A comparison of the arc of BMS policy to Hilton‟s discussion of evangelical social thought also suggests that the two diverged by the latter half of the nineteenth century, for Hilton sees the Age of Atonement giving way to greater emphasis on the Incarnation—a shift from Christ the sacrificial lamb to Christ the moral teacher. Hilton, Age of Atonement, 5. The Baptists certainly did not follow evangelical thought on this, as soteriology remained at the center of their faith and their missionary enterprise. In fact, the public dispute between Rammohun Roy and Joshua Marshman centered around this very idea, with the brahman taking the view of Christ as man, and Marshman defending the atonement. See chapter four. 167

that was to move the Hindoo nation.”501 The archetype for missions provided by Serampore stressed the value and abilities of Indian Christians as ministers whose background made them much more effective than European missionaries. “When we consider their superior acquaintance with the language, the circumstances, the ideas and reasonings of their fellow-countrymen, & with the snares which surround them, everything else being equal, how much more effectually must they speak to the heart, than a European can possibly do!” Carey wrote in 1806.502 The Serampore missionaries emphasized the need to build indigenous churches, with Indian pastorship, financial support, and administration. Believing their converts to be absolutely capable of supporting and leading their own congregations, they also opposed the importation of European forms or too much European oversight. Just as they themselves fought against society interference in their own work, they hoped to keep India‟s churches from any dependence, financial or otherwise, upon European Baptists or the BMS. The Serampore missionaries even wrote this policy into their 1805 Form of Agreement, making the mission‟s dependence on autonomous Indian agency a matter of principle: Still further to strengthen the cause of Christ in this country, and, as far as in our power, to give it a permanent establishment, even when the efforts of Europeans may fail, we think it our duty as soon as possible, to advise the native brethren, who may be formed into separate churches, to choose their pastors and deacons from amongst their own countrymen, that the word may be statedly preached, and the ordinances of Christ administered, in each church, by the native minister, as much as possible without the interference of the missionary of the district…The different native churches will also learn to care and provide for their ministers, for their church expenses, ...and the whole administration will assume a native aspect; by which means the inhabitants will more readily identify the cause as belonging to their own nation, and their prejudices at falling into the hands of Europeans will entirely vanish. Carey, Marshman, and Ward hoped that this approach, which took the maintenance of the mission churches out of European hands and placed them under Indian supervision as soon as possible, would lay the foundation for a truly Indian Christian church, and give converts “new energy in attempting to spread the gospel, when they shall freely enjoy the

501 Periodical Accounts II, 370. Recall that this impulse—to quickly view new converts as evangelists— came as much from the converts as from the missionaries themselves. Krishnu-pall took the initiative in speaking with inquirers, and early expressed concern about how all of Bengal could learn about Christ when some of the missionaries had died, and Carey, Marshman, and Ward were so taken up with duties of press and school. “I would go to the end of the world to make his love known,” Krishnu told the missionaries. Thus Serampore‟s policy towards native agency sprang initially from converts‟ expressed desire to preach and teach. Periodical Accounts II, 184 502 Angus Library MSS, Carey and others to BMS, Serampore, 31 August 1806, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 33 168

privileges of the gospel amongst themselves.”503 They expected that their message would “sound out even to the extremities of India” not from their European mission stations, but from Indian churches under Indian leadership.504 It was to native agency that these first BMS missionaries looked for the ultimate evangelization of India. There could be no stronger affirmation of their confidence in their converts or of their commitment to Christian brotherhood despite racial and national difference.505 As the 1855 Annual Report makes clear, however, the BMS deviated significantly from their missionaries‟ original vision of independent indigenous churches as the primary agency for evangelization. The divergence became clear very early in the society‟s history, and appeared along the same lines as the conflict between the Serampore mission and the London leadership over missionary independence. Missionaries in the field who experienced daily contact with non-white converts were most likely to view them as brethren and to encourage them to step into positions of leadership. Baptists back in Britain tended to have less confidence in the equal worth and ability of black Baptists in the Caribbean or native Christians in South Asia. It appears that, beginning in the 1820s, neither the BMS leadership in London nor the second generation of missionaries in Calcutta shared the Serampore missionaries‟ trust in native Christian agency. The committee wrote plaintively in 1822 of Krishnu‟s lack of success as an independent evangelist in Malda, where he had been working for twenty years. “Perhaps, if it were possible for the Society to associate some brother from this country with this faithful and interesting Hindoo teacher, we might, under the divine blessing, witness pleasing results,” the London leadership wrote. “Experience has fully proved that native talent is employed to most advantage, when aided and directed by the

503 Periodical Accounts III, 182-3 504 Marshman, Life and Times I, 229-230 505 This approach—that the gospel should be spread primarily by Indian Christians talking to their neighbors and supporting preachers from among themselves—persisted at Serampore even after London leadership became disillusioned with it. In 1820, the Serampore missionaries wrote to all the Baptist churches in India pressing upon them their duty to “hold forth the world of life to your neighbors and countrymen around you.” Small as the churches may be, the missionaries said, “they ought to consider themselves as so many Societies for propagating the gospel in India.” Abridgment of a Letter addressed by the Serampore Brethren to the Churches of Christ which have been raised up among the Heathen in India. Annual Report 1821, 39-43, Appendix one 169

judgment of a European Missionary.”506 This statement marks a clear digression from the policy Serampore had adopted less than twenty years before, and indicates a lack of confidence in and respect for the ability of an Indian Christian preacher.507 Eustace Carey, one of the second generation of Baptist missionaries in India and William Carey‟s nephew, likewise doubted the ability of Indians, who were “only newly awakened from heathen superstition,” having had “little previous mental culture,” to preach effectively. At best, he thought, native ministers would “be but partially competent to make known, defend, and exemplify the gospel.”508 Similarly, a General Baptist critic Amos Sutton argued that Indians‟ conscience and habits—which, he posited, were not so well developed as Europeans‟—would make them “idle and unfaithful” ministers. He further declared that he had never met an Indian preacher who could “be depended upon when alone,” without the watchful accompaniment of a European missionary.509 In the Caribbean, as at Serampore, progressive and pragmatic Baptist missionaries saw that non-European leadership was critical to the maintenance of their churches. In Jamaica, the training of black converts for positions of church leadership began even before full emancipation. James Phillippo, citing the example of his contemporaries in India who relied heavily on native converts for preaching, had “long had the service of upward of forty subordinate agents, each of whom…conducts the regular worship of God

506 Annual Report 1822, 2. It is significant that the writers of the Report did not base this conclusion on any information they had received from Serampore, whose missionaries remained confident in Krishnu and native agency generally. Rather, this statement follows a complaint that “no intelligence has reached us, for some time past, from Malda. It appears still to be occupied by Krishnu.” Hearing nothing, the BMS assumed the worst. Further, it seems not to have occurred to them that European missionaries in India were faring no better at the time. 507 No total distinction may be made between BMS attitudes over these periods; however, for in 1825 society publications may be found to again defend the abilities of an Indian preacher: “The journal of the native preachers at this station [Cutwa]...show their steady perseverance in proclaiming the word of life in the numerous villages around them. A single quotation from one of these journals, will prove that these humble teachers are not deficient in an acquaintance with Divine truth, or unskilled in the mode of conveying it to others. 'Spoke to a Brahman,' says Kangalee, 'who asked me what I thought of Ram Mohun Roy's way.' I said, 'that he was like a man who shows me a fine house in the jungles, but cannot point out the way or door to it. Ram Mohun Roy points out one God, but does not point out the way to him; and so his instructions can be of no use to me; Christ is the door, and none can go to God but by him!” Annual Report 1825, 10. This suggests that, though condescending rhetoric towards converts and their abilities does appear more frequently from about 1820 to 1840, a practical commitment to effective preaching remained, no matter the background of the preacher. 508 Eustace Carey, Supplement to the Vindication of the Calcutta Baptist Missionaries, 1831, 667, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 34 509 General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer, IX (March 1830), Amos Sutton to the GBMS, , 5 June 1829, quoted in Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 34 170

one or two evenings of the week,” he wrote to the society. “I refer to my leaders and deacons, being naturally the most intelligent and worthy members of my churches, who are in almost every sense of the word as much native assistants, or local preachers, as some of the converts in Hindustan.”510 Though their role was subordinate to that of the white missionary, these black converts played an active role in the work of the mission. They "instructed inquirers, visited the sick, sought after backsliders, superintended funerals, and reported cases of poverty and distress throughout their respective districts,” Phillippo reported. Not only did they share the duties, but in some respects they bore the responsibilities, of the pastor.511 Predictably, the BMS leadership in London was less prepared to entrust so much responsibility to slaves and former slaves. The society initially questioned the fitness of black converts for leadership, and some critics in Britain abused the “leader-system” as the missionaries called it, claiming that “the missionaries displayed great carelessness in the selection and oversight of these agents, and that as a class they were ignorant, superstitious, and often immoral men.” Detractors at home called the Jamaican Baptist system of black leadership “fatally and willfully faulty,” casting doubt on the intellect, the ability, and the faith of those converts of African descent whom the missionaries so trusted. These charges, leveled repeatedly, grew loud enough to necessitate a full inquiry into the matter by the society. Happily, in this case the BMS leadership, after observing the converts and their work, concluded that the situation in Jamaica demanded such a system, and admitted that the work of the black agents had borne good fruit. Edward Bean Underhill even called the accusations against the West Indian converts “a calumny on the noble, generous, and disinterested efforts of multitudes of good men, trained indeed in slavery, but whose earnest desire it was to lead their fellow-bondsmen to Christ.”512 In this circumstance, despite a clear initial divergence between Baptists in Britain and missionaries in Jamaica on the question of black equality and ability, the views of the two groups were reconciled.

510 Underhill, Life of Phillippo, 205 511 Phillippo, Jamaica, 435 512 Underhill, Life of Phillippo, 206-8. Phillippo, in his account, added a footnote on the leader-system: “It has been stated that it tends to diminish esteem for the pastor, and to promote divisions in churches. The whole of the author‟s experience is not only against such a conclusion, but in every instance which has come under his observation the effect has been directly the reverse.” Phillippo, Jamaica, 437-8. See also Phillippo‟s explanation of the system‟s origins in slavery laws, Phillippo, Jamaica, 393-5 171

It is nonetheless clear that missionary policy towards native agency and independence shifted over time. The Serampore missionaries, in the first thirty years of the society‟s history, consciously worked towards independent Indian churches, led and supported by indigenous Christians within an Indian cultural context. Beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, though, a greater emphasis on European leadership and civilization and a more paternalistic rhetoric emerged. Where did this regression come from? Andrew Porter has identified a shift in outlook on the part of British missionary societies in the 1830s which accompanied the turn towards humanitarian politics. This new attitude posited that the gospel would be most successful if carried hand in hand with British civilization. In other words, “Christianity required an appropriate cultural underpinning.” In the case of Baptist mission specifically, Porter cites the Free Villages of Jamaica as an example of the missionaries‟ new willingness to connect Christianity to British cultural forms.513 The Jamaica villages, set up by missionaries on land purchased by British abolitionist funds in the 1830s, undoubtedly evoked British evangelical culture. Many of the townships were named for Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, or various antislavery leaders like William Wilberforce and Joseph Sturge. Ceremonies which opened these new villages included the singing of both Baptist hymns and the British national anthem. The Caribbean Christians who lived in the townships sent their children to schools modeled on the British Lancaster system, and observers of the new village system wrote approvingly of the clean and industrious habits of their inhabitants.514 At the same time,

513 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 146-7. Catherine Hall also sees mission work of this period as connected to the civilizing mission ideology of the humanitarian movement. She argues of the Baptist Free Villages: “This was the abolitionist dream—a society in which black men could become like white men, not the whites of the plantations but the whites of the abolitionist movement, responsible, industrious, independent, Christian.” Civilising Subjects, 125. However, Porter makes the essential point that the missionary societies‟ taking up of this new position remained consonant with their previous and always primary goal of global evangelization. The new emphasis on civilization arose out of the societies‟ recognition of the humanitarian cause‟s practical value to mission advancement. Hall, on the other hand, mistakenly views the civilizing impulse, or the desire to remake Jamaica in evangelical Britain‟s image, as the primary goal of the enterprise. If this were the case, why did the missionary societies abandon the humanitarian approach once it ceased to be fruitful for their work? On the missionary abandonment of the commerce/civilization/Christianity connection in the late nineteenth century, see Porter, Religion versus Empire, 191ff. 514 Phillippo, Jamaica, 226-7; Gurney, Winter in the West Indies, 115-6; Underhill, Life of Phillippo, 189. These developments should be contrasted with Carey, Marshman, and Ward‟s earlier refusal to ask Bengali converts to change their names and style of dress, or even to abandon the symbols of their previous status in Hindu culture, such as the brahman‟s poita. However, these types of convert villages also sprang up in association with the Baptist mission in India in the 1820s, though much fewer in number. These continued into the 1840s. See Appendix II, Annual Report 1827, 35; Annual Report 1845, 22 172

images and language appeared in the society‟s publications that echoed the contemporary paternalist rhetoric of the antislavery movement. The Annual Report of 1835 closed with an engraving that depicts a shirtless black man, wearing an earring and holding a hoe, flanked by a black woman with a baby and two other family members, making gestures of supplication. The black man receives a Bible from Britannia, who is seated on a throne with a spear and Union Jack shield. The society‟s use of this type of image, redolent of the famous portrayal of the pleading slave who asked, “Am I not a man and a brother?” shows how deeply evangelical philanthropy influenced the BMS during this period. The following year‟s Annual Report continued to reinforce the partnership between missionary and humanitarian causes. The 1836 annual meeting resolved “that the value of Missionary labours, in promoting the temporal welfare of mankind in their social capacity, as well as in rescuing multitudes of immortal souls from the present dominion and final consequences of sin, has now been so fully demonstrated, as to enforce the obligation on all who know the grace and revere the authority of the Saviour, to encourage and support them.”515 Undoubtedly, the BMS of the 1830s—the first generation of missionaries and leaders fully removed from the guiding influence of Northamptonshire and Serampore—adopted to a great extent the language, imagery, and approach to nonwhite peoples that had helped to make abolitionism a mass movement.516 Why did this happen, and what is the significance of this change? The answer to these questions may lie in the Baptist rhetoric itself. The committee‟s willingness, in 1836, to link “missionary labours” to improvements in humankind‟s “temporal welfare” had one clear object: “to enforce the obligation on all who know the grace and revere the

515 Annual Report 1836, 3 516 It should be pointed out, however, that this does not mean that the first generation of missionaries ignored humanitarian causes. The Serampore missionaries worked actively to improve the earthly lives of their neighbors, but without privileging British culture—Marshman, through various education schemes and benevolent work among the Calcutta poor, and Ward, through printing and advocacy for Indian women. In Carey‟s case, such labors included turning an interest in botany towards agricultural improvements for Bengali farmers, as well as working extensively in Bengali language and literature, to great acclaim. Still, they always connected these efforts to their primary goal of evangelization, seeing them as immediately beneficial to India‟s temporal state but, in the long term, imperative as the groundwork for its spiritual future. On education, see M.A. Laird, “The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries to Education in Bengal, 1793-1837” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 31 (1968), 94-98. For a general overview of the group‟s benevolent work aimed at improving the material well-being of the people of India, see Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 62-75. 173

authority of the Saviour, to encourage and support them,” that is, missionary efforts. The BMS leadership and missionaries of the 1830s and 1840s employed the rhetoric and images that, in their day, were most successful in inspiring the support and loosening the pockets of the public. Both Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter have found that missionary bodies used paternalist expressions in their writings in order to justify and obtain support for their always primary goal of global evangelization. “Whatever the reservations held by leading figures such as Buxton or John Dyer about particular objects of [humanitarian] enthusiasm,” Porter writes, “they recognised its practical value to the missionary cause as well as its political potential.”517 In the 1830s and 1840s, when evangelical politics gained mass support by adopting humanitarian causes, pragmatic missionary leaders harnessed that contemporary enthusiasm to their cause, as well. By applying humanitarian images and rhetoric to the “heathen” and picturing converts as “men and brothers” and “women and sisters” crying to be lifted up, not only by British civilization, but by the gospel of Christ, the missionary societies generated enormous public support for missions. Undoubtedly, the society‟s shift in rhetoric and approach during this period should be viewed as a regression. Serampore‟s radically convert-centered vision gave way before a new emphasis on European leadership and civilization. However, it must be borne in mind that both approaches still arose out of a shared worldview and ultimate goal. Both the Serampore missionaries at the turn of the century and the BMS leaders in the 1820s-1840s believed that they operated in a world controlled by divine providence, and both used or ignored contemporary politics and culture as they opposed or extended global evangelization.518 It is further significant that, even as the BMS of this period invoked paternalist rhetoric and images and encouraged the importation of values and lifestyles associated with British evangelicalism, alongside these initiatives a practical commitment to indigenous leadership and eventual full control over native churches remained. The

517 Such language intended to “magnify the capacity of the gospel to emancipate the „heathen‟ from their barbarism.” Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization,” 170; Porter, Religion versus Empire, 149 518 We must, therefore, avoid looking at missionary societies‟ use of romanticized racial images and paternalist language in the 1820s-40s as representative of missionary approaches and goals in general. As has been shown, Serampore operated much differently before this period, and the BMS would abandon this type of rhetoric and emphasis soon after, beginning in the 1840s. Again, the Indian preachers controversy of the 1870s, discussed below, offers a perfect example of a moment in which missionary policy, though deeply influenced by contemporary cultural concerns, ultimately went in a different direction. 174

Calabar Institution, begun in 1840 in Jamaica, and Serampore College, founded by Carey, Marshman and Ward in 1818 and continued under the auspices of the society, testify to the missionaries‟ ongoing confidence in native, rather than European, agency. These institutions also underline that, even when society leadership deviated from indigenous ministry, missionaries in the field continued to recognize the practical value of native Christian leadership and preaching. Both colleges were designed by BMS missionaries as training grounds for native missionaries and church leaders. When in the 1850s the BMS committee recognized their digression from the path laid out by their first missionaries, and sought to revive their focus on native agency and independence, these schools provided the indigenous ministers who would carry the mission forward. Carey, Marshman, and Ward established Serampore College in 1818 as “an institution in which a higher and more complete education should be given to native students, more especially to those of Christian [convert] parentage, and in which native preachers and schoolmasters…should be efficiently trained up.” Much to the disapproval of many of the younger missionaries at Calcutta and the new generation of BMS leaders in London, the college curriculum included both Eastern and Western learning. An Indian Christian could not stand up to a brahman without a full understanding of Hindu philosophy, the missionaries reasoned. Thus, at Serampore College, “the native Christian teacher might obtain full instruction in the doctrines he was to combat, and the doctrines he was to teach, and acquire a complete knowledge of both the Sacred Scriptures, and of those philosophical and mythological dogmas which formed the soul of the Buddhist and Hindoo systems.” Equally radically, the college opened its doors to both Christians and non-believers, so that future missionaries could, firsthand, “obtain that knowledge of the character, the feelings, and the prejudices of the heathen among whom they were designed to labour.”519 The college prospectus concluded with a ringing endorsement for native agency and native evangelism: “If ever the Gospel stands in India, it must be by native opposed to native in demonstrating its excellence above all other systems.”520

519 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 463. On the disapproval and lack of support of much of the Baptist denomination for the College, see Potts, 133-4 520 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 168-9. At the close of 1819, the missionaries issued an address regarding the College, declaring that “the most effectual mode of diffusing divine truth through India, was that adopted in apostolic times, of employing, for the most part, those who were converted and trained up in the country itself.” The actual state of the Serampore mission at that time confirmed their commitment to 175

Much of the Baptist denomination in Britain disapproved of the college‟s openness and emphasis on Eastern learning, and refused to support it. Meanwhile the Serampore missionaries placed so much faith in the institution and its students that they ultimately entrusted the future of their mission to the College Council, rather than to the BMS leadership.521 The disagreement over the college again aligned with prior fractures between missionary generations and between older missionaries and new London leadership. Significantly, the debate over the college spanned the 1820s and 30s, as the missionary leaders at home became increasingly convinced that the gospel spread best when accompanied by Western civilization, while the Serampore missionaries remained certain that local context and knowledge were practical and necessary for the training of native missionaries. The Calabar Institution, founded to train Caribbean Christians for the ministry at the height of the society‟s engagement with evangelical philanthropy and its rhetoric and approaches, also affirmed that missionaries in the field remained committed to native agency and independence despite apparent doubt in Britain.522 Conceived by William Knibb as a seminary to train Jamaican Christians for mission work in Africa, the Calabar Institution also trained local pastors and ministers for Jamaica‟s churches after the society stopped sending missionaries and funds to the island.523 The timing of the Calabar Institution‟s initiation—it began regular operations in the mid-1840s—fortuitously aligned with readjustments in attitude and approach in Britain. By about 1842-3, the society leadership were beginning to return to the original plan for native agency, and London offered much more support to Calabar in the 1840s than they had to Serampore indigenous evangelization. Of the sixteen missionary stations then connected with Serampore, fifteen were overseen by native ministers, and only one by Europeans. J.C. Marshman II, 463-4 521 On the disapproval and lack of support of much of the Baptist denomination (and the Calcutta missionaries) for the College, see Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 133-4. The Serampore missionaries‟ last effort to reconcile with the BMS before their deaths rested in an attempt to place control of their mission stations in the Council‟s hands. The BMS refused this offer, since only two of the Council members were missionaries. Eventually, the society did agree to take responsibility for the College when it was threatened with bankruptcy. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 510-2, 522-3 522 This Jamaica college‟s full title was “the Native Collegiate Institution, Calabar, Jamaica.” See Clark, Voice of Jubilee, title page. 523 When BMS secretary E.B. Underhill visited the college in 1861, he reported that “the vacancies occasioned by the death, or departure from the island, of European ministers, have been more than supplied by the colored brethren who have been educated in the Institution at Calabar, so that there is now a slight excess beyond the greatest number of ministers the churches have had amongst them at any former period.” Underhill, The West Indies, 433. See also Underhill, Life of Phillippo, 206; Underhill, The West Indies, 293-6. 176

College in the 1820s and 1830s. Soon, the society leadership could write as though the previous decades‟ lack of confidence in black ministers and emphasis on European agency and civilization had never existed. The 1850 Annual Report lauded the Calabar Institution‟s role in promoting the independence of Caribbean churches from European aid. “Here is an institution such as the Baptist Missionary Society has been sighing for almost from its birth—a seminary for training young men expressly and exclusively for the work of the ministry; not missionaries' sons, nor native born whites, but bona fide natives—black and coloured men, who in due time will be able, by God's blessing, to carry on the work here irrespective of foreign aid; and other things being equal, they will have the advantage of Europeans in respect to climate, constitution, habit, etc.”524 As the BMS entered the second half of the nineteenth century, missionaries and society leaders again recognized the supreme importance of independent mission churches led and supported by local Christians. They would spend the next decades attempting to repair the damage and correct the tendencies their deviation had caused. The Return to Native Agency and Independence, 1840s-1870s The early 1840s are a particularly interesting moment in terms of the missionary movement‟s engagement—or disengagement—with contemporary politics and culture. Andrew Porter characterizes this as a time of success, confidence, and boldness for the British Protestant missionary societies. He points out “the domestic status, respectability, and degree of independence the missionary movement had acquired by the early 1840s. Together with new openings and more ample resources than had previously been known, these circumstances were responsible for the optimism and self-confidence marking the missionary endeavour.”525 Such optimism, arising at least partly out of the movement‟s very successful partnership with evangelical politics, does seem unfortunately to have created too much faith in European culture and agency, to the detriment of native church independence and support for evangelism. However, these missionary successes and the confidence they generated also “prompted the steady development of comparative and constructive practical thinking” that recognized the necessity of mobilizing native

524 Annual Report 1850, 35 525 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 162 177

churches to spread the gospel.526 Thus emboldened, the missionary societies of the 1840s broke from the racialized paternalism of their day and acknowledged the plain fact that the gospel could not spread effectively without native agency. Among the Baptists, Serampore‟s original passion for indigenous leadership and independence was reignited, and most crucially, persisted even as contemporary British culture grew more racist.527 At the same time, BMS publications began self-consciously to qualify the connection between missions and humanitarianism. In their 1843 report, the committee of the society solicited “the special prayers of the friends of the Society at this season,” when “circumstances in the times” magnified the need for God‟s guidance. These dangerous circumstances, it appears, arose out of evangelical philanthropy itself: “The philanthropy of the world is active, and professedly aiming, in common with the gospel, to promote human happiness,” the committee wrote. “How important, therefore, that the church should affirm the essential difference of these agencies—the one expecting the renovation of society from human means alone, the other relying supremely on the power of God as indispensable to success. By prayer we must prove to them, and impress upon ourselves, that our hope is in Him.”528 Clearly, the BMS leadership had begun to perceive a problem in humanitarianism‟s influence on their project, and sought to distance themselves from a philanthropy which viewed the agency of “human means alone” as sufficient for the regeneration of the world. The society‟s newly revived commitment to native agency appeared in this same Annual Report, which noted that the committee had passed a resolution on “the importance and necessity of a native agency for extending the gospel, especially in countries where the climate is unfavourable to the health of Europeans.” Highlighting their dependence on providential, rather than human or political methods, the society leadership now believed again that God intended to use indigenous Christians to spread the gospel. Thus the 1843 meeting “cordially approves

526 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 165. As Porter points out, other societies also began striving for self- supporting, self-extending native churches in the 1840s. Most notably, Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society focused the missions movement‟s attention on how indigenous churches might be developed and strengthened. Religion versus Empire, 167ff 527 Andrew C. Ross, “Christian Missions and Mid-Nineteenth Century Change in Attitudes to Race: The African Experience,” in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914, ed. Andrew Porter, 85-105 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Holmes & Meier, 1978) 528 Annual Report 1843, 58 178

of the encouragement given by the Committee to the training of native agents in India and Ceylon; in Honduras and the Bahama islands; and especially in Jamaica, whence teachers of African descent are about to carry into the land of their fathers, that gospel which contains the seeds of civilization and social happiness, and the still more precious blessings of eternal life.”529 While civilization and humanitarian causes remained important, here the society clearly sought to reemphasize that their primary aims were spiritual, and directed by God. Thus in the 1840s pragmatism and the old providential worldview slowly returned the BMS to their original policy towards native agency and independence.530 These new (yet old) attitudes appeared as the society faced a host of practical problems, many of which arose from recent regressive policies towards converts. The first among these was dependency in the mission churches. In the earliest days of the enterprise, missionaries had recognized that outcast converts in India would have to rely on the mission to sustain them, at least at first. Even the Serampore missionaries generally failed to avoid this hazard. The society‟s approach in the 1820s and 30s, which stressed European civilization, white missionary leadership, and the removal of native Christians from the “heathen” culture surrounding them, only reinforced the problem.531 By the time the society realized the harmfulness of their policy and began to try to correct it, many mission churches had grown accustomed to European leadership and funding, and actually resisted efforts to promote native independence. In 1851, the society‟s first attempt to fully detach mission churches from European support underlined the consequences of previous policy.

529 Annual Report 1843, xi. The committee reiterated that Christian truth must come before temporal welfare in their 1848 report: “We first seek to make known the truth, expecting that as in the first ages of the church, some will believe and some will not, and then subordinately and indirectly to promote the interests of humanity and civilization, giving the nations a written language, and books, and secular knowledge, and refinement, and freedom: „the sentiments of men and of Christians.‟” Annual Report 1848, 2 530 The renewed emphasis on independent, self-supporting mission churches may also be tied to contemporary evangelicalism‟s emphasis on self-help and the aid to deserving, respectable poor. See Hilton, Age of Atonement, 100-14. 531 Recall that the Serampore missionaries early found “difficulties respecting the employment and support of our new converts, as they can no longer live by idolatry or begging.” Hence many of the first converts became preachers or schoolmasters, or worked in the printing office. Periodical Accounts II, 244. Even as late as 1842, the committee bragged of Indian mission schools where children were “boarded as well as educated, and are thus kept apart from the contaminating influence of heathen example.” Annual Report 1842, 12 179

The society chose the Bahamas as the site for this first experiment for several reasons: first, a third of the population there attended some kind of Christian church, and about a tenth of the population were Baptists in connection with BMS-founded churches. Thus the committee had little reason to fear that failure might lead to the loss of thousands to “heathenism.” Also, the Bahamian churches had already made some strides towards independence simply out of necessity, since many of the smaller islands were so difficult to access that BMS missionaries were able to visit them only twice a year anyway. “The churches have therefore, for the most part, been necessarily left in the hands of native teachers or leaders: by whom, in the intervals of the missionary's visit, divine worship has been conducted, and the oversight of the churches discharged. They were not, however, pastors: the pastoral office has been retained in the hands of the missionary.” Now, the committee resolved to pursue native pastoral leadership for these churches, as well, and to slowly withdraw the white missionaries in the Bahamas to regions where the gospel remained less known. The Bahamian Christians, the committee declared, “by every scriptural rule of duty and example ought themselves to sustain the work of God in their midst. While these views are evidently applicable to other regions as well as to the Bahamas islands, the Committee resolved, in the first instance, to apply them here.” The experiment began, and one of the three white missionaries duly left the Bahamas for Haiti. A church on the island of Eleuthera accepted their native preacher as pastor and agreed to support him out of their own funds. On other islands, church members expressed some support for the plan. Objections also appeared, however, as the committee explained: “the long practice of the churches has to be broken through, and the discharge of scriptural obligations regarded as the duty of every member of the church of Christ. Reluctance is felt in some quarters to assume the burden of the pastor's support, and hesitation shown to yield to the necessity.”532 Because the society‟s British coffers had long funded Bahamian preachers and pastors, Bahamian Christians now understandably resisted the society‟s demand that they support these men and their evangelization themselves. Missionary H. Capern wrote to the society of his struggle to

532 Annual Report 1852, 4-5 180

persuade the Cat Island churches to accept and maintain their Bahamian teacher, Joseph Laroda, as pastor: This is owing to various causes, one of them is the opposition of the old leaders, who have resolved that they will not be under the supervision of a man of their own colour. They also think that a pastor will prove a pecuniary burden to them. Hitherto they have given what they pleased, at the annual visits of the missionary, and they do not like to think of contributing regularly towards the support of a pastor. This fact, in connexion with many others, proves but too clearly that the plan we are now adopting should have been in operation before. It was always evident that the numerous small and widely scattered churches on these islands could not be under the pastoral care of Europeans; and if under pastoral care at all, it must be that of their own colour. Those churches that persist in refusing native pastors will still continue under missionary supervision as heretofore. I hope, however, that in course of time all of them will adopt the general plan.533

The Bahamian churches‟ general reluctance, prejudice, and failure to give enough money to support their pastors—all practices bred and encouraged by prior BMS policy, as Capern acknowledged—made the implementation of the new policy extraordinarily difficult, though the effort continued to move forward. By 1853 thirty-one churches, or about 1,150 Christians, supported their own native pastors, though the society continued to supplement pastoral incomes when necessary.534 The next year Capern rejoiced that had increased in the out-islands, and cited this as evidence of “the success of our native brethren.” He noted that though the churches still did not “contribute as they ought towards the support of their teacher or native minister, yet they do not offer the opposition which they did.”535 A few years later, however, disaffection and a “worldly spirit” among the out-island churches led to the removal of several Bahamian pastors. At Eleuthera, church members attacked the moral character of their native pastor, while the church at Andros Island fired their preacher simply because they grew tired of him. For a greatly discouraged Capern, these instances underlined “the necessity of missionary supervision for the present.” The society further concluded that the Bahamian churches‟ tiny monetary contributions “gives us but little ground to hope that the time is at hand,

533 Annual Report 1852, 44. In the Eleuthera churches, the young Bahamian teacher W. McDonald became pastor. Capern spoke highly of McDonald as “truly evangelical in his sentiments” and “one of the best textualists I know.” However, he worried that McDonald could not support himself on the measly contributions of his congregations. “The contributions of both churches under his care only amounted, during the last year, to 32 dollars, 4 cents—6 pounds fifteen shillings sterling. This worthy brother has a family, a wife and 3 children. It is clear that they cannot live on the above sum…but such is the poverty of the people that they will not make a very large addition. What then is to be done? If we do not help the pastor, he cannot remain there; but to give up the station would be wrong; I must therefore implore aid for this station for a time,” 43-4. 534 Annual Report 1853, 2-3 535 Annual Report 1854, 52 181

when these churches will be independent of the society. The teachers to do not require any large sums of money for their support; but those which they now receive are certainly too small.”536 Finally, after more than a decade of mixed disappointments and successes, a native pastorate operated successfully and independently throughout the Bahamas. By 1862, the BMS paid the salary of only one white missionary there, while seventy-three native preachers and pastors oversaw the churches, living on contributions from their congregations, and funds raised in Nassau.537 The society attributed this success to the quality and commitment of native pastors like the brothers Shadrach and Daniel Kerr, who were “beloved by the people.” Such men were “well worthy of the confidence placed in [them.]”538 By determinedly pursuing their new policy of church autonomy in the Bahamas, the society ended dependency in the region and gained increasing confidence in the effectiveness of a Caribbean pastorate. The Bahamas project was spurred largely by the practical realization that dependent churches could not spread the gospel effectively. Even more than the problem of dependency, immediate financial concerns seem to have propelled the society‟s return to native agency and independence in the 1840s and 1850s. BMS pressure and concerns about funds influenced the Jamaican Baptist churches‟ decision to become independent of the society in 1842, and the society‟s reluctance to expend men and money in Jamaica in following years stemmed largely from financial difficulties.539 As already discussed, the revival of emphasis on native agency in 1855 likewise arose at least partially from the recent plateau in monetary contributions; the society could not pay enough white

536 Annual Report 1857, 55-6. Both Capern, who had now devoted much of his missionary career to apparently ineffective efforts on behalf of church independence, and the society leadership were greatly discouraged by these events. Of course, disaffection and worldliness were seen as problems in British churches, too, and fortunately, the problems of the out-islands were little evident in Nassau, where Christians readily supported their pastors and preachers, and kept their chapels well repaired. Thus the society pressed on with their policy. Annual Report 1857, 56-7 537 Annual Report 1862, 66-7 538 Annual Report 1862, 56 539 “The drain on the revenue of the Society for Jamaica objects could not be met without incurring constant and increasing debt, nor without neglecting the obligations the Society was under to its older missions in the East; so that the pressure from home was not inconsiderable to realize the bold and sanguine forecasts of the Jamaica brethren…The Committee at home, therefore, hailed with joy the resolution of the missionaries; and…there was at the time no sign that the prosperity the island then enjoyed would meet with an early check, or that the means of the people would undergo a rapid and painful diminution.” Underhill, Life of Phillippo, 202, see also 246-7 on reluctant society bail-outs. 182

missionaries to do the work.540 When BMS secretary E.B. Underhill visited India in 1855, he repeatedly encouraged indigenous church independence as not only scriptural and effective for evangelism, but financially necessary. At an ecumenical Protestant missionary conference in Bengal, Underhill professed to speak for the leaders of missionary societies everywhere when he noted that “year after year the funds of societies have become increasingly absorbed in the mere holding of ground taken, while in no case has there been the opportunity for extension by the relinquishment of completed work, and but little from an increase of their means.” This unfortunate circumstance could not be redressed, Underhill suggested, unless independent mission churches themselves shouldered the responsibility for evangelism in India. Missionary leaders at home saw that European missionaries had become too tied up in pastoring their small churches to evangelize. This prevented further growth, and promoted dependency. “The friends of missions at home have hence come to doubt the propriety of the missionary pastorate,” Underhill observed, and pointed out that apostles, as the first missionaries, had quickly promoted pastoral leadership in their converts, and continued on their way, spreading the gospel. Though “much has been said of the feebleness of the piety of the native Christians, of the weakness of their character, of their want of knowledge, and other things incident to an early stage of Christian life,” ultimately, Underhill blamed “the presence of the European missionary” for these defects, and argued that under a native pastorate, India‟s churches would have “greater freedom of growth, more expansion of mind, more active personal interest in the welfare of the body, and likewise of the world around.” 541 Underhill‟s frank indictment of previous policy, and his casting of independent mission churches within the apostolic mold, cemented the shift in BMS policy. Much of his career as secretary would be spent in pursuing this course.542 Before Underhill returned to Britain, he participated in the ordination service which set apart John Bernard, an Indian Christian preacher, who had previously assisted a European missionary, as pastor of the church at Muttra, outside Agra. At the same time,

540 Annual Report 1855, 12-3 541 Proceedings of a General Conference of Bengal Protestant Missionaries, 118-20. Ironically, the exchange between Free Church missionary Rev. Lal Behari De and LMS missionary Rev. A.F. Lacroix occurred at this same conference. 542 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire, 174ff 183

two Bengali Christians, Ram Narayan De and Chandra Mohun, began a two-month preaching tour, with instructions to report on their return. The committee planned, if their report were successful, to then set them apart as missionaries.543 The independence the society had pursued in the Bahamas was now begun in India.544 Regret over previous policy—particularly the tendency that had, in the 1820s and 30s, removed converts from their own cultural context—attended this new direction towards autonomous churches. The 1855 Report noted that the policy of creating Christian villages had secluded converts from their neighbors and made them into a new caste, preventing “their being what they should be, the lights of the world and the salt of the earth.” This mistaken approach also created dependent converts who “hung like children on the missionary‟s hand.” Now, the committee declared, “it is very gratifying to know that this need not be.” Citing recent strides towards indigenous pastorship and evangelism, the society also praised missionary efforts to promote the economic independence of their church members by establishing granaries for the needy and, in one case, introducing textile machinery to improve cloth production. These churches could support their own preachers and pastors, and care for their widows and orphans without European funds. Instead of living in an enclave on British resources, these native Christians moved independently and successfully in their own society, spreading Christianity by example.545 As had been the case in the Bahamas, the push towards independence met with difficulty at times. Churches at Intally and Colingah—the first in India to become fully independent of the society—suffered dissension in the early years of autonomy, with one indigenous pastor seceding and forming a separate congregation. Such problems “were not unforeseen,” the committee insisted in 1857. After all, “the transition from a state of dependence to one of independence would supply new tests of the reality of the work of

543 Annual Report 1856, 12. They were made missionaries the following year, and worked on the same footing as European missionaries; they had no European superintendence, and were paid and directed only by the committee in London, as their fellow missionaries were. Annual Report 1857, 28-9 544 By 1863, this policy was extended to Ceylon, where fifteen churches (about 400 people) were pastored by thirteen native ministers. Two of these churches were fully independent of British funds, and the remainder striving in that direction. Annual Report 1863, 14-5 545 Annual Report 1855, 13-4. A parallel might be drawn here between contemporary British praise of the respectable working poor and these converts who industriously looked after themselves. See Hilton, Age of Atonement, 73-114. 184

God among these converts, and lead to a display of character but little expected.” Society leadership stressed that, despite the split, all converts maintained their Christian commitment, and the seceding members built their own chapel. “In this the Committee cannot but rejoice, though the origin of their separation from their brethren was an occasion of sorrow and pain.” Further, another independent church under native pastors had recently formed, and the Indian missionaries Ram Narayan De and Chandra Mohun continued to labor successfully. Overall, “The Committee regard this experiment with great interest and hope. Should it ultimately succeed, the way will be prepared for a larger employment of native agency, without European superintendence, which has hitherto been deemed indispensable. The small expense of such agents is not their only recommendation; for their knowledge of native customs, habits, modes of thought and expression, and their own native manner of life, give them peculiar facilities for reaching the hearts of their countrymen.”546 Both financial and evangelical considerations—which the Baptists did not separate; both must serve providential purposes—continued to fuel the return to native agency and independence. Near-crisis in BMS finances in the late 1850s only reinforced the society‟s determination.547 In 1857, the committee complained that the funds at their disposal were inadequate to maintain present operations, and warned of approaching debt unless the Christian public would give more liberally. The committee speculated about the causes of this leveling off of support and interest in their enterprise, citing “the rapid enlargement of home operations—the efforts made by all denominations to erect new places of worship—the constant multiplication of religious and philanthropic institutions—the shifting of large portions of the rural population into the towns…the increased pressure of taxation, the high price of the main articles of subsistence, and the want of employment among large sections of the working classes” as possible reasons for

546 Annual Report 1857, 10-11. Supporters of native agency frequently pointed out that such preachers often required less financial support than a European. However, this was not always the case, and generally speaking, the society seems to have paid its agents based on experience and usefulness, rather than skin color. For example, in 1870 Francis Pinnock, a Jamaican native employed as missionary to West Africa, received 150 pounds per annum from the society while the BMS missionary to Norway, Mr. Ola Hausson, was paid only 40. BMS MSS., BMS Minutes 1792-1914, Quarterly Committee Meeting 28 June 1870, Minute 50, 215; Committee Meeting 4th October 1870, Minute 114, 246 547 Andrew Porter sees the 1850s and 60s as a period of financial frustration, stagnation, and self-doubt for all of the Protestant missionary societies, though the Church Missionary Society seems to have suffered most. Porter, Religion versus Empire, 189-90 185

waning interest and support. Most of all, society leaders feared that the problem stemmed not from the inability to give, but the unwillingness to give. Christians were growing too self-interested and should examine their own hearts and consciences, the committee suggested.548 These melancholy reflections led the Baptist leaders back, again, to their own previous failings of policy towards native agency and independence: It may be, however, that we are to be taught another lesson by these facts—that it becomes our duty once more to revise the principles on which we are conducting our enterprise. Its founders, from the hour that they fairly embarked in it, boldly avowed their conviction that the evangelization of the heathen was to be carried on by native converts. They relied on European agency only to do the preparatory work, and to assist and direct the movements of those who were raised up, by their instrumentality, to preach the gospel. It can scarcely be questioned that in later days we have considerably departed from this practice.

Now more than ever, with their enterprise on the brink of insolvency, society leaders had to ask whether their funds and energy were best placed in supporting European missionaries, or in promoting independent indigenous churches. The committee‟s answer to this question unequivocally favored native agency, not only because of financial exigencies, but because of practical results. The leadership “deem themselves fully justified in thus recording their convictions, by the fact, which almost every missionary confirms, that the larger proportion of converts is the fruit of native agency.”549 Native agency was expedient, it was scriptural, and it best served the providential goal of global evangelism. The Baptist Missionary Society would not depart from it again. The BMS entered the 1860s firmly committed to convert agency and independence, though public support and interest remained much the same.550 In India, both European and Indian missionaries exemplified ongoing efforts to build independent, missiological churches in their own cultural context. In Delhi, James Smith formulated a

548 Annual Report 1857, 12-3. These contemporary explanations align closely with the findings of S.J.D. Green, who seeks to explain apparent religious decline in a slightly later period. S.J.D. Green, Religion in the age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870-1920 (1996), 23-29, 375 549 Annual Report 1857, 14. The repentant and self-deprecating tone of this report is quite striking; the leadership later expressed their gratitude that “amidst all our mistakes, deficiencies, and shortcomings, thanks be to God His kingdom is rapidly spreading throughout the world,” 14-5. The same reference to deviation from original policy appears in the 1860 report: “The system adopted by the Serampore brethren undoubtedly was to constitute the missionary an overseer, who was to superintend a band of native agents, itinerating through a given district, and to instruct the churches to choose their pastor from among themselves. And if that system has subsequently been somewhat departed from, the directors of all missionary societies are now fast returning it.” Annual Report 1860, 6-7 550 In 1864, the society sent a circular letter to all the churches in India reaffirming this commitment, and asking Indian Christians for their support in the effort to promote church independence and indigenous ministry. See Annual Report 1864 Appendix I. 186

strategic plan for church independence that emphasized converts‟ ability to “remain in their own homes and spheres, follow their own trades, and strive to fight life‟s battle without our money.” In Smith‟s view, the policy of offering financial support to converts had crippled church independence and native leadership, and he therefore opposed the formation of Christian villages and separate schools, as well as any payment of Indian converts—as pastors, preachers, or simply needy individuals—from foreign funds. By operating along these lines among the Delhi Christians, by 1870 Smith could describe “more than a hundred families professing Christianity, not isolated in Christian villages or mission compounds, but scattered over the city among the heathen, working at their own trades, and thus earning their bread without troubling the mission, to a large extent conducting their own religious services, and making considerable efforts for the evangelization of their neighbours.” Instead of building up large congregations for public worship in European-style chapels, Smith advocated “small assemblies in the midst of the houses of the converts, wherever they exist, thus bringing our instruction, as far as practicable, within hearing of the women and children, with a view of reverting to the old apostolic plan of the church in the house.” By this approach he avoided the problem that many of the larger churches had experienced in finding a native pastor who had the necessary education, financial support, and inclination to lead, for most Christians were fully able to oversee small assemblies in the home setting. “Our brethren thus keep up twenty-one weekly services, according to a plan drawn up by themselves,” Smith reported with satisfaction. “About one thousand persons are in attendance at these meetings, and I anticipate results from them of far greater magnitude than we have ever realised in Delhi before.” All of these indigenous leaders drew their support from their small churches, and only Smith remained on the society‟s payroll. As Smith‟s fellow missionary C.B. Lewis wrote admiringly of this system: “I feel confident that no other station of our Mission in India exhibits so much evangelistic work carried on at so small a cost to our funds.”551 The financial and evangelistic success achieved at Delhi was mirrored in churches around Calcutta, who likewise became increasingly autonomous in the 1860s and 1870s.

551 Annual Report 1870, 8-9. At the same time, evangelical philanthropy expressed similar concerns about the possibly corrupting influence of charity, and emphasized that philanthropy should aim for the self- sufficiency of the recipient. Hilton, Age of Atonement, 269-70 187

In particular, the native missionary and pastor Goolzar Shah promoted church independence with great success, and personally modeled the new ideal of self-reliance by serving as pastor of the church at South Colingah without any payment at all. Further, he established a new mission in the mountains of Simla “carried on by his own personal labours and by contributions which he has raised in Calcutta and elsewhere.”552 Goolzar Shah‟s missionary colleague Gogun Chunder Dutt had similar success at Jessore, where he guided three churches to full independence of British funds.553 Slowly, and not without many moments of disappointment and failure, the mission churches recovered from earlier BMS policy, gaining confidence and independence. The Indian Preachers Controversy It was in this context—of more than twenty years of striving for indigenous autonomy in India—that the debate over the payment of Indian preachers took place in the early 1870s. The creation of a special BMS committee for India, whose questionnaire sparked such disparate and vehement responses from society missionaries, arose out of the society‟s ongoing determination that indigenous Christian churches should support their own leaders and evangelists without reliance on European money. These concerns are clearly reflected in the questionnaire itself, particularly the sixty-seventh question: “In your experience is the payment, by missionaries or by societies, of native preachers prejudicial to their reception among the people, and to the spread of Divine Truth?”554 While upholding the need to expand independence, Indian missionaries like Gogun Chunder Dutt and Goolzar Shah argued powerfully that the society should continue to send aid to India. Dutt cited the universal brotherhood of primitive Christianity to argue that, as long as India could not maintain Christianity without British help, British Christians should continue to support Indian preachers, or risk the reemergence of ignorance and sin.555 Goolzar Shah similarly defended the effectiveness of native preachers, and though he hoped they would eventually be supported from India alone, he thought Britons might continue to pay for the education of Indian missionaries at least,

552 Annual Report 1870, 9-10 553 Annual Report 1871, 8 554 Reports and Documents, 3-7. Evangelicals often asked this question in this period, both at home and abroad, for not everyone deserved help, and those who could help themselves should do so. Bebbington points out that Dissenter Baptist Noel “warned that the charitably disposed might turn the poor into greedy mendicants.” Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 121 555 Reports and Documents, 64 188

perhaps at Bristol College in England.556 What, then, was the ultimate result of this inquiry? Did the Baptist Missionary Society throw Indian Christians upon their own resources despite the opposition of men like Goolzar Shah and Gogun Chunder Dutt because they were no longer able, or willing, to pay them? The special committee‟s initial report does seem to recommend the severance of Indian preachers. In response to it, society leaders resolved in 1871 that it was “expedient, as soon as practicable, to cease the support of the present native agents by the funds of the Society.”557 However, this was not the end of the matter. In April of 1872, the committee received a letter from Mr. A. Littlehales of Nelson, forwarding a resolution passed by the Committee of the East Lancashire Union of Baptist Churches. Littlehales certainly was under the impression that the society had ended its native agency in India. It read: “This Committee has heard with regret that the Executive of the Baptist Missionary Society contemplates employing native agents in India only in exceptional cases, and respectfully submits that the employment of native agency is especially desirable in India and that the Society would do well to sustain as many native evangelists and missionaries as are qualified for mission work.” After considering the letter, the BMS leaders asked the secretary, Dr. Underhill, to “acknowledge the receipt of the resolution from the East Lancashire Union and furnish Mr. Littlehales with such explanations as may be necessary to remove the misapprehension it contains.”558 This statement seems to indicate that the society had, in fact, decided to continue supporting India‟s native ministry with British funds after all, though the Lancashire Baptists‟ confusion is quite understandable in light of the committee‟s previous statements. This misconception apparently persisted for some time, for in July of 1872, the committee decided to publish a Resolution on Native Agency in order to clarify their decision and, most importantly, “to explain that the object which the Committee have in view is to stimulate the native Christian Churches in India, to call forth and sustain an effective Native Agency for the evangelisation of the country.” It was desirable and apostolic, the committee insisted, that India‟s churches should support themselves and propagate the

556 Reports and Documents, 207 557 Reports and Documents 251-252 558 BMS MSS., Baptist Missionary Society Minutes 1792-1914, Quarterly Committee Meeting 19th April, 1872, Minute 195, 438-9 189

gospel among their neighbors without European funding. “But inasmuch as at present the native Christian Churches are unable to do so, and to cast this task upon them would stop the progress of a very large amount of useful and successful labour, the Committee have adopted measures to bring to a close their connection with such native agents only, as may be found inefficient by the Missionary Conferences in India, and for the future to prepare and employ only as efficient a class of agents as possible. They further propose the formation of Theological Schools at Serampore College and in the North West provinces, after the model of that now in effective operation in Kingston, Jamaica.” So ultimately, in spite of their general disappointment with the level of ability of some of India‟s preachers, the BMS recognized that to withdraw their support altogether could be fatal to the mission. They continued to feel responsible for the better education and nurturing of an indigenous ministry, and proposed to achieve it through institutions like Serampore College and the Calabar Institution (now located in Kingston)—again, the models that the society‟s earliest missionaries had laid out. Thus in 1872, BMS leaders made a difficult decision that balanced their commitment to native agency—a commitment that must be carried out firmly and even in opposition to indigenous resistance, if necessary—with the universal brotherhood of the gospel, and the exigencies of continuing to spread that gospel. Despite continuing financial difficulty and many calls to cease payment of Indian preachers, the society did not abandon their converts (though they did contemplate doing so).559 They simply continued to work, slowly and methodically, towards independent churches under competent native leadership. The 1872 resolution closed by reaffirming that “the Committee regard the existence of a qualified native agency as an object of paramount importance, and they have striven both in the East and in the West to secure it at the same time they endeavour in every way to stimulate the native churches to an earnest effort to spread the Gospel among their countrymen.”560 This particular moment in the history of the Baptist Missionary Society—as misunderstandable as it was—illuminates the nature

559 Here, the BMS, though clearly influenced by contemporary attitudes towards poor relief and concerns about the corrupting potential of charity, made a decision based on their ultimate providential goals and the needs of the mission, instead of taking the typical route of evangelical philanthropy. 560 BMS MSS., Baptist Missionary Society Minutes 1792-1914, Quarterly Committee Meeting 10th July 1872, Minute 63, 479-80

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of their enterprise. Generations of society leaders, missionaries, and preachers spent their lives in the thankless and apparently never-ending task of global evangelization. Mistakes and disappointments abounded. The mission constantly failed to progress in the ways and at the pace hoped for, and mission converts and churches frequently thwarted the hopeful expectations of the BMS and its missionaries. C. B. Lewis, longtime missionary at Delhi, captured these sentiments very effectively when he responded to the Indian special committee‟s questionnaire. “One cannot but wish that our native Christian brethren at Delhi were generally more intelligent and better-educated men than they are, and that their social status was higher and more influential,” Lewis wrote. As a church, the present condition of the converts must appear unsatisfactory, especially so to any one who looked for the speedy reproduction here in India of the orderly Christian communities we all know in our own land—with beloved and honoured pastors, intelligent and fervent-spirited deacons, teachers, and visitors of the sick and the poor, and commodious places of worship and schools. The Delhi Christians can show but little to represent all this—less, indeed, than is to be seen in some other mission stations, where the free expenditure of European contributions has provided the neat sanctuary, the well-instructed native pastor, bands of well-fed and cleanly- dressed school-boys and girls, and all else except a self-reliant, self-helping body of Christian people, united together only by their common faith in Christ, and determined to do just what they themselves can to hold fast and to hold forth the Word of Life.

Lewis seems to be responding to British frustrations, and airing his own. For so many years now, Baptist hopes for India had been repeatedly dashed. Progress in South Asia never matched conversion in the West, and British Christians who looked for the reproduction of their Victorian morality in India would never be satisfied. Lewis understood these frustrations, but he met them with hard words. “But such a trim model of an English church is an artificial thing,” the missionary insisted firmly. “It owes its existence to foreign benevolence, and its shape to foreign civilization, and, with the failure of foreign resources, it must necessarily fall to pieces. If there is less of apparent symmetry in the Delhi congregations than may be found elsewhere, there is at least unquestionable vitality, and if this be wisely cherished and encouraged,…there is every reason to hope that it will increase in volume and in strength.”561 Churches in India must be Indian, and they must be independent. This was not an easy road to follow, as Lewis clearly understood. Lewis‟s words, and the society‟s continuing pecuniary difficulties in

561 Annual Report 1872, 9-10 191

the rest of the nineteenth century, suggest that many British Baptists lost patience with this approach. Even so, the society did not depart from it.562 This chapter has shown that Baptist missionary policy, particularly as set by leadership in London, was indeed affected by changes and currents in contemporary British culture and politics. In the realm of native agency and independence, policy changes in the first half of the nineteenth century—though they fueled publicity and funding at home—had negative consequences for converts, their churches, and the larger goals of the mission. Society leadership recognized their mistake at mid-century, acknowledged it, and changed direction. Ultimately, this second reorientation took the BMS in quite a different direction than contemporary British culture.563 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the BMS remained committed to independent native mission efforts and churches even as popular scientific racism rose in Britain.

562 Though this project will not extend beyond the early 1870s, it is interesting to note that, according to Andrew Porter, the Protestant missionary societies returned in the 1880s to a very 1790s style rejection of organization and respectability, with significant decentralization. Religion versus Empire, 191ff 563 See Ross, “Christian Missions and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Change in Attitudes to Race.” 192

CHAPTER SEVEN “CHOSEN RACE:” MISSIONARIES, CONVERTS, AND ENGAGEMENT WITH DIFFERENCE

In 1803, three Christians undertook an itinerant preaching journey in Bengal. Two— Krishnu-pall and Sheetaram—were natives to the region, converts to Christianity from Hinduism, and now outcasts. The third was a white English missionary, Joshua Marshman. The latter‟s account of their trip indicates his awareness of the differences of race, nation, and power between himself and his companions, but also emphasizes his efforts to demonstrate that Christianity could overcome that difference. Marshman writes: Here Krishnu being tired, I desired him to ride; but the bearers refused to carry him, because he had lost cast, and was become a christian. On my peremptorily insisting, however, that unless they carried my friend, they should carry me no more, they complied; and I walked two hours, as I had indeed all the day, to ease them. I felt a thousand times greater pleasure while trudging along in the sun, than I should have done in riding, from the thought that these little circumstances did more than some of greater value, towards convincing our friends of our entire union of heart with them; while they convinced the bearers too, that there was more in the christian religion than they imagined. They had hitherto regarded Krishnu as my servant; but seeing him ride while I was walking by his side, they were convinced that the union between christians of whatever nation, was very different from that subsisting between a European and a Bengalee servant.564

This incident, and Marshman‟s language in describing it, are deeply revelatory of the tensions that perpetually existed within the joint work and religious fellowship of converts and missionaries. The three men travelled with a litter and bearers; ostensibly, this conveyance was primarily intended for Marshman, who might have been expected (certainly by British readers of the Periodical Accounts) to be sensitive to walking far in the enervating heat of Bengal. Here, however, it is the Bengali convert, rather than the white missionary, who becomes fatigued, and is carried by native bearers—though only after the European‟s threats have forced the unwilling men to tote an outcast. In this account, it is religious difference, not racial or national division, that creates prejudice and gives rise to intolerant behavior. Marshman delights in the event as a teachable moment; by insisting on Krishnu‟s riding in his own place, he could demonstrate his “entire union of heart” with his fellow Christians, while showing the unbelieving bearers

564Periodical Accounts II, 503-4 193

that the gospel ignored worldly distinctions of nation and race. The response of the bearers is also significant. Evidently, Marshman's consideration for Krishnu as his equal, rather than his servant, surprised them. This was not the way relationships between Bengalis and Englishmen usually worked.565 Marshman‟s very self-conscious statement here—recognizing difference in order to draw attention to Christianity‟s ability to overcome it—is one among many such testimonials that appear in both convert and missionary writings. Both racial and national divisions were ever present in the missionary project as men and women who belonged to the imperial race—however desirous they may have been of repudiating that connection—preached and taught among colonized, nonwhite peoples in the Caribbean and South Asia. As Peter Marshall has noted, “Empire reinforced a hierarchical view of the world, in which the British occupied a preeminent place among the colonial powers, while those subjected to imperial rule were ranged below them, in varying degrees of supposed inferiority.”566 Mission churches sprang up and grew within a colonial context where authority was inscribed through hierarchy and difference, and the alleged inferiority of colonized peoples and cultures justified British rule.567 It was impossible for mission work, which existed in this context, to avoid confronting separations and gradations of race and nation. As Marshman's account indicates, missionaries most often dealt with these inequalities by acknowledging the differences between themselves and their fellow Christians, and then emphasizing the capacity of Christian brotherhood to raze such boundaries. The historiography of missions in the context of the British Empire has emphasized the inequalities of power inherent in the relationship between converts and missionaries, calling particular attention to the opportunity the colonial relationship provided for missionaries to self-reflexively construct and understand their own

565 It should also be noted, however, that Marshman clearly had the advantage of the bearers here, and was not unwilling to coerce them into carrying Krishnu by threatening to end their services to him. 566 P.J. Marshall, “Imperial Britain,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxiii (1995), 385, quoted in Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 5 567 David Arnold, “Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India,” Historical Research 77 (May 2004), 254-273; Mrinalini Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India,” Journal of British Studies 40 (Oct. 2001), 489-91; Edward Said, Orientalism (1978); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton University Press, 1996) 194

identities.568 As Catherine Hall argues of the Baptist mission in Jamaica, missionaries could see themselves as white, English, and civilized by comparing themselves to their black, African, and uncivilized hearers. There is no doubt that racial and national difference, and the shadow of the empire itself, informed and affected the missionary project and the relationships within it. Missionary accounts, like Marshman‟s above, often consciously describe these differences. The missionary enterprise was not color blind; yet both missionaries and converts repeatedly claimed a spiritual identity and shared brotherhood that went beyond divisions of race and nation. How did the missionary project negotiate these separations? How did converts and missionaries themselves understand the role and effects of racial and national difference in their churches and their religious lives? To what extent was missionary rhetoric—which claimed the gospel‟s ability to break down barriers of caste and race—borne out in the actual experiences of the convert-missionary relationship? Difference and Identity in Mission Rhetoric Undoubtedly, missionary approaches and rhetoric were marked by hiearchical language that highlighted the difference between Christians and the “heathen” who did not know the gospel. As many scholars have noted, dramatic descriptions of barbarous idolatry and savage sinfulness best inspired generosity towards the project of global evangelization, and Protestant missionary societies used these paternalistic tropes to great effect.569 Though they loosened the pockets of the nineteenth century public, such depictions of the “heathen” abroad have led many historians to view the missionary enterprise as a racist project to eliminate cultural and religious difference. However, as Brian Stanley has shown, the missionary movement's engagement with hierarchy and difference was more

568 See Hall, Civilising Subjects; Thorne, Congregationalism; Wilson, Island Race. Recent literary criticism also focuses on this theme; Toni Morrison in particular has pointed out an “Africanist” presence within the American literary tradition. “The imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed is in large measure shaped by the presence of the racial other,” she argues. “Statements to the contrary, insisting on the meaninglessness of race to the American identity, are themselves full of meaning. The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion.” Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 46 569 Natasha Erlank, “„Civilizing the African‟: The Scottish Mission to the Xhosa, 1821-64,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley, 150; Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization,” 169-76; Kate Lowe, “The Beliefs, Aspirations and Methods of the First Missionaries in British Hong Kong, 1841- 5,” in Missions and Missionaries , ed. Pieter N. Holtrop and Hugh McLeod (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000), 54-6; Wilson, Island Race, 80 195

complex than this. Certainly, missionary writings emphasized the depravity of “heathen” cultures, viewing them as less civilized than their own. However, it is clear that any assertion of absolute, immutable difference between “heathen” and Christian would have caused the missionary enterprise to collapse into futility. Instead, missionaries paired dramatic descriptions of cultural and religious difference with an insistence on the humanity of those who heard their message.570 This commitment to a common humanitarian identity between missionaries and their hearers informed the work of the Baptist Missionary Society from its inception. One of the society's earliest publications demanded, “Hath not God made of one blood all nations, and shall we not respect all our fellow-creatures as brethren? And if we really consider them as such, should not love and compassion excite us to promote their present, and especially their eternal welfare?” Society leaders noted that Christ himself visited “the most undeserving and guilty, the most sinful and depraved," whom he made “objects of his self-moved compassion.” Christianity could lift up the most humble, and justify the most delinquent. In the Baptist worldview, all human beings had sinned. Depravity equalized everyone. But at the same time, all likewise shared the potential for redemption. All, through Christ, could become like God. "Ah! if the soul of a Hottentot, a Hindoo, or a Negro, be like mine; and who can dispute it?—capable of becoming like God in his moral image—capable of enjoying his favour and love—capable of communing with him, glorifying him, and being happy in his smiles for ever; how desirable it is to be instrumental to such inexpressibly glorious ends!"571 Baptists believed that all men and women were the same in their need for God and their potential for sanctification. Missionaries did make distinctions and call attention to difference—but the separation they emphasized was spiritual, not based on physical characteristics, and always, Christianity had the capacity to end such distinctions. Language that magnified the barbarism and ignorance of foreign people only underlined the regenerative power of the gospel, and the pressing need to extend its influence beyond borders of race and nation. Thus the hierarchy created by the missionary movement was very different from the usual colonial categories, since the missionary's scale of civilization was based on

570 Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization,” 169-70 571Periodical Accounts I, 10 196

spiritual status, rather than physical markers of difference. Because missionaries ranked people according to spiritual qualifications, instead of by skin color, wealth, or education, their gradations often turned typical colonial hierarchies on their heads.572 Examples abound in which missionaries compare their nonwhite hearers and converts favorably against colonial Europeans, suggesting that colonized people's greater religiosity and eagerness to accept the gospel placed them above their social betters on the scale of civilization.573 In the Caribbean, missionaries and philanthropists repeatedly contrasted the “uncivilized” behavior of white planters with the loving, Christ-like attitudes of black converts.574 The missionaries saw in the planter population every kind of wickedness. James Phillippo charged colonial elites with drunkenness, adultery, fornication, and hypocrisy and noted that, though licentiousness among the slaves ran rampant, it was even more common among the white population.575 Thomas Burchell blamed the plantocracy for the failures of the apprenticeship system, suggesting that the slaveowners needed “a strong police to watch over and restrain” their behavior, while William Knibb expressed open contempt towards Jamaica's racial elite: “If the white would but act properly, all would go on well; but this is not to be expected from the present race,” he wrote during the apprenticeship period.576 At the height of the Baptist mission's clash with the Jamaica planters, missionaries like Knibb did not hesitate to dismiss men of his own race—and of far higher social status than himself—as unruly children who did not

572 Colonial authorities in both South Asia and the West Indies were fully cognizant of the threat Baptist mission work posed to the racial and social hiearchies upon which empire depended. See chapter three. 573 David Cannadine argues that “social ranking was as important as (perhaps more important than?) color of skin in contemplating the extra-metropolitan world.” He sees the empire as built as much upon the projection of affinities—of social order, in this case—as the construction of difference. How does the missionary approach fit into Cannadine's thesis? Certainly, missionaries saw and sought to create affinities between converts and themselves by emphasizing everyone's need for salvation and capacity to receive it. For missionaries, perhaps spiritual status, rather than social rank, was “as important as or more important than color of skin” to their understanding of the imperial world. Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 8 574 Historian Horace O. Russell has identified a similar pattern in the West African mission. John Clarke, one of two missionaries who intially explored Fernando Po as a possible site for a new station, wrote scathingly of the vices of local European traders, who desecrated the Sabbath and encouraged slave traffic. “In contrast when Clarke dealt with the African religious scene, he betrayed both curiosity and sympathy,” and worked to discover “points of contact between himself and his hearers.” Russell, Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church, 119-20 575 Phillippo, Jamaica, 122-5, 138 576Burchell, Memoir of Burchell, 309; Hinton, Memoir of Knibb, 244; see also Hall, Civilising Subjects, 112-13 197

know how to behave. Meanwhile, the missionaries praised the forbearance, decorum, and kindness of the black population. Based on qualifications of Christian virtue, behavior, and receptivity to the gospel, black Baptists and inquirers always came out ahead of their former masters by the missionaries' reckoning. “The poor, oppressed, benighted, and despised sons of Africa form a pleasing contrast to the debauched white population. They gladly hear the word, and to them the gospel is preached,” Knibb wrote soon after his arrival in Jamaica.577 Burchell likewise proudly contrasted the righteous behavior of his congregation of apprentices with the planters‟ less civilized actions, noting the former slaves' Christ-like “readiness to forgive and forget the injuries of the past.”578 Measured in terms of their character and religiosity, Caribbean converts were, as a group, far superior to the privileged planters, the missionaries concluded. Further, missionaries identified themselves with their converts—as part of a family of sinners saved—instead of the white colonial elites and officials, rejecting racial divides in favor of spiritual ones.579 As Knibb declared in a radical speech at Falmouth in 1839, “the same God that made the white made the black man. The same blood that runs in the white man‟s veins, flows in yours. It is not the complexion of the skin, but the complexion of the character that makes the great difference between one man and another.”580 The missionary insisted on a significant separation between human beings—but that division was based on character, not race. Knibb‟s identification with the men and women of his church permeated his writings. In an 1835 letter to BMS secretary John Dyer, Knibb described his sincere attachment to “his people.” He defended his congregation against charges of ignorance and failure, and insisted that despite the “debasing system” of slavery that “has for their whole lives degraded their minds,” they were a kind and loving group of people who

577Hinton, Memoir of Knibb, 46 578Burchell, Memoir of Burchell, 345. See also Hall, “Gender and Ethnicity,” 211-2 579 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 98-106 580Hinton, Memoir of Knibb, 317. In another speech in 1838, Knibb denied “the right of having our sympathies called forth for the white man at the expense of the negro. I pledge myself, by all that is solemn and sacred, never to rest satisfied, until I see my black brethren in the enjoyment of the same civil and religious liberties which I myself enjoy.” Hinton, Memoir of Knibb, 293 198

were eager to learn, and who loved those who taught them.581 Knibb emphasized the church‟s peaceful unity and active faith, and explained that his own emotions and hopes were deeply tied to the men and women of his church. “My heart is knit to theirs; I mourn over their follies, and rejoice in their growth,” Knibb wrote. “I know I am enthusiastic, perhaps I need it should be so; but, identified with them, what concerns them concerns me…I assure you that, notwithstanding all the little things that do sometimes annoy, I bless God that I am here, and I pray that I may live and die among them, when, having finished my course as a poor ransomed sinner, looking for the mercy of my Lord, I hope with them I shall be received into the mansions of the blessed.”582 The levelling power of sin and the hope of salvation equalized all. Knibb identified himself with his congregation, sharing their sinfulness as well as their hope for divine mercy.583 Similarly, in the Bahamas, BMS missionary William Rycroft reported that “the great obstacle to our success among the whites is their strong feeling against the coloured classes.” As the Bahamian churches strove to gain full independence from European leadership and funds, Rycroft noted that, were the Baptists willing to make the racial distinctions “in our worship which others make, the case might be altered.” However, the gain of white support at the cost of racial equality would “be certain loss” in reality, and contrary to the gospel. “May the knowledge of Christian sentiment soon be correct, and men of all colours treat each other as children of the same parent,” the missionary hoped, and concluded that “the poor blacks are gathering up knowledge, while the poor whites are standing still. Prejudice is a losing side.” There seems little doubt which race won

581 Such a description aligns with Brian Stanley‟s argument that the missionary movement employed such rhetoric in order to stress the gospel‟s power to lift up the depraved. Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization,” 169-70 582 Annual Report 1836, 35. Knibb connected himself and his hearers by placing both in the context of the evangelical conversion narrative. See Hindmarsh, “Patterns of Conversion,” 71-2 583 In 1839, India missionary Ellis wrote in similar vein of a deceased Indian Christian friend of his, Ram Krishna Sirimani. Ellis spoke admiringly of Ram Krishna‟s Christian spirit even in the pain of death, and hoped that his own demise could testify as strongly to “the overcoming and triumphant power of faith in the hour of dissolution.” “I can only say, Dear friend and brother, may my end be like thine, and may our friendship and affection be renewed and perpetuated in the abodes and the blessedness of heaven.” Annual Report 1840, 11 199

the missionary‟s approval in this case; it was the white people of the Bahamas who chose wrongly, and blocked the growth of the church.584 In South Asia, as well, white colonials, and particularly East India Company officials, fared poorly when missionaries compared them to native Christians. Missionaries railed privately against a British Indian government whose white civil servants were “distinguished from the heathen around them chiefly by their total disregard of all religious observances,”and whose public support of Hinduism rankled.585 They also condemned the East India Company's neglect of public education and welfare, which kept Indians in subjection.586 Missionary John Chamberlain complained that EIC bureaucrats treated the evangelists as dangerous political radicals, and spoke of official intolerance towards Christianity with scathing sarcasm.587 By contrast, as in the Caribbean, missionaries in India admired the sincerity and abilities of native converts, and made clear that Christian character and lifestyle, rather than national background, commanded their respect. Sometimes, European faith and efforts were weighed in the balance against native Christian zeal, and found wanting. BMS missionary William Moore recorded the visit of a young English naval officer to his mission station in 1807. The young man “visited the native brethren, whose conversation about Christ filled him with shame, and seems to have been the means of deep and lasting conviction.” Here, a white man and a military officer experienced personal conviction of sin because of the example and influence of Indian believers, and the missionary was proud to report it.588

584 Annual Report 1851, 45 585J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 125-6. Missionaries complained of interference from European officials in Java, as well. In the 1830s, officials blocked even the circulation of tracts and scriptures. Annual Report 1836, 16 586J.C. Marshman, Life and Times I, 39 587Chamberlain vented his frustrations about the way Baptist missionaries were viewed to Fuller in 1815: “We are dissenters & worse, Baptists, & as we do not support the church we of course…are, democrats, demagogues & enemies to the state!!” BMS MSS., John Chamberlain to Andrew Fuller, Serampore, 3 May 1815, quoted in Potts, 58. Yet “British missionaries from Nonconformist missionary societies suffered from being identified as part of this same „alien‟ shadow of colonial rule (whose minions often despised them).” Dissenters found themselves tainted by their association with British power, while enjoying few of the advantages of that association. Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” 129 588Periodical Accounts III, 389. A similar circumstance occurred in 1810, when an Indian Christian woman sought to persuade her “heathen” European husband, also a military officer, to become a Christian. As missionary John Leonard wrote to Joshua Marshman of this event, “I was much gratified by the zealous spirit which she evinced, as well as by her anxiety to join the church. She has hitherto waited to see if the Lord would bless her endeavours to draw her husband in the right way. See what a blessing this native woman aims to be to her European husband.” Periodical Accounts IV, 232-3 200

Baptist missionaries in India also tended to stress indigenous Christians' inherent superiority to Europeans (including themselves) as preachers.589 William Carey praised a sermon by Krishnu-pall in 1804 as “the best bengalee [sic] sermon he ever heard…fluent, perspicuous, and affectionate in a very high degree.” Joshua Marshman similarly commented, “How different does the news of salvation sound in the mouth of a native, whose hope and joy it is, from what it does when delivered in our foreign and uncouth accents!”590 At times, missionary rhetoric seemed almost to denigrate British evangelists, contrasting the easy pulpits of home with the hostile crowds and climate both native and European missionaries faced in South Asia. William Ward wrote in 1813 that the Jessore station “suffered much from the departure of Carapeit,” referring to Carapeit Aratoon, an East Indian missionary who had recently moved on to another station. Ward further noted that “Pran-krishna and Punchanun are very valuable missionares.” His reflections on the merits of these preachers of Indian birth then led him to compare Indian to English ministry—much to England‟s disadvantage. “In our work, half the Dissenting Ministers in England, who merely preach twice or thrice a week when people come to them to hear the word, would be of little use…In the hands of a mere domesticated man, who prays at home, but never goes into the highways and hedges, things die a natural death.” Carapeit Aratoon, Pran-Krishna, and Punchanun were not such “domesticated men,” but rather valuable missionaries whose hard labors helped create new churches. The real work, Ward suggested, was happening in India.591

589 In Serampore‟s 1817 review of the mission, the missionaries noted the “number of brethren raised up in the country (the number of whom, blessed be God! Is increasing every year,) who, from their superior knowledge of their vernacular tongue, their intimate acquaintance with the habits and ideas of their countrymen, their being accustomed to the constant fatigue of walking in a climate congenial with their constitutions, and a variety of other circumstances, are far more adapted to the work of making known and explaining the gospel to small groups of their own countrymen, than Europeans, and have been generally more successful.” Annual Report 1818, 296 590Periodical Accounts II, 512 591Periodical Accounts V, 195. At the same time, the missionaries reiterated their own love for and identity with India, their adopted home. Joshua Marshman wrote to Andrew Fuller in 1804 that, had he been born in India, “the country and climate could not have agreed with me better, nor the work have been more congenial with my spirit, than I find it now. Great as my love is to my dear friends in England...a banishment from this country, over to England, would be almost insupportable.” Periodical Accounts II, 540. William Carey likewise considered himself “a man and a citizen of India,” and after he arrived in 1793, he never left the subcontinent. He died and was buried there. J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 475-7. Of course, as previously discussed, men like William Yates and Eustace Carey at Calcutta in the 1820s and 1830s, and the Rev. A.F. Lacroix in the 1850s, proved exceptions to this, doubting Indian ability and religiosity. 201

In many cases, missionaries in the field increasingly identified themselves with fellow Christians there, instead of with members of their own race or nation. Native converts also contributed to this rhetoric of unity in Christ despite difference. Indigenous Christians often spoke of their affection for European missionaries, and at times remarked upon the lack of distinction between the white men and women and themselves. In Jamaica, seeing the baptism of missionary daughter Esthranna Burchell together with a host of Caribbean penitents, local church members reportedly exclaimed, “Now we see there is no distinction!”592 Similarly, when the missionaries Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain arrived at Serampore in 1804, the Indian Christians there asked whether they had left parents and siblings behind in England. On finding that they had, one of the converts noted, “They cannot talk our language, but we see that all our hearts are one: we are united in the death of Christ!”593 Both of these incidents were reported by missionaries who quoted native Christians; however, such statements appear in converts‟ direct writings, as well. In a letter to the BMS secretary in 1812, the East Indian missionary John Peter called the missionaries at Serampore “very dear to me: they are more to me than all the world besides. They appear to me as fathers, brethren, friends, and saviours of mankind. They love me…I thank my God through Jesus Christ for their coming hither.”594 Likewise, in his argument for the society‟s continued support of Indian preachers, Indian missionary Gogun Chunder Dutt said that, in apostolic times, churches of all nations had come together to support preachers of the gospel. “There was no nationality among them to divide Christians from Christians, but it was an universal brotherhood, to unite them, and help each other for the great work in which they were engaged,” he wrote.595 In Baptist belief, all men and women who experienced conversion, whether Indian, Jamaican, European, Burmese, or Bahamian, became holy and new. Prior divisions and hierarchies were subsumed through the mysterious intercession of the Holy Spirit, and those sanctified together became, in biblical terms, “a chosen race…a holy nation” dedicated to God.596 This mixture of unity and separation—

592 Burchell, Memoir of Burchell, 272 593 Periodical Accounts III, xiii 594 Periodical Accounts V,125 595 Reports and Documents, 63 596On Conversion, 7 202

universalism within the church, yet transcendence of the sinful world—was the spiritual ideal towards which mission efforts always strove.

Evidences of Equality and Brotherhood

Missionary and convert writings claimed that their accord in Christ razed distinctions of caste, race, and nation. If black slaves and Bengali Hindus were the Other in missionary rhetoric before they accepted the gospel, they were called brothers and sisters after baptism. But such statements are limited as evidence of true egalitarianism within the mission project, for the Baptists would certainly have desired to present their enterprise in this positive light, even if such brotherhood were more difficult to attain in practice. As novelist and literary critic Toni Morrison has aptly noted, “The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion.”597 Missionary claims to end racial distinction did not necessarily translate to real equality of footing within churches and mission efforts. It must be asked, therefore, whether these assertions of concord and equality were reflected in missionary action, in patterns of church leadership, and in relationships between missionaries and converts. To what extent were European missionaries willing to work collegially with or even defer to West Indian and South Asian Christians of greater knowledge and experience? How far were indigenous Christians able to move into positions of real leadership without European superintendence? What do missionary expectations of rising indigenous leaders indicate about their confidence in native abilities? Were European missionaires willing to transfer property and institutional oversight to their non-white brethren? Finally, what can close personal relationships between Christians of different races and nations reveal about the viability of Baptist unity in spite of difference? The answers to these questions will indicate the success or failure of missionary claims to “oneness of heart” with their converts. They will also suggest final conclusions about the place of Baptist missions and mission churches in the context of imperialism. Of first significance are moments in which white missionaries expressed admiration for or deference toward non-European Christians. In these cases, missionaries regarded indigenous Christians at least as their equals, or, in some instances, their

597 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 46 203

superiors. Based on principles of Christian behavior as well as practical field experience, missionaries generally treated their hearers with respect, working to create trust and friendship as a foundation for evangelization. This included curbing European arrogance and viewing local people as equals. When Carey, Marshman, and Ward sent new missionaries Felix Carey and James Chater to Burma in 1807, they admonished them to “Be meek and gentle among [the Burmans]. Do them good in every way you can. Cultivate the utmost friendship and cordiality with them, as your equals, and never let European pride or superiority be felt by the natives in the mission house at Rangoon.”598 The missionaries were further required to learn the Burmese language as soon as possible, so that they might speak to people and print the Bible in the local tongue. National and racial arrogance would not advance the gospel. When missionaries did pursue such equality, their prior conceptions of native peoples were often exploded. Missionary William Moore praised and admired the elderly Christian Vrinda-vuna as “a man of great faith, unaffected humility, and a sincere desire to benefit his countrymen.” Contrary to contemporary European stereotypes of Indians, Vrinda-vuna was “most free from servility and duplicity,” Moore wrote to John Ryland. “We often hear much of the timid Hindoo [sic], but fear, of all things, seems to be the most distant from his mind. In the delivery of his message…no one can intimidate him, nor is he ever irritated.”599 In a different letter, this time to William Ward, Moore wrote that he found in Vrinda-vuna “quite a friend” whose society he enjoyed, and whose spirituality he much admired. “I promise myself much pleasure in becoming his pupil in some things, and his director in others,” Moore concluded, acknowledging that the aged man had much to teach him.600 In later years, another missionary who worked with Vrinda-vuna, Mr. Rowe, admitted, “I have often been surprised, charmed, and humbled, when witnessing his labours in the gospel.”601 Vrinda-vuna‟s character and work inspired white missionaries to examine their own attitudes. They learned from him. In West Africa, as well, the success of black Christians challenged European preconceptions of their abilities. New BMS missionary Mr. Diboll arrived at Clarence, a station on

598Periodical Accounts III, 426 599Periodical Accounts V, 359. On such stereotypes, see Arnold, “Race, place and bodily difference,” 255; Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. 600Periodical Accounts IV, 162 601Annual Report 1822, 13 204

Fernando Po off the coast of West Africa, in 1853 expecting to find considerable deterioration in the church there due to recent years without a European missionary. Instead he was “astonished to find” significant progress, for the members had kept up prayer meetings and scripture study. “He found at the class-meetings the people arranged under their several leaders, and going on with their reading and study of the word of God without interrupting each other.” This experience seems to have made quite an impression on Diboll, who reported, “could you but have seen the fire and life, as it appeared in the eyes and on the lips of these black men and women leaders, as they pressed home the application of recent sermons upon the minds of those present, you would have thought as I did, surely God is in this place.” Diboll‟s low expectations of black progress without European guidance gave way when he encountered the West Africans‟ committed and godly leadership of their church.602 The committed efforts and comparative success of native Christians like Vrinda- vuna, Krishnu-pall, the Clarence leaders, and many others continually brought proof of native worth and ability before European eyes, as missionaries often remarked. Mr. Leonard, a white man residing in Calcutta and deacon in the Baptist church there, wrote admiringly to Joshua Marshman of “the zeal and activity of our truly valuable brother Krishnu, who appears to gather strength of body from his unremitted labors,” which included fourteen sermons a week. Krishnu combined the ardor of a young convert with the “experience of a father,” Leonard said.603 Too, as has been shown, it was Krishnu‟s initiative in taking a leadership role in worship and evangelism that originally spurred the Serampore missionaries to focus on native agency. The disagreement between Krishnu and the missionaries did result briefly in Krishnu‟s exclusion from the church, but ultimately, it changed the course of mission policy, while Krishnu himself became a missionary with his own station.604 Many other Indian preachers gained the admiration

602Annual Report 1854, 8 603Periodical Accounts IV, 218. Another local European, Mr. Sutton, witnessed Krishnu‟s death in 1820, and admired the “Divine goodness…strong consolation and heavenly maturity which this first Hindoo disciple attained, as an earnest of what God will do for India.” Annual Report 1820, 12-3. Notice that both Leonard‟s and Sutton‟s assessment of Krishnu and Moore‟s and Rowe‟s of Vrinda-vuna are quite the opposite of contemporary European characterizations of Indians as effeminate, weak, or childlike. Vrinda- vuna is bold, while Krishnu is like a father who has obtained God-like goodness and maturity. Again, see Sinha‟s discussion of these caricatures in Colonial Masculinity. 604See chapter five. 205

of their European contemporaries, prompting Leonard to exclaim, “the labours of the native preachers are indefatigable!” after observing the work of Sebuk-ram, Bhagvut, Neeloo, and Manik in Calcutta alone.605 Often, European admiration arose from their observation of native Christians‟ zealous spirit as evangelists.606 Indigenous ministers also recommended themselves by their intellect and exegetical abilities—highly praised in the biblically-based Baptist faith. The scholarship of missionary Gogun Chunder Dutt prompted his European colleague Mr. Anderson to remark in 1864, “It will be a happy day for India when men with the intellectual and scholastic qualifications which Gogun possesses leave all for the sake of Christ, as he has done, and give themselves heart and soul to serve the Saviour in seeking the spread of his kingdom among their fellow countrymen.”607 In similar vein, H. Capern, one of the BMS missionaries in the Bahamas, praised Bahamian teacher W. McDonald as “one of the best textualists I know” when he proposed McDonald for pastoral duties.608 It is also notable that the BMS seems to have followed a policy of compensation based on education and field experience, rather than race or national background. For example, in 1870 Francis Pinnock, a black Jamaican employed as missionary to West Africa, received 150 pounds per annum from the society while the BMS missionary to Norway, Mr. Ola Hausson—a native to that region—was paid only 40 pounds. Pinnock was a graduate of the Calabar Institution in Jamaica, and had pastored a church there before making his way to Africa as a missionary. Hausson, on the other hand, was

605Leonard wrote to Ward in 1814: “It would take a whole day to do justice to a week's work of these men. Sebuk-ram preaches in twenty different places during the week, some of which are seven miles distant. He crosses and recrosses the river every day. Bhagvut preaches at eleven, in and about the town; Neeloo at about ten; and Manik at six.” Periodical Accounts V, 431-2. 606Some indigenous Christian preachers and missionaries attracted the positive notice of colonial authorities, as well. After observing the schools and worship service conducted by native Bahamian missionary Shadrach Kerr, the President of the colony reported to the Colonial Office that the colony was “under deep obligation to the missionary, for the able and earnest manner in which he seems to be conducting his labour among them. Mr. Kerr appears to take great pains with his charge....There was a good attendance of adults at the morning service, which Mr. Kerr conducted, and whose address was suited to his hearers, and displayed a knowledge of Gospel truth, with felicity in his manner of communicating it…I understand that Mr. Kerr has been happily an instrument in working a great change for th ebetter among the people, who appear much and deservedly attached to him.” Annual Report 1865, 13 607Gogun Chunder Dutt was initially ordained as an assitant missionary under the authority of a European supervising missionary, but later received his own station. He replied to the 1870s Questionnaire as a full missionary, supervising four Indian teachers in his own right. Annual Report 1864, 16; Reports and Documents, 56-63 608Annual Report, 43 206

relatively unknown to the society and had not been trained in a Baptist institution. Thus untried, he received meager payment, and it appears that his mission was short-lived.609 When missionaries travelled from the field to attend meetings in London or to raise funds for the society, the BMS proved equally willing to cover the expenses of Asian, West Indian, and European ministers. In 1871, for example, the Indian missionary Goolzar Shah visited England and attended BMS meetings. The BMS granted their missionary a full year‟s leave of absence from his post in Calcutta for the purpose, and paid his passage.610 The society also increased the salary of West African missionary Joseph Fuller, a Jamaican native, by 25 pounds per annum during the two-year period of his eldest son‟s education in Norwich, in order to help him meet the expense. The society took this step “in consideration of Mr. Fuller's valuable services both in this country and in Jamaica, and for more than twenty-five years as a missionary in Africa.”611 Another evidence of mutual respect between native converts and European missionaries lay in Europeans‟ early eagerness—particularly at Serampore—to include indigenous Christians in their decision-making for the mission. Ward wrote in his journal on March 18, 1804: “On Saturday night we began to hold a council with our Bengalee [sic] brethren, respecting the state of the church, the mission, etc. We intend to continue it weekly.”612 The Serampore missionaries regularly consulted the more senior converts as to the fitness of inquirers, and valued their judgment in matters of church discipline. Krishnu-pall and his family played an integral role in the reception and examination of visitors to the mission station, built a chapel on their own initiative, and led worship there without interference from the European missionaries, once the latter‟s early concerns

609BMS MSS., BMS Minutes 1792-1914, Quarterly Committee Meeting 28 June 1870, Minute 50, 215; Committee Meeting 4th October 1870, Minute 114, 246. At the same time, an Indian preacher named Sohu in Barisal was receiving from the society 36 pounds per annum with an annual allowance of 24 pounds for travelling expenses, including boat hire—also more than Mr. Hausson. Committee Meeting 23rd January 1872, Minute 148, 414 610BMS MSS., BMS Minutes 1792-1914, Quarterly Committee Meeting 21st April 1871, Minute 244, 318 Some of the sum advanced to Goolzar Shah seems to have reached India after he had already left for England. This money was received by C.B. Lewis in Calcutta, who wrote to ask what should be done with it. The committee voted the funds to Goolzar Shah anyway “in addition to the payments already made by the Committee in consideration of his services to the Mission.” Committee Meeting 5th December 1871, Minute 121, 398 611BMS MSS., BMS Minutes 1792-1914, Committee Meeting 18th June 1872, Minute 44, 467-8 612Periodical Accounts III, 34 207

were allayed by Krishnu‟s obvious effectiveness.613 By 1806 the Serampore mission had adopted a plan of evangelism that depended on pairs of indigenous itinerants, who worked “without any European brother.” To “direct and superintend the whole” evangelistic effort, the Serampore mission formed a new committee that included both the English missionaries and senior church members Krishnu-pall, Ram-rotton, and Ram- kanai.614 Most significant, in the following year Krishnu, Sebukram, and the young William Carey—son of Dr. William Carey the missionary—undertook a preaching journey to Malda, with Krishnu as acknowledged leader of this group. As missionary Mardon noted in his journal, “It is expected that Krishnu will baptize in that neighborhood.” Here, a mature convert of Indian birth held authority over a young European man, the son of the leading missionary. Further, no one seems to have found this particularly remarkable.615 A similar situation arose at Dum Dum, a military station northeast of Calcutta, where the Serampore missionaries had long been preaching to the European soldiers in English, while indigenous Christians taught the soldiers‟ native wives in Bengali or Hindustani. Out of these efforts came enough conversions to necessitate the forming of a church in 1820, and Soobhroo, one of the preachers who had taught the soldiers' wives, became pastor. His ministry, the missionaires, reported “has been greatly blessed. Soobhroo devotes much of his time to the instruction of his flock: and the remainder to the superintendance of two native schools and the preaching of the gospel in both of them, and in the bazaars and villages around the station.” Soobhroo exercised spriritual authority over a church which included both native women and European soldiers.616 Thus the missionaries seem, at least in some cases, to have valued spiritual maturity, experience, and the evidence of success over racial or national distinctions. Certainly, the society‟s instructions to their first Jamaica missionary to defer

613For example, Marshman privately consulted Petumber Singh and Krishnu about Petumber Mittre and his wife before admitting them to the church, Periodical Accounts II, 273; Ward valued Petumber Singh‟s discernment regarding relationships within the church and between the church and the outside world, Periodical Accounts III, 357-8. On Krishnu and family‟s role as mission hosts and evangelists at Serampore, see Periodical Accounts II, 272-3; and on worship Indian Christians led at Serampore, Periodical Accounts II, 376. 614Periodical Accounts II, 262-4 615Periodical Accounts II, 323 616Annual Report 1820, 36 208

to the elder wisdom of black Baptist Moses Baker indicate this.617 These kinds of working relationships between European and native Christians further created many opportunities for white missionaries to reexamine and discard their racialized preconceptions about indigenous peoples. Ultimately, it seems that contact and collegiality between European and native for the common cause of evangelism—and growing evidence of native effectiveness in ministry—significantly contributed to egalitarian policies within the BMS. Thus a second key confirmation of the Baptist claim to brotherhood despite difference may lie in patterns of leadership, particularly circumstances in which indigenous Christians exercised authority without European oversight, or actually pastored or directed Europeans—as in the case of Soobhroo at the military station. Often after the Serampore era, BMS policy blocked the development of an independent native pastorate, but as mission needs and resources made the practicality of indigenous independence plain, non-European ministers were able to exercise increasingly greater authority. In the case of the Bahamas, European oversight gave way over time to purely Bahamian leadership. The BMS missionary H. Capern, who had seen the abilities of men like Shadrach Kerr and W. McDonald, played a leading role in pushing back against European interference in the islands. Capern insisted in 1854 that the native pastors exercised “the same discrimination and care which European missionaries have been wont to exercise” in receiving new communicants, and argued that new Christians actually received better pastoral care from native ministers than European ones.618 In 1856, Capern took his defense of indigenous ministry even further. Praising the efforts of Bahamian pastor Joseph Laroda, who in the last year had superintended nine stations in which he baptized thirty-two people, Capern declared, “Were it proposed to send a European missionary to that island, I would do all I could to prevent the fulfillment of such a purpose,” for to “assume any authority over him…would militate against both his influence and his usefulness.” Laroda continued to pastor San Salvador alone, without European oversight.619

617Clarke, Memorials, 9-10, 18; Periodical Accounts V, 292; see further discussion of the society‟s careful respect of Baker, Liele, and other black Baptists who preceded them in Jamaica in chapter five. 618Annual Report 1853, 41 619Annual Report 1856, 44 209

The West African mission provides an interesting example of interracial collegiality in action. Here, as in many places, European primacy gave way—upon the proof of black ministers‟ greater success—to egalitarianism. John Clarke and George Prince, both white BMS missionaries, established the mission at Clarence, on Fernando Po, in 1841. Immediately, local Christians took part in the church there, and some itinerant preachers oversaw stations on their own. These itinerants maintained the church when Prince and Clarke returned to Britain and the West Indies to recruit more ministers and money.620 The first full complement of missionaries went to Africa in 1843, and included both black and white ministers, Joseph Merrick, John Clarke, and Alfred Saker among others. These men operated on an equal footing.621 The society‟s relationship to black Jamaican Joseph Merrick as a full missionary, not subordinate to Clarke or Saker, is clear from some of the official reports of his work. Merrick worked at Fernando Po and Bimbia from 1843 until he died at sea enroute to England in 1849. During his tenure in Africa, he translated much of the Bible into the Isubu language, which was spoken by most of the townships in the region of the Niger Delta and Cameroons. He also worked on an Isubu dictionary, laying the foundation for future evangelism in the region. His death was a severe blow to the African mission, as the BMS leadership acknowledged in a lengthy official resolution on the occasion—a more extensive notice than had been given to such an eminent European missionary as Joshua Marshman in the past.622 Merrick‟s obituary resolution contained all the hagiography normally associated with missionaries who shattered their health in the field. With great regret, the Committee recorded:

620Historian Horace O. Russell notes that native West African John William Christian, who was probably converted initially by Methodist missionaries, worked as a fulltime itinerant preacher and was solely responsible for work in three surrounding towns, Bani, Bassa-ka-troo, and Ba-Ka-Ka. He later supervised Clarence when Clarke and Prince were away. Interestingly, the establishment of this mission coincided with the disaster of Buxton‟s Niger expedition. As Russell points out, in a negative way (i.e., Europeans die in Africa) the Niger disaster supported the cause of native agency. Russell, Missionary Outreach, 125- 6, 144; see also Stanley, BMS, 106-7 621Russell establishes that Clarke and the Merricks had already had a close friendship in Jamaica for some years. Clarke had taught Jospeh Merrick Hebrew and Greek to prepare him for ordination, and Merrick had already pastored a church without European superintendence in Jamaica. Jamaicans George and Dorothy Bundy, both of mixed racial background, were also formally accepted for service to West Africa. Russell, Missionary Outreach, 135-7, 145. Joseph Merrick and George Prince together oversaw the society‟s purchase of the West African Company‟s property in Fernando Po in December 1843. Russell, 151 622See the respectful but brief notice of Marshman‟s death in Annual Report 1838, 34 210

the decease of their missionary brother, the Rev. Joseph Merrick. Of African descent, and educated in the Society's schools in Jamaica, where it pleased God to call him by His grace, he began to preach the gospel of Christ in 1837, and soon after was set apart to the work of the ministry, as co-pastor with his father of the church at Jericho. He entered on mission work in Africa in 1843, where…he laboured most diligently in the evangelization of the degraded Isubus, in whose language he could speak with great readiness and precision. He has been called to his reward just as those attainments and labours were producing fruit unto God in the conversion of some…While grieving over the loss which Africa and the Society have sustained, the Committee express with gratitude to the great Head of the Church their high estimate of his piety, of the ability and devotedness he had shown in mission service, and of the uniform and elevated Christian character of all his proceedings. They tender to his bereaved wife and fatherless child, and to his aged mother, still living in Jamaica, their affectionate condolence and sympathy. It is their prayer that God may comfort and bless them, and likewise raise up many such men to carry on the missionary work among the heathen.623

The language of this notice is significant, for it contains all of the hieararchical rhetoric one might expect from such a resolution. The people to which the missionary had ministered were “degraded,” while he had attained “precision” in their language, and Africa would miss him sorely. If only the society had more such men. It is a typical resolution, but significant here because in this case, both the devoted missionary who lost his life, and the “degraded” people he was teaching, had black skin. Even more striking, two years after Merrick‟s death the BMS instructed the English missionary Alfred Saker to take over his duties. Saker was pleased to find that, in spite of the absence of a missionary, the church had met regularly and maintained fellowship and discipline. “It might well have been thought,” the society reported in typical fashion, “that many of the converts would quickly return to their degrading superstitions if the watchful eye of the missionary were removed…It would have been no surprise to have found the church disorganized…and large numbers again captive to the vices of savage life.”624 Again, this remark is particularly significant because of whom the missionary in question was— Joseph Merrick, a black man born in Jamaica. His watchful eye had prevented the encroachment of savagery, and when his civilizing hand was removed, the BMS feared anarchy would result. Happily, though, this was not the case. Other men of African descent also moved into positions of autonomous leadership as BMS missionaries in West Africa. Joseph Fuller and Francis Pinnock of Jamaica, and Horton Johnson, who was native to West Africa, all began work there as teachers,

623Annual Report 1850, 8. On Merrick‟s death and its significance, also see Russell, Missionary Outreach, 226-8, and John Clarke, Memorials, 208-10. 624Annual Report 1852, 2 211

subordinate to the authority of the white missionary Alfred Saker. Over time, however, their competence and practical need led to their independence from European oversight, and they became full missionaries answerable only to the society. Fuller and his wife first worked under Saker at Bimbia, though they oversaw the station during Saker‟s frequent absences to other stations or to England, and always with fruitful results. Saker spoke highly of both, and encouraged Fuller to baptize those he had taught, instead of performing the ordinance himself as senior missionary.625 The BMS accepted Fuller as a full missionary in 1850, and he worked in the Cameroons until he retired in 1888. Brian Stanley argues that, in this tenuous period for the West African mission, “it was Fuller, even more than Saker, who provided continuity and stability.”626 Horton Johnson, a West African Christian taught and baptized by Saker, also proved an enormous asset, working at Cameroons, at first under Saker's supervision, and later as missionary. Saker declared of Johnson in 1852, “without him I should be at a loss,” and reported that “the natives love him with a strong affection.” In 1854, Johnson became independent and took full responsibility for the Cameroons church. The BMS and Saker justified this step by noting that Johnson had “secured the affection and confidence of all around him.”627 Horton Johnson continued his fruitful work at Cameroons, baptizing eight converts in 1856, among them a local chief.628 The exigencies of the African mission—especially high European mortality in the region in the era before widespread quinine prophylaxsis—meant that it developed in circumstances particularly conducive to native leadership.629 As Horace Russell argues, these circumstances, combined with a trend towards indigenous independence in society policy, led to “an acceptance of Africa on her own terms, and a willingness to work within the given framework of African social

625Annual Report 1852, 52; Annual Report 1854, 58. However, Saker‟s relationship with some of his fellow missionaries, black and white, seems to have been strained at times. Stanley notes that “the character who emerges with greatest credit from these years is J.J. Fuller—who clearly suffered from Saker‟s regime, yet refused to contemplate breaking his connection with the BMS, and as an old man defended Saker‟s memory.” Stanley, BMS, 112-4 626Stanley, BMS, 109 627Annual Report 1852, 52; Annual Report 1854, 9 628Annual Report 1857, 5 629 On the barrier disease, particularly malaria, presented to European penetration of Africa until the mid- nineteenth century see Headrick, Tools of Empire, chapter three. 212

and political structures. It was radical thinking and in conflict with the times.”630 In their revolutionary West African mission policy, the BMS leadership and missionaries, black and white, brought the society ever closer to the Christian ideal of brotherhood despite difference. In South Asia, Serampore's early commitment to indigenous independence and convert leadership—Krishnu was baptizing and administering the Lord's Supper as early as 1807, and Carapeit Aratoon had full charge of the Jessore church by 1809—gave way to a more regressive BMS policy, as has been shown.631 However, the society's intentional shift of focus in the 1850s soon saw Indian Christians rise to positions of leadership as assistant missionaries or co-pastors with Europeans and, and later, as full pastors and missionaries responsible directly to the society.632 In 1850, the church at South Colingah had two pastors, European missionary John Wenger, and Indian pastor Shujaat Ali. These men were assisted by three native Christians serving as deacons. At the same time, the Intally church was also jointly pastored by a European, George Pearce, and an Indian, Ram Krishna Kabirag; while Pearce oversaw the Lukhyantipur church together with Darpanarayan Mandal and Khageshwar Sirdar.633 These arrangements seem to have been a trial or preparatory period, for both the Colingah and Intally churches soon came under fully Indian oversight. Goolzar Shah took over the Colingah church and also became a full BMS missionary in the early 1850s. He was particularly instrumental in promoting church independence, and his congregation supported two itinerant preachers without outside help.634 The Intally congregation, pastored by Shem

630 Russell, Missionary Outreach, 233. Emphasis on native agency in West Africa continued. In 1863, the BMS reported that four native Duallas and two other native Africans worked as full-time mission teachers. Annual Report 1863, 73 631Ward's journal May 1807 notes Krishnu's presiding over the Lord's Supper. Periodical Accounts III, 348-9. Joshua Marshman's remarks on the leadership of Aratoon underlines his awareness of its significance. “As [Jessore converts] will of course form a part of the church in Jessore, under the care of brother Carapeit, we thought it best to leave the work of receiving them to him and the members of the church, six or seven of whom were present: we only assisting as spectators, or rather helpers of their joy. Brother Carapeit examined each candidate, and conducted the business of the church with great propriety. We thought it would also strengthen their respect for him as their pastor if he baptized them. This he did the following day…we witnessing this from one raised up in this country with a degree of pleasure and joy which you can better conceive than I describe. Thus were men awakened, brought to the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, baptized, and added to the church, entirely through the instrumentality of those born in the country, while through the whole we have been only spectators of the work.” Periodical Accounts IV, 86 632 On the long development of autonomous churches in India, see Stanley, BMS, 140-156 633Annual Report 1850, 10-2 634 Annual Report 1865, 8-10 213

Chandra Nath, also became fully independent of the society in 1854.635 By the 1860s, pastoral oversight of churches in Delhi and Agra had been transferred to Indian Christians.636 Further, the BMS leaders were careful to make clear the relationship between the society and the Indian pastors, writing in an 1864 circular letter to all of the Indian churches, “The pastors of the Churches are your servants for Christ's sake, and not ours.”637 Despite regressive policy that had created dependency and curtailed indigenous leadership in the 1820s-40s, by 1870 India‟s mission churches had made significant strides towards independence under native leadership. This shift underlines the extent to which the missionary enterprise lived up to its claim of mutual love and respect among Christian brethren, despite differences of nation and race. It was not easy to fulfill this ideal, but in the 1870s, the possibility was certainly within reach—in India, in West Africa, in the Bahamas, and in Jamaica, where the majority of the pastorate were native to the island, educated in the Baptist Calabar Institution.638 The Calabar and Serampore Colleges, both established for the express purpose of training indigenous Christians as pastors and missionaries, also may offer some indication of mutual amity and respect within the global Baptist church. White missionaries wrote the curriculum of these institutions—courses of study that would prepare Indian and Caribbean men for the ministry. As such, the curriculum is suggestive of white missionaries‟ expecations of indigenous people‟s intellect and capabilities, and hence the extent to which European ministers viewed their prospective colleagues as their intellectual equals. In 1853, European missionaries James Phillippo and B. Dexter conducted the Annual Examination of the students at the Calabar Institution. The seven students translated a section of Ovid‟s Metamorphoses from Latin, and were “next examined in the first nine chapters [of Matthew] in the original Greek, and afterwards in the Hebrew of the first ten chapters of the book of Joshua, each of which they read with fluency and translated with accuracy, replying with ease and correctness to the numerous questions which were proposed during a minute and prolonged examination,” the

635 Annual Report 1855, 25-6 636 Annual Report 1867, 39, 16-7. Other churches under native leadership included one at Sewry, in Birbhoom, five in Calcutta, and at least two in Jessore by 1871. Annual Report 1857, 10; Annual Report 1871, 8-9 637 Annual Report 1864, 63 638 In 1864, Jamaica had thirty-nine pastors, twenty of whom were persons of color. Annual Report 1864, 23 214

examiners reported. “They appeared indeed to be thoroughly grounded in the grammars of the several languages, and to have laid such a foundation for further stores of learning, as cannot be easily destroyed.” The Calabar students next presented their progress in “several branches of general science, including English grammar and composition, the higher rules of arithmetic, natural philosophy, geography, general and ecclesiastical history, and rhetoric; in all of which such progress was displayed as testified alike to the capacity and industry of the students and the eminent qualifications and untiring diligence of their esteemed tutor.” The Baptist commitment to Biblical study in the original languages, and to rigorous education for all members of the pastorate, was certainly borne out here. Phillippo and Dexter fully expected the young men they were examining—all natives to Jamaica, many of them born to slaves—to be able to handle this level of scholarship, and the students did so with apparent ease.639 The curriculum of Serampore College was equally rigorous, including Biblical languages as well as study in classical Sanskrit, Arabic, and the vernacular Indian tongues.640 Apparently, nothing in white missionaries‟ experience of their native colleagues had suggested that South Asian, Caribbean, and European Christians were not all equally capable of preaching the gospel from the Biblical languages, matching the scholarship of any adversary with rigorous training and a shared commitment to Christian belief. European Baptists‟ willingness to transfer control over property and institutional leadership to Christians in the mission field also indicates some level of equality within the mission community. Serampore College provides the best example of such a transfer, for the Serampore missionaries Carey and Marshman invested control of their mission, including schools, stations, chapels, and mission house, in the college council—instead of the Baptist Missionary Society—upon their deaths. Carey and Marshman justified their decision by arguing that “if the College were to be the source of India‟s Baptist

639 Annual Report 1853, 47-8 640 J.C. Marshman, Life and Times II, 171. Native pundits had higher salaries (nearly double) than European professors at Serampore College. Recall also that this college admitted non-Christians, to the disapproval of British detractors. The Serampore missionaries hoped that the college students, “after becoming good Sungskrit [sic], as well as Hebrew and Greek scholars…may be successfully employed as translators of the divine word into languages, with the structure of which they will be perfectly familiar. The dialects of India are so numerous, that it can hardly be expected that the holy scriptures will be very soon rendered into all of them; and when that shall have been accomplished, their improvement and perfection can only be hoped for through the revision of learned Christian natives.” Annual Report 1819, 56-7 215

missionaries, it seemed…only logical that it should also have the management of India‟s Baptist missions.”641 When the society objected to this arrangement because several of the council members were not BMS missionaries, Carey rejoined, “it is not the pageantry of a form which constitutes a missionary: he is one in the genuine sense of the word, who does the work of an evangelist,” and heartily endorsed the true missionary character and zeal of the professors who made up the council. “Considering, moreover,” he added, “the advantages of their locality, their intimate knowledge of the language, habits, and prejudices of the country in which they reside…why should they not be better fitted [than the BMS] to conduct the undertaking?”642 At a time when BMS policy shied from indigenous autonomy, Carey and Marshman transferred authority over their mission to Christians in India, rather than to the society leadership in London. A similar transmission of control, from an exclusively European body to a more diverse group of Christians in the mission field, occurred following the special inquiry into the Indian mission in the early 1870s. Based on questionnaire responses from all BMS missionaries in the subcontinent, both Indian and European, the Special Committee on the Indian Mission concluded—among many other new policy adjustments—that “the efficiency of the Mission would be largely promoted were the missionaries to assemble at least once a year in conference for mutual assistance, counsel, and prayer.”643 The foundation for such conferences had already been laid by similar missionary meetings in the Calcutta and Delhi regions and in Ceylon in previous years. Edward Bean Underhill had attended and reported favorably on many of these in 1855.644 Most significantly, now in 1872 the committee further instructed that “It will be the duty of these Conferences to examine, receive and dismiss, as may be necessary, the native agents of the Society; to fix the amount of their stipends; to superintend the classes that may be formed for the education of native candidates for missionary or pastoral srevice; to

641 Letters, Official and Private, from the Reverend Dr. Carey, 52-6 642 Letters, Official and Private, from the Reverend Dr. Carey, 47. Carey‟s description of the professors‟ famliarity with Indian languages and beliefs suggests that at least some of them were native Christians. 643 Annual Report 1872, 10 644 Minutes of a Conference of Missionaries and Native Pastors held at Colombo, from June 26th to 30th inclusive, 1855 (Calcutta: J. Thomas, Baptist Mission Press, 1855); Minutes and Reports of a Conference of the Baptist Missionaries of Bengal. Calcutta, 1855 (Calcutta: J. Thomas, Baptist Mission Press, 1855); The Minutes and Reports of a Conference fo the Baptist Missionaries of the North West Provinces, Held at Agra from Dec. 19th to Dec. 22nd, 1855; with a letter from the Secretary of the Society (Calcutta: J. Thomas, Baptist Mission Press, 1856) 216

provide for the examination of missionary probationers during, or at the end of, their two years term of probation; to advise the Committee on all matters relative to the occupancy of new fields of labour, the continuance of stations, and the removal of missionaries; and, finally, to watch over the general intersts of the Mission.”645 In short, the London leadership of the BMS authorized the transfer of their supervisory authority over the India mission from themselves to these missionary conferences on the spot. Such conferences included South Asian missionaries like Goolzar Shah and Gogun Chunder Dutt of India, and Whydoo Nadan, who attended the 1855 conference for Colombo. Hence a mixed-race missionary body would now exercise control in a host of areas of evaluation and compensation, including appraisal of the fitness of new missionary probationers of whatever racial or national background. This decision indicates a tendency towards flexibility and decentralization, and underlines the rising influence of the mission field on society policy, a trend also noticeable in the West Africa mission, as Horace Russell has noted.646 Such changes created more and more room for missionaries to lead based on the authority of their experience in the field, instead of their national or racial background. Finally, intimate personal relationships between European and native Christians bore witness to the capacity of shared belief to transcend racial and national difference. In one example of such intimacy, female European missionaries or missionary wives routinely sought the services of native midwives and wet-nurses during and after childbirth.647 Such an arrangement suggests a striking lack of racial feeling on the part of both nurses and mothers, and would certainly have helped alleviate any prejudice on both sides. Even more significant, marriages between indigenous Christians and European missionaries or missionary children powerfully confirmed the Baptist mission‟s goals of unity in Christ despite difference. In March 1811, Felix Carey, the eldest son of BMS founder and Serampore missionary William Carey, married a native of Burma, Miss N. Blackwall, whose name suggests mixed English and Burmese parentage. As the society reported, the new Mrs. Carey “had been a professed Christian of the Roman Catholic

645 Annual Report 1872, 11-2 646 Russell, Missionary Outreach, 233 647 The 1855 Bengal missionary conference discussed the payment of a native wet-nurse as a usual expense for missionary families. Minutes and Reports of a Conference of the Baptist Missionaries of Bengal, 65 217

persuasion, but…has lately rejected her priest, and discontinued all attendance on the Roman Catholic worship.”648 Significantly, the society‟s concern about their missionary‟s native wife arose not from her racial background, but from her prior attachment—now resigned—to Catholicism. Dr. William Carey, the new father-in-law, certainly seems to have approved the match, for he shortly thereafter penned a letter to Andrew Fuller in which he boasted happily about all of his sons, three of whom were “engaged in the important work of publishing [the] gospel among the heathen, two of them in new countries.”649 The American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson and his wife soon joined Felix and his family in Rangoon, and Judson reported that “Mrs. Carey…improves in speaking English, and I am happy to say, that she and Mrs. Judson have become quite attached to one another.”650 Unfortunately, the Careys‟ marriage would be cut short by tragedy in 1814. Mrs. Carey and their two children drowned when their vessel sank in a sudden squall outside Rangoon. Felix himself barely survived. He expressed the depth of his loss in his journal, sections of which were rather unfeelingly republished in the Periodical Accounts. “I have lost all that I was worth in this vain world—let it go;” Felix wrote, “but the loss of my dear wife and dear little infants goes near my heart.”651 The event affected him sorely; he ceased his missionary activity thereafter, and for some time fell out of contact with his father and the BMS. He eventually died of cholera at Serampore in 1822.652 Despite its tragic end, the marriage between Felix Carey and a Burmese Christian testified to the possibilities of unity and love in spite of difference. Felix Carey‟s position as eldest son of the most famous Baptist missionary in India gave his marriage particular significance. The same might be said of another

648 Periodical Accounts IV, 405 649 At this time, 1813, about two years after Felix‟s marriage, Felix was missionary to Burma, his brother William to Cutwa, north of Serampore, and Jabez to Amboyna. William Carey Sr.‟s fatherly pride in his missionary sons is particularly clear in this letter as he describes his opportunity, along with Felix and William, to ordain his third son Jabez to the ministry. “To me the Lord has been very, very gracious,” Carey wrote. “I trust all my children love the Lord in truth, and three out of four are actually engaged in the important work of publishing his gospel among the heathen, two of them in new countries. I am fully sensible of the imperfections of my children, and feel a constant solicitude that they may adorn the gospel of Christ in all things: but I cannot, I wish not, to shut my eyes to the goodness of God so abundantly poured upon me.” Periodical Accounts V, 403-4 650 Periodical Accounts V, 381-2 651 Periodical Accounts VI, 151-2 652 Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 66 218

marriage which took place in the family of William Knibb, the best known Baptist missionary in Jamaica, beloved or reviled for his role in slavery abolition. In 1855, Anne Knibb, the second daughter of the missionary, married Ellis Fray, a black Jamaican. Fray had been a member of Knibb‟s church at Falmouth during the days of emancipation, and entered the Calabar Institution to train for the ministry in 1847. He eventually became pastor of the church at Refuge, which had been founded by Knibb himself, and Mr. and Mrs. Fray spent many years there, “energetic and devoted” in God‟s work, as their missionary colleague John Clarke reported.653 Thus while many European misssionaries entered the field already married to European women, it was not out of the ordinary for their children—raised as they were in an environment that encouraged Christian community across racial lines—to marry indigenous Christians. Neither of these marriages occasioned reproach or even remark. Indeed, in light of the circumstances and goals of the missionary enterprise, these relationships were quite natural. Certainly, the trajectory of the Baptist mission‟s history and policy also provided moments of tension in which divisions between missionary and convert, European and native, white and black, were all too clear. While William Carey‟s son fell in love with a Burmese woman, his nephew Eustace derided Indian Christians‟ mental culture and questioned their ability to preach without oversight. The Rev. A.F. Lacroix, though not a Baptist, exemplified how ugly the missionary project could be when it adopted contemporary racial stereotypes. The Serampore missionaries initially refused to sanction Krishnu‟s preaching in his own chapel. Yet countering these moments of European arrogance were many examples of striving towards mutual respect and common ground in a shared cause. Society leadership admitted their mistake and changed their policy towards native agency in the 1850s, and held their course despite the rise of scientific racism in Britain. Indigenous churches in the West Indies and South Asia slowly gained independence under native pastors and missionaries. Field experience and effectiveness repeatedly recommended a native ministry over European agency, and patterns of leadership and compensation shifted accordingly. European and native Christians identified with one another, called each other brother and sister, and even married.

653 Clarke, Memorials of Baptist Missionaries, 217; see also Hall, Civilising Subjects, 171 219

Though the missionary enterprise was not blind to distinction—sometimes the actions of missionaries even promoted racial and national hierarchies—most Christians believed that their shared faith could transcend difference, replacing brahman and sudra with castes of sin and holiness, and shattering black chattel slavery with a family in which there was neither slave nor free.654 The ideal that all people could be remade by Christ informed the missionary project in 1801, when the first leaders of the BMS wrote to the first Baptist converts at Serampore, Krishnu and Joymooni, to impress upon them that “the nature of Christianity is to unite those that were divided; that we all may be one, as the Father is in Christ, and Christ in the Father, that we may be one in both. Satan wishes to divide men from God and one another; but the gospel breaks down every middlewall of partition, making us of one heart and of one soul—no matter distance of situation, difference of customs, language or [culture] shall prevent a union of spirit…You have lived without hope, and without God in the world; but now ye are no more strangers, and foreigners, but fellow workers with the Saints, and of the household of God.”655 The Baptists of all nations who made up the global mission family in the nineteenth century never wholly achieved this ideal, that all may be one. But this failure, too, was a feature of Christian life, in which a mysterious providence worked through men and women despite their deficiencies and apparent setbacks to reach the millenial harvest when all would know God, and no distinctions would remain but those made by Christ himself. It was in the nature of Baptist faith to be always laboring, always working to improve, but never gaining perfection except in Christ. The missionary project‟s attempt to overcome difference was much the same; perfect harmony would never be reached. God alone would make the final reconciliation. Conclusions: The Missionary Project in the Imperial Context Scholarship that examines mission work in the nineteenth century routinely challenges missionary claims to universal brotherhood in Christ and shared religious goals, seeing the missionary project instead as a religious form of—or a religious justification for—

654 Frykeberg points out that in the case of Indian Christianity, even the transcendence of caste was never attained. “All Indian Christians knew that their religious identity could never supercede other identities that were grounded in history and culture,” he points out. This dilemma arose largely from birth and caste. “Unity and diversity, polarities and contradistinctions, have persisted everywhere.” Frykenberg, “Christian Missions and the Raj,” in Missions and Empire, 128 655 BMS MSS., Home Office Correspondence, 1792-1914, Krichna Pal from Committee, letter, 1801, n. pag., underline in original. 220

cultural imperialism.656 The mission field, historians argue, was a place in which English and white identity could be made, and economic and cultural exploitation routinely practiced. Missionaries constructed their identities through opposition, calling attention to difference between Christian and heathen and seeking to remake converts into reflections of themselves, subjects of God and of England.657 Whether they admitted it or not, missionaries promoted British dominion abroad, and every exchange between European evangelists and colonized hearers was colored by the inherently unequal power relationship between the two. Such a depiction of the missionary enterprise does reflect many of the challenges missions faced in the imperial context. As Andrew Porter has pointed out, “the extent to which missionaries were identified by local peoples with conquerers and colonisers, damned by proximity…was often seriously underestimated at the time.”658 The hierarchies of colonialism, as well as the inevitability of human failure, militated against the full realization of missionary goals that “all may be one” in the universal family of the sanctified. However, to interpret the missionary project as a political enterprise with material, this-worldly goals is to completely misunderstand the nature of evangelical identity and the theological imperatives that drove missionaries abroad. The motive or foundation of the movement lay in a newly outward-looking religious faith that, bastioned by Enlightenment universalism, spurred an upwelling of concern that every person must hear the gospel, for all were capable of receiving it. Nineteenth-century Baptists felt “constrained,” as Andrew Fuller put it, to spread Christianity—a message they believed was transcendent truth with eternal ramifications—so that their ultimate religious goal, global evangelization under divine providence, might be realized. This motive and this goal, both grounded in theology and religious identity, animated the missionary project. Their religious worldview led Christians to view themselves as instruments in the hands of God, and history as directed by providential wisdom. As evidenced by Baptist willingness to utilize, ignore, or defy their governments or contemporary social mores when it served the purposes of the mission to do so, all other

656 As Kathleen Wilson puts it, the missionary enterprise carried out “imperatives to convert, subdue and possess the world through the power and superiority of English Protestantism.” Island Race, 81 657 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 107-39 658 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 13 221

commitments and identities—political and cultural—were secondary to the religious imperative of global evangelism. More than anything else, these theological beliefs informed missionary identity and policy. Significantly, neither the missionaries themselves nor the colonial officials who watched them with a wary eye viewed the missionary enterprise as supportive of empire. Imperial authorities recognized the challenge missions posed to colonial hierarchies, and worked to curtail or abrogate their work. Interpretation of missions as cultural imperialism thus significantly overestimates the power and reach of the missions movement to influence overseas societies, and accords to the missionary project an interest in colonial dominion that both missionaries and imperial officials discredited. Finally, interpretive focus on missions as a locus for the construction of English identity creates a one-sided narrative in which missionaries speak into silence. The responses of missionary audiences remain unexamined, making it easy to assume that missionary claims to exclusive truth were received by people who—because of missionaries‟ alleged coercive power—had no choice but to accept them.659 However, this is far from accurate, for millions heard the Baptist gospel and ignored it, or fought it openly. Some did take an interest in the missionary message, but altered it significantly to meet local needs, creating a hybrid faith that discomfited European evangelists. Even among mission converts who sincerely adopted the missionary gospel, new Christians played an active role in evangelism, leadership, and the construction of autonomous churches in their own cultural contexts. The “most important of all reasons not to conflate or confuse Christian missions with Western colonialism rests, very self- evidently, in the essential participation, power, and presence of [indigenous] Christians,” as Robert Eric Frykenberg contends. 660 Any complete picture of Baptist missions and mission churches must account for the influence of doctrine, providential goals, and the responses—both positive and negative—of missionary hearers. Such an interpretation achieves a nuanced vision of the missionary enterprise as a complex and difficult negotiation of various mission strategies, failures and revisions, colonial suspicions,

659 “Scholars who see empire-building in the consequences of missions too easily ignore that missionary insight [that their enterprise would only survive under indigenous leadership] and negelect the considerable power which local societies possessed to deflect or selectively absorb Western influences.” Porter, Religion versus Empire, 321 660 Frykenberg, “Christians in India,” 61 222

indigenous resistance, and internal conflicts. From this tangle, churches emerged whose members viewed themselves as a unified chosen people, instruments selected to continue the extension of the divine plan. “We have begun to publish the gospel;” Krishnu-pall declared to an audience of his Hindu neighbors in 1807. “We have a church; and we administer the ordinances in this country. If this church be steadfast, and we continue in prayer, many people in this country will embrace christianity.”661

661 Periodical Accounts III, 419 223

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kelly R. Elliott received a B.A. in history from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas in 2005, M.A. in European history from Florida State University in 2007, and PhD in British history from Florida State in 2010. Her research focuses on social and religious history, particularly the interaction between Baptist missionaries and colonized peoples in the context of imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the future, she will further explore the experiences of South Asian Christians and European missionaries in South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is also interested in the role religious belief plays in creating personal, community, and national identity in Britain and the Empire.

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