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Eighteenth-Century Writers of Color and the First Great Awakening. (2014) Directed by Dr PISANO, ANDREW MICHAEL, Ph.D. “To Speak For Myself”: Eighteenth-Century Writers of Color and the First Great Awakening. (2014) Directed by Dr. Karen Weyler, 197 pp. This dissertation contends that the first religious Great Awakening of the eighteenth century provided colonial American and early Republic writers of color with an ideological catalyst that helped them define themselves and their communities’ sense of pride, purpose, and continuance. My project examines a literate group of South Carolina slaves, free black itinerant preacher John Marrant, and Mohegan minister Samson Occom. By considering how these marginalized writers and revivalists shaped and inspired textual forms of representation, I expand the boundaries of early Black Atlantic literary studies and understandings of Mohegan resistance to colonial religious and cultural surveillance. Highlighting these writers’ adaption of and engagement with the cultural norms and literary genres of the Great Awakening and New Light Stir further nuances our knowledge of how oppressed writers of color asserted themselves as vital, imaginative agents of social justice. “TO SPEAK FOR MYSELF”: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS OF COLOR AND THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING by Andrew Michael Pisano A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2014 Approved by _______________________________ Committee Chair © 2014 Andrew Michael Pisano To my wife, Kristina Pisano Your continual love, faith, and support saw me through ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair __________________________________ Karen Weyler Committee Members __________________________________ Mark Rifkin __________________________________ Alexandra Moore ___________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee members: Dr. Karen Weyler for devoting countless hours to my writing, encouraging me to submit my work for publication, and for guiding me through various professional landscapes. I could not ask for a better mentor; Dr. Mark Rifkin for continually challenging me to be a more rigorous thinker and writer; and Dr. Alexandra Moore for offering valuable perspectives on the development and completion of my project. Thanks are due to my friend and colleague Scott Gibson. His overall support of my project and feedback on several early drafts of these chapters was invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, grandparents, and in-laws for their unshakable love and faith in my work over these many years. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................1 II. THE EMERGENCE OF BLACK LITERARY AGENCY IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD .................................................................................30 III. THE SEVERITY OF SILENCE: THE AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF JOHN MARRANT’S JOURNAL ................................70 IV. “MY BROKEN HINTS TO APPEAR IN THE WORD”: SAMSON OCCOM’S A SERMON, PREACHED AT THE EXECUTION OF MOSES PAUL, AN INDIAN AND THE DISCURSIVE FORMATION OF NATIVE SOLIDARITY ............................................122 V. CONCLUSION...............................................................................................174 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................181 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION From 1734 to 1745, a religious fervor moved across the American colonies. Since the 1840s, historians and religious scholars have referred to this spiritual movement as the First Great Awakening.1 The revivals of the 1730s and 40s are most notable to scholars because they inspired the emergence of a transatlantic cultural matrix that joined together religiosity, print culture, and audience participation (Lambert, “Pedlar” 9).2 Worshippers from Scotland, Wales, and Britain, to Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston found themselves part of an ongoing debate over expressions of Protestant Christianity.3 By 1737, colonial American Calvinist Christianity had fractured into two dominant groups: New Lights and Old Lights. There were, of course, moderates who chose to embrace what they perceived to be the most reasonable and practical of the two groups; however, historians are clear on the point that there was a split. New Lights argued that all are welcome, regardless of race, sex, or class, in worshipping Christ as long as they publicly profess a new birth in Christ. The profession of one’s new birth encouraged an emotive experience: worshipers cried out, collapsed to the ground, sang exuberantly in unison, and even fell into trances. For clergy and laypeople alike, worship in fields was as sacred as churches. But perhaps most controversial, New Lights discouraged rigid hierarchies in religious communities, instead opting for open participation among worshippers and clergy alike.4 For many communities throughout 1 the Atlantic world, such disregard for religious authority challenged firmly entrenched social norms by proposing an equal spiritual opportunity for impoverished whites, blacks, and Native peoples. To this point, scholarship on the Awakening considers, in some degree, the transformative nature of the revivals on black and Native communities. However, with little exception, discussions of the Awakening address writers of color in passing reference.5 My project seeks to remedy these exclusions. This dissertation takes up the perspective of nonwhite writers who were inspired by the egalitarian impulses of the Great Awakening. My project reframes discussions of the Awakening by examining the movement as a catalyst for black and Native writers to assert their emergence as socially conscious subjects. I challenge the scholarship that glosses over black and Native writers' skillful understanding and application of rhetorical and genre conventions by elucidating how these writers skillfully adopt revivalist norms and literary conventions as testaments of political and philosophical resistance. Specifically, I examine South Carolina planter elite Jonathan Bryan’s slaves as emergent authorial agents via the publication of Anne Dutton’s A Letter to the Believing Negros, Lately Converted in America (1742); black itinerant preacher John Marrant’s missionary account, The Journal of the Rev. John Marrant (1791); and Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772). These authors and texts refracted the ideas of a white-dominated Awakening as a means of publicly affirming their individual and communal integrity. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were exemplary figures of the Great Awakening generally and the New Light revivals specifically. Edwards and Whitefield 2 found much success in converting typically marginalized groups of peoples, such as the youth, women, blacks, and Native peoples. Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) incited the First Great Awakening’s transatlantic print campaign and touched off the New Light revivals. Edwards argues that the religious stirrings in and around Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733-34 were unique and that the actions taking place in his community were the work of God. Edwards attempted to prove his argument in several ways; but, perhaps his most precise rationale is his underscoring of both the community’s distance from the shifting ideas of urban spaces and the diversifying of worshippers in attendance: young and old, rich and poor, black and native, all sought conversion. In one example, Edwards observes: there are also “several Negroes, that from what was seen in them then, and what is discernible in them since, appear to have been truly born again in the late remarkable season” (66). Writing of his fellow Northampton residents, Edwards observes that “they have been preserved the freest by far, of any of the country, from error and variety of sects and opinions. Our being so far within the land […] we have not been so much corrupted with vice, as most other parts” (57). For Edwards, the religious conversions taking place in Northampton cannot be attributed to the passing trends of religious fervor often found in cities or ports; rather, they are divinely inspired. Edwards’s Faithful Narrative legitimized the mass spiritual awakenings throughout the British Atlantic world with its religious zeal and reliance on recognizable rhetorical moves. The account conveys several conversion narratives of younger people, a common practice for the religious writings of the day. Since Edwards’s maternal 3 grandfather, Solomon Stoddard’s own evangelicalism led to many “soul harvests” from 1679-1718, Northampton had seen its fair share of religious fervor. However, by the time Edwards stepped to the pulpit in 1729, he had “inherited a church socially fractured and in spiritual decline” (Gura, 48, 62). Much of this had to do with dissenting opinions between Stoddard’s open-door policy for church membership and Cotton Mather’s more regulated, scrutinizing methods in the Boston area. Clearly new generations of worshippers were dismayed or, at the very least, disaffected by such theological in- fighting. Edwards observes as
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