CHRISTIAN LITURGY AND THE CREATION OF BRITISH SLAVE SOCIETIES, 1650-1780 By Nicholas M. Beasley Dissertation Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History August, 2006 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Professor Jane G. Landers Professor Joel Harrington Professor Kathleen Flake Professor James P. Byrd Copyright © 2006 by Nicholas M. Beasley All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During graduate school, I have enjoyed support from a variety of units within Vanderbilt University. The Department of History generously awarded me a teaching fellowship and a University Graduate Fellowship and supported my research through grants from the Weaver and Binkley Funds. Vital summer funding and new intellectual relationships came from the Vanderbilt Interdisciplinary Seminar in Social and Political Thought and the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture. My final year was supported by a generous dissertation fellowship from the Center for the Americas. Beyond Vanderbilt, I received research support from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church and a fellowship from the Episcopal Church Foundation. St. George’s Church in Nashville offered me a quiet office and much more. I am profoundly thankful for the support of these institutions and for the people who make them all that they are. That support enabled me to use a variety of research resources. I am thankful for the staff of Vanderbilt’s Central Library, especially Peter Brush, Paula Covington, Marilyn Pilley, and Jim Toplon. Among several archives, I was helped by particularly fine people at the South Carolina Historical Society, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the South Caroliniana Library, the Jamaica Archives, and the Barbados Archives. Amparo and Mark McWatt were generous hosts during my stay in Barbados, where I also benefited from the guidance of Canon Noel Titus and Karl Watson and Pedro Welch at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill. In Kingston, Geoff and Genevieve Siebengartner graciously hosted me, as did the Franciscan Sisters at Constant Spring and the United Theological College of the West Indies. I was also iii thankful for the counsel and hospitality of James Robertson of the University of the West Indies Mona. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., chair of my committee and Holland McTyeire Professor of History, has been a generous and gentle advisor. He and Jane G. Landers eased me into early America at a critical moment, a great kindness that I will always appreciate. Joel Harrington has allowed me to keep one foot in early modern Europe and in the social history of Christianity. Kathleen Flake and James Byrd have been rigorous readers and reliable guides to the historiography of American religion. I owe my professional interest in history to members of the History Department at the University of the South, particularly W. Brown Patterson, Charles R. Perry, and Susan Ridyard. I am deeply thankful for all of their guidance. My loving parents Joy M. Dixon and Robert L. Beasley encouraged my academic interests from an early age and sustained me through college and divinity school in many ways. They have been joined in that support in more recent years by wonderful in-laws in Nancy and Pinckey Irwin. I am grateful to them all. Elizabeth Irwin Beasley has forgiven me many things during my time in graduate school. She made a home for us in Nashville, endured my strange trips to Caribbean archives, and delayed her own hopes for the future so that I could pursue mine. I hope that her time is about to come. My greatest debts will always be to her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.........................................................................................vi Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: CHRISTIAN RITUAL AND THE CREATION OF BRITISH SLAVE SOCIETIES............................................................................1 II. RITUAL TIME AND SPACE IN BRITISH PLANTATION COLONIES ................16 Church Seating ...............................................................................................17 The Ritual Year ..............................................................................................40 III. DOMESTIC RITUALS: MARRIAGE AND BAPTISM IN THE PLANTATION COLONIES..............................................................................67 The Culture of Marrying .................................................................................68 Baptismal Ways..............................................................................................86 IV. THE MEANINGS OF THE EUCHARIST IN THE PLANTATION WORLD ...... 120 Metropolitan Precedents and the Political Meaning of the Eucharist.............. 121 The Social and Pastoral Meanings of the Eucharist ....................................... 131 The Material Culture of the Eucharist ........................................................... 147 V. “DEATH IS MORE BUSY IN THIS PLACE”: MORTUARY RITUAL IN THE PLANTATION COLONIES .............................................................. 163 VI. CONCLUSION: REVOLUTION, EVANGELICALISMS, AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF ANGLO-AMERICA................................................ 208 VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................ 220 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BA Barbados Archives, Black Rock, Barbados BMHS Shilstone Library, Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Barbados CCPL Charleston County Public Library, Charleston, South Carolina JA Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica NLJ National Library of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica SCDAH South Carolina Division of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina SCHS South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina SCL South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: CHRISTIAN RITUAL IN BRITISH SLAVE SOCIETIES In 1627, three years before John Winthrop set foot on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, Englishmen alighted in Barbados and began the creation of a British plantation world.1 They adapted to their new setting ably, creating a creolized English culture that celebrated metropolitan mores even as it made concessions to life in a tropical environment. That culture proved both durable and replicable. In 1655, some Barbadians sailed west across a thousand miles of sparkling Caribbean sea to join in the English conquest of Jamaica, an island 26 times the size of Barbados and of enormous economic potential. South Carolina’s roots were in Barbados’ fertile soils as well, with more than half of the earliest migrants to that continental colony, both black and white, coming from Barbados.2 In both of the younger colonies, lessons learned on the older island served settlers well as they created highly successful plantation entrepots. Growing from a common cultural hearth in Barbados, the British plantation colonies thus shared a colonial experience, even as each had their singular characteristics as well. Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina were all places where the majority of the population was made up of Africans and their descendents, most of whom were enslaved and engaged in plantation agriculture. After short periods as societies with slaves, all 1 For the founding of Barbados, see Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625-1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926); Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2 Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 73; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 111-116; but see L.H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), for a caution on ascribing too much to Barbadian influence in Carolina. 1 three became paradigmatic slave societies.3 White minorities composed of planters, merchants, and their employees profited from the labor of the enslaved and used those profits to maintain connections to London, from whence came the consumer goods, information, and colonial officials that reinforced the imperial connection. The Church of England was by law established in all three colonies, and social and political privilege was associated with membership in that church. The white minorities that controlled the export economies of these colonies focused production on sugar in the two West Indian islands and on rice in Carolina, though other products were periodically important as well. Those economies produced great wealth at higher rates than anywhere else in British America. A sugar revolution in the 1640s and 1650s brought Barbados its wealth early, making the island “the richest colony in English America” by the end of the seventeenth century.4 Its daughter colony Jamaica would easily surpass it in the eighteenth. The per capita net worth of each free white Jamaican in 1775 was an enormous ₤12,000.5 While that dwarfed the 1774 wealth for whites in the area around Charles Town in Carolina, Carolinians’ ₤2337 per head easily quadrupled the average net worth of haughty Virginians.6 The richest men in the 7 first British Empire