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The Racial Politics of Resurrection in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World

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The Racial Politics of Resurrection in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World christopher trigg Nanyang Technological University, Singapore The Racial Politics of Resurrection in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World Abstract: This essay examines the impact of the eighteenth century’s developing rheto- ric of racial difference on Protestant attitudes toward the religious salvation of Afri- cans across the Atlantic world. As English colonies passed legislation that widened the legal and social gap between blacks and whites, missionaries and theologians called for more robust and wide- ranging efforts to evangelize African men and women. I show how speculation into the fate of bodies of color in the afterlife helped some Protestant authors navigate this apparently contradictory situation. Reading the work of two Massachusetts puritans (Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather), and one Connecticut Anglican associated with the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (John Beach), I demonstrate that the fine details of these writers’ eschatologi- cal and millennial schemes often belied their overt insistence that ethnic distinctions would be entirely transcended in the world to come. Each suggested, in his own way, that it was impossible to imagine that a resurrected body could be black, thereby underlining the subordinate status of Christians of color during mortal life. Keywords: resurrection, afterlife, millennialism, religious conversion, African Americans, slavery, Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall On April 3, 1711, Samuel Sewall had dinner with his fellow justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court. He noted in his diary that the com- pany “[s]pake much of Negroes” that day (2: 305). In the course of their dis- cussion, Sewall raised the problem of whether Africans “should be white after the Resurrection,” prompting a vigorous debate at the table. John Bolt maintained that the question was inherently “absurd, because the [resur- rected] body” would be translucent, and therefore “void of all Colour.” Sewall retorted that Bolt “spake as if it [the resurrected body] should be a Spirit,” reminding him of the risen Christ’s words to his disciples in the Gospel of Luke: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke { 47 48 } eArLY AMERICAN LiterAtURE: VoLUMe 55, NUMBer 1 24: 39). Sewall’s diary entry on the conversation ultimately abstains from offering a firm conclusion on the whitening of resurrected black saints, although it does suggest that he considered it a serious possibility. Twelve years later, Sewall’s son Joseph preached a sermon that touched on the same idea. In April 1723, Boston was panicking over a series of arsons that had begun on March 30 and would continue for several weeks. Follow- ing a second fire three days later, “in Leverett’s Lane[,] near the Quaker’s Meeting House,” the Boston News Letter reported that “a Negro Man Ser- vant” had confessed to starting the blaze (4 Apr. 1723, qtd. in Hutchins). More fires followed, including one on April 13 that very nearly spread to “the Wooden part of Judge Sewall’s dwelling House” (Boston Gazette, 15 Apr. 1723, qtd. in Hutchins). Enslaved men were assumed to be behind these further incidents, and Samuel Sewall himself counseled Governor William Dummer to advertise a reward for information leading to the apprehension of those responsible (Hutchins). It was in this context that Joseph’s homily addressed the African inhabitants of the city, encouraging them to confess to the crimes or to identify the perpetrators. As Zachary Hutchins observes, Sewall linked this cooperation in the investigation to the remission of sins and a prospective setting aside of the “burdens” of their “black bodies.” “The terms of forgiveness,” Hutchins continues, “are framed by Sewall in the racialized language of Isaiah 1:18—‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’” The language of Sewall’s sermon stressed that accepting Dum- mer’s offer would mean receiving enough money to purchase one’s free- dom. Hutchins explains that this prize is figured as a kind of “social ascen- sion” or resurrection: by quoting Philippians 3:21 Sewall suggests that the African servant can exchange the “vile body” of the enslaved for the “glori- ous body” of the free man. The prospect of a literal blanching after death, I would add, was also in play. These two episodes in the history of the Sewalls (a family actively in- volved in the slave trade) raise an interesting question, bringing together eschatology, soteriology, and the then still emergent category of racial dif- ference. Did eighteenth- century Protestants believe that ethnic identity would be carried over into the world to come? In the early modern era, Christian apologists had highlighted pagan beliefs about life after death in order to defend their conviction that all humankind shared a common The Racial Politics of Resurrection { 49 origin. Horrified by Isaac La Peyrère’s proposal that non-European and non- Semitic nations were descended from men and women who had lived before Adam and Eve, orthodox theologians claimed that pagan super- stitions regarding resurrection, reincarnation, and the transmigration of souls were corrupted forms of ancient Jewish doctrines.1 Through the 1600s, then, the concept of the afterlife was more closely linked to under- lying similarities between peoples than to divergences between them.2 By the 1690s, however, Europeans and Euro-Americans were finding it in- creasingly advantageous to draw distinctions between themselves and other peoples. This change was reflected in debates over postmortem exis- tence. As skin tone gradually became an increasingly important marker of racial difference, some scientists and theologians came to the same conclu- sion as Joseph Sewall: blackness was an impediment and disfiguration that could not be permitted to enter heaven. Other thinkers adopted positions comparable to John Bolt’s, emphasizing the brightness or transparency of all resurrected bodies as a means of downplaying the significance of ethnic distinction in the next life. Later in the century, during the age of revolu- tions, African American spiritual leaders would develop this position to further their own ends. Since skin color had no bearing on salvation, they insisted, blackness should not be viewed as a marker of inferiority.3 This essay will explore the dynamic disclosed by this last example. Eighteenth- century debates about the resurrection of men and women of African descent, I will argue, were closely connected to the increasingly vexing problem of their social and political status in the present dispen- sation. Although Protestant conceptions of the millennium and the after- life were already bound up with assumptions of European cultural superi- ority, two new developments combined to intensify this association. First, around the turn of the century, the colonies of the British Atlantic began to codify racial distinctions more strictly. In Virginia, the marriage of English to African had been illegal since 1662, but a 1705 statute, An Act concern- ing Servants and Slaves, hardened the distinction between the two groups by stipulating that unlike their “christian white” counterparts, African and Native American servants were subject to perpetual, heritable enslavement, as well as harsher disciplinary measures (Henning 450). As the numbers of enslaved men and women in North America and the Caribbean con- tinued to increase, other jurisdictions followed Virginia’s lead in passing legislation that not only delineated the terms of slavery but also described 50 } eArLY AMERICAN LiterAtURE: VoLUMe 55, NUMBer 1 a widening gap between Africans and Euro-Americans in general. In New England this legal division was not as broad as it was farther south—both free and enslaved Africans could give evidence against white people in court, for example (Greene 179). The small number of slaves in the North meant that they and their enslavers “were densely enmeshed in the over- lapping relationships that formed local communities” (Sweet 62). Never- theless, slavery there was still characterized by the principle described by Orlando Patterson as “social death”—although they were present within the body politic, enslaved people were not full members of it, being barred from serving in the militia and from marrying whites (Sweet 63). This ex- clusion extended to the grave—Africans were usually buried in a “separate section of [a town’s] burial ground,” and in some places this proviso was legally compulsory (Jordan 132). The second key context for my investigation cut across this growing separation of the races, without necessarily seeking to counteract it. As the eighteenth century progressed, both Anglicans and dissenters argued that English Protestants should take the conversion of Africans more seriously. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in London in 1701, sent missionaries across British North America and the Caribbean to bring enslaved people into the Church of England. In New England, meanwhile, a new generation of ministers led by Cotton Mather challenged the long-standing complacency about the small number of African church members. The efforts of each of these parties met with resistance, as owners worried that the baptism and conversion of their human chattel would be taken as grounds for emancipation. As Heather Kopelson and Rebecca Goetz have shown, enslaved people across the colonies did indeed seek to take advantage of the ambiguity that their baptism created by petitioning civil and religious authorities for their free- dom. While they could appeal to the Protestant conviction that all Chris- tians were equal members of the collective “body of Christ” (Kopelson 7), this claim had to compete against the widely held belief that Africans (as well as Native Americans) were constitutionally predisposed to be imper- vious to the spiritual and social transformation that accompanied true conversion and were therefore trapped within a “hereditary heathenism” (Goetz 139).
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