A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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Court ruled in 1665 that a mixed-race Christian man named Manuel was to be treated as an indentured servant rather than permanently enslaved, the legislature responded with a 1667 act stating “that the sacrament of baptism ‘doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome.’”59 An act in 1670 let stand legislation (1655 and 1658) that classified enslaved Native Americans as indentured servants, but specified that non-Christians who arrived in the colony by ship (presumably from Africa or the Caribbean) were enslaved for life.60
One of the motives for treating enslaved African Americans and indentured servants differently was the perceived danger that the two groups might unite against their common oppressors. This is in fact what happened in Virginia in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. A dispute between English settler Thomas Matthews and members of the small Doeg tribe, which was touched off by the destruction of the Doegs’ corn by Matthews’s hogs, quickly escalated as a result of two complicating factors: the presence in the region of Iroquois-speaking Susquehannocks who were probing south from their base in southern New York and a simmering dispute among settlers about the exclusive trading agreements with Native Americans held by the colony’s upper class (which less-privileged settlers considered to be a scheme to limit available land and maintain the value of large estates). Matthews’s men attacked a Susquehannock village in error, thinking that it was inhabited by Doegs. The Susquehannocks retaliated, killing approximately three hundred settlers, particularly along the Rappahannock River that marked the northern most line of settlement in Virginia at the time. Nathaniel Bacon (1647–76), who had only been in the colony since 1674 and was related by marriage to Governor William Berkeley (1606–77), blamed Berkeley for inaction. Bacon raised an army composed of indentured servants and Africans to whom he promised land, attacked the Siouan-speaking Occaneechee tribe in the southwest of the colony (which had nothing to do with the Susquehannocks), and sacked the colonial capital at Jamestown. Bacon died of disease and the rebellion soon collapsed. His followers were subdued, with twenty-three going to the gallows.61
The fear of this sort of collaboration between indentured servants and Africans led legislators to construct provisions limiting contact between groups. This was already happening before Bacon’s uprising. The Virginia legislature passed laws in 1662 setting the fine for fornication of people of different races as twice that for those of the same race. A Maryland act in 1664 spoke of interracial marriage in strongly negative terms. In 1691 Virginia specified banishment for any person who married another of a different race.62 Other legislation was designed to limit the presence of free Africans, who might be perceived as offering hope to those who were still enslaved. In 1691 Virginia banned the freeing of any enslaved person, unless provisions were also made for that person to leave the colony. In 1729 Bermuda required all free Africans and Native Americans to leave the colony.63
This effort to separate enslaved Africans from English indentured servants was the source of the linguistic convention of referring to persons of European origin as “white.” Early acts had spoken of Africans and Christian servants but beginning in Barbados in the 1650s the term “Christian servants” was replaced by “whites.” In many cases the term was paired with the designation of persons of African heritage as “blacks.”64
By the 1670s some were raising their voices against the formalization of the slave trade and the status of enslaved people that had begun a decade earlier. Merchants protested against the monopoly of the Royal African Company, not objecting to perpetual servitude but arguing that their inability to engage in the profitable market was an abridgement of their rights.65 Some clergy—particularly new arrivals from England—protested against the denial of common humanity and the resistance to evangelization of enslaved people. William Frith preached in his parish in the Barbados in 1677 that “Negroes have souls to be saved, no less than other people, and an equal right, even to be saved, to the merits of Christ.” One of the other five Church of England clergy on the island preached in a similar vein. Both he and Frith were ejected from their parishes as a result.66 Clergyman Morgan Godwyn (baptized. 1640, died between 1685 and 1709), who served in a parish in Virginia and also spent time in Barbados, raised similar objections. After returning to England he published a critique of the colonial practice (Negro’s and Indians Advocate, 1680). He advocated adoption of the Bermuda scheme of the 99-year indenture (which potentially preserved the free status of children), chided the European settlers to baptize Africans and Native Americans, and suggested that failure to evangelize and allow free religious practice to an enslaved person should result in “a present and absolute release to the said Slave for ever.”67 Some Virginia clergy were apparently not supportive of the 1691 ban on intermarriage, for the legislature thought it necessary in 1705 to adopt a further act that specified a fine of ten thousand pounds of tobacco for any clergyman who presided at a marriage of a black to a white.68
These individual protests were not capable of turning back the expanding institution of slavery. The title of a sermon that Godwyn preached in London and published in 1685—Trade Preferr’d before Religion69—did a good job of summarizing the problem. The churches in the British colonies, divided as they were into competing denominations, were no match for the economic lure of the fortunes to be made in the African slave trade.
The enslaving of Native Americans did end—though for economic and political—rather than humanitarian—reasons. The English settlements in the middle colonies initially lacked the numerical advantage that had enabled Virginia and Massachusetts colonists to dominate Native Americans and as a result opted for negotiated treaties.70 The enslaving in the Carolinas continued until colonists learned of the lethal consequences of war with Native Americans and Native Americans became convinced that sale of captives from other tribes to the English was unwise as a long-term policy.71 Perhaps most importantly, the English grew aware of the need to cultivate Native American allies against the French and Spanish.
Virginia banned the further enslavement of Native Americans in 1705. Massachusetts (1712) and Connecticut (1715) followed suit with similar legislation.72 The Yamasee War in the Carolinas (1715–17) marked the end of ended large-scale slaving there.
NOTES
1. Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011), 106–7.
2. Prior to the 1970s it was common for historians to assume that the English people had embraced an internally consistent Protestant Anglicanism at some point in the reign of Elizabeth I. James Anthony Froude argued in his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth (1856–1870), for example, that the failed invasion of the Spanish Armada convinced the English people to accept the Reformation. A. G. Dickens argued in his English Reformation (1964) that what he identified as a “balanced Anglicanism” came into being around 1600. It is now common for historians to suggest that change for a whole nation comes at a far slower pace and that English religion