Atlantic Faiths: Restriction and Toleration

           Through the articles, it is quite apparent there were restrictions concerning religious freedom in the Atlantic World – such as the forced removal of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula or the forced baptism of newly arrived slaves in the New World.  Even though Christianity was forced upon various peoples in the Atlantic, many still retained their traditional beliefs secretly while adhering to a public Christian appearance.  Due to the demanding economy of the Atlantic and the lack of state church power in the New World, there were various religious leniencies within the Christian faith – such as African Christianity and the port Jews in Brazil.  As a result, an outward Christian identity proved paramount, while what the individual practiced privately was of less importance.

            Sultana Afroz attempts to make the argument that the Baptist Rebellion of 1831-1832 in Jamaica was actually a jihad influenced by slaves who practiced Islam secretly.  As noted by Afroz, 56.8% of Jamaican slaves came from Muslim areas (Afroz, 228).  Even though the slaves were members of Christian churches, many retained their Islamic faith.  Jamaican slaves that adopted Christianity done so to, “avoid confrontation and punishments from the plantation owners and the church (Afroz, 231).  Thus, African slaves often adopted Christianity from their masters in order to assimilate, avoid punishment, and fit into their new environment.  In essence, the Atlantic World proved to offer no alternatives to a Christian identity publicly. 

            John K. Thornton discusses the advent of African Christianity in the New World and in Africa, which blended African and Christian religious themes.  Various papal bulls demanded slaves to be instructed in Christianity after their purchase (Thornton, 269).  African Christianity typically paired African gods with Christian saints –an effort that missionaries eventually adopted so that Christianity appeared less foreign to their future converts.  Once the Atlantic slave trade increased, African Christians – not the clergy - taught African slaves how to retain their traditional beliefs, but to also exhibit the identity of a Christian.  Even though African Christianity was far from orthodox, it was accepted in Africa, the New World, and by the Church (Thornton, 266).  In the New World, African slaves that partook in acts that were deemed “fetishisms” were often punished such as nocturnal dancing (Thornton, 277).  Thus, even though variants of Christianity such as African Christianity were accepted in the New World, outward acts considered foreign such as nocturnal dancing were not tolerated.

            Finally, Wim Klooster discusses Jews who began to create their own communities along the ports of the Atlantic, so that their trading networks allowed economic and religious benefits.  Jews were forced to leave the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies or to convert to Christianity after the Alhambra Decree. Some Jews took a Christian identity to retain their homes and businesses, but secretly continued to adhere to Judaism.  Jews who fled to Amsterdam retained a strong religious and economic relationship with the crypto-Jews of the New World colonies.  Once the Jews in the New World proved to be successful economically, the Spanish and Portuguese became suspicious of the special relationship between Brazil and Amsterdam.  In response, the Dutch invaded Brazil and overall allowed religious toleration of the Jews because they proved to be, “indispensable to the colony” economically (Klooster, 137).  This is evidence of religious toleration in the Atlantic where the rules of the state church were not enforced as vigorously in the colonies as they were in the Old World.

              In all, there were religious restrictions in the Atlantic such as the forced baptism of slaves, but there was also toleration in the New World as exhibited by the port Jews - at least in comparison to the Old World where state churches were very powerful.  The lack of state church power in the American colonies allowed individuals to adopt a Christian public identity in order to assimilate or fit into their new environment, but to still practice their traditional religion secretly.

           

Harry Washington

In Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850, Cassandra Pybus discusses the story of Henry “Harry” Washington.  Harry Washington was a slave of George Washington who sought refuge behind British lines during the Revolutionary War.  After his service to the British Crown, Harry embarked on a transatlantic journey around the Atlantic World to attain his own sense of independence and freedom from the plantation slave society in Virginia.  Unfortunately, Harry Washington and his fellow runaway slaves found that their promise of freedom and independence would remain ultimately unfulfilled.  Harry Washington’s account and Richard Price’s discussion of the Saramaka Maroons are similar in their process of creolization – or cultural change.  The Saramaka Maroons were runaway slaves that wished to escape slave society and used their general African ancestry to form a community that was unique, but still retained New World concepts of culture – all characteristics that Harry Washington and his group of runaway slaves exhibited. 

George Washington often spoke about the tyranny of the British Crown over the American colonies and his desire for independence and political freedom in his home on Mount Vernon.  Harry Washington, his slave, also desired to discard the tyranny of slavery.  Thus, “As the king was now Washington’s enemy, it was to His Majesty that Harry should entrust his aspirations for freedom” (Racine, 103).  Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, invited runaway slaves to join his regiment with the promise of freedom for their loyalty to the British Crown.  Harry Washington joined Dunmore’s black regiment in a non-combatant support position in the Black Pioneers (Racine, 105).  As noted by Richard Price, the Saramaka Maroons were runaway slaves that resided in Suriname or French Guiana in South America.  The goal of Harry Washington and the Saramaka Maroons were essentially freedom, but the means in which they strove to acquire it were different according to their respective time period and surrounding world events.

After the war, negotiations commenced between the British Crown and the newly independent American colonies – with an uncertain future for the runaway slaves.  Harry Washington, along with other runaway slaves that served for the British Crown in the war, settled in British New York where they formed unique communities.   “Whether they lived in barracks or in the canvas town of the burned-out districts on Manhattan, the black allies of the British formed a community, bound together by the struggle to survive and by forms of cultural expression that reached back to an African past” (Racine, 106).  The runaway slaves found that their common African past served as a solid foundation for the newly formed community in British New York as it did for the Saramaka Maroons (Price, 518). 

Once England had officially granted independence to the American colonies, the question of how to upkeep former promises of freedom to the runaway slaves came to the forefront.  The Treaty of Paris 1783 had prohibited the British Crown from, “carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American Inhabitants” (Racine, 107).  The former slave owners arrived in New York to reclaim their runaway slaves through coercion or kidnapping.  The Maroons also struggled to retain their community, “Seeking refuge in a harsh and hostile environment, they were faced with the task of creating a whole new society and culture even as they were being relentlessly pursued by heavily armed colonial troops bent on the destruction of their communities” (Price, 517).  The runaway slaves pressed the British authorities to keep their promises and protect them from their former masters, in which the British assured they would keep their moral obligation.  

Harry Washington went on a British ship with almost 400 other Africans to Birchtown, Nova Scotia in which the climate proved to be inhospitable.  The black settlers found that their promises of land grants were not fulfilled and that tensions between the white settlers were increasingly strained due to widespread poverty.  Once the prospects proved dim, Harry Washington and many other black settlers took a ship to West Africa to settle in Sierra Leone.  In Sierra Leone, the black settlers once again found their promises unfulfilled as in Nova Scotia.  Conflicts with the company that financed the land grants in Sierra Leone forced some black settlers such as Harry to runaway once again and form their own camp in which they formed their own system of politics.  The runaway black settlers were hunted down by the Sierra Leone Company to pay their debts where they were executed, forced into slavery, or banished from the colony.  Harry was banished from the colony and his experience of hardship is emulated through the words of Price describing the fortunes and misfortunes of the Maroons, “creolization involved rupture and loss, creativity and transformation, and celebration as well as silencing of cultural continuities and discontinuities.”

 Overall, the account of Harry Washington who was a runaway slave and the account of the Saramaka Maroons are very similar despite different environments and political situations.  The Saramaka Maroons simply wished to attain independence from slave society and form their own community.  Harry Washington and the American runaway slaves desired freedom as well, but extended their definition of freedom to include political rights due to the influence of the American Revolutionary War.  Through their identity of runaway slaves that used a common African past to form unique communities which emulated New World concepts – Harry Washington and the Saramaka Maroons revolved around Price’s concept of creolization and cultural change.

Atlantic Communities

            In the Atlantic World, parallels are naturally drawn between the growth in Atlantic communities and the Atlantic slave trade.  Most Atlantic communities were located near major slave ports and were thus directly affected by conditions in Africa and the slave trade.  However, the Atlantic World and its communities did not necessarily grow solely because of the slave trade itself – forces behind the slave trade caused the growth in these communities.  Such influences as local competition in the global economy along with ideals of creating a distinct social identity where boundaries of race and culture became mixed were a driving force in the Atlantic communities.  Whether in Georgia or along the Slave Coast, the people of these Atlantic communities desired to create their own distinct identity.

Bristol attempted to keep a distinct financial identity in the Atlantic as a major slave port in Britain.  Even though its financial primacy was relatively short, Bristol made significant contributions to the Atlantic slave trade.  Its contribution and impact on the slave trade is quite apparent as well as its dependency on the slave trade financially, “For some, indeed, the city’s involvement in slave trafficking in the eighteenth century is synonymous with its golden age, when the city became the metropolis of the west and was a major importer, refiner and consumer of slave-grown American sugar and tobacco” (Richardson, 35).  In order to keep its share in the Atlantic slave trade, Bristol was constantly in competition with its local rivals in Liverpool and London to increase productivity and shorten voyage length to Africa and the New World (Richardson, 42). 

The communities of the Slave Coast became part of the wider Atlantic World through its participation in the slave trade which resulted in a blending of European and African customs.  As Bristol had struggled to retain financial dominance in the slave trade, so too did the slave ports named Ouidah and Lagos along the Slave Coast due to local events such as wars.  Europeans, especially the Portuguese, took advantage of African states that were politically weak which resulted in the spread of Christianity along the Slave Coast.  Europeans married Africans and their families formed a distinct identity along the Slave Coast in which they were not either entirely African or European (Law and Mann, 327-328).  Before the abolition of slavery, there were many European settlements along the Slave Coast – Portuguese, British, and French.  Once the slave trade was abolished, however, the Portuguese community dominated on the Slave Coast.  British and French merchants retreated from the area and essentially had ceased its trade with the area.  People on the Slave Coast began to self-identify themselves different from their neighbors, but retained their special connection with Brazil during the Atlantic slave trade.

In Minas Gerais, African slaves and free blacks who were transported to Brazil through the slave trade desired to form a distinctive identity of community and family in the New World.  The African slaves and free blacks were able to achieve this through the fraternity known as the Our Lady of the Rosary which blended Portuguese and African traditions of religion.  The article’s author, Kiddy, poses the question why slaves and free blacks would join an institution that was European in origin.  According to Kiddy, Our Lady of the Rosary did not make the slaves or free blacks social equals to the Europeans, but it did allow them onto the social playing field (Kiddy, 48).  Africans experienced a sense of “social death” when they arrived in the New World – being cut off from their sense of family and community.  The fraternity allowed the Africans to incorporate and assimilate into the culture of the New World while still creating a sense of resistance among the community to have a distinct ethnic identity through their time of oppression (Kiddy, 55).

The Trustees of Georgia also wished to create a distinct identity in the New World through moral reform and creating the ideal colony.  The Trustees wished to reform and elevate the lower classes of society through physical labor with an emphasis on morals.  The Trustees are often criticized for being overly idealistic, but their efforts created a distinct community in the Atlantic World.  For instance, to elevate the lower class, slavery was banned in hopes of securing employment for the lower classes so that they could compete within the world economy.  The settlers of Georgia, however, often disagreed with the ban on African slavery by declaring whites were naturally unfit to withstand the harsh climate and labor. Many settlers also contended that the British Empire, including Georgia, could not survive and compete with its rivals without slavery.  As Spady states, “The main consequence of not using the correct racial body for labor in Georgia was that Georgian exports were not as competitive with goods exported from South Carolina as they might have otherwise been” (Spady, 241).  Even so, the Trustees desired to make Georgia an ideal colony with a distinctive moral character, “Colonials defined their identity partly by what they would not allow it to become” (Spady, 257).  Once the ban on slavery was lifted in Georgia, however, the Trustees focused their efforts of reform on orphanages in which emphasis was placed on community identity.

Overall, the Atlantic was a driving force behind the growth in the Atlantic communities.  Local competition within the global economy which depended on the slave trade allowed massive financial gains in Bristol and the Slave Coast, but also caused concerns with the social aspects of slavery in Minas Gerais and Georgia.  Even though the Atlantic communities grew in very different ways, they all strove to attain a distinct identity and a feeling of belonging in a demanding global economy.

The Sugar Revolution and Involuntary Migration

Richardson describes the Atlantic slave trade as one of many types of involuntary migration in which he elaborates on Old World traditions of indentured servitude, serfdom, and even slavery.  The Atlantic slave trade, however, was distinct from Old World forms of involuntary migrations because of its scale, mortality, and obvious racial bias (Richardson, 581).  Before the advent of sugar plantations in the New World, the economic situation in British North America and Spanish South America were quite different.  At the start of the Age of Discovery, Spain was able to mine for gold and silver in South America while the British struggled to find a major export to sell to Europe (Elliot, 92).  It is also important to note that those that migrated to South America done so in search of profit from the supposed riches in the New World while the majority of those that populated North America done so to settle and form a new home. 

In the 16^th century, once the “sugar revolution” in the New World began, the economic situation in the Americas changed with labor in high demand to work the expanding sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  There was a large population of indigenous peoples in South America – which led to Spain experimenting with the ideal that the natives would be the laborers at the mines and on the sugar plantations.  This proved ineffective as many of the natives were killed by disease. In 1542, the Spanish Crown had ruled that the indigenous peoples were not to be enslaved since they were by extension subjects of the Spanish Crown.  Other attempts were made to accommodate the growing demand for labor on the sugar plantations – but none were satisfactory.  British North America invested in tobacco and sugar plantations in the Caribbean as well – but due to a low native population in comparison to South America, it needed a sustainable labor supply as well (Elliot, 104). 

As noted by Richardson, slavery was already a long established practice in the Old World - so to expand slavery to the Caribbean seemed to be a natural progression.  “In the Old World, plantations of sugar were often identified with African slavery especially in the Middle East and Mediterranean, until it moved to Brazil and the Caribbean Islands” (Richardson, 571).  Africa had a history of enslavement often after war raids in which it was an accepted form of international commerce whether it was for economic or political gains (Richardson, 572).  After 1700, Europe began to discredit the idea of enslaving its own people while supporting the use of African labor on the sugar plantations.  At the time, African slavery appeared to be the most logical and obvious choice to supply labor to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  The Atlantic slave trade proved to be devastating to many African societies, while for others it was a profitable venture to supply slaves for the sugar plantations in the Americas.

According to Richardson, the need for slaves never went away even in the Old World, “The pace of involuntary displacement of people did not apparently slow down, therefore, though its location and direction evidently changed” (Richardson, 571).  According to Richardson an estimated 80% of the slaves in Africa in the Atlantic slave trade from 1500-1800 were sent to work on the sugar plantations (Richardson, 580).  As the sugar plantations expanded, the demand for replacement slaves was even higher as the life expectancy for the slaves was dim.  It was believed by the West Indian planters that buying a new slave or replacement slave from Africa would be cheaper than producing them locally (Curtin, 117).  Even though Richardson is able to draw parallels to the Atlantic slave trade in the Old World, the severity, scale, and high mortality makes it distinctive to its comparisons.  The sugar plantations and African slavery in the New World provided an environment in which the African slave was seen as disposable and replaceable, while in the Old World slavery was a constant practice.  Overall, the “sugar revolution” brought an extraordinary demand for labor in which the native population of the Americas was unable to meet – which led to the expansion of African slavery in the New World which took a distinctive nature that even today Africa appears to be feeling the effects of.