19th century AD

ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly), Dec, 2000 by Youtha C. Hardman-Cromwell

Introduction

   Oh, freedom! Oh, freedom!
   Oh, freedom all over met
   When I am free!
   An' befo' I'd be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave,
   An' go home to my Lord an' be free.

   Negro Spiritual

They call it "The Devil's Den." It is located in the White Oak area of Silver Spring, Maryland, a tunnel burrowed between the sides of a horseshoe shaped bend in the nearby Paint Branch Creek. A slave blasted through solid rock to create the tunnel. His owner wanted to build a mill there, using the power of the water in the branch to run the mill. The slave risked his life to build the tunnel. In exchange he would get his freedom. The tunnel which is six feet high at it highest point is 35 feet long. The slave labored with sledge, drill, gunpowder and fuse for many months. The tunnel exists as a witness to how much one slave wanted his freedom. He sought freedom at the risk of death. He would be a freed body or a freed soul, but he would be free! ("Tunneling").

One of the finest and saddest examples of how religious faith has flourished in the midst of adversity is the story of the African slave in the Americas. Contrary to popular ideas of that day and perhaps of many of this day, the Africans did not cross the Middle Passage in the holds of slave ships and discover faith in America. They were a people of spiritual awareness and commitment in their own land, in their own tribal groups, in their own families. They brought with them a belief in an ultimate being or beings, in a god or gods. Their faith, whatever its content and expression, had its own values and its own rituals. Their African spirituality, their understanding of the sacred in African Cosmos, opened them to "deeply appreciate and existentially appropriate Christian symbols and Christian meaning" (Sobel 128).

The faith they brought with them had its own way of helping the African deal with the circumstances of life. In the whole operation of slavery, faith played its part. From allowing Africans to engage in the slave trade by capturing people from other tribes and bringing them to the coast for sale to white slave traders, to the deliberate suicidal acts of slaves both in the Middle Passage and on American soil, to the killing of their children to prevent them from being sold as slaves or separated from their parents in slavery, and to their refusal to give up religious rituals and practices even in the face of punishment from their new masters, the faith of the slaves had its influence on their ideas and actions. They drew on that faith in the midst of the adversity slavery brought into their lives as slavery tried to shape for them an identity that was not of their choosing.

Early on the slaves understood Christianity and asserted its incompatibility with slavery. Raboteau notes:

   As early as 1774 American slaves were declaring publicly and politically
   that they thought Christianity and slavery were incompatible. In that year
   the governor of Massachusetts received "The Petition of a Grate Number of
   Blacks of this Province who by divine permission are held in a state of
   slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian Country." (290)

In arguing for their freedom, these New England slaves combined the political rhetoric of the Revolution with appeals to the claims of Christian fellowship (Raboteau 291).

Because they understood this incompatibility, slaves made a distinction between the slaveholders' gospel of obedience to their masters and true Christianity. The third verse of a slave hymn expresses it this way: "Ole Satan's church is here below. Up to God's free church I hope to go. Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God!" (Brent 73).

This inward rejection of the "white man's religion" was expressed as rejection of the white man's domination. The freedmen's "distaste for moralistic preaching was directly rooted in their experience of the dichotomy between Christianity and the practice of Christian slaveholders" (Raboteau 299-300).

Jones, in "They Sought a City: The Black Church and Churchmen in the Nineteenth Century," asserts that the nineteenth-century African American church pursued a two-pronged dream: the New Jerusalem and the reality of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in the nation's life (256-57).

Gray explains this double-pronged urge for freedom in this way:

   Their identification with the history of Israel and Jesus' passion afforded
   them ready tools for coming to terms with the hardness of life [...]. What
   is important to note is the fact that they were not immobilized by their
   situation. On the contrary [...] they engaged in and advocated an active
   life. The struggle the ministers urged was not only against Satan. Their
   experiences with God, as well as their reading of the Bible, had taught
   them that they were God's children. Having heard, and experienced, the
   liberating affirmation of their personhood, they felt obliged to struggle
   against those conditions that were not consonant with their experiences. In
   this way, resistance become [sic] all important; resisting the devil and
   resisting oppression. (216-17)