Ritual time in British Plantation Colonies, 1650-1780

Church History, Sept, 2007 by Nicholas M. Beasley

Slaves and servants received gifts from their owners and employers on these holidays. Eliza Pinckney insisted to her sons' guardian in England that the boys "should make your Servants some acknowledgement for their trouble at holi-day times-what you think proper. It is what they always did to our own." That included "Whitsuntide [when] they used to make Mrs. Greene a present of a guinea for a pound of tea." (116) These holy days' related commercial importance for city merchants is revealed by the South Carolina Gazette heading for May 27, 1751: "ADVERTISEMENTS. WHITSUN-MONDAY, 1751." (117) Carolinians and others dated events in their lives around the great days of the Christian year, as when a Carolina medical student dated his departure "Good Friday April 1st 1768," while his arrival in Portsmouth was "on the following Whit-Sunday." (118) An aged father told his son that it was on "the Eve of Whitsunday 1759" that "I married your mother" in Jamaica. (119) The Christian year was thus built into the minds of many in the plantation colonies.

IV. THE DAILY OFFICE AND MINOR FEASTS

Sunday and the great feasts were hardly the only days for worship in the colonial world. Unnoticed by the many historians who have described the irreligion of the plantation colonies was a tradition of weekday corporate prayer. In 1717, public prayers were read in St. Michael's church in Bridgetown "every Day, twice every Holiday and Saturday." (120) In the 1720s, services there were "perform'd every morn, at which we have a numerous Congregation." (121) This duty likely fell to the curate, a junior clergyman employed by the rector. In 1732, during a dispute with his vestry, the rector of the same parish was "unwilling the Parish shd be depriv'd of daily Prayers" and paid the curate himself. (122) In Speightstown's St. Peter's church further up the leeward coast, there was "divine Service every morning between the hours of eight and nine [with] a considerable number of constant attendants." The minister provided catechetical instruction "on Tuesdays after the Second Lesson at Morning Prayer." (123) St. Philip's in Carolina held prayers every Wednesday and Friday, with up to fifty persons in attendance. (124) Forty years later that pattern held true at St. Philip's and the newer Charles Town parish of St. Michael, both of which offered services "with Great Decency and Order: both on Holidays and Week Days." (125) Port Royal in Jamaica also held services every Wednesday and Friday, but the minister admitted that the congregation was thin compared to Sunday worship. (126) The same schedule and result were to be found in Kingston parish. (127) When the Duke of Portland was governor of Jamaica, his domestic chaplain "read prayers every Morning in his Grace's family and in a Chapel in Spanish Town (built by Sir Wm. Beiston some time Gover. of this Island) every afternoon and Preach[ed] a Sermon Every Thursday in the sd Chapel." (128) The rector of St. Catherine's seems to have led daily morning prayer in the same chapel.(129) While churches in the rural plantation parishes were unlikely to be open during the week, a tradition of weekday prayer was to be found in the great port cities. These weekday corporate prayers supplemented the private devotions of families, so difficult to recover from the few surviving diaries and personal papers of the plantation colonies. (130)