Jon J. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in
North Carolina, 1763-1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998. 342 pp.
In this carefully-researched book, Jon Sensbach explores a subject
that is at once unusual and timely. It is unusual in that it concerns a
population that has been heretofore overlooked or ignored in African
American religion--the black Moravians. It is timely because it engages
some of the most fashionable themes in Southern history, such as race,
culture, and religion, using a fresh and nuanced approach.
"Indeed, as Sensbach shows, they resolved
their ambivalence over the questionable morality of purchasing human
property by drawing lots, securing a positive sign from God that He would
bless their endeavors."
The Renewed Unity of Brethren, more commonly known as the
Moravians, were a sect of radical German pietists who settled in the
Piedmont of North Carolina in 1753 with the hopes of creating a
self-sufficient religious enclave. The Moravians were well acquainted with
the harsh realities of human servitude--they had organized one of the
earliest Protestant missions to Africans in the Caribbean--and yet their
sympathies toward the spiritual plight of slaves did not automatically
confer an abolitionist stance. Indeed, as Sensbach shows, they resolved
their ambivalence over the questionable morality of purchasing human
property by drawing lots, securing a positive sign from God that He would
bless their endeavors. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the
Moravian church in North Carolina would corporately acquire a small number
of bondspersons as hired hands, construction workers, livestock managers,
craftspersons, and small-scale farmers. Carving out a niche in the colonial
frontier, the Moravians forged settlements in which blacks and whites,
slaves and freedpersons existed in a kind of "rough social parity."(63) Yet
over time, social and racial distinctions became more fixed as the
community grew, and white Moravians were faced with the dilemma of an
increasing population of blacks in their midst, not only as unfree
laborers, but as fellow Christians.
In examining the lives of those Africans and African Americans who
were immersed in the web of spiritual, familial and economic relations that
structured this interracial community, Sensbach situates his study within
the context of the shifting configurations of race and slavery between the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He utilizes a vast
compilation of documents that includes diaries, church minutes and
conference proceedings from the Moravian archives in North Carolina, as
well as a rare collection of short memoirs called Lebenslauf, third-person
autobiographical testimonies that were solicited from all converts.
Sensbach is most successful when he relates the life-histories of his
Afro-Moravian subjects by creating a sub-narrative with these sources, as
he does in a chapter that follows an African soldier who is taken captive
as a slave to the French West Indies, Virginia, and eventually to North
Carolina in the 1770s. At the heart of his study, Sensbach details the
motives and methods by which African Americans entered into the redeemed
Christian community, a process that was replicated in biracial Protestant
congregations throughout the South. Furthermore, he highlights dimensions
of the cultural and religious assimilation of Africans and
African-Americans as they adopted the language, beliefs and values of their
German-Moravian brethren. Most intriguing is Sensbach's treatment of
potential areas of black-white religious syncretism, the African-based
practices and traditions which may have facilitated the slaves' embrace of
Moravian Christianity.
The Moravian church offered black members an opportunity to form
enhanced kinship networks that allowed for greater family cohesion, as well
as the protection of converted spouses and their children from sale and
forced separation. Church rituals, also, afforded Afro-Moravians a measure
of equality in the spiritual arena which offset their social subordination.
Sensbach characterizes the Moravians' relationship to African Americans as
"fraternalistic;" they were "nominal spiritual equals" who each "owed
allegiance to a higher authority, Christ." (120) Within the bounds of their
spiritual association, at least for a time, black and white church members
existed upon common ground. Much would change, however, with the third
generation of Moravians in the nineteenth century, who were committed to
acquiring even greater numbers of slaves, money, and land. As the region
shifted to a more labor-intensive plantation economy, work relations became
more stratified, racial hierarchies became more inflexible, and the
relative egalitarianism that had characterized black and white religious
life in the earlier period eroded.
A Separate Canaan is a study that will reward general readers in
American religious history. Jon Sensbach provides us with a glimpse into
the world in which Africans and African Americans and German immigrants in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived, worked, worshiped, and
struggled together to realize their respective visions of religious freedom
and spiritual equality. Ultimately, the failure of both groups to effect
those visions was a sad consequence of both the inevitable expansion of
racial slavery, and the limits of Christian fellowship.
