Rebecca's revival: creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic world 9780674016897, 9780674022577, 9780674043459

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JON FF. SENSBACH sbtnrntnihtnnting/GrbimabteshtenbtonntandiniGrbinrhtnrbturdtndbbadtind/Grbinrhtsntnantnninnhnd i Grbbenninnnt

Rebecca’J Revival Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England 2005

Copyright © 200s by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sensbach, Jon F Rebecca’s revival : creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic world / Jon FE Sensbach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-01689-0 (alk. paper) 1. Protten, Rebecca, 1718—

2, African-American evangelists—Biography. 3. African-American women—Biography. I. Title. BV3785.P74546 2005 269’ .2'092—dc22

[B] 2004054021

FOR MY PARENTS

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CONTENTS

Prologue 1 1. A Baptism of Blood 8 2. Rebirth and Remembrance 28 3. A Priestly Woman 45

4. The Path 69 5. Witness 101 6. The Devil’s Bargain 133

7. A Pilgrim in Europe 162

8. Christiansborg 202 Epilogue: Rebecca's Shadow 234 Abbreviations 249

Notes 251 Sources 290 Acknowledgments 294

Index 297

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174 REBECCA’S REVIVAL there; in fact, she encountered a handful of very familiar faces. Since the late 1730s, a few black converts from St. Thomas had returned with white missionaries to Germany, where they were to receive fur-

ther religious training before returning to the island. Some were free, while others had been purchased as slaves by the church and lived quasi-free in Europe. Some succumbed to the cold climate and

unfamiliar disease environment after a short time; Anna Maria, Rebecca's co-worker and helper for the women’s bands on St.

Thomas, had come to Germany in late 1739 but died in March the next year. When Rebecca arrived in Germany, however, she saw two

old friends: the helper Andreas, one of Friedrich Martin’s first converts, and Maria, the eldress, who were now married and living in Herrnhaag. Both had been purchased by the Brethren and had left St. Thomas in the early 1740s for the church’s new communal settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they married before traveling to Germany. The couple were emblematic of an emerging triangle of black Moravian communities in the West Indies, Bethlehem, and Germany, with St. Thomas the source of them all.’ The small band of Afro-Caribbean Brethren leaving the island represented a first wave of black Christians migrating back across _ the Atlantic from the Americas—a tiny current against the mighty tide of the slave trade—to intersect with the transnational vision of Afro-Europeans like Protten, Svane, and Capitein. For these men and women, religion provided a new and different sense of purpose _as well as an opportunity for mobility across vast geographic spaces. Just as black sailors on merchant vessels circulated news and ideas to

black communities throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa, evangelicals were beginning to do the same thing. As the sea and the church became their escape routes from America, they began to plant the seeds of the black Protestant international movement.” Rebecca herself was well known by reputation among the European Brethren, who held mission workers, especially “natives,” in high esteem. Martin’s letters through the years had documented her

A PILGRIM IN EUROPE 17§ work on St. Thomas and her marriage to Matthaus. Her stand in the courtroom and redemption by Zinzendorf gave her a deep reservoir of respect in the Moravian imagination and a special connection to the Brethren’s leader. Indeed, the fact that she had dreamed of Zinzendorf’s arrival in St. Thomas two days before it actually happened—a divine signal played up by the Count himself—

heightened her mystique and, within the limited circle of the Brethren, made her something of a star. For a short time after her arrival, documents referred to her as “Rebecca Freundlich,” but soon everyone simply called her Rebecca, which appears to have been a gesture not of condescension, but of respect, since only a handful of prominent church women—such as the leader of the Single Sisters, Anna Nitschmann—were usually called by their first name. In the world of the Brethren, there was only one Rebecca.

The question was what to do with her. At a meeting of church leaders in September 1742, one minister said that “the aim should be to marry her to a Brother and send her back to St. Thomas,” pending the approval of Zinzendorf, who was away on one of his many

trips to other congregations on the continent, the British Isles, or America. In the meantime, Rebecca would begin to take part in church conferences and in the Stundengebet, the 24-hour prayer cycle in which participants took turns praying for an hour, waking each other up in succession through the night. Elaborate gender-divided schedules preserved from the period—indicative of the high degree of bureaucratic organization in the church—show Rebecca regularly filling an hourly time slot along with dozens of other women, including the two other West Indians, Maria and Hanna." Such rituals convey the degree to which non-European brothers and sisters were assimilated into this sacramental world. They prayed and sang with their white counterparts in the elaborate services and festivals that made up the Moravian devotional culture; they bunked with them in gender-separated residential halls; they spoke German, the community's lingua franca; they wore the dis-

176 REBECCA’S REVIVAL tinctive clothing of the Brethren. Trading in her West Indian clothing, Rebecca now wore a dark dress laced at the breast and a Haube, or bonnet, fastened with a white bow to indicate she was a widow;

married women wore blue bows and single women, pink. These markers designated each sister's membership in a church “choir,” a group divided by age, gender, and marital status under the authority of a supervisor. At some point—exactly when is not clear— Rebecca appears to have taken up lodging in the widows’ house in Herrnhaag, as did Maria, along with nearly two hundred women of the widows’ choir.” Choirs were the basic social units of the church, in which most of the teaching and worshipping took place. Single men were housed together, as were single women, married men, married women, in-

fants, children, widows, and widowers, the theory being that coneregants followed the divine light best if surrounded by comrades of similar personal circumstance. An expansion of the band system that had worked so effectively in St. Thomas, the choirs served as surrogate families in a church culture that de-emphasized and separated nuclear families. Believers were expected to submerge their own desires in the will of the group. Choir members ate and bunked together, often worked side by side, and met at least once a day, often more, to worship and discuss religious texts. Each congregant also met weekly with the choir leader in private conferences called Sprechen, or “speakings,” to review his or her spiritual progress. With authority to punish backsliders and bar the wayward from worship, house leaders were the congregation’ first line of defense in maintaining social order. Choirs enforced the community's sexual regulation by ensuring that single men and women would never meet until the elders arranged their marriage.”° But choirs were also important for women because they provided social and religious spaces apart from men, reflecting the church's reverential view of female spirituality. Women were ordained as

A PILGRIM IN EUROPE 177 acolytes and deaconesses, a rare conferral of status and recognition among eighteenth-century Christian churches of women’s ability as teachers, leaders, and organizers. Anna Nitschmann, known to all congregants as “Mutter,” or Mother, wielded immense authority in her own choir and in the inner circle of church elders; she even embarked on an itinerant preaching tour of Pennsylvania in the early 1740s along with two other women, including Benigna Zinzendorf, the Count’s daughter. On one occasion Nitschmann preached to a Quaker meeting “[to] the greatest astonishment of those present.””! Rebecca had capitalized on many of these ideas in St. Thomas and, as far as the records indicate, appears to have been comfortable absorbing herself into this new family. At the same time, she might have been surprised by the arrangement made for her two-year-old daughter, Anna Maria. Moravian children were raised by the community, not by their parents. Count Zinzendorf believed that children should be inculcated as young as possible with church princi-

ples, a task better handled by trained foster parents than by birth parents. Children were taken away from parents and put in the nursery between the ages of one and two, and parents took little subsequent role in raising them. In 1743 a church board considered putting Anna Maria into the nursery, but, as they customarily did when determining congregants’ living arrangements, they consulted the lot, which was considered the Lord’s will. Posing the question, “Should Rebecca’s child be recetved into the small children [choir]2”

they drew from a bowl containing yes, no, and blank answers, and picked a negative lot, meaning Anna Maria could not be admitted.

Instead, they placed her in the orphans’ house across the square from the widows’ quarters. Mothers socialized into the church from an early age generally accepted and even embraced such forced separations, but it is impossible to gauge Rebecca's reaction. Undoubtedly she accepted the arrangement outwardly as the expression of divine intent, but, accustomed to Anna Maria’s constant presence with

178 REBECCA’S REVIVAL

her, she might have privately found it unsettling. The daughter whom Rebecca had hoisted on her back to go tramp the hills of St. Thomas probably now saw her mother only occasionally.”

| Rebecca and other brothers and sisters of color lived as spiritual and social equals among white congregants, but as Christian Protten

had discovered earlier, their physique and culture also tagged them as different. Such distinctions applied not only to black West Indians, but to all the converts from the church’s many mission fields who lived in Herrnhaag and Marienborn, which, despite the insular quality of the church, were remarkably international places. During the 1740s, at least thirty-one non-Europeans lived in the German

congregation towns—a small percentage, to be sure, but visible enough reminders of the church’s worldwide outreach. On one occasion, Rebecca participated in a Mohren-Liebesmahl, or “Moors Lovefeast,” in Herrnhaag along with three black Mohren from St. Thomas—Hanna and two youths, Peter and Andreas—as well as Felix, a Malabar from Ceylon, Benedict Weist, a gypsy, and Michael Samuel Jeremias, a Tartar, all lumped together as “Moors.” Why such a gathering took place is unclear. Were the participants encouraged to meet by church leaders who believed that all non-Europeans, vaguely distinguished by their darker skin color or “heathen” origins, shared a spiritual and cultural affinity? Or did the converts call the meeting, believing themselves marked as different, and sensing an otherwise artificial spiritual kinship with one another? The records do not say, indicating only that “it gave the workers heartfelt joy to see them gathered all together.” But the very ambiguity of the issue reflected the Brethren’s insistence on defining people by outward appearance while denying that “race” existed in the eyes of Jesus.” However they were perceived, these brothers and sisters from around the world were fundamental to the identity of the Brethren. They were among a group of seventy people—fifty men and twenty women—who climbed into carriages in Herrnhaag in July 1743 to

A PILGRIM IN EUROPE I79 ride to Hirschberg, in the province of Vogtland, a few days’ travel to

the east, to attend the annual synod, the church’s most important decision-making meeting. The party included all the foremost leaders of the church as well as representatives from far-flung congregations in England, Estonia, Holland, Pennsylvania, Greenland, Ceylon, and elsewhere. Rebecca and Maria attended, representing St. Thomas, as did two “savage Indians,” Ludwig and Anna, from America, and Andreas, speaking for “Moorish matters.” Despite the diversity of attendees, discussion at synods was usually dominated by a small group of male leaders, especially Zinzendorf himself. Although extensive minutes of the meetings were kept, they reveal very little of what participants outside the inner clique might have said. One important item on the agenda, however, was to compile a list of all the workers and assistants in the church, and the group came up with a list of 1,031 people—606 brothers and 425 sisters worldwide. It is an extraordinary document, probably unique

in the Protestant world at the time, for no other church had extended its mission reach so widely; the list includes not only Euro-

peans but also the hundreds of indigenous workers who formed the core of the helper class abroad. Rebecca, “a leader herself who should go back into service,” is listed among the women, along with

Maria and Marotta from St. Thomas, Sara, “a Malabar eldress,” Buhimega from Greenland, Sara from Checomeco in Pennsylvania, and many others—a multiethnic, global sisterhood of the spirit demonstrating that where Christianity took root around the world, it was spread largely by indigenous women and men themselves.”

There was another issue on the table at the synod of 1743, and it came from deep within the soul of the church itself. In Herrnhaag, Rebecca unwittingly found herself in what, to modern sensibilities, and to some contemporary critics as well, was becoming one of the most bizarre spiritual experiments in eighteenth-century Europe. It had to do with blood. The Brethren had always celebrated the

180 REBECCA’S REVIVAL shedding of Christ's blood, and his mutilation, as the ultimate savying power of his sacrifice. There was precedent for this; the medieval church had long glorified the stigmata of Christ and the violence with which the martyrs died. Lutheran theology, upon which many Moravian beliefs were grounded, was steeped in “blood and wounds” as well. But among the Brethren in the early 1740s, these | doctrines entered a new dimension altogether, and they were not for the faint-hearted. In their choir meetings and congregational gatherings, the Moravians chanted that they were “corpse bees” or “fishes”

swimming in Christ's blood and drinking his sweat. They sang of their longing to crawl for haven inside the Savior’s “moist and juicy side-wound,” to sit in the “treasure hoard” of the “cavernous wounds of Jesus.” They spoke of dining at the “Cross-Delicatessen”

offered by the ritual eating of Christ's flesh and drinking of his blood at communion.” Much of this heightened relish for gore had happened during Zinzendorf’s prolonged absence, promoted by a group of young Brethren, including the Count’s son, Christian Renatus Zinzendorf. Favoring a more enthusiastic approach to religion, they opposed a body called the “General Conference” of twelve men and women who ran the church while the Count was away. Some of these leaders wanted to separate from the Lutheran Church, with which the Brethren were still formally aligned, and return to the more austere forms of worship of the ancient Unity of Brethren, the Moravians’ fifteenth-century predecessor. When Zinzendorf returned to Herrnhaag in the spring of 1743 he found the church rent by generational and theological divides, and he used the June synod to restore order. Rebecca witnessed the end of the power struggle as the Count, sid-

ing with the younger group, ousted the General Conference, re| claimed his own leadership, and launched the Brethren on a new exaltation of Christ’s bloody gift.”” Through poetry and prayer, Zinzendorf and others set about con-

structing an elaborate linguistic shrine to the principal wound of

A PILGRIM IN EUROPE 181 Christ—the Seztenhdlchen, or little side-hole, the bleeding gash left in Jesus’ side by a Roman spear. The side-hole, as one scholar has written, was “the narrow door, the portal to paradise, the means of entry into the body of Christ.” It provided life, answered every question, comforted every trouble. Jesus gave birth to mankind through the opening: “Side-hole, side-hole, you are mine . . . the Motherplace of our spirit,” went the incantation. The wound even became the subject of erotic imagery in Moravian art and verse, a kind of va-

gina that the faithful were enjoined to enter, to lick, to taste, and through which they sublimated sexual desire. During one service, “the whole congregation fell before its bloody husband and lay there trembling in the presence of the side hole.” A series of hundreds of

tiny watercolors, painted on small cards by an anonymous artist, depicted the side-hole in the form of female genitalia enclosing pleasant domestic scenes—a bedroom, a meal-laden dining table, a cottage and garden enclosed by a picket fence. The cards bore inscriptions such as “I enjoy strolling in the side-hole,” or instructions on how married couples should have sex. The side-hole thus became a vehicle for an erotic relationship with Christ, the “bridegroom” of the church, with whom spiritual union was termed “sleeping in the arms of Christ.””®

Zinzendorf himself penned some of the most vivid imagery of this gruesome theology, especially in his “Litany of the Wounds,” a long recitation from 1744 in which two choirs, in call-and-response form, hailed the saving mysteries of the wounds: Purple wounds of Jesus, You are so succulent, whatever comes near you Becomes like wounds and flowing with blood.

Juicy wounds of Jesus, Whoever sharpens the pen and with it pierces you just a little, and licks it, tastes it.

Near wounds of Jesus, I want to be even a hair’s-width from your hole.

Painful wounds of Jesus, Sensitive to the Lamb, and even for that reason, so connected to the cure and so proven.

182 REBECCA’S REVIVAL | Soft wounds of Jesus, I like lying calm, gently, and quiet and warm. What should I do? I crawl to you.

Hot wounds of Jesus, Go on heating until you are able to cover the entire World with your warmth. Treasure wounds of Jesus, To you slaves, beggars and kings, farmers and counts make pilgrimages.

Eternal wounds of Jesus, You are my house to dwell in. In a million eons you will still be new.

At the end of all trouble, Anoint us, you red wounds. In the meantime, I believe the death-streaked eyes, the spit-dripped mouth, the fire-baptized corpse, the thorn-scratched head, the furrows on the back: Until I, at the proper hour, can see in my flesh the body wounds for me, on which we build so firmly, and greet close by, the works in his hands and feet.

Hail! Lamb of God.

Christ, Have mercy!

Glory To the side-wound!”” In the face of this gory onslaught, all traces of the Enlightenment

were banished from congregational discourse. Emotion and faith brought life, the intellect only betrayal. “May your astonishing simplicity make reason hateful to us!” implored the Litany. In that spirit, a group of aristocratic Brethren formed a Society of Little Fools in 1743 dedicated to spirituality of the heart and senses; as a playground for bored gentlemen, the society more than lived up to its name. Brothers and sisters strove for childlikeness, sprinkling their daily speech with diminutives like “little lamb” or “little sidehole” so frequently that, Zinzendorf eventually complained, they called everything by that term, trivializing its redeeming power. The Count himself, known to congregants as “Papa,” now became — “Papagen,” or Little Papa. Enthusiasts coined fanciful new words like Kreuzlufivégelein (cross-air-bird), conveying an ethereal sense of the spirit floating to Jesus.*°

This brand of piety would wield obvious influence on the Ger-

A PILGRIM IN EUROPE 183 , man Romantics later in the eighteenth century. But in the 1740s, church leaders, aware that their doctrines could be perceived as con-

troversial, tried to conceal the most graphic imagery from outside view. “Such books, letters, and hymns should be handled carefully and not communicated so freely because it is unbearable for the wounds of Jesus and similar things to be prostituted to the ridicule of the world,” they warned. Word leaked out, however, helping to fuel the break with other churchmen like George Whitefield and John Wesley, with whom Zinzendorf had once had cordial relations, but who were now repelled by reports—partly exaggerated— of bloody revelry among the Brethren.*!

At the same time, repellent as the blood and wounds theology was to many, it provided a raw, visceral appeal to thousands of peo-

ple on the continent, in the Americas, and in the British Isles who sought an intensely personal relationship with Christ. Exaltation of the wounds was the devotional engine that drove the overseas missions. And in Herrnhaag, Rebecca and other brown and black worshippers became insiders when they lifted their voices to the wounds. The side-hole was the great spiritual and social equalizer, the blood of Jesus the universal cleanser. In emotional as well as practical terms, to swear fealty to the side-hole was to secure a place in this spiritual universe.” Rebecca stayed on in Herrnhaag as one year turned into two. She became a regular at many of the councils where church matters were discussed—the Pilger or missionaries’ conference, the Helpers’ and “servants” meetings, and the annual synods. Then, in February 1744, her daughter Anna Maria, now four, died suddenly, or “went to the Lamb,” in the orphanage. The cause of death was not listed,

but almost none of the children who came to Europe from St. Thomas or other tropical climates survived in the new environment more than a few years. The children’s sections of the Gottesacker, or

184 REBECCA’S REVIVAL God's Acre, in Marienborn and Herrnhaag already contained the graves of other black children such as Anna Gratias, Johannes, and David “the Moor,” and now Anna Maria joined them as well.* Rebecca's temporary status in Herrnhaag became ever more elastic as the plan to find her another husband went nowhere. Congre-

gants were not allowed to court, and all marriages had to be arranged by the elders, who considered variables such as a prospective couple’s age, social class, and spiritual progress in making matches. There were plenty of eligible men in town, but a mate for Rebecca

had to be the right kind of man—a preacher, cut out, like her, for the missions. And what about his origins, his appearance? Ordinarily, pairing marriage partners in the church was a straightforward business, but her case was different. Although no discussion by the elders of potential candidates has been preserved, it is possible they were wary, in light of her history, of marrying her to another white man for further work in the West Indies. They might also have believed a match with a non-white man to be more appropriate, given their readiness to classify all non-Europeans as “Moors” with apparent spiritual and cultural affinities. True, she had married a white Brother once before, but that match had been a product of contingency on St. Thomas, and the elders seemed uneager to repeat it. Christian Protten’s arrival in Marienborn in the spring of 1745 must have seemed the perfect solution. Rebecca’s counterpart in every way, he evidently represented the ideal partner in a union of God's servants, a groom for the symbolic wedding of the American and African wings of a germinating international Afro-Protestant movement. The records do not show exactly how and when a match was arranged, but it evidently took place late in 1745. Ordinarily single people, who were strictly segregated by sex and prohibited from any contact, did not even know each other before a betrothal, but that seems unlikely in Rebecca and Christian's case. As missionaries,

who were considered something of an exalted separate class, they would have taken part in some of the same conferences and worship

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services. Protten, who had never been married, might even have proposed a match himself, but he was not allowed to ask Rebecca directly, and the elders would have negotiated it with her after seeking the Lord’s approval through the lot. As with Matthaus, she had

the right to refuse, but she accepted, and on December 27, 1745, Rebecca and Christian became engaged during a lovefeast along with eleven other couples. An official diarist described them as a “mulatto couple,” leaving little doubt of the importance of their shared mixed-race heritage in the minds of church leaders, and, perhaps, in their own self-perception as well.*

On January 6, 1746, Rebecca and Christian gathered with the eleven other engaged couples for a mass wedding in the chapel at

186 REBECCA’S REVIVAL

Marienborn. Each pair was assigned a pastor to consecrate the union; Rebecca and Christian drew Brother Lintrop. As a diagram of the occasion shows, the couples, with their pastors, stood before the altar arrayed in three concentric three-quarter circles: ministers up front, sisters in the second circle, and brothers in the third, en-

suring that the betrothed would stand next to each other but not next to other single people of the opposite sex. In a long sermon interspersed with song and prayer, Zinzendorf addressed the group on the meaning of marriage, in which both spouses were “brides” of Jesus, who was the third partner in every union. “Our marriages are nothing but blessed societies, little churches, illustrations of the holy trinity. There are two people, and within them lies the third, who, through their union, is revealed by the holy guardian as a mystery, a

profound and prophetic mystery.” God would “send the spirit of the church, the spirit of the bride of the Lamb, of the wife who prepares her husband; and when that spirit is parceled out between husband and wife, you have all you need.” Then, an account of the ceremony reports, “these 12 new couples had their hands joined by 12 ordained Brethren” and Zinzendorf blessed the group, admonishing them to “remember your bond to the congregation, to be true Vice-Christs

and true daughters of the Saviour.” With that, the Afro-Dane and the West Indian ex-slave became Brother and Sister Protten.* After the ceremony, perhaps directly afterward, Brother and Sister Protten engaged in marital relations. But having sex in this community was no simple act of consensual privacy. It was a holy ritual, a radical celebration of the divine gift of sexuality. According to Moravian belief, because Jesus and Mary had genitalia, the sex organs were sacred and meant to be used by ordinary humans in wedlock, for procreation, certainly, but for spiritual fulfillment as well, even after a woman's childbearing years. The Brethren talked openly about sex, sang hymns about it, and issued detailed instructions about how, when, and how often to have it. While they embraced sexuality, however, they also sought to control it. Since married cou-

A PILGRIM IN EUROPE 187 ples lived in separate quarters, they came together for regular conjugal visits called Eheviertelstunden (“marriage quarterly hourlies”) scheduled by male and female “bed masters” and “curators.” Couples waited their turn in line for these encounters, which generally took place once a week, or after special religious ceremonies. In some communities a bedroom in a choir house was set aside for sex, while in others, such as Herrnhaag, a “blue cabinet” or enclosed chamber served the purpose. Rebecca and Christian probably repaired to such a place after the wedding to queue up with the other eleven couples for a turn in the cabinet—their initiation to a lifetime together.*°

As with the most graphic of their blood and wounds imagery, the Brethren tried to keep these practices secret, but word leaked out. A former church member named Jean Francois Reynier, who lived

in Herrnhaag during the early 1740s before defecting in 1743 to write a salacious exposé, reported that officials such as Bishop August Spangenberg, who had befriended Rebecca on St. Thomas in 1736, watched the action through a peep hole in the cabinet, and that before weddings Count Zinzendorf fondled the brides’ breasts. Whether such accounts were exaggerated is not clear; it is difficult to reconcile the image of Zinzendorf and Spangenberg, in some ways brave advocates for the slaves on St. Thomas, now reduced to gropers and peeping toms leering at their former disciple through a spy hole (and Spangenberg was in Pennsylvania at the time of Rebecca’s wedding). In any case, the lurid stories contributed to a erowing perception outside the church that the Moravians were a twisted cult, crazed by perverted orgies and blood lust.*’ Inside the Herrnhaag community, however, marriage now com-

pleted Rebecca’s climb up the ladder of authority and status. Just four days after the wedding, she and her fellow West Indian, Maria, were formally ordained as deaconesses along with six other women. Important positions in the church hierarchy, deacons and deaconesses “helped the preacher in a// matters, including the administra-

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