Sex and religion

Sex and religion

The interweaving of Christianity and white supremacy is considered a defining quality of Southern slavery. Yet this also happened in the North. Not only was slavery sanctioned by the God of the Old Testament, it was a positive duty of his chosen people in the New World, because it brought the Gospel to the pagans of Africa. Thus could a Rhode Island elder rejoice, without any apparent consciousness of irony, when a slave ship coasted in to the wharf, that 揳n overruling Providence has been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathens to enjoy the blessings of a Gospel dispensation.擺5]

Not only was religion a justification to the Puritan slaveowner, it was an instrument of control. Cotton Mather, in "Rules for the Society of Negroes" (1693) taught the Massachusetts slaves that they were the "miserable children of Adam and Noah," and told them that part of their duty as Christians was to inform on one another.

In the catechism prepared for the slaves to memorize, Mather taught the Negroes that they were enslaved because they had sinned against God and that God, not their masters had enslaved them. Service to the master was identified with service to God and in the Ten Commandments, prepared by Mather for the slaves, submissiveness to and respect for the master were substituted for the similar deference which the owners gave to God. The Fifth Commandment ("Honor thy Father and Mother ...") was twisted to mean for the slave 'I must show all due respect unto everyone and if I have a master or mistress, I must be very dutiful unto them.' For the slave, the Tenth Commandment ("Thou Shalt not Covet, ...") was interpreted as 'I must be patient and content with such a condition as God has ordered for me.' Mather then promised the slaves that if they were 'faithful and honest servants,' they would receive 'rest from their labours' and, as a reward, God would 'prepare a mansion in Heaven for them.'[6]

Similar precepts were adopted throughout the 18th century in religious teaching to slaves by Ezra Stiles, Daniel Wadsworth, and others.

Despite the Puritan strictures against sexuality (Massachusetts was one of a handful of colonies to punish what later was called "miscegenation"), free whites and black slaves had sex under a range of circumstances, and a population of mulattos began to grow. By the early 18th century, Connecticut and Massachusetts had to recognize mulattoes as a separate race classification. Exact numbers from colonial times are difficult to pinpoint, but Rhode Island did make a specific census in 1782, which found that, of 3,806 non-whites in the colony, 464 or one-eight were mulattoes. The districts with the highest number of black slaves had the fewest mulattoes, which is consistent with the pattern in the South a century later.

Strict moral and social pressure rejected any romantic attachments across race lines. Anne Grant wrote that New Yorkers believed nature had drawn a line between the races 搘hich it was in a high degree criminal and disgraceful to pass; they considered a mixture of such distinct races with abhorrence, as a violation of her laws.擺7] Yet it happened. In the case of New England, white women outnumbered white men, while demand for slave laborers meant black adult males in Massachusetts outnumbered black adult females in 1755 by nearly 2 to 1. Instances of co-habitation and even marriage (when and where it could be legally accomplished) between black men and white women are recorded throughout New England and to a lesser extent in the middle colonies. Such activity was not without risk, however: in 1718 a Connecticut man discovered a black man and a white woman together, and in his enraged reaction he castrated the other man. The 揃oston News Letter� reported this, approvingly.[8]

The situation was reversed for rural Vermonters during the 1800s, when the population of white women fell because so many had moved down to the towns to take factory work. Black women, who did not have that option, were still around and were the only other choice for wives. Vermont changed its rules about birth certificates to speed the legal assimilation of mulattoes into the white population. Certificates for first-generation children of interracial marriages were marked "negro;" second generation, "colored;" and third generation "white." To the average Vermonter, however, even after the third generation they were just "bleached niggers."

Neither were the Northern colonial mulattoes exclusively free people. Many were slaves. A sampling of New England runaways showed that one in six were advertised as mulattoes, and the proportion was similar in the middle colonies. The 1780 slave register of Chester County, Pennsylvania, shows mulattoes made up 20% of the total. The 揚ennsylvania Chronicle� from 1767-73 advertised 61 fugitives, of whom about 20% had white blood in some degree. In some cases the proportion was so high that the advertisers warned the fugitive slave could pass for white and probably would attempt to do so.

The two colonies with the strongest religious foundations -- Massachusetts and Pennsylvania -- were the ones that outlawed miscegenation outright. In all places where race-based slavery thrived, mixed race persons upset the natural definitions of white and black. But in the Christian spiritual settlements of the Puritans and the Quakers, the mixing seems to have been felt as a dreadful contamination of God's elect by the blood of the very people he had especially marked for slavery. The Massachusetts law against mixed marriage or sexual relations between the races, dating to 1705, was passed 揻or the better preventing of a spurious and mixt issue.擺9] It subjected a black man who slept with a white woman to being sold out of the province (likely to the cruel plantations of the West Indies). Both were to be flogged, and the woman bound out to service to support any children resulting from the illicit union. In cases involving a white man and a black woman, both were to be flogged, the man fined �nd held liable for support of any children, and the woman to be sold out of the province. In liberal Pennsylvania, meanwhile, the Quaker founders had freed marriage from the tyranny of the state and the established church, but the leadership nonetheless raised a bar against interracial marriages.

These statues were not simply about control of slave populations, because they also covered free blacks. The Massachusetts law made no distinction between freemen and slaves, and the Pennsylvania law specified that a free black who was guilty of sexual relations with a white person was to be sold as servants for seven years, and any who married a white person was to be sold as a 搒lave during life.� Any minister or magistrate who performed such a marriage was subject to a crushing fine of �.

Northern slavery shared many other qualities with the better-known Southern variety. There are even cases of free blacks buying enslaved ones. The first federal census, in 1790, showed six black families in Connecticut that owned slaves. As in the South later, such cases sometimes turn out, on closer examination, to be free blacks buying loved ones in bondage, such as this contract from Boston in 1724:

Whereas Scipio, of Boston aforesaid, Free Negro Man and Laborer, purposes Marriage to Margaret, the Negro Woman Servant of the said Dorcas Marshall ... that the said Intended Marriage may take Effect, and that the said Scipio may Enjoy the said Margaret without any Interruption ... She is duly sold with her apparel for Fifty Pounds.