Jonathan Edwards and Mid-Eighteenth Century Afro-Protestant Conversion

Jonathan Edwards, among several churchmen between 1680 and 1760, expressed views against the slave trade, colonial slavery, or masters’ abuse of slaves (Sallient). While very little has been written on the regional development of anti-slavery in the American colonies before and leading into the mid-eighteenth century, exploring Edward’s involvement in and treatment of slavery might illuminate changes in Afro-Protestant conversion. The tendency to overlook the strong anti-conversion sentiment that existed throughout the Protestant regions of North America and the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries places too little emphasis on planters’ resistance to convert slaves to Christianity. Katharine Gerbner’s “Protestant Supremacy” articulates how planters constructed a caste system by creating an exclusive ideal of religion based on ethnicity.

The emergence of evangelical revivalism and the Great Awakening gave enslaved people new religious choices while underlining commitments to maintaining proper patterns of subordination (Glasson). Attention to Jonathan Edwards’ shifting thinking on slavery and the slave trade forces us to rethink the traditional timelines for the development of antislavery thought in New England which usually locates the earliest efforts of any significance in the 1770’s (Minkema). Enslaved Africans are gaining admittance to many churches across New England during the 1730s and 1740s, and Edwards is the first minister at Northampton to baptize blacks and admit them into full membership (Minkema).

While the Edwardses did oversee the manumission of slaves, the description of Rose Binney Salter’s conversion, written by Dr. Stephen West, offers a distinct account of her Christian life and experience (Minkema). A slave named Rose, who the Edwards brought with them when they moved to Stockbridge in 1751, becomes a full member of the Stockbridge church and is no longer a slave by 1771 (Minkema). The political success of abolitionists needed a tradition of sympathy in the culture to draw upon, and documents like Rose’s conversion, whether fictional or historical, help humanize the enslaved. This document also might help us assess Jonathan Edward’s legacy for the abolitionist movement. If stories like Roses ‘aestheticize anxieties’, and play on anxieties about the changes society is undergoing, her account can be read to respond to shifting anti-conversion sentiment in Protestant slave societies.

 Representations of enslaved people like Rose Bonney Salter (1771) show the centrality of religion in shifting thinking of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG)’s slave conversion program in the colonies between 1740 and 1765 (Gleason). And documents like Rose’s conversion help to humanize the enslaved for a wider reading public. If terms like “white” emerge from “Christian,” (Gerbner) accounts like Rose’s highlight changes in anti-conversion sentiment during the age of gradual abolition. Rose’s last comment reads closely with later abolitionists' claims that slaves desired to be free not for themselves, but rather to achieve mental and civic states in which they could worship God properly. In addition, Rose’s confession of spiritual freedom followed her baptism and church membership, suggesting new and different ceremonial connections of Christianity to freedom in the Americas within the period.