Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage

Context

Englishmen made their first attempts to settle the Chesapeake region of North America in the late sixteenth century, a time when Europeans tested one another’s limits through fierce competition for dominance over lucrative transatlantic trade routes and the colonization of the Western Hemisphere. British nobles, ill prepared to confront the harsh realities of life in Virginia, were responsible for the failures of the colony’s earliest settlements. In 1606, Britain’s King James I granted a land charter to investors of the Virginia Company of London, hoping the entrepreneurs would shape the overseas colony into a profitable asset. The company’s shareholders placed their money and their faith in the hands of merchants who pledged large profits and proclaimed their intent to Christianize the region’s indigenous people.

During this stage of European exploration, the British were not alone in identifying religious conversion as a primary goal of colonization. Most seventeenth-century Christians considered non-Christians uncivilized pagans in desperate need of Christian salvation and a subsequent imposition of European cultural norms. Their beliefs were rooted in the religiously inspired Crusades between western Christendom and Muslims that began in the eleventh century, with the aim of reclaiming the Holy Land. Generally, Europeans viewed the process of colonization as beneficial to all participants involved. The majority of the British colonizers who settled Jamestown belonged to the Anglican Church of England. They understood that proselytizing and profit making were tandem goals of British colonization. However, in practice, Virginia’s early Christians spent more of their energy and efforts struggling to survive than preaching for conversion. In 1624 King James I, frustrated with the Virginia Company’s mismanagement of the colony, proclaimed Virginia a royal colony and replaced company officials with men of his own choosing. In addition, the king recognized the Anglican Church of England as the colony’s prominent religious institution and mandated that all settlers support the church with taxes. Thereafter, Anglican authorities expected their colonial ministers and Virginia’s ruling planter class to promote Christianity among their indentured servants and slaves.

Prior to the king’s intervention, the Virginia Company of London planned to strategically manage the colony’s economic growth. The intent was to export settlers trained in assorted occupations, who would then build and sustain a diverse economy capable of producing stable dividends for investors. However, Virginia was an ocean away in a time of limited means of communication, and the colony’s large landholders had their own ideas regarding growth and economics. Virginia planters rejected a diverse economy and instead focused their efforts on the production of a single crop, tobacco. In the seventeenth century tobacco was a popular commodity in Europe. Within a decade of the founding of Jamestown, the tobacco produced by Virginia planters was selling in British and European markets. By the 1620s tobacco planters, motivated by strong sales of the product in European markets, focused their efforts on increased production. Initially, tobacco sales returned good profits for planters. That changed when England insisted the colonies restrict their trade to English markets alone. Britain’s restrictive trade policies and an overabundance of tobacco created a glut in the market. By 1660 the price of tobacco would decline to such low levels that most tobacco planters would spend more years coping with debts than being economically solvent. This turnabout in market prices and reduced profits would leave tobacco planters committed to maintaining a cheap source of labor.

The fact that tobacco is an agricultural product grown in rural environments hindered the development of urban centers in the Virginia Colony. The colony’s large landholders established independent communities on their tobacco plantations and relied on indentured servants and slaves to fashion the necessities of everyday life. Although the Virginia Company of London set out to build a colony sustained by a stable and diverse economy, many of the early colonial tradesmen and artisans encouraged to settle in Jamestown returned to Britain complaining that they could not find work in their chosen fields. Virginia’s economic identity developed into a plantation system of production, and the tobacco planters shared a common goal, to obtain and keep a large labor force at minimum cost in order to secure profits. To meet that goal they looked to three possible sources of labor: They enslaved Native Americans, appealed to the Virginia Company for more indentured servants, and copied the method used by British planters in the Caribbean colonies of Jamaica and Barbados, the increased importation of enslaved West Africans.

British colonials discovered that sustaining a large labor force from enslaved Native Americans was difficult and deadly. Foremost, Native Americans died in staggering numbers from exposure to devastating European diseases. Second, enslaved Native Americans, familiar with the region’s natural resources and geographical terrain, proved to be successful runaways who were rarely recaptured. Finally, since their earliest encounters, British colonials considered the indigenous people of the Chesapeake region to be savage and inferior beings. Misunderstandings related to cultural differences and language barriers often ended in acts of violent aggression by both parties. In 1622 a confederation of Native Americans came together and attacked Jamestown, leaving more than three hundred inhabitants dead. Although the attack did not drive the British out of Virginia, it did teach the lesson that Native Americans, if united, were powerful enough to challenge the colony’s survival. Colonial tobacco planters turned to their second source for labor and urged company officials in England to supply the great numbers of laborers necessary for successful tobacco production.

The Virginia Company distributed pamphlets and posters advertising Virginia as a land of opportunity. The timing proved advantageous, as Britain’s population had increased disproportionate to its economy in the sixteenth century. This uneven growth continued until the middle of the seventeenth century and left in its wake a large class of unemployed and poverty-stricken British citizens. In exchange for their passage, shelter, and food, many of them signed labor contracts and arrived in Virginia as indentured servants bound to a master for a specific number of years. The British government also sanctioned the shipping of convicted criminals and political prisoners to its British colonies for the purpose of serving out their sentences. With this large influx of laborers, Virginia’s planter class could now meet their labor demands.

Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, the majority of colonial laborers were white indentured servants. Gradually, the steady stream of indentured servants arriving from England slowed in relationship to its economic prosperity and political stability. Over the years, merchants and sailors carried stories of the colony’s famines, sicknesses, and deadly conflicts with Native Americans back to England. Their tales refuted the lure of opportunity and discouraged laborers from signing indentures. Britain’s colonial holdings were successfully supplying resources and creating markets for English goods. As a result, English laborers could now find jobs in England instead of seeking opportunities in distant colonies. The diminished supply of white indentured servants persuaded tobacco planters to use their third possible source for labor, enslaved West Africans.

Initially, black slaves appeared randomly in small numbers during Virginia’s early years. Most of them were transported to the colony either because they were considered unfit for sugar production in the Caribbean or to fulfill a specific request for slaves of a certain age or gender. Often pirates smuggled slaves into the colony, hoping to turn a quick profit. After they were sold, enslaved West Africans worked shoulder to shoulder with whites and small numbers of Native Americans. When the day’s work was done, social contact among this diverse labor force spilled over into their private lives and, by extension, into the lives of their communities.

At this time the social order in Virginia was divided by class, not race. Economic assets and royal pedigrees determined a person’s status in the community. Under this system Virginia’s most marginalized class was the landless working class of indentured servants and slaves. Away from work, in their private worlds, this mix of people created friendships, engaged in recreational activities, maintained intimate relations, married, and had children. While struggling to survive colonial hardships, they found common bonds they could share. As time went on, former servants and some slaves who acquired their freedom through various means carved out new lives for themselves in the colonial wilderness. Although class boundaries were apparent in the first half of the seventeenth century, white legislators had not yet cemented racial boundaries into legal statutes. A small number of blacks managed to take advantage of the fluidity and became small landholding farmers of the yeoman class with servants and slaves of their own. Their successes demonstrated to enslaved blacks that opportunities existed if they could find a way out of slavery.

West Africans of various ethnicities understood slavery through their own life experiences. While slavery in any form is rarely a desirable state of existence, West African norms permitted slaves, over time, to assimilate into their enslaver’s extended family unit either through marriage or by proving themselves to be extremely valuable assets. That is not to say that all slaves in West African societies had such opportunities; it is just an acknowledgment that the slaves of early colonial Virginia came from a world where to be enslaved was not necessarily a life sentence. Enslaved blacks surely found the conditions of servitude in Virginia harsh and at times unbearable, as evidenced by their regular efforts to resist their enslavement. One means of resistance repeatedly documented was to challenge the legality of captivity by petitioning the colony’s courts for freedom. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the possibility of successfully maneuvering through and out of the permeable boundaries of slavery still existed. Choosing to convert to Christianity was one of the paths black slaves hoped would lead to freedom.

White Anglican ministers were generally unsuccessful at persuading blacks to abandon their chosen faith and embrace Christian ideals. Most enslaved West Africans arrived in the Western Hemisphere practicing Islam or one of the many indigenous faiths of their homelands. They demonstrated little interest in adopting the faith of the white planter class that held them in bondage and governed the colony. Still, small numbers of black slaves did accept the sacrament of baptism and converted to Christianity. Their reasons for doing so are explained by colonial court records that detail petitions filed by blacks who challenged their legal status as slaves, arguing it was unlawful, under English common law, to enslave a fellow Christian. For those slaves, adopting the religion of one’s master was simply a means to an end and little different from wearing European dress or learning to speak English. Freedom was their ultimate goal, and, drawing on their West African understanding of slavery, assimilation was their means.

As fellow Christians, enslaved blacks believed they shared a common bond with their owners, a bond that they could use as a path to freedom. Baptism was a documented event, written into church ledgers and sometimes baptismal certificates. The ceremony’s rituals and subsequent recording lent an air of validation to the act; it also presented the possibility of entering into something more than the state of enslavement. The process of conversion was a public invitation into a community of believers who shared ceremonial and spiritual bonds. As communal members, enslaved blacks felt justified in challenging their legal status. The colonial courts and legislators were faced with a dilemma. Some slaves had already won their freedom by proving they were Christians. If that trend continued, it was likely that slaves throughout Virginia might join the Anglican Church in record numbers. In addition, awarding freedom for conversion acknowledged equality, at least in the sphere of religion. That could set a precedent for equality in colonial political and economic institutions.

Virginia’s white legislators were not alone in their struggle to define a legal relationship between conversion and bondage. Maryland’s legislators ruled on the issue in 1664. In many British colonies, legislators were dealing with judicial challenges from enslaved blacks who were seeking legal loopholes for gaining their freedom. Virginia’s legislators ruled in 1667 that converting to Christianity through the sacrament of baptism did not change the legal status of a slave. Their decision echoed the choice made by legislators in Maryland. Through that ruling, Virginia’s lawmakers created two distinct categories of Christians, free and enslaved. That black slaves living in the colony understood the path to freedom through conversion was closed is evident in the low numbers of slaves who converted to Christianity over the next five decades. The majority of black slaves generally avoided Christianity until the middle of the eighteenth century, when evangelical Protestants interjected some semblance of equality into the religious practices of the First Great Awakening.