- Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the fourth in this series of lectures on How Protestants Encountered the Wider World. They didn't set out to become implicated in one of the most terrible and drawn out crimes in human history. Many of them were deeply uneasy about it. They tried hard to believe that it was something other than what it was, but they had no choice, but to be drawn into it, or rather they did have a choice. But the option of rejecting it seemed too difficult, too costly, too eccentric, even too cowardly to be realistic. Cowardly because for many decades, it seemed to Protestants as if it was their duty not to pretend that the ghastly machine of human misery, we call the Atlantic slave trade could be wished away. Instead, they thought it was a reality, which they had to work with, even if working with it meant sullying their own moral purity, which it did. My story this evening is about how, despite, or even because of how they came to the subject with high moral purpose and fine intentions, Protestant missionaries and churchmen were fatally compromised and corrupted by their dealings with slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries. And I do mean fatally, although the cost in lives wasn't paid by the missionaries themselves. The price that they paid was to see most of their hopes and efforts come to nothing and slowly, some of them to come to see that their supposed realism and pragmatism were founded on wishful thinking and self-serving prejudice. The only realistic thing to do with Atlantic slavery was to recognize it for the monstrosity it was. And if that sounds anachronistic like wisdom after the fact, I hope to show you that there were grounds enough to see it at the time for those who were willing to see. In this series of lectures, we've been thinking about how Protestants first began to take their religion out to the wider world. For most of the lectures, we've taken a different continent as our focus. So we've done Europe and the America's, next time is Asia. But today, our focus is not so much Africa as Africans, because, of course, by far the most frequent encounters that Protestants in this period had with non-Christian peoples were with Africans enslaved in the new world. I will be touching on missionary encounters in Africa itself, but this is a story which is rooted in the Caribbean and on the American mainland where something in the order of 12 million Africans were forcibly taken between the 15th and the 19th century. The pattern was set by Spain and Portugal, which had conquered vast sways of the new continent and needed laborers for their minds and plantations. But European diseases were saeving through the indigenous peoples and tropical diseases meant that European laborers also faced the fearsome death rate, and in any case, the labor was brutal. The Portuguese and others after them had begun to make use of slave trading networks on the African coast, alongside straightforward raping and kidnapping. Africans were both reasonably resistant to old world diseases and to tropical diseases and also readily replaced if they died as perhaps a quarter to a third of them did, either in transit or in their first year in the Americas. But it turned out that by using an unpaid workforce who can literally be worked to death, you can make quite a lot of money. Once the pattern was established, a relentless economic logic drove colonial economies towards large scale sugar and tobacco plantations worked by enslaved labor. When enterprising and idealistic settlers tried to break this pattern, and they did invariably, they failed. Running a sugar plantation without slave labor in the 18th century was like running a modern economy without oil. That is, it's conceivable. Lots of idealists would like to do it, but no one has ever yet come close to making it work in practice. As Protestant empires began to take shape in the years around and after 1600, they began to deal with this already existing system. And they generally found it distasteful but not shocking. They were accustomed to the idea of forced labor. There wasn't slavery very much slavery as such in Christian Europe at this date, but there was serfdom, enslavement was sometimes used as a judicial punishment and voluntary temporary bonded labor was commonplace from apprenticeship through military service, through the indenture service, which was often used to populate early colonial ventures. And while the household servants who were ubiquitous in Europe, weren't slaves, well, let's say that their working conditions were usually not enviable. So when Dutch traders in the Far East found that household slavery was the norm for the wealthy classes of the region, it was only natural for them to pick up the pattern. There was really only one uncomfortable feature of this practice for the Dutch in the Far East, these were Christian merchants who suddenly found that their households were filled with infidels, pagans, idolaters. Now that distinction made it all the easier to justify keeping them as slaves because European views of bonded labor often had a religious inflection. The most obvious example of that is the common rule that Jews were not allowed to keep Christians as servants or apprentices, but the other way round was fine because that way, Jews might be persuaded to convert. It was assumed that the head of a Christian household had paternal responsibility for everybody under his roof, whether his actual family, his servants, or indeed his slaves. So there are obviously some tensions here. These were first really laid bare in the Autumn of 1596, when a captured Portuguese ship was brought into the Dutch Port of Middelburg as a prize of war. And the privateers tried to sell the cargo, but the cargo consisted of 130 men and women. The mayor of the town secured an order bidding the sale and stating that they should not be held by anyone or sold as slaves but had granted their true freedom without anyone pretending to hold them as property. But the reason for this order was not that slavery itself was illegitimate, but because these particular people were baptized Christians. That probably meant that they came originally from Angola or from the kingdom of Congo. Regions of west Southern Africa, which already have got quite a substantial Catholic population at this state. Some of these people may have found employment in Middleburg. We certainly know that at least nine so-called moars were buried in Middleburg that winter. But the privateer vigorously protested at the mayor's ruling kept most of them on his ship and set out instead of selling them locally to ransom them and the whole ship back to the Portuguese. And that seems to be what happened. So as far as the Dutch were concerned, the problem went away. And as far as most of the captives were concerned, a bitter winter in Middleburg was only a detour on route to the Caribbean plantations. But the problem of what to do with Christian slaves remained unresolved. 20 years later, in 1618, a national center of the Dutch church in the City of Dotdt was asked to rule on the question. They'd been asked by the Dutch churches in the Far East the question, if you a Christian slaveholder and your pagan slaves have children while in your household, should you baptize those children as Christians, after all, they're under your overall care, just as much as your own children are. And indeed, although no one was craft enough to say this out loud, they might very well be your own illegitimate children. The Dutch East India Company delayed the departure of its annual fleet to the Far East to await the synod's onset to this naughty problem. The eventual ruling was that the children of enslaved pagan women shouldn't be baptized till they were old enough to decide for themselves. But the synod also ruled baptized slaves should enjoy equal right of Liberty with other Christians and ought never to be handed over again to the power of heathens. Now, if that sounds a little vague, it is. But I think the aspiration in that is clear enough. What the delegates of Dotdt were envisaging is a sort of soft transitional Christianized enslavement, more like indentured labor than chattel slavery. A system in which pagans would become slaves to Christians would then become Christians themselves would secure new rights and status in the process and might eventually aspire to freedom. This aspiration may sound like a pipe dream, but there are occasional signs that it might have become real. This practice of setting slaves free after some years of service seems to have been almost normal in parts of the Dutch Far East. And in the Atlantic world, the closest we get is in the Dutch colony called New Netherland, which the English renamed New York, when they seized it in 1664. The first enslaved Africans were landed in New Netherland in 1628. And importantly, again, most of them were from Angola and from Congo. So were already baptized Christians. Many of them were admitted to membership of the Dutch church. In 1641, the colony's church council expressed optimism about the progress of the gospel among them. Most remarkably though, in 1644, a group of 11 enslaved Christian Africans in new Netherland wrote to the directors of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam asking for their freedom. They said that they'd repeatedly been promised it and emphasized their faithful service for the last 15 years and more. And their petition was granted, sort of. They were required to pay annual tribute to the company for the rest of their lives. Their children were tied to employment with the company. Even so, this looks like the kind of thing that the center of Dotdt had had in mind. But this brief mirage is already failing. The next wave of arrivals into new Netherland were enslaved west Africans from the Gulf of Guinea. They're not Christians. And if, and when they aspired to convert, they were met with suspicion. In 1664, Dutch minister refused to baptize the children of slaves because he feared that they were only seeking baptism to find a way out of slavery. Because, of course, this was the problem with the Senate of Dotdts idealism. If enslaved people acquired fresh rights and a roots to freedom through baptism, then it would take an unusually idealistic slaveholder to allow them to be baptized. It's partly for this reason that we begin to see unmistakably from the mid 17th century onwards, a rising wall of resistance from slaveholders to any notion of preaching Christianity to enslaved people, and in particular to baptism. Colonists and churches alike in the Dutch empire, try to close down the route that those 11 enterprising petitioners had taken advantage of. But the Senate of Dotdt vague ruling is periodically revived. Ultimately in the 1770s, it leads to Dutch legislation requiring that all baptized slaves throughout the Dutch empire should be set free. The result naturally is virtually a dead letter. By then, it was long established Dutch practice that only a tiny number of the enslaved. Most of them acting as personal servants and so on relatively intimate terms with their masters, that only they would be instructed in Christianity. And usually, that was explicitly a prelude to setting them free. Other Dutch-held slaves were effectively barred from religious instruction. And as a result, they were seen as less civilized and so as less deserving of freedom. It is no coincidence that the Netherlands is the very last European power to outlaw slavery in its colonial empire, as late as 1863. Nor is it a coincidence that the longest-lasting Dutch colony in Africa itself, the one which was established at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 gave rise to the modern world's most poisonous system of institutionalized racism. The root from the Senate of Dotdt idealism to apartheid isn't a direct one, but it's there. And that when we're talking about the Atlantic slave trade is where good intentions get you. The story in the other principle Protestant empire is different. A handful of individuals in one or two of England's colonies were able to negotiate freedom for themselves on the basis of baptism, but slaveholders aghast at the prospect of their so-called property disappearing quickly ensured that that door was slammed shut. Colony after colony passed laws, insisting that baptism has no effect on a person's enslaved status. But the idea refuses to die. Partly because the mother parliament at Westminster never rules on the subject. That body was not dominated by the slaveholding lobby. So there was always the chance it might suffer a fit of conscience. But if Christianity and freedom come to be associated with each other in England's colonies, the connection works in a slightly different way. The island of Barbados, which is the sugar-powered beating heart of England's Atlantic empire has an African population of over 90% by 1700. And the vast majority of those are enslaved, but not all. There is a small, but growing group of freed Africans and people of mixed race who had fragile but real rights and freedoms. One means to secure those rights, to claim their place in the Island's brutal hierarchy and to distinguish themselves from the enslaved majority was for them to embrace Christianity. In particular, only Christians could legally marry in the British Caribbean. And legal marriage was one of the most important differences between slave and freed, because, of course, enslaved people were property in the eyes of the law, and therefore couldn't make binding contracts or stop their owners breaking up families for sale as and when they wished. So, although slaves were not set free by becoming Christians, many of them, most of them became Christians if they were set free. Now, Protestant ministers and enthusiasts found themselves caught in a quandary. They've got a genuine pious impulse, a deeply felt duty to bring the gospel to unbelievers, to save souls. And that duty is felt especially urgently with regard to enslaved people, partly because they're simply much more accessible than most other non-Christians and preaching to them is generally not dangerous. And also the paternalistic understanding of slaveholders position made them feel directly responsible for these people's spiritual welfare. And yet, most slaveholders were increasingly and firmly opposed to any serious attempts to convert the people who they claimed to own. A large part of our story is about navigating that problem. For an example of what could and couldn't be done, consider the case of Elias Neau. He's a Frenchman. One of the Protestant minority who'd been exiled from France in the 1680s. He enters English service, but during the Anglo-French wars of the 1690s is captured by France and sentenced to Galley slavery. After a year of this, his persistent attempts to preach to his fellow captives have him sentenced to solitary confinement. He spends three years in prison, including a year at the infamous Chateau d'If of Marseilles which would later be made famous in The Count of Monte Cristo. Although Thofe's account makes it clear that Duma's version of the prison is a sanitized and romanticized one. He's finally released in 1698, following the peace treaty between France and England. And he published this account of his ordeal in an attempt to secure the release of his comrades, who were still being held. And he also returned to where he'd briefly settled before his capture to New York, where he picks up his old business and makes a living as a merchant. In 1703, he was contacted by the newly founded Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the SPG. This is the Anglican outfit whose aim was to help the church of England take root in the colonies. And the SPG asked Neau if he might be interested in missionary work amongst native Americans. And Neau is not keen, he believes as he writes back to them that they are miserable creatures who breathe nothing but blood and slaughter, but he's got an alternative to suggest. Would the SPG support him to work with African slaves in New York City. More than a thousand souls, almost none of them Christian, but he assures them pliable and eager to learn. And this launched his nearly 20-year career as to give him his formal title, The Society's Catechist to the Negroes. He was paid a small stipend. Three nights a week, he hosted catechism classes in his house. Within three years of starting, he had over a hundred people in his books, and he was having to curtail his Mercantile business as this new responsibility burgeoned. But the work was always uneasy. Neau himself was not an ordained minister. The city's Anglican hierarchy was not easy about the zeal of this Frenchman for instructing their slaves. The fact that he himself had once been enslaved was hardly reassuring. The rector of the city's main Anglican church was openly suspicious of Neau. Neau goes to considerable trouble to mollify him over many years. Neau's main concern was that so few slaveholders in the city allowed their people to come to him for instruction. He pressed repeatedly and vainly for a law in the colony requiring slaveholders to allow missionary work. The crisis for his school came on the night of the sixth, 7th of April 1712 when New York experienced what virtually every slave society experienced once a generation or so, that is a rebellion. The death toll was relatively modest for such an event. Nine whites were killed during the rising. 21 enslaved people were executed, and a further six took their own lives. As usual, however, there was a backlash against any attempts to humanize the enslaved population, and a consensus quickly formed in the city that Neau's school was where the rising had been plotted. A petition to have it shut down was circulated. But in fact, only two of those executed had ever attended Neau's school. And of those, only one was a baptized convert. He was apparently convicted on very slender evidence. The other was slave to a merchant whom he'd been petitioning for two years for permission to be baptized without having it granted. He was hanged in chains for killing his master during the rising. Neau's enemies in the city led by that long-serving clergymen spotted their chance. New city regulations banned Africans from moving around the city after dark, which made holding evening catechism classes almost impossible. Neau was even suspended from his office for a while. But the SPG and the colonies governor continued to support him. Eventually, the school resumed. Its numbers were greater than ever. He died in 1722, leaving a prospering school behind him. The SPG appointed a new catechist, but he was a poor replacement. Pretty soon, he was both complaining that,"I never had so many Negroes Mr Neau had," by which he meant that his numbers had fallen from one or 200 to two or three individuals. The only reason that he could give for this was that most of them are so vicious that people don't care to trust him in companies, which is perhaps explanation enough why they didn't come to him. The delicate line that Elias Neau tried to walk was going to become the defining problem, formation to the enslaved for most of that century. The core problem was this. How could slaveholders be persuaded to allow Christian instruction? Neau had wondered about legal compulsion, others floated schemes for taxing incentives and the like, but these schemes were dead on arrival in any colonial legislature. Most missionary enthusiasts instead resorted to persuasion. Surely Christian slaveholders could be cajoled or reassured or shamed into doing their Christian duty. The fact that a small minority of slaveholders did embrace missionary projects seen as a hopeful sign, especially if it proved that that need not interfere with the smooth and lucrative running of a plantation. The SPG itself, the missionary society was, in fact, bequeathed an entire plantation in Barbados in 1710. And they decided to use it as a model of Christian slavery to show the islands skeptical white elite, that you could Christianize your slaves and still, extract enough profit from them. Unfortunately, the demonstration wasn't very successful. The SPG as an institution turned out not to know much about running a sugar plantation and the local men that it had employed as agents were variously corrupt, or inept, or at least completely out of sympathy with the society's ideals. One of them had to be told to stop branding the word society onto enslaved people's skin as a mark of ownership. Catechists and schoolmasters were sent to the estate in periodic fits of enthusiasm. They found themselves wrestling with the plantation's managers to be allowed to have time with the slaves. They also found of their evidence surprise that the people that they were sent to work with were no more enthusiastic about enforced Christian instruction than they were about their other tasks. You might even say that the society's plantation project succeeded. It was meant to demonstrate how a model Christian slave plant might work. In fact, it demonstrated painstakingly that no such thing was possible. But it would be a long time before the missionizing white Protestant establishment was ready to hear that message. The primary solution to the problem across the middle of the 17th century was exhortation. In 1727, the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, who had overall responsibility for the Anglican churches and the colonies, although in practice almost no power over them, wrote these forceful open letters to slaveholders. And they sum up most of the themes of this argument, allowing Christian preaching, Bishop Gibson insisted was a simple duty to deny it was to call down God's judgment on yourself. But alongside the stark warnings comes reassurance. Slaveholders he insists have nothing to fear from Christianization. The myth that baptized slaves might claim freedom or increased rights is completely without foundation. Instead, he insists if enslaved people became Christians, they would be better slaves because Christianity, of course, brings with it moral improvement. So they would be more honest, more clean living, more hardworking than ever before. And they would, as a matter of conscience, embrace the Christian principle that slaves should obey their masters. So it is not only a matter of slaveholders Christian duty to permit instruction, it's sheer self-interest. Now, this approach could achieve something. Maybe the best example of it is on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas now in the US Virgin Islands, but then a Danish colony where the Moravian brethren, this is a small Protestant church fizzing with missionary energy, launched a mission to enslave people in the late 1730s. And one of their first converts was this woman. She was then a teenager born into slavery, but recently freed at that stage known only by her given name of Rebecca. This portrait was painted a little later in her life. She quickly fell in with the Moravians, and although not yet 20, she became central to their mission. She visited slave quarters. She preached to the women of the island in a variety of languages. She organized self-supporting study groups. The Moravians wrote in their reports home that she is very accomplished in the teachings of God. Everything depends on her, they said. And, in fact, one of the missionaries goes so far as to marry her, apparently in an attempt to offer her some protection. But in the event, this provocative assertion of racial equality just outrages the Island's plantation owners. She and her new husband were arrested on trumped-up charges and she faces the prospect of being sold back into slavery. What saves her is the arrival on the island of the Moravian church's aristocratic patron, Count Ludwig Von Zinzendorf, who preached a sermon openly defending the institution of slavery and insisting that his church had no intention of subverting the social order. And that turned out to be enough. Rebecca and her husband were freed, although expelled from the island and the Moravian mission was allowed to continue. That's only the start of what would be a long and extraordinary life, which took her to Europe and then to Africa and would make her the first black woman ordained in a Protestant church. So, working with the reality of slavery could sometimes produce some results. But a contemporary of hers gives us a different view of the matter. Johannes Capitein wrote a Latin thesis defending the legitimacy of slavery that was published in the Netherlands in 1742. And this book became famous less because of what he argued than because of who he was. Capitein was born, raised, and when he was seven or eight years old, enslaved at Elmina in modern Ghana, where the Dutch had a slave trading post. Eventually, he fell into the hands of a merchant who kept him as a personal servant and took him to the Netherlands where he was freed, baptized a Christian, and eventually graduated from Leiden University and was ordained as a Dutch reformed minister. His celebrated thesis, defending slavery, had the same purpose as Bishop Gibson's open letter. And Zinzendorf's sermon, to persuade slaveholders that they had nothing to fear and everything to gain from Christian preaching. I want to say that this front is piece to the published version of his thesis, actively disproves the point he was trying to make. We don't have any other pictures of him. possibly, he did look like this, but this looks to me more like a lazy and racist caricature of an African face than an actual portrait. All the high minded attempt to persuade slaveholders to be reasonable and to Christianize the slave system flew in the face of a persistent problem, which is that they had no wish to do it. What makes these repeated arguments so frustrating is that they're so disconnected from reality. The claim that Christianity would produce virtuous and docile slaves. Didn't really even make sense. Slaveholders were quite right to fear the impact of a doctrine, which emphasized the equal spiritual worth of all human beings, which saw acquiring literacy as almost essential to spiritual maturity. And which taught that marriage was a sacred and indissoluble bond. The efforts made to deny that Christianity did, in fact, do those things ended up creating a parody of it, which could scarcely appeal to enslaved people while also doing nothing to win over skeptical slaveholders. And of course, the argument is disconnected from reality in another sense, which is that this was an argument about converting people in which the one voice that was neither heard nor considered was that of the enslaved people themselves. This inability to recognize that they might have views of their own is just as prevalent amongst missionary idealists as among the slaveholders. For an example of what that meant, consider a project that the SPG undertakes in the 1740s, they receive a bequest intended to fund work amongst African in the new world. And they try to work out how best to spend it. So they canvas opinion, obviously not from any actual Africans, but from white ministers in the colonies. The idea they choose amongst the various that are submitted to them is a project for a school for enslaved children. This is suggested by Alexander Garden, the Bishop of London's commissary in Charleston, South Carolina. Garden argues that the teachers in a school like this mustn't be slaveholders, nor should they be whites sent from England. The children, he said, must be taught by their own peers, by people born into slavery in the Americas. People who could understand them, who could overcome the barriers of mistrust. I put it like that it sounds quite bold, almost visionary. But his idea was that the SPG should buy two teenage boys who might be trained to work as teachers but who would remain enslaved. Harry and Andrew were duly bought and educated. And in its own terms, the project was modestly successful. The school opened in 1743. Andrew turned out not to be as capable as was first hoped. So in 1750, Garden sold him. The SPG mindful of its investment, wanted him sold to the Caribbean where the prices were higher, but Garden disregarded the order and sold him locally instead. That's about as close to an act of human kindness as we're going to get today. Harry served a schoolmaster for 25 years. I can imagine that of the various ways to experience slavery in 18th century, South Carolina, that wasn't the worst. But when the school was closed in 1768, Harry was sent to the local mad house for what the parish authorities called his repeated transgressions. The point, I think, is that to work within the slave system was inevitably to be implicated in it. The other side of this argument, the slaveholders answers to these endless appeals for mission to the enslaved is much harder to hear. It's very clear that they deeply disliked the idea, but pinning down their objections is frustratingly difficult because a whole host of reasons are aired. Christian instruction takes time out of a slave's week, and that's a cost to the slaveholder. Getting large numbers of enslaved people together constitutes a security risk, so does teaching them to read. The effort is pointless because so few of them understand enough English, or because they're encouragebly sunk in moral corruption, or because they're too stupid to understand the basics of Christianity or because they're violently resistant to instruction. And those who do convert become tricky and disobedient exactly the opposite of what the preachers promised. When you hear this barrage of objections, some of them seem more serious than others, but it's hard to get away from the sense that all of them are rationalizations of a more deeply felt instinct. That there is just something offensive about the thought of a black Christian slave. When an Anglican missionary on Barbados was told that he might as well baptize a puppy as a certain young Negro, we're maybe getting closer to the heart of things, because slavery is about turning people into property, into animals, into objects. Even the most watered-down version of Christianity is subversive of that. The idealists who hammered away at this futile notion of a reconciliation between Christianity and Atlantic slavery should have recognized the pointlessness of their project long before they did. And I can say that not just with the benefit of hindsight, but because the problem was mercilessly pointed out early on. It's time to introduce you to one of the most compelling and repulsive writers on this subject. An Anglican minister on the Caribbean island of Nevis named Robert Robertson. When Bishop Gibson published his rebuke to slaveholders in 1727, Robertson was moved to publish this reply, defending them. It is a remarkable book, remark for its harsh clarity in a debate generally characterized by cloying platitudes. Robertson asks us his readers to put ourselves in the shoes of a planter who finds himself owning a slave plantation. That is, as he says, a plantation worked by people who are encouragebly stupid with a peculiar propensity to theft idleness and lying quarrelsome foul mouth, stubborn, revengeful, and lovers and strong drink. There's a lot more abuse in this vain. But the point is not that these characteristics justified enslavement, rather his point is to argue that nobody would run an estate with a workforce like that, if they had a choice. No planter, he argues, chooses slave labor. It's their only option. He even invites us to pity the lot of the poorest slaveholder forced to depend for their livelihoods on these worthless heathens. I did tell you he was repulsive. And yet he doesn't stint in his depictions of the evils of what he calls this horrid slavery. His description of how Africans come to be kidnapped and sold into slavery and of how many die in the process is unrelenting. And he describes the brutal work regime to a level of detail that fewer his English readers can have known about. The sugar manufacturer in our colonies, he correctly says, admits of as little respite from labor as perhaps any sort of business whatsoever anywhere else. And if he says,"The nature and circumstances"of this abstruse uncouth trade"would be displayed before the world"were we to consider the millions of lives it destroys"and what little care is or perhaps can be taken"of their souls."If that were to happen,"then pyre souls would cry out for it to be abolished."And if Britain or any one country"was doing this while others remained innocent,"then what he asks would the rest of man mankind call them." But as he points out, they're all doing it. The British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, even the Danish. Were any of them to break it off on the topic of unlawfulness they'd soon lose their share in the profits and others would swarm in to fill the gap. And what applies on the level of competition between nations applies to the individual sugar estate too. Again, he invites us to put ourselves in the planter's shoes. Had it been the lot of the best-natured and holiest man that now lives in England to have lived in any of the sugar colonies he must have done so too. He would run his estate the same way. Now that's not quite true. Such a person would have the option of not engaging in the slave trade or the sugar business at all of setting free any slaves he may have inherited. But in a deeper sense, he's right, isn't he? If a heroic few might have struck out alone, most human beings in such circumstances would take the path of a least resistance. Would work with the system, would tell themselves they were making it better and would put a spoonful of sugar in their tea. That was true of Robertson's 18th-century readers passing judgment on him from 4,000 miles away. And if some evil spell was to land you or me as the heir to a Caribbean plantation in this era, it would probably be true of us too. In fact, he tells us every so often an idealist does show up in the Caribbean. Typically it's an earnest young clergyman filled with zeal to confront evils of which he's vividly aware, but about which he's usually not very well informed. And Robertson tells us these people's careers usually follow the same pattern. They arrive they meet the plantation owners. They learn to see the situation from their perspective. They discover that Caribbean slavery is just impervious to improvement, to idealism. His extended account of such a priest embarking on his ministry to the enslaved population is grimly comical. The hapless young man arranges with a plantation owner to hold a catechism class, a hundred men and women are pressed into a space and told to listen to this oddly dressed stranger. As Robertson correctly reminds us these men and women we're a very varied bunch. The majority of them African born taken from a dozen different regions of Africa speaking different languages. Their English would be very limited and would not be strong on theological or ethical terms. The minister, after viewing them well and not without some inward horror at the undertaking. He's now entering on the vast unknown deep he's launching out into begins with asking and writing down their names, and I'll spare you the rest, but you can imagine how excruciating he makes this scenario. For such ministers in such circumstances to give up, to retreat into the easy embrace of the white community, to conclude that it's impossible to minister to this vast alien, incomprehensible mass of people whom they're being told are not much more than animals. Such a central neglect of their duty and their vocation would be shameful, but it would also be the easiest thing in the world. And if you are confident that you would not do the same thing in that situation, you're a better person than I am. Robertson saved his deepest contempt for those like Bishop Gibson, whose response to slavery was to attempt to have Christianity grafted onto it, to pretend that it could be improved. Instead, Robertson saw, and he was surely, right, that slavery was simply a vast and irredeemably terrible fact, a blunt reality, which was what it was, and couldn't be sweetened. The only courses of action he says are to abolish it entirely, and to him, that seemed both economically and politically impossible and to live with it. But living with it didn't mean pretending it was nice."I leave it he says"to the serious thoughts of any man of candor and ingenuity,"who knows what Christianity is and what this slavery is."Whether a Christian slave be not"another conjunction as God-mammon or Christ-Belial." That is a simple contradiction and impossibility. What's more wrong. The clear-eyed cynic like Robertson who chooses to live in comfort in the middle of this vast evil repeating the liturgy every week and preaching the doctrine of obedience, or the idealist who hopes that slavery can be turned into something more gentle, more humane, less cruel, and more Christian. It was half a century before the lesson that this malevolent prophet had preached began actually to be learned that is half a century of earnest wishful thinking from well-intentioned Protestant do-gooders determined to believe that the circle could be squared. That Christian slavery was possible, that Robertson's bleak choice could be avoided. Half a century in which well over a million people were shipped across the Atlantic. As to why by the 1780s, significant numbers of British American Protestants lost faith in this lethal fantasy. That's a different question. The simplest answer is the American revolution, which broke out in 1975, which created a new nation filled with earnest moral purpose, about half of which chose to apply that purpose to the slave trade. But, of course, the American revolution also denuded the slave-trading lobby in the British empire of some of its most powerful supporters, and persuaded Britain's highest political classes that the loss of their American empire must be a divine punishment for some dreadful national sin. Or maybe the long attempt to believe in the possibility of Christian slavery ultimately failed because even the most convenient untruths eventually, collapse under their own weight. The final episode I want to introduce you to this evening certainly suggests that because it shows us the Protestant vision of Christian slavery being tested to destruction. You'll remember Johannes Capitein, the formerly enslaved African who was ordained in the Dutch church in 1742. After he published his book, he was sent as a missionary, not to the enslaved in the new world, but to his home continent, back to the Dutch slave-trading station at Elmina. It did not be go well. His senior position in the Dutch hierarchy was a source of considerable resentment. Every initiative he tried to take was blocked. He was met with suspicion by his own kinsfolk, and he died in less than five years. But the idea of missionary ventures to Africa itself did have an appeal. In 1750, an English SPG missionary in New Jersey named Thomas Thompson asked permission to attempt a mission to Africa. And in 1751, he arrived at Cape Coast Castle, a British slave-trading Fort in modern Ghana, still there. He spent five years as chaplain and missionary there with little success, but he did send three promising African boys to England for education. Now, these boys were not enslaved. They came from prominent local families and were sent with their agreement. One of the three died. Second one ended up in a mad house, but the third, a man named Philip Quaque, and to nobody's surprised, we've got no portraits of him. Quaque were told improved in every branch of knowledge necessary to the station for which he was designed. And in 1765, he was ordained as an Anglican priest, the first African ever to be so ordained. And then like Johannes Capitein before him, he was sent back to Cape Coast Castle as a missionary to convert his own people with high hopes invested in it. He remained at Cape Coast as a missionary, for the remaining 50 years of his life. What makes his mission significant isn't its success, which was minimal, he was earnestly committed to the Christian cause deeply frustrated by his inability to reach his kin's people with the gospel message. His bleak story matters because of why he failed. In large part, this was simply because the SPG and the English establishment liked the idea of an ordained African more than they liked the reality. Quaque was given the title of priest and of missionary. He was not given the authority which those titles generally commanded. The most remarkable thing about his extensive correspondence with the SPG is how one-sided it is. He sent a full report every six months as he was supposed to often asking for guidance on specific issues or requesting particular supplies, but he didn't receive a single reply until he'd been there for almost six years. And that is only prompted by a desperate letter in which he asked permission to move to a more congenial post in Senegal. And the reply to that is simply a flat refusal. Some of the British officers and visitors to the Castle accepted him in his role, but more of them cold shouldered him, or denied him permission to use the Castle's chapel or wheeled him out for visitors as a freakish curiosity, look, the black priest, He was stranded between two worlds and the more he protested his Englishness and his Christianity in a vain attempt to be accepted in that realm, the less he was able to make any progress amongst his own people. But as the years rolled past, he became increasingly convinced that at the heart of the impossibility of his mission lay one key factor. As he told the SPG in one of his regular reports in 1782,"While Countenance is given to the practice of slavery,"religion will prove to us in these parts,"a stumbling block, and to the heathens"who we earnestly wish"may speedily become the kingdom of God"and of his Christ foolishness." By this time Quaque wasn't just corresponding with the SPG in London who never replied to his letters, but with a range of people interested in these questions on both sides of the Atlantic. An American correspondent asked him whether there is any seeming prospect of establish Christianity in Africa, or whether that cursed slave trade was not the chief obstruction. And Quaque agreed that of all the obstacles facing his mission what he called the horrid slave trade was the principle. To attempt to spread the Christian gospel from the same fortress that was being used to purchase, hold, and ship captors into perpetual slavery was a contradiction too acute for even the most heroic amount of wishful thinking to overlook. In the end, something had to give. And so sooner or later having tested every other alternative structure and beyond black and white Protestants alike were driven reluctantly to conclude that the slave trade and the spread of their faith were alternatives, which they had to choose between. They could and should have reached that conclusion long before all the facts were there for them, but they wouldn't be the first or the last people to spend their lives striving mightily to avoid confronting a truth, which was too terrible to see. Thank you all very much.(audience clapping)- [Participant] Did the Calvinist Doctrine of Predestination inform the Dutch attitude towards Africans and slaves?- The Calvinist Doctrine of predestination informs the Dutch attitude to everything. It is a really kind of pervasive aspect of their thought. It doesn't, though, act as a bar to trying to convert heathen peoples as they would call them whether enslaved or not, their view is that it's their duty that they've been called by God to preach the gospel. It is then down to the mystery of divine providence, who will be given the gift of faith and allowed to hear that. So it breaks the link between direct missionary responsibility for people's fate. There isn't that sort of immediate sense of urgency of if I don't get out of bed and preach this sermon to these people, then they'll go to hell whereas otherwise, I might save their souls. But the sense of it is your duty to do this because you have been called on to be the agent by which these people will be saved. God will find a way of saving them if you don't do it, but you'll be in trouble if you don't is the logic. Maybe that removes a little bit of urgency from it, but in general, Calvin predestination is much less of an obstacle to this sort of preaching than it might look at first glance.- Okay, thank you. Do the SPG archives reveal any knowledge of Muslim religious thought, which saw immediate many mission of slaves if they converted to Islam.- The SPG as such doesn't deal with that, because it decides very early on that its remit is going to be of the Americas, the Atlantic world and the fact that they have these couple of missionaries in Africa is a step out of their normal framework. So the Muslim world is something that they have an eye on at all. Their sister organization, the SPCK, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge has some missionary ventures in the Middle East and in East Asia, which I'll be talking about in the next lecture. They're aware of the different ways that slavery is practiced in the Muslim world. Not least because there's a not-insignificant number of European Christians who wind up enslaved in the Muslim world. And the heroic narratives of those who refuse to buy their freedom by converting are celebrated. Of course, they don't see any moral equivalency here. This is very much framed in terms of, if they choose to free people embrace their false religion, then that's all the more Finnish way of tempting people into era, rather than a moral ideal to be emulated.- [Participant] Thank you. I wanted to ask about the tradition of Negro spirituals and how that ties in with Christianity and the imposition of Christianity on slaves.- That's a really good and difficult question to answer because we're dealing with an oral tradition. And so tracking it back into this period is really difficult. There is a whole later stage to this story, which I didn't get into because I've only gone out, which is to do with the spread of Christianity amongst the enslaved population in the post-independence United States, where the dynamics of this changed quite significantly, that by the time you get to the mid 19th century to the era of the civil war of emancipation, a very large proportion of the black population, both slave and free in the United States have embraced Christianity. And that longstanding slave holder's objection towards Christianization has been overcome. And you find slaveholders in the American south, in the second quarter of the 19th century, arguing that, in fact, they are able to create a truly Christian model of slavery, much to the horror of their of their opponents in the North. That does involve creating a particular version of slavery Christianity. One feature of which is that in most of the slave states of the American South enslaved people are banned from learning to read. And, in fact, attempting to teach a slave to read was a criminal offense in most of those states. So it's an attempt to set up something different. And it's in those sorts of circumstances that you see an oral tradition of African American religion starting to appear and to be documented. It is clear even from this early period that the use of music in the attempts that are being made to conduct mission activities amongst enslaved peoples is a recurrent feature of it. And there's a lot of comment on how popular the use of music is, singing metrical songs and so forth. What we'd really like to know is how those sorts of musical patterns, which missionaries are bringing in, are interacting with the musical cultures that these folks have brought with them from their home countries, or that they're developing in the cultural melting pot that they've been placed. But actually establishing what's really going on from these sources immensely difficult. One of the central points about the history of slavery is that actually hearing the voices of the enslaved, voices which are being systematically silenced is tremendously difficult. There are times when you can catch an echo of it, but often not much more.- I'm afraid we do have to stop there. We've gone just a little bit over, but I wanted to thank you, Professor Ryrie, for your lecture. And I hope you'll all join me in thanking the professor.(audience clapping)