Sensbach, A Separate Canaan

ISSN: 1094-902X
Volume 1, Number 2 (Spring 1998)

A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840. By Jon J. Sensbach. University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 342pp. $17.95.

It is rare indeed to discover a book that unveils an entirely new historical subject while also shedding light on familiar theoretical and historical debates. A Separate Canaan accomplishes both, fusing imagination with impressive original research.

“Afro-Moravian” is the startling adjective that Jon Sensbach uses to illuminate the little-studied world of North Carolina Moravian Brethren in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book rests on the assumption, now widely accepted in scholarly circles, that race was a far more malleable construction in early America than it later became. As was the case in many communities across the South, racial hierarchies in early Moravian communities were not fixed.

Caught up in the ardor of their pietist campaign, early southern Moravians were so ambivalent about the moral correctness of owning slaves that, unable to agree among themselves, they resolved the issue by lot. The answer, presumably a direct assent from God, was positive; Moravian Brethren could own slaves. (65) Yet before the Revolution they acquired few slaves, and these were owned by the church, not by individuals. Some of those slaves joined the Moravian Brethren. The community they created was a “mixed German and African enclave” where “free white and enslaved black Brethren worked and worshipped side by side." (xviii)

Following conversion, early Afro-Moravians were likely to be regarded as full brothers and sisters in Christ. Spiritual status, gender, and seniority in the religious community often superseded hierarchies of race. Moravians lived together in age and gender-based "choirs." Sensbach claims that in the eighteenth century, evidence suggests that the black Single Men slept, ate, worked, and worshipped with the other Single Men. These Moravian Brethren were "united more by gender than they were divided by race" (126).

Early Afro-Moravians may have also enjoyed a rare protection from the forced sale of family members. Moravian custom prohibited the sale of converted spouses, providing incentive for slaves to marry (and to join the church). Moreover, Moravian masters were "bound on their conscience" to raise baptized slave children "for the Lord, and not to sell them for Profits to other people." (134) This commitment encouraged many slaves to have their children baptized into the fold. Family relationships were extended through baptism to include an ever-widening circle of godparents and baptismal sponsors, both black and white. (137-143)

If the first half of the book seems somewhat romantic, envisioning a world where African Americans were treated with fraternal respect, the second half demonstrates how those precarious privileges were systematically taken away around the turn of the nineteenth century.

After the Revolution, the numbers of slaves began to increase in Moravian lands, and whites erected insurmountable walls of separation between themselves and blacks. Sensbach situates these changes within a larger context of the growth of slavery in North Carolina, and the concretization of racial hierarchies in the early republic. This larger story was cemented by demographic changes within the Moravian community itself; by 1800, the first generation of Moravians was dying off. In the place of those German-influenced, zealous pietists stood a new generation of American-born landowners who experienced difficulty in emulating the piety of their forebears. These third-generation Moravians, in a classic case of cultural assimilation and spiritual declension, “now declared themselves to be Germans no longer, but good Americans.” (190) Becoming “good” Americans, for them, required them to construct their whiteness in contradistinction to the black slaves they acquired in ever-greater numbers.

By the 1820s, with slaves held by private individuals rather than the church, the eighteenth-century guarantees about upholding the integrity of the slave family were no longer in force. Spouses could be separated, and baptized children were no longer protected from sale. (250)

The religious expression of Moravians, both black and white, was also severely affected by the new racial policies. Many of these changes (such as gallery seating) reflected larger trends present in other churches at the turn of the nineteenth century. Others were distinctively Moravian, demonstrating whites’ new discomfort with the intimate, body-based rituals of the Moravian past. Afro-Moravians were banned from traditional footwashing, having instead to observe whites performing the ritual on each other. They were no longer welcomed with the kiss of peace after baptism, since it would be "unseemly" to demonstrate this quasi-sexual ritual before white Moravian children. Finally, to hammer the last nail in the proverbial coffin, blacks became segregated in death as well as in life -- by 1816, separate black cemeteries were apportioned for all blacks, including non-Moravians. Clearly, racial identity had superseded the spiritual identity which had been so important to early Moravians. (200-204)

By 1822, white leaders deemed it time for the final, most radical, break: the creation of a separate congregation for African Americans. This strategy backfired somewhat, because once blacks maintained their own church, new members began to steadily trickle in. (226) Although they often had to circumvent a Moravian-appointed white pastor, blacks concentrated what little power they had and transformed their church into a life-sustaining, central institution.

To this day, that congregation remains as "one of the oldest black churches in continuous existence in the South." There are currently few African-Americans in the North American Moravian fellowship—but 75% of the 500,000 Moravians worldwide are of African descent. (302)

Sensbach’s study is richly informed by primary source materials, including Moravian Lebensläufe (life histories) and the records from the black church at Salem. However, none of these records was written by an African American; every story about life in Salem was filtered through the lens of white church leaders. Sensbach as a historian sometimes speculates too heavily about the motivations, emotions, and inner struggles of his Afro-Moravian subjects. While his instincts seem generally on target, much necessarily has to remain conjectural.

Another minor criticism is that there is sometimes rather sketchy evidence for the syncretism of African and Moravian practices that Sensbach wants to claim. For example, although preliminary archeological excavations have discovered objects such as shells, scissors, and broken mirrors in the slave cemetery at Salem, the connection of these objects with African traditions remains murky. Also, he notes that Afro-Moravians enjoyed a rich musical life, developing their vocal and instrumental talents, but he also implies that black Moravians’ music differed in kind from the approved musical forms of white Moravians. (240-2) This potentially interesting thread deserves further explanation and development.

The book’s many strengths (including its fluid, imaginative writing style) outweigh these small reproaches. More than just a community study, A Separate Canaan will greatly enhance our understanding of how racial stratification had become entrenched in many religious communities by the early nineteenth century. Sensbach’s Afro-Moravian narrative is “a parable of America— of dreams for a regenerated world, of the battleground of race, of the pressures of assimilation, and of promises left in ash.” (296)

Jana K. Riess, Columbia University