Death and the Moravian missions in the West Indies

Death played a central role in the Moravian missionary's negotiation of their place in Caribbean society. About once a week, the missionaries had to bury someone. The ritual of burial was immensely important to both them and their slaves. If a missionary got to preach at the burial, he simultaneously asserted his spiritual and earthly dominion over the souls of the dead, a performance that held powerful sway over the living. If he didn't, his authority was threatened.

In Jamaica, the Moravians codified the significance of baptism by creating a separate burial ground for their baptized slaves called "Gottes-Acker" or God's Acre. When the first baptized slave, Sampson, died in 1756, the missionaries rejoiced when they buried him on the hallowed ground. Candidates for baptism, meanwhile, were buried in a nearby but separate plot while the heathen were buried elsewhere (and their burials were conducted by slaves).

The centrality of death in Jamaican life connects in interesting ways with the mission policy shifts made by the Moravians in the 1730s and 40s. While the first Moravian missionaries in the West Indies taught reading and writing, later missionaries "simplified" Christian theology by focusing solely on the crucifixion of Christ. This shift has usually been seen as an accommodation to planter pressure, but I would argue that it was also a strategic shift that made sense in terms of Jamaican society and culture. By "deathifying" their religion, they played to the most communal social experience on the island: the experience of watching other people die.

Most recent research on Moravian missions has emphasized the Moravians' depiction of blood and wounds as central to their appeal to enslaved and free Africans and Creoles. Scholars have suggested that the blood and wounds theology could be adapted easily into an African religious context, in which blood sacrifice played an important role. Yet perhaps this emphasis on blood and wounds takes our attention away from the more important message that the Moravians were imparting: the death of their Savior. It was death, more than wounds, that became the central message to the enslaved Africans in the British and Danish West Indies.

As one can see in Oldendorp's Historie or in the numerous diaries written from the West Indies, slaves in the "post-literacy" Moravian missions (ie the Missions that no longer taught reading and writing) were primarily motivated to seek baptism when they were close to death. Take, for example, the story of one particular sick slave that Oldendorp describes:

A sick Negro was particularly anxious to be visited by a missionary, requesting baptism in order not only to ensure the salvation of his soul but also to make sure that his body would be properly buried by the believers. The missionary Georg Weber considered the matter and decided to grant his request right away. When he repeated his visit eight days later with the purpose in mind, the missionary was not a little amazed to find the man dressed in white, and his house clean and neat, wherein stood a container filled with water in readiness for the baptism." (Oldendorp CM, p. 492)

Oldendorp also recounts how many "backsliding"(ie baptized slaves who return to their "heathenish" ways) return to the mission once they grow old, begging to be forgiven. In both cases, the missionaries seem to hold the greatest amount of sway with the oldest and frailest segment of the population.

A word on Moravian missions and Slave categories

These days, my life has been filled with archaic German Script: I am translating the early records from the Moravian mission to Jamaica into English and trying to make some sense of them.

A little background: the Moravians (aka the United Brethren) are a Protestant denomination founded in eastern Germany in the 1720s (though they trace their roots back to the 15th century followers of Jan Hus). In the 1730s, due to a chance meeting between a former African slave and the leader of the Moravians, Count Zinzendorf, the Moravians decided to send missionaries to the Caribbean, where they could spread the gospel to African slaves.

Moravian missionaries soon head out to the Danish West Indies and in 1754, Brother Zacharias George Caries led a new mission to Jamaica. He did well. In two years, 69 slaves were baptized and dozens more sat on deck as candidates.

Today I was reading a letter that Brother Caries sent from the mission in Jamaica to Brother Spangenberg in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In it, he is trying to convince Spangenberg that he has done a great deal of work among the slaves. At one point, he divides the converted slaves into categories I found both curious and alarming:


The translation of this section read: "43 Negroes were baptized in the year 1756, 17 more as the year before. Among them is Sambo, who was the first. The others are from various groups, 18 circumcised [beschnittene] Negroes, who also look like Jews and who wear small beards [Bärter], and some of the cannibals [Menschenfresser], 30 of which are Guinea Negroes and 13 Creoles. 6 single brothers, 2 widowers and 35 married men. No women have wanted to be baptized because I didn't have anyone who could administer their baptism, but now the Sister [Sone?] is here..."

There are several bizarre things about this description: first of all, why did Caries divide the slaves into circumcised and non-circumcised? And why did he think some looked like Jews? Now, many Christians in the early modern period liked to fit both Africans and Native Americans into a biblical master narrative, in which Native Americans could be the Lost Tribe, and Africans could be either the curses descendents of Cham (this reasoning was often used to justify slavery) or another biblical group.

So was Caries using one of these narratives to make sense of the slaves in his midst? And also: were there really circumcised slaves? Where would they have come from?

Second bizarre aspect: why does he characterize the entire group of baptized slaves as "cannibals"? [Menschenfresser] This, also, was a typical way of categorizing "the other" during the early modern period, and it was often used to refer to Native Americans, but it is surprising that Caries using the term so easily to refer to individuals with whom he has had extended (and, one would hope, meaningful) contact. And, to top that, these were CHRISTIANS, and since Christians are never cannibals (so it was thought), it seems odd that Caries combined the categories of Christian and heathen into one human subject.

Caries also includes both "Guinea Negroes" and "Creoles" within the "cannibal" category. That means that even blacks who had been born and raised in the Caribbean were considered cannibals.

The last method of categorization that Caries uses makes a lot more sense: he splits up the men into single, married and widowers. For Moravians, this division was particularly important because Moravians divided congregations into these groups. In Herrnhut and Bethlehem, two Moravian communal settlements, single brothers lived together in one building while married women lived in another, etc, etc.

To bring these mental perambulations to a close, a word on why categorization is important: understanding how Caries and other Moravian missionaries subdivided African slaves into different groups helps us understand what it meant to be African and a slave in 18th Jamaica. Not that Caries' categories were "right"--but that is beside the point. During this period, Europeans were going through a major shift in their understanding of "us" and "them." Before and during this period, it was common to refer to "us" as "Christian" while "they" were "heathen" (or cannibal, etc.). But in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is possible to see a shift away from a Christian/other worldview into what could be called a nascent racial worldview. In place of Christian/heathen, we have white/black. Among other things, this allowed for blacks to be Christian while still be "other."

In my research, I am trying to trace this shift, which I believe to be critical to the formation of a racially-based world-view that plagues us to today. Though that is not to say that the Christian framework is better-- certainly not. But both have their pros and cons, and I believe we can learn from them still.