CHAPTER 5
Slavery and Social Power in Dutch Reformed Churches
When James Murphy accepted the call of Ulster County’s Rochester, Clove, and Wawarsing churches in 1814, he kept a powerful secret (see Figure 5.1). Although he appeared to be a white man, his mother, Jane Cox, was a Black woman who at the time of his birth was held in bondage by David Johnston, patriarch of one of New York’s most influential families. As the child of an enslaved woman, Murphy had been enslaved upon birth, but in accordance with Johnston’s will he obtained his freedom when Johnston passed away in 1809. Murphy was now twenty-one years old and determined to make the most out of his newly obtained freedom. Within five years, he completed the New Brunswick Theological Seminary and became an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.1 When Murphy received a call from the Clove, Wawarsing, and Rochester churches in Ulster County in 1814, he hid his background from the congregation, at one point even claiming that his mother had died when in fact she was still very much alive. He likely did so because he understood that as a freed Black man, he would not be accepted in such a highly respected church position. At the time, the number of Black congregants in Dutch Reformed churches had increased significantly after a century-long period during which very few free and enslaved Black people appeared in New York’s Dutch Reformed churches. But these Black congregants were generally seated in a separate section of the church, they often had to wait to receive communion until all white congregants had done so, and Black elders and deacons remained nonexistent in the predominantly white Dutch Reformed churches. Black congregants were generally not accepted in church positions of power and certainly not as a minister who literally looked down on his congregation from the elevated pulpit.2
FIGURE 5.1. James Murphy, date unknown. Artotype by E. Bierstadt, NY. Courtesy of the Archives of the Reformed Church of America.
Indeed, when congregants discovered that Murphy was a formerly enslaved Black man, it caused great turmoil in his church community. At this point, he had served as their minister for almost ten years. Most of the congregants were willing to accept him regardless of his personal background, possibly because they did not want to draw too much attention to the fact that a freed Black man had been their minister for so long. However, a few of them opposed Murphy vehemently. Three congregants in particular, Anne Bevier, Dirck Westbrouck, and Rachel Westbrouck (also spelled Westbrook), argued for Murphy’s discharge from their congregation. Bevier insinuated that Murphy had lied about his background to hide “the imputation of African mixture in his pedigree.” She claimed that the Rochester congregation was willing to forget about his ancestry: “We therefore, as usual, attended his ministry and cheerfully contributed to the promotion of his comfort. His mother was dead—no mutual visits then between mother and son could disturb the public feeling. And in his misfortune we began to forget the mistake he had committed.” But doing so became impossible, according to Bevier, when “reports began to circulate that his mother was still alive.”3 Thus, they tried to convince first the consistory and later the classis that Murphy should be terminated from his position. They claimed they were opposed to their pastor because he had lied about the death of his mother.4 Their testimonies reveal, however, that they were more concerned about the fact that their minister was a formerly enslaved Black man.
At the time that Murphy became an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, New York was home to a large number of denominations, including the Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Huguenot, and Lutheran Churches.5 Even though the Dutch Reformed Church was no longer the only accepted religious institution as it had been during the Dutch colonial period, it still maintained a powerful position throughout the region and especially in the predominantly Dutch American communities. There, the Dutch Reformed Church proved an important social and cultural institution. The church connected congregants to each other as well as to the larger Dutch world, and with Dutch as the predominant language used for sermons and church correspondence throughout most of the eighteenth century, the church continued to stand central at the formation of Dutch American identity.6 Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, most Dutch Reformed Church ministers received mandatory training in the Netherlands, where many of them were born, and they regularly communicated with the Classis Amsterdam, the governing body that supervised the American congregations until 1772.7 The church also connected Dutch Reformed communities across the region, and clergy at the various churches often corresponded with each other. Consequently, the church remained a bastion of Dutch culture in North America for several generations.
Not surprisingly, the Dutch Reformed Church’s significance extended beyond its religious influence. As was common in other American colonies, the church served as a social and cultural institution, and its buildings functioned as important social and cultural spaces.8 In New York, Dutch Reformed congregations helped shape and strengthen Dutch communities. But whereas the churches provided a sense of belonging and social standing to their congregants, they also became spaces of exclusion for those who were deemed unworthy.9 Congregants determined who would be allowed to participate in these spaces, which parts of the spaces they could access, and in what capacity. Thus, Dutch Reformed churches became powerful places of social power, especially in the ways that congregants organized their churches and practiced their religion in these spaces. Although scholars have researched the ways in which social power intersects with church life and architecture in various European and North American Christian denominations, no such study exists of Dutch Reformed churches.10 When historians research slavery and the Dutch Reformed Church, they often focus on theology, not on the social aspects of church practice or space.11 This chapter examines the ways in which social power manifested within the church space, focusing in particular on the conditions of free and enslaved Black New Yorkers in these churches. It argues that congregations’ practices of selective admission to these spaces, exclusion from these buildings and church yards, and segregation within these spaces reinforced the social and racial hierarchies that supported slavery in their communities.
Spatial analysis of churches has produced a wide array of scholarly works. Some of these studies have examined churches as sacred spaces, a concept central to Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, while other research has focused on architecture or church practice within these churches.12 Similarly important in studies of religion in Early America has been the concept of “lived religion,” which originates in David Hall’s study of the ways in which religion permeated daily life in New England and proves essential in understanding that people’s social and religious life could not be separated.13 Scholars like Dell Upton, Gretchen Buggeln, Andrew Spicer, Nicholas Beasley, Peter Benes, Louis Nelson, Rhys Isaac, and Jeanne Halgren Kilde have used these concepts to study religion, social power, and space in early modern Europe and early America.14 Their studies show that in the same way that religion permeated every part of social life, social life shaped religious practice and the organization of religious spaces. Consequently, slavery and racial thought influenced early American churches and religious practice within them, whether these were the Anglican churches of Virginia or the Dutch Reformed churches in New York.15 As Murphy’s experience shows, any challenges within the church to society’s social hierarchies threatened slavery and Dutch Americans’ social power.
Black Membership
Although a significant number of free and enslaved Africans attended New Amsterdam’s Dutch Reformed Church, they became largely absent from church records by the early eighteenth century. Only toward the end of the century, when the Second Great Awakening swept the young nation, did their participation in the church increase again, albeit slowly. Scholars often attribute the apparent decline of Black people’s participation in the region’s eighteenth-century Dutch Reformed churches to a denomination and clergy that did not welcome enslaved people in large part because they questioned enslaved people’s motives for conversion.16 Examination of Dutch Reformed Church records suggests, however, that the church’s governing bodies did not deliberately exclude Black men and women; in fact, a small number of free and enslaved New Yorkers still joined the church. Instead, it is more likely that enslavers prohibited the people they held in bondage from participation and that white church members at times blocked Black New Yorkers from participation and especially membership in the church out of fear that this would challenge the social hierarchy of their slaveholding societies. White congregants could use their power within the church to keep enslaved and free Black New Yorkers from joining.
The church was not just a religious space; in fact, church communities provided powerful social networks. The church, then, was a place of social interaction, and church connections proved invaluable in society at large. Simply being a worshipper in the church could enhance one’s social status in New York’s Dutch communities. Enslaved Africans in the seventeenth-century Dutch colony likely understood how useful participation in the church could be when they had their children baptized. Although they appeared to improve their societal standing through their participation during the Dutch colonial period, such opportunities became unattainable to enslaved men and women in most eighteenth-century churches.
One of the few remaining sacraments in the Dutch Reformed Church, communion served as a powerful tool of inclusion in and exclusion from the church community. John Calvin had emphasized the significance of communion and encouraged congregations to practice it regularly, but most Dutch Reformed churches held the Lord’s Supper a few times a year.17 Only full members could participate in this sacrament, and not everyone had an opportunity to become a full member in the church, which required a profession of faith after months of regular catechism lessons. Plus, church elders had the power and the obligation to refuse membership to anyone whom they believed was not sincere in his or her profession of faith. According to the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the church’s founding documents, if those unworthy were to be admitted in the church, “the covenant of God would be profaned, and his wrath kindled against the whole congregation.” Thus, church elders, responsible for protecting the congregation, were compelled to deny those aspiring members whom they believed to be “infidels” or “ungodly.”18 They also determined whether or not Black men and women could receive access to communion.
Even when someone had been accepted as a full member, that person’s right to communion could be taken away.19 In 1704, for example, the Kingston congregation withdrew Fennetje in ‘t Veld’s right to communion because the congregation believed she had wrongfully accused Johannes Schepmoes of having had sexual relations with her. Her “deception,” Schepmoes claimed, was evident after she apparently had given birth to a Black child. The consistory agreed and determined she would no longer be allowed to commune with them until she acknowledged her wrongdoing and repented.20 Congregants could also put pressure on the consistory to withhold communion from fellow congregants. According to Robert Alexander, who closely studied the Albany church records, Anneke Schaats, daughter of Albany’s Domine Schaats, lost her right to communion when some women of the church’s congregation found out that the unmarried woman was pregnant. According to Alexander, these women “banded together and declared that they would refuse to take communion from the same table as Anneke Schaats.”21 In these communities, then, allowing access to communion could be used as a mechanism of social control.
Congregants and clergy understood that accepting enslaved men and women as full members could enhance their social standing, and some feared that they might use their full membership to improve their social circumstances or even to obtain their freedom.22 As early as 1664, Reverend Henricus Selijns expressed his concern that some enslaved men and women wanted their children baptized because this could help them achieve freedom.23 Such concerns were not completely unwarranted. Several of the men and women enslaved by the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland had used the fact that they were Christians as one of the most successful arguments for manumission.24 Some eighteenth-century congregations had enslaved people promise during their confession that they would not use their full membership to obtain freedom, as demonstrated in an entry in the Kingston baptismal records, to avoid such challenges to their bondage. When in 1703 an enslaved woman named Rachel received baptism after she made a profession of faith, the baptismal record explicitly stated that she promised the congregation that she would serve her mistress, Catharin Cottyn, “faithfully and diligently until the death of her mistress, and after her mistress’s death will serve her master Jan Cottyn another 8 months.” Only then would she become free.25 Even after the New York Council passed a law in 1706 that determined enslaved New Yorkers would not have the right to freedom after they converted to Christianity, enslavers likely continued to worry that the men and women they held in bondage might use their acceptance in the church to obtain their freedom.26 Regardless of what state law detailed, full membership in the church would improve enslaved New Yorkers’ social standing in these communities.
That such social concerns could motivate congregations to keep enslaved people from obtaining full membership in the church is evident from a letter written by Peter Lowe, reverend of the six Kings County congregations. A student of Reverend John Henry Livingston, Peter Lowe—baptized in 1764 as Petrus Louw in the Kingston church—was among the first Dutch Reformed ministers who received their education in North America.27 He became an ordained pastor at Kings County’s six congregations (Brooklyn, Flatlands, Bushwick, New Utrecht, Flatbush, and Gravesend) after he completed his theological studies in October of 1787.28 Soon after he started this position, a group of Black men requested full membership in one of his churches. In a letter to an unnamed friend, Lowe detailed his congregants’ main objections to accepting these Black men as full members in the church. Lowe did not agree with his congregants and believed the men “were Worthy, and had a right to the priveledges [sic] of the Gospel.” In fact, he included his own rebuttal to each of the congregants’ objections. Their concerns expose a fear that accepting the Black men who had asked to become full members could present serious challenges to the social hierarchy of their slaveholding community, where at the time almost 75 percent of the free, white households included enslaved laborers.29
The diverse reasons these congregants presented for exclusion of the Black men exposed the arbitrariness of their arguments, which is particularly evident in the second objection Lowe listed in the letter: “They are descendants of Ham, or of the Treachorous Gibeonites?” While both these biblical accounts were often used to justify slavery, the congregants apparently did not agree which part of the Scripture explained supposed Black people’s inferiority or provided a justification for their bondage and exclusion from full membership in the church.30 Moreover, they suggested that they could not endure these men next to them in church and that they would be ashamed to commune with them because Black people were of a “different species”: “witness their nauseous sweat, complexion, manners.”31 Clearly, they considered the church a white space, and they objected to the spatial closeness and intimacy that could occur if Black people were admitted.
The congregants also worried that accepting these men might encourage other Black New Yorkers to request membership, which, according to them, would degrade the value of their congregation: “If those should be admitted who have now applied—the whole county of Blacks will flock to, and what a terrible congrigation [sic] shall we then have.” The prospect of Black men becoming church elders or deacons further terrified these congregants, who suggested that granting Black men positions of power would bring chaos and disharmony to the church.32 “What an awful sight, negro Elders, deacons, Church masters,” they exclaimed. Congregants also suggested that their “seeming desire for the privileges of the gospel may leave them; They will then be rotten members, and bring disgrace on the Church.” In fact, some congregants suggested that the aspiring church members’ “pretended zeal … is nothing else than vain parade & ostentation.”33 Thus, these church members suggested that the Black men might not be serious in their request and eventually leave the church.
The objections outlined in Lowe’s letter reveal why these Dutch Americans did not want to accept Black men and women as full members in their church, but Lowe also detailed why he disagreed with them, at one point calling the congregants who objected “pharaisaical masters.” When the congregants stated that Black people were “a species very different from us” and that they “would be ashamed to commune with them,” Lowe suggested that their objections demonstrated that they did not love God. Their claim that Black people “have no souls” provoked another admonition by Lowe: “I pity the Condition of yours, if you have one,” he wrote, thus questioning the congregants’ humanity. Fears that admitting these men would cause an overwhelming flood of Black people who would want to join the church met Lowe’s claim that these church members did not want “success of the Gospel.” In response to the assertion that these men were not true Christians because they would gather on Sundays for heathenish celebrations, Lowe declared, “I rejoice that they are a praying People; They do what many of their masters do not.”34 With his rebuttals, Lowe not only expressed his outrage that he could not accept the Black men, he also suggested that these objecting congregants behaved unseemly and lacked religious zeal.
Even though he did not agree with any of the objections listed in the letter, Lowe, a slaveholder himself, did not question the institution of slavery or society’s racial hierarchy.35 When the congregants stated that Black people were descendants of Ham or the Gibeonites, Lowe dared them to prove such a claim. However, he responded to the assertion that African Americans were “accursed by God” by admitting that “servitude is imposed on them,” but he then argued that their servitude did not “extend to their spiritual state.”36 In so doing, Lowe suggested that physical slavery did not conflict with spiritual liberation, which was a popular argument among some eighteenth-century Dutch Reformed ministers and theologians. In fact, historian Ryan Hanley argues that this interpretation was typical for Calvinist denominations, which did not consider corporeal freedom necessary to achieve spiritual liberation through conversion to Christianity.37 In the 1730s and 1740s, the West African Dutch Reformed Church minister and formerly enslaved Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, for instance, argued that slavery did not contradict Christianity; in fact, he defended physical enslavement if accompanied with spiritual liberation.38 When serving in Suriname in the 1740s, Reverend Lambertus De Ronde, who would later become a minister in New York City, worked tirelessly to convert the enslaved population of this Dutch colony but claimed “it by no means disturbed the bodily condition.”39 Similarly, Lowe suggested that Christianizing slaves did not conflict with their enslavement; indeed, he claimed that “religion will make them good Christians & better servants.”40
Lowe’s assertions as articulated in the letter reflected the church’s position. As Lowe suggested, the Dutch Reformed Church never officially objected to Black people’s membership; instead, the Classis of Amsterdam generally supported proselytizing among so-called heathens even if they were enslaved. In the eighteenth century, the classis became more active in sending out ordinances to its overseas churches that promoted catechization and eventual baptism of enslaved people. Conversion would not conflict with their status; in fact, it would enhance faithfulness to their enslavers. A 1743 ordinance the classis sent to the Society of Suriname, for instance, informed them that the classis supported active catechization among enslaved Africans.41 In 1779, the classis sent out a similar ordinance directed to foreign churches, urging enslavers to allow catechization of their enslaved laborers.42 The classis also proclaimed that in addition to baptism, enslaved people could become full members in the church, which included the rights to receive baptism as well as communion.43
Although Lowe could not admit the men, he wrote in his letter that he would raise the question at the next synod in the hope that there, “we shall not be daunted … by the opposition made by the ignorant & prejudiced.”44 Maybe not coincidentally, then, the General Synod, the highest authority for the North American churches after they separated from the Classis of Amsterdam, passed its first resolution on this subject in 1788 when it resolved that enslaved people should be accepted in the church, though “overseers of congregations should exercise all proper prudence, by receiving the testimony of masters and mistresses in relation to the subject.”45 When the General Synod met again in 1792, the Reverend Body appended the previous legislation, stating that “slaves or blacks, when admitted to the church possess the same privileges as other members of same standing,” and “ministers who deny them any Christian privileges” should be reprimanded.46
As evidenced by Lowe’s letter, social and economic realities largely motivated exclusion of these Black New Yorkers from full membership. Enslavers could keep their enslaved laborers from attending church or receiving religious instruction, and congregations could keep enslaved and free Black New Yorkers from obtaining full membership in the church. In communities that relied heavily on enslaved labor, enslaved men and women often did not have the necessary support to join these congregations. Because Black New Yorkers in the region’s Dutch communities often did not have access to these church communities, they also lacked important opportunities of social advancement.
Black Members and Positions of Power
Because congregants, many of whom slaveholders, controlled access to their churches, the Black presence in Dutch Reformed churches could differ significantly per congregation. Several Dutch Reformed churches had a small number of enslaved and free African Americans and Native Americans who attended church services, received baptism, or had their children baptized. Some of them were accepted as full members. Descendants of the first Africans who joined the Manhattan congregation continued to be members in New York City’s churches, although they became more difficult to identify since their names no longer revealed their African ancestry.47 In addition to these free Black families, at least one enslaved man and one enslaved woman—Willem of Capt. Davidt Provoost, and Anna of Abraham Kip—received baptism in this church in the early eighteenth century.48 In the 1730s, a relatively large number of enslaved men and women—Jeptha, Abraham, Cobus, Jinny, Elizabeth, Clara, and Jannetje—received baptism in Albany’s church after “confession.”49 The Kingston records mentioned only one enslaved woman and two enslaved children who received baptism during the period from 1660 through 1809.50 Yet, records of the Fonda Church in the frontier town Fonda (previously known as Caughnawaga) listed several enslaved people in the 1770s and 1780s.51 Although for most of the eighteenth century they did not join the church in large numbers, free and enslaved Black New Yorkers were at times baptized or even accepted as full members.
Though some references to enslaved New Yorkers appeared in these church records, their presence was clearly minimal. Before drawing any conclusions, it is important to acknowledge that the surviving baptismal and membership records may be incomplete. Historian Dirk Mouw suggests that not all people who received baptism were recorded in the church records. While baptism was free, having one’s name recorded in the church records generally required a small fee, and coming up with the money to do so was undoubtedly a challenge for enslaved men and women.52 His research also reveals that some churches held separate records for Black congregants, and these records may not have been preserved with the same care as the records that listed their white counterparts.53 Even if membership, baptismal, and marriage records do not provide a complete account of their baptism and membership in the church, the above-mentioned church records suggest that Black people’s presence in eighteenth-century Dutch Reformed churches remained small for most of the eighteenth century.54
By the late eighteenth century, Black baptisms and memberships in North American Dutch Reformed churches increased significantly. Influenced by Enlightenment thought, the American Revolution, and the Second Great Awakening, Dutch Reformed congregations evidently became more accepting of Black women and men in their churches. By the early nineteenth century, the church, its ministry, and some of its members even promoted and celebrated African American inclusion in the church. The Acts and Proceedings of the General Synod of 1816 mentioned in their “Synodical Reports of the State of the Churches” that in the church in Poughkeepsie “the revival has been powerful, and extended its happy influence to the souls of not a few blacks.”55 By 1819, the New Brunswick Sunday school educated at least forty-three Black men, and in 1826 the Particular Synod of New York praised the Classis of Philadelphia because “considerable attention is paid to the instruction of the blacks, small and great.”56 Even the Kings County churches, where Lowe had faced such strong opposition in the 1780s, now accepted Black members.
As their participation increased, free and enslaved Black New Yorkers became more visible in these churches. An increasing number of them achieved full membership, and some of them even moved to positions of power within the church. When they did, they frequently faced opposition from white members. For white congregants, the thought of having to share full membership with the men and women they enslaved was often unbearable. Not only did their full membership suggest that Black congregants were considered worthy, white congregants would also have to share the Lord’s Supper with their Black brethren.57 During communion, full members, regardless of status or skin color, were to gather around the table for the Lord’s Supper.58
Some congregations may have practiced such an inclusive communion, although to my knowledge no such descriptions have survived. More commonly, however, when congregations included enslaved or free Black communicants, these men and women were segregated from the white church members during communion. As detailed in Lowe’s letter, some of his congregants worried that Black members would “intermix with white People at the Lord’s Table to their great offence,” to which Lowe responded that enslaved members would not be seated among their white counterparts: “Are they Pharisees to choose the principal Seats.—will not Christian prudence, and humility dictate to them a place at the last Table—by themselves.”59 Here, Lowe suggested that white and Black congregants could remain separate during communion, and it appears that when enslaved and free Black New Yorkers were accepted in communion, they rarely shared this sacrament with their white counterparts. By the early nineteenth century, when the number of black congregants became more substantial, Black members were often seated at a separate table, or they were made to wait for communion until after their white peers had finished. While in theory they had access to the same sacrament, white congregants made sure to spatially and temporally segregate Black members’ participation in an effort to avoid physical intimacy and any hints of equality. Even when Black men and women had access to communion, congregations continued to use this sacrament as a way to delineate rank and assert their supposed superiority over Black women and men.
When congregations welcomed Black women and men in their churches, they still resisted giving them equal access to positions of power. Kilde explains how Protestant churches relied on a church governance system that was largely informed by and reinforced social hierarchies that existed outside of the church. Elders and deacons, for example, were charged with the monitoring of churchgoers’ moral behavior inside and outside of the church.60 These positions of power would be reserved for people who had a certain social standing, while Black men were generally kept “at the fringes of congregational life.”61 This was not particular to the North American churches. When in 1775 the Classis of Amsterdam received word from the ministry in St. Croix, it was outraged to hear that the church there had allowed Black men to become church elders. The church may have allowed Black people to participate, but they were not expected to receive well-respected church appointments or full equality within the church.62
New York’s congregations mostly kept Black men out of powerful church positions, but doing so proved increasingly challenging when their participation in the church increased. Such efforts likely contributed to the James Murphy controversy. When congregants first discovered that he had misled them, he had served as their minister for almost a decade, and, as church records indicate, he was well respected in the church community.63 Even after Murphy apologized and the consistories of the churches where he served concluded that “as far we know he has been faithful in the duties of the ministry and we believe that the members of our church unanimously and the Congregation at large are much attached to our minister,” Bevier, Rachel, and Dirck Westbrouck continued to discredit him. In fact, Dirck Westbrouck was called upon by the church of Rochester’s committee of elders who tried to “convince him of the impropriety of his conduct & open abuse of the minister and Consistory of the Church.” They found Westbrouck’s behavior at this meeting, which included “treating the consistory with contempt and manifesting the most open insubordination,” so reprehensible that they suspended Westbrouck from communion “until he shall give Evidence of Repentance for his conduct and shall show due subordination to the rules of the Church.”64 But Westbrouck did not give up, and the case made it all the way to the General Synod, where in 1823 it was decided that “there is no reasonable ground of grievance.”65 It appeared that Murphy had triumphed over his opponents.
While initially the local churches, the classis, and the synod supported Murphy, his challengers did eventually achieve their objective, as Murphy left the Rochester, Wawarsing, and Clove churches for the Second Church in Glenville, New York. Moreover, in 1824 the particular Synod of Albany directed the Ulster classis to “exercise that discipline upon the Rev. Mr. Murphy, which is prescribed in the constitution towards offending members, and which his case deserves.”66 Murphy managed, however, to remain a relatively well-respected reverend in the church for at least another decade, and in 1840 he presided over North America’s General Synod, the first African descendant and formerly enslaved man to do so.67
Controversies also complicated Mark Jordan’s aspirations of becoming a minister in the church. When Jordan, a long-standing member in New York’s Garden Street Church, also known as the South Reformed Church, first revealed in 1822 that he wanted to become a minister in the church, he faced initial scrutiny. After careful examination, the committee that reviewed Jordan’s case determined that he did not obtain all the required documents because he had “never passed through a regular course of academical instructions” or studied with a “Professor of Theology.” The committee decided, however, that Jordan, “a coloured man” who “desires to labor among the people of colour,” could be allowed to serve among Black New Yorkers.68 Possibly, the classis saw in Jordan an exceptional opportunity to serve a Black congregation. Nevertheless, Jordan’s ambitions continued to meet resistance. The Reverend Ezra Cornish objected to Jordan’s appointment, suggesting that it would “destroy his moral character.”69 At the request of the New York classis, the consistory of the Garden Street Church investigated these accusations and found Jordan “not guilty.” Jordan then became a “student in divinity” under the care of the Classis of New York.70 Thus, the synod rejected a complaint against the Classis of New York, and in July 1823 the classis licensed Jordan “to preach the gospel.”71 He now led the first Black Reformed Church congregation, which held its services in a public school at Duane Street from 1823 to 1829.72 The congregation did not survive for very long. According to Graham Hodges, Jordan lost his license in 1828, which also ended the services for this African American congregation.73
As Jordan and Murphy’s experiences show, Black men struggled to obtain and maintain positions of power within the Dutch Reformed Church. Even when white congregants became more accepting of Black congregants, they often limited their participation and excluded them from the more respected church positions. In a society where church life generally reflected society’s social hierarchies, it remained unimaginable that Black people would hold positions of power.
Church Buildings
Churches were places of worship, often considered sacred spaces, but they also reflected and reinforced society’s socioeconomic and political dynamics.74 Even in the Dutch Reformed churches, which appeared more egalitarian than their Catholic or Anglican counterparts, church and social hierarchy were closely intertwined and evident in their buildings. The minister preached from an elevated pulpit, elders and deacons had the most prominent seats close to the pulpit, men often occupied seats in what were considered superior locations, and those who had more money could purchase the most coveted pews. When the number of Black worshippers increased, they were often restricted to certain areas within these churches. Dutch Reformed church buildings mirrored the socioeconomic and political structures of the communities they served, and church seating in particular reflected and reinforced social hierarchy within the church community.75
Some of New York’s oldest surviving Dutch Reformed churches date back to the eighteenth century. Many of these buildings have imposing porticos, bell towers, organs, galleries, split chancels, and center aisles in between fixed seating. Importantly, most of these churches look nothing like their eighteenth-century counterparts. Church buildings were not static or fixed, and congregations regularly modified these buildings and their interior. Often these modifications reflected cultural and social changes, or they were necessary to accommodate growing congregations. This section will look at some of these changes, and how they mirrored larger American architectural trends. Reconstruction of how these church buildings changed over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shows that, just like the congregations that worshipped in them, these buildings became increasingly American. As a part of these changes, these buildings would eventually include designated sections for Black worshippers. Just as these buildings symbolized religion and community to its white congregants, these structures would often become spaces of exclusion for the Black men and women who lived in these communities.
It is important to note that in theory Dutch Reformed church buildings were not considered sacred spaces. According to the teachings of John Calvin, there was not one place that was sacred, and thus people could worship anywhere. Holiness depended on the act of worship, not the location of such worship. In this respect, the Dutch Reformed church buildings differed significantly from the consecrated Catholic and Anglican churches.76 Because in Calvinist denominations, churches, meetinghouses, or temples were merely places that housed congregations, it was not uncommon for these denominations to worship in spaces that were also used for civic meetings.77 Several scholars have shown, however, that most churchgoers, including Dutch Reformed congregants, did likely consider these buildings sacred spaces.78
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Dutch Reformed churches in the region generally resembled their European counterparts. Some of the church’s initial services were held in makeshift spaces, as was the case in New Amsterdam where for a while services were held in the attic of a mill.79 When congregations raised enough money to build independent churches, these structures often followed European architectural models. Many of these churches had square, hexagonal, or octagonal plans with galleries, turreted roofs, and a belfry in the center (see Figure 5.2).80 Because the Reformed church focused on the word of God, which was communicated via the minister’s sermon, the pulpit became the focal point within these buildings. The pulpit was usually elevated, only to be reached through the use of a narrow ladder, and placed in the center of the nave, opposite the entrance. In this location, the minister was not only closer to God, he could also be heard better throughout the church.81
Whether it concerned socioeconomic status, race, or gender, seating arrangements in the Dutch Reformed churches clearly reflected society’s social and political structures. Seventeenth-century churches often did not have fixed seating, thus requiring worshippers to stand or bring their own seats. When churches did have fixed seating, these were often benches on the first floor, along the walls, and in the galleries, “en manière de theater.”82 Most of these early churches had galleries; in fact, in her work on Christian architecture, Jeanne Halgren Kilde argues that galleries were an important element of Protestant churches because they brought worshippers closer to the raised pulpit. Kilde also notes that these galleries often became important tools “of delineating social rank.”83 As was the case in the theater, seats along the walls and in the gallery were generally considered more prominent.84
FIGURE 5.2. Engraving after Philip Hooker’s A View of the Late Protestant Dutch Church in the City of Albany, ca. 1810. Yale University Art Gallery.
When seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century congregations practiced gender-segregated seating, as recommended by John Calvin, men were generally accommodated in the galleries and on benches along the walls.85 These were considered the best seats in the house, thus reflecting men’s superior status within Dutch Reformed religion. These seats also gave them oversight of the center of the church, where women and children were seated. Several New York churches practiced such gender-segregated seating throughout the eighteenth century, and some congregations continued this practice into the nineteenth century.86 For instance, the first Claverack church building, built in 1727, was a one-room structure with center pews for women and children and pews along the walls that were occupied by the men.87 Pehr Kalm similarly noted that in the Old Dutch Church in Manhattan the men were seated in the gallery and women on the first floor.88 Both the first and second church buildings of Albany’s congregation had women seated on the main floor and men in the gallery.89 In the second Albany church, built in 1715, only members of the consistory and the older men who had trouble climbing up to the gallery were seated on the first floor.90 Some of these churches may even have had separate church entrances for men and women in an effort to keep them completely segregated.91
Elders and dignitaries had special seating in these churches. Directed sideways and adjacent to the pulpit, these seats provided these men with a view of both the preacher and the congregation. In 1754, for instance, the Kingston church consistory voted to reserve special seats for several prominent church members.92 In the eighteenth-century Flatbush church, the elders were seated to the right of the pulpit and the deacons to the left.93 In his study of Albany’s Dutch Reformed Church, Robert Alexander suggests that the elders were seated in the front, close to the minister, so that they could ensure the minister’s sermon “properly accorded with scripture.”94 Kilde argues, however, that the elders in congregational churches were regularly seated in these side-oriented, front seats so that they could oversee the congregants. Protestant congregations relied, in part, on surveillance, “as congregation leaders watched worshippers and worshippers watched one another.”95 The community’s most respected men were charged with supervising the minister and surveilling the rest of the congregation.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church records generally do not reveal where enslaved churchgoers would have been seated. As “permanent guests” in these churches, they most likely occupied what could be considered in-between spaces.96 It is important to point out that while some enslaved people were able to attend church for religious reasons, most of them undoubtedly were there solely to attend to their enslavers’ needs. For example, enslaved women were largely in charge of refilling the charcoal foot stoves that kept their female enslavers warm during service on cold days, and when churches did not have permanent seats, enslaved men or women were likely responsible for bringing seats into the buildings for their enslavers.97
While there are few exceptions, the enslaved men and women who attended church usually did not have designated seats. Alexander claims that in the 1715 Albany church, a section of the benches on the east side of the balcony was set aside for Black participants. He also suggests that the 1767 list of pew sales at Albany’s church included that part of the benches in the gallery were set aside for Black congregants.98 Most church plans, however, did not include such designated areas until the early nineteenth century. In fact, records suggest that during most of the eighteenth century, even free Black worshippers did not own pews in these buildings. Instead, Black men and women most commonly would have been occupying the in-between spaces, seated or standing in the aisles close to their enslavers, in the back of the church, or outside the church building.99 Sextons would be charged with keeping an eye on the Black people who attended. New York City’s consistory, for instance, ordered its sexton, Jan de la Montagne, to ensure there would be no “disorderly conduct either by children or by Negroes, neither before, nor during, nor after the sermon.”100 Because there were usually few Black people present in these churches, congregants likely did not feel the urge to restrict them to a specific area of the church.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, church structures were often replaced with larger buildings that could accommodate these communities’ growing number of worshippers, but the changes did not stop there. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, newly built churches mostly had a rectangular shape and bell towers instead of turret-mounted belfries. In subsequent changes that generally took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, family pews increasingly replaced church benches. Galleries and the pulpit were lowered, and eventually the pulpit was moved to the narrow side of the church. Benches along the walls were mostly removed. As part of these modifications, the church entrances were moved to the bell tower, across from the pulpit.101
These architectural changes were not particular to the Dutch Reformed churches. In fact, they resemble those of the congregational churches in New England, where over the course of the eighteenth century the meetinghouses began to look more like the North American Anglican church buildings.102 Peter Benes claims that these changes were the result of a more progressive group of churchgoers who wanted a more broadened and modernized church, but Benes and Philip Zimmerman also find that the New England meetinghouses were generally influenced by an increased separation of church and state in the area, which took municipal meetings out of the church buildings.103 Thus, these buildings became more exclusively spaces of religious worship, which fit their new architectural style.
Similar developments likely influenced the changes in Dutch Reformed churches, and through these changes a typical American church-building style developed across denominations. In fact, by the early nineteenth century, churches across the Atlantic seaboard looked incredibly similar. To some extent Gothic revival but more so Greek revival and Federal styles now influenced church architecture from Charleston to Boston.104 For instance, by the 1840s many churches included porticos.105 Albany’s First Church, the New Paltz Dutch Reformed Church, and the Shawangunk church buildings still exhibit these imposing entrances (see Figures 5.3 and 5.4).106 Some changes in worship caused modifications to these structures. Organ music became more prominent in nineteenth-century churches, which required the installation of often large organs in the back of the church, by the bell tower.107 Thus, influenced by both international and regional cultural trends as well as changes in worship, American church builders had developed their own style by the early nineteenth century.
Seating arrangements in these buildings likewise changed over time, but they continued to reflect and reinforce social hierarchies. By the early nineteenth century, many congregations either had switched or began to switch the seating arrangements to family pews in the nave and in the galleries. At this point, most pulpits and galleries had been lowered, and thus the gallery seats were no longer the most coveted seats in the church. Instead, the cost of these pews depended on their proximity to the pulpit, with pews located closest to the pulpit the most valuable. Thus, socioeconomic status determined which congregants could afford pews closest to the pulpit. Congregants who could not afford a pew often had access to benches on the balcony.108 Elders and dignitaries were still seated close to the pulpit where they could see both the minister and congregation.
Church plans now more often included reserved seating for Black worshippers, which suggests that as their numbers increased, they more commonly occupied a designated area of the church. Mostly, they were seated on benches in the back of the church by the bell tower, either in the galleries or on the first floor.109 In those areas, they would have been the farthest removed from the pulpit and least visible from the nave. For instance, Albany’s First Church had designated seating for its black congregants in the back of the church, both on the first floor and on the balcony.110 And when the New Paltz congregation built a new church in 1839 for its growing congregation, a drawing of the pew arrangements included segregated seating for black men and women in the back of the gallery, by the bell tower.111 Not only were these designated and controlled seating areas of the church—in the back and close to the doors—considered “less desirable,” restricting Black worshippers to these seats also allowed for very few interactions between Black and white congregants and caused Black churchgoers to be minimally visible within the churches they often helped build.112
Louis Nelson, Dell Upton, and Robert Olwell found similar seating practices in southern churches.113 Nelson suggests that in South Carolina’s Anglican churches it was not until the early nineteenth century that churches actually reserved certain seats for enslaved men and women, and these seats were usually located in the balcony. Before that, their seating may have been more haphazard, depending on the congregation.114 Nelson argues that the increased use of designated seating for enslaved people in South Carolina’s Anglican churches was “an expression of increasing racial anxieties.” As more Black people joined these churches after the American Revolution, they were more frequently seated in separate and controlled spaces.115 In his study of Virginia, Upton proposes that eighteenth-century Anglican churches had no designated seating for enslaved churchgoers, and that the so-called slave gallery of the nineteenth century “was a rarity in the eighteenth” when this area of the church was often reserved for private seating.116 Jon Sensbach also notices that among North Carolina’s Moravian churches, segregation began in the nineteenth century.117 In New York’s Dutch Reformed churches, white New Yorkers’ increased efforts to separate Black people from white spaces in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also occurred when a growing number of Black men and women attended Dutch Reformed services. Across denominations, then, gallery seats, especially controlled and subpar areas in the far back, became the designated section for Black worshippers in these churches.
FIGURE 5.3. The Reformed Church of Shawangunk, Wallkill, NY. Picture by author.
FIGURE 5.4. Reformed Church of New Paltz, New Paltz, NY. Picture by author.
Black congregants were not just restricted to the least desirable seats. When it best suited congregants or the consistory, they had no problem relocating the church’s Black worshippers. The first church of Albany, for example, resolved in 1799 “that the Negro men be placed on the south side of the Gallery & the Negro Women on the North side.”118 In 1811, the church again reserved gallery seats for Black churchgoers.119 When the church needed more income from pew sales, the consistory decided that “the three Pews heretofore reserved for the Blacks attending divine service, be sold.” The men and women who had previously used these seats were now redirected to “the three circular Pews in the South east corner.”120 In some cases, white congregants who objected to worshipping in close proximity to their Black counterparts used their spending power to keep Black churchgoers from being seated close to their pews. In 1815, Daniel Winne informed the treasury that he would pay for his pew “provided the Consistory will remove the Blacks from behind his Pew as was understood.”121 The consistory then determined that it would sell the pews on the first floor that were now “occupied by people of colour.” Elderly Black churchgoers had been allotted these seats on the first floor, but now they were relocated to the gallery. The sexton was told to “direct these people to conform themselves accordingly.”122 With churches that relied on pew sales, white congregants could put monetary pressure on the church if they did not like where Black churchgoers were seated.
For Black congregants, their unequal treatment in these churches would have been a painful reminder that white congregants controlled these spaces of worship. Their assigned seats in the back of these churches allowed them only limited access to the sermon and clearly symbolized their supposed inferior status within the church and society at large. By the 1820s, when Scotsman James Kent visited New York City, he noted that African Americans in the city’s churches of all denominations were “packed up in some back benches in the gallery and not allowed to come near a white mans [sic] person.”123
While there are no surviving descriptions by Black New Yorkers who attended these Dutch Reformed churches, discussions of Black men who attended white churches elsewhere help reconstruct how these Black worshippers must have felt. Frederick Douglass, for example, explained that he found it a humiliating experience when he attended a New Bedford, Massachusetts, Methodist church where Black congregants were seated in the gallery and allowed to partake in communion only after all white congregants had done so.124 When Cato Pearce, an enslaved man from Rhode Island who would eventually become an itinerant preacher, attended a New England Presbyterian church, he too had to sit in a section designated for Black worshippers, which was so far from the pulpit that he could barely hear the sermon. He evidently found the experience of being seated in what according to him were commonly called “nigger pews” so traumatizing that he feared he would be sent to such separate pews again when he attended a Baptist church the following Sunday.125 William J. Brown, a Black man from Providence, claimed in his memoir that many Black Rhode Islanders chose not to attend church altogether because “they were opposed to going to churches and sitting in pigeon holes, as all the churches at that time had some obscure place for the colored people to sit in.”126 He wrote that these circumstances motivated Black Rhode Islanders to establish their own churches.
These descriptions reveal that Black churchgoers often found their experiences in these white-dominated churches humiliating. In fact, many of them would rather not attend church than be submitted to such degradation. Yet, some Black worshippers may have used the fact that they were seated in a separate section as an opportunity to connect with other Black congregants during church service. Since these sections were usually located in the back of these churches, other congregants and even the elders and ministers would have had limited oversight over the people seated there. For some enslaved men and women who had few opportunities to interact with other enslaved people, these few hours in church would have had a valuable social function.
Just as congregations changed over time, so did the buildings that housed them. Dutch Reformed church builders increasingly adopted a more American architecture. Interiors of these churches were also modified by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Seating arrangements proved powerful reflections of the communities’ social inequalities. White men with significant status and spending power could obtain the most coveted church seats or pews, whereas Black men and women were either left to occupy in-between spaces or restricted to back benches. Both free and enslaved Black New Yorkers were treated as permanent guests in these churches. They had no pews and were quickly forced to move elsewhere in the church when white congregants requested them to do so. Thus, the organization and utilization of these church spaces transmitted a powerful message to all: even when Black men and women had access to the privileges of the gospel, they were never considered equal to their white counterparts in these white-dominated churches.
The Churchyard
The churchyard served as an extension of the church, both as a religious and a social space. Nineteenth-century historian Andrew Mellick provided an especially vivid description of a Bedminster, New Jersey, Dutch Reformed Church when he wrote that “to appreciate what a religious and social factor is Bedminster Church in this well-ordered community, it should be visited on the first day of the week—on a pleasant Sunday morning.” He then depicted part of Sunday ritual at this church: “As the hour for service approaches the women have passed inside, but the men gather about the door or under the trees, discussing their horses, the crops and whatever may have been of interest during the past week. This Sunday morning talk is not limited to the one sex, for, on entering, we would find the wives and daughters in animated converse over the backs and partitions of the pews.”127 He later detailed that churchgoers often held picnics in the churchyard at which some enslaved people had “stands on the church-green for the sale of root and malt beer, thick slices of buttered rye bread, sugared olekokes [better known as oliebollen, a Dutch version of fried dough], Dutch crullers, and gingerbread.”128 As he portrayed, gathering in the church and churchyard allowed churchgoers to meet and catch up with neighbors, especially in the more rural areas.
The churchyard, then, served as a social space where congregants could catch up on the latest news. In fact, public announcements, which may have included “runaway slave” notifications, were often posted by the church door since that was an especially effective way to reach many in the community.129 The churchyard also provided a space for displays of social status.130 The records of the Caughnawaga church, for instance, mentioned that “the Visscher brothers always attracted attention because of the fine horses they rode to church, their slaves following them to care for the horses.”131 Edward Lamson Henry’s late eighteenth-century painting of the Shawangunk church depicts similar pageantry that became an important part of the Sunday ritual (see Figure 5.5).
FIGURE 5.5. Edward Lamson Henry, Sunday Morning, 1898. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK.
While congregants enjoyed these social interactions with their neighbors before or after service, enslaved men and women who escorted their enslavers to church often had opportunities to interact with each other in the churchyard when church was in service. Coachmen would stay in the churchyard so that they could take care of the horses, while some enslaved women may have been required to wait outside and enter the church only when the women who claimed to own them needed their foot stoves refilled. These men and women would have been able to use these brief moments in the churchyard to reconnect with family and friends. And if Mellick’s recollections are accurate, some enslaved people who lived close to the church would have been able to sell goods during church picnics.
The church yard also included the cemetery. Calvinist denominations did not consider funerals a sacrament. The Synod of Dordrecht had prohibited burial sermons, and New York churches likely followed these recommendations. The New Amsterdam church, for example, urged congregations to stop holding funeral services because they had been prohibited.132 Thus, funerals took place outside of the church, even when the deceased were buried in the church cemetery. Nevertheless, these burial grounds became powerful reflections of society’s social hierarchies. Churchgoers had to pay a certain fee to be buried in the cemetery, and some areas of the cemetery were more expensive than others. New York City’s seventeenth-century church, for example, determined the cost of burial plots per age but also allowed those who wanted to be “buried outside the appointed section,” to be able to “do so by paying double.”133 Ministers were often buried beneath or closest to the church. For instance, both Johannes Mauritius Goetschius and Henry Polhelmus were buried in the Shawangunk church.134 Thus, wealth and social power continued to be displayed in the church cemetery.
Just as these cemeteries became reflections of the church community’s social hierarchies, they also served as spaces of exclusion.135 Enslaved women and men rarely received a burial inside the church cemetery.136 In fact, Dennis Maika suggests that separate burial grounds for enslaved people probably served as the “most visible example of segregation taking place within the religious communities.”137 According to the African Burial Ground report, between 1727 and 1804 only five Africans were interred by the New York City Dutch Reformed Church, and only one of them, Susannah Rosedale, had been buried in the church cemetery.138 Janny Venema discovered that Bassie de neger had been buried in the Albany church cemetery in 1671, but he is the only Black man known to be interred there.139 Most often, enslaved and free black New Yorkers would not be buried in the church cemetery.
Because enslaved people were usually not allowed in church cemeteries, they had to bury their dead in separate areas, often on land in the area that was considered of little value. Consequently, enslaved burial grounds can be found across the region. Henry Stiles, for instance, mentioned a “negro burying-ground” in Brooklyn, and Gertrude Vanderbilt suggested that Flatbush had an African burial ground.140 According to David Steven Cohen, enslaved African Americans who attended the Dutch Reformed Church in the Ramapo Valley were interred outside of the church cemetery.141 New Paltz and Kingston similarly had separate African American burial grounds. Because these graves and burial grounds were often left unmarked, they frequently disappeared from the public eye as the land was reappropriated.142 In more recent decades, several of these burial grounds have been rediscovered. Most famously, in 1991 excavations in Lower Manhattan uncovered what is now known as New York City’s African Burial Ground, but similar discoveries have taken place in, among others, Colonie, Kingston, New Paltz, Queens, Harlem, and Brooklyn.143
As an extension of the church, the churchyard had both a social and a religious function. Similar to the church buildings, the ways in which white congregants utilized this space generally reflected society’s social hierarchies. Congregants intermingled in these spaces and they displayed their social status through various forms of pageantry. The cemetery further reinforced social power. Not only could congregants use their economic power to purchase burial plots closest to the church building, they commonly reserved these burial plots for white congregants only.
Black Religious Life
Exclusion from or segregation within Dutch Reformed churches and cemeteries did not prevent Black religious life. In fact, in some cases such practices gave Black New Yorkers opportunities to practice their religions more independently, with less white oversight. Some of them joined churches that did welcome their participation, while others worshipped privately.
When congregations or enslavers prohibited Black New Yorkers from worshipping in a Dutch Reformed church or when Black New Yorkers simply did not feel welcome in these spaces of worship, they sometimes joined other denominations or, after the 1770s, founded Black congregations. As some of the congregants pointed out to Lowe when they were opposed to Black men becoming members in their church, Black people in the area would gather on Sunday evenings for religious celebrations: “They clan together on Sunday evenings, and do what they ought not to do—pray and sing together, not the psalms of David—but hymns & spiritual songs—no one knows how erroneous.”144 In the early nineteenth century, some of these men and women would attend a Methodist church in Brooklyn, which according to one newspaper article caused various frustrations among the town’s white population.145 By the 1780s, New York’s Methodist churches had welcomed people from diverse backgrounds, including many African Americans.146 In fact, historian Richard Boles calculates that by 1790 New York City’s Methodist Church counted more Black members than any other denomination.147 Maybe that is why Lowe’s congregants suggested that “it is downright Methodism” to accept Black members to their church.
But Black New Yorkers did not only join Methodist churches. Graham Hodges argues that the Anglican Church “made the strongest institutional effort to convert Africans in the New York region,” and indeed hundreds of Black New Yorkers attended Anglican churches during the eighteenth century. Elias Neau was especially successful in reaching New York City’s enslaved men and women, many of whom were enslaved in Dutch American households.148 During the Second Great Awakening, interdenominational camp meetings that were generally more diverse and focused on preaching instead of reading the scripture proved especially appealing to enslaved men and women. Sylvia Dubois, an enslaved woman in a New Jersey Dutch community, recounted that she would happily walk more than ten miles to attend such camp meetings.149
Most enslaved New Yorkers did not have an opportunity to join a church. In many of New York’s Dutch communities, the Dutch Reformed Church would be the only denomination in the region. Even if there were other churches in the area that opened their doors to enslaved New Yorkers, these women and men were usually not able to attend the churches without permission from the people who held them in bondage.
Enslaved New Yorkers searched ways to practice their religious beliefs, and especially African religious practices, out of view from their enslavers. Archeological research has helped uncover some of these hidden practices. At the Hendrick I. Lott house in Kings County, for example, archeologists found evidence of religious artifacts under the floorboards of the garret spaces where at least some of the home’s enslaved inhabitants lived. A cloth pouch containing an oyster shell and part of a sheep or goat pelvis had been deposited there likely in an effort to safeguard this space.150 These items resembled cached deposits found across Africa and the diaspora, and the items in these pouches as well as their placement held important religious meaning to the people who created them.151
Corncobs that been placed under the same floorboards at the Lott house appear to have formed either a five-pointed star or a cross, which further points to religious practices. The kernels of the cobs were still intact, which indicates that they had been placed there intentionally and possibly ritually. They were found by the entrance of the enslaved people’s living quarters, and by the chimney in one of these rooms, suggesting that the people who placed them there did so to safeguard these spaces. The X-shaped cross has been found in various forms in places inhabited by enslaved Africans and on items that belonged to them, revealing that it was a powerful and resilient symbol in the African diaspora. It should be noted, however, that the cross served as an important symbol in many African as well as European cultures, which could explain why it has been so resilient and prevalent in the African diaspora.152
Excavations at the outdoor, brick kitchen of the Lott home, the place where some of the family’s enslaved and servant laborers likely lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, uncovered an American-made serving bowl with an “X” carved on the bottom.153 Although at first glance this bowl or the “X” may appear insignificant, archeologists have discovered that the symbol here was likely not just a maker’s or owner’s mark. While doing fieldwork in South Carolina, anthropologist Leland Ferguson found bowl-shaped pottery known as Colono Ware or Colono-Indian Ware that featured similar crosses on the bottom, on either the inside or outside.154 Originally, scholars considered such pottery of Native American making, but further research shows that it was often produced by enslaved Africans. Ferguson argues that these bowls may have been used to cook sacred medicine according to Bakongo tradition, with the cross symbolizing an important connection to the water spirits.155 If Ferguson is correct, the cross on the bowl at the Lott house tells us not only that this bowl was used and produced by enslaved Africans but also that it was used to make medicine through spiritual ritual.
FIGURE 5.6. Coin amulet, 1736. Brazil. Copper alloy. 32 mm (diameter). A.SSB.1973.58. The cross is visible in the center of the coin. Courtesy of New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.
A perforated ten-réis Portuguese coin, likely used as an amulet, that archeologists discovered during an excavation in Albany also featured the cross (see Figure 5.6). The “X” on the coin stood for ten réis, but it is probable that for the owner the mark held a religious meaning. Archeologists uncovered the coin in the 1970s on State Street at the location where Luycas Wyngaerd and later in the eighteenth century his cousin Volkert S. Veeder lived. Both Wyngaerd and Veeder held people in bondage—among them were Simon, Jeremy (Jem), and Bet—and the amulet probably belonged to one of them.156 While it is impossible to find out exactly who owned this amulet, its owner likely originated in West Central Africa or its diaspora. At both an eighteenth-century cemetery in Ngongo Mbata and a burial ground in Luanda, archeologists found similar Portuguese, perforated coins, though of twenty réis. These coins were minted in Portugal in 1697 and 1698. They had two X-marks on one side that represented the twenty-réis value, and a depiction of Saint Anthony welded on the other side, most likely crafted by a Kongolese metalworker. Cécile Fromont deems these pendants perfect examples of Kongo Christianity because they “reformulated central African and imported elements” to form something entirely new.157 In North America, perforated coins have been found at several African American burial grounds, though these are always American-made coins. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) ex-slave narratives and folkloric studies revealed that in the nineteenth century such amulets were often used as protective charms, especially for small children.158
Research shows that enslaved men and women also continued to practice African burial rites in New York’s Dutch communities. Some African rituals were uncovered during excavations of New York City’s African burial ground. Most of the remains that were found at this site date back to the eighteenth century. These excavations revealed that shells, beads, tobacco pipes, and similar objects had been buried together with their owners, which was a common practice in many precolonial African societies, as discussed by both Olfert Dapper and Willem Bosman.159 About burial rites in Angola, for example, Dapper said that it was practice to bury the deceased with various goods, including glass beads that were used as jewelry.160 Maybe not coincidentally, then, one of the burials at New York City’s African burial ground contained a woman who was laid to rest with a string of beads and cowrie shells around her hips and “an unused smoking pipe.”161 Moreover, the African Burial Ground report notes that beads found with the body of an infant “were characteristic of West African manufacture.”162 These artifacts show that at least some enslaved New Yorkers incorporated burial practices from their homelands or the lands of their ancestors.
That African descendants maintained part of their traditional burial rites in New York is not at all surprising. These rituals were especially important to people who strongly believed in the continued influence of the ancestors. A proper burial was crucial to let a person go to rest properly and not to offend the ancestors in any way.163 As such, in many African and African diaspora cultures, burial rites held great significance, and in some cases funeral rites could last for days.164 The segregation of burial grounds may have given Black New Yorkers more opportunity to continue parts of these burial practices.
Because Dutch Reformed congregations practiced exclusion and segregation, they kept their churches predominantly white. But keeping Black New Yorkers from worshipping in these churches did not keep them from practicing their religious beliefs. When they had the opportunity, many Black New Yorkers joined churches that did accept them or they established their own churches. Much of their religious life, however, took place privately. As archeological research has revealed, they continued religious practices that originated in Africa and its diaspora outside of the established Christian churches.
In his study of the Anglican Church, Robert Olwell found that for most enslaved people “the ceremonies of the established church were rituals of exclusion that served as reminders of their inferior and outsider status.”165 Undoubtedly, enslaved New Yorkers would have felt the same about Dutch Reformed Church rituals. In fact, the churches and churchyards themselves became spaces of exclusion and segregation. When an increasing number of enslaved people were permitted participation in the church by the late eighteenth century, Dutch Reformed congregations often carefully segregated them physically and temporally from their white counterparts. In doing so, white congregants may have worshipped in the same buildings as Black New Yorkers, but they did not actually share their place of worship.
Only when these churches are recognized as social spaces does it become evident that these places of worship became important tools in reinforcing social power. Social hierarchies that were necessary to sustain slavery influenced church communities and buildings. When more enslaved men and women joined Dutch Reformed churches, these communities created spatial methods to assert their superiority over these Black worshippers. Even when theoretically these Black congregants were equal before God, congregations made it clear in their church buildings and practices that Black churchgoers were not equal to their white counterparts.
Considering these circumstances, it is no surprise that James Murphy tried to hide his background, even if that meant he had to pretend his mother was no longer alive. As a minister in the church, he understood all too well how social power influenced congregations and their decisions. Once his background was uncovered, it was only a matter of time before he would lose his position at the Rochester, Clove, and Wawarsing churches. No freed Black man could assume a position of power in churches controlled by enslavers.