Slave Revolts, Devilish Priests, and Infernal Landscapes

[unrepentant progress]

The full title is Demonization and Racialization in British North America: Slave Revolts, Devilish Priests, and Infernal Landscapes but that was too long for DU, and the subtitle is sexier so I used that instead.

It's hard to ignore that racism is thoroughly baked into our society, often in surprising and little seen ways.

The two things that British North Americans feared most in the colonial era were slave revolts and the Catholic Church. Within the colonial imaginary these two threats occasionally coalesced into one. The result was an infernal spectacle that forced colonial anxieties about the basic structures of colonial society to the surface. The soundness of the institution of slavery, emerging conceptions of the public, and the British Protestant beachhead in the overwhelmingly Catholic Americas all came into question.

The colonies were undergoing just such a crisis in the late 1730s and early 1740s. In 1739, a group of slaves in South Carolina rebelled and fled to Florida, where they were promised freedom by the Spanish. Along the way they burned down a number of houses owned by those who were especially cruel. In 1741, colonial officials believed a series of fires in New York City to be a sign of a potentially large-scale slave revolt orchestrated by Catholic priests. In both the Stono Rebellion and the New York Conspiracy, commentators worried that these revolts were but the first step of a larger invasion from Catholic Spain or France. Jill Lepore’s New York Burning (2005) has engaged the difficulties of figuring out what occurred on the ground in New York, but for this rather long post I want to focus on the colonial imaginary, and especially how the language of demons and hell functioned to protect and legitimate the interests of white colonial America.

The idea of a Catholic-backed black slave revolt haunting the British North American imaginary may, at first glance, seem strange, and in need of explanation. In the eighteenth century, many Britons understood the Catholic Church to be a global, conspiring institution bent on the destruction of the primarily Protestant British Empire. The Church acted through its Jesuit priests, who were marked by their rhetorical subtleties and capacity to manipulate the weak-minded. At the same time, blacks were believed to be easily fooled and prone to over-indulge in alcohol. Alongside the very real possibilities of Spanish-Catholic subversion and slave rebellion, the anxious British North American typologies of the “Jesuit” and the “black” made their collusion coherent and even probable within the colonial imaginary. In the case of the New York Conspiracy, the courts reviewing the incident believed that subversive priests like the Irishman John Ury had converted and thus weaponized black slaves. The latter were understood to be tricked not only because of their assumed intellectual inferiority, but because priests provided them with alcohol, drew them in with the superstitions of mass, and promised them penance for their violent actions.

The presumed coalescence of the calculating Jesuit and the violent black provoked totalizing language that emphasized the demonic and the infernal. Accounts provided vivid descriptions of both the agents of the revolts and the infernal landscape they produced by burning down—or at least attempting to burn down—private houses and governmental buildings.

Full essay: http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2014/12/demonization-and-racialization-in.html