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Evangelical Networks in the Greater Caribbean and the Origins of the Black Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2010

Extract

Henry Beverhout looked out over the West African village of Freetown in 1792 with misgivings. From his own experience and from the complaints he received from other townspeople, he now recognized that the black men and women of Sierra Leone were not being afforded the equal treatment they had been promised. Exploited and discriminated against for most of their lives by white masters in America, these expatriates had arrived in West Africa determined to chart a new course for themselves. But the path to economic, civil, and religious freedom was littered with obstacles. They soon encountered problems with white Sierra Leone Company officials over low pay, high prices, and the slow pace at which land was apportioned to the new settlers. Just as important, the black émigrés were dismayed by the company's system of justice, whose juries Beverhout said did not “haven aney of our own Culler in” them. Having absorbed the British and American legal traditions of trial by a jury of one's peers, he demanded that in any “trial thear should be a jurey of both white and black and all should be equal.” Going even further, he then made the explosive claim that “we have a wright to Chuse men that we think proper to act for us in a reasnenble manner.”

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Research Article
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2010

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55 Coke, History of the West Indies, 3:201; William Gordon to Bishop Porteus, 7 September 1792, Fulham Papers, vol. 15, Exuma, Lambeth Palace Archives, London, England, 87–93; Craton and Saunders, Islanders in the Stream, 182, 185–86. That Dunmore freed the slaves of disloyal Virginians who joined the British army in 1775 but subsequently helped to re-enslave so many in the Bahamas points to the political expediency of his “Proclamation.” For Lord Dunmore's activities and their effect on the coming of the American Revolution in Virginia, see Holton, Woody, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omhundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 133–63Google Scholar.

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61 Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 7–8.

62 Coke, Thomas, A Farther Continuation of Coke's Journal: In a Letter to Rev. J. Wesley (London, 1787)Google Scholar, http://galenet.galegroup.com, 4.

63 Coke, A Farther Continuation, 4; Hammet, Hammet's Journal; Reverend John O. Wilson, Sketch of the Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 1887, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; Fraser, Charleston, 178; Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 137; Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 2628Google Scholar.

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