The History of Black Congregants at the Old South Meeting House — Part One
Written by Jim Bennett, Visitor Experience Supervisor
Revolutionary Spaces’ Visitor Experience Supervisor and historical interpreter Jim Bennett recently completed research on the history of Black congregants at Old South Meeting House. With the exception of Phillis Wheatley’s poems, there are no known first-hand accounts of Black congregants’ experience at Old South. But there are many second-hand accounts of the Black community at Old South Meeting House from its white pastors and congregants which provide a partial picture of this experience. This blog is the first part of a three-part series covering Bennett’s findings.
Revival and Religious Life at Old South Meeting House
In the early 1740s, the congregation of the Old South Meeting House was in the throes of the Christian revival movement that historians would later call the Great Awakening. In September 1740, George Whitefield, the greatest preacher of the era, addressed the meeting house for the first time, drawing a crowd of thousands. Thomas Prince, one of Old South Meeting House’s co-pastors, observed that Whitefield appealed to oft-overlooked members of the congregation, writing that he “distinctly applied his exhortations to the elderly people, the middle aged, the young, the Indians and negroes; and had a most winning way of addressing them.”1 A week later, Governor Jonathan Belcher, the most politically prominent member of Old South Meeting House, specially requested that Whitefield preach to “a great number of negroes on the conversion of the Ethiopian (Acts VIII).”2 A few months later, after the preacher Gilbert Tennant addressed Old South Meeting House, Prince wrote that “there repaired to us many boys and girls, young men and women, Indians and negroes, heads of families, aged persons; those who had been in full communion and going on in a course of religion many years.”3
The baptism and membership records of Old South Meeting House in the early 1740s bear out Prince’s observations, attesting to an enthusiasm for religion that had not been seen in Boston since the 17th century and would not be witnessed again for the remainder of the colonial period. During the revival years, OSMH received 15 Black adults who came forward to be baptized and to “own the covenant,” whereby they agreed to live under the discipline of the church. Four Black adults became full members of the church, which meant that they gave a relation of faith and gained the right to take communion. The Puritan theology of OSMH insisted on respecting the autonomy of the individual Christian conscience. Baptism was not to be compelled upon any adult who did not request it, and full membership was reserved only for those who demonstrated a desire for God both in their words and in their manner of living.
On February 22, 1741, “Ann, a free negro,” was baptized at Old South Meeting House, and just one week later, on March 1, she made her relation of faith and was accepted as a full member, a remarkably short turnaround that spoke to her strong desire for God and the confidence of the church in her testimony. Since Ann was free, we can trust that she made her decisions without undue coercion. In contrast, every other Black person who was baptized or became a member of OSMH during the heady days of the Great Awakening was enslaved, most often by wealthy congregants who would have watched them approach the pulpit for baptism or to relate their conversion experience. Such people included Cornwall, the enslaved man of John Ellery, who had been baptized as an adult in 1726 and became a member in April 1741. Just a month before, he had been married by OSMH pastor Joseph Sewall to a woman named Katherine, who was herself enslaved by the Winslows, another OSMH family. Not long after, Cornwall and Katherine were both freed, and they stayed with the church and baptized their children there.
Religious Agency amongst Black and Indigenous Congregants
How can we speak of a “free” choice to be baptized or become a church member under conditions of enslavement? It would be plausible to read Black involvement in the church as the result of enslaver compulsion, but such a model would render a relatively flat demographic line of Black church engagement. Instead, the chart of Black participation in the rituals of the church has peaks and valleys, much as it does for the white population, rising during periods of revivals.
All told, 100 Black and Indigenous people were baptized at Old South Meeting House during the colonial period, of which 47 were adults. Twenty-six Black and Indigenous people became full members. The vast majority of them were enslaved. Almost none of them left any written record of what they thought about the time that they spent at OSMH, but the pattern of baptisms and memberships suggests that most of them had at least some agency in deciding how involved they wished to become in the life of the meeting house. Phillis Wheatley’s poetry speaks to her consent to becoming part of the OSMH community. She concluded “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773) by writing “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” When Wheatley took her place as the 22nd Black member of OSMH in August 1771, she joined a long train of Black life at OSMH that extended back more than a century, a heritage etched indelibly in the records of the church itself.
The next blog post in this series will include the perspectives of Old South Meeting House pastors Thomas Paine and Joseph Sewall on slavery and how it influenced their sermons. It will also examine the complex Christian perspective and moral cover on slavery throughout the 1700s.
- Thomas Prince, An Account of the Revival of Religion in Boston in the Years 1740–1–2–3 (Boston: Kneeland and Green, 1743), 8. Accessed on archive.org
- George Whitefield, George Whitefield’s Journals (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960), 483. Accessed on archive.org.
- Prince, Op. Cit, 19