Missionaries, Evangelical Identity, and the Religious Ecology of Early Nineteenth‐Century South Carolina and the British Caribbean

Abstract

This article examines a critical question that fraught contemporaries throughout the Atlantic system in the early nineteenth century: could slavery be ameliorated and, thus, by implication, could slaves be 'improved'? Despite strong eighteenth-century connections through trade and as provincial outposts of the British Empire, South Carolina and the British Caribbean differed markedly on this issue by the early 1800s. But the reasons for this divergence cannot be adequately explained by the effects of the American Revolution. South Carolina slaveholders believed that slavery could be ameliorated through the adoption of evangelicalism. West Indian proprietors, however, believed that the introduction of evangelical religion among their slaves would only incite them to rebel. Thus, evangelical missionaries were often crucial figures in defining the character of slaveholding societies in South Carolina and the West Indies. These missionaries illustrated South Carolinians' paternalistic, benevolent sense of a permanent slave society, while itinerants in the West Indies described a violent, lawless, and temporary society beyond the pale of British standards of civility and humanitarianism.In the British colony of Demerara in 1812, Governor Lyle Carmichael told the Court of Policy that the new missionaries being imported from Britain to instruct the slaves 'were not of that sect usually called Methodists' and were instead employed by the 'Missionary-Society for the Propagation of Religion.' The new missionaries were licensed and approved to catechize slaves by the 'Head of the Ecclesiastical Church' in Christa Dierksheide is a PhD candidate in the department of history at the University of Virginia. Correspondence to: