Is shrinking. That means were getting the word out there. Thats really exciting. Where to start. You all have heard for those regulars here, you know i usually will Say Something about how you cant tell the story of e plur bus umen without the plur bus. I think the talk fits in great with the museums mission to broaden peoples understanding of what we mean by the American Revolution to make sure that everyone sees the American Revolution reflected in themselves. Im flashing at you now a wonderful note card that has a whale on it with a note from almost exactly a year ago. This is april 24th, 2018, from gina whalen. Gina, raise your hand. Katherines aunt. The next question is how many people in this room are related to katharine . So jenna, if you have seen George Washingtons tent upstairs and have been moved to tears as i have been, jenna was the textile conservator who did all the work to prepare that tent for display. It was wonderful for two years just about every day sitting in a warehouse in phoenixville as jenna and her intern would sit and with these tiny little needles and tiny little threads, make sure every single loose thread on that entire other home of George Washington was fastened down so it could be displayed. Thank you, jenna. Not just for making George Washingtons canvas condominium available for display in the museum, but for writing me this wonderful little note which said dear scott, heres a copy of a book for the library. As you know, katie is my niece. So she was theres no collusion here. Shell be happy to sign the book for you the next time she comes home to philly, but i devoured this book. As you all know, race is a philosophy, not a fact. And theres something that we as a nation need to grapple with. It is this question today, and i the relevance of this book to where we are today in society is absolutely shines through. Youre really only getting a piece of this with the talk this evening about slavery in the gawker wor quaker world. The other part that was fascinating was katherines work with the records of the moravian charge. The analogy was its like theres this enormous reservoir of oil, only people get a little bit of oil out of this. This is incredible material that reflects virtually every aspect of life in early america from missions to native americans to south america, around the world. People from africa. Just daily life through the middle colonies and new york. Because its written in german and we dont teach Foreign Languages in school anymore and because of the german script, youve got to go to school to learn how to read it. How many of our children and grandchildren cant read Cursive Writing anymore . Were repeating history. The material that coming out of the archives is gold. I know youre going to show us at least one of those to whet our appetite. Katharine is educated in germantown. Good local girl who has come back by way of harvard. Shes smart. And is teaching in minnesota now, is it still winter up there . Its snowing currently. Its snowing currently up there, and i saw my first thing that looked like a leaf today in philadelphia here. I am crossing my fingers. Im not going to stand up here and talk all night. Would you like to just launch into it . Please give a warm welcome to katharine. [ applause ]. Hello and welcome. So i am delighted to be here, and i just want to begin with a word of thanks to scott and everyone here at the museum of the American Revolution. To the National Society of the colonial dames which i should say, helped to fund this research nine years ago. I am very grateful for that, and i continue to be so. Thank you. As well as stenten. I know theyre connected. Thank you, everyone who was involved in planning this event. I really am appreciative of all our efforts. Im especially thrilled to be returning to philadelphia to give this talk. So as you have heard by now, i did grow up here. There may be some relatives in the room. And i attended germantown friends school. There are some of my teachers here as well. But in many ways my research grew out of my experiences growing up here. And i also want toed a that this is my first time visiting the museum of the American Revolution, and i am so impressed. It is an incredible place, and such a wonderful addition to this alreadyincredible city. So thank you to everyone who made it happen. Today im going to talk about a book that is close to me but far away. My talk as you know is slavery in the quaker world. I dont have the sub title philadelphia and barbados in here. Thats in the official title. Its far from us in terms of chronology. Ill be talking about the 17th century ri over 300 years ago. Its close because and i think scott mentioned here, in many ways this history is still with us. The history of race, of racism. Its a product largely of the history of slavery. So while slavery was abolishes more than 150 years ago, were still living in its wake. My research is about the past and also about the present. And so with that in mind, i want to tell you about my research by telling you a personal story about how i ended up writing about this in the first place. Here is the final product. You saw that in the book. I actually began the research for what became this book, christian slavery, about 15 years ago when i was a senior undergraduate in college. I was looking for a topic to write about for my senior thesis. And up to that point, i staided things literally far from home. I studied religion and politics in south asia and the middle east. But i felt when it came to picking a research topic, i wanted to write about something that would not only matter to the people i grew up around, but also something that was more connected with my own life and experiences. So i went to a historical library. I was introduced to this document by one of the archivists there. Some of you may recognize this document. Its a copy of the 1688 quaker antislavery protest. It was the first document in north america to denounce slavery. And it was written just down the street from germantown friends school. It turns out, i had passed the site of its creation hundreds of times as i drove with my mother and my sisters from our home in Chestnut Hill down germantown avenue to gfs. So the 1688 protest is a really extraordinary and important document. It declares among other things the authors are, quote, against the track of man body. It continues to explain that slavery is not be a christian practice. Its against the golden rule. I want to read a few lines. Its powerful so many hundreds of years later. So the authors write, there is a saying that we shall do to all men like as we will be done to ourselves. Making no difference of what generation, descent or color they are. Those who steal or rob men or buy or purchase them, are they not all alike. Here is liberty of conscience. Here ought to be liberty of the body. So for the 17th century, this is an incredibly unusual document. Its a document that i think quakers but also all americans can really be proud of. So i was really excited to write about it. And i thought that examining the origins of quaker abolition would do a lot of things. I wanted to show how something is important as abolition had a history, but also how we could learn about social justice by studying the past. As i looked closer at the petition, i started to become less interested in the protest itself than in the last line. A line that was added not by the authors of the protest, but by the quakers who represented the monthly meeting in the philadelphia yearly meeting. This is a closeup. Ill read it for you. The script is not super easy to read. We have inspected the matter above mentioned and considered of it. We find it so weighty that we cannot think it expedient for us to meddle with it here. Below that theres another line. A paper being here presented by some german friends concerning the lawfulness and unlawfulness of buying and keeping negros, it was adjudged not to be proper for this meeting to give a positive judgment in this case it having so general a relation to many other parts and therefore, at present, they fore bear it. So if the convoluted language makes you question what theyre saying, i will say they rejected the protest. While i intended to study quaker antislavery, i thought that this was actually more important. What it revealed is that while a very small minority of quakers rejected slavery in the 17 th century, most did not. And further more, i had questions like what did it mean that slavery had so general a relation to many other parts . What other parts were they talking about . To answer this question, i had to dig deeper into the 17th century quaker world. At the time i was very surprised to learn that slavery was actually an accepted and common practice among the english quakers who were in control of political pennsylvania. That wasnt all. Quakers were also involved in the slave trade, and as it turned out, many of the quakers in philadelphia had imimprated not from england but from the caribbean islands of barbados. Theres barbados. Pennsylvania may have been the First Official quaker colony, but it was not the First Community in the americas. There was a large quaker presence on barbados. In the 1670s, it was called the nursery of truth by quakers because it was so filled with quakers. When philadelphia was founded, william penn and others used their connections to purchase enslaved africans. As the social and economic structures developed, trade flourished. In 1690, for example, this is less than ten years after pennsylvanias founded and two years after the germantown protest, william penn announced probably that ten slave ships arrived from the west indies in just one year. The trade with barbados was a source of pride and a symbol of prosperity for many english quakers who considered slavery to be necessary for economic development. So i realized that i needed to tell this story. Like many stories that are sort of shameful or embarrassing, this one had frankly largely been suppressed in the quaker histories that i had read. Most histories about quakers and slavery in the 17 th century, they acknowledged that quakers owned slaves but they focussed mostly on finding the seed of abolition in these early quaker records. So i decided to ask different questions. Instead of reading quaker abolition back in time, i thought it was important to understand how these slaveowning quakers fit into their own time. None of them would have predicted the demise of slave trade or slavery. I really wanted to understand them and the relationship between quakers and slavery. So i needed to take a different approach. So why did quakers accept slavery in this period . How did they justify slavery within their theological world view . How did their views compare to other european christians who encountered slavery . I also wanted to think about what christianity may have meant to enslaved and free black men and women who joined the ranks to the quakers as well as other dmom nations. When and why did they choose to convert . As i moved away from my thesis and toward writing a dissertation and eventually a book, these became the questions that fuelled my research. So i started by taking a closer look at barbados. Now, barbados, for those of you who dont know was the most important english colony in the 17 th century. Its not new england. Its not pennsylvania. It was barbados. And we dont talk about barbados very much, because it wasnt one of the colonies united with the other 13 come cannilonies and be United States. In order to understand the 17 th century, we have to remember the economic and social landscape then, and barbados, we should understand it is the center of the english colonies in the americas in many ways. It was settled in 1627. Colonists soon began to plant tobacco and then sugar. While english colonists initially relied on a joint labor service, by the 1650s enslaved africans had become the majority of the labor force. Quakers started to flourish around the same time. Two quaker missionaries named ann fisher and mary austin landed on the island in 165 5 and converted or convinced in quaker parlance several island residents. Two decades later, there were thousands of quakers living in barbados. All but four were slave owners. This map was created by a quaker living in 17th century barbados, richard ford. Its an amazing map, because quakers have a pieeace testimon. They didnt want to support the militia. He refused to draw any of the military forts on the map. You read the letters from the governor back to the lords of trade implantation in london. Hes so mad. Hes saying we do have fortifications but this quaker guy just wouldnt put them on the map. I love that. So by the 1670s, then, the quaker founder george fox decided to visit quaker communities in the colonies. And ill say up to this point, we dont know very much about what quakers on barbados were thinking about slavery. We know they owned enslaved people. But when george fox decided to come to the americas, he stopped first in barbados. Right . Because as i was saying before, this was sort of the center. There he became deeply concerned about the presence of slavery. But not necessarily for the reasons that we might hope. So while he did urge quakers to consider he didnt call for an end of slavery as a practice. Instead he did Something Else. He urged friends to worship with the enslaved people in their households and to introduce them to quakerism. So in many ways this is disappointing. In fact, much of the scholarship about foxs visit to barbados debates whether his remarks were protoantislavery or not. But i actually think that when we focus on antislavery, we really we miss a really important point. And that important point has to do with the reaction of other colonists in barbados. So in 1675 a few years after foxs visit, english colonists discovered that a group of enslaved men were planning a rebellion. In response, the english colonists took drastic measures. They executed the enslaved rebels. Tortured others, and were rewarded the informants. They also did something pretty unusual. They passed an act that forbid quakers from worshipping along said enslaved men and women. This is a passage. The act asserted that enslaved people had been suffered to remain at the meeting of quakers and taught in their principles whereby the safety of this island may be hazard. If the act continued any enslaved person was, quote, found with the said people called quakers at any time of their meeting and as he hearers of their preaching, the quakers would have to pay a fine. One was fined for 80 enslaved people being in a meeting inside his house, and another for 30 being present in a meeting. What is going on here . Why would quakers we talked about their antiwar testimony. Why would quakers be blamed for slave rebellion when they had a peace testimony . So i learned that when youre doing history research, when things dont make sense, dig in. Its often these things that reveals something fundamentally important about a particular place in time. So lets do this. 17th century quakers, i came to understand, were radical. But not because they were abolitionists. Instead, quakers like george fox were radical because they suggested that blacks and whites should meet together for worship. And quakers werent the only christians who were purse cuted for meeting together with enslaved people. As i began to investigate this issue further, i looked beyond the quaker records to the archives of other protestant demd denominations. Other smaller denominations like the moravian church. As i did so, i realized there were some very important similarities in their experiences. In each case, english slave owners attacked protestant missionaries and enslaved christians for meeting together. On slave owners stole bibles from enslaved christians and burned moravian books. You were promised an image. Here it is. Its my favorite document that i found. So i had to find some way to get it into a talk on quakerism. This is a letter that was either written or probably more likely dictated by a free black moravian woman writing to the queen of denmark to ask her to support black christians. The island of st. Thomas, now part of the u. S. Virgin islands was part of the danish west indies in the 18 th century. Thats why shes writing to the queen of denmark. She asks the queen to support the women of thomas. It was first written in her west african language on the left and then translated into dutch creole, the language of the danish west indies on the right. You can see why its my favorite document. The appeal was accompanied by another letter also written in dutch creole, and signed by several other black moravians. It went into more detail about the problems. The white quakers beat and injure us when we learn about the as i looked closer at these and other sources, i began to understand why english slave owners found the prospect of conversion so threatening. So ill just lay it out for you. First of all, when enslaved people became christian, it challenged the justification for slavery which was religious difference. And im going to come back to this. Because we have to remember we just heard from scott race is a philosophy, not a reality. Is that right . Im going to push it one step further. Race is a political strategy. And it was not yet created in the 17th century. Second of all, in some cases, missionaries taught enslaved people to read the bible and write. Slave owners did not like this. One of the ways they tried to keep enslaved people on plantations was having a written note from your overseer or slave owner in order to leave your plantation. So if you can write yourself, this is obviously they perceived that as a a danger. Third, when enslaved christians would meet for worship, white colonists feared they were plotting a rebellion. This is what happens in barbados. When quakers started to include people in meetings, english slave owners acted aggressive. The same year as the attempted rebellion, there was an attack by the governor for making the negros christians and making thm rebel and cut our throats. So i want to pause again here. Because these documents reveal what i think are some very misunderstood aspects of colonial slavery. What this history shows us is that english slave owners thought of christianity and especially protestantism as a religion for free people. And they worried that an enslaved person baptized would demand freedom and possibly rebel. As a result, they excluded most enslaved people from protestant churches. I felt like this was a very important aspect of early colonial slavery, and it had not been fully recognized. So in my book, i gave it a name. I called it protestant supremacy. And i can talk a little bit about why i chose the word protestant rather than christian or another word. But protestant supremacy i came to understand was the predecessor of White Supremacy. White supremacy uses race to create inequality. But in the 17th century ri as ive mentioned, race as we know it didnt exist. And most significantly, the concept of whiteness had not yet been created and codified. So slave owners created the ideology of protestant supremacy. It used religion to justify slavery. I turned to the legal archives to understand this better. I read through all of the laws passed in the island of barbados in the 17th and early 18th century. You notice in the early slave laws colonists dont call themselves white. They call themselves christians. So protestant slave owners, they constructed a cast system based on christian status. In which the quote, unquote, heathen slaves were afforded no rights or privileges while you see catholics, jews and nonconforming protestants were viewed with suspicion and distrust but granted more protections. This is why it was so controversial for quakers and other missionaries to introduce enslaved people to christianity, because it threatened to undermine the system of slavery as it existed at the time. So the next question, how did it change . How did protestant supremacy become White Supremacy . Weve already seen how protestant supremacy was challenged. It was challenged by missiona missionaries including the quakers and also by enslaved and free blacks who wanted to become christian. But in each case, it was challenged in a different way. So ill start with the missionaries. What i found is that quaker anglican and other missionaries responded to protestant supremacy we trying to argue that christianity and slavery were compatible. Protestant missionaries drew on biblical descriptions of slavery to encourage slave owners to allow enslaved people to convert. They noted that christian slavery had a long and wellestablished history in the catholic and american colonies and missionaries tried to defend slave conversion by arguing that enslaved christians would be more docile and hard working than their, quote, heathen counterparts. For an example, we return to the quaker, william ed mondayson. When he was attacked by the governor of barbados for worshipping alongside enslaved people, his response was, it was a good work to bring them to the knowledge of god and christ jesus. And that would keep them from rebelling and cutting any mans throat. I think the implications here are clear. Conversion would make slavery safer. It would make enslaved people less rebellious. As a boackground here, this is publication about barbados which explains a little bit of how english colonists thought about the relationship between christianity and slavery. This man, this planter says the laws you cant make a christian a slave because theyre governed by the laws of england. They think its incompatible. So enslaved christians fought protestant supremacy in a different way. They tended to argue they had a right to practice christianity, to read the bible and worship together. Over time more and more enslaved and free people of color did fight their way into christian churches. And they did so for numerous and complicated reasons. I think theres no easy reason to explain why someone makes a decision, but there were theological, practical and social and Community Related reasons for their decisions. So one of these individuals was named charles coffee. Coffee was probably born into slavery, and was baptized on september 9th, 16 77 in a church in barbados. The minister of the church noted coffee had recently been freed which made him the first free black man to the baptized on the island. In 1689 he brought two children to the baptismal font. Thomas and mary. They were son and daughter of charles coffee, free christian negro. By joining the church, coffee was making a claim for himself. As a free christian man he acquired most of the markings of a freeholder. According to law he would be eligible to vote in elections and at least hypothetically run for office if he could acquire enough property. It was in response to free black christians like charles coffee, i argue, that english slave owners began to create White Supremacy. Soon after coffee brought his children to the baptismal font, there was a new law redefining citizenship to include the word white as well as christian. This was one of the very first times that youll find the word white used in the colonial legal records. The law declared that, quote, every white man professing the christian religion who hath attained to the full age of one and 20 year and have 10 acres of freehold shall be deemed a freeholder. 12 years later lawmakers refined the definition of whiteness. A law clarified that a, quote, white person could have no extract from, quote, a negro. This is thereby, establishing a one drop rule as the definition of whiteness and laying a new foundation for slavery and social oppression that made race seem like a natural category. Something that was inate. What we see here is the codification of whiteness is a legal category that was specifically intended to exclude free black christians from the full rights of citizenship. So we often take whiteness and race as a given, but it has a very specific history. We assume that race is buy logical when its actually political. As we saw, slave owning politicians actively created this category as part of a political strategy to protect slave ownership, and to restrict the Voting Rights of free blacks. And this did Something Else that was really important. With the creation of whiteness, slave conversion became less threatening. Because whiteness rather than religious difference became the new way to justify and enforce slavery. So what do we do with this history . Im going to try, but i mean, i dont have all the answers. But i do want to make a few concluding remarks to bring this history back to the present. So first of all, ill say that when we as a society are increasingly aware of the lasting effects of White Supremacy, its important to think about where whiteness comes from. The belief that race is biological is really destructive. Because it naturalizes race and whiteness, and it allows us to forget that categories like whiteness were created in order to legalize and justify inequality. In other words, we need to acknowledge that individuals, its not just they didnt just come out of the ether. Individuals made decisions that led to protestant and White Supremacy, and these concepts had a purpose when they were created. Second, i think its important to think about the many different meanings that religion had during this early colonial period. So we see in protestant supremacy that religion could be a source of oppression. But thats certainly not what it meant to the enslaved men and women who fought hard to be baptized. I think when we tell the story, we need to keep these things in balance and not let to oppressive regime of protestant supremacy overpower the experiences of enslaved and free black christians. And then to bring it back to the quakers, for those of us who identify with the quaker tradition, and im one of them, this history i think invites us to think about what it really means to combat oppression. So for me this means confronting uncomfortable aspects of quaker history. I think that when we relegate the blame for slavery and oppression to people in the south or far away, not us, were actively erasing the quaker complicity and support for slavery, not only in barbados, but also in philadelphia. I think looking carefully at the quaker past can teach us a lesson about social justice. I think it shows us that its not enough to just be radical. Right . George fox was radical. And he was pushing against many of the customs of the time. But i dont think he fully grasped the sort of complexity of the political situation. And what ends up happening is that he started to create he and other quakers and other missionaries trying to do something they felt was really good and important, they end up creating a justification for slavery by saying that christianity and slavery are compatible. So, again, i think its not just enough to be radical. We have to be really aware of history, of the categories were using and about the plexties of inequality in society. And finally, i will end by saying that history is never inevitable. Things come could have developed differently. As we all know, quakers as well as many evangelical christians played a central role in the Abolitionist Movement in the 18th and 19th centuries. I think that we can and should remember and treasure these abolitionist quakers and learn from them, but we should do so without forgetting those who came before them. Thank you so much. Lets vote first. Does she deserve flowers . Ill bet there are some questions. Yes . First, that was awesome. I love that whole area of early atlantic history is really cool. Im a nerd. Me too. Its okay. My question is about the germantown friends antislavery writing from the monthly meeting. Ive read it, and one of the criticisms that i in my research i came up with was that some of the motivation for it seemed to be, like, about the dignity of work and the sort of concern of those meeting members that somehow having slaves doing that sort of stuff not by the free will was denigrating what they were doing as craftsmen and everything. I was wondering if you could speak to that at all. Definitely. So i think yeah. The complexities, even even when you look at quaker antislavery in this period, its i read you parts that i think are wonderful. And the 1688 protest really is an amazing document, because its not just there are aspects of this sort of i would say theres an antiblack undercurrent. Right . And so but its not as strong there as you see in other documents from the 17 th century ri written by quakers who are also arguing against slavery, but theyre doing so because basically theyre racist. They dont want to live with people of African American dissent. I do another talk about that. And putting the 1688 protest within sort of the larger spectrum of even antislavery thought. Because i do think that its important to acknowledge that sort of this idea of christian slavery, the argument that e enslaved people should brought into the christian community. In many ways thats going against part of the Antislavery Movement which says we shouldnt have anything to do with those people. So there are other documents. Theres a letter, and then i think the robert piles letter are much more of a tribalist approach. Were us. We just want to be in our community, and we dont want slavery, because we dont want those people in our community. So i think that addresses the question. Because there are there are those unsavory aspects, even of Something Like antislavery which we would think we would be all before, but thank you. I think i think you need the theyre recording this. Thank you. I find this very fascinating, and im probably not as informed of quakerism and slavery as i am of e pisk pail yanism and slavery. In the southern part of the United States especially south carolina, you see the landscape dotted with beautiful little chapels that were built for the involvement of black slaves in a l litter ji kind of. The congress dwagation has a ro. They are believers, but quakerism is something very different, and in quaker services, youre giving everyone the right to speak as they find inspiration. So it seems to me inherently dangerous in the context of that time to give slaves a freedom of expression in a religious service. How much of your research seems to be a fight between liturgy and quakerism . Part of my book does look at also the church of england. It becomes the Episcopal Church after the revolution. The missionaries in this period who tried to convert enslaved people received some of the same pushback quakers are receiving and Moravian Missionaries are testifying. By the late 18th and 19th centuries, once you the establishment of White Supremacy, you have an idea, the idea of christian slavery, that its compatible. Thats the bread and butter of the pro theologians, especially of the Episcopal Church, other churches, so you see a shift in how christianity is functioning in relationship to slavery. But earlier on i think it is especially striking that even the anglican missionaries are being attacked by other anglican slave owners, because they see what theyre doing as inherently problematic. Theres a real change over time there. Hi. My name is gwen. Im the curator of lest we forget Slavery Museum located in germantown. We talk about the quakers in their efforts in abolitionism. I would like to know, though, first, thank you for explaining protestant supremacy and how it transitioned into White Supremacy. That makes perfectly good sense. Good. Or good sense, i should say. I would like to talk about those quakers who though they didnt believe in slavery, did not necessarily think that the slaves should be freed into the white population. In fact, they preferred the back to africa movement. They felt that once they were freed, they should go back to their own country. So could you explain to me how they were able to justify their feelings about not wanting slavery but did not want to associate or have the blacks infiltrate into their White Society . Yes. Absolutely. And this connects really well with this first question. Because what you see, right, if in this early Antislavery Movement you see some people, and i think we could probably say the germantown quakers are part of this group who are more inclusive of people of african dissent. I would say probably the majority of antislavery quakers dont think that way. I mean, again, they are they want racial segregation. And thats part of the reason that theyre against slavery. And so, again, were talking about uncomfortable stories. I sort of emphasized this uncomfortable story about quakers who owned slaves, but in many ways they were not segregationists. So, you know, choose your poison, but i mean but then a lot of the Antislavery Movement among quakers and again, you know, i dont want to sort of throw a blanket over everyone, but i think that we have to come to terms with that fact also. That even abolitionists, and if you look at the history of the african colonizing in society, so many we could call them i guess in our terms, like, progressive white people. They thought they were doing something good, but really, they couldnt imagine an actually racially equal society. And i think that in that, we can see the facts that like i was saying, we cant just think of the oppressors over there in the south. Even within the movements that i think we would prize today as examples of social justice, you still see these effects of racism and White Supremacy in them. And that if we dont acknowledge that, we cant we cant act differently and better today. Thank you for the question. Yes, and then yes. You first, and then in the back. You mentioned more or less in passing about how the catholic colony and experience of slavery was somewhat different. As a graduate of Georgetown University which is dealing with a lot of its own issues from one of selling slaves to keep the doors open to having the First Black University president by the 1870s, talk about spinning around in circles. Right. What was your perception of what was different between the protestant supremacy and the catholic attitude . Now i can explain why i called it protestant supremacy. She didnt feed me that question. So in the first chapter of my book, i look at the broad landscape of christianity and slavery starting i sort of begin in the 17th century with this issue of why are these slave owners not allowing people to convert to christianity. I look at what is happening in the catholic colonies. There the legal situation is and the situation of the church is very different. So whereas the protestant regions you have to in many ways slavery is justified through religious difference, and protestants are afraid that once someone is baptized, theyll have to be free because theres this real Close Association in the minds of a lot of protestants between propertestants and freedom. In catholic colonies, baptism was part of the enrichment of enslavement. You had to be baptized by a catholic priest. That was the premise upon which catholics enslaved people. Seriously. They had a baptismal font in a slave island in the atlantic. And a lot of these were cursory baptisms. I mean, theyre enslaving hundreds of thousands of people, but as a result, the bureaucracy is so important. The bureaucratic function of this had really interesting and different implications for people who were enslaved and were in catholic colonies versus those in baptized, they were recognized as part of the catholic community, even though they were enslaved. You never want to go down the road of this slavery was better than that slavery. Right . Never. But it did it meant that, for example, if you were married and a slave owner wanted to sell your spouse, you could appeal to a priest. So you have these implications of the way that slavery and christianity functions that were very different in catholic colonies. Thats why i call it protestant supremacy. Because there because of the got to go into the back history of the reformation, and the base over who can be baptized. Were you a visible saint or not . I mean, theres a lot. Theres a lot of and a lot of people there were wars fought over this. And so as a result, yeah, the protestant community, you can say, was much more constrained and than the catholics. The catholics didnt White Supremacy . Well, they still did. You know, White Supremacy is all over the place, but it was a different cast system. If anyone has seen a costa painting, they had a very complex hierarchy of people who if you were a person of african d dissent and married to a person of indigenous dissent, they had a word for each of the different your child would be they had a word for that. It was still a society based on White Supremacy, but its a different form of it. Whereas what you see in barbados is the development of the one drop rule which is how we see whiteness today. I wanted to ask if you could tease out a little bit more. I think im just having a hard time tracing dates. Yes. You talk about the fact that initially the salient category in barbados for protestants is are you christian or not, or are you protestant or not, and then you come to a point where some of the quakers who are opposing slavery are opposing slavery because implicit enslavery is you might have people in your house who are a different race. So over that span of time, race is not just becoming a legally recognized category. Its becoming a site of deeply held understanding of and dislike of difference. And im wondering sort of about that shift in world view. How are people talking about phenotypical difference when religion is the salient category, and how does that shift out and play out as people start not wanting to share or are there always people who dont want to share space with people who are looking that different even though sort of the categories of race that we have havent been invented yet, or how does that play out . Right. Even though they werent calling it race or racism, were you seeing some form of it even before it existed . Is that right. And then how does it come whats the sort of Chronological Development of that shift . Right. Well, ill tell you the chronology. Thats my favorite thing. So i would my normal thing is to say 1650 is where you see sort of the development of protestant supremacy. The increasing importance of the category of christian and the law books. And you see but at the same time i mean, people recognize and they use the word of nations more than we use the word race. Thats its people still see differences in skin color, hair, et cetera. And so i think that i mean, some people have called religion in this period like a protoracial category. You see some of the same functions but the trajectory is that its by 17001700 you see t becoming increasingly important. And by 1750, i would say, theres an establishment of whiteness. But a lot of that has to do with, like i was saying in the talk, it has to do with these political moments where, you know, i just imagine i counted every all of the people of african descent who had been ba baptized. There werent that many still because it was most people, you know, were forbidden from accessing, but it was enough, you can just imagine, in the minds of those people. They see those people of african descent and add this whiteness into the law books. I dont know if i totally answered your question but ive at least given you chronology. We can talk about it more later because for sure theres still people interacting in ways that recognize difference and have implied hierarchy. One, two, three, and four and five. Im just wondering if you could say a quick word about john woolman. I think i have romanticized him to some degree but i know you have been doing this research and you must have a quick synopsis of his motivation. His motivations and efforts. I dont have anything bad to say against john woolman. And here ill pause and say there are wonderful people in the world. I havent done Extensive Research on john woolman. Ive read some of his writings. I find them very touching and moving and so maybe we can have some heroes in the mix. Thank you. Yes . Hi, good evening. My name is muriel thomas. I noticed you opened your talk with you kind of said it will be difficult to debate twhawhat wa going on in the mind of the quakers in barbados back then. Mine isnt really a question but to encourage you to dig deep near that. The reason being is because barbados is in my dna. I was born and raised there as an anglican. Came to the u. S. Your topic was very pertinent to me. One of the things i have found as a member of your philadelphia yearly meeting is that race and slavery is often held over there as something that happened in the past and doesnt have very much particular influence or theres a forgetfulness of how it was. And being from barbados, i do know some stories of how barbados was a location where slaves were broken before they were transported to other caribbean colonies and to the u. S. So theres this wanton forgetfulness. I would encourage you and other historians to really dig deep near that history because one of the things i know in coming here a lot of the barbados history around quakerism is actually not talked about in barbados that much. Very few quakers, i dont know of any actually before i left, who exist in barbados. So something happened that i dont have the history for, only the dna for, that has caused such a dramatic shift. But also something has happened here today present day philadelphia yearly meeting where theres a refusal to acknowledge those roots. I encourage you. Thank you. Well, thank you. I appreciate the encouragement and i think, yeah, i will try harder. You really touched your personal connection in this talk. But its true what you say about barbados. This was where people were initially shipped and then would be sent elsewhere. So, yeah, and its i want people to recognize that barbados is part of u. S. History, also. Its not and that we have to bring this into our conversations, and i really agree with you wholeheartedly that we cant see these things, race and slavery, as being separate from our lives today. So thanks. Thank you for the presentation. My name is anthony johnson. Im a methodist researcher. I really appreciate your work because it sort of takes the top off of the work im trying to do. I appreciate it. Its a great resource. Thank you. My question to you is with respect to the people of african descent who youre encountering, can you tell whether they were a first, second, or Third Generation . Yes. And the other question that i have is what are you doing in your research to bring the african perspective into this work . A lot of people have approached the subject matter. They approach African People as though they are not people. They are thinking, emoting beings, but they also had a world view and traditions. Are you finding anything in the african tradition thats coming out in your encounter with those folks . Thank you for that question. So this is okay, i will talk about the records now. This is one of the things so hard in the research. The quakers, frankly, are the worst. You know they are owning enslaved people and they dont mention them. Its like, you know, youre banging your head against the wall. I was so excited when i started to read through these moravian records. There are daily diaries and, again, written in german script so theyre really hard to read, but theyre an untapped resource. Im trying to get into those records and try to access and write about the african diosporic histories with more nuance, right, because theres so much about a lot of writings about africanAmerican History, about slavery. Its either just straight oppression or like slave rebels, and its hard to get into this texture of peoples everyday lives and the things they were struggling with. Ill say the research im doing now, ive hopped islands. Im looking at jamaica, and im reading through the records from the first Moravian Mission there. One of the things ive been contemplating is when the first missionary arrives, he writes that the people there, the people of african descent call him obia. Some people may have heard of this. Its kind of its an african diosporic kind of practice that melds religion and medicine, healing practices. It was criminalized after the largest slave revolt in the british empire. And so im trying to figure out, okay, this document was written in the 1750s so before it was criminalized. It has chak echanged in people understanding. What can they say about the practice of ovia. I think theres exciting work to be done that can start to probe these complexities. Its hard work because our language is colonized. The word religion, its were living in the legacy of the language the slave owners gave us like whiteness. You have to find the records and push back against all of this the legacies of White Supremacy and colognialism and slavery in order to get into this. I hope im going to be able to do that more and continue to work on that as i sort of expand this research. So thank you. Dr. Gerbner has time for two more questions before the book signing. I ask questions four and five selfidentify and well get a microphone over to them. Hi. My question i will limit to the 17th century. Im over here. Thank you. Youre using the term protestant supremacy. The only major protestant slave owning culture would have been the dutch, so im wondering if there are any differences based on nationality as opposed to race. And the other thing i really have to say because im from south jersey, the first quaker colony in north america was in jersey. Sorry, philadelphia. All right, all right. Ill let you have that. Okay, so the dutch the dutch are really important. I didnt get to talk about them today. They were an imperial power before the english and what i argue in my book, so theyre a part of this first chapter im giving the context, up until about 1600 you have these catholic empires where, again, like i was saying before, baptism was part of the enslavement process and the dutch break the mold. You can look at the history of dutch brazil, curacao, they say initially were going to make these catholics protestants, right . And then they get there, uh, actually well just let them continue to be catholics. The Dutch Reformed Church becomes restricted just like other protestant churches do afterwards. And so i think they actually, in many ways, create a lot of precedence for later like the english empire and thats one of the ways i think they create a precedent. They have a measly missionary force and thats another thing about bureaucracy. The protestants all disbanded their big missions. No jesuits, who will do the work . The dutch realized that and throw their hands up. Its okay. Us europeans will continue to be the dutch reforms. Thank you. 4. 5 and 5. Piggybacking on what youve been talking about, im thinking of before the may flower and how the author talked about in the fact south america there were fewer problems or kinder treatment, whatever that means, of slaves in catholic south america than in protestant america. Thats one and the second thing, is that my half . Can you explain how christianity got so how slaves and even africanamerican churches today have absorbed christianity in such a way when christianity really dumped on them. Okay. So the first question so there are some books that say that catholic slavery was less severe than protestant slavery. I dont agree with that argument. Thats what i emphasize in the book. I dont think we should be going down that road. Thats my comment for the first part. The second part i just forgot what was how the slaves ingested, bought into. This is another important point because i think our understanding of the relationship between christianity and slavery has been mostly fed to us by proslavery propaganda from the 19th century who argued that christianity would make, enslave people. And so theres this perception this was accommodating to your masters will when you convert to christianity and one of the things im trying to emphasize on the research thats not how it was. Weve forgotten the history of protestant supremacy. If we dont understand the complexity of the decisions that people were making to become christian christians, its so important to recognize that so that we dont just see these people in the past and say, well, that was dumb. Why would you do that . We dont understand their lives fully or completely enough when we make that move and so, again, its hard to recover the complexities of peoples individual experiences, but the records as far as i have looked at them so this was a really complicated decision that, again, had theological, political, social and Community Aspects to it. They were just as complicated as us. Thank you for that question, both of them. Last question. Last question. So you talked about william penn and his slave ships and yet he was known for his very respectful attitude towards the indigenous native populations of pennsylvania. Did you see any or can you talk about any differences to how people he thought about those peoples . Thats a question i havent really thought about that much actually. But i think that William William penns legacy with native americans, i havent done research on this but i think its a little bit more complex than being the champion of native peoples. But, you know, im going to have to answer you later. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. You earned them. Just end with two observations. If it was 1776, april 10th, right now, the right half of this theater, you would be sitting in a home of a quaker couple, benjamin and Mary Humphries who in 1776 emancipated a woman of african descent named quonchiba. I wanted to make the point although weve talked a lot about the caribbean, we think of water as a barrier but this was the thing that connected. In the time it takes me as a kid to go on a twoweek Summer Vacation to yellow stone, the whole Atlantic World is connected by ships that were docked a block or two from where were sitting here in philadelphia. These ideas, these experiences, is philadelphia history as well. Then i will end by continuing a long tradition of misquoting William Faulkner by saying the past is not dead, its not even past. Thank you all. We can continue the conversation with katharine out in the hallway. See you all soon. All week were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Lectures in history, american artifacts, real america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency, and special event coverage about our nations history. Enjoy American History tv now and every weekend on cspan3. Week nights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. This week a look at our weekly lectures and history series which takes you into College Classrooms around the country. Tonight programs that examine legal history including the 1981 trial of jean harris, accused of murdering scarsdale diet doctor, university of colorado professor sarah fields discusses mrs. Harris background, her long relationship with the doctor, and her conviction for his murder. Watch at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan3. Labor day weekend on American History tv, saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on lectures in history, a discussion about Abraham Lincoln and native americans. Sunday at 4 00 p. M. On real america, the 1950 army film invasion of southern france. And monday, labor day, at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of virginias first General Assembly held at jamestown. Explore our nations past on American History tv every weekend on cspan3. In the wake of the recent shootings in el paso, texas, and dayton, ohio, the house judiciary will mark three gun prevention bills including banning high capacity ammunition magazines, restricting firearms from those deemed by a court to be a risk to themselves, and preventing individuals convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes from purchasing a gun. Live coverage begins wednesday on cspan and cspan. Org. If youre on the go listen to our live coverage using the free cspan radio app. Next, former Colonial Williamsburg interpreters talk about bringing africanamerican stories to life and about how they felt compelled to tell their ancestors stories. Panelists included American Civil War museum ceo Christy Coleman and National Museum of africanAmerican History and culture curator rex ellis. Good evening. My name is beth kelly and i am the Vice President and it is my honor to offer you a warm and personal welcome. The word welcome has a great deal of meaning for Colonial Williamsburg. We have been welcoming guests to come and learn about our 18th Century Community since 1932. 40 years ago the foundation recognized we were telling only half of the story, and so with determination and courage