Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity

Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

Bibliographic Data

ID3489231
AuthorsJohn Saillant (0000-0003-3724-9101, Midwestern University, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume69
Issue1
Pages86-115
Publication date2000-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueChurch History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0009-6407 • E-ISSN: 1755-2613
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3170581
OpenAlexW2165071858
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited51

Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768-1834) and Elizabeth (1771-1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead-he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops-then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. Soon the sisters came to write about faith, slavery, and freedom. Anne and Elizabeth Hart were moderate opponents of slavery, not abolitionists but meliorationists. When compared to their black American, British, and West African contemporaries, the Hart sisters illuminate the birth of a black antislavery Christianity in the late eighteenth century precisely because they never became abolitionists. The Hart sisters shared with their black contemporaries a vivid sense of racial identity and evangelical Christianity. Yet as meliorationists, the Hart sisters did not oppose slavery as an institution, but rather the vice it spread into the lives of blacks. The difference between the Hart sisters and their contemporaries such as Richard Allen, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Lemuel Haynes, and John Marrant-all luminaries of black abolitionism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-was that the abolitionists felt themselves citizens of a modern nation-state characterized by power that could be used against slave traders and slaveholders. The Hart sisters never thought of themselves as citizens and abjured political means, including revolution, of ending slavery. This essay aims to describe the Hart sisters' faith and antislavery activity and to analyze the difference between meliorationism and abolitionism in terms of a black writer's ability or inability to identify as a citizen of a modern nation-state

Abolitionism · Archaeology · Christianity · Faith · Institution · Methodism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Theology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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