SLAVERY AND THE UNCHRISTIANS

...it's good history and will stand...

...He proposes that Afro-Americans were confronted with being Negroes as well as Americans, and, ironically, and shamefully for the nation, frequently that contradiction was aggressively contradictory...

...slaveholding revolutionaries declaring to the world that "all men are created equal...

...Scherer's is less satisfying...

...It takes a slice of Afro-American history, examines it, and suggests the complexities and nuances of being black in America...

...The studies reviewed here are shrouded by two ironical contradictions: The supportive relationship between Christianity and slavery in early North America and the role of Black Americans in the nation's imperialist assumption of the "white man's burden" at the turn of the 20th century...

...Scholars will find Slavery and the Chinches in Early America brief and skkchf...

...The role of the churches in all this...

...Lester B. Scherer's Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619-1819 C. PETER RIPJLEY touches the irony of Christians owning slaves in colonial America...

...Gatewood's is thorough, well researched and readable...

...This land-from its seventeenth century origins as British colonies through its emergence as a world power-has been hard-pressed to reconcile its equalitarian philosophical underpinnings with its treatment of Africans and Afro-Americans...

...slaveholding Americans tactfully avoiding the slavery issue in the new Constitution, and, finally, slaveholding continuing in the new nation long after it was outlawed throughout the British Empire...

...During the period 1763-1819 most church governing bodies discussed the future of slavery...

...Some were as jingoistic as the most aggressive* white expansionist...

...The colonial church first greeted slavery with silence and then supported it, in part, by spreading a conservative gospel to those slaves who would listen...

...From the early seventeenth century to the eve of the American Revolution churches and churchgoers were silent on slavery, believing, as they did, concludes Scherer, That slavery was necessary to themselves and not really harmful to the slaves...

...Witness, for example, the racial flavor of the different responses to American interest in Cuba and Hawaii: a black majority supported intervention in Cuba, hoping that America would liberate the residents of the island from Spanish domination, but that same majority was far less enthusiastic about intervention in Hawaii, an island of free peoples which was threatened by eventual American control...

...An interested novice could read it for all outline and for its references to related works by Davia B. Davis, E. Franklin Frazier, Winthrop Jorden and Thad Tate...

...Abandoning the last vestiges of unfulfilled Reconstruction promises, by the 1890s, Americans had succumbed to a negro-phobia which forced a feeling of mounting crisis in the black community...

...But even when responding as boosters or soldiers, black expansionists often had one eye at home, believing, or at least hoping, that service to the nation abroad would improve domestic race relations...

...Most owners, concerned that baptism might challenge the civil status of their chattel slaves, did not offer them religious training...

...The ironies are obvious...

...Despite conditions at home, by 1898 and the start of the Spanish-American War, many black Americans had turned their attention to United States expansion...

...Racial oppression and legal discrimination increased dramatically in the last years of the nineteenth century...

...All of which means that some church leaders recognized these contradictions and embraced abolition of slavery as they did American independence...

...But they were a minority in the black community...

...They reflected contemporary "ambiguities of revolutionary ideology concerning black people and slavery," concludes Scherer...

...Despite black patriotism and support of American imperialism, a racial ideology qualified all black responses...

...But ironically, that majority eventually felt duty-bound to participate in the military struggle in Cuba and the Philippines, believing as they did that black patriotism would smother white prejudice at home...

...The period from 1763 to 1819-a half-century of revolution and nation building - generated additional and equally obvious ironies: slaveholding colonists railing against British tyranny...

...yet most church members "had difficulty . . . overcoming their . . . 'prejudice' enough to raise the plight of black slaves to the same level as their own quarrel with the mother country...

...and ' weak in research and methodology, a bit jejune...

...Once that fear was quieted, a cautious Christianity was offered to slaves, and predictably (and ironically) that Christianity stressed obedience to masters and heavenly rewards...

...The two studies reviewed here share little beyond ironical contradictions...

...Other blacks were firm anti-imperialists, assuming that position, feels Gatewood, "principally on the grounds that a crusade abroad Would divert attention from the racial crisis at home...

...Nor could black Americans embrace all imperialism equally: a racial identity witii the peoples of Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines and an awareness that American interference affected the self-determination of each of those islands differently made black Americans cautious of the "white man's burden...

...A majority, though/fell somewhere between the two positions...

...but, except for the Quakers who eventually excluded slaveholders from membership, American churches failed to successfully challenge slavery or their slaveholding members...

...V. of Illinois Press, $1225 Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619-1819 LESTER B. SCHERER Eerdsman, $555 A sense of irony permeates Afro-American history...

...tells how it was done and how** black Americans responded...

...Blacks were cognizant of the similarities between their conditions at home and the conditions of the people in the islands-all "longed for liberty and freedom from white oppression," concludes Gatewood, which gave them a common interest...

...As late as 1763, he continues, slaves were as ignorant of Christianity as when they left Africa...

...If it seems ironical that Christianity and the churches in early America were wed to slavery, consider the proposition that during the 1890 while America disenfranchised, segregated, lynched, and terrorized its black citizens with abandon, the nation shouldered the "white man's burden** in order to help those "less fortunate" in Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines: Nevertheless, that's what happened- And Willard B. Gate-wood, Jr...

...This racial window as a viewer of American imperialism is Gatewood's strength...

...black Republican officeholders, particularly, believed that following administra-r tion polky and helping the white man with his "burden" would generate greater respect (and rewards) once the empire was consolidated...

...the resulting anxiety was the benchmark which guided black responses to overseas expansion-those who opposed expansion as well as those who embraced it did so because of the eventual effect they believed their preference would have on domestic race relations, concludes Gatewood...

...They "pursued a tortuous course characterized by ambiguities, contradictions, and dramatic reversals...

...Black Americans were less apt to perceive the colored peoples in Cuba, in Hawaii or in the Philippine Islands as "burdens" and more apt to identify and sympathize with them than white Americans...