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Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

Part of: Looking Forward, Looking Back: Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John Saillant
John Saillant
Affiliation:
assistant professor of English atWestern Michigan University.
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 86 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2000

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References

1. Like all readers of Anne and Elizabeth Hart, I owe a major debt to Moira Ferguson, even though I disagree with her characterization of the Hart sisters as “abolitionists” and “radicals.” For all the known writings of the Hart sisters, see The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals, ed. Ferguson, Moira (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).Google ScholarFor Ferguson's revision of the birth-dates given in The Hart Sisters, see Ferguson, Moira, ed., Nine Black Women: An Anthology of Nineteenth- Century Writers from the United States, Canada, Bermuda, and the Caribbean (New York: Routledge, 1998), 5–9, 27–30.Google ScholarFor Ferguson's analysis of the Hart sisters' abolitionism and radicalism, see her introduction to The Hart Sisters, 1–47, and her comments in Nine Black Women, 1–7, 27–29. A brief version of my views, again relying on Ferguson's edition, appears in “Anne Hart” and “Elizabeth Hart” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Women Prose Writers to 1820, vol. 200, ed. Mulford, Carla, Vietto, Angela, and Winans, Amy (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998), 174–86.Google Scholar

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