Religion in the American colonies

Craig Gallagher (Boston College)

Introduction

There have been few subjects as valuable as religion for historians who have sought to make coherent the long and complex history of the colonial Americas. Religion was something common to the experience of almost everyone who lived in early America, whether their origin was Native, European, African, or creole, or whether they were among the earliest Spanish settlers in the fifteenth century or the Revolutionary generation in the late eighteenth. Religion was also the most common point of contact between the various peoples of the Atlantic world, as many European contacts with Native American and African peoples were led by missionaries. Early modern Europeans most often came to the Americas because of their religion, whether to spread its influence or to protect it from persecutors at home. New religions were founded there, in new communities of Native Americans forced together by disease epidemics and population displacement, or in African communities forged by the common experience of slavery, or by Europeans who sought to make sense of their harsh frontier lifestyle. Religion shaped political relationships between colonists and their metropolitan cousins back in Europe, and it forged the social and cultural bonds that would become the foundation of new nations in the late eighteenth century. In fact there are few periods or places that have been as influenced by, or had such an influence on, religious history as colonial America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As a result, the CO 5 collection held at the National Archives in London has long been an invaluable repository for students and scholars seeking to study religion in colonial North America, despite its status as an ostensibly political and economic manuscript collection. Because most records within the CO 5 papers pertain to how Britain administered its overseas colonies, the collection has traditionally been most useful to those interested in the history of the thirteen North American colonies that became the United States after 1783, the former French colonies that became Canada (especially after 1763), and those Caribbean colonies, like Jamaica or the Bahamas, that were in British possession. The Board of Trade (and its predecessor institution before 1689, the Lords of Trade) received thousands of letters, petitions, reports, maps, and contracts from governors, ministers, merchants, soldiers, and ordinary settlers who lived in the American colonies in the century between its formation and the advent of American independence in 1783. It also generated substantial paperwork of its own, on matters political, religious, and economic, in response to the information it received from its correspondents, and for the eyes of its government in London. Despite its name, then, the Board of Trade’s records have value to scholars interested in matters beyond simply commerce, as from its very inception the Board was to all intents and purposes Whitehall’s official legislative, judicial, and regulatory arm in British America.

Three key themes that have shaped the history of religion in the American colonies can be extracted from the CO 5 collection. The first is exile, as European Catholics and Protestants alike fled their home countries to seek a safe haven abroad in North America, where they sought freedom from persecutions and prosecutions, on account of their faith, mounted against them by various sovereigns and established churches. This theme also reflects the experience of African and Native Americans, the former exiled from their native continent and religious centers, the latter from their ancestral lands now in European possession. The second theme is that of distrust of authority, especially among dissenting Protestants who feared the encroachment of the Church of England on their American refuges in the eighteenth century. But as Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Quakers sought to shore up their authority to resist Anglican designs on their independence, they provoked further defections from those inclined towards the evangelical teachings of Baptist, Methodist, and Moravian preachers, whose outdoor services to massed crowds in the mid-eighteenth century became so popular and widespread that they spawned a movement known as the Great Awakening. The third and final theme is that of widespread fear of popery and tyranny among colonists, in particular its international, imperial manifestations. Such fears inspired factious colonists to put aside their differences, recognize their common heritage as Protestant, English men and women, and to take part in the global contest waged by Britain against Catholic France and Spain on the high seas and on the North American frontier. Throughout the eighteenth century, American colonists increasingly came to fear that popish forces with designs on suppressing their Protestant liberties not only menaced them on their French and Spanish borders, but after the British conquest of Canada in 1763 and the concessions granted by Parliament to the Catholic habitants there, had infested their own government in London as well.