God's Fields: Landscape, Religion, and Race in Moravian Wachovia

Drawing on Salem's original community plan and unique aspects of Moravian theology and cemetery arrangement, Ferguson demonstrates how increased exposure to "outside" ideas like slaveholding, racial segregation, and industrial capitalism slowly turned Moravian practice away from a radically inclusive community ethos to one increasingly like that of America at large. [...]Ferguson's central focus is on how a group whose members previously tried to sell themselves into slavery in the Caribbean in order to preach to enslaved Africans could, in a matter of a few short generations, come to own slaves and practice racial segregation. Not lost on Ferguson is the location of the log church and St. Philips church buildings at the base of the hill forming Salem's major topographic element. [...]African Americans were increasingly pushed to the peripheries of Salem, with even their segregated places of worship and burials removed from public view.