Swarms of Negroes Comeing about My Door: Black Christianity in Early Dutch and English North America

Bonomi argues that Christianity left a significant impress on slaves' religious lives and legal status in early Dutch and English North America. This challenges the attenuating yet still-resonant historiography that begins the story of black Christianity only with the evangelical clergy's outreach to blacks in the mid-eighteenth-century Great Awakening. That view both ignores the agency of African Americans in their own religious history and disparages work among blacks by dedicated Dutch Reformed and pre-Great Awakening Anglican missionaries. Bonomi reinterprets slave Christianity in New Netherland and compares it with harsher practices in the English colonies of Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and New York, while illuminating blacks' manipulation of the laws and slave owners' ambivalence about holding Christians in bondage.