Reviving Rebecca and Her World

Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

In a world dominated by white men, Rebecca Protten transcended many of the boundaries society had fixed around her. In his engaging Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World, Jon Sensbach recovers the nearly erased life of a major figure in the emerging black Protestant Christianity of the eighteenth century, demonstrating how black women and men, like Rebecca, “began to blend Christianity with the religions they had brought with them from Africa, creating a faith to fortify themselves against slavery” (3). In the end, Sensbach not only provides a fascinating story about an equally fascinating woman, but he also illustrates the flexibility of “boundaries between slavery and freedom, whiteness and blackness, male and female activity” (233).

Rebecca Protten, known as Shelly to her biracial parents, was born on the island of Antigua late in the second decade of the eighteenth century. As a young girl, Shelly, like many other non-whites, was forcibly removed from her family and sold into slavery on the nearby island of St. Thomas. Purchased by the prominent van Beverhouts, Shelly, a mulatto, was assigned to the household staff. This assignment provided the young girl with many opportunities that field laborers did not enjoy. Shelly made the most of such opportunities. She learned, for example, to read and write. Perhaps the most significant of these prospects, though, was that Shelly was exposed to the Dutch strain of Reformed Christianity at a relatively early age. By the time she was twelve, in fact, Shelly had been baptized by a visiting Roman Catholic priest and christened with the name Rebecca. Ultimately, this exposure did more than simply give her a new name. Rebecca used her new faith to negotiate a place for herself not only in America, but also in the larger Atlantic world.

When Moravian missionaries arrived in St. Thomas in 1732, it did not take long for them to hear about the piety and ability of Rebecca. They quickly seized the opportunity and put the eager young woman to work in their mission. Rebecca, as Sensbach argues, used the occasion to invent (or re-invent) herself as a teacher and a leader in the Moravian work (65). Her ability, and perhaps the fact she acted “like a white,” prompted the mission’s leader, Friedrich Martin, to arrange Rebecca’s marriage to another of the missionaries, Matthäus Freundlich (89). Already troubled by the Christianization of their human property, St. Thomas’s planters saw this interracial marriage as yet another threat to social order. So, they quickly moved to quell the progress of the Moravians, which lead to the imprisonment of Martin and the Freundlichs in 1738. While Martin was released due to health issues, Rebecca and Matthäus remained in custody until Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the founder of Moravianism, arrived early the following year and interceded for the couple. Freed from imprisonment, Rebecca continued to teach St. Thomas’s population of enslaved Africans. The white planters, or Blancken, did not make her task any easier, however. In 1741, a respite was needed. Thus, Rebecca, Matthäus, and Friedrich Martin left for Germany. Their trip did not go as planned.

Only Rebecca, in fact, arrived safely to their destination of Marienborn. Following the death of his replacement, Martin returned to St. Thomas. Matthäus became ill and died. Rebecca arrived a widow. Her grief, however, did not keep her from laboring within the Moravian community in Marienborn. Aware of her abilities as a teacher from reports made by Martin, the leaders in Marienborn and nearby Hernnhaag quickly put the gifted woman to work. They also labored to find a suitable husband for the gifted missionary. In the end, they chose Christian Protten, an mulatto preacher from Africa. Following their wedding in 1746, Rebecca and Christian worked in various capacities and with varying approval in Europe until 1763, when the couple decided to return to Africa to establish a Moravian work at Fort Christiansbourg on the Gold Coast. They finally arrived in Africa on May 10, 1765 and established a school for the region’s mulatto children. Their work suffered one of its greatest setbacks when Christian died in 1769. Again alone, Rebecca refused to return to St. Thomas or America, opting instead to remain in Africa until her own death in 1780. “She lived,” as Sensbach so powerfully writes, “as a kind of reverse cultural bridge across the Atlantic during the period of the overwhelming one-way flow of Africans to America” (233).

Aside from the story of Rebecca’s life and the groundwork laid by religious women and men of color for the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century, Rebecca’s Revival reveals much about the flexibility of identities within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Rebecca inhabited a tenuous position between freedom and servitude. While she only lived part of her life enslaved, she was never able to escape the stigma of bondage attached to the color of her skin. She “belonged to that small class of free people of color, found in every New World society, dangling between slavery and freedom” (41). This was seen clearly when she was threatened with enslavement during her imprisonment on St. Thomas. She knew “that liberty in a slave society was ephemeral, easily and legally retracted by the authorities” (121). Christianity could not secure the liberty of believers. Rebecca’s story also demonstrates the flexibility of “race” in the eighteenth century. A mulatto, Rebecca lived caught between two very different worlds. She was never truly “black,” but her “whiteness” could never go beyond her actions. Even her migration to the Continent could not remove her difference. As Sensbach shows, Moravians, like Europeans in general, tended to lump together all non-Europeans in categories that stressed the differences in their outward appearances, despite claims to spiritual and social equality (178). Christianity could not erase the “race” of believers. Finally, Rebecca stepped outside the traditional activities assigned to women, illustrating the flexibility of gender roles. While clear expectations for men and women existed, Protestantism, especially in the earlier stages of sect development, afforded many women, both black and white, occasions to serve in ways that were off limits a few years earlier. Such a situation would not last, though. As Moravians, and other Protestant groups, struggled for respectability in ensuing years, they inevitably “scaled back controversial practices such as the prominent leadership role of women” (236). Christianity could not rescue believers from the negative effects of patriarchy. The ministry of Rebecca Protten, recovered by Sensbach in Rebecca’s Revival, delineates the strengths and weaknesses of Christianity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Though she could never escape the confinements of her day, Rebecca “had a way of turning up in unexpected places at important times to help conduct social experiments that challenged strictures of race, religion, and gender” (7). Christianity, white and black, remains indebted to the labors of Rebecca Protten. So do the multi-racial societies of the twenty-first century.