Religion and the early south in an age of Atlantic empire.

EARLY 1704: QUEEN ANNE'S WAR RAGES ON THE FRONTIERS OF EASTERN North America. Indian and European allies advance southward through the forest on unsuspecting enemy villages. A surprise raid--defenders are quickly overpowered. Homes and churches are torched, captives are burned at the stake while reciting religious verse, hundreds more file northward into slavery, and those who cannot keep up are butchered on the trail. A fellowship of the godly is decimated.

This scene might well describe the famous raids by French and Iroquois attackers on Deerfield and other towns in colonial Massachusetts, immortalized in contemporary survivors' accounts and revisited in dramatic detail by modern scholars. But, in fact, it more accurately depicts the attacks eleven hundred miles to the south by Carolina colonists and their Creek allies on the Spanish mission villages of northern Florida. By August 1704 more than one thousand Apalachee and Timucuan Catholics had been killed or enslaved, many to be sold to the West Indies. Thousands more fled to Louisiana or, disgusted by the mission system and by the Spaniards' inability to protect them, left voluntarily to relocate in South Carolina. Slaughter, captivity, and flight hastened their virtual extinction as peoples; the mission system, the linchpin of Spanish colonialism in the American Southeast since the 1560s, was essentially destroyed. By any measure the assault was far more destructive than its New England counterpart, forever changing the face of the Southeast with the eradication of the great majority of the region's Catholics. But because of the enduring grip of the Puritans on the public and scholarly imagination, the Deerfield raid lives on in the working vernacular of historians of early America, while the annihilation of the Florida missions is mostly known to a few specialists, remaining a largely obscure episode in southern geopolitical history and in the growing literature on the Indian slave trade. In fact, it was a turning point in both early American history and in the religious history of the South. (1)

In a rare gaze southward, Perry Miller reminded us long ago that the founding of Virginia was as much a religious enterprise as a commercial one and that English religion was present in the South earlier than in New England. (2) Still, in this four-hundredth anniversary year of Jamestown, we do well to remember that Catholicism was the dominant form of Christianity in the American South long before the Virginia Company's New World gambit. In 1570 Spanish Jesuits had begun a mission on a Chesapeake peninsula they called Ajacan, between two rivers the English later named James and York. A year later, Indians destroyed the mission and killed the friars, but by the early seventeenth century the Spanish chain of missions stretched from the coast of Georgia as far west as present-day Tallahassee, claiming many thousands of native converts. Just outside Gainesville, Florida, archaeologists recently uncovered the remains of San Francisco de Potano, the largest Timucuan mission, founded in 1606 and abandoned under duress a century later. Potano's four-hundredth anniversary passed in 2006 with little notice.

Just as Spanish "borderlands" history has remained on the margins of southern history, historians still have not widely assimilated the Spanish missions or a strong sense of Protestant-Catholic antagonism into a general understanding of early southern religious history. While historians as venerable as Verner W. Crane and as recent as Alan Gallay, Kathleen DuVal, and Juliana Barr have depicted the early South--particularly the region south of Virginia--as a vast zone of demographic complexity and territorial dispute between Britain, France, Spain, and multiple Indian peoples, scholars have seldom applied this approach to the study of religion. That study has been shaped by an assumption that "the South" equated to Britain's southern colonies and that very often Virginia was representative of those colonies. Thus, while our understanding of southern Anglicanism and the evangelical churches, particularly in the Old Dominion, has grown increasingly sophisticated, the religious cultures of the Anglo South can appear disembodied from the broader pluralistic and contentious worlds around them. (3)

The field has emerged in this way for specific reasons rooted in the broader study of American religious history and southern history. For the pioneers of the field of "southern religion" that began to flourish in the 1970s, the challenge was to rescue southern religious history from the neglect and condescension of a historiography hypnotized by the Puritans and their descendants. Religion in the South, when it was mentioned at all, was reduced to passing references to the Scopes trial or to stereotyped images of camp-meeting enthusiasts that gave almost no sense of any religious activity below the Mason-Dixon Line before the mid-nineteenth century or of how evangelical religion came to the South at all. As well, historians of the South, including specialists of the colonial period, themselves often showed little interest in religion, choosing instead to investigate the formation of political institutions and the rise and consolidation of plantation economies.

Accordingly, in response to these tendencies, the central impulse animating what have now become the classic works in southern religious history has been to unravel the origins and place of evangelical Protestantism in southern life: the role of the Anglican Church in the British colonies before the evangelicals; the conditions that enabled the so-called New Lights to gain a foothold and consolidate power in the region; and the enduring hold of evangelicalism in the South for more than two hundred years. This literature has been characterized by sensitivity and empathy toward the evangelicals, often tempered with a sharp critique of the world they created. It has illuminated the clash between established religion and upstart revivalists that changed the South permanently. And, within a broader historiography of American religion that has often been blind to race, the field of southern religious studies has shown a fastidious awareness of the emergence of African American Christianity and of the biracial shaping of evangelicalism in the shadow of southern slavery. The overall impact of these advances has been to demonstrate that religion, far from being a mere sidelight to social, economic, and racial aspects of southern history, has long been fundamental to that history. (4)

The rescue worked: southern religious history has become a robust field that is beginning to revise the way American religious history is being written, though no one has forgotten about the Puritans. Scholars can now refer to the online Journal of Southern Religion, to a steady stream of books and articles about southern religious history, and to an entire volume on religion in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Success has come with a price, however, because the literature has created the impression that "southern religion" is evangelical religion. Groups that lie outside the narrative of the evangelical ascendancy are often excluded entirely from the story of religion in the early South. When the field of southern religious studies was on the rise, for example, the French and Spanish sectors of the Gulf region were not widely considered part of traditional colonial history, which was English speaking and Protestant. Long-standing debates that have characterized the literature on southern evangelicalism, such as the tension between individualism and communalism, have little purchase in those other regions, which contributed further to their marginalization. As a result, conceptions of the early South became foreshortened to a time and place that explained the evangelical moment, and the religious diversity of early southern history remained underexplored. (5)

In the past quarter-century, historians--some of them specialists in religious themes, others not--have made enough headway reconceptualizing the very nature and extent of the early South as to suggest the outlines of a new appraisal of religion. Recent scholarship now allows us to see the colonial South as more than a cultural appendage to the northern colonies, more than an isolated backwater on the fringe of the British empire, and more than a prelude to the evangelicals. To take a wider geographic view of the South is by necessity to embrace a broader cultural view. Recent literature has consistently shown that, from the British colonies through Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, the early South was a place of imperial rivalry and profound international influences, continually remade by free immigrants, transformed by the trade in African and Indian slaves, deeply implicated in European politics, linked by transatlantic networks of communication, culturally connected to the British Isles, France, Spain, and the German lands, and an extension of West Africa as well as the greater French, British, and Spanish Caribbean. At no other time in its history has the South been shaped by such a heterogeneous mix of people espousing such a medley of religious beliefs, from its many Native American traditions to several kinds of Catholicism, many varieties of Protestantism, as well as Islam and Judaism. The confrontation and, often, mixing of these beliefs and the changes to them, including but not limited to the rise of evangelicalism, are the larger story of religion in the colonial South. This web of forces calls into question, or at least forces us to re-examine, the very notion of "southern religion" we have grown comfortable with.

Religion figures prominently, for example, in much of the new work that is bringing French and Spanish Louisiana from the periphery to the center of early American and Atlantic historiography. A well-established if somewhat older literature on Catholicism in Louisiana was once widely ignored by historians of early America and southern religions. No more. Scholars have realized the critical role of the church in shaping French and Spanish colonialism, race and slavery, and gender roles, among other themes. The encounter between Christianity and native religion, for instance, was a central if often overlooked aspect of Hernando de Soto's trek through the Southeast from 1539 to 1542, and several chiefdoms in the Arkansas River valley sought to absorb and manipulate the symbolism of the cross to favorable political advantage in their dealings with the Spanish. And though the efforts of French missionaries to win converts among Indians in the lower Mississippi and Arkansas River basins are not as famous as those of their counterparts in Canada, they arrived in the South as early as 1673, re-established contact in 1698 before the permanent French settlement of Louisiana, and remained a component of imperial strategy thereafter. The Catholic missionary presence among the Natchez, Arkansas, Taensa, Tunica, and other peoples in the Southeast was both a spiritual front in the war against English Protestantism as well as a source of contention in the struggle for cultural hegemony between the French and Indians who sought to incorporate the other into their world. As Michelene Pesantubbee has shown in the case of the Choctaws, the steady assertion of French religious and political power in the region undermined native tradition, especially to the detriment of women, who saw the erosion of their roles as interpreters of the sacred. (6)

Echoes of Frank Tannenbaum still resonate in the literature on Catholicism and slavery in Louisiana, and though there is broad consensus that the two were closely entwined, disagreement lingers over whether the church helped mitigate the harshness of slavery. Historians have found innovative ways of maneuvering within these longstanding debates. Emily Clark's work on the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans, for example, places those women at the heart of French imperial policy, civic and philanthropic culture, and the religious life of the capital city. The nuns' work in converting and educating enslaved Africans--many of whom the nuns owned--was consonant with colonial policy in the greater French Caribbean. A cadre of black lay sisters that emerged from these efforts became during French rule the core of the city's Afro-Catholic community that carried over into the Spanish and American periods. As this and other work remind us, furthermore, in large Spanish sections of the American South the colonial period did not end in 1783, and continuities with a long Catholic past persisted. (7)

Many themes that have helped stimulate interest in Louisiana can be extrapolated to the broader contours of early southern religious history. As straightforward as it now seems, for example, to assert that native people have been central to southern religious history, their experiences lie largely outside the dominant narratives of the field. Yet work after work on the early contact period reaffirms that Indians and Europeans negotiated their sense of each other and of the changing world around them through religious imagery and symbolism. After two centuries of catastrophic demographic loss and territorial displacement, furthermore, southern Indians were vastly outnumbered by 1800 in a region they once controlled. Therefore, the most significant change in early southern religious history, arguably, was not the rise of evangelicalism but the replacement of native religions by Christianity and African religions and the corresponding desacralization of native landscapes. We still have much to learn about the cycles of spiritual change, loss, and renewal experienced by Indians in the early South and far to go to incorporate those struggles into the longer trajectory of southern religious history. (8)

The religious lives of Indian, European, and African women in the early South are receiving more sustained attention, but just barely. Juliana Barr's study of women as spiritual negotiators in Spanish-Indian encounters in Texas, along with Clark's work on the Ursulines and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly's studies of Methodist women, point to the possibilities, but gendered approaches to early southern religious history have generated nothing close to the kind of sustained scrutiny that New England, (northern) New France, and New Spain (south and west of the Gulf region) have received. (9)

New transnational approaches are demonstrating how thoroughly the South was enmeshed in expansive Atlantic religious worlds. One group to benefit from this historiographic renaissance, for example, is the Huguenots, who settled in colonial Virginia and South Carolina, among other American destinations. Recent works reposition the Huguenots in the Reformation politics of sixteenth-century France and track their expulsion and dispersal around the Atlantic rim in the late seventeenth century, from the Netherlands to Britain to North America and the Caribbean. From this perspective, the Huguenot world of the American South was not a remote, self-contained outpost but part of an international, well-connected diasporic community. (10)

Similarly, recent literature gives a human--if sometimes unflattering--face to the Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers in the South Carolina backcountry who evoked scorn from itinerant Anglican minister Charles Woodmason in the 1760s. In Peter N. Moore's careful reconstruction, the church-based world of Scots-Irish settlers was at once connected outwardly to international networks of religion, kinship, and commerce but closed in on itself, suspicious of outsiders like Anglicans and Baptists. It was also riven by internal conflicts between second- and third-generation evangelical Presbyterians from Pennsylvania and more conservative Covenanters from northern Ireland, a conflict that gave religious overtones to disputes over social class that foreshadowed the rise of the plantation economy in the backcountry. Roark Atkinson, meanwhile, has uncovered astonishing evidence of Scottish witch-hunting practices in eighteenth-century South Carolina, a legacy of violent witch hunts in Reformation Scotland and of a deep-rooted belief, transferred to America, in a supernaturally charged spiritual landscape. This was a world not only of harmless folk charms and spells but also of self-appointed "devil masters" who sought to root out Satan's earthly agents--a practice Atkinson links to the roots of southern lynching. It was just such a posse of witch-hunting vigilantes in 1792 who, seizing three elderly people suspected of casting a spell on cattle, whipped and burned them with hot coals and pressed one of the accused with a giant log. Such practices belong to a largely untold but emerging story of popular religious practice in the early South. (11)

The recent publication of transatlantic slave-trade databases has helped generate a great deal of new scholarship on African cultural transmissions to the New World. (12) Much of this work focuses on specific ethnic or cultural groups deriving from identifiable regions of West or West-Central Africa that left marked cultural imprints in the Americas. It is common nowadays to assert with greater precision a particular Yoruba, Kongolese, Ibo, or Bambara influence on a certain slave society, and while such fingerprinting can run the risk of heavy-handed ethnic determinism, it gives historians a chance to transcend generalities about undifferentiated "Africans" while thinking about cultural commonalities and variations between the South, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The search for African religious manifestations in early America, for example, has been fundamentally changed by John K. Thornton's work on Kongolese Catholicism in South Carolina and elsewhere and by Michael A. Gomez's work on Islam. Still, it is one thing to chart first-generation practices among enslaved Africans in America and another to discern their descendants' beliefs two or three generations later, and that challenge remains. (13) The challenge is enriched by our growing awareness of the ways in which African and African American religious belief and practice began to reflect absorption of Christianity in the Anglo, Spanish, and Francophone South of the eighteenth century. Wherever they did so, and in whatever form, religion became the basis by which people of African descent arbitrated cultural change in America.

Historians speak increasingly of the colonial and Revolutionary-era South as part of a pan-Caribbean world, but they have barely begun to explore the spiritual connections between regions. Suggestive hints have emerged. In its border position on the Gulf, Florida again exemplified those overlapping, conflicting connections as it faced northward in the war against Protestantism and southward to its fellow Spanish colonies. Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries in Florida followed a well-rehearsed hemispheric and global plan for converting indigenous populations, and religious life in the colony--which, apart from the missions, remains largely unexamined--should be placed in the larger context of Catholicism in Spanish America. When the colony was ceded to the British in 1763, the docks in St. Augustine were crowded with Catholic refugees bound for Cuba, including the few remaining Timucuan Indians--remnants of the debacle of 1704--and the now-famous defenders of Fort Mose, the South's first free black town.

It is helpful to remember as well that the Church of England operated in a vast plantation world spanning Britain's southern mainland colonies and the West Indies. Historians are finding new things to say about that reputed bastion of social and political conservatism. The stodgy elitism, emotional stoicism, institutional weakness, and racism of the church are often cited as having created a spiritual void that the supposedly more egalitarian evangelicals rushed to fill. Without denying those flaws, however, historians have sought more lately to modify the negative image of the church--a characterization perhaps derived too closely from the anti-Anglican rhetoric of the evangelicals themselves. Recent work (which has tended to focus almost exclusively on Virginia as the model of southern Anglicanism) has shown that the church was often more intellectually and spiritually vibrant than it is usually given credit for, that it supplied the religious and social needs of thousands of worshippers, and that it is too tidy a historical trajectory to attribute evangelical success to Anglican weakness alone. In this vein, Nicholas M. Beasley has recently offered a comparative framework for understanding how the church functioned in and supported slave-based plantation economies in the Deep South and the Caribbean and how parishioners, both white and black, drew meaning from its rituals and sacraments. (14)

The theme of Anglican stagnation preceding evangelical vigor is rebuffed as well by Thomas J. Little, who argues provocatively that the origins of "southern evangelicalism" are properly understood as emanating from the Church of England's attempts to reinvigorate the faith in South Carolina early in the eighteenth century. This "Anglican renaissance" generated new churches, new clergy, new enthusiasm, and mission attempts by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to convert slaves as part of an international Protestant awakening. Little places these developments in the context of evangelical tensions within the larger Atlantic Protestant world that played out in South Carolina in the form of revivals, schisms, and charismatic preaching among Huguenots, Presbyterians, Baptists, and German Pietists. Such manifestations of the spirit, he argues, anticipated the better-known revivals by the New Lights later in the century, lengthening the timeline of the evangelical advent in the South and extending the Atlantic circumference within which it took hold. Nonetheless, as much as historians have begun to follow evangelical and Pietist communication networks back and forth across the ocean, they have continued to do so mostly with an Anglophone, New England perspective. (15)

To an extent that has not yet been thoroughly investigated, then, the South was both a receiver and a generator of religious philosophies, a connector node for ideas and people in constant motion, as we again see in the black Protestant evangelical movement of the mid- to late eighteenth century. The success of Moravian missionaries in converting thousands of Afro-Caribbean slaves in the Danish and British West Indies heavily influenced evangelicals to extend missions into Britain's southern mainland colonies, where they helped generate similar enthusiasm among African Americans. In turn, black Christians from the South--some enslaved, some free--evacuated with British troops and American loyalists after the Revolution to found new congregations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Many black lay evangelicals in this reverse diaspora came from the Silver Bluff, South Carolina, Baptist church, the first black congregation in the early South and one of exceptional importance in the history of African American Christianity--George Liele went to Jamaica, Moses Baker to the Bahamas, David George to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. White Methodists like Thomas Coke, Francis Asbury, and William Hammett also regarded the South and the British Caribbean as a linked region, shuttling back and forth between them to preach among slaves. (16)

In the context of such transatlantic exchanges, the evangelical ascendancy appears not so much as the beginnings of southern religion but as one among multiple competing and often overlapping narratives of religious expression in the early South. Of course we know that evangelical Protestantism took hold by the early nineteenth century and has remained firmly entrenched ever since; its association with "the South," as that cultural and geopolitical term was coming into use, rightly remains a subject of study. But the region before the demise of indigenous populations, before the triumph of Anglo-American Protestantism, before the South became more culturally homogeneous, was a different world altogether, although still recognizable for all its difference. Amid severe hierarchies of worldly power, native people, Europeans, and Africans sought to make sense of each other through the idiom of religion and, in doing so, produced spiritually hybrid cultures that reshaped the region. Historians have long pointed out that the dividing line between sacred and secular was not neatly drawn in early modern societies. We might venture to say that, for most early southerners, to exist was to be religious in some form. In all its manifestations, therefore, religion lay at the heart of the early South and remains central to the study of its history.

(1) Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002): John H. Harm, Apalachee: The Land between the Rivers (Gainesville, 1988); John E. Worth, The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida. Vol. 2: Resistance and Destruction (Gainesville, 1998). On the Deerfield raid, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994); Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst, Mass., 2003). The author would like to thank Juliana Barr for her comments on an earlier version of this essay.

(2) Perry Miller, "Religion and Society in the Early Literature on Virginia," in Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (New York, 1956), 99-140.

(3) Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Ann Arbor, 1929); Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2007); Thomas J. Little, "The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism: Revivalism in South Carolina, 1700 1740,'" Church History, 75 (December 2006), 768-808, esp. pp. 768-71.

(4) Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977); Mathews, "'We Have Left Undone Those Things Which We Ought to Have Done': Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect," Church History, 67 (June 1998), 305-25; John B. Boles, The Irony of Southern Religion (New York, 1994); Boles, "The Discovery of Southern Religious History," in Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge, 1987), 510-48; Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997).

(5) Journal of Southern Religion, http://jsr.fsu.edu; Samuel S. Hill, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Vol. 1: Religion (Chapel Hill, 2006). These themes are explored further in Jon F. Sensbach, "Before the Bible Belt: Indians, Africans, and the New Synthesis of Eighteenth-Century Southern Religious History," in Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews, eds., Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill, 2004), 5-29. See also Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2nd ed.; Macon, Ga., 2005).

(6) Bradley G. Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, 2005); DuVal, Native Ground, 39-41; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 102-5, 111-22; Jennifer M. Spear, "'They Need Wives': Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699-1730," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999), 35-59; Michelene Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Albuquerque, 2005).

(7) Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill, 2007); Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, "The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (April 2002), 409-48; Sue Peabody, "'A Dangerous Zeal': Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635-1800," French Historical Studies, 25 (Winter 2002), 53-90.

(8) James Axtell, The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge, 1997); Joel W. Martin, "Indians, Contact, and Colonialism in the Deep South: Themes for a Postcolonial History of American Religion," in Thomas A. Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley, 1997), 149-80.

(9) Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, "Passion, Desire, and Ecstasy: The Experiential Religion of Southern Methodist Women, 1770-1810," in Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, eds., The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York, 1997), 168-86; Lyerly, "Religion, Gender, and Identity: Black Methodist Women in a Slave Society, 1770-1810," in Patricia Morton, ed., Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past (Athens, Ga., 1996), 202-26. A recent anthology largely devoted to women and religion contains not a single study based in the South; see Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800 (New York, 2003).

(10) Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, S.C., 2003); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 2006). Though it treats Huguenot migration from France to New York, Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots' New World, 1517-1751 (Baltimore, 2005), is a methodological tour de force that further illustrates the group's immersion in the early modern Atlantic world.

(11) Peter N. Moore, World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750-1805 (Columbia, S.C., 2007); Roark Atkinson, Invisible Plantations: Religious Violence, Occult Healing, and Witchcraft in the Scottish Atlantic World, 1590-1820 (Baltimore, forthcoming).

(12) David Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, Eng., 1999); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000).

(13) Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, 2005); Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington, 2004); Douglas B. Chambers, Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia (Jackson, Miss., 2005); Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York, 2002); John K. Thornton, "On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas," Americas, 44 (January 1988), 261-78; Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York, 2005).

(14) Edward L. Bond, ed., Spreading the Gospel in Colonial Virginia: Preaching Religion and Community; With Selected Sermons and Other Primary Documents (Lanham, Md., 2005); Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Joan R. Gundersen, The Anglican Ministry in Virginia, 1723-1776: A Study of a Social Class (New York, 1989); John K. Nelson. A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Nicholas M. Beasley, "Christian Liturgy and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650-1780" (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2006).

(15) Little, "Origins of Southern Evangelicalism," 768-808 (quotation on p. 788). Important recent considerations of the transatlantic nature of eighteenth-century evangelicalism also include Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill., 2003); David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, 2005); and Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, 2004).

(16) Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998); Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). See also the dissertation in progress by John Catron at the University of Florida.

MR. SENSBACH is a professor of history at the University of Florida.