Moravian Americans and Their Neighbors, 1772–1822

While the world was weathering a global pandemic in September 2020, curious minds from a variety of disciplines gathered online for a conference on Moravians and their neighbors between 1772 and 1822. Focused on the Moravian settlement in North Carolina, conference attendees specifically asked how the interaction between Moravians and their white, indigenous, and enslaved and free black neighbors shaped the process of Americanization. The resulting book, Moravian Americans and Their Neighbors, 1772–1882, has enabled those key questions to engage a broader audience, contributing to a discussion of southern political and cultural development in the decades following the American Revolution and wondering about the relevance those questions still hold for contemporary Moravians.Editors Ulrike Wiethaus and Grant McAllister have taken a set of sixteen diverse papers and skillfully woven them into a coherent picture of how the communal and theocratic ideals of the early Wachovia settlements gave way to a white individualism characterized by “private property, land acquisition, and a market economy based on chattel slavery” (20). While they acknowledge that this story has already been advanced in book-length studies by scholars such as Jon Sensbach and Elizabeth Sommer, they posit that the interdisciplinary nature of this volume offers reassurance that these conclusions are evident in musical, architectural, and aesthetic sources as well as textual ones.Wiethaus and McAllister arrange the essays in this book in four analytical categories: foundation of the southern Moravian theological and economic presence, adaptation to new American sensibilities that often involved discarding European customs, innovation that produced a “dual American Moravian identity” (4), and segregation that embraced racial division as a core element of southern Moravianism. In the four essays that launch the “foundations” section of the book, Craig Atwood, Larry Tise, Winelle Kirton-Roberts, and Paul Peucker acknowledge the uniqueness of Moravian communal and theological convictions, but they all challenge the purity of the foundational narrative. Atwood notes the inconsistency in Bishop Spangenberg’s call for interracial fellowship while refusing to condemn slavery. Tise reveals that the competition between Moravians and their Methodist neighbors for evangelical dominance in the region began long before North Carolina was either of their homes. Although Kirton-Roberts’s work focuses on Antigua and Tobago, she argues that missionaries not only failed to condemn slavery, but they actively sought to erase African cultural practices, underscoring the fact that the racialized segregation found in Wachovia by 1822 was not so different from the attitudes present at the establishment of Moravian settlements. Paul Peucker pokes an additional hole in the foundational myth by pointing out that the archives from which we derive most of our evidence for Moravian thought and practice were deliberately crafted to tell a particular story. Records were frequently expunged between 1760 and 1810 to ensure that the church bore the image designed by the Unity’s leadership.The adaptation section is where the book’s central theme of shedding Moravian distinctive traits in favor of a new American identity is most visible. John Ruddiman suggests that the American Revolution’s threat to Moravian land forced leadership to not simply rely upon outside political patrons for protection but to send some of their own to serve in the legislature, a move that signified an increasing identification with American institutions. If Ruddiman focuses on external challenges to Moravian traditions, Riddick Weber looks at internal uncertainty, particularly examining Salem’s Single Sisters Choir. He contends that originally the choir system drew women to the Moravian faith because it offered them more opportunities for leadership and personal expression than other Christian groups, but by the nineteenth century and the spread of American ideals of individual freedom, young women and men were finding the choir system too restrictive. They demanded freedom to choose their own marriage partners and arrange their own economic deals, going so far as to proclaim that the choir system was a human creation rather than something ordained by God. Jon Sensbach reinforces this point about youthful restlessness, showing that tensions arose within the community when leaders tried to shift the definition of freedom from individual license to the right to live under “duly constituted authority” (192). Sensbach presents the Moravians as immigrants, noting that they followed a typical pattern of assimilation. Having followed the path of cultural assimilation themselves, they became agents of change for people like the Cherokees or enslaved Africans. Stewart Carter offers the final example of adaptation in this section, highlighting the reluctance of some Moravians to support the performance of “secular” music like Haydn’s Creation.If, after the adaptation section, readers might be tempted to conclude that by the mid-nineteenth century Moravians had lost most of their unique religious and cultural characteristics, the innovation section of this book aims to uncover Moravian contributions to broader American culture. Thomas McCullough argues that the Moravian proclivity for commemorating special events in the life of the church made them ideally suited for enfolding secular holidays like the 4th of July into the church calendar, something that other Christian traditions mimicked. David Bergstone examines architectural patterns, showing that while there was a move away from the European, communal styles of the eighteenth century, the early twentieth century witnessed a “Moravian revival” aesthetic that influenced secular architects as well as the church. Although Stewart Carter indicates that some Moravians fretted about performing secular music, David Blum shows that the community was not musically isolated. From the settlement’s earliest days, Moravians introduced a German musical culture to the colonies, and throughout the nineteenth century, their musicians and teachers were instrumental in disseminating many different styles of music throughout the new nation, specifically by encouraging school children to engage in the practice of copying music. The final selection in the innovations section belongs to Geoffrey Hughes who reframes the question about becoming American to ask “how did Americanism (industrialization, segregation, individualism) become acceptably Moravian?” (309). This question opens the door to analysis that is largely absent from this collection. Although focusing on Wachovia’s geographic neighbors and the influence of a unique southern culture clearly reveals the emerging Moravian preference for an American identity, examining how North Carolina Moravians continued to connect with their brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania (and even the Caribbean and Europe) would shed light on how much of that change came from external values and ideas and how much came from attitudes within the church itself.The final section (segregation) is in some ways a subset of adaptation, but as Wiethaus and McAllister point out, “the rise of a racialized Moravian self-understanding was the crux of Americanization and its changing definition of neighbor” (5), so it deserves its own section. Both editors contribute essays, McAllister demonstrating how the Easter sunrise service’s appeal to southern neighbors was a significant factor in prompting leadership to form a separate congregation for Black Moravians, and Wiethaus echoing Sensbach’s point about assimilated Moravians participating in the US government’s acculturation program for the Cherokee. Martha Hartley charts the progression of Moravians being increasingly drawn into slaveholding and how the legacy of those decisions continues to influence the city of Winston-Salem. Charles Rodenbaugh shows that Salem’s Moravians tended to be more interested in connecting with white neighbors of varying religious traditions than with a new community of enslaved co-religionists who had been brought to the mainland from the Caribbean.Although the essays in this collection primarily offer arguments already advanced elsewhere, Wiethaus and McAllister are correct in their assertion that the combination of these perspectives underscores the fact that the Moravian embrace of a deeply racialized ethos was not simply the product of theological drift or economic expediency but a concerted attempt to identify with one set of neighbors while labeling another set inferior. As many of these authors point out, however, the seeds of these choices were already germinating long before the birth of a new nation.