Your Holy Dwelling: Religion, Legislation, and Free Black Community in Virginia, 1800-1840

From roughly 1800-1840, religious spaces were arenas of intense debate over autonomy, identity, and belonging in Virginia. Religious authority – the right to interpret scripture and preach – was increasingly linked to slave rebellion. White legislators, desperate to preserve a Southern society which rested upon the institute of slavery, believed the solution to be the strict regulation of Black worship under white direction which emphasized obedience and subservience. Early 19th century Virginia saw a flurry of increasingly strict and specific laws over the right to autonomous worship. Religion was key to the organization and ideology of the two major 19th century slave revolts in Virginia, respectfully in 1800 and 1831, prompting white fears over the power of religion to support uprising and abolition when scripture was interpreted by Black leaders. Black congregants were highly aware of the anxieties of white legislators. They, in turn, mobilized their legal experience to petition for state recognition of their own religious spaces defined by their self-identification as a community outside of the white surveillance state. This study follows the flux of rebellion, legislation, and congregational responses, highlighting the white struggle to control the legacy of two major enslaved rebellions, the challenge to racial hierarchy which Black preachers came to embody, and the responses by collective congregational bodies. At the heart of early 19th century tensions was the effort to make religious authority exclusive to white men in order to prevent the mobilization of scripture toward rebellion.