Heading: (African American, 1858)
Author:
Title: Letter from a Baptist white woman shocked by an account of a Black church service
Place Published: Poughkeepsie, New York
Publisher:
Date Published: 1858
Description: Autograph Letter Signed ("Mary"), 4 pp. with original stamped mailing envelope. To Miss C.E. ("Lottie"), Robertson, [Friendship], Nile, Allegany County, New York. April 11, 1858.During Easter week 1858, the Third Great Awakening of Christian piety was much in evidence throughout New York State. In the city of Poughkeepsie, there were revivals in every church, including the writer's own Baptist church. She writes a friend, "the colored population make the most noise. We live near one of their Churches and they dance, sing, scream and jump enough to craze the whole neighborhood... I would not like to go to such meetings. God, I do not think, is deaf or requires us to dance in order to be one of his chosen ones. I like to hear a good sermon and prayers as well as any one but a mock of religion is unpardonable to me..."The reaction of such white northerners to their first view of Black Christian religious rituals must be seen in the context of the larger question of slavery that embroiled the entire country on the eve of Civil War. Slavery and the slave trade were not outlawed in New York until 1827, followed by a decade of involuntary servitude, so it's probable that many of the congregants in Poughkeepsie's African Methodist Episcopal Church were ex-slaves, perhaps descendants of enslaved families in the South The AME Church was closely allied with a white Congregational Church of fervent Abolitionists who welcomed the fiery anti-slavery sermons, though the first of these, in the 1830s, had triggered a riot by a white mob which had swarmed the pulpit and nearly murdered the speaker. That scene was not repeated when Frederick Douglass spoke there ten years later, after which the church raised funds to buy the freedom of a fugitive slave who had made his way north via the Underground Railroad and was kidnapped by US Marshals for forcible return to the South. Yet that white Church was the only one in the city to hold prayer vigils for the Southern enslaved. So, in Poughkeepsie, as in communities throughout America, such varied reactions of visitors to Black churches may have depended as much on ingrained racism as religious mores.

Very good.