ABSTRACT
In April 1741, German missionary Friedrich Martin was accosted by an angry planter on the main road through the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. Since the mid-1730s, Martin and other evangelists from the Moravian Church had been in the Danish colony, about forty miles east of Puerto Rico, preaching Christianity to enslaved Africans whose labor fueled the island’s economy. The missionaries had become immensely popular among the slaves, who crowded prayer meetings to overflowing and sought baptism by the hundreds. Fearful that Christianity would breed insurrection among their slaves, planters had waged a campaign of intimidation for several years, harassing missionaries and brutally punishing black workers who dared attend church. The planter who faced down Martin that day in 1741 minced no words: “Listen, I have something to say to you. Don’t teach my Negroes to be Pietists, or you’ll know what I will do,” the missionary reported. “That evening the Negroes came to tell me how he was out for me, and how he was watching them. I urged them to be patient, that he would grow weary. He has already beaten them twice over it.” The planter never carried out his threat, but for years enslaved converts continued to endure whippings at the colony’s “justice pillar.”1
