ABSTRACT
Black slaves worshipped alongside their white owners in Amite County, Mississippi. Steeped together in an evangelical tradition which was peculiar to their regional place and which clearly drew upon the spiritual experiences of Africans, Europeans, and the third nation the two groups created with others, they nonetheless rarely shared an unguarded moment of religious worship. In the years from first settlement of the Mississippi Territory until the coming of civil war-a conflict viewed by many whites as a holy war or a struggle for redemption-blacks and whites watched each other with mounting suspicion, confusion, and resentment. The drums which had expressed the African legacy to the slaves' evolving religious ethos had been muffled early by whites whose own tradition forebade complicity with foreign gods. Indeed, the uses to which theology was put by antebellum Southern theologians should be viewed with caution; many Southern divines, themselves holders of slaves, deliberately crafted a religious message in the service of the South's peculiar institution. Said one historian,
And according to another,
Planters were so convinced of their license to oppress that they decided to share the details of this heaven-sent dominion with those they persecuted.2
