Religion and Racial Violence in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter considers the ways in which racial violence in the nineteenth century proved formative to developments in the religious lives of people raced outside of whiteness. It draws on borderlands scholar Luís León’s description of marginalized communities transforming existing religious concepts and practices, as well as creating new religious options, a process he calls religious poetics. It also suggests the critical importance of debating and enacting racial violence for members of communities raced white. These actors engaged in a poetics of racial violence, in which they sought to interpret and reconfigure their worlds in relation to the violence that perpetuated America’s racial order. The chapter surveys justifications for and condemnations of racial violence, as well as responses to racial violence, in an effort to explore how religion and violence intersected in the ongoing development of racial classifications and the circulation of social power in nineteenth-century America.

John Quincy Adams at Prayer

At seventy-three years old, John Quincy Adams embarked on a winter lecture tour to share his views “On Faith” and drew on his “intercourse with the world” to describe the “many liberal minded and intelligent persons—almost persuaded to become Christians” whom he had met. So powerful was Adams's religious message that when his youngest son came across the manuscript years later, he simply docketed it: “Two sermons/JQA.” The speech, delivered from Boston to Salem and Hartford to Brooklyn—but never printed—laid out his decades of seeking and the formulation of Adams's own theology. Overall, Adams came to believe that man's unity of faith, hope, and charity could defeat earthly ills and clarify choices in the early republic's burgeoning religious marketplace. “Faith must have its bounds, and perhaps the most difficult and delicate question in morals is to define them clearly,” Adams said, praising the American government's nonintervention in forming official articles of faith. “But allow me to say that this unbounded freedom of religious faith, far from absolving any individual from the obligation of believing, does but impose it upon them, with a tenfold force.” This insight was especially true of Adams's own religious history. Therefore this essay offers a reintroduction to America's sixth president based on the diverse circles of prayer that he moved through, and the religious poetics that he created to narrate that pilgrimage. It ends with a glimpse of the curious afterlife that American religious culture assigned to him.