A separate Canaan
Subtitle: the making of an Afro-Moravian world in North Carolina, 1763-1840
By: Jon F. Sensbach.
Publisher: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press; The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 342
Subjects: African Americans -- North Carolina -- History -- 18th century.; African Americans -- North Carolina -- History -- 19th century.; Moravians -- North Carolina -- History -- 18th century.; Moravians -- North Carolina -- History -- 19th century.; North Carolina -- Race relations.
Description: In eighteenth-century North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge - an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community grew, so did its demand for labor, and Moravians began buying slaves to help build and operate their farms, ships, and industries.

The Moravian Brethren believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together, far removed from the sprawling plantations to the east. Black Moravians spoke, read, and sang in German, played Moravian music on classical instruments, and shared communal dormitories with white Moravians.

According to Jon Sensbach, the Moravian social experiment demonstrated the fluidity of race in an age when Revolutionary rhetoric championed the rights of man - even though white Brethren never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-239) and index.