[97] Anderson Intelligencer, July, 1867, quoted in The American Freedman, Aug., 1867, p. 264.
[98] American Freedman, Feb., 1867, p. 168.
[99] Letters from Port Royal, p. 37; The Freedmen's Journal, Jan. 1, 1865, pp. 13-15; W. C. Gannet, North American Review, vol. CI (1865), p. 24.
[100] Pierce, in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 12 (1863), p. 305.
[101] A. M. A. Annual Report, 1866, p. 27; 1867, pp. 32-33; National Freedman, May, 1866, p. 142.
THE RELIGION OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVE: HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE AND DEATH
I propose to discuss the religious behavior of the American Negro slave, between 1619 and the close of the Civil War, first, by a brief discussion of the religion of the tribes in Africa, and the tendency of the old habits and traditions to maintain themselves among the American slave; second, by a consideration of what the slave found in America, and his contact with another religious culture called Christianity; and third, by a description of the slave's reaction to a Christian environment, or what the slave's religious behavior really was.[1] My thesis is that the religion of Africa disappeared from the consciousness of the American slave; that the slave himself, by contact with a new environment, became a decidedly different person, having a new religion, a primitive Christianity, with the central emphasis, not upon this world, but upon heaven.[2]