| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jon F. Sensbach. A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1998. Pp. xxiii, 342. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.

In this richly documented and engaging study of the interaction between African Americans and German Moravians in the North Carolina piedmont, Jon F. Sensbach recounts the gradual surrender of whites to American racism and the lived experience of blacks in the Moravian settlement. Although the Moravians were in many ways unique, Sensbach's analysis—of racial attitudes and tensions, of waning religious idealism, of slave culture and community—sheds light on larger trends and developments in the South and the nation. This book is a pioneering study of a German slaveholding community in the South and a valuable addition to scholarship on slavery, early American religion, and race relations. 1

The members of the Renewed Unity of Brethren, known as Moravians by the English, who settled in central North Carolina in 1753 came to establish a community of the faithful. To minimize worldly influence, the Brethren carefully monitored members' lives and limited contact with "strangers," as non-Moravians were called. Within a decade, however, Moravians began hiring slaves and in 1769 collectively purchased their first slave, Sam, christened Johann Samuel when he became their first black convert in 1771. Moravians were not morally opposed to slavery, but the church did demand that slave owners treat enslaved Moravians well, keep the marriages and families of converted slaves intact, and admit African-American members to a biracial fellowship that could be remarkably color-blind. Sensbach terms Moravian interracial relationships "fraternal." Fraternalism did not, as Sensbach notes, mandate social equality or slave manumission, but because of the church's emphasis on righteousness, religious status, in some contexts, was more important than race. . . .

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