Christ Church, Shrewsbury (NJ) Investigates its History with Slavery

Christ Church, Shrewsbury, an Episcopal Parish in Monmouth County, New Jersey has recently published its investigative work into its history with slavery. The research was conducted by a significant team including Parish historian Robert Kelley and Shrewsbury Historical Society Trustee and author Rick Geffken. It involved the investigation of the parish register from the colonial era, and other colonial era documents, and turned up evidence that both parishioners and priests at the church routinely enslaved Blacks. The Rev. Thomas Thompson, who served at Christ Church in the mid-eighteenth century, was an influential defender of slavery. The Rev. Samuel Cooke, who served up until the Revolutionary War was among the priests at the church who kept slaves. Parish documentation from the era has been digitized to facilitate further research. Among the conclusions of the study are the following: 

"This study indicates that Christ Church parishioner slaveholders were usually from the upper, wealthy classes of 18th century Shrewsbury Town society. These slaveholders were also prominent citizens, involved in the political issues of their time... Perhaps surprising to modern readers, several clergymen were slaveholders, as abhorrent as “America’s original sin” seems to us now. Yet men like the Rev. Samuel Cooke (1723-1795) were representative of the broad acceptance of slavery in colonial East Jersey... Missionary priests also recoiled from challenging slave-owning parishioners due to a possible loss of congregants for economic concerns... Owners of large tracts of farmland justified slavery to support their families and to accumulate more wealth. This was compounded by eighteenth century attitudes which saw Africans as savages, less than human, and therefore exploitable as 'farming machines.' Often families of the time were multi-generational slaveholders, passing their 'chattel property' down to their heirs, as described in numerous Last Wills... It is our belief that in order to understand the racial tensions remaining in America today, we must face the uncomfortable truths of our shared past. We trust these articles will help that understanding."