ANGLICAN SLAVERY PILGRIMAGE - SITE #1 LITURGY

SITE VISIT #1: AT PERTH AMBOY FERRY SLIP

(300 Front Street, Perth Amboy, NJ)


Opening Prayer

 

Living God, always our teacher, open us to learn from this history of greed and enslavement of your beloved children and help us to respond with humility and purpose to repair the sins of the past and present, so that in our future together we may truly walk in your ways, through the Holy Spirit who guides us, and Jesus Christ, our liberator. Amen.

 

View marker:




Introductory historical reading:

 

Before the annexation of New Jersey, the [British] Crown was already directly profiting from the Atlantic slave trade. From 1660 it had operated a transportation monopoly in the Atlantic as the sole legal provider of enslaved peoples to British colonies. British settlement in New Jersey after the annexation mainly came from migration between colonies, including plantation owners from the British colonies of the West Indies who came for the promise of land granted in proportion to the number of enslaved persons brought…

Barbadian settlers especially had brought with them to [New] Jersey the legal precedents of the English colonies of the West Indies. There, during the seventeenth century under the colonial plantation system, the English had developed both racialized chattel slavery and the new linguistic-legal conventions of “black” (associated with “slave” and “pagan”) and “white” (with “free” and “Christian”). The legal statutes of East Jersey, formalized in 1694 and 1695, replicated and perpetuated these particularly English (and by extension, Anglican) systemic developments. After the unification of East and West Jersey the Barbadian plantation owners of East Jersey, through their political influence in the legislature (as the so-called “Anglican Ring”), managed to extend these laws to the entire unified province by way of the 1704 omnibus slavery bill. Among the provisions of this bill were the prohibition of property ownership for both slaves and free Black people, and the formal disqualification of Christian baptism as legal grounds for manumission (which had been a rather well-established European custom). This latter provision was passed with full approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury…

            [T]hrough the middle of the eighteenth-century slavery took on an increasingly important role in the economy of New Jersey, becoming the “primary labor supply” in rural areas, but in truth, “[operating] in almost every imaginable locale and time.” The enslaved population of New Jersey also rapidly increased as a result of increased importation of enslaved Black people directly from Africa, and on the eve of the Revolution enslaved persons made up over seven percent of New Jersey’s population, while in some east New Jersey counties the figure stood at as much as fifteen percent. (Pruszinski, Anglican Slavery in New Jersey).
 
POEM: Freedom by Langston Hughes (1901-1967) 

Freedom will not come 

Today, this year 

Nor ever 

Through compromise and fear. 

I have as much right 

As the other fellow has 

To stand 

On my two feet 

And own the land. 

I tire so of hearing people say, 

Let things take their course. 

Tomorrow is another day.

I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. 

I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread. 

Freedom

Is a strong seed 

Planted

In a great need. 

I live here, too. 

I want my freedom 

Just as you.

 

Prayer refrain

Emmanuel, God-with-us, give us courage to awaken to and repent for our history of enslavement and systemic racism in New Jersey. As we seek to repair and restore our communities, may we trust that you charge us, O God, with co-creating a world that is loving, liberating, and life-giving for all. Amen.




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