Essay On African Slave Religion

The enslavement of African Americans in the antebellum South and the atrocities that occurred against the slaves are unspeakable to say the least. However the African slaves had modes of strategy, a sort of “silent sabotage” of sorts or they would try to make the best out of the situation. Slaves resistance of their forced servitude with techniques such as trickery, song and faith. One technique slaves used in their silent resistance of being enslaved would be that of deception. Faith, at first, for slaves coming from Africa would have seemed pagan and “devil worship” to the Christian masters in the Americas. Masters on a plantation started to bring priest to the slave quarters on Sundays so that the slaves would be converted into Christians and have some type of hold over them. What slave owners did not realize is that slaves would indeed become Christians and have faith in God.
As the decades went on and slaves were turned away from their “pagan” religions and towards Christianity they incorporated spirituals into the Christian faith. In spite of being in bonage, slaves managed to put double meanings in their new Christian songs. For instance Go Down Moses is a folk song about how God tells Moses to free his people, the Jews, from the grips of the pharaoh keeping them in bondage. To a southern plantation owner it would sound as if the slaves would be singing out about God and Moses, to them it would be joyous because it means that they were successful in making the African slaves Christian. Nonetheless the slaves singing Go Down Moses would interpret the as the liberation of the Jews by Moses. To a slave this would inspire hope and faith that someone, one day will set them free from the shackles of slavery. In a way they seemed to “...project themselves forward to a world of