The Underground Railroad was one of the most influential and consequential civil rights movements of America's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alicestyne Turley argues that the historiographical literature surrounding the Underground Railroad tends to centre and romanticise White northern abolitionists and their creation of ‘safe houses’ to aid enslaved people in their escape from the slave system. Turley strives to disrupt this popular narrative and attempts to wage a critical intervention with her text, which centres on the role of enslaved and free Black people who engineered their own freedom struggle and freedom networks. Turley seeks to understand the role of escapees beyond the role of White northern abolitionists and wants to demonstrate how enslaved people actively constructed a southern freedom network which, as she argues, ‘resulted in the formation of Black communities and religious, economic and social institutions’ (p. 1). Turley centres her analysis of the Underground Railroad in the state of Kentucky. Her research draws from county and religious histories, archival data and extant slave narratives to understand the ways in which Black communities in Kentucky created and sustained a robust freedom network.
Religion, particularly Protestant Christianity, was the primary catalyst for African American community-building. Turley primarily cites the First and Second Great Awakenings in early American history as the religious movements that had a significant impact on the brand of Christianity that enslaved and free Black folks endorsed and espoused. The particular style of Christianity that would emerge from the Great Awakenings was Evangelicalism. Turley highlights how the Second Great Awakening encouraged temperance and denounced violence against women, children and enslaved people while also opposing social and economic inequalities. Turley claims that the Second Great Awakening established the modern concept of America being a free and equal democratic society. During the Second Great Awakening, free and enslaved Black people accepted, internalised and adapted the teachings of Evangelical Christianity for their own purposes, which led to the establishment of Black churches and self-help organisations where they would foster and cultivate a freedom agenda.
Turley cites James B. Hudson's scholarly work as providing a critical analysis of the role of Black Kentuckians in aiding slave escapes below the Mason-Dixon line. Turley intends to build on Hudson's work by examining the formation of Kentucky communities of faith by reviewing property and government records that clarify how Black people obtained their freedom. In order to demonstrate how enslaved and free Black folks created their own freedom networks, Turley examines the role of Black preachers. During the period of the Second Great Awakening, Turley points out how White Church leaders empowered Black Christians to become religious leaders of enslaved populations. This status allowed Black ministers to travel freely about the state of Kentucky to evangelise slaves and establish congregations while also performing funerals, weddings and baptisms. Given their ability to travel so freely, Black Christian leaders became a significant asset in directing escaping slaves to safe communities that would aid them in their escape from the slave system. Black Christian leaders performed multiple duties in their communities. They were able to facilitate and cultivate the process of community-building in local churches while also serving various enslaved communities in aiding their escape.
Turley also highlights the role of journalism and the use of media to construct and spread the message of freedom to the broader American society. During the First Great Awakening, Turley makes the observation that Black people were seen as silent beneficiaries of White anti-slavery generosity. Enslaved people did not have any control over their own image, and they were viewed as not being the architects of their own religious stories or political narratives. Turley argues that this was a false narrative and points out how Black journalism in the 1830s articulated a clear and robust freedom vision for Black Americans. For example, Turley points to John Russwurm's and Samuel Cornish's Freedom Journal, an African American newspaper that allowed Black folks to express and share their views in multiple states. She also points out how White abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison would have never developed robust ideologies of justice and freedom without the aid of Black Evangelicals. Turley comments on the ways that Garrison has been given historical credit as the founder of American anti-slavery ‘immediatism’ when it was Black Evangelicals who were at the forefront of this ideology and pushed Garrison to their position of calling for the immediate abolition of slavery. Turley demonstrates this point by examining historical documents that show Black Christian leaders such as the Revd Charles W. Gardner, who argued for abolitionist ‘immediatism’ well before Garrison expressed this view.
The Gospel of freedom makes a critical intervention in the historiographical literature of the Underground Railroad while also contributing to the field of African American religious history by attempting to historicise the origins of Black Evangelical religiosity and its role in Black communities. Turley's analysis of the centrality of religion could have been bolstered by having a section at the beginning of her text that clearly defines terms and concepts such as Black Evangelical and Afro-Protestantism. In the broader field of African American religious history, it is hard to distinguish between Afro-Protestantism and Black Evangelicalism, especially during the Great Awakenings. Given that so many Black folks endorsed Christianity during this period, there is a temptation to refer to all Black Christians as Afro-Protestants because it is an umbrella term that describes the particular ways in which Black Christians adapted and appropriated Western Christianity to fit their needs and experiences in America. However, Black Evangelicalism strikes me as a more narrow term that describes the particular doctrinal beliefs that some Black Christians endorsed and then appropriated in one of the most critical periods in American history, the Great Awakenings. Turley blurs the line between these two categories and makes them synonymous. All Black Christians during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not Black Evangelicals, but Black Christians had different doctrinal leanings, such as Anglicanism, another denominational movement in early America. A question that I found myself asking throughout Turley's text is, what does she mean by Black Evangelical and Black Protestant, and how are these categories informing the religious and social practices of the Black folks she is studying? The Gospel of freedom provides an essential opportunity for other scholars to read Turley's historical analysis and expand on it in clearly defining and illuminating the differences between Black Evangelicalism and Afro-Protestantism.
