Rachel, Daughter of Hagar, Daughter of Bathsheba: Some Preliminary Observations on Late-Eighteenth-Century Black Anglicans of Digby, Nova Scotia

During the research I conducted for my PhD thesis, I spent several visits at the Nova Scotia Archives looking through the parish records of Roger Viets, the Anglican missionary at Digby from the 1780s into the early 1800s.[1] Viets was a Loyalist clergyman who migrated to Nova Scotia from Connecticut during the American Revolution. In 1786 he was appointed to the Loyalist congregation at Digby by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (the missionary arm of the Church of England).[2] From his parish post at Digby, Viets made annual visits to the outposts of his mission district – the coastal villages of Clementsport, Weymouth, Gulliver’s Cove, and Sandy Cove. He also ministered to Digby’s large free and enslaved Black population. Brinley Town, as this Black community was known, occupied the areas of the Grand and Little Joggins – just outside the town of Digby, where Conway and Acaciaville exist today.[3]

What I have learned about this church community – its individuals, its families, and their faith ­and circumstances – through the Anglican records has given me pause to reflect on the potential of such church archives to convey significant data on historical Black communities.[4]

The proportion of Black congregants in Digby’s foundational Anglican communion is note-worthy.[5] While many early Afro-Nova Scotians were evangelical Christians – such as Baptists or Methodists – the Black communities of the greater Digby region demonstrate a strong adherence to Anglicanism in the decade following the Loyalist migration. While, on one hand, such Anglican ‘conformity’ could be expected among a group of Loyalists fleeing civil war – on the other hand, for Black Loyalist families living in the wake of former enslavement in the Thirteen Colonies, participating in the rites of Nova Scotia’s established church could endow racialized individuals and families with social legibility, political legitimacy, and spiritual credential as ‘up-standing’ members of colonial society. This religious adherence can, in some cases, be traced through multiple generations of Black families in Digby. And, in one case, the Anglican records can tell us certain details about the circumstances of the women of one Black family, traceable from grandmother to granddaughter over two decades.

First, I wish to demonstrate the meaning of church rites for free Black individuals and to young Black families. The 1780s in eastern North America were characterized by the severe political and social fractures caused by the American Revolution. In their new Nova Scotian home, free and some enslaved Black people relied on the rituals of the church to solidify their relationships with others, inscribing their kinship ties to spouses, children, and parents through the rites of marriage and baptism. On a single day in October 1787, we can observe the meanings that Anglican rites bore for Dido Night, identified by Viets as “a black adult”. Dido was a free woman, who on Sunday, October 21 had herself baptized into the Anglican communion at Digby, along with her son Jacob.

In this case, mother and child shared the ritual of baptism, the rite of initiation into Christian life and into the church community. Still, that day at church bore further spiritual significance for Dido as she also wed a man named Harry. In the record of their marriage, Viets called the couple “Blacks, of the Little Joggan in Digby.” That day, Dido Night’s family was both transformed and given new internal structures. Dido chose not only to submit herself to baptism (no small decision), but to share the experience with her son. She further embodied Anglican rites by entering into the vows of marriage – effectively also mediating her son’s acquisition of a step-father (unless Harry was Jacob’s father, of a premarital pregnancy). We cannot know any other details about Dido, Jacob, or Harry from these records, but this triad of sacramental rites conducted on a Sunday in October 1787 conveys enough of the circumstances of the time to see a young, free, yet vulnerable, family emerge from the historical record, if only in a series of ritual moments. Dido was not alone as a free Black woman who decided on an Anglican baptism for herself. Others, such as Nellie Francis, Rose Jones, Violet Bonnell, and Nancy and Judith Bush, all identified as “female black Adult[s]” presented themselves at various times for baptism at Digby. Meanwhile, Black women also brought their children to be baptized, as when Viets blessed “A female child of Ruth Sampson, a black named Sally” and “A female black illegitimate child of Jane Roberts named Charlotte.”

From another calibration of ritual acts, we can construct the history of a particular Black female kinship lineage that acquired spiritual structure (and an archival trace) by Anglican rites of baptism. The trio of women involved contrast with the example of Dido Night, a free woman, as they occurred within the context of slavery and its afterlife. In November 1788, Viets noted that “A female black child of Mr. Hetcht’s Bathsheba” was baptized, “named Hagar.” The possessive used to refer to Bathsheba implies she was the slave of “Mr. Hetcht” – Frederick William Hecht, a New York Loyalist who settled in Annapolis County after first living for a time in Saint John, New Brunswick. Hecht was a well-known slaveowner. In 1797 he endeavoured to sell a woman named Rachel Bross, who he claimed as a slave, but whose husband argued to the supreme court was a servant. Bross, after departing from Hecht and subsequently obtaining employment for wages in Halifax, was eventually declared a free woman.[6] It’s unclear if Hagar was held as a slave by Hecht during her childhood, but the fact that she was the daughter of his slave (and that she carried his family name, see below) suggests she was once considered his property. It was legally understood in the British colonial Americas that the children born of enslaved women became the enslaved property of their mothers’ masters.[7]

Hecht owned other slaves throughout his life, including a “Molatto man” named Joshua Moore who he manumitted in Saint John, in 1786. The woman identified as Bathsheba was Hecht's slave after he relocated to Nova Scotia in 1787. No further information is available about Bathsheba, but “Hagar Hecht”, then bearing the name of her mother’s master, later bore a child, who, in February 1806, she brought to Viets for baptism. Evidently raised to some degree in the Anglican tradition (having been baptized by Viets herself), the approximately 18-year-old Hagar brought her daughter to likewise be baptized into the Church of England. Of interest, Hagar’s daughter was named Rachel. We might ask: did Hagar name her daughter after Rachel Bross, who, like Hagar’s own mother, had been enslaved by Hecht? As Bross’ case was publicly known in Nova Scotia, having gone before the Supreme Court less than a decade earlier, it’s possible Hagar was inspired by Bross’ successful claim to freedom and wished to pass the legacy of Black female strength and determination on to her own daughter.

Regardless of Hagar Hecht’s inspiration for naming her daughter Rachel, the three women in her lineage were named after important women of the Hebrew Bible: Bathsheba, Hagar, and Rachel. Bearing such biblical names, these women – who bridged enslavement and freedom – claimed Christian identities and the moral expectations to be treated with respect and dignity. Their use of biblical names also contrasts with the common use of giving ‘pagan’ classical names to Black people – such as Dido, Cato, Caesar, or Pompey (all names appearing in the Digby register) – to underscore their non-Christian and thereby not fully ‘civilized’ nature. Rather, Hagar and Rachel were baptized into the Anglican communion and carried names from the Book of Genesis. Bathsheba’s origins and Christian background cannot be known. She must have encountered Anglicanism either in New York or in Nova Scotia, and she perhaps recognized in Christian practice the aspirational potential for the descendants of her enslaved body to become congregants of the colony’s established religious tradition. No other persons enslaved by Hecht appear in the Digby church register, making Bathsheba’s decision to initiate her daughter into Christian life the more notable. Some have said that the figure of Hagar had a particular meaning for enslaved women. "[A]n oral tradition of African American biblical interpretation," writes theologian Andrew Prevot, likened the lived realities of "ordinary Black women, both during and after slavery, to those of the Egyptian woman Hagar, who was enslaved to Abram and Sarai; bore Abram's son, Ishmael; and encountered God in the wilderness."[8] In naming her daughter Hagar, Bathsheba evidently drew personal significance from this biblical narrative. These three generations of women in Digby – women whose lives bridged enslavement and freedom – mediated their spiritual realities via the official church of the British Empire. In like manner, Dido Night chose to affiliate with the Church of England and to bind herself, her son, and her husband into a legible and legitimate spiritual unit via Anglican rites.

These several examples reflect only a small portion of Digby's Black Anglican community and they demonstrate my method of applying ritual studies to the history of religion and the uses of religious archives. While these preliminary findings tell us important details of the regional, social history of Digby, my findings from the Anglican registers also reflect pertinent matters concerning the intersections of gender, race, and religion in the early Americas and the British Empire.

[1] These records are known as the Notitia Parochialis of Trinity Parish, Digby, Nova Scotia, Church Records, reel 11,337, Nova Scotia Archives. All citations are from this parish register.

[2] For Viets’ biography and his context in the American Revolution, see Arthur Wentworth Eaton, The Church of England in Nova Scotia and the Tory Clergy of the Revolution (New York City: Thomas Whittaker, 1891), 181-82.

[3] For the history of slavery in the Maritimes and the Black Loyalist migration, see Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016); and James St. George Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992 [1976]).  

[4] On the politics of archives, race, and historiography, see Harvey Amani Whitfield, “White Archives, Black Fragments: Problems and Possibilities in Telling the Lives of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes,” The Canadian Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 2020): 323-345; and Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

[5] On the Church of England, race, and slavery, see Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Nicholas Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650-1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). Also, in more general terms, see Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680-1730 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). On the notion of the 'wake', see Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

[6] Afua Cooper, “The Enslavement of Africans in Canada,” The Canadian Historical Association’s Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada Series, no. 39, (Ottawa, 2022), 33; Julian Gwyn, “Female Litigants before the Civil Courts of Nova Scotia, 1749-1801,” Histoire sociale / Social History 36, no. 72 (2003): 342-43; Barry Cahill, “Habeas Corpus and Slavery in Nova Scotia: R v. Hecht ex parte Rachel, 1798,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 44 (1995): 179-209. There are other such examples of the possessive, indicating enslavement, in the Digby Anglican register. See the baptisms of a "black child of Bristol Capt. Moody’s named Sylvia" and of "Dinah, a black female Adult of John Ditmars." Also, the burial of "Capt. Moody’s black man" who died "of Amputation of a Leg."

[7] Jennifer Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (March 2018): 1-17. On the matter of slaves perceiving baptism as a pathway to freedom, see Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 2004 [1978]), 123.

[8] Andrew Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2023), 246. Here, Prevot draws from the work of Delores Williams.