Christian LaTrobe, Moravian Missions, and the Slave Economy in the British West Indies, 1780s–1830s

This paper will examine the late 18^th and early 19^thcentury Moravians’ engagement with slavery and missions, and will focus on the British/German Moravian networks regarding slavery and missions in the British West Indies and the tension between the slave economy and spiritual liberty.  Not only Moravians but also evangelicals of all stripes often linked spiritual and worldly liberty to protest slavery. Between the 1780s and 1830s, Moravian minister Christian Latrobe’s engagement with British and German Moravian missions to the slaves epitomized this fraught negotiation. His Atlantic evangelical career offers a lens into the Moravians’ economic and theological conflicts over slavery and “liberty of conscience.”

This paper will expose the economic and theological tensions between the German/British Moravians’ overriding impulse to privilege, on the one hand, slaves’ spiritual “liberty of Conscience” in juxtaposition to, on the other hand, slaves’ physical liberty. To this end, I will show the economic exigencies of these cash-strapped missions and their dire need, therefore, to a) garner funding from Saxony and London  b) be complicit with the physical inequality of the slaves for both economic and theologically-driven reasons.  Even in the period of antislavery agitation leading up to the British slave-trade abolition in 1807, Latrobe (who testified for the British parliament about West Indian slaves’ deplorable conditions at the behest of parliamentary abolitionist Member of Parliament and fellow evangelical, William Wilberforce) cherished the promotion of Moravian missions in the West Indies and Africa as a concern that all but overrode his spiritual vocational impulse to agitate for the abrogation of the Atlantic slave trade, which he feared would interfere with the missions’ proselytizing ambitions.  Latrobe thus exemplified evangelicals’ tormented ideal of “liberty of conscience” and its relationship to the slave economy among the Atlantic-wide clerical networks in the revolutionary era.