Community, Self and Dependency: Enslaved Voices in Moravian Lebensläufe (1747–1820)

This article discusses two biographical accounts of enslaved members of the Moravian Church in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The first one is a brief posthumous memoir ( Lebenslauf ) of an enslaved man known as Christian Gottfried (c. 1730–1765). The second account is part of a letter of complaint, dictated in 1784 by the Moravian widow Magdalena More (c. 1781–1820). In each of the two sources, different voices are present: The voices of Moravian selves—Brother Christian Gottfried, Sister Magdalena—tell of personal crisis, successful integration into the community and a growing relationship with the Saviour. Alongside these Moravian voices, there are the voices of enslaved and thus highly dependent individuals who had to establish themselves in foreign surroundings and understand and master the hierarchies and language of the Moravian community. A close reading of these documents provides glimpses of strategies of survival and adaptation as well as self-perceptions shaped by experiences of enslavement and the adoption of Moravian teachings. Furthermore, it reveals different and sometimes conflicting understandings of what it meant to be enslaved or free.