“An Objectionable Anthem”

George Wilson Bridges was born in England to a wealthy family, and his parents expected him to join the church. After studying at both the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, he was ordained into the Church of England in 1812. In 1817 he moved to Jamaica to become rector of the newly formed Manchester Parish on the invitation of that parish's namesake, the Duke of Manchester, governor of Jamaica. Bridges was appointed rector of St. Ann Parish in the North of Jamaica in 1823: at the time, the largest parish in Jamaica.Footnote ⁸ At some point during his first few years at the parish church of St. Ann, Bridges decided that he was going to improve the music at his Sunday services in order to attract a greater congregation of African and African-descended people, enslaved and free. Anglican parishes had been established in the Caribbean since the seventeenth century, but they rarely made any significant conversion attempts to the enslaved population.Footnote ⁹ The Church of England was a slave-owning organization, and even if some prominent members of the Church publicly opposed slavery, the Church itself did not.Footnote ¹⁰

A missionary branch for the church, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, was founded in 1701, but for most of the eighteenth century it was more active in North America than in Britain's Caribbean colonies.Footnote ¹¹ Anti-slavery societies, religious groups, and even the pro-abolition lobby in parliament expressed their dismay that for over two centuries there had been few efforts to Christianize enslaved people. There are many reasons that conversion figures were so low in Britain's Caribbean colonies. Many white people in the Caribbean who profited from slavery had a longstanding resistance to official pressures to convert the enslaved population because they feared that the liberatory message of Christianity would spread the idea of freedom and equality to the people they claimed as property, a fear no doubt compounded by their awareness that white people were outnumbered in Jamaica by Africans and their descendants by more than ten to one.Footnote ¹² As support grew in Britain for missionary efforts amongst enslaved people in the 1820s, dissenting Protestant denominations such as Methodists, Moravians, and Baptists began significantly expanding their missionary efforts in the Caribbean with the express goal of converting enslaved people to Christianity.

The Church of England was the default, if not practiced, religion of the minority demographic white elites in Jamaica, but there were few practicing ministers on the island; certainly not enough to also serve the 90 percent of the population who were enslaved.Footnote ¹³ But this was not the only reason that enslaved people may have felt that dissenting missionaries offered a more attractive and accessible version of Christianity than the Church of England. A white British visitor to Jamaica in 1834, Richard Madden, observed that a possible reason that Methodist and Baptist churches were often full while Anglican churches were sparsely attended was because of “the entire attention that is given by the clergy of the former to the mode of adapting their instruction to the capacity of the negroes; while in the Protestant church, where the majority of the congregation consists of white people, the clergyman must adapt his language and delivery to one class only.”Footnote ¹⁴ This selective preaching led to a service that was unattractive to those unfamiliar with the customs, language, and liturgy of the Church of England, compared to churches where missionaries actively adjusted their teaching to the African-descended majority of the Jamaican population. Madden also suggested another reason why the Church of England struggled to attract Black congregants was because of “all the adventitious circumstances which enlist the senses on the side of religion, there is none that has greater influence on the devotion of the negro than that of sacred music,—a fact which the sectarians are well aware of, and have evinced their knowledge of, in their selection of simple tunes and familiar language for the hymns they teach the negroes.”Footnote ¹⁵

Bridges had come to a similar conclusion about the appeal of music some eight years earlier. But unlike the rector of the parish church that Madden visited, Bridges decided to do something about what he perceived as an underuse of music and ritual in Church of England services in British Caribbean colonies. There had been music of various forms in Anglican churches in the Caribbean for almost two centuries by this point: wealthier parishes had built and maintained organs in the British colonial Caribbean since at least the early eighteenth century, and many parishes also maintained children's choirs made up of the poor white children of the parish who received a weekly allowance for their musical services.Footnote ¹⁶ The music that was sung in these churches was referred to as psalmody. The term psalmody originally referred quite specifically to biblical psalm texts sung metrically by a congregation, but by the early nineteenth century its meaning had expanded to cover a variety of congregational singing in protestant churches which included sung psalms but also included hymns.Footnote ¹⁷ The majority of the service, however, was spoken. Aware that a largely spoken service was not attractive to many enslaved parishioners, Bridges went back to a 1661 religious tract to justify that the music in parish churches hadn't always been so solemn, and that the Book of Common Prayer—the rubric for Anglican liturgy—permitted melodious singing and use of instruments in many parts of the liturgy, not just the psalms.Footnote ¹⁸ With this justification, Bridges began to reform the music at St. Ann by introducing new harmonized responses for the choir, and replacing parts of the service that were previously spoken, such as the Kyrie and Sanctus, with choral settings of those texts. Bridges also added choral anthems to his services; these were stand-alone pieces that were not liturgical but based on a biblical text. With donations from wealthier parishioners, Bridges replaced the organ and employed a new organist, who presumably was responsible for rehearsing the choir in its new repertoire.Footnote ¹⁹

For the first seven years of Bridges's tenure as a colonial parish rector, there were few strong links between churches in the Caribbean and the Church of England's authorities in London. Anglican clergymen based in the Caribbean were technically responsible to the episcopal jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, but in reality they were semi-autonomous and far more strongly aligned with planters and slave-owners than any ecclesiastical authority in England.Footnote ²⁰ The relationship between the Anglican church in Britain's Caribbean colonies and the seat of Anglican power in London changed significantly when in 1824 the Diocese of Jamaica was established and put under the direction of a resident Bishop of Jamaica, Christopher Lipscomb, who took up his new post in 1825. When Bridges began to develop the choral singing at his church in St. Ann in 1826, it did not take long for news to reach the first Archdeacon of Jamaica, Edward Pope—Lipscomb's eyes and ears in the parishes. Pope heard the choir of St. Ann's rehearsing Bridges's Te Deum, recalling that “the Singers at St Ann's Bay practiced a part of the Te Deum before me in December 1826: and I expressed myself in terms of approbation of their performance and of the Composition. I had then no idea that Mr. Bridges intended to compose a complete Choral Service—to chant passages which the Rubric expressly directs shall be read, or to introduce an objectionable anthem.”Footnote ²¹

Bridges did not agree with Pope's assertion that he was liturgically incorrect in introducing music for parts of the Sunday service that were traditionally read. Bridges consistently claimed that the music he introduced to St. Ann's Parish was valid within the practices of the Church of England as he was following the rubrics of its official guidelines, the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote ²² Bridges wrote about his liturgical correctness at length in his widely-criticized two-volume Annals of Jamaica, writing that he was “following the directions of the Rubric, the Te Deum, the Jubilate, and the responses to the Commandments” which “were chanted in the sublime strains of Kent and Handel, and assisted by an organ which was expressly built.”Footnote ²³ Although such a musical practice was not standard at the time in Britain's Caribbean colonies, to Bridges it was liturgically acceptable.Footnote ²⁴

Not only did Bridges reform the music of his church without permission from the Bishop, he also published A Service for the Parochial Church of Saint Ann Jamaica in 1827 of his own volition, and on his own press.Footnote ²⁵ The cover of the publication announced that it was to be sold for the sum of ten shillings “for the benefit of the choir.” This fourteen-page publication was no small undertaking. Along with a preface written by Bridges on the value and potential of music to converting African and African-descended people in Britain's Caribbean colonies, the printed choral service consisted of ten short choral settings, with the notation for each prepared on lithograph by Bridges himself.Footnote ²⁶ No composers are listed. The music is on a grand staff that is suitable for reading on domestic keyboard instruments at the homes of those wealthy enough to own and maintain them. The text-setting throughout implies that the choir of St. Ann's was for higher voices only, suggesting that it would have been a children's chorus. For example, the last piece in the Service for the Parochial Church of Saint Ann is the anthem “Oh! Had I the wings of a dove,” a setting of the 55th psalm. This is likely the “objectionable anthem” that Archdeacon Pope complained about, and is entirely suitable to be sung by children who were regularly rehearsing. The lilting melody is sung mostly in close thirds throughout, supported by a simple bass line that could easily be filled out with chords and embellished by even a moderately experienced organist. The introduction of choral responses and anthems at St. Ann Parish was heralded by Bridges as an unparalleled success story. In particular, he made the argument that once the music was improved, attendance from enslaved parishioners increased significantly, “filling the once empty church benches.”Footnote ²⁷

Despite this apparent success, Bridges had not gained the permission of Bishop Lipscomb to publish, practice, or sell his choral service. Early in April 1827 someone, perhaps Archdeacon Edward Pope, showed Bridges's printed pamphlet to the Bishop. This was the first time that Lipscomb had heard about the musical innovations at St. Ann, and the first time he had seen the printed choral service that resulted from it. Lipscomb was less than pleased when he found out about the publication and Bridges's changes to the musical life of the parish. In particular, Lipscomb objected that he was not consulted over what he considered to be major and incorrect changes to the liturgy. But it was not only Bridges's theological insubordination that Lipscomb opposed. He thought that the music Bridges was using was inappropriate for enslaved and non-white people to hear. As Bishop of Jamaica, Lipscomb reported to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in London, at the time the 3rd Earl Bathurst. Lipscomb thought Bridges's behavior was errant enough to warrant being reported to the Colonial Office, and in June 1827 the Bishop wrote to Bathurst to report Bridges's choral service and to ask for further instruction, writing that he:

Lipscomb enclosed a copy of the printed service with his letter for Bathurst's attention, which is how the Service for the Parochial Church of Saint Ann Jamaica came to be preserved in the Colonial Office records at the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

Before writing to Bathurst in London, Lipscomb had sent a message to Bridges via Archdeacon Pope, ordering him to immediately discontinue the choral service until he received further instruction.Footnote ²⁹ On April 8, 1827 the Archdeacon Pope read the following message to Bridges:

Despite protests from Bridges, the choral music stopped and the organist was dismissed. A letter to the Bishop signed by forty-seven parishioners objected officially, with the signees expressing their regret that the Bishop had ended “a form of Divine Worship so successfully perfected and so unfortunately interrupted.”Footnote ³¹ By the end of 1828 Bridges reported to the Bishop in a terse and defensive letter that his pews were once more empty, “relapsing into the deserted State in which it was before the music attracted a congregation from the Dissenting Chapels.”Footnote ³²

Bridges was not alone in seeing non-Anglican denominations, or dissenters, as a threat to the established church. Many planters feared that the egalitarian message of Christianity when evangelized by Methodist, Baptists, and Moravian missionaries risked promoting not only spiritual freedom and individuality, but also planting ideas about political freedom and equality in the minds of enslaved Christians.Footnote ³³ This fear, that enslaved people converted to Christianity by dissenting missionaries were more likely to advocate for their rights and freedoms, verged on paranoia, and Methodist and Baptist ministers were frequently blamed and prosecuted for slave insurrections. This paranoia often led to violence, and in 1831 Bridges co-founded the Colonial Church Union, an organization which carried out violent attacks on the homes and places of worship of Baptists and Methodists in St. Ann.Footnote ³⁴ Bridges's assertion that his music persuaded congregants away from dissenting churches was no idle boast, but a re-assertion of the rightful place he felt that the Church of England should have in the parish.

But even if Bridges considered the Church of England to be the appropriate church for enslaved people, he had no way of forcing people to attend. Most enslaved Africans and their descendants working on plantations had limited freedom of movement except on Sundays. This “day of rest” was not kept as a Sabbath day, as for most enslaved laborers on plantations it was the only day they had to tend to their provision grounds where they grew their own produce, the only day they could go to market to trade goods, to socialize in large groups and with people from further afar, and to go to church if they so chose. There was a long tradition of Sunday markets and gatherings such as dances in the British colonial Caribbean, even as both practices were widely criticized by European visitors and religious anti-slavery campaigners as an open desecration of the Sabbath.Footnote ³⁵ Bridges's pride in the increase in his congregation during the period he had a sung Sunday service illustrates that attending an Anglican church was a choice for his parishioners. He boasted that “the vacant benches of the church were immediately crowded; the negroes left the dissenting chapels, and deserted even the Sunday market; [and] their attention was fixed upon the service, and the public registers proved, that during the ten months which followed the renewal of a neglected form of worship, the conversions to Christianity were more numerous than ever, and the rites of marriage more frequently applied for.”Footnote ³⁶ Bridges's use of emphatic language—he italicized “immediately,” and used an adverb to emphasize that his Black parishioners “deserted even the Sunday market”—suggests how unusual it was to see the church of St. Ann full of enslaved people who had chosen to be there, and even to convert to the Anglican church through baptism and the sacrament of marriage.

Bridges had previously supported his public proslavery stance with statistics of record-breaking numbers of baptisms and marriages of enslaved people performed in his parish, in so doing arguing that the teachings and faith of the Church of England were compatible with race-based chattel slavery. An 1823 pamphlet Bridges published boasted that during his residence as rector in Jamaica's Manchester Parish he baptized 9,413 enslaved people, “many of whom attend church.”Footnote ³⁷ A year later, this number had gone up to 12,000 slave baptisms, with the hope he could perform another 5,000.Footnote ³⁸ These fantastically high numbers were met with skepticism in British abolitionist publications, with one anonymous writer questioning how Bridges had time to properly convert so many people and wondering “if they were not converted to Christianity, or if they did not understand the nature of the solemn vow and covenant they were called to make, what a mockery of religion, what a prostitution of the sacred initiatory rite of baptism, is here made the subject of boast!”Footnote ³⁹ Skeptics of the integrity of Bridges's high number of baptisms also pointed out that Bridges was paid per baptism, with the majority of his income coming from fees received for performing baptisms, marriages, and funerals.Footnote ⁴⁰ It mattered to religious abolitionists that baptized African and African-descended people became full, practicing members of the Church of England, disavowing previous beliefs and accepting Anglican theology. But the concept of conversion was not necessarily understood as so absolute by the thousands of enslaved and free African and Afro-descended people that Bridges claimed to have baptized and who attended his church, and who would have held a variety of understandings of Christianity and its compatibility with other systems of belief and ritual. Survivors of the middle passage had brought their own religious practices and beliefs to the Caribbean, and these practices adapted and transformed to the conditions of the colonial Caribbean over generations. Christianity was not necessarily understood as contradictory to previously held beliefs, and as Travis Glasson explores, “African and Afro-Caribbean people . . . decided largely for themselves how religion would operate in their lives,” often defying missionary ideas of conversion to Christianity.Footnote ⁴¹

Making claims about conversion anywhere, particularly in scenes of chattel slavery, is difficult if not impossible.Footnote ⁴² Afro-Caribbean Christians were not a homogenous group. Some enslaved Africans had already encountered Christianity before they were taken captive and brought to the Americas, for example, those who had experienced Catholicism in the Kingdom of Kongo.Footnote ⁴³ Those who converted while enslaved did so for a variety of different reasons. These reasons cannot easily be categorized as subversive, or collaborative, but can be considered, as ethnomusicologist Michael Birenbaum Quintero writes, as “maneuvers through the various available forms of sociality and culture [that] were conditioned by what they saw as the means to better, or at least ameliorate, their lot. Their choices exhibit the range of possible human responses to oppression, from resignation to insubordination.”Footnote ⁴⁴ There was no one way to be Christian in the British colonial Caribbean, and personal religious life was one of the few areas of life in which enslaved people in the 1820s could exercise some degree of autonomy. And even then, their beliefs were scrutinized by men like Bridges, who sought to influence even these most personal choices.

Anticipating African Listening

Bridges was not the first European to use music as a persuasive tool to promote the established church to an enslaved population. One of the earliest recorded instances of Anglican musical proselytizing was the French Huguenot Elias Neau who used prayer and singing to attract and retain enslaved congregants at his meetings of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New York in the early eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, unlike Bridges, Neau was teaching people to sing as an active method of prayer and for learning the teachings of the church. This tactic was also used by Baptist and Moravian missionaries, to whom singing psalms and other religious songs was a central part of worship at church and at home. For example, John Shipman (1788–1853), a white English Methodist preacher who resided as a missionary in Jamaica and was a contemporary of Bridges, believed that enslaved people could be encouraged to convert not through listening to music but by making it themselves, writing in 1820:

Shipman's promotion of singing as a tool for conversion illustrates Methodist belief in the immediacy and centrality of religious experience through singing. His guidelines went on to posit singing not only as a spiritual tool, but as a disciplined and disciplining practice, suggesting that teaching enslaved people to sing psalmody had additional benefits for those that claimed to own them:

Some Anglican ministers in the Caribbean interpreted dissenting missionaries’ use of singing as a tactic of conversion as a threat, as they could not promise the same immediacy and centrality of religious experience through music. Bridges lamented the advantage that he perceived dissenting churches had over Church of England chapels, noting that “the sectarians of Jamaica, aware of the power of melody over the negro mind, have introduced vocal music among their congregations with peculiar effect: for so susceptible are the Africans of the influence of that art which variously affects the mind by the mysterious power of sound, that they will scarcely give any attention to a religious instructor who possesses a harsh or discordant voice,” reiterating that to him the only way for the Anglican clergy to become more attractive to Black people in the Caribbean was to focus on music.Footnote ⁴⁸ Bridges even went as far as considering Catholicism to be more attractive to African and African-descended people than Anglicanism, an unusual position for an Anglican clergyman in the generally anti-Catholic British colonies, cynically imagining that although:

This more Catholic approach is the path that Bridges chose for his music program at St. Ann, which involved parishioners not participating through singing, but by silently listening to music sung by a choir. Bridges consistently claimed that novel music was the only way to persuade non-white parishioners to his church, using contemporary stereotypes about African and African-descended people's innate capacity for music. In the preface to his printed choral service, Bridges shared his belief that “music has ever been found to possess the greatest influence in commanding the passions of the most barbarous; and it has, therefore, been an art of more importance amongst uncultivated, than with civilized, nations. Accordingly, we find the Negroes, and all barbarous tribes in every clime and every age, to have expressed all strong emotions of the mind by Music.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This idea, that African people and their descendants were innately musical, was a racial stereotype that was broadly, though not universally, accepted at the time. For example, the abolitionist William Dickson wrote that “The fondness of the negroes for music, and the proficiency they sometimes make in it, with little or no instruction, is too well known to need support, from particular instances. Thus their taste for melody and harmony, if it does not demonstrate their rationality, ought, at least, to be admitted as an argument in proving their humanity.”Footnote ⁵¹ This use of musicality to demonstrate humanity was frequent in both travelogues of European visitors to the Caribbean and in abolitionist writing.Footnote ⁵² However, just a few years later Bryan Edwards, a historian and prominent Jamaica planter wrote, “[an] opinion prevails in Europe, that they [Africans] possess organs peculiarly adapted to the science of music; but this I believe is an ill-founded idea. In vocal harmony they display neither variety nor compass. Nature seems in this respect to have dealt more penuriously by them than towards the rest of the human race.”Footnote ⁵³ As the nineteenth century progressed the matter of whether or not African and African-descended people were innately musical would develop into a scientific discourse that could be mobilized both by those who wanted to deny Black people's claim to humanity and equality with Europeans, and those who fought for the recognition of Black people as equals.

Bridges's ideas about race and musicality lie somewhere between those two political causes. Bridges believed in the inherent musicality of Africans, but although he at first makes the claim that music was more important “amongst uncultivated, than with civilized nations,” he goes on to draw a line of continuity between European and African ways of listening. Writing to his perceived white audience using the plural first person, Bridges philosophized that:

Bridges asks his readers to empathize with African listening by reflecting on their own strong, and seemingly irrational, reactions to music from their youth, in order to advocate for a similar musical reverie and strong emotional connection to music to be made available to the enslaved listeners in his parish.

Bishop Lipscomb seemed to have held a more binary understanding of the difference between African and white European listening. Lipscomb's objection to Bridges's choral music was in line with earlier claims he had made about the enslaved population of Jamaica and their relationship to musicality. Only a month into his tenure as Bishop of Jamaica, Lipscomb wrote to Bathurst in London giving his first impressions of “the negro population,” observing that “psalmody & organs have great attractions for them & the severity & baldness of Presbyterianism have never yet gained one convert. They seem particularly fond of form & ceremony & greater critics than many persons will give them credit for, remarking every particularity of manner & gesture, & have a great predilection for a powerful sonorous voice.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite Lipscomb's initial observation on arrival in Jamaica that Black people to his mind seemed to like and gravitate towards music and organs, ceremony and form, it was “simple psalmody,” not “laboured & artificial compositions” that he deemed suitable for non-white congregations in the case of Bridges's choral service.Footnote ⁵⁶

Lipscomb's “simple psalmody” is likely to have referred to hymn tunes and metrical psalms that could be easily taught by rote to parishioners who were mostly unable to read or write and could be sung in unison without the need for a conductor, at church or at home. In contrast, the music printed in Bridges's Service for the Parochial Church of Saint Ann Jamaica required the singers to produce written harmonies, and was sometimes non-metrical, requiring either more rehearsal or to be conducted. Bridges's musical innovations were towards professional choral singing more akin to the musical practices of British cathedrals and away from congregational singing. Most cathedrals had professional choirs who sang parts of the mass that otherwise would have been congregational, leading to a less active role taken by congregants. Bridges's admiration for this model is clearly stated in the opening lines of his preface to the published choral service: “To blend in harmonious expression the fervent aspirations of prayer and praise, is the most sublime effect of the powers of music: and cold indeed must that heart be which is not warmed by the devotional melodies of a Cathedral Choir.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Lipscomb's heart, however, was not warmed. For the Bishop, emulating the “laboured & artificial compositions adopted by our cathedrals” was neither an acceptable nor appropriate form of worship for African and African-descended congregants in Britain's colonies, despite Bridges's claim that his music increased congregation size.Footnote ⁵⁸

What is curious about Bridges is that he appealed to African-descended people's supposed curiosity and listening skills, and their potential for him to build a congregation, rather than the benefits of singing and music-making themselves, which was what missionaries from dissenting churches did with the same racialized stereotype. In the preface, Bridges wrote that curiosity for listening to unfamiliar music would be enough to draw in Black attendees to the church, claiming that “more especially would the influence of Sacred Music be felt by those whom we here labour to convert. — — Those objects of our solicitude who have yet, unhappily, a religion to adopt, are peculiarly susceptible of the powers of music, and were they but induced to join our congregational worship by motives no better than curiosity, they would be retained by the devotion which a Choral Service would inevitably inspire.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, Bridges shows he was aware of his own novelty in encouraging the choir as a way of getting people through the door in the hope they would then be inspired to devotion. Bridges believed that the musical curiosity of enslaved and free Africans and their descendants was strong enough that if there was new music to be heard, that alone would make them inclined to attend his services. Although Bridges grants his parishioners agency here, he also maintains the racial status quo. For although he implied that his parishioners could listen to, enjoy, and be drawn to the type of European church music that he was promoting, he never demonstrates any commitment to the possibility that Africans and their descendants were capable of learning this music, performing it, or producing something similar themselves.

If we accept Bridges's claim that when his music began the pews swelled with enslaved and free Black congregants persuaded in by the music, and when the choir fell silent they emptied again, then it is worth exploring why the music may have been appealing. In the absence of testimony from enslaved people in the parish of St. Ann at the time, I am left to speculate from the printed Service for the Parochial Church of Saint Ann Jamaica and the paper trail about it, as well as other contemporary descriptions of religious services in Jamaica.

Imagine the scene. African and African-descended people would have travelled from their homes to the church in St. Ann's Bay. It is likely that many of these people would have walked several miles from the plantations where they lived and labored to attend the Sunday church service. Some of them may have sacrificed other Sunday tasks like tending their provision grounds, resting, and socializing in order to journey to church. Like most churches in the British colonial Caribbean St. Ann's would have looked superficially similar to an English Parish Church, standing in the middle of a churchyard, having a West and a North door, and perhaps even a tower. Unlike English churches, the long windows had no glass, just shutters that allowed a breeze to flow though the building and cool the congregants within. St. Ann could hold three hundred to four hundred people, and the hierarchies of the outside world were represented within. Like in most British churches of the time, seating at the front was fixed pews assigned to individual families; in the Caribbean wealthier white congregants paid annually for the use of their pew.Footnote ⁶⁰ Behind them sat poorer white people unable to afford the annual fee. Behind them, if there were pews left, or otherwise on benches at the sides or in the aisles, or on the gallery if there was one, was where free people of color and enslaved people could sit.Footnote ⁶¹ Even if impoverished white churchgoers were more poorly dressed than the African and African-descended people, which is likely considering the attention to dress of free people of color and many enslaved people in Jamaica, particularly on high days and holidays, they would still sit in front of them. The enslaved women and children who chose to attend, perhaps hearing about the new choir, would probably have been dressed in their finest white outfits.Footnote ⁶²

Enslaved men, women, and children may have been drawn to St. Ann through a curiosity about the music, but they were not ignorant of the segregation of the room and the violence and views of Bridges's church and what it represented. The harmonies of the responses and anthem may have brought delight and interest, and the coolness of the church may have brought relief, but this did not override that they were in a house of white supremacy that was committed to the continuation of race-based slavery. Some of the congregants in attendance were almost certainly owned by Bridges, and they may have struggled to reconcile his performance at the pulpit, and his delight in the choir's music, with his everyday violent behavior. After the service had finished, enslaved parishioners may have gathered outside the boundaries of the churchyard to exchange stories, rumors, news, and opinions. It seems likely that at least some of these conversations would have been about the new choral music. Although these conversations are untraceable, it is possible that the musical goings-on at St. Ann's created as much talk among the enslaved and free congregants as it did a transatlantic correspondence between the Bishop and the Secretary of State. Although speculative, the presence of those conversations lingers as a counter-conversation beneath Bridges and Lipscomb's speculation about the limits and desires of Black listening.Footnote ⁶³

What did Kitty Hylton hear?

Bridges, Bishop Lipscomb, and Archdeacon Pope all claimed people as property. Although British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade had been banned with the Slave Trade Act of 1807, it was not until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 that British parliament legally pledged to end slavery in its Caribbean colonies a year later on August 1, 1834. However, even this emancipatory act had benefits for those who had long profited from slavery. Former slave-owners were compensated for “loss of property” to a total of over £20 million, and the majority of enslaved people remained tied to their former owners through a period of coerced labor called apprenticeship until August 1, 1838.Footnote ⁶⁴ At emancipation, Archdeacon Edward Pope was compensated for fifty-seven enslaved people, and his wife held more than 660 people enslaved on her sugar plantation.Footnote ⁶⁵ The conditions on her plantation were bad enough to come to the attention of British abolitionists, who noted that between 1824 and 1830 the number of enslaved people held there decreased by ten percent due to deaths caused by the brutality of their working conditions.Footnote ⁶⁶ Bishop Lipscomb's family also still held enslaved people at emancipation, and Bishop's Penn, the home of the Bishop in Spanish Town, Jamaica, was run by enslaved servants. Bridges was compensated for three slaves at emancipation. In St. Ann, in 1826 Bridges reported in the Annual Return of Slaves that he claimed twelve people in his possession, six men and six women. Three years later he claimed eleven people as enslaved domestic servants.Footnote ⁶⁷ Bumbling vicars they were not. Like many Church of England clergymen in the Caribbean, they were deeply committed to the creation of wealth for themselves and their families through the continued enslavement and exploitation of people whose skin was darker than theirs. It would be easier for me to remain focused on Bridges, Pope, and Lipscomb's petty squabbles and back-and-forths over the music at services at St. Ann's than the lives of the hundreds of people they claimed to own, because far more ink was spilled over the legitimacy of the singing at St. Ann's than was ever written about the lives of the people that they counted as their property.

However, there is one significant exception to this archival silence: Kitty Hylton, an enslaved woman who worked in Bridges's house. The only reason I can say Kitty Hylton's name is because she made a complaint against Bridges in 1829 to St. Ann's council of protection, an assembly of magistrates and vestrymen who judged cases of improper punishment of slaves after the establishment of the largely ineffectual ameliorating slave codes of 1816.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hylton claimed that Bridges unjustly and brutally flogged her over a mistakenly slaughtered turkey. Like enslaved Black women throughout the past and present of the Americas, her name and a tiny part of her life story was only made known because of the extreme violence she suffered. Because of Bridges's notoriety amongst abolitionists, her case was of interest in England, and was published first by anti-slavery advocates, and eventually raised in parliament.Footnote ⁶⁹

Evidence given by Hylton at the court of protection claimed that one Friday after breakfast she asked Bridges what he wanted for dinner, and he said that he wanted a turkey for his meal. However, later in the day when Bridges saw that she had indeed slaughtered a turkey, he took her into the pantry, “nailed her against the dresser,” and kicked her severely for over an hour. Hylton recalled that while doing so he said, “he wished he could see her a corpse, as he hated her so.” After this kicking, she was dragged to the cow pen, where he made her lie down, not on the grass where she requested, but on the rocks, and flogged her severely. After he had flogged her, Bridges ordered an enslaved man nearby named Charles, also in Bridges's possession, to continue the whipping and to “cut all the flesh off her.” Charles did not give evidence at the court of protection. Blood was running down Hylton's back and legs and soaked through her dress, but she did not change clothes until Bridges saw her later that afternoon serving his wife, and ordered her to change. When Hylton said she only had one other dress and it was dirty he brought her another dress and ordered her to change and to then burn the bloodied dress that she was beaten in. Hylton's testimony was corroborated by several witnesses. The white governess Miss Moreland witnessed Bridges beating and kicking Hylton in the pantry as well as the dress burning. Another witness, Thomas Raffington, a white man residing nearby, gave evidence that Hylton came to him and he “never saw a female in such a situation,” that she was “terribly lacerated,” and he “never saw a woman so ill-treated.” The local doctor who examined Hylton when she was sent to the workhouse by Bridges said that the marks on her body were severe, and showed she had received punishment far beyond the thirty-nine strikes that were allowed by law. Bridges did not deny that he had ordered the woman to be lashed; but despite the evidence against him, the council of protection—a council made up of his own peers, many of whom as vestrymen met regularly in his church, and sanctioned the choral service—decided that he should not be prosecuted.Footnote ⁷⁰

The report of the council of protection does not give us much information about Hylton beyond this scene of violence. She is described as a “quadroon,” which was understood at the time as the child of a “mulatto” woman (a mixed-race person with one parent of African descent and one of European descent) and a white man. She had only been working for Bridges for three months at the time of his attack. Bridges's butler called her “a troublesome woman in the house” and said that he had often heard her say “I will do it when I think proper” when she was ordered to do anything. This spark of resistance and self-confidence, paired with her taking the risk of bringing a formal complaint about the man who claimed to own her, points towards Hylton being a woman who knew her rights and was prepared to fight an injustice done to her, despite having experienced the severe and violent consequences of advocating for herself. I have not yet been able to find any more details about Hylton's life, but, as Saidiya Hartman writes, “the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them.”Footnote ⁷¹ I am aware of my desire to imagine Kitty Hylton as a resistive counterpoint to Bridges despite knowing I am unlikely to ever find evidence that fills in her character beyond the ways in which she was represented in the council of protection and to British readers four thousand miles away, or that elucidates her opinions and interpretations of Bridges's behavior and choices at home and at church.

To readers in Britain, Hylton was presented as a sympathetic case illustrating the need for the end of slavery in the British colonial Caribbean. It is perhaps not surprising that Hylton's status as “quadroon” is immediately listed in the description of her in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, which may have marked her as sexually desirable and part of a long tradition of using light-skinned African-descended women as the face of moral outrage of abolitionists while also being titillating.Footnote ⁷² In the account of the case in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, one witness, J. Harker, claimed that he examined Hylton, finding that “her posteriors were very much cut up; on the inner part of her thigh on each there were several black marks.”Footnote ⁷³ To the British readers of the Anti-Slavery Reporter Harker's mention of the violence done to Hylton's buttocks and inner thighs may have conjured up imagery of the long history of sexual violence that white men perpetuated on Black enslaved women that is inseparable from the history of racialized chattel slavery. Harker's testimony seems to open the possibility of that sexual violence, in the imaginations of readers, if not in the minutiae of the case.Footnote ⁷⁴ I hesitate to mention the bleeding and bruised back of Hylton for fear of committing further violence by retelling the violence that was done to her, what Hartman calls “replicating the grammar of violence.”Footnote ⁷⁵ There is a long history of the bodies of Black women being used for the anti-slavery cause; as Diana Paton wrote so clearly, “when abolitionists wanted to convey a sense of slavery's horror, they told stories about women. They emphasized the violations of women's bodies that accompanied enslavement—the sexual brutality, the vicious flogging, the enforced nakedness.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Perhaps one way to redress the use of violence is to imagine other ways that Hylton may have interacted with the world of Bridges.

I do not know whether or not Hylton attended the Sunday services of the man who laid claim to her, nor whether or not she heard the choral service. If she did attend a church it would be unlikely that she would choose to attend another denomination. Because Hylton worked in the rectory, not as a field laborer, it is likely that she would have had to work part of her Sundays in the kitchen, serving Bridges and any guests he might have had. Indeed, in her testimony at the council of protection she mentioned that she would be willing to buy another turkey with her own money and serve it for Sunday dinner. Living in such close proximity to Bridges, Hylton must have heard that at the beginning of 1829 he had a man named Henry Williams, enslaved on a nearby estate, sent to the workhouse where “he was put in chains, and repeatedly flogged, and so severe was the punishment inflicted upon him, that [it was necessary] to place him in the hospital, where his death was expected.” The reason for this punishment was that Williams was unable to persuade other enslaved people on the estate he worked on to attend Bridges's church rather than the Methodist chapel.Footnote ⁷⁷ The message was clear: deviating from Bridges's desires could lead to life-threatening violence.

Hylton was purchased by Bridges after the choral service was no longer being sung, but I suspect that the musical life of the parish would still have intersected with her day-to-day life. As an enslaved domestic servant, she would have spent most of her time in Bridges's house, and probably also lived there. Other enslaved people in the house would have overheard moments of preparation for the choral service. Perhaps Charles, the enslaved man who was ordered to take over Hylton's whipping, may have heard parts of the service being prepared on a piano in Bridges's home when he first had the idea. Perhaps he, another enslaved servant, or even the white governess Moreland gossiped with Hylton when she arrived, warning her that the name of the Bishop was not to be raised with Bridges, as he was still furious about the fallout from the disbanding of the choir. Perhaps Hylton served food and drink when parishioners who had signed the letter to the Bishop complaining about his decision visited Bridges, and overheard them complaining about the lapsed state of music in the Anglican churches of the British Caribbean, and cursing the dissenting missionaries in the area. Perhaps Hylton sometimes overheard Bridges singing on his way to church; perhaps Bridges overheard Hylton singing as she prepared dinner in the kitchen.

And this is why I cannot speak about Bridges without speaking about Hylton, and cannot sing the choral service without thinking about the conditions of the lives of those who listened to it. If, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts, “the past does not exist independently from the present,” then Bridges's racialized thinking about music must have an intellectual inheritance.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is easy to condemn and hate a man like Bridges. What is more difficult to acknowledge is that his ability to focus on music and the musical object while minimizing his attention and responsibility to the conditions of the enslaved Black people in his parish mirrors a mode of understanding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music in Europe and the Americas that neglects to acknowledge the imperial and colonial networks that allowed that music to flourish, in ways that still have impact today.Footnote ⁷⁹ Bridges attempted to manipulate what he believed to be the natural musical curiosity of enslaved Black people in his parish for his own gain, be that through increased notoriety and readership in Britain, or increased income through presiding over more baptisms of new converts. The amount of work required to recruit an organist, rehearse a choir up to a higher standard, fundraise, and print the choral service lithographically was significant, and yet his efforts were short-lived. But ultimately, Bridges underestimated the sensibilities of the very people he was hoping to inspire by music, who surely must have had a more nuanced understanding of religion, slavery, colonization, faith, entertainment, and music than he was able to grasp. Bridges's lack of long-term strategies for retaining Black congregants backfired on him; as once the choir was disbanded, there was no longer a reason for people interested in the choral music to continue attending the church of St. Ann.

It is easy to write about Bridges; it is much harder to write about those African and African-descended people who listened to the choral service in the few months it was performed. It is more possible to write a little about the light-skinned Hylton. Although her story is desperately violent, some part of that violence was recorded in print and is recoupable, unlike most of the violence in the lives of the enslaved plantation laborers that attended Bridges's church. I cannot recover what those enslaved listeners may have thought of the music at St. Ann's in those months that spanned 1826 and 1827.Footnote ⁸⁰ But even in the absence of the possibility of that recovery I think we can speculate that Bridges was attempting to train Black people to appreciate and learn to listen to a type of European music that he didn't believe they were capable of producing themselves. This idea would gain traction throughout the nineteenth century. Bridges's choral service does not offer redress to his violence. However, the exceptionality of its survival in print is an opportunity to attend to the entanglement of music, race, power, and listening—then, and now.