Most earlier scholarship on enslavement in Bethlehem relied on the spiritual memoirs of enslaved people. Every member of the Moravian community wrote, or dictated if they were illiterate, a spiritual memoir. These materials, though, are “compromised or questionable. You don't know in these Moravian spiritual memoirs if people are saying what they expect the community to hear or what they actually feel,” Gordon explains.

There are several first-person memoirs by enslaved men and women in Bethlehem, but “these memoirs are problematic because, again, they're not private documents, they're public documents,” Gordon says. His research, however, uncovered much more information about the enslaved population than just these spiritual memoirs.

The Moravians were unique for keeping exhaustive records, from disciplinary and economic committees to building committees to diaries of different groups. Many people of African descent appear in these diaries and meeting minutes, though their legal status is often not noted. The records consistently note, however, the race of African-descended people who were members of the community and the congregation. 

Tracing Their Journey

“When I started to talk to people about this, it struck me how much people wanted to hear about it.” This interest made it easier for him to shift his research focus from early American arms to enslavement in Bethlehem. Despite his English literature background, his current work looks more like a historian’s, putting narratives together from materials like ledgers, receipts, and church records.

Part of Gordon’s research involves uncovering how enslaved people arrived in Bethlehem. Some records show individuals who were enslaved to Moravians elsewhere, like Philadelphia or Lancaster, asking the church to purchase them so they could remain in Bethlehem. Some Moravians gave their slaves to the church in their wills. In many cases, enslavers moved to Bethlehem and brought their slaves with them. Gordon notes, “once these enslaved people were here, they were almost all bound to someone, either individuals or to the church.”

This research challenges previous understanding of slavery in the Moravian community in Bethlehem, which had contended that all the enslaved men and women were enslaved by the church and brought to Bethlehem by the church. 

Gordon also has found that “most people of African descent were relocated outside of Bethlehem to other Moravian settlements to the north, like Nazareth and Christian’s Spring.” He adds, “We don't really know why.”

The Moravian Rationale for Slaveholding

One of the most compelling and rare cases in the archive is a 1784 letter written by a freed Black woman named Magdalena More (ca. 1731–1820). She was married to an enslaved man named Andrew, who remained enslaved from his arrival in Bethlehem in 1746 until his death in 1779. In this letter, Magdalena writes to the church after her husband’s death to complain about his treatment. She insists that the Moravian church had obligations to care for him, clothe him, and bury him. With Josef Köstlbauer, Gordon published the letter for the first time in an article titled, “Magdalena More’s Complaint (1784)” in the Journal of Moravian History (2024).

The Moravian church’s response to Magdalena More’s complaint was that Andrew was enslaved “in name only,” since he was an “economic equal” who earned wages and was expected to pay for his lodging and clothes. “There's a dispute between Magdalena and the church, not exactly about Andrew's status, everybody agreed that he had been enslaved, but what a legal enslavement meant in Bethlehem,” Gordon says.

Another notable example involves a young enslaved man named Jacob who tried to leave Bethlehem when he was about 20. “He left without permission and the Moravian authorities resorted to the legal system to haul him back, insisting that he's their property,” Gordon explains.

This remarkable incident points to the church’s potential reasoning for keeping slaves. Enslavement in Bethlehem is a different model of slavery than elsewhere in colonies. In early America, chattel slavery is the predominant model where the labor of the enslaved population is being exploited to enrich their enslavers.

“The church kept these African-descended people enslaved in Bethlehem, even though they considered them brothers and sisters, because they thought it was better for them to be here and to be transformed from ‘heathen’ into good European Christians. They kept them enslaved in order to ensure that transformation,” Gordon says. “This rationale helped Moravians see this injustice as a form of benevolence.”

Though the Moravians didn’t operate American Indian boarding schools, Gordon draws a parallel between the Moravians’ approach and the Native American residential school system—widespread in America in the 19th- and 20th centuries where Indigenous children were stripped of their culture and forcibly assimilated. 

Moravians in Bethlehem kept people enslaved because they believed they knew what was best for them. Their paternalism justified their project of eradicating African traditions and culture. “If the African-descended people were willing to tolerate that, willing to be transformed and to perform the fact that they had transformed from their African ways into good European Christians, if they were willing to do that, they could live an unusual life here that did not subject them to violence and indignities we think of when we think of institutionalized slavery.”

With the passage of the Gradual Abolition Act in 1780, the Moravian Church didn’t register any of the men and women who it legally owned, and so the nearly a dozen people enslaved by the church were all freed on December 2, 1780. Again, no record has been found that explains the reason for the church’s inaction. However, individual Moravians in Bethlehem did record the names of their enslaved people, ensuring they remained their property. Slavery ended in Bethlehem by the early 1790s. In a period of 60 years, about 50 enslaved people had lived at different times in Bethlehem.

Gordon returns to his central argument—why the church didn't free these people earlier if they thought of them as brothers and sisters. “They didn't think of them as adults capable of making their own decisions. They felt they knew what was best for them, and it was best for them to be in a place where their spiritual lives were taken care of. And so they kept them bound.”