4 “I Have No Shortage of Moors”: Mission, Representation, and the Elusive Semantics of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Moravian Sources

Abstract

In a letter written in apparent haste to request the expeditious transfer of an enslaved young woman named Cecilia, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf assured the recipient, Danish plantation owner Johan Lorentz Carstens, that his only concern was for the woman’s soul. “After all,” he added, “I have no shortage of Moors.” Committed to paper as a thoughtless aside seemingly bespeaking aristocratic selfconfidence and sense of entitlement, this statement is remarkable. Not only does it attest to the extension of slavery and the slave trade to Northern and Central Europe, it also provides an insight into howMoravians perceived enslaved men and women living among them in Germany, as well as the motivations for bringing them there. What is more, it represents a small breach of the peculiar silence encountered in the sources when researching the presence of enslaved persons in the Moravian communal settlements (Gemeinorte). Typically, Moravian archives remain mute as far as the ambiguous status and slavery background of Africans or West Indian Creoles living in the communities is concerned. On the surface, they appear as brothers and sisters who ideally provided edifying examples of missionary achievement and spiritual awakening. The experience of slavery – shared in different ways by slaves and enslavers – and its confrontation with Moravian life in Europe stay hidden beneath this surface. Therefore, research on non-Europeans in the Gemeinorte is especially concerned with things left unsaid: It has to contend with the lacunae and omissions in the written discourse.