Finding Diana in the Purrysburg Mission Diary, 1739

abstract:This article presents an excerpt from a journal kept by Moravian missionaries in the course of their mission to enslaved Africans and African Americans in South Carolina in the 1730s. This resource is offered as a representative example of the kind of material preserved in the Moravian Church archives, whose primary location is in Herrnhut, Germany. The remoteness of this collection and the archaic eighteenth-century alphabet used by the original record keepers make these documents relatively inaccessible for early American historians. This is unfortunate, as there is abundant material of surprising value for scholars interested in the histories of slavery, race, religion, and gender. The figure of Diana is highlighted as a special example. As scholars such as Patricia Morton and more recently Marisa J. Fuentes have highlighted, it is particularly challenging to locate the lives of enslaved women in the archives. Whereas historians like Fuentes have made brilliant use of thin and often impersonal information to reconstruct those lives, the interests of the Moravian missionaries resulted in their journals and correspondence containing unusually personal information about the individuals they encountered, like Diana.