COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 25 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 Gordon stumbled onto this new information by accident while researching how Pennsylvania armed itself during the Revolution. Since the state could not produce nearly enough weapons to arm its troops, officials would instead show up at a citizen’s house, take their arms, and give them a receipt. Gordon sifted through box after box of receipts from various Pennsylvania counties to trace how arms were taken from individuals and redirected towards unarmed troops. Gordon’s article detailing this research, “A Moravian Rifle Goes to War: Disarming and Arming Pennsylvanians, 1775-1776,” recently won the Pennsylvania Historical Association’s 2025 Klein Prize. It was while working on this article that he uncovered what many academics assumed was lost: Northampton County’s Register of enslaved people. Gordon discovered this “lost ledger” at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives in Philadelphia, amidst other Northampton County papers, while looking through these arms receipts. In the Archives In 1780, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass a Gradual Abolition Act. Designed to slowly end slavery, the law emancipated children born to enslaved mothers once they reached a certain age. However, the law also permitted slave owners to legally retain those already born into slavery as long as the enslavers registered them in a county ledger. “It didn’t really emancipate many people,” Gordon remarks. “It really was a continued enslavement law because if individuals recorded the names of their enslaved property, those people were still enslaved for life.” By requiring owners to register their slaves, this ledger provides a rare record for historians. “There were some names from [the ledger] that made me realize that we needed to take a whole new look at who was enslaved in Bethlehem. More importantly, who enslaved them, whether it was the church or individuals, and how they got here. The ledger revealed that the little that people knew about slavery in Bethlehem, which one historian after another repeated, turned out to be entirely wrong.” 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, Scott Paul Gordon spends time at the Moravian Archives in the Northside of Bethlehem (above) to read through spiritual memoirs and letters stored there (left). CHRISTINE KRESCHOLLEK
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