Mechal Sobel illuminates the form and content of the religious experience of the largest group of Christian slaves. She especially argues, and is largely convincing, for the centrality of the spiritual experience generally ignored by historians. The focus on the inner aspect of religious experience is fresh and powerful. -- Eugene Genovese, University of Rochester

Mechal Sobel's fascinating study of the religious history of slaves and free blacks in antebellum America is presented here in a compact volume without the appendixes. Sobel's central thesis is that Africans brought their world views into North America where, eventually, under the tremendous pressures and hardships of chattel slavery, they created a coherent faith that preserved and revitalized crucial African understandings and usages regarding spirit and soul-travels, while melding them with Christian understandings of Jesus and individual salvation.