„Es war, als wenn ein wilder Bär unter uns regirte“

Rasmus Holt, Gewaltexzesse, Krisenmanagement und Krisenkommunikation auf den Herrnhuter Plantagen der westindischen Inseln 1780–1782 in Briefdokumenten

Abstract

The subject of this study is the circumstances that led to the mistreatment of slave children and the killing of one of them on St Thomas in 1780 by Rasmus Holt, as well as the disputes that ensued among the directly and indirectly affected brothers and sisters of the Moravian mission. The disputes described here not only reflect the management and communication of conflicts within and between groups, all of whom had undergone a Moravian socialization, but also reveal general patterns of how faith communities respond to extreme human misconduct within their ranks. In the Moravian community the event remained virtually unknown, and for good reason: any public mention would have meant a serious setback for Herrnhut’s missionary activity. The conflicts with and around Ramus Holt were unique and shed light on the structures of crisis management and crisis communication at three levels: the brothers and sisters who were directly affected on the ground, the higher Moravian leadership on the islands, and finally the Unity Elders Conference (Unitätsältestenkonferenz – UAC). In order to be able to reconstruct these disputes, it is necessary to consult a special type of source, namely the private letters that the brothers and sisters on the Danish islands sent to each other and to the members of the UAC. They could send such private letters to members of the UAC only if they could be sure that the content would be treated as confidential and would not, as was otherwise usual with diaries, be edited and made available to a broad public in the common news. However, these sources must be considered in the light of two limitations. One is that there are virtually no letters from the missionary women among the letters from the West Indies in the Unity Archives. This does not mean that the sisters did not write letters. It is just that they were not considered worthy of archiving. The more substantial limitation is that we have no written sources from the slaves themselves in the correspondence. After learning of the violence on St Thomas, the UAC immediately recalled Rasmus Holt to Europe. At the latest with the visitation journey of Johannes Loretz in 1784, the waves in the West Indies subsided and the brothers and sisters continued to focus primarily on questions of marriage and admission to the Lord’s Supper with regard to the slaves. The new missionaries were still not prepared for the special situation on the plantations. Slavery itself was not questioned until the nineteenth century.