Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

I argue in the pages to follow that during the Reconstruction period, reformation efforts by white northern activists attempted to shift the perception of Conjure from a dangerous yet useful spiritual tradition that served both the enslaved and their enslavers, to a spiritual tradition representative of a savage and backwards African people. Mainstream religious movements of the 1800s, the same movements that contributed to the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and early 1930s, were centered on the moral reformation of the United States. Missionary societies that branched off from these larger religious movements sent workers into southern states to ensure that recently freed Black communities would socially, economically and politically integrate into mainstream American society by focusing on aspects such as formal education and morality. In the process these efforts drew Conjure into focus as Northern reformers deemed it both an intellectually inferior spiritual tradition and an immoral practice. I have in turn divided the body of this thesis into two parts to develop this line of analysis. The first section centers eighteenth century laws for what they illuminate about Conjure in its medicinal capacity; this section also explores the history of Conjure in the context of the nineteenth-century plantation communities in the U.S. South.  The second section of my thesis proceeds to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, and traces shifting arguments over Conjure in the context of the transition  from slavery to freedom.

Comments

Undergraduate Research Awards - 2026 Finalist, Junior/Senior Category

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