Codrington, the Church That Owned a Plantation

When the planter Christopher Codrington died in 1710 he left two Barbados sugar estates to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Church of England's new missionary arm, directing that the income maintain professors and scholars to study medicine and divinity. The bequest made the church itself a slaveholder. For over a century the Society ran the Codrington plantations with hundreds of enslaved workers, whose deaths and replacements are recorded in its own account books, and in the early decades new arrivals were branded on the chest with the word Society, a fact the modern church has publicly acknowledged.

The estates funded Codrington College, opened as a grammar school and refounded in 1830 as a theological college, the oldest Anglican seminary in the western hemisphere, whose graduates staffed pulpits across the Caribbean, ministering to congregations descended from the very people the endowment had enslaved. The contradiction has become a central case in the reckoning of churches with slavery: historians made Codrington a textbook example of religious institutions' direct profiteering, the Church of England apologised formally in 2006 for its role in the trade with Codrington named, and the college, still training clergy above its sea cliff in Saint John, now carries the history in its own teaching, a working seminary that is also a monument to what its founders could not see.