Joseph Parker’s journey illustrates the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and slavery.
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On a crisp Virginia morning in September 1831, Joseph W. Parker sat across from Nicholas Sterling Edmunds, the owner of the nearly 2,000-acre Homewood plantation. Parker had spent the past two years as a schoolteacher for Edmunds’s children while simultaneously ministering to and evangelizing Edmunds’s slaves. He had seen remarkable spiritual fruit—both within Edmunds’s family and among the enslaved people. The faith of one of these newly converted slaves shone so brightly that his owner was forced to admit, “If my hope of heaven were half as bright as my confidence that John is fit for it, I should be a much happier man than I am.”
Now everything was about to change.
