John Jasper (4 July 1812–30 March 1901), Baptist minister, was born into slavery in Fluvanna County and was the son (reportedly the twenty-fourth child) of Tina Jasper and Philip Jasper, who preached in a rural Baptist church. Members of the Peachey family, who inherited Jasper when he was very young, took him to Williamsburg and later assigned him and other enslaved persons to work on various family plantations in different parts of Virginia. From sometime in the 1830s until Jasper gained his freedom at the end of the Civil War in April 1865, his enslavers leased him to work in the coal mines of Chesterfield County and in tobacco warehouses and factories in Richmond.
About 1838, while Jasper was living in Williamsburg, he married Elvy Weaden, but because they were both enslaved, the marriage had no legal standing; indeed, shortly afterward, he was moved to Richmond and may never have seen her again. In 1844, he married Candus Jordan in Richmond. They had nine children before they divorced. As his second marriage had no legal standing either, the divorce was not a legal process but evidently an agreement they reached with the approval of their church congregation as well as of their enslavers. One of their sons enlisted in the 45th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, in 1864 and fought for the United States during the Civil War.
On Jasper's twenty-seventh birthday, in 1839, he walked through the crowd that was celebrating the fourth of July in Richmond's Capitol Square. He later recounted that he became deeply aware of his sinful nature, comparing his experience to Saul of Tarsus becoming Paul the Apostle in the New Testament. Three weeks later he experienced a full religious awakening and joined the city's First Baptist Church. In 1841, a large number of Black members withdrew from the church and established their own congregation, First African Baptist Church. Jasper was baptized there on 9 January 1842, with the blessing of the owner of the tobacco warehouse where he worked.
Jasper learned to read with the help of an enslaved man and studied the Bible until he could recite long passages from memory. Jasper soon began preaching, even though doing so was technically illegal. The white pastor of the church allowed free and enslaved Black men to speak and lead prayers that so much resembled sermons that many observers believed that Jasper was the minister. Jasper soon gained fame for preaching at funerals in and around Richmond. On at least one occasion, though, whites threatened to shoot Jasper if he preached a funeral sermon for deceased enslaved persons on a local farm.
Late in the 1850s, the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society appointed Jasper to attend annual meetings of the Foreign Mission Board, held in Petersburg, and deliver donations from local Black churches to support the board's work in Africa. During one such meeting, the congregation of Third African Baptist Church successfully arranged for Jasper to preach twice per month. During this period Jasper preached at many cities and counties across the state. He had developed such a reputation that wherever he spoke he drew congregants from other churches, sometimes causing jealousy among other Black ministers. On those occasions when Jasper preached beyond Richmond, congregations were required to provide one dollar per day that he ministered. These funds went to him or his owner to offset money Jasper was not earning at factory work for which he was hired out. Churches also routinely took up separate collections for him.
During the Civil War, Jasper sometimes preached to patients at the Confederate hospital on Chimborazo Hill in Richmond and to free Blacks and enslaved persons working in the city's factories. He married Mary Anne Cole, a widow with one daughter, on 2 September 1863. They had no children before she died on 6 August 1874. For several months beginning with his freedom in April 1865, Jasper earned a living cleaning bricks. He was then called to be the permanent minister at Petersburg's Third African Baptist Church. He stayed about a year, during which time he also founded a church in Weldon, North Carolina. In September 1867, after Jasper returned to Richmond, he and several others founded Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church, which held its services in an old carpentry shack until the congregation bought a brick church building. Enthusiasm for the church was such that Jasper reportedly baptized three hundred souls in two hours. Beyond the pulpit, he occasionally participated in politics at that time and was elected chaplain at the founding meeting of the Jackson Ward Republican Club in April 1871.
Jasper became one of the most famous Virginians during the final decades of the nineteenth century. His celebrity spread beyond the Richmond area because of his preaching style and, in particular, a sermon that gained the title, "The Sun Do Move." In mid-March 1878, Richmond newspapers first reported on the sermon and the controversy that erupted among ministers and lay leaders in the city's African American churches. Jasper asserted that numerous passages in the Bible disproved contemporary scientific ideas that the earth was spherical and that it revolved around the sun. Early reports of the sermon indicate that its content, organization, and length varied. Several versions of the sermon were published then and later, all apparently derived from notes and transcriptions made by his listeners. Jasper stated that he never wrote out his sermons but delivered them extemporaneously, so that no two would have been the same. One of the earliest texts of the sermon appeared in the New York Herald of 24 March 1878, apparently supplied by a prominent white Richmond man who heard Jasper preach it in his church soon after Jasper began delivering it.
From "Sermon on the Sun" and "The Sun Moves" in 1878, the title also evolved. The text that Brentano's Literary Emporium published in New York early in 1882 had the title, “The Sun Do Move”: The Celebrated Theory of the Sun’s Rotation Around the Earth, as Preached by Rev. John Jasper of Richmond, VA. With a Memoir of His Life. The title referred to the passage that Jasper cited from the tenth Book of Joshua, verses 12–13, that at Joshua's request, God bid the sun stop its course through the sky long enough for the Israelites to prevail against the Amorites on the battlefield at Gibeon. From that miracle, Jasper deduced that the sun revolved around the earth. He delivered the sermon scores of times in and around Richmond and on tours beyond Virginia, including in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. In February 1884, some members of the General Assembly attended a service at Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church in order to hear the famous minister preach his most famous sermon.
Most of the printed texts are in a heavily stereotyped dialect not unlike that which Joel Chandler Harris used in his Uncle Remus tales that were popular with white readers of the time. Whether Jasper actually spoke as the published texts indicate is not clear. What is clear from the many laudatory reports is that his delivery of the sermon was a spectacle that drew large crowds of people of both races and sexes and of all ages. The congregation grew to more than 2,400 members during the 1880s, and in 1887 a larger brick church building was constructed in the Norman Gothic style with a crenelated bell tower centered on the front facade. The church was expanded in the 1920s, but the 1887 structure remains at the core of the building, which was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. Jasper's fame helped ensure the church's survival when highway construction during the 1950s led to the demolition of many surrounding buildings.
Jasper was tall, dignified, and elegant in appearance with a short beard and graying hair. He had a commanding presence and natural eloquence that audiences seemingly found irresistible, even people who believed that his cosmology was fanciful and his theology questionable. For Jasper and for many of his contemporaries, the Bible was to be read as literally true in every particular; and if it recorded that God commanded the sun to stand still, it stood still, which indicated that it normally moved. Some of the many thousands of men and women of both races who sought opportunities to hear Jasper preach his sermon may have quietly looked down on him as unsophisticated, but they rarely failed to appreciate his natural oratorical genius. The demeaning dialect of the printed versions of the sermon could have indicated to readers that Jasper could not even speak English properly and that therefore the poorly educated preacher need not be taken seriously and was merely an entertaining performer. But in his strict, literal interpretation of the Bible, Jasper in fact shared a religious outlook with millions of other Americans, both white and Black.
On 24 March 1892, Jasper married a fourth time, to a widowed grandmother, Mary Cary. He remained a prominent figure in Richmond and continued to preach, although on a reduced frequency, almost to the day of his death at his home in the city on 30 March 1901. His funeral drew a very large crowd. He was buried in Union Mechanics Cemetery, just outside the city limits in Henrico County, and a twenty-foot-tall obelisk was erected at his grave on 4 July 1905. The monument and Jasper's body were moved to Woodland Cemetery, in Henrico County, in 1918.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in E. A. Randolph, The Life of Rev. John Jasper, Pastor of Sixth Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Richmond, Va., from his Birth to the Present Time, with His Theory on the Rotation of the Sun (1884) (with birth date, date of third marriage, and death date of third wife), Mary J. Bratton, "John Jasper of Richmond: From Slave Preacher to Community Leader," Virginia Cavalcade 29 (1979): 32–39 (with portrait); feature article in Richmond Daily Dispatch, 17 June 1880; interviews in Richmond Dispatch, 5 June 1887 (with years of first and second marriages), and Richmond Evening Leader, 30 Nov. 1897; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 19 Mar. 1878; Richmond Daily Whig, 19 Mar. 1878 (including interview with birth date); New York Herald, 24 Mar. 1878; July 1812 birth date in United States Census Schedules, Richmond City, 1900, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; fourth marriage in Marriage Register, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Richmond City Death Certificates (with death date and variant 4 July 1813 birth date), 1901; obituaries in Richmond Times, 31 Mar. 1901, Richmond Planet, 6 Apr. 1901 (with account of funeral), and Washington Colored American, 6 Apr. 1901; funeral photographs printed in Richmond Planet, 13 Apr. 1901.
Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.
How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "John Jasper (1812–1901)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Jasper_John, accessed [today's date]).
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