Page 162 →Page 163 →Chapter 6“The Evils Which Now Oppress Us”

Southern Civil Religion and the Lost Cause

The name John Lafayette Girardeau carries conflicting meanings depending on the context. Among southern Presbyterians he is known as a great orator, preacher, seminary professor, missionary to enslaved African Americans, and the first southern Presbyterian (PCUS) to ordain African Americans to the office of ruling elder. Among African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, Girardeau is known as a minister to the antebellum enslaved community, as well as an advocate for education and racial reform through ecclesiastical equality in the years after the Civil War. In stark contrast historians and Lost Cause advocates are mostly familiar with the name Girardeau for his role in perpetuating a civil religion that served to undergird the tenets of the Lost Cause during Reconstruction.¹

However Girardeau’s life and world displayed a much more complex picture than his missionary activity, representative Calvinism, efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, or Lost Cause ideology often reveal. In Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, David Blight gave three disparate visions of the Civil War’s legacy in American memory. Girardeau can be found in all three (reconciliationist, White supremacist, and emancipationist) each during the same epoch.² Girardeau complicates our understanding of Christian clergy’s roles in the Civil War era and displays that they could often possess different personas and competing ideologies among different groups. Girardeau’s career encompassed an antebellum missionary to enslaved African Americans, his work in the biracial missions church, as well as his ecclesiastical reform from 1866–74 combined with his legacy of embodying defeat as a former Confederate chaplain through Lost Cause ideology. The competing visions of Girardeau during Reconstruction further cloud the already murky waters through which historians have examined the role of clergy in the Civil War era South.

Page 164 →Applying Blight’s visions to three separate phases of Girardeau’s career perhaps paints a more representative picture of a conflicted Southern clergy whose theology and ecclesiology often challenged their views on race and enslavement while fully embracing and supporting the social, economic, political, and racial status quo. Girardeau’s postbellum ecclesiastical reform in ordaining African Americans and pushing for their ecclesiastical equality placed him among those with the emancipationist vision. His work on the battlefield as a Confederate chaplain, his helping the public to cope with death and destruction after the Civil War, and his serving as pastor of an integrated church places him in the reconciliationist camp. His work as a defender of the Lost Cause, which helped justify the racial violence perpetuated by its adherents, undoubtedly also places him among the White supremacist vision.

While attempting to deal with Christianity, enslavement, and a changing landscape during the Civil War and Reconstruction era, Girardeau found himself captive to a society whose central tenet was preserving the institution of enslavement. Later a strict adherence to the racial status quo brought about by a violent political redemption, driven by the Lost Cause during Reconstruction. By the end of Reconstruction, Girardeau and Southern Presbyterians would find themselves also pushing the culture in promoting Lost Cause ideology and modeling racial segregation twenty-two years before Plessy v. Ferguson.³

In Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, Wilson uses Girardeau to display the “traditional Calvinist explanation” for an interpretation of the Civil War and also as an example of the “hope of future vindication.”⁴ As Girardeau penned in 1866, Confederate ideals would one day “in some golden age, sung by poets, sages and prophets, come forth in the resurrection of buried principles and live to bless mankind, when the bones of its confessors and martyrs shall have moldered into dust.”⁵ In W. Scott Poole’s Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry the religion of the Lost Cause was rooted in a deep pessimism about “the possibilities of society that issued in both sad praise for a conquered past and a critique of the materialistic and utilitarian present.”⁶ We see this on display in Girardeau’s Lost Cause apologetics during Reconstruction. However at the same time Girardeau was speaking at Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies and disseminating a Lost Cause ideology, he was also challenging the racial status quo in one of the most racially conservative denominations in the country: the Presbyterian Church United States (the southern branch of the Presbyterian Church).

Page 165 →Girardeau seemed to be a man torn between two worlds. Yet these worlds collided during Reconstruction in familiar ways, reflecting similar tensions in southern culture in the antebellum context. In one context Girardeau was a Civil War veteran who fought with and served the Confederacy as a chaplain in the Twenty-Third Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers. In another he was a missionary to Charleston’s enslaved African American population, many of whom saw him as a spiritual father, as a racial moderate, and as a man who advocated for their ecclesiastical rights.⁷

After the war a strange marriage occurred between these two competing visions. Girardeau was called upon by leading lights of the Lost Cause in Charleston to speak on the justness and holiness of the Confederate cause, a cause that defended the perpetual enslavement of African Americans as one of its main tenets.⁸ Girardeau engaged in this activity partly because he was attempting to cope with and help his listeners grasp the changing nature of their surroundings. He was also providing the men and women in the audience a vision to cope with defeat by displaying a postbellum southern honor built on both gentility and violence through continued sectionalism and White superiority.⁹ There is a staunchly unreconstructed tone throughout this speech, and even in defeat Girardeau remained defiant arguing that there “are two senses in which it must be admitted that they [Confederate soldiers] lost their cause, -they failed to establish a Confederacy as an independent country, and they failed to preserve the relation of slavery,” which led southerners to forms of government considered the “evils which now oppress us.”¹⁰

Serving as a minister of civil religion in the Lost Cause provided Girardeau with a powerful postwar public platform. He found himself in the process of redefining what it meant to be a southern Presbyterian minister in the latter half of the nineteenth century, helping the landscape heal after a crippling military defeat while also helping shape, define, and put into practice what would later become Jim Crow segregation buttressed by racial violence. Girardeau had never had such broad audiences, and he found himself not only preaching to his biracial church but also preaching to the broader citizenry about the justness, rightness, and holiness of the Confederate War effort and how these characteristics should be maintained. He went from being a local missionary to enslaved African Americans to a Confederate chaplain to becoming a statewide and regional defender of the memory of the Confederate dead and advocate for the Lost Cause. As advocate for the Lost Cause, he helped forge a postwar identity of White South Carolinians bent on redemption and Page 166 →wresting political, economic, and social control away from African Americans and Republicans.

While serving as a minister of the Lost Cause, Girardeau also became the leading southern Presbyterian advocate for ecclesiastical integration. It seemed as if Girardeau was either comfortable with this contradictory clash between African American ecclesiastical equality and civic inequality, was completely unaware of the distinctions between the two, or was adapting and redefining his Christian identity by publicly serving as a minister-patriot of the Lost Cause while also in a local church context helping to expand ecclesiastical rights for African Americans.

His unquestioned loyalty to the Lost Cause and his embodiment of it as a living testament to Confederate memory in Charleston would make it difficult for detractors to question the old chaplain when it came to his moderate stance on race in the church. Girardeau seemed to use those powers of influence in complex ways in ecclesiastical circles, which oftentimes ran counter to accepted broader cultural standards of racial hierarchy and sometimes even contradicted basic tenets of Lost Cause dogma. The complexity of Girardeau’s life complicates our understanding of southern White clergy who often moved in competing circles, were sometimes conflicted, and even contradicted themselves based on the context in which they found themselves at a given moment.

Increasing hostility throughout the South toward freed persons from 1871 to 1873 led to complete racial segregation in southern Presbyterian churches in 1874. In 1871, Girardeau began speaking at Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies openly advocating a racially charged Lost Cause ideology by prompting his audience to never forget the cause for which Confederate veterans died. The beginning of Girardeau’s public life as a Lost Cause apologist in 1871 paralleled the period of his fight for ecclesiastical reform among southern Presbyterians.

In the late nineteenth century, Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies often included ex-Confederate chaplains who not only reaffirmed the holiness of Confederate troops, but who also helped embed the sanctity of the Confederate cause in the southern landscape. These clergy were central to the development of a collective Confederate identity and memory. The combination of their education, oratorical skill, and first-hand account of the events of the Civil War gave Confederate chaplains powerful positions in postbellum southern society. Furthermore their education, spirituality, and ability to comfort and inspire their audiences made them effective speakers for Memorial Day events, such as the one that the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Charleston hosted at Magnolia Cemetery on May 10, 1871.

Page 167 →That day four ministers participated in the event: Reverend John Bachman, Reverend Ellison Capers, Reverend Edward R. Miles, and Reverend John Lafayette Girardeau. Of these four ministers, Capers and Girardeau served as Confederate chaplains. Girardeau delivered the main address.¹¹ The purpose of the event was the reinternment of South Carolinian Confederate troops who died at Gettysburg. As Girardeau wrote, “The circumstances which assemble us in the streets of this City of the Dead are” that “the bones of our brethren have for nearly eight years been sleeping in the bloody battlefield of Gettysburg” and are now returned to “the State that they had loved so well.” In some strange combination of afterlife mysticism (not common among Calvinist Presbyterians of the nineteenth century) and sectionalism he awkwardly proposed the theory that the soldiers, “as dying children to a mother, yielded up their gallant spirits” and “breathed the fervent entreaty: ‘Send our bodies to South Carolina to be buried there!’”¹² This is a strange statement from a southern Presbyterian who, according to theological principles laid out in the Westminster Confession of Faith (to which Girardeau ascribed), the “bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God . . . where they behold the face of God.”¹³ Girardeau’s comments seemed to be in stark contrast with the views of the writers of the confession.

Girardeau was insulted at the thought of South Carolina’s sons lying in a grave for “rebels and traitors.” If Girardeau believed these men to be “beholding the face of God” and had immediately “returned to God” along the lines of an orthodox view of the Westminster Confession, then why would the souls in question be worried about whether their bodies of dust were in Pennsylvania? Worse Girardeau presumed that the corpses were deeply offended. He asked his audience, “Was it in their latest moments of consciousness” that “they recoiled from the thought that they would be interred in an enemy’s soil?”¹⁴ This important question from an authority about religion, death, and the Civil War implanted in the listeners’ subconscious a memory of their dying fathers, brothers, and sons. This statement implied that to honor these men properly the listeners to and preservers of their fallen men’s memory could not see the soil of Pennsylvania as in any way common, shared, unified or in union with soil of South Carolina. To Girardeau and his audience Pennsylvania in 1871, six years after the surrender at Appomattox, was still the enemy’s soil.

To honor the dead Girardeau’s listeners had to remember that their sons gave their lives in defense of a state, a cause, and a way of life. “There are living issues which emerge from these graves,” Girardeau claimed, “gigantic problems Page 168 →affecting our future, which starting up in the midst of these solemnities demand our earnest attention. The question which thrills every heart is, ‘Did these men die in vain?’”¹⁵ Girardeau’s assertions in addressing this question, which point to an ideology of preserving the memory, sacrifice, and cause of Confederate soldiers seemed to have undermined his work in ecclesiastical racial reform.

Girardeau first declared that these soldiers “had, as a peculiar people, occupied graces by themselves—in death as in life adhering to a noble and sacred, though despised and execrated, Cause.” The cause to which Girardeau was referring was a right to preserve the southern cultural, social, political, and economic way of life. The most important aspect of this way of life was the preservation of the institution of enslavement and perpetuating an antebellum racial hierarchy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In admitting failure on behalf of the Confederate dead Girardeau noted, “They failed to preserve the relation of slavery,” which along with other issues “underlay and pervaded that complex whole which we denominated our Cause.”¹⁶

Girardeau asserted that it was the duty of those left living to remember this cause in noble and sacred ways rather than to accept current political, social, or economic conditions as a possibility for an acceptable future. Rather than admit that the soldiers died in vain, in the sense that the cause was ultimately lost and that neither enslavement nor the Confederacy was preserved, Girardeau implored his listeners for a type of southern civic duty. “Shoulder to shoulder they stood; now let them lie side by side. Confederates in life, confederates let them be in death.” This duty was to honor and possess an “unspeakable love,” a “boundless admiration,” and an “undying gratitude” for the “heroes of a defeated but glorious Cause.”¹⁷

In clear terms Girardeau asserted what this cause was about: “There are two ways in which it must be admitted that [the soldiers] lost their cause,— they failed to establish a Confederacy as an independent country, and they failed to preserve the relation of slavery.”¹⁸ Underneath these two main tenets Girardeau placed other fundamental principles, such as preserving an antebellum social order as well as civil and religious liberty. According to Girardeau’s statements, it may be properly assumed that the intent of the Confederate cause was to establish a government under which enslavement might continue to grow, flourish, and perpetuate. The question posed to the audience members forced them to consider how antebellum social relationships could be perpetuated in a country that had outlawed enslavement and the Confederacy had been defeated and ceased to exist.

Page 169 →Girardeau then connected the listener to his or her role in this cause: “And the question whether those who fell in its support died in vain . . . must depend for its answer upon the course which will be pursued by the people of the South.” In a not-so-subtle shift Girardeau transferred the burden of supporting the principles of the “cause” from the fallen Confederate soldiers to the remaining civilian population of the South. He claimed that “our brethren will not have died in vain, if we cherish in our hearts . . . the principles for which they gave their lives.”¹⁹

Therefore for Girardeau and his audience it became the duty of every southern man and woman to remember the cause, to continue to preserve state sovereignty in practical ways, and to keep freed persons in a separate and unequal social order. Girardeau was carving into the hearts and minds of his listeners a sense of transferred guilt and duty thus perpetuating the cause of the Confederacy onto the next generation. Not honoring and remembering the dead—and the cause for which they died—was akin to desecration of their graves. Girardeau therefore helped contribute to the development of an explicit southern White memory of the Civil War using overtly religious language. This memory was not just philosophical and ethereal. It had real, tangible, and palpable application for his listeners and for the African Americans now living in Charleston, who would become the focal point of yet another century of racial violence. It would mean buttressing racial divides, perpetuating an antebellum structure of racial hierarchy, and committing violence if necessary to preserve this way of life. To the men in the audience who did not fight in the Civil War Girardeau was communicating that they could still prove their masculinity by upholding these tenets in the memory of their slain forefathers. They could even act violently to preserve this way of life because it adequately honored the memory of the veterans.

In Girardeau’s view how were the audience members to respond to Reconstruction government and African American political participation? Girardeau did not mince words: “Let us cling to our identity as a people! The danger is upon us of losing it—of its being absorbed and swallowed up in that of a people which having despoiled us of the rights of freemen assumes to do our thinking, our legislating and our ruling for us,” which would remove and “wipe out every distinctive characteristic which has hitherto marked us.”²⁰ This firmly unreconstructed statement displayed continued defiance of federal authority and disdain for South Carolina’s largely integrated state government during Reconstruction. The identity not so subtly referred to was that of White superiority Page 170 →solidified in a “states’ rights” ideology promoting African inferiority and thus forcing African Americans to exist in a state of subservience.

For Girardeau the characteristic that marked southern people was their commitment to White control, virtue, and resistance to racial amalgamation. He mentioned that “there is a race, which, coming down through the centuries enveloped with antagonistic influences and hostile nationalities, has stood out in perpetual protest against amalgamation with other peoples.”²¹ With this statement Girardeau connected the listeners’ identity with a European ancestry, which had supposedly remained unmixed and even “today preserves its characteristics, as the current of the great Wester River flows into, without blending with, the multitudinous waters of the Gulf.”²² To continue the Lost Cause the listeners would need to maintain White solidarity and supremacy and would be responsible for teaching the next generation of the virtues of social order. It would be this kind of oratory that would help set the stage for decades of Jim Crow segregation in southern schools, public facilities, private businesses, intermarriage laws, and even church membership.

Connecting this philosophy to practical implementation Girardeau insisted that “appointing anniversaries” for the commemoration of “the deeds of men who died for our fundamental liberties and constitutional rights” would be necessary to maintain the cause. Further a dogmatic adherence to perpetuating “the phraseology of the past—making it a vehicle for transmitting our posterity ideas which once true are true forever, all opposition to them by brute force to the contrary notwithstanding.”²³ It was clear that education of new generations of southerners would be necessary to maintain antebellum political, economic, and social relations. It would be necessary to make “nurseries, schools and colleges channels for conveying from generation to generation our type of thought, sentiment and opinion; by stamping on the minds of our children principles hallowed by the blood of patriots.”²⁴

In a seemingly eerie glimpse toward a post-1954 era, Girardeau predicted the prevalence of segregated southern public and private universities replete with Confederate markers and flags, the development of segregationist academies after Brown v. Board of Education, and pervasiveness of history textbooks, all of which perpetuated myths of Reconstruction and in some cases used Lost Cause rhetoric into the late twentieth century. As Wilson noted the southern jeremiads, mysticism, evangelism, and education all rooted in southern civil religion perpetuating a Lost Cause was “the story of the use of the past as the basis for a Southern religious moral identity, an identity as a chosen people.”²⁵ Religion played an absolutely central role in perpetuating a Lost Page 171 →Cause ideology, which helped cement a solid Jim Crow South, in some cases into the late twentieth century.

Girardeau closed with the image of a dying Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who “faint from the loss of blood, and suffering from excruciating pain, . . . partly raised himself from his prostrate posture and in a tone of authority said: ‘Hold your ground, Sir!’” One can only speculate as to the heightened volume and theatrics Girardeau offered in this moment. Given his use of pronounced language and facial expressions to drive home a point in the pulpit it was likely that Girardeau expanded his presence at this juncture in an attempted recreation of the scene for his audience. He was turning the hearts and minds of the listeners to the revered Confederate general and who by this time had taken on the kind mystical power reserved only for mythical legends. Girardeau was calling on the crowd to hold its own cultural, economic, political, and social ground. He said, “We must, by God’s help, hold our ground, or consent to be traitors to our ancestry, our dead, our trusts for posterity, to our fire-sides, our social order, and our civil and religious liberties.”²⁶

With this statement Girardeau was essentially offering what can only be called a military-style order to a civilian population to continue to fight. Invoking the memory of Jackson and recreating his call for them to “hold their ground” was a clear clarion call to maintaining the antebellum order at all costs. This kind of rhetoric proved incredibly successful as South Carolina would help lead the nation over the next century in preventing integration, perpetuating racial violence, and holding its ground on issues of state versus federal authority, refusing to implement antilynching laws, and regaining White control of state politics as well as limiting educational and economic opportunities for African Americans into the twentieth century.

However just a year and a half before this speech Girardeau became the first White Presbyterian to ordain African American freed persons to leadership positions in an interracial church. While giving this speech Girardeau was simultaneously pastor of a church with African American members, many of whom he helped gain expanded ecclesiastical rights. How was Girardeau able to reconcile these two ideologies? Perhaps he was suggesting that White men and women of the South ought to choose a public and political course supporting a social order that reflected a belief in the Lost Cause for which their fallen soldiers died, all while blatantly rejecting the same order in their own local church and more private ecclesiastical contexts. Or perhaps Girardeau even saw the church as a vehicle for helping to promote the kind of education and instruction that he called for to maintain the Lost Cause. Maybe Girardeau Page 172 →saw the church as an institution that could over time help bring African Americans beyond ecclesiastical equality to full civic equality, and he needed to play a contrasting public role to give him space to maneuver in the ecclesiastical sphere. Whatever his designs might have been, broader denominational forces were at work to prevent the latter from happening.

Girardeau’s postwar career and legacy of memory in Charleston were multifaceted. He was a slave missionary before the Civil War who became an advocate for the ecclesiastical equality of freed persons during Reconstruction while simultaneously arguing that White Charlestonians should defend a cause undoing any potential civic or social equality.

The memory and legacy of Girardeau is mixed based on who is speaking, which is indicative of the complex nature of southern interracial worship, memory, and Lost Cause mentality. While the postwar career of John Lafayette Girardeau was somewhat ambiguous because of the conflicting nature of his perspectives, his legacy as a southern moderate on race and the church ran parallel to his career as an orator of the Lost Cause. Girardeau complicates our understanding of southern White clergy and competing notions of masculinity, identity, and morality in the postwar South. His work also helps us understand further the positions that White southern moderates on issues of racial ecclesiastical integration played in a burgeoning Lost Cause movement.

Despite this southern pastor’s efforts toward ecclesiastical reform it was the Lost Cause that ultimately left a tremendous legacy in the post-Reconstruction South. Indeed the southern population would now have the authorization and even orders from a Confederate chaplain to maintain an antebellum order at all costs. The leading lights of southern Presbyterianism not only helped defend an antebellum southern way of life in the postbellum South but also helped mobilize an embittered and resentful southern population toward reclaiming political, economic, and social control through violence. The church, an organization that was to be a place for all people, would become a steadfast bastion in the effort to “hold your ground” on issues of racial inclusion. At different points in his career Girardeau embodied all three of Blight’s visions. Ultimately however Girardeau could not detach himself from the White supremacist vision so common among Lost Cause advocates in the postwar South.

Girardeau continued to honor, make sacred, and memorialize a Lost Cause movement into the end of Reconstruction. Simultaneously his work in the church undermined several of the tenets of the Lost Cause. However capitulation to culture on issues of race became inevitable. Like his predecessors Page 173 →Girardeau would more and more reflect the broader cultural mores of fellow southerners bent on maintaining segregation, White control, and the political and economic exploitation of African Americans. Rather than being captive to culture, southern Presbyterians like Girardeau helped model to the rest of the South what practical White control might look like after Reconstruction. The Presbyterian Church United States became segregated in 1874 and helped set the tone for the rest of the South on how to go about a process like “organic separation.” Unlike the cultural captivity of the early nineteenth century southern Presbyterian Christians in the latter half of the nineteenth century lead the way and pushed the culture on issues of segregation.

Through reading the letters of many Presbyterian missionaries, such as those of Thomas Donnelly, T. C. Stuart, Charles Colcock Jones, John Adger, and John Girardeau, to enslaved African Americans and Native Americans it seemed as if some of these men privately despised the dehumanizing aspects of the institution of enslavement. Perhaps these Presbyterian missionaries with very distinct philosophies regarding missions to enslaved African Americans and Native Americans were consciously even attempting to subvert the peculiar institution or at least the accepted racial attitudes of their surroundings. Eugene Genovese avowed in Slaveholders Dilemma that most Christian pastors believed in the Gospel as a liberating force. John Boles argued that many missionaries and Southern Presbyterian pastors operated with a “limited emancipationist impulse” and some like Girardeau would end up pushing for ecclesiastical reform during Reconstruction.

However what we see more fully is that while there may have been private misgivings most Southern Presbyterian shepherds succumbed to the prevailing notions of race and the institution of enslavement. They used theology, biblical exegesis, and ecclesiology to force the church to conform to the aforementioned prevailing notions on race throughout the South. In short southern shepherds let the savage wolves in to ravage the flock. Further creating second-class worship spaces for African Americans led the southern Presbyterians not only to become supporters of pro-enslavement theology but created the very structures needed to accommodate, support, and practice pro-enslavement ecclesiology. Southern Presbyterians would become early adopters of segregation as yet another acceptable biblical, theological, and ecclesiological framework.

Twenty years before Plessy v. Ferguson the PCUS would adopt “organic separation” and segregated worship spaces for Whites and African Americans with one dissenting voice in the 1874 General Assembly: John L. Girardeau. Page 174 →Southern Presbyterians played a major role in sanctioning American enslavement by creating a space for it in the life of the church, nurturing the system, and even creating separate worship spaces to accommodate it. Southern Presbyterians led the charge in responding to abolitionism with theological arguments, biblical references, and even ecclesiological structures that attempted to show northern Christians that southerners were more adept at theology, biblical understanding, and how the church “really worked.” Southern Presbyterians could more appropriately model and display to northern Christians how to “properly and in good order” accommodate enslavement, make room for slave holders/enslavers, salve their consciences, and simultaneously provide spaces in which enslaved African Americans could worship in a second-class manner and not be granted full ecclesiastical rights.

Therefore the savage wolf of racism and practitioners of the institution of enslavement drove the work of slave missions as much or in some cases more than as an interest in gospel ministry. Ultimately White southern Presbyterians did not believe that African Americans were equal to Whites either civically or within the kingdom of God. African Americans were to have churches without full rights as members until they “matured” to the point at which they could function within the church as equals. Southern Presbyterians desired to missionize enslaved African Americans and convert them to Christianity, but once there was conversion the same Presbyterians were not willing to grant full rights to African American members of the church. While adult African Americans were conducting ministries as watchmen, class leaders, exhorters, and all manner of leaders, White Southern Presbyterians considered these grown adult leaders as little more than children. For most Southern Presbyterians even as African Americans were ordained to the office of ruling elder in 1869, it would be many years in their minds before any freed persons were ready to discharge the offices of a teaching elder.

Other savage wolves were let in to ravage the flock. One main wolf was fear. The entire system of enslavement in the South was built on the perceived inferiority of the African American race. It was made clear through the South Carolina ordinance of secession that White southerners believed Africans and African Americans were inferior people who were only created to labor physically. A great deal of fear undergirded the White response to missions and later an integrated church. Robert Dabney displayed this fear perfectly in his belief that racial amalgamation or “the mixing of races” would happen if the churches remained integrated. Southern Whites feared their children would marry Blacks. This fear would continue into laws against intermarriage in the Page 175 →South until the 1960s. This issue is still a major problem in multiethnic Presbyterian churches and youth activities in Reformed circles into the twenty-first century. It is fine for little children to play together, but once the children reach adolescence many White families remove their children from integrated schools, integrated youth groups, and multiethnic churches across the South. This fear, rooted in racism, gripped the church in the antebellum context and during Reconstruction and continues to grip southern Presbyterianism (and perhaps even national Presbyterianism) into the twenty-first century.

While there are many wolves that these southern shepherds let in to ravage the flock, another major wolf was greed. Again and again Southern Presbyterians chose the pursuit of mammon, wealth, and economic growth over the love and care of their fellow persons. This pursuit is typical in the American church as enslavement touched every aspect of American society from the seventeenth century up to the late nineteenth century and beyond. The unique contribution of southern Presbyterians was the complete way southern pastors prostrated themselves before their members’ profits. The leaders (ruling elders and deacons) of the antebellum southern Presbyterian Church tended to be wealthier, landholders, and somewhat educated. Most of these persons were either enslavers or benefited financially from their connections to enslavement.

This greed is especially poignant when considering that many of these elders and deacons were holding stolen persons in perpetual enslavement (violating Old Testament law), that many of these men and women were fellow Christians, and many of these elders and deacons were having children outside of wedlock with enslaved African American women. There seems to be no discussion, rebuke, or accountability on these issues from southern Presbyterian pulpits from 1830–65. What this should tell us is that wealth and the pursuit of wealth in America was and is the true god. It had a massive impact on the church in America that has unquestioningly connected wealth with God’s blessing and the pursuit of wealth as the ultimate product and form of a good “Protestant work ethic.” For antebellum southern shepherds owning enslaved persons was acceptable labor and a very acceptable way to earn a living. Further enslavers were growing their wealth by having children with enslaved women largely through rape and sexual abuse. This practice went unquestioned. The wolves ravaged the flock, and the shepherds stood by silently.

This book has examined how some missionaries created functional spaces in which some equalities were a part of the ecclesiastical life of a multiracial community, and these rights expanded under Reconstruction. What we ultimately see is that southern Presbyterian Christians sanctioned enslavement Page 176 →and went a step further to formalize a space inside the church to make room for pro-enslavement theology, that theology’s application to an ecclesiological setting, and its function in church practices. Rather than admit equal status to enslaved African American members and Native American members, Southern Presbyterians created a second-class church in which there existed some but not all membership rights. This separate and nonequal space set an example and precedent for other southern spaces such as schools, parks, drinking fountains, and other public spaces throughout the twentieth century.

Slave missions were more than just about conversion of the enslaved. They were about justifying the southern way of life, supporting pro-enslavement ideology, and providing a functional space in which pro-enslavement theology could be put into practice in the life of the church or what I have referred to as a functional racist ecclesiology. The goal was to prove to northern abolitionists that Southern Presbyterians were more correctly reading their Bibles and creating a more “biblically acceptable” church for enslaved people, which became the slave mission church. Southern Presbyterians attempted to respond to abolitionism with their own version of what was acceptable biblically, theologically, and functionally. What was created was the enslaved persons’ mission church. However, for all their reworking of the scriptures, for all their theological gymnastics, for all their ecclesiological innovations to accommodate race, southern Presbyterians ultimately failed and fell short of understanding that there is no room in God’s church for second-class members, and second-class children of God.

These wolves—the pursuit of mammon, greed, fear, obsession with profit over care for one’s neighbor, and racism—ran rampant. The wolves not only destroyed the sheep but rendered the shepherds defenseless, impotent, and voiceless. As the shepherds accommodated these wolves the sheep suffered tremendously. As we will see in the latter sections of this final chapter, it would not be the last time that these southern shepherds would let savage wolves in to ravage the flock. Southern Presbyterian shepherds would let other wolves that fit within a southern evangelical worldview like segregation, White supremacy, resistance to civic equality, resistance to justice movements, fear, and politics into the church while excluding other political positions. Southern Presbyterians hid behind a “spirituality of the church” doctrine and used it to remove themselves from issues surrounding integration, civil rights, justice, and even the intermarriage of different races. All these wolves would feast on the flock into the twentieth century. That feasting continues in different ways into the twenty-first century.

Page 177 →It is the historian’s job to examine continuity and change over time. While there have been important changes in southern Presbyterianism, there has ultimately been great continuity with regard to race, greed, fear, and politics. The twenty-first century has seen southern Presbyterians shrink from justice movements, work to connect their religion with alt-right conservative movements, and marginalize, isolate, or remove African American members or congregants who speak out. For a denomination with such strong theological acumen, biblical literacy, borderline obsession with catechisms, standards, rules of governance and order southern Presbyterian churches still tend to stand with the regional cultural forces that drive economics, racial hierarchies, politics, consumerism, and lack of care for a just society for all. For a denomination that believes in God’s predestined plan, his will, his authority over all things, and his rule there seems to be a great deal of fear that resides in southern Presbyterianism: fear of a shrinking church, losing political power. demographic change, providing justice for all, people who do not look like them, the outside world, culture. What does the Bible say about this? “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.” It says, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” It says, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”²⁷

If all the above is true one must reconcile biblical accounts that point to a trajectory of freedom with the overt Christian support of the institution of enslavement in the antebellum South and submission to segregation during Reconstruction. It is difficult to reconcile the two since an overwhelming number of southern pastors supported the institution of enslavement and segregation so vehemently. However history is complex, and Presbyterian mission churches might also serve as spaces in which a biblical tenor of humanity’s trajectory toward freedom existed in some lived context in the antebellum South. The fact that there were many ecclesiastical reforms at Zion, Girardeau argued for ecclesiastical equality after the Civil War, Zion became a place for African American community after emancipation, Thomas Donnelly preached manumission of the enslaved, and T. C. Stuart expanded roles of enslaved members at the Monroe Mission shows it is possible that a liberating ideal concerned about ecclesiastical equality, racial justice, and love of one’s fellow persons existed among some Presbyterian missionaries to enslaved persons and can exist again. Where this mind-set existed ecclesiastical, social, and educational opportunities were more prevalent for enslaved African Americans and Native Americans. As opposed to other interracial spaces in Page 178 →the South, these Presbyterian mission churches both failed African Americans and Native Americans while also creating opportunities for enhanced ecclesiastical reforms for African Americans and Native American members, which would become important for both communities.

As Stuart continued to work with the Chickasaw and enslaved African Americans in Monroe his views on enslavement softened. As Girardeau continued to work with enslaved African Americans, he grew to realize that they were human beings made in the imago dei and hence worthy of ecclesiastical rights with White congregants during Reconstruction. Many of the preceding facts in this book, some of the most poignant being Stuart’s willingness to ask Dinah to translate preaching, Donnelly’s willingness to preach emancipation, Girardeau’s work for postbellum ecclesiastical equality and ordaining ex-enslaved persons to the office of elder in 1869, evidence these beliefs.

Enslaved African Americans at Monroe and Zion experienced more expanded ecclesiastical opportunities than at many other historically White churches throughout the South. Preaching to the congregation, learning in the mission schools, experiencing new ecclesiastical freedoms, securing the place of honor in seating, availing themselves of leadership opportunities as class leaders and later as ruling elders, teaching and reading in Sunday school classes, and choosing their surnames as well as the name of the church were all part of the development of southern Presbyterian missionaries to enslaved persons. All of these facts combined with a continued and long-lasting relationship after Native American removal and the Civil War suggest that there was something distinct and unique about the way Presbyterians conducted Native American missions, missions to enslaved African Americans, and post–Civil War race relations.

Presbyterians were not as historians have declared an afterthought in the work of missions to enslaved persons. In contrast they might provide nineteenth-century models of promoting integrated worship, pushing for ecclesiastical reforms, engaging in interracial worship, and might even push modern conversations about racial reconciliation, ecclesiastical integration, and racial healing and solidarity movements. In contrast Southern Presbyterian missionaries to enslaved persons might also be innovators in creating second-class church memberships for African Americans, segregating worship on Sunday morning, and ongoing racism within White churches. While the overall numbers of congregants may have been fewer than those of the Baptists or Methodists, the Presbyterians also provided examples of missions and missionaries to the Page 179 →enslaved in the antebellum South that were unique. Presbyterianism lent itself to a depth of theological inquiry, ecclesiology, and biblical study that pushed Girardeau’s position on ecclesiastical reform. Other denominations without the benefit of in-depth theological training before circuit riding or church planting were perhaps more vulnerable to cultural captivity.

Evaluation of southern Presbyterian ecclesiology and the theology undergirding principles of missionary work with Native Americans and enslaved African Americans is largely missing from historiography. Despite Donnelly’s work to manumit enslaved African Americans in Rocky Creek, T. C. Stuart starting the first multiethnic churches on behalf of South Carolina in north Mississippi, Charles Colcock Jones’s legacy as the father of missionaries to enslaved persons, as well as Adger and Girardeau’s creation of one of the largest churches for enslaved African Americans in the US South, the Presbyterians of South Carolina have not received enough attention in their roles as missionaries to enslaved persons. They have also not received enough attention for their ecclesiological segregationism, which left a tremendous impact on the southern landscape through creating second-class churches for enslaved African Americans and laid the blueprints and moral justification for the region into continuing racial segregation on a larger scale. Missions to enslaved persons in South Carolina are distinct and their missionaries have been overlooked as innovative individuals who were simultaneously pushing for expanded ecclesiastical reform and ecclesiastical segregation. This history also needs to be placed into the larger contexts of American, southern, and African American history as well as American religious history so that a fuller understanding of the broad range of southern race relations in the church is better understood. To grasp the complex roles of religion and race in the history of the South a fuller understanding of Presbyterian missionaries to Native Americans and enslaved African Americans brings forth a more complex and complete picture.

Finally both autonomous congregations of Native Americans after removal and of enslaved African Americans after emancipation played pivotal roles in the provision of leadership for each community. The remnant ecclesiastical spaces of former missions continued to serve as respites from an often-hostile White environment in the last half of the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century. There is little doubt that the Presbyterian missionaries to Native Americans and enslaved African Americans of South Carolina assisted in establishing an ecclesiastical leadership base from among Native American and African American communities and helped create a Page 180 →legacy of engagement, education, civil activity, and service. These leaders, as early as Dinah and the Colbert family in the 1820s, to Zion’s “leaders” in the 1850s, who later served as elders in 1869, guided both Native American and African American communities in South Carolina through removal, Reconstruction, a violent Jim Crow era, and a revolutionary civil rights period.

The leadership abilities, education, and experience in race relations proved to be vital tools in combating a hostile southern White community that sought to deny rights to Native Americans and African Americans into the mid- and even late twentieth century. The roles that Rocky Creek, Monroe, Jones’s mission work, and Zion played in helping to establish this base of ecclesiastical leadership that promoted political activity and provided an important ecclesiastical space for community amid a difficult time period cannot be underestimated. Education and leadership development also played a substantial role in the lives of the various Native American nations as well as African American communities throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

As Don Mathews has reminded us, “This is not to deny that forms of Protestant Christianity were used to create a means of social integration, leadership selection, and ideological expression. There is much evidence that they did. But black religion was as much a creation of the slaves themselves as it was a gift of the white man. Jones could not create his biracial community because it expected too much of the white man and too little of the black.”²⁸ Indeed this leadership base was just as much the result of Native American and African American creation as it was of the missionary’s work. Developing a leadership base among Native American and African American Presbyterians in South Carolina was partly due to White missionaries creating those spaces but mostly due to the enslaved and Native peoples who chose to use what was provided to improve their situations.

Before Chickasaw removal and before the Civil War, throughout occupation of reservations in Oklahoma, and throughout Reconstruction, Christian missionary men and women worked alongside and cultivated relationships with populations of Indigenous people as well as enslaved African Americans. While slave missions in South Carolina were fundamentally biracial, Native American missions were multiracial. Enslaved African Americans belonging to the Chickasaw were also vital members of these multiracial, ecclesiastical communities. These multiracial communities and complex relationships within these communities reveal human beings from various racial, cultural, Page 181 →and religious backgrounds struggling to communicate, to know one another, and to make some sense of their changing worlds. In many ways it was not unlike our twenty-first-century efforts to overcome divisions of race, religion, and culture. Studying the experiences of these mission communities can help navigate the multiracial dimensions of our own national identity.

Some have interpreted missionaries as only imperialistic entities. Missionaries only living among Native Americans and African Americans attempted to proselytize them to Christianity to dominate, acculturate, and indoctrinate with a westernized, highly individualistic view of education and religion. From this perspective both enslaved African Americans and Native American peoples were robbed of their own religious traditions, their children stolen and sent to boarding schools away from the bosom of community and kinship—all to dominate them or make them culturally speaking more “civilized.”

This interpretation robs both the White missionaries and Native American and African American members of these churches of agency. All three communities made decisions that at times ran counter to the prevailing notions and openly challenged or violated the racial status quo. Native Americans and African Americans seized opportunities presented to them to improve their lives and the lives of their children. White missionaries sometimes wrestled with and challenged the expectations of the racial ecclesiastical hierarchy and perhaps even whether the institution of enslavement was the best system for labor. Sometimes these missionaries made decisions that supported the status quo, and other times openly challenged them. These actions present a much broader and more complex understanding of interracial religious communities in the nineteenth century and complicate our understanding of history through the complexity of human relationships.

It is easy to write off missionaries as little more than well-meaning imperialists, but a closer inspection reveals relationships of immense complexity. This position may only serve to weaken our understanding of antebellum US history, African American history, Native American agency, interracial relationships, church history, and the missionaries themselves. More important this view robs us of hope for future racial reconciliation, solidarity, and unity within ecclesiastical structures. That there were glimmers of reform provides hope. In the long arc of history, and while the work is slow, perhaps we can push those glimmers into bright shining beacons. A hope that can trace its roots in surprisingly harmonious interracial missionary communities two hundred years ago provides modern churches with a precedent, a history, and Page 182 →an identity that work that has started can be picked up once again. To know that Southern religious history once fostered not only fellowship but also ecclesiastical reform among races means that perhaps the twenty-first century southern Presbyterian church can once again pick up the baton, learn from the mistakes of the past, and help to create a beloved community that reflects God’s love.

Missionaries to enslaved African Americans and Native Americans sacrificed much. They suffered limited career opportunities, familial isolation, and cultural ostracism, acting in some cases as the only White advocates for enslaved African Americans and as mediators of Native American rights with government agents. Missionaries occupied a difficult and tenuous middle ground. They were often torn between loyalty to their own region and the state as well as a concern for the people they served. Historian Ernest Trice Thompson described their commitment, noting that they

renounced titles and estates to engage in the work; most of them were of finished scholarship and refined habits . . . They faced all manner of privation merely for the sake of making some portion of the world a better place in which to live, or to improve the condition of a fellow mortal, no matter how unworthy the latter may have been considered in the esteem of mankind.²⁹

Perhaps we can begin by walking through and dealing with a horrific past. We should not gloss over our history or neglect to repair its offenses. But we should also look to the past for examples of somewhat peaceful and positive interactions that give us hope and cause us to pause to begin the work toward a genuine and lasting reconciliation and solidarity. We need to look at history and expose its problems but also claim and celebrate moments of meaningful coexistence as touchstones that can lead us forward. Perhaps the lives of T. C. Stuart, Thomas Donnelly, Charles C. Jones, John Adger, and John Girardeau as well as the lives of the Colbert family, Dinah, Paul Trescot, William Price, Jacky Morrison, Samuel Robinson, William Spencer, John Warren, and Jonathan Gibbs can provide examples of Christian men and women who while deeply flawed also made decisions that complicate our understanding of religion in the US South. The members of these mission churches provide examples of communities who sought opportunities for humanity and dignity in an institution filled with degradation. These members and later ruling elders, persevered, served, taught, preached, ministered, and cared for their own families while laboring under the dominance of enslavers. They would Page 183 →see freedom in 1865 and use these spaces to assert their rights to education, a political voice, and economic uplift. The missionaries, while no doubt paternalistic and deeply flawed, could in some way provide a historical model for what it looks like to challenge entrenched, unjust institutions as well as examples of what can happen when we remain silent and sit by as the wolves come in to ravage the flock. May we all strive to be good shepherds.