Page 17 →Chapter 1 “A Black Swan in the Flock”

Race and Enslavement in Rocky Creek, South Carolina, 1801–2

Ernest Trice Thompson, an early twentieth century Presbyterian Church historian once mentioned that missions in the Southern Presbyterian Church “recognized its responsibility to certain needy classes located within its bounds—Indians, Negroes, Foreigners, isolated Mountain folk, and others.” Thompson was discussing the Presbyterian impulse toward “domestic missions” or peoples that urban, property-owning Presbyterians thought were on the margins and needed to hear the gospel. Presbyterian ministers throughout the nineteenth century labored as domestic missionaries to Backcountry immigrant populations, enslaved African American populations, Native Americans, and those considered “needy.” While evangelicalism certainly drove this sense of “responsibility” there were other characteristics that typified Presbyterian mission work. Presbyterians were noted for their belief in education, and so literacy was a prime focus of missions work—as well as theological training, ecclesiastical organization, and development of ecclesiastical leadership.¹ However as the missionaries brought their version of the gospel, they also brought with them expectations on culture, racial hierarchy, and the importance of profit through enslaved labor.

The Reverend Thomas Donnelly, pastor of the “Carolina Covenanters” in Rocky Creek, South Carolina, once wrote that there may be such a thing as a Christian holder of enslaved persons, “but a slaveholder among Christians is like a black swan in the flock.”² This is a unique perspective among South Carolinians in the early nineteenth century. The “peculiar institution” in South Carolina goes back to 1691 when Sir John Yeamans, a Barbados planter, first governor of Carolina, and one of the founders of Charleston, brought enslaved African people from Barbados to clear his plantation on the Ashley River.³ Enslavement as an institution is interwoven in the state’s history and culture but also deeply embedded within the religious consciousness of its people. Page 18 →However one South Carolina Presbyterian, Thomas Donnelly, seeing the dehumanizing effect that enslavement had on enslaved African Americans, began a process among a group of Presbyterians in Rocky Creek, South Carolina, to consider the ecclesiastical rights of enslaved members of their church and the issue of enslaved person ownership itself. In a rare move among South Carolinians in the early nineteenth century, Donnelly and his congregants strove to consider their own duties within their small ecclesiastical context to enslaved African Americans within their flock.

It is important to note that while later chapters focus on Presbyterian missions to Native Americans and African Americans, this chapter displays the intent of a Reformed Presbyterian Church to spread missions to southerners and individuals in the US South who had recently emigrated from Europe. So while domestic missions might include missionary efforts to people considered “heathens” such as the African Americans or Native Americans, there were also domestic missions attempts to recent immigrant communities without a church of their own.

The Carolina Covenanters, or members of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, looked upon the institution of enslavement as “an evil of enormous magnitude.”⁴ In 1802 a Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPC) pastor and theologian living in Albany, New York, Reverend Alexander McLeod, authored a pamphlet entitled Negro Slavery Unjustifiable. This document was not only groundbreaking for its time, but it also employed biblically based arguments that would go on to benefit the abolitionist cause some thirty years later. In South Carolina, Donnelly, acting under the Coldenham Presbytery’s vote for acceptance of McLeod’s views on enslavement, would oversee the process of making sure his church implemented the decisions of the presbytery. Indeed some thirty years before the height of the abolitionist movement and sixty years before emancipation, a handful of families in Rocky Creek, Chester District, South Carolina, decided to free enslaved African Americans in response to the work of McLeod and Donnelly. This event, while a small representation of South Carolina Presbyterianism, is significant for the history of Reformed Presbyterians and their impact on anti-enslavement in American society. It helped to frame an ideological stance against American enslavement as unbiblical and out of accord with historic Christian practice and Christian theology in a stronghold of American slavery: South Carolina.

Many northern abolitionists would later cede biblical arguments to southern theologians because there were verses in the Bible defending enslavement and southern theologians were experts in the exegesis, and sometimes Page 19 →exegetical gymnastics, it took to apply these verses to a modern context. As Eugene Genovese has mentioned, “intellectual historians and northern thinkers such as the Emersons and the Adamses” thought “that southerners had no minds, only temperaments,” but “on one subject after another the intellectuals of the Old South matched and in some cases overmatched the best the North had to offer.”⁵ This would most certainly include the southern theological arguments for the biblical justification of enslavement from the pens of men like James Henley Thornwell, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and Robert Lewis Dabney.

As a result, numerous abolitionists withdrew from making biblical arguments to defend abolition in favor of arguments proposing social reform influenced by Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. David B. Davis, in his book The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823, seems to imply that the abolitionists did not think so highly of the biblical arguments for anti-enslavement. Davis mentioned “Garrison’s disciple, Henry Clarke Wright, summed up the radical abolitionist view in the title of an essay, ‘The Bible, if opposed to Self-Evident Truth, is Self-Evident Falsehood.’” For another abolitionist, Charles Sterns, this meant that the Old Testament was a tissue of lies, “no more the work of God than the Koran, or the Book of Mormon.”⁶ William Llyod Garrison asserted that the Bible “must be judged by ‘its reasonableness and utility, by the probabilities of the case, by historical confirmation, by human experience and observation, by the facts of science, by the intuition of the spirit. Truth is older than any Parchment.”⁷

In contrast the examples of Mcleod and Donnelly provide a historical precedent of a biblically rooted and well-developed biblical exegesis and theology of anti-enslavement. This work would influence a denomination that had experienced some measure of success with freeing enslaved people in South Carolina. The example of Rocky Creek can provide us with fresh insight as to how a biblically orthodox denomination successfully challenged the entrenched system of enslavement in the South, where so many other denominations failed. To be sure understanding Mcleod’s groundbreaking Negro Slavery Unjustifiable is central to gauging what happened in Rocky Creek, South Carolina, in 1801–2. Further exploration into this unique historical episode and document displays the Presbyterian Church’s function as it related to anti-enslavement and domestic missions in South Carolina.

In “1763 the Peace of Paris marked the end of the Great War for Empire (the French and Indian War in America and the Seven Years War in Europe).”⁸ This was a time of radical change in America as the new colony was seeking Page 20 →to legitimize itself as a recognized entity. Thomas Paine’s rationalistic writings ushered in a time of conflicting ideologies in American thought between an English Enlightenment and Calvinistic theology. In the latter half of the eighteenth century the United States was just coming off a devastating revolution and war. Revolution had also broken out in France, and the political landscape of the world was changing dramatically. After the American Revolution John Locke, “whose doctrine of natural rights was the keystone of revolutionary ideology,” and who had a hand in the early documents forming Charles Town as a colony while serving as a secretary to one of the founding Lord’s Proprietors Ashley Cooper, and had simultaneously “justified slavery as a continuation of a state of war in which a captive was enslaved rather than killed.”⁹

A few states, such as Vermont in 1777, had gone so far as to outlaw slavery.¹⁰ In 1779, John Laurens of South Carolina proposed the arming of three thousand enslaved African Americans promising them freedom if they fought for the cause of the Americans. The Continental Congress approved his proposal, but the South Carolina legislature rejected it.¹¹ James Madsion, who after the war recaptured his enslaved African Americans who had tried to run away under British protection, stated: “I will not punish a slave merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, and worthy pursuit, of every human being.”¹² The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided a means by which new states could be created and therefore western lands added to the Union. Article VI held that there should be no slavery received in those new states and there were “no southern members of the Congress of Confederation” who “voiced the slightest disapproval of Article VI, which a committee of five, including a South Carolinian and two Virginians” approved.¹³

In 1787, South Carolina enacted a temporary ban on the enslaved persons trade and later in 1788 Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania forbade their citizens from participating in the slave trade.¹⁴ In 1793, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin paved the way for the “cultivation of short-staple cotton through much of the South.”¹⁵ This invention helped make enslavement an embedded institution in the southern landscape because of the profitability that the cotton gin provided. Southern Christians began to see a more entrenched view of slavery at this time within the confines of the church because most, if not all, of the landed elites serving in the churches as elders were enslavers or had business interests that benefited directly from the institution of enslavement. As enslavement became more and more entrenched in the southern landscape, Presbyterian churches in the South began justifying American Page 21 →slavery as biblically supported even though there were important distinctions between enslavement in the near east (BCE), in the Greco-Roman world, and in the Atlantic world and US South. The most important distinctions were that in the seventeenth century sub-Saharan African people were targeted for enslavement because of their race, a trade market developed on the coast of West Africa with European vessels as market drivers, and this market required that human stealing take place to provide the “commodities” for this market.

The abolitionist movement had its early beginnings in 1794 in Philadelphia where the first meeting of the Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies met.¹⁶ In 1800, John Rutledge Jr. of South Carolina opposed an anti-enslavement petition in Congress referring to “this new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality.”¹⁷ As the nineteenth century began, Gabriel Prosser’s plot to take over Richmond, Virginia, via armed enslaved persons, was discovered. William Henry Harrison called a convention and appealed to Congress to suspend the Northwest Ordinance and allow enslaved persons to be in the Indiana Territory. In 1803, after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, South Carolina opened its ports to the African enslavement trade once again after an act of Congress, passed in 1800, made it illegal for Americans to engage in the enslavement trade between two or more nations.¹⁸ There was also a heightened sense of fear throughout the South of enslaved person insurrections. It is in this context that Alexander McLeod made his way into the United States from the highlands of Scotland and penned the discourse entitled Negro Slavery Unjustifiable.

Alexander McLeod was one of twelve McLeod children on the Island of Mull in the Scottish Highlands. There on a small farm on the southwest coast of the island of Ardchrisinish, McLeod grew up. The farm included the southern boundary of the district known as Borlas, which the Duke of Argyle rented to the family. Here Alexander was born on June 12, 1774.¹⁹ His father was a pastor who died when Alexander was young. His mother oversaw his formal education with the help of many tutors. Mcleod’s biographer, Samuel Brown Wylie, wrote, “he was remarkably a child of prayer, and had been devoted to the ministry of the gospel from his birth; and of this object, amidst all the vicissitudes of his early life, he never once lost sight.”²⁰

A letter from Alexander’s brother, a colonel in the army, corroborates this description of McLeod. Colonel McLeod wrote, “From early infancy, my brother was fond of study; and while I was engaged in boisterous and sometimes dangerous sports, he would be picking up scraps and leaves of books. He had a most retentive memory, and as far as I can recollect, he was eager Page 22 →to become a minister of the gospel.”²¹ In 1792, McLeod left from Liverpool to America. He settled in Albany close to the Mohawk River. He soon became connected with other Scottish Highlanders who had emigrated to America. Wylie mentioned that “his manners were agreeable; his mind noble, generous, and ardent. He was affable, condescending, and national. He loved the country of his birth; he loved and cherished his countrymen wherever he met them.”²²

McLeod was a Presbyterian, but he came to this conclusion only from extensive investigation, reasoning, and reflection. After much consideration in the late eighteenth century, he and several of the Scottish immigrants from the Mohawk and Schenectady vicinity adopted the articles and testimony of the RPC. This denomination was ardently biblically orthodox in its focus and held to the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechism as the creed of their church. Most notably the denomination was famous for its musical worship employing only the Bible; therefore it only sang the psalms and without the aid of instruments. The other noteworthy distinction of the PRC was the “Old Scottish Covenanter” view that Jesus was Lord and King over all the earth and therefore any state or nation’s constitution must include this as a basic tenet.²³ Members of the RPC did not run for public office, nor did many of the members vote in elections for a representative that did not hold to these tenets.

Alexander McLeod then came under the tutelage of the Reverend James McKinney, a member of the RPC who had come from Ireland. Alexander attended Union College in Schenectady and graduated with distinguished honors in 1798.²⁴ McLeod then studied theology under Reverend McKinney and read the Bible as well as Francis Turretin’s theology and commentaries. At his ordination McLeod was called upon “to deliver, viva voce, his answers to the Presbytery’s inquiries. Mr. McCleod’s . . . grasp of his subject; his arrangement; his manner of delivery; his self-possession, and the tout ensemble, could leave no doubt on the mind of any intelligent auditor, that he possessed talents of the first order.”²⁵ At this time the RPC denomination was small and mostly located in the Northeast in Vermont, Pennsylvania, and lower New York, but there was also a small covenanter community in South Carolina under the direction of a Mr. King, “who had some time before, as a member of Committee of Scotch Presbytery, arrived in South Carolina.”²⁶

While McLeod was studying theology under McKinney; King had also received a student of divinity in South Carolina, Thomas Donnelly. In 1800, Donnelly became the main pastor for the covenanters in South Carolina, and McLeod labored in the southern part of New York. Later that year “in the fall Page 23 →of 1800, a call was made on Mr. McLeod to the pastoral charge of the united congregations of the City of New York and Coldenham, in Orange County, in the same State. Mr. McLeod demurred, on the plea that there were slaveholders among the subscribers to the call.”²⁷ The issue of enslavement was now before the presbytery, which included a church in the enslavement state of South Carolina.

Wylie noted that “at Mr. Mcleod’s suggestion, the subject was acted upon and this inhuman and demoralizing practice was purged from our connection.”²⁸ Presbytery minutes from February 11, 1801, mentioned that “a petition came in requesting a reconsideration of the business respecting slaveholders, so far as this species of traffic might be supposed to affect Christian communion.”²⁹ The minutes showed “it was agreed upon prior to the further consideration of this subject that all slave-holders in the communion of this church should be warned to attend the next meeting of the committee.”³⁰ On February 18, the presbytery met, and the minutes recorded “it was unanimously agreed that enslaving these, our African brethren, is an evil of enormous magnitude, and that none who continue in such a gross departure, from humanity and the dictates of our benevolent religion, can have any just title to communion in this church.”³¹

Wylie described the presbytery’s position: “It only required to be mentioned. There was no dissenting voice in condemning the nefarious traffic in human flesh. From that period forward, none either practicing or abetting slavery in any shape, has been found on the records of our ecclesiastical connection.”³² What would this mean for the RPC in South Carolina, most of whose membership were practicing holders of enslaved persons? First, it is important to understand McLeod’s position, which became the accepted RPC view on enslavement. Indeed examining Negro Slavery Unjustifiable, it is important to understand that this was McLeod’s first publication. Yet as Wylie noted “It is true, the style and phraseology, have a few vestiges of the author’s juvenescence; but many characteristics of powerful discrimination and cogent deduction exist.”³³

Dwight Lowell Dumond discussed McCleod’s discourse in Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America. Dumond mentioned McLeod as one who fought for anti-enslavement in the early nineteenth century: “He went on to become one of the leading preachers in the country, a powerful champion of individual freedom.” Further “he denounced slavery as immoral, contrary to the rights of man, and destructive of intellectual powers and finer sensibilities. The most important part of his argument, however, was his emphasis Page 24 →upon the way in which the inferiority of the Negroes to the whites had been so grossly exaggerated.”³⁴ Dumond emphasized the importance of the discourse by pointing out that it was “published in eleven separate editions, the last in 1863.” Dumond also noted that the discourse was important because “it went beyond slavery itself to the more fundamental and lasting doctrine of racial inferiority.”³⁵

After Alexander McLeod received a call to pastor a church in Orange County, New York, “he perceived among the subscribers the names of some whom he knew to be holders of slaves. He doubted the consistency of enslaving the Negroes with the Christian system, and was unwilling to enter into a full ecclesiastic communion with those who continued the practice.”³⁶ C. Vann Woodward argued that “the party that led the Northern crusade against slavery has not come off well at the hands of the new revisionists who have been emphasizing the pervasiveness of anti-Negro sentiment in Northern society.”³⁷ Indeed McLeod was reacting just as much against the New York view of the enslaved African Americans as much he was the southern and South Carolina view.

Negro Slavery Unjustifiable is a discourse that McLeod intended for the elders, the members of the church, as well as the greater denomination about his sentiments regarding enslavement. As his prime text, McLeod chose Exodus 21:16: “He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, shall surely be put to death.” McLeod went on to argue against American enslavement from several passages in the Bible, which made his discourse novel and ahead of his time. McLeod made many arguments against enslavement in the discourse, but there are five which should be given particular attention.

The first argument McLeod presented was that to hold any man in perpetual enslavement was sinful. McLeod here presented the natural rights of humans whom God made in the image of him and as a bearer of the imago dei. Therefore “one’s life and his faculties are the gift of God. Considering man a free agent, by the constitution of nature he has a right to the exercise of freedom, in conformity to the precepts of that law by which the author of nature has ordered him to regulate his actions.”³⁸ McLeod here addressed the deeper issue of the total removal of freedom that the American peculiar institution inherently lacked. For McLeod this went against God’s nature, which gave humans freedom and made them active agents. To be sure, enslavement was “an attempt to reduce a moral agent to a mere machine, whose motions are to be regulated by external force; and, consequently a denial of his right to the person enslaved.”³⁹ It is important to note that this was another distinction from ancient slavery Page 25 →in the Near East or in the Greco-Roman period. Both societies held enslaved persons for a time, but neither held people in bondage for their entire lives with no hope of manumission or that of their children or children’s children. In American enslavement, one’s race meant that enslavement was forever and generational down to one’s children’s children with no hope of freedom.

A second argument from McLeod’s discourse was that American enslavement had a definite and clearly defined racial element. McLeod noted that “right stands opposite and contrary to right” and that if “I have a right to enslave and sell you, you have an equal right to enslave and sell me. The British have a right to enslave the French, and the French the British—the Americans the Africans, and the Africans the Americans.” ⁴⁰ Very few if any pro-enslavement advocates would have been willing to admit that Americans, British, or French citizens could be forced into enslavement by Africans. Indeed the notion that an Anglo of European descent could be taken in bondage into enslavement by an African was both unthinkable and preposterous in the context of the nineteenth century. This meant that pro-enslavement Europeans and Americans believed that there was an inherent subservience within the African race, that somehow Africans were a debased form of humanity who should be treated as animals or livestock. As McLeod insightfully noted, “Such absurdity will meet with few advocates to plead its cause in theory.”⁴¹ Thus, McLeod was arguing that the entire system of enslavement in the Atlantic world, beginning in the early seventeenth century, was racially driven and therefore constructed based on the perceived racial inferiority of the sub-Saharan African. It is important to note here that to believe in this system and practice it, one had to believe in White or European superiority and African or African American inferiority. This system therefore makes it a racially driven or White supremacist system.⁴²

A third argument, made by many later abolitionists, was that the practice of enslaving men and women stood equally opposed to the general tenor of scripture as well as against four precepts of the Decalogue. As the abolitionist and Virginian Presbyterian George Bourne stated in 1845, “Slavery, however supported by use of ‘isolated passages,’ is against the spirit of the Scriptures.”⁴³ Here McLeod made use of various texts such as Acts 17:26; Jesus’s statements of the golden rule; James 2:10; as well as the fifth, sixth, eighth and tenth commandments to show the general crux of scripture as against enslavement. McCleod found it clear from the overall theme of Jesus’ teachings as well as of God’s character throughout the Bible that holding men in perpetual bondage without the hope of freedom based solely on race was inimical to the biblical Page 26 →and Judeo-Christian ethic as well as to the overall thrust of scripture: freedom in Christ.

The last argument from McLeod was “the pernicious consequences of the system of slavery”⁴⁴ on humans and a society in which enslavement was prevalent. This was a rather large category in McLeod’s argument but is also the most cogent and inventive. The first point under this larger framework was that “this practice has a tendency to destroy the finer feelings and render the heart of man more obdurate.”⁴⁵ McLeod compared the owner of enslaved persons to the butcher or the executioner who becomes desensitized to death and blood. He described their demeanors in detail: how their attitudes remained immovable even when faced with physical torture and cries of those killed, lashed, and beaten. Mcleod again referred to the racial aspect of enslavement in the midst of this argument mentioning that, “the slave-holder views all the Ethiopian race as born to serve. His heart is steeled against them.”⁴⁶ This argument contained much depth and foresight in that it not only mentioned the hardened heart toward physical violence, but it also provided an understanding of a racist worldview undergirding the ethos of American enslavement and how this racist worldview ran counter to biblical teaching. Thus McLeod seemed to possess a very full understanding of enslavement in the nineteenth century. To be sure men like McLeod and others knew that race was a major factor, and this was evidenced in his argument.⁴⁷

For McLeod, one race could not hold another in perpetual enslavement for centuries without developing some demented, backward, and hateful views of another race. The owner’s heart was not only hardened to the physical torture that he or she was implementing but also became hardened to the possibility that the African American could be just as free, imaginative, intelligent, and industrious as himself or herself. This would also have implications for the role of the African American church member. There would be questions by many White southerners as to the ability of African Americans to serves as pastors, teachers, and elders. Thus sown into the fiber of the American enslaver’s understanding of the enslaved African American were the seeds of a racist ideology that have blossomed into poisoned fruit even into today’s cultural, political, social, economic, and religious landscape.

McLeod concluded that enslavement “debases a part of the human race and tends to destroy their intellectual and active powers.”⁴⁸ Wherever Christianity has gone, in the post-Reformation period, it has encouraged education and literacy among the people exposed to it. For McLeod enslavement in America was inconsistent with church history and the church’s interest in promoting Page 27 →biblical literacy and understanding. McLeod wrote, “The slave, from his infancy, is obliged implicitly to obey the will of another. There is no circumstance, which can stimulate him to exercise his own intellectual powers. The energies of his mind are left to slumber. Every attempt is made to smother them.”⁴⁹ Not only is this treatment inconsistent with the history of the Christian church, but it is also inconsistent with the orthodox Christian teaching of God’s design in Genesis of humans as thinking, acting, and creative individuals made in God’s image. For McLeod the dehumanizing effects of American enslavement were a direct contradiction to the creation ordinances of God. According to Genesis God created humans to have dominion over creation and to exercise their talents, gifts, and creative powers over the earth as a reflection of and image bearer of God. American enslavement, as McLeod pointed out, robbed humans of this privilege intended for them by God and stood in stark contradiction to the most basic principles of the biblical creation ordinances. For McLeod then the Christian church could not tolerate American enslavement as it existed in early nineteenth-century America.

McLeod then went on to anticipate expected objections and answers. One of the points was an answer to the distinction between humans and enslaved humans. McLeod asserted that “the inferiority of the blacks to the whites has been greatly exaggerated.”⁵⁰ Americans at this time thought that a less technologically advanced civilization possessed an inherent incapability in the human intellect of that given civilization. McLeod disposed of this argument by citing the works of Phillis Wheatly, the eighteenth-century American poet, which evidenced for McLeod that “the negroes are not destitute of poetic genius.”⁵¹ McLeod also rightly noted that it did not matter what the intellectual capabilities of a certain civilization were; humans inherently possess “moral sentiments, and a free agent. He has a right, from the constitution given him by the Author of Nature, to dispose of himself, and be his own master in all respects, except in violating the will of heaven.”⁵²

McLeod also made use of a very modern argument for his time. He referenced recent studies of New Guinea’s inhabitants. These studies displayed that all humans around the world were different in appearance because of “the action of the elements on the human body, the diet and manners of men, are causes sufficient to account for that change in the organization of bodies which gives them a tendency to absorb the rays of light. A difference in these can make a distinction in the same latitude.”⁵³ McLeod went on to argue the changes that occurred in groups over twenty to thirty centuries due to the climate and diet, but that these changes do not affect persons’ intellectual capabilities, nor did it Page 28 →affect the dignity that is due to them for simply being human and bearing the imago dei.

McLeod went on to anticipate the argument that many southern theologians, most notably including Robert L. Dabney in the 1840s and 1850s, offered as a reason for the biblical justification for the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. Many southern, as well as some northern, theologians claimed that the curse of Noah in Genesis 9:25–27 was the reason for the Africans’ subservient state. Those who would later be opposed to McLeod would claim that the African race was Ham’s posterity. McLeod virtually dismembered this argument on four grounds.

In order to justify Negro slavery from this prophecy, it will be necessary to prove four things. 1. That all the posterity of Canaan were devoted to suffer slavery. 2. That African negroes are really descended of Canaan. 3. That each of the descendants of Shem and Japheth has a moral right to reduce any of them to servitude. 4. That every slave-holder is really descended from Shem or Japheth. Want of proof in any of these particulars will invalidate the whole objection.⁵⁴

McLeod continued to show in the subsequent pages how ridiculous and false this argument was for the justification of the American trade in enslaved persons since none of the particulars above either historically or archeologically applied to American Whites or American African men or either’s ancestry.

McLeod closed with a plea to those holders of enslaved persons in his church and in America. He wrote, may God, “enable you to maintain an honorable testimony against the abominable usurpation. Be merciful to them. Cultivate their understandings. Make them feel themselves to be men. Raise them to the rank, which God has assigned them. Teach them the doctrines of the gospel. Give them habits of industry.”⁵⁵ McLeod then begged holders of enslaved persons to set their men and women free stating, “Sacrifice the property, which the civil law gives you in them, on the altar of religion.”⁵⁶ McLeod concluded his discourse with this poignant indictment of America: “It must appear ridiculous to Europeans ‘to hear an American patriot singing with one hand declarations of independency, and with the other brandishing a whip over an affrighted slave.’ Can you be sincere friends to liberty and order, and tolerate this dreadful traffic?”⁵⁷

It is important to fully understand McLeod’s discourse before examining the events at Rocky Creek in 1802. Indeed the Rev. Thomas Donnelly would use McLeod’s arguments with the RPC’s holding of enslaved persons in South Page 29 →Carolina as the document was central to the presbytery’s decision. McLeod’s discourse was also considerable in that it lent historical significance to the orthodox, biblical Christians who believed in the infallibility of the Bible, held to a traditional understanding of the Westminster Standards, and consequently saw the American enslavement trade as an aberration of the sacred scriptures. The example of McLeod, the RPC, and Rocky Creek are important examples of American Christians in the US South who pushed back against the transatlantic enslavement trade and the domestic institution of enslavement. McLeod’s thinking and arguments, buttressed by the presbytery’s decision to remove holders of enslaved persons from membership, made its way into the hands of Thomas Donnelly in South Carolina at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To be sure the incident at Rocky Creek added to the impact that McLeod’s discourse had on American Reformed Presbyterianism and South Carolina ecclesiastical life.

Rocky Creek Church in South Carolina’s Chester District was located on Little Rocky Creek in the northeastern portion of the state near the border with North Carolina. The history of the church dated back to 1750 with the arrival of immigrants from Pennsylvania and Virginia.⁵⁸ It was the first Presbyterian church settled near this creek just five miles from the Catholic church. One of the early families of the area was John McDonald and his wife, who were killed by the “Cherokee Indians in 1761 and their seven children carried off.”⁵⁹ The settlement grew considerably over the years and the Reverend William Richardson of Waxhaw was the only minister within a hundred miles. In 1772, the Reverend William Martin came from Ireland and became the first covenanting preacher among the people of Rocky Creek.⁶⁰

The first church building was a log facility, which the British burned down during the 1780 American Revolution. Lord Cornwallis took the Reverend William Martin prisoner and released him at Winnsboro. Because of the “disturbed state of the country,” Martin went to Mecklenburg, North Carolina. Martin ended up coming back to Rocky Creek after the war, but the church sent him away after a short spell due to his “intemperance.” The Reverend William King along with the Committee of Scotch Reformed Presbyterians joined Reverend Martin in 1792. In the 1790s “the majority of the members of the (Reformed Presbyterian) church in North America” in the US South “were at this time in South Carolina.”⁶¹

However, the people in Rocky Creek Presbyterian’s demeanor and disposition toward McLeod’s position must be somewhat attributed to Reverend James McKinney’s work and preaching; he was the same man mentioned earlier as Page 30 →McLeod’s theological mentor. The Reverend D. S. Faris, in his history of the RPC in South Carolina, noted that McKinney was “very magnanimous. They flocked to his preaching from all quarters.” In 1801, sixteen elders at Rocky Creek are listed, a number that would most likely represent a rather sizable community. Reverend Thomas Donnelly was “ordained and installed pastor of Rocky Creek and vicinity, March 3, 1801.”⁶² Reverend McKinney died in August 1803, and the brunt of responsibility for ministry of the RPC in South Carolina fell to Mckinney’s fellow pastor, Reverend Thomas Donnelly.

Thomas Donnelly received his education in Glasgow, Scotland, and finished training in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He then studied theology under the Reverend William King and was among McLeod, Black, and Wylie when they were going through ordination in 1799 at Coldenham. Donnelly was noted as the “divine” of the group, while McLeod was known as the “orator.”⁶³ His contemporaries knew him as a “true and superior theologian.” After the famous declaration of the Coldenham Presbytery of 1801 regarding enslavement, the presbytery sent a note to every member of the congregation in South Carolina involved in the enslavement trade. The note included the following:

Sir, you are hereby informed, that none can have communion in this church who hold slaves. You must therefore immediately have it registered, that your slaves are freed, before the sacrament (communion). If any difficulty arises to you in the manner of doing it, then you are desired to apply to the Committee of Presbytery, who will give directions in any circumstances of a doubtful nature in which you may be involved, in carrying this injunction into execution.⁶⁴

As the communion season was coming soon in South Carolina, Donnelly and the church of Rocky Creek decided that they needed to figure out how to emancipate their enslaved persons before the sacrament was dispensed. Faris noted that “said bonds be in the meantime delivered into the hands of Rev. Thomas Donnelly and that Thomas Donnelly, John McNinch, and Robert Hemphill be appointed to a committee to inquire into the peculiar circumstances of each of the slaves to be liberated, as also into the true legal forms of emancipation.”⁶⁵ One significant issue was that the men and women of the church did not question the presbytery’s decision even though they likely would have been the victims of derision in South Carolina. In addition the economic loss would occur, which would have come with manumission as enslaved people were kept as both property and investments. Their children were an investment in future property and potential for economic growth.

Page 31 →It would have been relatively easy for the church members to attend another Presbyterian church such as the Associate Reformed or even another RPC church that had split from Rocky Creek in 1798 due to political dissent. Nevertheless the members and session at Rocky Creek decided, “the intentions of the Reformed Presbytery in purging out the accursed thing from among them may be carried into the most speedy effect.”⁶⁶ Samuel Wylie noted that a committee from the RPC Presbytery was commissioned to go south on a rather hazardous journey from the northeast traveling through Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, and into South Carolina. They made it to Rocky Creek where Wylie mentioned that they were “kindly received and hospitably entertained” by a covenanter, Mr. Quinn.⁶⁷

Before the next communion, the committee reported to the church at Rocky Creek that the last meeting of the Coldenham Presbytery decided “respecting slaveholders, declaring that such must either immediately emancipate their slaves, or be refused admission to the Lord’s Table.”⁶⁸ Wylie stated that the committee was “no less surprised than delighted, to find with what alacrity those concerned came forward and complied with the decree of the Presbytery. In one day, it is believed, that in the small community of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, not less than three thousand guineas were sacrificed on the altar of principle.”⁶⁹

Faris’s history of the RPC Church in South Carolina noted that the committee representing the presbytery was “given orders on this matter” and “empowered by Presbytery to abolish enslavement in the church.”⁷⁰ Wylie declared, “a nobler, more generous and magnanimous people, than these South Carolinians, are seldom met with in any community” and he went on to name a few of the church members including, “the Mcmillan’s, the Kell’s, the Cooper’s, the Orr’s, and the Neil’s.”⁷¹ Howe’s history of Presbyterians in South Carolina also mentioned the Kell family, who “owned a negro at that time and freed her.”⁷²

One result was that the enslaved African Americans who received their freedom were invited to join the church as ecclesiastical equals. Faris noted that “some of the slaves then freed also became members of the church. Three children of Will and his wife, the former set free by James Hunter, and the latter by John McDill, are now members of Church Hill congregation in Illinois.”⁷³ The Carolina Covenanters continued in the belief that enslavement was an inhuman abomination in society and claimed some notoriety for their aiding and abetting fugitive enslaved persons in South Carolina. Faris mentioned that “the underground railroad found its most daring conductors and station Page 32 →agents among the Carolina Covenanters” of South Carolina’s Chester District. Later Faris noted that “having abolished slavery among themselves, they were not ashamed to be called abolitionists; and they were not afraid to incur the wrath of citizens and civil officers by helping the fugitives. It was part of their religion.”⁷⁴ However, a few members, according to Howe, “refused to submit to the regulations, believing that the scriptures justified the possession of the heathen, whom they as teachers, were civilizing and Christianizing. It would be, they thought, as cruel to free them as to turn a child out to buffet with the world.”⁷⁵

Donnelly continued in his fervent disdain of the institution of enslavement throughout his life. Some of Donnelly’s contemporaries heard that “he had always consistently opposed the iniquitous institution, his severe denunciations and arguments were overlooked, with some such remark as, ‘Oh, it is only old Donnelly, let it go;’ while if a Northern man has said the same thing it would have secured him a coat of tar and feathers.”⁷⁶ Donnelly’s son would later become a Presbyterian minister, not in the RPC tradition, and a holder of enslaved persons. The two would argue the points of biblical holding of enslaved persons as well as the precedents set by Christians who were holders of enslaved persons, and the father replied, “It may be so, but a slaveholder amongst Christians is like a black swan in the flock.”⁷⁷

Because of the Carolina Covenanters’ views on enslavement, many were forced, whether it was pressure from their neighbors or by the civil authorities, to leave their native state and flee South Carolina. Faris noted that his father, “The Rev. James Faris used to say that he would have made the south his home, had it not been for the danger to his family through the temptations held out by the peculiar institution.”⁷⁸ In 1847, Thomas Donnelly died and was buried by the few remaining covenanters near Rocky Creek Church beside his wife as well as beside the men who labored as pastors before him, McKinney and King.⁷⁹

It is possible that this “redemption at Rocky Creek” might be overemphasized as a triumphalist anti-enslavement success of just a few southern abolitionists, when in all actuality members of a church were simply submitting to the decisions of their superiors. While there is some truth to this objection, the situation is certainly more complex than at first glance. If the Carolina Covenanters were simply submitting to the presbytery, then why were there members of the church who left? They either objected to the presbytery’s ruling or were not willing to face the social ostracism and public disdain that the faithful at Rocky Creek faced because of their decisions. We must then believe Page 33 →that these Carolina Covenanters were convinced by biblically orthodox principles and Donnelly’s preaching on the matter that enslavement was wrong. If this is the case then the emancipation of slaves at Rocky Creek complicates the historical understanding of how Presbyterians in South Carolina responded to enslavement, at least in one mission church in the Upstate of South Carolina.

A second area of importance is Rocky Creek’s place in historical research considering orthodox Christians and anti-enslavement. Many historians, such as Mitchell Snay, Eugene Genovese, and Larry Tise, have noted Christian clergy who took a biblical pro-enslavement stance. However few historians have taken up the charge of presenting biblical, orthodox, Christians in the US South who were involved in the anti-enslavement movement and were successful in promoting slave manumissions from members in their congregations. John Christie and Dwight Dumond have given us the example of the Virginian pastor George Bourne, who presented an overture to the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1815 denouncing holding of enslaved persons.⁸⁰ Lawrence Thomas Lesick has provided us with the case of the Lane Rebels, the Lane Seminary students who risked suspension from school on the grounds of their anti-enslavement sentiments and actions. Gilbert Hobbes Barnes’s The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 also provided “a corrective to the overemphasis that had been placed on the role of William Llyod Garrison”⁸¹ and consequently a shift back to revivalism as a motivator for anti-enslavement. Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery provided the story of evangelical men fighting against enslavement, but it shed little light upon the biblical reasoning for either of Mr. Tappan’s motivations. Ann C. Loveland’s article, “Evangelicalism and the ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought,” “was the first attempt to develop the idea that abolitionists ‘derived the doctrines and methods of immediatism from evangelicalism and . . . prosecuted the antislavery movement as a religious and moral enterprise.’”⁸²

There is still much work to be done on the role of the orthodox, reformed, biblical inerrancy-believing confessors to the Westminster Standards who opposed enslavement in the nineteenth century South. These Rocky Creek “rebels” add to the historical scholarship done on the role of evangelicalism, southern religion, and social reform in the US South. The example of the Carolina Covenanters showed that the Bible and Christian theology might contribute to civil rights, justice, liberation, anti-enslavement, and social transformation. The Rocky Creek Covenanters may provide historians with an example of the success, motivations, and tactics of some southern Page 34 →abolitionists in South Carolina. These incidents of abolitionists swaying the opinions of southerners toward their positions are rare, but the success of Alexander McLeod and Thomas Donnelly, while small, is noteworthy.

This incident set a precedent for how one could achieve anti-enslavement success in a Presbyterian mission church in South Carolina and the broader US South. The Reformed Presbyterian Church sent missionaries into South Carolina to live among holders of enslaved persons and to proclaim a biblically orthodox position on enslavement. Donnelly was ordained in New York State, lived among his neighbors, ministered to them, preached in their churches on Sundays, conducted their weddings and funerals, and became a leader in their community. Slowly through preaching and ministering he convinced his congregants of the biblical rejection for human enslavement as it existed in the American South. When it came time for the presbytery to abolish enslavement in the churches, most of the Rocky Creek members adhered to their decision without dissent or protest. In addition when Donnelly was publicly vocal about his abolitionist tendencies, he would only elicit the response, “It’s only old Donnelly; leave him alone.” This pastor, shepherd, and flock provided an example and a historical precedent for future Presbyterian South Carolinians that this pathway was possible. A shepherd did not have to always let wolves in to ravage the flock. He could stand at the door and protect them.

By the 1830s abolitionist movement’s high-water mark the system of enslavement was much more entrenched in South Carolina. The proliferation and production of cotton due to Eli Whitney’s invention would have made it close to impossible to achieve a similar result in Charleston or the Lowcountry. However perhaps these Carolina Covenanters provided an example that could have been followed or at least a precedent that would make later pro-enslavement persons at least question their stance. The Redeemers at Rocky Creek are men and women who fought for the rights of the enslaved in their own ecclesiastical contexts in South Carolina in 1802. The larger flock was against slavery, the shepherd preached against slavery, the sheep listened, and the wolves were kept at bay.

Many shepherds ministered to South Carolina White immigrant, Native American, and African American communities. Because of the RPC’s strong stance and McLeod’s arguments, which won the day in the presbytery, Donnelly and other shepherds were able to keep the savage wolves at bay for a time. They could have simply offered the wolves a preference in their church body amenable to a South Carolina population that preferred gaining wealth on the total enslavement of African Americans. By doing this they possibly could Page 35 →have grown the flock and achieved “success” by the standards of how some shepherds measure church “success.”

However McLeod and Donnelly challenged these ideas and the Chester Covenanters of South Carolina, stand as an example of what can happen when a church lives out the principles it claims to follow.

The Rocky Creek mission kept the same categories for membership whether someone was White or African American. Further Donnelly and McLeod set a precedent for other Presbyterians in South Carolina to follow. They created a road map for other missionaries so that a church might exist as a representative in the deep South to disturb and disrupt the institution of enslavement. For these missionaries the savage wolves at the door were rabid, but the shepherds provided protection to the sheep under their care at great cost. Sadly even with this precedent future missionaries in South Carolina would allow savage wolves to come into their flocks and feast upon their sheep. They would not be willing to sacrifice economic growth and entrenched views on race to make room in the flock for all the sheep. Some Presbyterian missionaries in South Carolina would stay home and minister directly to enslaved African Americans. Others would move out to the western regions of South Carolina to minister to Native Americans.