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Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves: Presbyterian Domestic Missionaries and Race in South Carolina, 1802–1874: Notes

Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves: Presbyterian Domestic Missionaries and Race in South Carolina, 1802–1874
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table of contents
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction Southern Religion and Domestic Missions to Enslaved Persons
  7. Chapter 1. “A Black Swan in the Flock”: Race and Enslavement in Rocky Creek, South Carolina, 1801–2
  8. Chapter 2. “The Father of Native American Missions in Western South Carolina”: T. C. Stuart and the Chickasaw Mission in Western South Carolina before Removal, 1819–34
  9. Chapter 3. “To and Fro Like a Forest in a Storm”: Antebellum Missionary Activity in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, 1829–47
  10. Chapter 4. “We Are Marching to Zion”: Antebellum Missionaries in Charleston, South Carolina, 1847–60
  11. Chapter 5. “Still in Its Bud in Our Every Heart”: Postbellum Multiethnic Worship in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865–74
  12. Chapter 6. “The Evils Which Now Oppress Us”: Southern Civil Religion and the Lost Cause
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index

Page 197 →Notes

Introduction: Southern Religion and Domestic Missions to Enslaved Persons

  1. 1. Joshua 4:1–7 (English Standard Version Bible).
  2. 2. Luke 15:6 (English Standard Version Bible).
  3. 3. Presbyterian Church in American, Book of Church Order. Lawrenceville, GA: Presbyterian Church of America: ch. 8-1.
  4. 4. Revelation 7:9 (English Standard Version Bible).
  5. 5. Sean Michael Lucas, For A Continuing Church: The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015).
  6. 6. Racial Reconcilation (2002). https://pcahistory.org/pca/studies/race.html; Personal Resolution on Civil Rights Remembrance (2015), https://www.pcahistory.org/topical/race/2015_Personal%20Resolution%20on%20Civil%20Rights%20Remembrance.pdf.
  7. 7. The PCA called for a committee to write a report on racial and ethnic reconciliation to the forty-sixth General Assembly. The report contains a survey from over five thousand pastors and ruling elders in the denomination on their views on race. The report was accepted in omnibus at the forty-sixth General Assembly in Atlanta, but members of the committee were called “critical race theorists, communists, radicals and progressives,” which are all considered pejorative terms in the PCA. https://resources.pcamna.org/resource/report-on-racial-and-ethnic-reconciliation/.
  8. 8. Acts 20:29–30 (English Standard Version Bible).
  9. 9. Luke 4:18–20 (English Standard Version Bible).
  10. 10. Baird transcript (2015). https://www.pcahistory.org/topical/race/2015_Baird_transcript.pdf.
  11. 11. Report on Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation (2018). https://resources.pcamna.org/resource/report-on-racial-and-ethnic-reconciliation/
  12. 12. The Christian believes that before regeneration or rebirth a person is a slave to sin, is not free, and is a child of wrath. Christians, especially Presbyterians in the nineteenth century, believed that one could only truly be free in Christ. This is one of the reasons why Presbyterians took up the missionizing of slaves in the early to mid-nineteenth century. They truly believed that they were liberating the souls of enslaved Africans and thus doing something socially aware and just. However they either did not recognize, were culturally captive to, or simply ignorant of the fact that they were simultaneously desiring to free people from sin yet keeping them enslaved in body. This is not consistent with Christianity. This is instructive for Christians and all human institutions today that we can say we believe one thing and yet live in a way that completely contradicts those principles and be completely blind to it.
  13. 13. Page 198 →Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Southern Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 245–46. Loveland forged a three-pronged conceptualization of enslaved persons missions. Before this work it was widely believed that enslaved Africans worshipped either in white-led mixed churches or in “chapels” set up on larger, more rural plantations. Loveland also pointed out that some congregations created actual separate congregations for the enslaved Africans themselves. These types of churches were rare throughout the 1830s and 1840s according to Loveland, and many early missionaries such as James O. Andrews and Charles Colcock Jones opposed this idea of separation in worship. However into the 1850s the model of the church built separately for enslaved Africans was a collective “decided improvement” over the models that tended to be more laborious for the missionary to enslaved persons. Finally Loveland did an excellent job of pointing out the various ways in which an individual could work as a enslaved persons missionary. According to Loveland they were not all puppets of the planter class, nor were they all anti-enslavement progressives. However some did seem to be more passionate about working with enslaved African Americans. An enslaved persons missionary who perhaps was trying to mitigate the effects of enslavement believed that Christianity was liberating of the soul. This type of missionary moved in two separate spheres of influence to placate southern whites while also working to alleviate the condition of enslaved African Americans.
  14. 14. There are so many historiographical threads running throughout this study that it is too difficult to limit the scope of the work to only one historiographical discussion. Therefore, to better engage in an ongoing historical dialogue, this work fits best under the broad historiographical category of southern religion. However, the historiographical framework for this research fits within a period of the nineteenth century, from 1802 to 1874, specifically focusing on antebellum southern religion, race, and mission spaces. Focusing the historiographical scope to the antebellum South from 1802 to Reconstruction is necessary because it places the study in a particular framework under a two very broad lenses: antebellum southern religion and religion in the South during Reconstruction. It is necessary to have some understanding of the religious context of the South during Reconstruction since the research carries the relationships forged in multiracial antebellum mission churches beyond the Civil War and into the Reconstruction. Further the institution of enslavement is so dominant in the antebellum southern landscape and plays such a vital role in southern religion during this period that the religion of enslaved African Americans and the historiography of slave missions are central to understanding the context of domestic Presbyterian missionaries in South Carolina. Certainly there are multiple other historical discussions that touch on this topic, but antebellum southern religion with a particular focus on the southern religious frameworks of enslaved African Americans and Native Americans is a lens that best fits for the purposes of this work.
  15. 15. John Boles, ed. A Companion to the American South (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), ch. 10. See also Randy Spark’s “Historiography of Southern Religion,” in Page 199 →Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, eds. John Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 156–57. In this historiographical essay focusing on antebellum southern religion, Randy Sparks noted that the entire notion of southern religion was built on an idea of “southern exceptionalism: that there is a unique region called the South with a distinctive history worthy of examination on its own terms.” As the field of southern history developed over time, so has its importance in a national Atlantic world and global perspectives. For Sparks southern religion has been an integral part of the developing global South. Indeed as Sparks mentioned, “the importance of religious institutions and refugees within it, offers exciting possibilities for the integration of southern religious history into a larger, more comprehensive theoretical framework.” Sparks saw the colonial era placing the South as an important sphere in European religious history, the Atlantic world as well as linking it to Spanish South America and the British West Indies. Therefore a multireligious Atlantic world was the context that linked Europe, South America, and Africa to the United States South. This world informs and helps create the context for Charleston, South Carolina as a home for Barbadian planters, Anglicans, and large numbers of enslaved Africans. Sparks corroborated for southern religious history what historian Jon Butler argued about American religious history in Awash in a Sea of Faith: that a transatlantic focus was absolutely sine qua non for understanding the history of religion. Part of this focus was the close cultural connections between the Americas and Europe, the conscious attempt on the part of the Americans to follow European models, as well as the “overwhelmingly derivative” nature of American society. However the role of western Africa, the experiences of enslaved people in the British West Indies, and the influence of the Spanish in early South Carolina with Native Americans also played a tremendous role on the religious landscape of South Carolina. Both Sparks and John Boles place the beginning of historical attention to southern religion in the 1960s. Kenneth K. Bailey, Samuel Hill, and John Boles all began publishing works on southern white Protestantism and southern churches in crisis and revival in the mid- to late 1960s. The field of southern religion has grown tremendously over the last several decades as scholars continue to place the American religious experience into larger and more comprehensive frameworks. Virtually no limits will exist to understanding, tracing, and conceptualizing the impact of southern religion throughout the last four hundred years in an Atlantic and even global context.
  16. 16. Charles R. Wilson, ed. Religion in the US South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 41–44. This work was adapted in part from C. Eric Lincoln’s larger work Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.). Charles Reagan Wilson edited a collection of essays with chapters from John Boles, Samuel Hill, Edwin Gaustad, and J. Wayne Flint entitled Religion in the South, which is a collection of essays that came out of the Porter L. Fortune Chancellor’s Symposium on Southern History Series at the University of Mississippi and published Page 200 →through the University Press of Mississippi. This book positions religion in the South as a powerful force adding to the region’s distinctive culture. The focus was on different time periods, the history of evangelicalism, religious diversity of the South, the social gospel in the South, politics and religion, and even geographical distributions of religious groups. The article most pertinent to this book is C. Erin Lincoln’s article on missionary efforts among enslaved African Americans in the US South. Lincoln makes the argument that “by the 1840s the missionary movement among the slaves had the support of most of the denominational churches. The Methodists were most zealous, closely seconded by the Baptists, with the Presbyterians and Episcopalians active but less prominent in the plantation ministry.” Lincoln’s argument is largely connected to the Charles C. Jones model of preaching to the enslaved African Americans on plantations, and he mentions it being “considered by most white clergyman to be a contemptible ministry, if not an actual abuse of the calling.” He does not focus at all on the Presbyterian style but largely examines Methodist and Baptist missions due to the large numbers of attendees. While this is true the Southern Presbyterians tended to “out punch their weight” with theological ability, education, and influence in terms of thought and ideas. Because they were a smaller denomination their impact was theological, writing systematic theology and offering commentaries on the Bible. Southern Presbyterians created unique mission churches with their own theology, ecclesiology, and implantation of that academic work into church life. This makes southern Presbyterians worthy of their own examination on this topic. However Lincoln’s discussion of the invisible church, autonomous African American congregations, and African American ecclesiastical community are very important to the corpus on works on slave missions.
  17. 17. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald Mathews Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Beth Barton Schweiger and Don Mathews also contributed an edited collection of articles on the topic and nature of southern religious history titled Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture. In this book several authors who focus on southern religion such as Paul Harvey, Jon Sensbach, Jerma Jackson, and Emily Bingham examine the development of religion across the US South through three centuries from the early eighteenth century up to the civil rights era.
  18. 18. Charles Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). This book plays a tremendous role in shaping the field of southern religious history particularly on the ways in which whites and enslaved African Americans shared religious worship spaces in the colonia era. While whites and African Americans prayed together, sang together, worshipped and heard many of the same sermons as well as attended similar church functions, Irons argued that the white Protestant owners of enslaved persons became the chief and most virulent defenders of Page 201 →race-based chattel enslavement. Irons also argued that it was enslaved African American evangelicals and their actions that helped shape the nature of pro-enslavement doctrine. When enslaved people participated in different churches, rejected colonization, and promoted autonomous congregations, their actions displayed to white enslavers that the need to control the actions of enslaved people was necessary and defended biblically.
  19. 19. Other important works pertaining to religion in the South and the important role of African Americans include Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Albert Barnes, The Church and Slavery (New York: Negro University Press, 1857); William G. McLoughlin, ed. The American Evangelicals 1800–1900 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); John B. Boles, Black Southerners, 1619–1869. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Robert M. Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); David B. Cheesebrough, Clergy Dissent in the Old South, 1830–1865 (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1996); Kenneth Moore Startup, The Root of All Evil: The Protestant Clergy and the Economic Mind of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Edward R. Crowther, Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2000); Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); One Name but Several Faces: Variety in Popular Christian Denominations in Southern History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Samuel S. Hill, ed., Varieties of Southern Religious Experience (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture 1795–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978); James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Charles Reagan Wilson, ed., Religion in the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); Victor B. Howard, Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837–1861 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990); Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); John R. Mckivigan and Mitchell Snay, Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
  20. 20. John Boles mentioned in Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord that some ministers in biracial churches “placed too much emphasis on the ‘slaves-obey-your-master’ homily and thereby neglected to preach the gospel in its fullness often sought an alternative worship experience.” Other important monographs of slave missions include Milton Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity 1787–1865 (Metuchen, NJ: Page 202 →Scarecrow Press, 1975) and J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Some important articles on slave missions include, Carlton Hayden, “Conversion and Control: Dilemma of Episcopalians in Providing for the Religious Instruction of Slaves, Charleston, South Carolina, 1845–1860,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 36 (March 1967: 35–61), Timothy Reilly, “Slavery and the Southwestern Evangelist in New Orleans (1800–1861),” Journal of Mississippi History 41 (November 1979): 301–18, George C. Whately, “The Alabama Presbyterian and His Slave, 1830–1864,” Alabama Review 13 (January 1960): 40–51. Helpful dissertations include Donald B. Touchstone, “Planters and Slave Religion in the Deep South,” PhD diss., Tulane University, 1973, Marjorie Jordan, “Mississippi Methodists and the Division of the Church over Slavery,” PhD diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1972 and Thomas Erskine Clarke “Thomas Smyth: Moderate of the Old South,” ThD diss., Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, 1970.
  21. 21. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) and Robert M. Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). Two particularly important works on these topics include Rhys Isaac’s Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, and Robert M. Calhoon’s Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South. Isaac’s Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 is a fascinating look at the religious, political, and social revolutions in eighteenth-century Virginia that led to a transformation of class, religious affiliation, and social order. To understand southern religion from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Robert M. Calhoon’s Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South shifts the focus beyond the colonial experience and into the nineteenth century. Calhoon’s book is an investigation of southern evangelicalism as a belief system that could sustain itself within the conservative political environment of the Old South. Like Isaac’s work, Calhoon’s argument about the impact of religion on the South and of the South on religion informs the discussion of nineteenth century missions to enslaved Africans and Native Americans. Indeed, in many ways, the mission churches were countercultural spaces, but the churches also served as places in which southern values shaped the culture.
  22. 22. Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). This reciprocal process was an overarching theme of this book. Making acculturation reciprocal was a key point for Frey and Wood because they believed that if it was not reciprocity then the African Americans were not active agents in participating in Christianization. Additionally Frey and Wood presented a responsible contribution of the roles of women in the African American church. They stated that the role played by African American women was critical in “the formations of revival culture, in the creation of affective ritual worship, in the Page 203 →establishment of institutional foundations of the early black church, and in the dissemination of religious values within and between generations.”
  23. 23. Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); H. Shelton Smith, In His Image but . . . Racism in Southern Religion, 1780–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); Kenneth K. Bailey, “The Post-Civil War Separations in Southern Protestantism: Another Look,” Church History, XLVII (December 1977); Timothy John Nelson, “Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Religious Ritual in an African American Congregation,” PhD diss., University of Chicago (1997); Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole, Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005); Mark Kelly Tyler, “Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: The Life of a 19th Century Educational Leader, 1811–1865,” PhD diss., University of Dayton, (2006).
  24. 24. Important works in Presbyterian history as well as Presbyterianism’s role in African American history as well as in South Carolina include John B. Adger, My Life and Times, 1810–1899 (Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899); Henry Alexander White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders (New York: Neale Publishing, 1911); Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 3 vols (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1963); F.D. Jones and W.H. Mills, eds., History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina Since 1850 (Columbia, SC: R. L. Bryan, 1926); Randall Balmer and John R. Fitzmier, The Presbyterians (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993); William J. Weston, Presbyterian Pluralism: Competition in a Protestant House (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); James O. Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henry Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); and Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
  25. 25. John Boles’s important collection of essays on slave missions entitled Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord has been important to the development of the historiography as well. Indeed, it called for historians to pay more attention to the role of religion in examining the institution of enslavement. The book also dealt specifically with biracial churches and the “white mission to the slaves.” Boles showed that early owners of enslaved persons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were hesitant to attempt the conversion of enslaved Africans. Like Raboteau and Genovese, he found “there was no viable religious institution to incorporate the two races into one worshipping community.” It was not until the early to mid-nineteenth century, with many southerners feeling compelled to justify the institution to northern abolitionists, that there was a movement towards the religious instruction of enslaved Africans. However Page 204 →Boles’s exposition of slave missions painted a much different picture of slave missionaries. For instance, Boles noted the “limited emancipationist impulse” of many missionaries to enslaved persons who “tended to criticize slavery in the abstract, delineate its evils both to the slaves and even more to the whites, emphasize that slaves were persons with souls precious in the sight of God, and suggest that slavery be ended ‘insofar as practicable.’” This pointed to a position that missionaries to enslaved persons were not clear-cut representatives or supporters of the institution and that there were those whose economic position even “enabled them to see blacks as potential fellow believers.” Indeed Boles pointed to the expanded freedoms evident within these biracial churches arguing that, “it is still fair to say that nowhere else in southern society were they [enslaved Africans] treated so nearly as equals.” Boles went on to argue that the biracial churches “offered a spark of joy in the midst of pain, a promise of life-affirming forgiveness to soften the hopelessness of unremitting bondage, an ultimate reward in heaven for unrewarded service in this world.” For Boles, these biracial slave missions constituted the only avenues in which enslaved Africans experienced any sort of equality.
  26. 26. Jane Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 131; Victor B. Howard, Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837–1861 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). Clarke, Howard, and Cornelius furthered the historiography of slave missions. Cornelius’s monograph Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South has been an important reexamination of the role of missionaries to enslaved persons and their interactions with enslaved Africans toward the process of Christianization. Cornelius built on Frey’s and Wood’s contention that Christianity was a religion in which Whites and Blacks shared reciprocity. Indeed through the interaction of Whites and Blacks, of enslaved Africans, pietistic planters, and pastors, of European interpretations of Christianity and African customs, a unique African American church came into being. “European American Christianity in the South” was “transformed by its interaction with the black church. The slave missions, with all their contradictions, were the vehicles through which this interaction took place when the black church became a reality in the years immediately before freedom.” Cornelius also examined the postbellum period by looking at colonization, mass emigration, relations between the newly freed persons and their old “pastors” and the freedom that was found in the African American Church during Reconstruction. The overarching theme of Cornelius’s work was that a very complex relationship existed between missionaries to slaved persons, their enslaved congregants, and the planter elite who allowed or did not allow the missionaries onto their plantations. Cornelius’s missionaries were introducing slaves to print culture, advocating reading in violation of state law, and hiring Princeton-trained graduates to teach on their plantations. Page 205 →Further Cornelius found that missionaries were sometimes beaten, ridiculed, and denounced as enemies of enslavement. She specifically focused on the work of Charles C. Jones, William Capers, Richard Fuller, Stephen Elliott, Basil Manly, Thomas Clay, and John Hartwell Cocke. Their work, Cornelius claimed, was “‘enigmatic’ because studying their contradictions is fascinating, but perplexing.” Indeed “conclusions about the white missionaries’ motives and accomplishments are difficult to state in simple terms; the goals of the slave missions were primarily spiritual but also secular, with implications for freedom, power, and control.” Cornelius built on the assertion that enslaved African Americans were active participants in “slave missions.” Both African Americans and Whites served as pastors and teachers in this movement. To be sure, blacks also quickly perceived that the slave mission offered them an opportunity to create a small space in the oppressive conditions of slavery: to conduct their own meeting, to take advantage of the privileges of leadership, to seize chances for literacy, and to build the black community.” Experience gained in missions to the enslaved went on to serve the leadership of the emergent African American church after the Civil War. Often the leaders of African American churches became the political, educational, and spiritual leadership of African American communities even into the civil rights movement. Missions to the enslaved, the churches that grew out of them, and early education provided by them were places that yielded racially integrated worship as well as an independent African American leadership base into the twentieth century. Also some missionaries wanted to see an end to the institution and thought like New Orleans Methodist clergyman Holland McTyeire that the “church was the only possible theatre for the slave’s ambition.” Cornelius spent much time in Slave Missions discussing the importance of Charles Colcock Jones, the “father of slave missions” and “the apostle to the Negro slaves.” Jones had a tremendous influence on John Girardeau as his mentor and cousin. Indeed Jones who became “Georgia’s most devoted missionary to the slaves” conducted the most groundbreaking work in missions to the enslaved throughout the South in the nineteenth century. As has been shown previously religion and enslavement have long been important historiographical themes. However while scholarship has addressed the role of missionaries to the enslaved it has not dealt exhaustively with the variance of conflicting philosophies within the body of missionaries, pastors, and lay ministers working with enslaved Africans.
  27. 27. Early historiography of southern religion includes the following publications: Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); Samuel S. Hill, Jr., Southern Churches in Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966); Lester B. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches in Early America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1975); Samuel S. Hill, ed., On Jordan’s Stormy Banks Religion in the South: A Southern Exposure Profile (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983); E. Brooks Hollifield, Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978); Charles R. Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 Page 206 →(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); James O. Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henry Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997); Eugene Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Erksine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); C. N. Willborn, “John L. Girardeau: Pastor to Slaves and Theologian of Causes,” PhD diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 2003.
  28. 28. Charles R. Wilson “Southern Religion(s),” in Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Steve Longenecker, Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023). As Charles R. Wilson argued there is a trifocal vision of religion in the postwar South. The Confederate vision grasps a divine purpose in the result of the Civil War: the purification of White southerners for a future righteous cause. The northern missionaries had a particular vision: reconciliation of North and South and conversion of White and Black southerners to a “truer” religion than they had known before the Civil War. Finally the evangelical freed people’s vision created separate religious denominations from those of Whites, institutionalizing their dreams of ecclesiastical independence. The Confederate vision became the triumphant southern position in which religion was used in buttressing the Lost Cause. Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy used religious rhetoric to sacralize and memorialize the Confederacy as well as the cause for which it stood. Sanctification of the Confederate experience after the Civil War became one of the orthodoxies at the heart of the southern way of life. African American religion established new denominations and orthodoxies. Freed persons withdrew from biracial churches and sought to control their own religious destinies. The folk spirituality of quarters for enslaved persons merged with organized and orthodox denominational churches. Some leaders championed a social separatism, and others expediently embraced accommodation, but “uplift” was the key orthodoxy of the Black church. Steve Longenecker, in his Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction, has made the argument that former Confederate chaplains are important figures in understanding the Lost Cause. He argues that some chaplains defended the Lost Cause and that others were more progressive and advocated theological liberalism leading into the twenty-first century. His chapter on John L. Girardeau, Moses Drury Hoge, and George Gilman Smith, “Nearer My God to Thee,” puts Girardeau in the predictably conservative camp, accepting orthodoxy and Page 207 →resisting religious modernization such as multiethnic worship. Longenecker argued that Girardeau was firmly consistent with the Lost Cause ideology and helped turn the tide in South Carolina toward Wade Hampton and a Democratic victory in the late 1870s. Indeed, “In small ways, then, John Girardeau was atypical . . . but in large ways he was typical.”
  29. 29. Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Paul Harvey’s Redeeming the South examined Black and White Baptists from the end of the Civil War into the 1920s. Harvey found that both denominations in these years became well-organized bureaucracies, with ministers pushing for and achieving professional status. Harvey identified tensions and contradictions such as rural church members continuing to worship in nonmodern ways, and he organized the book as corresponding studies of two Baptist groups (one White, one Black), rather than as an incorporated narrative. Harvey’s model as religion providing a space for interracial interaction in the late nineteenth and twentieth century is useful when considering similar religious spaces in the early nineteenth century. Indeed the church not only provided opportunities for racial uplift in postbellum South but also in the antebellum South. The mission churches were spaces in which African Americans could take advantage of education and leadership opportunities as well as forge relationships with influential Whites, some of whom would later help them to freedom and even legitimize their ecclesiastical status by ordaining them to leadership positions in the church. At this point transitioning into an understanding of the historiography of Native Americans and religion, interracial interaction, and missions’ history might help provide a framework for considering the history of Presbyterian mission stations among the Choctaw and Chickasaw.
  30. 30. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Zondervan, 2019) and Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism suggests that white evangelicalism in the South, as well as the nation at large, connects white evangelical Christians and Protestants with a tendency to compromise on issues of human dignity and equality. Tisby displayed skillfully that a pattern of white supremacy and continuing an oppression of marginalized people of color in America was a kind of modus operandi within White evangelical spaces. Tisby’s chapter on the southern defense of enslavement and the lead up to the Civil War confirms much of what Presbyterian missionaries in the South believed and acted upon. Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America displays how central White supremacy was in southern evangelical thought. Southern pastors and theologians used the Bible to defend enslavement and during Reconstruction used the Bible to justify violence toward African American freedmen as well as removing the franchise from African American citizens. Butler makes the Page 208 →argument that the long history of southern white Protestantism is one firmly rooted in racial division, racial oppression, and the rule of white supremacy and southern Whites participating in these churches adhered to the status quo.
  31. 31. Donald G. Mathews. “Charles Colcock Jones and the Southern Evangelical Crusade to Form a Biracial Community,” Journal of Southern History 41, no. 3 (August 1975): 299.
  32. 32. There were several other anti-enslavement Presbyterian ministers in South Carolina. James Gilleland, member of the South Carolina Presbytery, was summoned and disciplined by the presbytery for preaching anti-enslavement. He appealed the case to the Synod of the Carolinas, but the synod upheld the presbytery’s ruling. The synod stated that Gilleland was free to use his “utmost endeavors in private” if he desired to help enslaved persons. Another included Robert Wilson, a young Presbyterian minister who thought about leaving the state “or the ministry rather than submitting to enforced silence on slavery.” In 1798, Johnathan Edwards encouraged Wilson to “remain in his office, for in private he could still assist like-minded brethren and perhaps lead younger ministers to his way of thinking.” However both ministers ended up leaving South Carolina: Gilleland in 1804 and Wilson in 1805. This is in Essig’s The Bonds of Wickedness, 119–20.
  33. 33. Otis W. Pickett, Encyclopedia of Mississippi History, “Stuart, Thomas C.” (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi).

Chapter 1: “A Black Swan in the Flock”

  1. 1. Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterian Missions in the Southern United States (Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1934), 137.
  2. 2. D. Faris, “Reminiscences of the R.P. Church in South Carolina,” 2.9, Our Banner (September 15, 1875): 348.
  3. 3. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 203.
  4. 4. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 346.
  5. 5. Eugene Genovese, The Slaveholders Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 2.
  6. 6. David Brion Davis. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 523.
  7. 7. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 523.
  8. 8. Lester B Scherer. Slavery and the Churches in Early America. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1975), 104.
  9. 9. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches, 106.
  10. 10. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 25.
  11. 11. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 25.
  12. 12. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches, 115.
  13. 13. Page 209 →David Brion Davis. In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 189.
  14. 14. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 27.
  15. 15. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 29.
  16. 16. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 29.
  17. 17. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches, 114.
  18. 18. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 30–31.
  19. 19. Samuel Brown Wylie, Memoir of Alexander McLeod, D.D. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), 13.
  20. 20. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 16.
  21. 21. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 17.
  22. 22. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 17.
  23. 23. See https://rpcna.org/trunk/page/convictions.
  24. 24. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 21–22.
  25. 25. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 33.
  26. 26. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 26.
  27. 27. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 51.
  28. 28. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 52.
  29. 29. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 346.
  30. 30. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 346.
  31. 31. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 346.
  32. 32. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 51.
  33. 33. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 62.
  34. 34. Dwight Lowell Dumond. Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 80.
  35. 35. Dumond, Antislavery, 80.
  36. 36. Alexander McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable: A Discourse (New York: T&J Swords, 1802.), 4.
  37. 37. C. Vann Woodward, The Abolitionists: Means, Ends and Motivations (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1972.), 191–92.
  38. 38. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 8.
  39. 39. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 9.
  40. 40. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 9.
  41. 41. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 9.
  42. 42. I am taking the term “White supremacy” to mean any system that recognizes Whites as superior and in any way marginalizes people of color as inferior. Many have made the mistake that a White supremacist structure must be akin to a neo-Nazi system or a system that systematically murders any non-White person. While this is White supremacy a White supremacist system may be any system that privileges one race over another and sees one race as superior while another is inferior. It is this description that the author has in view.
  43. 43. Page 210 →Willard Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1983), 46.
  44. 44. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 15.
  45. 45. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 15.
  46. 46. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 15–16.
  47. 47. Some have made the argument that modern historians use race as a modern tool applied to structures and institutions, and those men of the eighteenth and nineteenth century “didn’t see race” and were not “influenced by race.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These men and women were absolutely shaped by racial categories and used race as a construct to force people into bondage. Modern historians are not putting race into the writings of nineteenth-century ministers or politicians. Race existed, and historians are simply pointing out how our world, our society, our structures and institutions are founded on the worldview that some were superior and others were inferior based on their race and culture. This view was widely accepted in McLeod’s context, and he is clearly pointing it out in Negro Slavery Unjustifiable. Therefore discussing race is not a modern invention by biblically unorthodox “liberals.” It was a discussion many nineteenth-century clergy were comfortable discussing.
  48. 48. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 16.
  49. 49. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 16.
  50. 50. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 22.
  51. 51. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 22.
  52. 52. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 22.
  53. 53. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 24.
  54. 54. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 40.
  55. 55. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 38.
  56. 56. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 38.
  57. 57. McLeod, Slavery Unjustifiable, 41.
  58. 58. George Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. (Columbia, SC: Duffie & Chapman, 1870.), 700.
  59. 59. Howe, Presbyterians in SC, 700.
  60. 60. Howe, Presbyterians in SC, 700.
  61. 61. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 343.
  62. 62. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 344.
  63. 63. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 345.
  64. 64. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 347.
  65. 65. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 347.
  66. 66. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 347.
  67. 67. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 53.
  68. 68. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 53.
  69. 69. Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 53–54.
  70. 70. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 348.
  71. 71. Page 211 →Wylie, McLeod Memoir, 54.
  72. 72. Howe, Presbyterians in SC, 707. Other family names mentioned in Faris’s history include the Loughridges, the Edgars, the Wyatts, the Mortons, the Mcquistons, the Stormonts, the Rocks, the Hemphills, the Coulters, the Harbisons, the Martins, the Cunninghams, the Smiths, the Montgomerys, and the Blacks. Many of the same names are in Howe’s history.
  73. 73. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 348.
  74. 74. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 348.
  75. 75. Howe, Presbyterians in SC, 703.
  76. 76. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 348.
  77. 77. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 348.
  78. 78. Faris, “Reminiscences,” 349.
  79. 79. Howe, Presbyterians in South Carolina, 704.
  80. 80. John Christie and Dwight Dumond, George Bourne and the Book and Slavery Irreconcilable. (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1969), 66.
  81. 81. Lawrence Lesick, The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980), 3.
  82. 82. Lesick, Lane Rebels, 4.

Chapter 2: “The Father of Native American Missions in Western South Carolina”

  1. 1. Donald G. Mathews, “Charles Colcock Jones and the Southern Evangelical Crusade to Form a Biracial Community,” Journal of Southern History vol. 41, no. 3 (August 1975): 299.
  2. 2. Along with Southern Presbyterians like James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney, who defended the institution of enslavement with an in-depth biblical defense, there were several other Presbyterian missionaries interested in race, anti-enslavement and creating opportunities for multiethnic worship in the nineteenth century. James Gilleland, member of the South Carolina Presbytery, was summoned and disciplined by the Presbytery for preaching anti-enslavement. He appealed the case to the Synod of the Carolinas, but the synod upheld the Presbytery’s ruling. The synod stated that Gilleland was free to use his “utmost endeavors in private” if he desired to help enslaved persons. Another included Robert Wilson, a young Presbyterian minister, who thought about leaving the State “or the ministry rather than submitting to enforced silence on slavery.” Further in 1798, Jonathan Edwards encouraged Wilson to “remain in his office, for in private he could still assist like-minded brethren and perhaps lead younger ministers to his way of thinking.” However both ministers ended up leaving South Carolina: Gilleland in 1804 and Wilson in 1805. This is in Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness, 119–20. Presbyterian missionaries to enslaved Africans in South Carolina and Georgia such as Charles Colcock Jones, John Lafayette Girardeau, and John B. Adger created multiethnic ecclesiastical spaces, which further complicates the Page 212 →role of race in nineteenth-century southern Presbyterianism and Presbyterianism in South Carolina.
  3. 3. Clara Sue Kidwell’s The Choctaw in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970 leans on her earlier work regarding Presbyterian missionaries and sees this time period as helpful in understanding later Choctaw notions of private property. Further, Kidwell points to the tensions “between full-blood and mixed blood elements.” These tensions help explain pre-removal multiracial tensions within the Choctaw nation and the complexity of a space combined with race, religion and gender. Later Valerie Lambert produced Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence. While this work mostly focused on postremoval history and nation building, Lambert did posit the important role that preremoval Choctaw history played in developing a postremoval political order. Indeed “from the creation of the Choctaw tribe out of the crumbling Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeast, through forced removal and allotment, the Choctaws have a long historical legacy of upheaval and resurgence that influences Choctaw culture and politics today.” Most important Lambert argued that Choctaw identity was something that shifted over time, “from a more inclusive identity based on self-identification to a more tribally sanctioned identity based on legal documentation.” Clara Sue Kidwell argued that the missionaries came with a spiritual intent, but the interests of the federal government tainted their teachings. As Kidwell explained, “Government policy fed white land hunger and finally to a policy of separating Indians entirely from white society, and from their lands.” Kidwell’s contention that while the role of the missionaries “moved full circle in shaping the lives of the Choctaw people” they were essentially turned out to be “major agents of . . . assimilation.” While this is no doubt true it is also fair to say that the relationships between missionaries and Native Americans were not solely based on attitudes of assimilation. In many ways the relationships between missionaries and Native Americans existed on a sort of “middle ground” in which Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders exerted influence over the missionaries and forced them to make concessions in their policies. In 2003, Bonnie Sue Lewis built on Kidwell’s work with her important Creating Christian Indians: Native Clergy in the Presbyterian Church. In the debate on whether a Native American could be both “Christian and Indian” Lewis decidedly assents; Christianizing largely took place through Native American Presbyterian ministers to the Dakota and Nez Perce. Lewis is a careful scholar of congregational life and does well to tease out the notion of “band organization” and its impact on the Indigenous church. Lewis points to several instances through which “many converts explicitly conceived of their new lives in terms of a separation from their non-Christian tribal members.” Forming separate communities along religious lines became commonplace.
  4. 4. William G. McLoughlin’s After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 perhaps provided the most thorough social, cultural and political history of the Cherokee as they struggled to fight for autonomy throughout the antebellum era and into Reconstruction. Due to the time period and focus on the nation Page 213 →before and after the Civil War McLoughlin’s framework fits nicely with the Chickasaw. He also does well to trace the history of the Cherokees by synthesizing a number of historical texts on the nation while uncovering previously unused primary resources. McLaughlin’s work pushes this research about the importance of trying to objectively understand the historical context of all parties involved rather than turning a very complex historical situation into a false dichotomy of “good” and “evil.” His work provides a space to examine this ongoing tension. McLaughlin’s treatment of missionaries among the Cherokee was more nuanced. More at home in the sphere of religion McLaughlin did an excellent job in Cherokees and Missionaries of displaying the complexity and distinctions of the historical cast of characters. Indeed he argued that the Cherokees were focused on “ideological and social reorientations” as a result of Christian influence as well as maintaining Cherokee religious traditions. McLaughlin also saw white missionaries’ interactions with Cherokee and how these forced the missionaries to “make critical reevaluations of their own culture.” This framework provided a lens through which to think about how missionaries to the Choctaw and Chickasaw were able to reflect on their own culture and what was acceptable eschewing what was not useful. To fully understand missionaries and religion among the Choctaw and Chickasaw an overview of Cherokee history is needed. In Cherokees and Missionaries McLoughlin for perhaps the first time in the historiography of Native American missionaries went beyond an examination of the preacher in the pulpit and into the Native Americans occupying the pews. McLoughlin reminded us that Native American indifference and outright opposition to the teachings of missionaries was common. However, those who did attend the congregations of the Moravians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists often picked and chose what they wanted to hear and believe. McLoughlin argued that few missionaries intermarried with the nation or attempted to learn Cherokee or adopt cultural patterns. Indeed the missionaries gravitated toward interacting with mixed-race Cherokees of European descent. This interaction helped tremendously in thinking about the missionaries to the Choctaw and Chickasaw. According to McLoughlin missionaries were often comfortable with cultural patterns, married into the nation, and began to soften on entrenched Eurocentric philosophies. Further McLoughlin’s expansive denominational overview included the Methodist James J. Trott and the Baptist Evan Jones, both of whom fought for the rights of the Cherokee even with their own denominations renouncing their efforts. It is from McLoughlin that we understand syncretism with regard to a blending of Native American religion with Christianity.
  5. 5. In terms of early missions to Native Americans some important colonial and eighteenth-century texts have been Robert F. Berkhofer’s Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862; Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest; James P. Ronda’s “The Sillery Experiment: A Jesuit-Indian Village in New France, 1637–1663”; and “We are Well as We Are: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Page 214 →Christian Missions.” Each of these texts pointed to early Christian activity among Native Americans using both Catholic and Protestant examples. Similar to Jennings’s title the thrust of this historiographical argument was that missionaries were similar to other imperialistic endeavors and sought to invade, destroy, and acculturate with little regard for the theological positions of the missionaries, the interracial nature of the mission churches, and with regard for accepted interracial ecclesiastical interaction of the time period. There is some truth to this with regard to Presbyterians and early nineteenth-century missionaries, but further analysis of the aforementioned issues points toward enhanced clarity of a very complex interracial situation. Further Neal Salisbury’s works “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Elliot” and Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 have moved the field forward. Further important works considering the first missionaries to Native Americans in the colonial era were George E. Tinker’s Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide and James Treat’s Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices in Religious Identity in the United States and Canada. Both texts carry similar theoretical frameworks in which the missionary was little more than a religious conquistador attempting to claim the souls of Native Americans as European explorers did with territory. Conquest, acculturation, and the indoctrination of European religion on an already existent religious community were the overwhelming themes. However Salisbury’s Manitou and Providence provided important distinctions on how Native Americans in New England used Christianity to continue perpetuating their own communities in the face of European incursion into their society. Indeed using a hybrid Christianity with their own religious practices was one of the ways Native Americans convinced Europeans of their “civilization.” The Choctaw and Chickasaw used the Presbyterian missionaries in similar ways from 1817 throughout the Civil War.
  6. 6. Theda Perdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 traces the history of the Cherokee from colonialism to the mid-nineteenth century while examining how the institution of enslavement played a role in each period. Perdue found that the Cherokee adopted the culture of the Europeans to survive. Duane King’s collection of essays entitled The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled Nation shed more light on this issue of cultural survival. Theda Purdue’s essay on enslavement and its transformation over time examined the slaves’ role in mission churches.
  7. 7. Randy Sparks’s Religion in Mississippi and his more general study of evangelicalism in Mississippi, On Jordan’s Stormy Bank are both helpful. The fields of anthropology and ethnohistory, particularly the work of Robbie Ethridge, have certainly enhanced the understanding of Native American culture in Mississippi. Ethridge’s works include From Chicaze to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippi World, 1540–1715 and her coedited volume The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760 have enhanced historians’ understanding of how European incursions and invasions into Chickasaw country in the Southeast created Page 215 →much transition across the cultural landscape and left a tremendous impact on Native American society moving into the nineteenth century.
  8. 8. Minges’s Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetowah Society and the Defining of a People, 1855–1867 pushed understanding of the impact of Christianity and mission churches on the Cherokee view of enslavement. According to Minges the Keetowah society had its own trifocal ecclesiastical relationships in which white missionaries, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans functioned within a church structure with relative equality. Daniel Littlefield’s Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War examined the relationships among whites, the mixed-race elite, enslaved Africans, and the Creek. His findings illuminate similar relationships especially in the context of the church among the Chickasaw. Littlefield sees the federal government as well as the southern slavocracy playing a tremendous role in proliferating enslavement among the Creek and Chickasaw. Littlefield also found that racial mixing between the Whites and Creeks created a “mixed offspring” that “dominated Creek affairs, carried Anglo-Saxon values into the Creek nation, and readily accepted government efforts to ‘civilize’ the Creeks.” Littlefield also saw racial prejudice among the Creek’s “divide and conquer strategy” to keep enslaved Africans from aligning with the Creeks against them. However Littlefield found that the small number of enslavers among the Creek was minor compared to that of the Choctaw. Soon after his work on the Creek Littlefield examined the freed Africans among the Chickasaw in his The Chickasaw Freedmen: A People without a Country. Gary Zellar’s African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation argued that African Creeks played important roles in the formation of cultural identity. As workers, interpreters, and even political figures these individuals left their imprint on the nation. Similar to the Chickasaws, African Creek embraced Christianity early, adopted it, and grew its teachings from their own communities to the rest of the Creek nation. Zellar examined how groups divided themselves along racial lines. Celia E. Naylor’s African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens builds on Daniel E. Littlefield’s The Cherokee Freedman: From Emancipation to American Citizenship, but she did so by paying close attention to the WPA narratives and how African Cherokee actually saw themselves. Naylor argued that African Cherokee never really gained full equality within the Cherokee nation, somewhat mirroring the Jim Crow South through the exclusion of African Americans. This work explores preremoval interracial interaction and is applicable to understanding multi-ethnicity in mission churches.
  9. 9. James F. Brooks’s Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America was incredibly insightful in helping historians of race understand the significance of “blood” and racial identity. Brooks’s collection of essays brought fuller understanding of how the lives of enslaved African peoples became so interwoven with those of Native Americans, especially in the colonial and antebellum contexts. Both Susan Sleeper-Smith and Circe Sturm point to this racial self-awareness and identity with regard to native women marrying French traders as well as the “construction of Page 216 →blood status” among the Cherokee in Oklahoma. To be sure mission schools as well as churches, are helpful spaces for examining these identities. Theda Purdue tackled issues of interracialism and biculturalism in “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South. In it Perdue argues that terms such as “mixed-bloods,” “full-bloods,” and “mestizos” don’t fully explain or help us understand southeastern Native American culture, behavior, or community. Instead of telling these single stories Perdue reminds us to think through the complexity of human relationships. She started with an examination of marriages between Indian women and European men. She found that initially they were largely on Native American terms with Native American traditions of kinship networks controlling absorption into the nation. European men largely adhered to Native American tradition and raised their children within this context. Perdue also examined why so many mixed-race children ascended to leadership within the Native American political power structure into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She found that one’s race did not necessarily create leadership opportunities. Instead there were individuals of mixed-race heritage in a variety of political circles as the position of Native Americans became more tenuous. Later Perdue found that mixed-race Native Americans came to prominence due to white European racism. Indeed those who advocated removal argued that it was only the mixed-race Indians who could be “civilized.” Perdue is very helpful in thinking through the impact of racism even in the missionaries’ thoughts concerning mixed-race and full-blooded Chickasaw. Circe Sturm built upon Perdue’s work regarding the impact that race, culture, identity, and the “language of blood” played in postremoval Cherokee society in her book Blood Politics. Sturm affirmed that “blood” is a social construct of Cherokee society that Cherokees have altered over their history to fit their own needs. Sturm discussed connection of these notions with the Dawes Commission and the current application for citizenship requiring a certain degree of Indian blood and argued that “citizenship by the virtue of ‘blood’ is a political construction but that more traditional ways Cherokees define ‘blood’ in ways that are not necessarily synonymous with ancestry.” This work is helpful in the role that race and racial ideology played in the mission churches and its allowance for multiple ethnicities functioning alongside one another.
  10. 10. Tiya Miles explored enslavement and mixed-race Afro-Cherokee identity in her Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Miles brought to the forefront a topic that had long been neglected by the historiography: owners of enslaved persons by Native Americans. Her narrative of a Cherokee-African family helps provide some insight into this controversial dynamic. Miles “examines the changes over time in Cherokee gender roles, the matrilineal kinship system, and the Cherokee system of African slavery.” The Cherokee used enslaved Africans to advance economically but also “and more importantly, as evidence of Cherokee civilization and acculturation. Cherokees wanted to demonstrate their right to exist as a sovereign nation independent of the United States.” Therefore while there was an Page 217 →“Americanization” of Cherokee culture, “the Cherokee Nation borrowed political systems and racial ideologies from the United States to avoid being colonized by the United States.” Miles ultimately concludes that initially the Cherokee system of enslavement was more in flux than previously thought and largely reflected attitudes of equity in the Cherokee’s historical relationship to human beings. Miles’s work is helpful in understanding how a largely White enslavement of persons had a tremendous impact on the cultural landscape. But this perspective also robs Native Americans of their own agency and ability to maintain a cultural autonomy in the face of an Anglocentric hegemony. Indeed the Chickasaw were able to achieve syncretism in enslavement and their religious attitudes and pragmatically borrow what was helpful to them from the institution of enslavement while also negating aspects that seemed outside their own cultural value system. This framework certainly applies to how the Chickasaw used the missionaries to achieve their own, as we will examine later. Miles, along with Fay Yarbrough, continued to examine issues of race, enslavement, and the Cherokee in important recent works: Race and the Cherokee Nation and The House on Diamond Hill. Nancy Shoemaker produced a monograph addressing this issue entitled A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. Shoemaker is particularly helpful to this work in examining religious commonality. This work contributed to an understanding of the multiracial nature of the Chickasaw mission churches and the peaceful as well as hospitable nature of the relationship between the variety of races worshipping, teaching, and learning in these spaces.
  11. 11. Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), xiv.
  12. 12. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, xiv.
  13. 13. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, xiv.
  14. 14. Robert Milton Winter, Outposts of Zion: A History of Mississippi Presbyterians in the Nineteenth Century (Holly Springs, MS: self-pub., 2014), iii.
  15. 15. Winter, Outposts of Zion, iii.
  16. 16. EE. T. Winston, ed., “Father” Stuart and the Monroe Mission (Meridian, MS: Press of Tell Farmer, 1927). This work will be used heavily throughout the paper as the edited volume by E. T. Winston included church session records from Monroe Church, interviews with members and individuals of the church, Stuart’s own letters and memoirs from 1861, as well as secondary historical narrative regarding the Chickasaw, the Monroe Mission, and the town of Pontotoc. For the sake of brevity the papers will be referred to as Winston, Stuart for the remainder of the paper. Most of the papers are housed at the Reformed Theological Seminary Library Rare Book Room in Jackson, Mississippi.
  17. 17. Thompson, Missions, 137.
  18. 18. Thompson, Missions, 138.
  19. 19. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 1.
  20. 20. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 1.
  21. 21. Page 218 →Winter, Outposts of Zion, 5.
  22. 22. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 1.
  23. 23. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 8.
  24. 24. Thompson, Missions, 141.
  25. 25. Thompson, Missions, 141.
  26. 26. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 9.
  27. 27. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 10.
  28. 28. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 10.
  29. 29. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 11; William C. Davis, A Way through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace and the Civilization of the Southern Frontier (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
  30. 30. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 26.
  31. 31. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 27
  32. 32. Thompson, Missions, 145.
  33. 33. William A. Love, “The Mayhew Mission to the Choctaws,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, vol. 11 (1910): 386–87.
  34. 34. Howe’s History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. In Winston’s Stuart, 66. These letters were originally written for and published in the Southern Presbyterian, a journal of the southern Presbyterian Church throughout the late nineteenth century and up until the early twentieth century.
  35. 35. Howe’s History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. In Winston’s, Stuart, 66.
  36. 36. E. T. Winston, “Father” Stuart and the Monroe Mission. (Meridian: MS: Press of Tell Farmer, 1927), 19.
  37. 37. Winston, “Father” Stuart, 19.
  38. 38. Winston, “Father” Stuart, 19–20.
  39. 39. George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
  40. 40. Winston, “Father” Stuart, 20–21.
  41. 41. Thompson, Southern Missions, 145–46.
  42. 42. C. W. Grafton, History of Presbyterianism in Mississippi (Jackson, MS: papers photocopied from microfilm and bound, 1927).
  43. 43. C.W. Grafton, History of Presbyterianism in Mississippi.
  44. 44. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 46.
  45. 45. Winston, Stuart, 20.
  46. 46. Winston, Stuart, 20.
  47. 47. Winston, Stuart, 44.
  48. 48. Winston, Stuart, 44.
  49. 49. Winston, Stuart, 44.
  50. 50. Winston, Stuart, 44–45.
  51. 51. Winston, Stuart, 44–45.
  52. 52. Page 219 →Winston, Stuart, 45. An elder is a term in Presbyterian polity and church governance indicating church authority and leadership. The session, or group of elders, govern church business and there are normally teaching as well as ruling elders. Stuart would have been a teaching elder, and he would have shared governance of the church with the ruling elders.
  53. 53. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 45.
  54. 54. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 45.
  55. 55. William L. Hiemstra. “Presbyterian Missions among the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, 1845–1862” (master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 1947), 6.
  56. 56. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 146.
  57. 57. Winston, Stuart, 20.
  58. 58. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 146.
  59. 59. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  60. 60. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 146.
  61. 61. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  62. 62. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 147.
  63. 63. Ursula Smith, Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 119.
  64. 64. Presbyterians use language of a mission church and a “particularized church” to display the church’s autonomy. A particularized church typically has its own leadership, budget, membership, building, and recognition from a presbytery that it has gone through a process to transition from a mission church to a particularized congregation. This means the church is not dependent upon another church for its survival and can raise its own money to function as well as elect its own leaders rather than borrowing leaders from nearby churches.
  65. 65. Numerous historians like John Boles, Charles Irons, Paul Harvey, Erskine Clarke, and others have discussed the role of interracial worship in an antebellum context. But there has not been as much investigation into western frontier mission spaces as religious communities in which a white hierarchy was not as clearly established as it was in spaces like Charleston, Savannah, and Norfolk. Indeed the frontier mission space in the 1830s and 1840s saw Chickasaw and African American leadership within an ecclesiastical context while providing for and supporting white families struggling for survival.
  66. 66. Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 197–98.
  67. 67. This is true particularly of Presbyterian missionaries as evidenced by the work of Cyrus Kingsbury, Cyrus Byington, and T. C. Stuart among Native Americans and by John Adger, John Lafayette Girardeau, and John Leighton Wilson among Africans and enslaved African populations of Georgia, South Carolina, and in western Africa.
  68. 68. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 147. Given the fact that the Presbyterian Church commissioned Thompson to write this history one must take this comment Page 220 →with a grain of salt. Thompson although an able historian would naturally want to paint Stuart in this light. However much of what we know of Stuart seems to bear out a narrative of at least a peaceable existence among the Chickasaw. We must be careful with such self-congratulation as “in the four centuries of American history there is no more inspiring chapter of heroism, self-sacrifice and devotion to high ideals than that afforded by the Indian Missions.”
  69. 69. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 147.
  70. 70. Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 64.
  71. 71. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  72. 72. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  73. 73. Winston, Stuart, 17.
  74. 74. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 146.
  75. 75. Winston, Stuart, 23.
  76. 76. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  77. 77. Winston, Stuart, 23–24.
  78. 78. George Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina (Columbia, SC: Duffie and Chapman, 1870), 72. These letters were originally written for and published in the Southern Presbyterian.
  79. 79. Winston, Stuart, 23–25
  80. 80. Winston, Stuart, 53.
  81. 81. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  82. 82. A session is a court of the Presbyterian Church that is typically nominated and elected by members of the congregation. A session consists of teaching elders/pastors and ruling elders who meet regularly to conduct the business of the church in a court-like “session.”
  83. 83. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 48.
  84. 84. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 25
  85. 85. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 53.
  86. 86. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 72.
  87. 87. Otis W. Pickett, “We Are Marching to Zion: Zion Church and the Distinctive Work of Presbyterian Slave Missionaries in Charleston, South Carolina, 1849–1874.” Proceedings: Journal of the South Carolina Historical Association (Spring 2010): 91–104.
  88. 88. Winston, Stuart, 26.
  89. 89. Winston, Stuart, 25.
  90. 90. Winston, Stuart, 25–26.
  91. 91. Winston, Stuart, 34.
  92. 92. Church session records showed many enslaved Africans and individuals of African descent added as members to the Monroe Church. December 24, 1823, showed that “three black persons, John, Daniel and Rebecca, were added to the communion on examination. March 4 “Affy, a black woman. May 6 Three black persons, Agnes, Mary Page 221 →and Bob were admitted. Sept 30 Two black women, Sarah and Indah, were admitted on examination. December 24, 1825 Three black persons, John, Daniel, and Rebecca were added to the communion of the church on examination.” Several others joined in the mid- to late 1820s according to the session records.
  93. 93. This is not the only instance in church records of an enslaved African “owned by an Indian” being accepted for membership. July 2 showed that “Chloe, a black woman belonging to an Indian, applied for privileges to the church.”
  94. 94. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 54–55.
  95. 95. Winston, Stuart, 26.
  96. 96. Although it took a bit longer for Native Chickasaw to begin to join the church, records from May 7 showed that “Molly Colbert, a native, came forward and offered herself as a candidate for admission.”
  97. 97. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 72.
  98. 98. Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 63.
  99. 99. Winston, Stuart, 27–30.
  100. 100. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 72.
  101. 101. Pickett, Zion Presbyterian Church, 96.
  102. 102. Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 63
  103. 103. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 49.
  104. 104. Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 9
  105. 105. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 72.
  106. 106. Winter, Outposts of Zion, 49.
  107. 107. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 72.
  108. 108. Winston, Stuart, 53.
  109. 109. Winston, Stuart, 39.
  110. 110. Winston, Stuart, 30–32.
  111. 111. Winston, Stuart, 34.
  112. 112. Winston, Stuart, 40.
  113. 113. Winston, Stuart, 41.
  114. 114. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 15–36.
  115. 115. John R. Swanton, Chickasaw Society and Religion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 87.
  116. 116. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 67
  117. 117. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 68.
  118. 118. Thompson, Presbyterian Missions, 147.
  119. 119. Winston, Stuart, 48.
  120. 120. Winston, Stuart, 48.
  121. 121. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 69.
  122. 122. Winston, Stuart, 60–62.
  123. 123. Page 222 →Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 10.
  124. 124. Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 12. In 1832, General John Coffee arranged for a land cession treaty with the Chickasaws. In 1834, there was another treaty with those who remained, and in that year the mission to the Chickasaw, as an official entity, ceased to exist. William Colbert along with William Spencer, James Hodges, Henry Love, Ishtohotopah, and James Perry, an interpreter, signed the treaty, which sent the Chickasaw west to Oklahoma. Later, Presbyterians and other denominations attempted to set up mission stations among the Chickasaw in Oklahoma, but it took years before the memory of 1832 and 1834 disappeared. That memory of betrayal despite Washington’s promise to Colbert was palpable.
  125. 125. Hiemstra, “Presbyterian Missions among Chickasaw,” 12.
  126. 126. Winston, Stuart, 56–57.
  127. 127. Winston, Stuart, 56–57.
  128. 128. Fred R. Graves, ed., The Presbyterian Work in Mississippi (Sumner, MS: Sentinel Press, 1927).
  129. 129. Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina; Winston, Stuart, 66. These letters were originally written for and published in the Southern Presbyterian, which was a journal of the southern Presbyterian Church.
  130. 130. Winston, Stuart, 76.
  131. 131. Winston, Stuart, 76.
  132. 132. Otis W. Pickett, “T. C. Stuart and the Monroe Mission among the Chickasaws in Mississippi, 1819–1834,” Native South 8 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 63–88.
  133. 133. Winston, Stuart, 76–77.
  134. 134. Winston, Stuart, 78.
  135. 135. Winston, Stuart, 78.
  136. 136. Winston, Stuart, 78–80.
  137. 137. Winston, Stuart, 57.
  138. 138. Winston, Stuart, 57.
  139. 139. Otis W. Pickett, “Hope for Racial Healing: Rethinking Christian Missions among the Chickasaw,” Oklahoma Humanities Magazine, no. 23 (Summer 2012).

Chapter 3: “To and Fro Like a Forest in a Storm”

  1. 1. Donald G. Mathews, “Charles Colcock Jones and the Southern Evangelical Crusade to Form a Biracial Community,” Journal of Southern History 41, no. 3 (August 1975): 299.
  2. 2. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 299.
  3. 3. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 300.
  4. 4. Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 7.
  5. 5. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 300.
  6. 6. Page 223 →Janet Duitsman Cornelius. Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 78.
  7. 7. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 12.
  8. 8. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 10.
  9. 9. “Docetism, (from Greek dokein, “to seem”), Christian heresy, and one of the earliest Christian sectarian doctrines, affirmed that Christ did not have a real or natural body during his life on earth but only an apparent or phantom one. Though its incipient forms are alluded to in the New Testament, such as in the letters of John (such as 1 John 4:1–3; 2 John 7), docetism became more fully developed as an important doctrinal position of gnosticism, a religious dualist system of belief arising in the second century AD that held that matter was evil and the spirit good and claimed that salvation was attained only through esoteric knowledge or gnosis.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Docetism.
  10. 10. Andover Seminary in Massachusetts and later Princeton Seminary in New Jersey.
  11. 11. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 301.
  12. 12. Charles C. Jones to Elizabeth J. Maxwell, October 4, 1825, Charles Colcock Jones Collection, Tulane University (JCTU); Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 11.
  13. 13. Victor B. Howard, Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837–1861 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 18.
  14. 14. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 12.
  15. 15. Charles C. Jones to Mary Jones, July 22, 1829, JCTU.
  16. 16. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 301.
  17. 17. Jones to Mary Jones, October 5, 1829; see also Jones to Mary Jones, October 24, 1829, JCTU.
  18. 18. Charles C. Jones to Mary Jones, September 8, 1829, JCTU. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 13.
  19. 19. Charles Colcock Jones to Mary Jones, May 30, 1829, Sept. 8, 1829; Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 79.
  20. 20. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 303.
  21. 21. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 81.
  22. 22. Cornelius, Slaver Missions and the Black Church, 83.
  23. 23. Boles, Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord, 6, 122.
  24. 24. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 82.
  25. 25. Matthew 7:15 (English Standard Version Bible).
  26. 26. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 83.
  27. 27. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 303.
  28. 28. Eugene Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 27.
  29. 29. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 19.
  30. 30. Cornelius. Slave Missions and the Black Church, 72.
  31. 31. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 303.
  32. 32. Page 224 →Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 303–4. Others like Jones include William Capers, Stephen Elliott, John B. Adger, John L. Girardeau, and Thomas Smythe. Smythe battled those who sought to deny the humanity of enslaved Africans, and he would later refute the dual origin theory, which held that Africans were not of the same origin as Whites. James Henry Thornwell also recognized a need for slave missions against those that would say that Africans were “heathens.” Conflict was present in the lives of these shepherds. It was a conflict that they did not know how to act upon without being cast aside socially or even fearing death. However it is this conflict and subversive behavior toward the institution that separate them from other slave missionaries. The importance of Jones was that he created a sphere that dealt with this conflict.
  33. 33. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 79–81.
  34. 34. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 8.
  35. 35. Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 188.
  36. 36. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 305.
  37. 37. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 36–37.
  38. 38. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 294.
  39. 39. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 260–61.
  40. 40. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 294.
  41. 41. Eugene Genovese. A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 19.
  42. 42. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 310.
  43. 43. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 138.
  44. 44. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 206–7.
  45. 45. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 295.
  46. 46. Biblical texts referring to enslaved persons obeying their masters can be found in the Ephesians and Philemon. Many pro-enslavement theologians used these texts as well as Old Testament verses in which God considered Abraham’s slaves to be part of his household whom he would bless and therefore according to southern theologians approved of the institution.
  47. 47. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 41–43.
  48. 48. Don Mathews, ed. Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 49.
  49. 49. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 41.
  50. 50. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 83.
  51. 51. John Boles, Masters and Slaves, 9.
  52. 52. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 306.
  53. 53. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 313.
  54. 54. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 306.
  55. 55. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 1–8
  56. 56. Page 225 →Boles, Maters and Slaves, 1–8.
  57. 57. Zion Presbyterian was perhaps the largest congregation of enslaved Africans in the entire South seating almost three thousand people in sabbath worship. Girardeau also continued to work toward ecclesiastical equality and education for free African Americans after the Civil War. More will be said on this in chapters 3 and 4.
  58. 58. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 317.
  59. 59. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 315.
  60. 60. There are several sources here on the idea of cultural captivity and how the church was simply held captive by the prevailing culture of racism, enslavement, and the influences of these frameworks. This perspective is not in the works of Samuel S. Hill: Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1983); One Name but Several Faces: Variety in Popular Christian Denominations in Southern History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
  61. 61. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 316.
  62. 62. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 319.
  63. 63. Most prominently was in May of 1845 in an address to the public on the religious instruction of the Blacks. This is discussed at length in Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 100–107.
  64. 64. Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, Letters, and Reflections (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans, & Cogswell, 1914), 218; C. N. Willborn, “John Lafayette Girardeau: Pastor to Slaves and Theologian of Causes,” 93.
  65. 65. Adger was a long-time member, pastor, and associate minister of Second Presbyterian throughout the nineteenth century.
  66. 66. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 95.
  67. 67. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 145.
  68. 68. By “full” I mean that while enslaved Africans were offered a membership status they still could not be nominated for the ordained offices of deacon or elder. They could not vote alongside White congregants to call a pastor or on matters related to the building, hold their session accountable in any church court, or attend or ask that a session member give them an account of the presbytery or General Assembly. These are all rights that full members in Presbyterian Churches possess.
  69. 69. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob.
  70. 70. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 144–45.
  71. 71. Second Presbyterian Minutes of Session, South Caroliniana Library, 1–2.
  72. 72. Erskine Clarke stated that the author of “Many Citizens” was no other than A. G. Magrath, who became “judge of the United States District Court and would serve as governor of South Carolina during the last days of the war. As a fire-eating judge, he would declare that the foreign slave trade was not piracy when the slave ship Wanderer was captured illegally selling African slaves in Georgia.”
  73. 73. Page 226 →Willborn, “Girardeau,” 100.
  74. 74. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 146.
  75. 75. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 147. In 1817, Denmark Vesey had been a member of Second Presbyterian Church. Vesey had maintained his membership at Second Church and there had been little to distinguish him from other black members. That was what made his memory so dangerous for the religious instruction of slaves. White ministers had all been saying that if Vesey and other conspirators had been under the influence of a white minister, there never would have been a plot. It had not prevented him from being at the center of the most dangerous insurrection planned by urban slaves.
  76. 76. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 147.
  77. 77. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 127.
  78. 78. Second Presbyterian Minutes of Session, South Caroliniana Library, 9.
  79. 79. Second Presbyterian Minutes of Session, South Caroliniana Library, 10.
  80. 80. Starobin, Robert, ed. Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 131.
  81. 81. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 127–30.
  82. 82. There were other slave churches in Charleston, such as Paul Trapier’s Calvary Episcopal and several Methodist churches (such as Trinity or Bethel), which held over 150 classes for enslaved Africans across the city. Zion, however, was the only church to have such massively successful numbers of enslaved Africans in attendance in one single church service, the only to spend huge sums (like $32,000 for the initial plans), and to have not only classes, but African American leaders, exhorters, and teachers.
  83. 83. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 297. The old Anson Street Mission is now the Reformed Episcopal Church attended by master blacksmith Philip Simmons, now deceased.
  84. 84. Lois Simms, A History of Zion, Olivet, and Zion-Olivet Churches 1850–1985 Charleston, South Carolina (Mercury MicroComputer Products: Library of Congress, 1987), 2.
  85. 85. This issue of “having a place of honors” in the seating will be dealt with at length later in the chapter.
  86. 86. Lois Simms, A History of Zion, 1.
  87. 87. James O. Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henry Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 220–21.
  88. 88. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 298.
  89. 89. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 149–50.
  90. 90. Kevin DeYoung, “Two Cheers for the Spirituality of the Church,” January 31, 2019. The Gospel Coalition.
  91. 91. DeYoung, “Two Cheers.”
  92. 92. Charles Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
  93. 93. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 99.
  94. 94. Page 227 →John Adger received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the College of Charleston in 1853 for his work with the enslaved African population of Charleston. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 151.
  95. 95. W. F. Robertson, History of Zion Presbyterian Church. Vertical File, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. It should be noted here that between 1852 and December 1853 between Adger and Girardeau the Reverend Ferdinand Jacobs filled the pulpit at the Anson Street Mission. However it is clear to most historians of these churches that Jacobs was a replacement until the presbytery could secure Girardeau from his post in the Wilton Presbyterian Church. Girardeau was on everyone’s mind to take up where Adger left off. Presbyterian historian Henry Alexander White noted that Jacobs was a “faithful shepherd and preacher.”
  96. 96. W. F. Robertson, “Dr. Girardeau Devoted to Negro Work,” History of Zion Presbyterian Church. Vertical File, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  97. 97. George A. Blackburn, ed. The Life Work of John L. Girardeau, D.D., LL.D.: Late Professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Columbia, S.C. (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1916), 32.
  98. 98. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 108–9.
  99. 99. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 195. Gullah is a recognized language and not simply a dialect. It has its roots in the Krio language of Sierra Leone and has developed over centuries from a mixture of Indigenous African tongue, English, French, creole languages, and Spanish.
  100. 100. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacon, 151.
  101. 101. Robertson, “Dr. Girardeau,” in History of Zion Presbyterian Church, by W. F. Robertson. Vertical File, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  102. 102. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 300–301.
  103. 103. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 145.
  104. 104. Second Presbyterian Minutes of Session, South Caroliniana Library, 2.
  105. 105. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 16.
  106. 106. Douglas Kelly, Preachers with Power: Four Stalwarts of the South (Great Britain: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1992), 124.
  107. 107. John L. Girardeau, John L. Girardeau Papers, 1825–1908, “Letter of John L. Girardeau to Miss Emily M. Girardeau,” May 15, 1846. Columbia: South Caroliniana Library.
  108. 108. Blackburn, The Life Work of John L. Girardeau, 27.
  109. 109. Karen Stokes, “John L. Girardeau and ‘Big Zion’: A Forgotten Chapter in South Carolina History,” Carologue: A Publication of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. 33, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 12.
  110. 110. Page 228 →Before pastoring at Anson Street Girardeau spent a significant amount of time at Wilton Presbyterian Church as well as in Adam’s Run where he employed C.C. Jones’s model of enslavement missions by visiting plantations and preaching in various churches on plantations.
  111. 111. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 301.
  112. 112. Prefatory Notes, Thomas Smyth Papers: Second Presbyterian Church Papers: Records of Anson Street and Zion Church Kept by Dr. Girardeau, collection 24, box 5, folder 6. South Carolina Historical Society.
  113. 113. White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 301.
  114. 114. Stokes, “Girardeau and ‘Big Zion,’” 13.
  115. 115. Stokes, “Girardeau and ‘Big Zion,’” 13.
  116. 116. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 102.
  117. 117. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 195.
  118. 118. Jones, “Work among the Negroes,”. 107.
  119. 119. Minutes of Session of Zion Presbyterian Church, June 5, 1858. Today a hotel is located where the old “Big Zion” Church was. There is a small plaque in front of the hotel commemorating Zion.
  120. 120. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 195.
  121. 121. It is important to note that this observation or imagining is reflective of multiple conversations that Dr. Nick Wilborn and I have had standing in front of what is now a hotel on Calhoun Street where Zion Church used to exist. We would both remark on how shocking it would have been to White eyes to see a throng of enslaved African Americans exiting a massive church structure and onto Calhoun Street in the 1850s. Both of us believe that this symbol would have been startling to the White population of Charleston for a variety of reasons.
  122. 122. Randall Balmer and John R. Fitzmier, The Presbyterians (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 73.
  123. 123. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 102.
  124. 124. Stokes, “Girardeau and ‘Big Zion,’” 13.
  125. 125. John L. Girardeau, Unpublished Notes of His Ministry, Thomas Smyth Papers, 16; Willborn, “Girardeau,” 121.
  126. 126. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 174.

Chapter 4: “We Are Marching to Zion”

  1. 1. Zion was literally an area in Jerusalem called the city of David, 2 Samuel 5:6-9 and 2 Chronicles 5:2.
  2. 2. Zion is also used figuratively as representing God’s kingdom in Psalms 125:1, Hebrews 12:22 and Revelation 14:1.
  3. 3. Conley Smith, “Churches’ Histories Documented,” Post and Courier, Thursday, December 14, 1989. Also Exercises Connected with the One Hundredth Anniversary of Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston, SC, in Thomas Smyth Papers: Second Page 229 →Presbyterian Church Papers Collection 24, box 4, folder 9, at the South Carolina Historical Society.
  4. 4. Stokes, “Girardeau and ‘Big Zion,’” 13.
  5. 5. Stokes, “Girardeau and ‘Big Zion,’” 14.
  6. 6. Adger, My Life and Times, 173; Blackburn, “Work Among the Negroes-Part III,”Life Work of Girardeau, 101–3; Willborn, “Girardeau,” 112.
  7. 7. Whites sat in the galleries of Girardeau’s church, which was perhaps another reason for the Minute Men’s anger.
  8. 8. Robertson, Dr. Girardeau Devoted to Negro Work.
  9. 9. Second Presbyterian Minutes of Session, South Caroliniana Library, 6.
  10. 10. Blackburn, “Work among the Negroes, Part III,” 89–90.
  11. 11. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 90–91.
  12. 12. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 25.
  13. 13. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 129.
  14. 14. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 130.
  15. 15. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 14.
  16. 16. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 129–31.
  17. 17. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 13.
  18. 18. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 129–31.
  19. 19. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 14
  20. 20. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 14.
  21. 21. Girardeau also included hymn recommendations to go with catechism questions.
  22. 22. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 127.
  23. 23. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 127.
  24. 24. Minutes of Zion Session Presbyterian Church, October 25, 1859; Willborn, “Girardeau,” 136.
  25. 25. Zion-Olivet Papers, box 1, folder 1, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  26. 26. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 12.
  27. 27. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 9.
  28. 28. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 153.
  29. 29. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 153.
  30. 30. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 196–97.
  31. 31. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 153.
  32. 32. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 193. Clarke went on to state that these southern churches’ roll books showed that “when a slave joined a church, only the Christian name was listed, followed by ‘servant of’ or occasionally ‘slave of,’ ‘London, servant of Tho. Bennett,’ ‘Judy, servant of Col. I. Bryan.’”
  33. 33. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 193.
  34. 34. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 197.
  35. 35. Zion Presbyterian, Minutes of Session, 1856.
  36. 36. Page 230 →Simms, A History of Zion, 2.
  37. 37. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 152.
  38. 38. John Berkley Grimball Collection, letter dated November 27, 1859, South Caroliniana Library.
  39. 39. Joseph B. Mack, “Work among the Negroes, Part II,” in George Blackburn, ed., The Life Work and Sermons of John L. Girardeau (Columbia, SC: State Company, 1916), 58.
  40. 40. Blackburn, Life Work of Girardeau, 61.
  41. 41. Blassingame, Slave Community, 93.
  42. 42. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 10.
  43. 43. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 7.
  44. 44. Quoted in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 642.
  45. 45. Blackburn, Sermons, 4–5.
  46. 46. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 10.
  47. 47. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 235. Clarke went on to state, “With the end of the war, they met the challenge of drawing their congregations together once again, of forging new traditions and institutions as freed people, and of walking together along the difficult road between two worlds. That road, they believed, for all its ambiguity and difficulty, was the only road that led toward a still distant freedom and justice.”
  48. 48. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 14.
  49. 49. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 196.
  50. 50. While Clarke argued that much of this work at Zion enforced a “move toward the vision of a well-ordered, class-stratified society,” I am not quite convinced that this education and development of a leadership within the African American community lent itself to the prevailing notions of order in Charleston of the 1850s. It seems that it turned those roles upside down in the sense that enslaved African Americans were not really dependent on Girardeau for a number of church duties and supplied their own leaders to teach, conduct funerals, and hold classes. Clarke’s entire argument about Zion was that it reinforced Thornwell’s notion of “regulated liberty” and was strictly paternalistic in that it “talked about the duties of and rights of masters as masters and the duties and rights of slaves as slaves, each in their own concrete place, each according to their God-given responsibilities.” Indeed “it helped to legitimize the present order—with whites in control—even as it called for a new order. It provided a sense of identity, and it stood as a preserving counter-vision to the challenges of revolution, antislavery, and the disintegrative forces of the modern world. Thornwell’s vision, in other words, was not only utopian, it was also profoundly ideological. Both the utopian and the ideological elements were held together in a single conceptual framework. That framework—a fusion of the world view and the ethos of the low country Reformed community—with its primary metaphor the middle way, led to the Anson Street church and to the experiment in paternalism that followed.” This is a compelling Page 231 →argument. However, how is it paternalistic to provide education and help create a leadership base for enslaved African Americans chosen from among and within their own community in a society that was trying to destroy any sense of a liberating leadership? How was it paternalistic to make one’s own race (Whites) sit in the galleries while enslaved Africans were given the “place of honor” in the pews before the pulpit at Zion? Why were the Anson Street work and the work at Zion drawn along the same paternalistic lines when it was running counter, in a multitude of ways, to other paternalistic slave missions throughout the South? The work at Zion cannot be written off as only paternalistic when it is so distinct from slave missions and slave churches that did not acknowledge humanity, create an community-led leadership base, or acknowledge surnames in the roll books.
  51. 51. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 14.
  52. 52. John L. Girardeau, “Conscience and Civil Government: An Oration Delivered before the Society of Alumni of the College of Charleston on Commencement Day, March 27th, 1860,” Pamphlets, College of Charleston Special Collections (Charleston, SC: Evans & Cogswell, 1860), 8–11.
  53. 53. John L. Girardeau, “Conscience and Civil Government,” 8–11. It must also be noted that this type of missionary to enslaved persons existed in various places throughout the South. One example is of the Reverend James Smylie of Mississippi who “devoted his time exclusively to the religion of the negroes,” and he “organized large classes for study and trained them to recite the whole of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Smylie also prepared a catechism long before C. C. Jones’s effort. This is in White, Southern Presbyterian Leaders, 304–5.
  54. 54. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 18.
  55. 55. Matthew 21:13 (English Standard Version Bible).

Chapter 5: “Still in Its Bud in Our Every Heart”

  1. 1. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 5, 17.
  2. 2. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 5, 17.
  3. 3. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 17.
  4. 4. Bowen Family Papers, Letter from John L. Girardeau to Clara Bowen from Camp on Sullivan’s Island, Dated April 5, 1864. South Caroliniana Library, 2–3.
  5. 5. Bowen Family Papers, Letter from John L. Girardeau, 2–3. Girardeau spent time in Wallace’s Brigade Infirmary where he wrote, “the two great armies of Lee and Grant are lying at ease, like two lions with their heads upon their paws eyeing one another. Sometimes a poor fellow is brought back shot through the head, but this is now of comparatively rare occurrence, as the men are a little more conservative than they used to be.” Continuing with a rather humorous story of the difficult context of preaching in trenches, he wrote, “A few Sabbaths ago I had occasion to preach to the Holcombe Legion in the trenches. It had been tolerably quiet along the lines for some time previously, but after I had been preaching some time one of our batteries for some cause or Page 232 →another fired a shot.” In the midst of the firefight, Girardeau kept preaching to the men and wrote, “This drew a rapid fire of mortar shell from the enemy. They came whizzing and popping about us in proximity too near to be altogether pleasant. But after that I managed to keep straight. Imagine a preacher with pointed finger and earnest voice laying down a sentence and just in the midst of it, the man at whom he was intensely looking, steals a glance up into the sky, then dodges down and WHIRRR –POW! finishes the sentence.” Girardeau continued to preach despite the disturbances and even asked the commanding officer if he should omit the hymn as the men were clumped together and the chances of them being hit were greater. The officer replied “‘No, sir, you might as well go on!’ So we did and sung while the mortar shells were roaring.”
  6. 6. Thomas H. Law, “Pastorate after the War” in George Blackburn, ed. Life and Work of John Lafayette Girardeau (Columbia, SC: State Company, 1916), 133.
  7. 7. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 177.
  8. 8. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 179.
  9. 9. Stokes, “John Girardeau and ‘Big Zion,’” 15.
  10. 10. Prefatory Notes, Thomas Smyth Papers.
  11. 11. Blackburn, Girardeau, 136. Erskine Clarke also wrote that “a bitter debate followed in which Gibbs sought under the Civil Rights Act to secure the building for the black members; the white trustees appealed to General Rufus Saxton of the FreedMen’s Bureau for the return of the building; and John Adger appealed to the Northern General Assembly to oppose Gibb’s action. The military authorities finally acted, returning the building to the white trustees with the stipulation that a school for blacks operated by the Northern Assembly be allowed to continue on the ground floor of the building. Girardeau, who had been preaching to the white congregation at Glebe Street, returned to the pulpit at Zion in January 1867, while continuing to be the pastor of the white Glebe Street congregation.” Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 226.
  12. 12. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 210
  13. 13. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 226. Clarke went on to state that African Americans came to Zion “from churches all over the city: From First Scots and Second Presbyterian, from Methodist Churches and Baptist Churches, and from First Colored Presbyterian (the congregation of Gibbs). They came from country churches too: Johns Island and Edisto, James Island and Wadmalaw. A few came from other parts of the state: from Sumter and Columbia and Spartanburg. Most, however, came not by transfer from another church but on examination, joining a congregation for the first time. They were all people on the move, working out the meaning of their new freedom. Within two years, four hundred blacks had joined Zion, and many more were worshipping there every Sunday.”
  14. 14. Prefatory Notes, Thomas Smyth Papers.
  15. 15. Blackburn, Girardeau, 134.
  16. 16. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 209.
  17. 17. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 209.
  18. 18. Page 233 →Letter from Paul Trescot to John Girardeau, dated July 27, 1865, microfilm roll 160, South Caroliniana Blackburn Papers at the South Caroliniana Library.
  19. 19. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 210–11.
  20. 20. Willborn, Girardeau, 194.
  21. 21. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 178.
  22. 22. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 190–91.
  23. 23. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 192.
  24. 24. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 193.
  25. 25. John Lafayette Girardeau. “Ecclesiastical Relations to Freedmen,” Southern Presbyterian Review 18 (1866): 2.
  26. 26. Robert L. Dabney. Discussions: Volume 2 (London, England: Banner of Truth Trust, 1891), 2:204.
  27. 27. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 4.
  28. 28. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 4.
  29. 29. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 4.
  30. 30. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 14.
  31. 31. In the twenty-first century in a multiethnic Presbyterian church in Jackson, Mississippi, there were still members who believed that an African American could not pastor White people. This mind-set has been in southern ecclesiastical bodies since Reconstruction. The individual who said this later repented and ended up sitting under the preaching and authority of an African American PCA teaching elder named Reverend Mike Campbell.
  32. 32. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 10.
  33. 33. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 5.
  34. 34. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 14.
  35. 35. Girardeau, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Freedmen,” 5.
  36. 36. Lucas, Dabney, 145.
  37. 37. Lucas, Dabney, 24.
  38. 38. Lucas, Dabney, 101.
  39. 39. Lucas, Dabney, 31.
  40. 40. Lucas, Dabney, 102.
  41. 41. Robert L. Dabney. A Defense of Virginia and the South (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1977), 145.
  42. 42. Eugene D. Genovese. A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 95.
  43. 43. Lucas, Dabney, 135.
  44. 44. Smith. In His Image, 266.
  45. 45. Smith, In His Image, 239.
  46. 46. Smith, In His Image, 239.
  47. 47. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 200.
  48. 48. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 201.
  49. 49. Page 234 →Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 202.
  50. 50. Lucas, Dabney, 146.
  51. 51. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 206.
  52. 52. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 206.
  53. 53. Lucas, Dabney, 149.
  54. 54. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 149.
  55. 55. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 203.
  56. 56. Lucas, Dabney, 149.
  57. 57. Dabney, “Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes,” 217.
  58. 58. Lucas, Dabney, 148.
  59. 59. Lucas, Dabney, 148.
  60. 60. Lucas, Dabney, 148–49.
  61. 61. Blackburn, Life Work of Girardeau, 143–44.
  62. 62. Blackburn, Life Work of Girardeau, 143–46.
  63. 63. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 190.
  64. 64. Blackburn, Girardeau, 137.
  65. 65. Blackburn, Girardeau, 144.
  66. 66. Those who entered the ministry from Zion Church included the Reverends. James E. Fogartie, George A. Trenholm, W. G. Vardell, J. B. Warren, C. E. Chichester, and T.B. Trenholm. Thomas Law recalled, “All these Brethren, I venture to say, drew their inspiration and encouragement for the higher work from their consecrated and ever zealous pastor.” Blackburn, Life Work of Girardeau, 147.
  67. 67. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 203.
  68. 68. The seven individuals include Paul Trescot, John B. Mitchell, Sam Robinson, John Warren, Jacky Morrison, William Price, and William Spencer. In Prefatory Notes, Thomas Smyth Papers.
  69. 69. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 203.
  70. 70. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 203. W. F. Robertson also recorded “Charleston, July 6, 1869—At a meeting of the colored congregation of Zion Church, Charleston S.C., held this night and called for the purpose of considering the propriety of organizing them according to the plan recommended by the last General Assembly, the following resolution was adopted—Resolved—That this congregation accepts the plan of the Assembly and desire to be organizes accordingly thereto . . . Resolved that the session of Zion Church be authorized to carry out the plan above adopted.”
  71. 71. A session would include teaching elders and ruling elders. A teaching elder has a formal seminary education and must be examined by the presbytery before receiving license to preach. A ruling elder is nominated by the congregation; examined in theology, the Bible; and church government by the session; and voted on by the congregation. If the vote passes the individual would then be ordained in a service with members of the session and even members of the presbytery present. It would Page 235 →have been very significant to have White teaching and ruling elders in the Charleston Presbytery attend such a ceremony in 1869 and preside over the ordination of African American ruling elders who would then be equal voting members and colleagues in session and presbytery meetings.
  72. 72. Blackburn, Life Work of Girardeau, 150
  73. 73. Boles, Masters and Slaves, 18.
  74. 74. Prefatory Notes, Thomas Smyth Papers.
  75. 75. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 205.
  76. 76. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 209–10.
  77. 77. Prefatory Notes, Thomas Smyth Papers.
  78. 78. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 205.
  79. 79. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 227.
  80. 80. William Banks Papers (1814–1875), Letter from John L. Girardeau to Reverend J. B. Mack, dated July 29, 1874, William Banks Papers (1814–1875), South Caroliniana Library, 2–4.
  81. 81. Blackburn, Life Work of Girardeau, 160.
  82. 82. Tennent Family Papers, Letter from John L. Girardeau to Dr. Charles Tennent dated June 6, 1878. South Caroliniana Library, 3–4.
  83. 83. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 205
  84. 84. Dr. Girardeau Devoted to Negro Work. Part of Girardeau’s legacy was that in April 1878 the Records of the Charleston Presbytery show that “the Zion colored church, Calhoun Street, Charleston, S.C., is still open and religious services are conducted twice every Sabbath by a Presbyterian minister, a minister, however, who is not in connection with our Presbytery.
  85. 85. Dr. Girardeau Devoted to Negro Work.
  86. 86. Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 178
  87. 87. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 139.
  88. 88. News and Courier, “Exhibit Tracks Rise of Black Charleston Churches.” Region section, February 21, 1988. Vertical File, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture Vertical file, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet.
  89. 89. News and Courier, “Exhibit Tracks.”
  90. 90. Post and Courier, “Wallingford Presbyterian Church Being Torn Down.” March 4, 1968. Holloway family scrapbook collection box 2, folder 1. Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  91. 91. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 244.
  92. 92. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 244.
  93. 93. Post and Courier, “Wallingford Presbyterian Church.” Reverend Woods also expressed in the article that “according to the records the first session of colored elders to serve the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina were ordained in this church.
  94. 94. Page 236 →News and Courier, “Exhibit Tracks.”
  95. 95. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 247. Clarke continued to argue for the continuity of antebellum education with the post bellum schools stating, “Beyond whatever formal education an elite free black such as Francis Cardozo was able to attain as a youth in Charleston, the Reformed community had head for generations the scholarly sermons of low country white preachers, had memorized with whites the questions and answers of catechisms, and had worshipped in churches that affirmed order, reasonableness, and simplicity and that deprecated emotionalism and disorder. They had had, in other words, adequate time over several generations and the needed context to have already internalized to a significant extent a Reformed tradition, in its world view, and its ethos.”
  96. 96. Post and Courier, Conley Smith, “Churches’ Histories Documented,” Thursday, December 14, 1989, vertical file, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  97. 97. Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 9.
  98. 98. Holt, Black over White, 11.
  99. 99. Holt, Black over White, 14
  100. 100. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 241.
  101. 101. Sharon E. Garrett, Zion-Olivet Presbyterian Church (USA) Collection 1854–1992, January 20, 1993, vertical file, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  102. 102. F. P. Metz, 1971 Annual Review of the Zion-Olivet United Presbyterian Church in the USA by F.P. Metz, vertical file, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  103. 103. Willborn, “Girardeau,” 205–6.
  104. 104. F. P. Metz, 1971 Annual Review.
  105. 105. Souvenir Booklet, anniversary of Zion Presbyterian Church 1858–1948, vertical file, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  106. 106. Post and Courier, First Black Leader Chosen by Area Presbyterians,” 1B February 3, 2002, 1B, vertical file, Churches-Presbyterian-Zion-Olivet, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
  107. 107. Post and Courier, “First Black Leader.”
  108. 108. F. P. Metz, 1971 Annual Review.
  109. 109. F. P. Metz, 1971 Annual Review.
  110. 110. Otis W. Pickett “Race and the Visions of John Lafayette Girardeau,” Southern Religion, Southern Cultures: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi).

Page 237 →Chapter 6: “The Evils Which Now Oppress Us”

  1. 1. Charles Regan Wilson, Baptized by Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 73.
  2. 2. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 2.
  3. 3. John B. Boles, Black Southerners, 1619–1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Robert M. Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); David B. Cheesebrough, Clergy Dissent in the Old South, 1830–1865 (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1996); Kenneth Moore Startup, The Root of All Evil: The Protestant Clergy and the Economic Mind of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Edward R. Crowther, Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2000); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture 1795–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978); James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); W. Scott Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); and Religion in the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985).
  4. 4. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 66, 73–74.
  5. 5. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 74.
  6. 6. Poole, Never Surrender, 56.
  7. 7. Pickett, “We are Marching to Zion,” 91–101.
  8. 8. John L. Girardeau, College of Charleston Special Collections Pamphlets, “Confederate Memorial Day at Charleston, S.C.: Re-interment of the Carolina dead from Gettysburg” (Charleston, SC: W.G. Mazyck, printer, 1871).
  9. 9. Betram Wyatt Brown Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1982).
  10. 10. Girardeau, “Re-internment,” 6–7.
  11. 11. Girardeau, “Re-internment” 3.
  12. 12. Girardeau, “Re-internment,” 6.
  13. 13. The Westminster Confession of Faith (Lawrenceville, GA: Committee for Christian Education & Publications), 96–97.
  14. 14. Girardeau, “Re-internment,” 6.
  15. 15. Girardeau, “Re-internment,” 8.
  16. 16. Page 238 →Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 7–8.
  17. 17. Girardeau, “Re-internment,” 8.
  18. 18. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 8.
  19. 19. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 8–9.
  20. 20. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 17.
  21. 21. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 19.
  22. 22. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 19.
  23. 23. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 18.
  24. 24. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 18.
  25. 25. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 1.
  26. 26. Girardeau, “Re-Internment,” 20.
  27. 27. Isaiah, Timothy 1:7, 1 John 4:18, Proverbs 29:25. ESV.
  28. 28. Mathews, “Jones Crusade,” 318.
  29. 29. E.T. Thompson Presbyterians in the South. 3 vols. (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1963).

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