Page viii →Page 1 →Introduction Southern Religion and Domestic Missions to Enslaved Persons

The driving questions behind this book have been with me ever since I formally began the study of the history of southern religion. One of my chief questions was, “Why is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in American life?” As I became a Presbyterian and was training for full-time ministry in seminary, I began asking, “Were there any southern Presbyterians who were anti-enslavement or who desired an integrated church?” I possessed a desire to work one day in a multiethnic church, and this was a part of my inward call to ministry. In a way I was attempting to discern whether Presbyterians in the US South possessed any history of integrated worship. My search led me to Southern Presbyterian domestic missionaries and shepherds of marginalized flocks in nineteenth-century South Carolina. I was so interested in this question that I left training for full-time ministry and pursued training to become a fulltime professional historian.

I found out that Southern Presbyterians played an outsized role in creating segregated churches in the US South, laying the theological groundwork and the ecclesiastical practices in the antebellum era that would come to dominate the postbellum landscape up to the modern Civil Rights movement and beyond. I found that Southern Presbyterians became one of the first denominations to vote for racial separation as an official practice in a church court and thereby providing the theological and moral justification for segregation in other spaces both public and civic. I found that there were some anti-enslavement Presbyterians, and there were some Presbyterians who desired integrated churches, but those individuals lost ground to an entrenched economic system driven by enslavement, a divisive political climate, an entrenched view of the inferiority of non-White persons and, ultimately to a Lost Cause, a cause that continued into the twentieth century and has had reverberations into the twenty-first Page 2 →century. In Joshua 4, the Lord commanded Joshua to “take twelve men from the people, from each tribe a man, and command them saying ‘Take twelve stones from here out of the midst of the Jordan.’ After this was done the Lord said, ‘When your children ask in time to come [What do these stones mean to you?] then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.”¹ It is my hope that this book is a memorial stone or a stone of remembrance of the work that happened in South Carolina and that it might stand as a memorial to the ways in which some Presbyterian missionaries and pastors attempted to push back against these systems, but ultimately succumbed to the system’s entrenched grasp on the southern landscape.

As historians of southern religion have examined nineteenth-century pastors, I think it is important not to overlook the connections that the Bible repeatedly makes to pastors as shepherds. Jesus of Nazareth once said, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost,”² and there are numerous other passages that make this connection. As someone who has trained for this calling and later served as an ordained ruling elder or “shepherd” alongside a team of pastors and other ruling elders on a church court that Presbyterians call a “session” for an intentionally planted multiethnic church, I have given a great deal of thought to this verbiage and what it means regarding race. The calling of Christian ministers or “shepherds” regarding pastoral oversight is to care for the flock of God and to protect the flock at all costs. According to the Presbyterian Church in America in the Book of Church Order “the office (of Ruling Elder) is one of dignity and usefulness” and it is the “duty to be spiritually fruitful, dignified, and prudent, an example to the flock, and to govern well in the house of the Kingdom of Christ.”³

In South Carolina in the nineteenth century there were Presbyterian missionaries who shepherded recent European settlers or immigrants, Native Americans, and enslaved African Americans. These “southern shepherds” or missionaries served as shepherds or undershepherds of integrated flocks while also recognizing that some in their churches had privileges based on their race that others did not. These southern shepherds often served in a mission church, which meant that the oversight of the church belonged to a governing body known as the Presbytery until the church particularized or created a local governing body known as a session.

The Presbyterian Church in South Carolina was evangelical, cared deeply about missions, and saw that domestic missions along with foreign missions were an integral part of a practicing Christians’ duty. Domestic missions would Page 3 →have included a pastor or missionary being sent to evangelize, set up a church, and minister to what were considered “foreigners” to the faith within the landscape or close to major settlements that were a part of the then fledgling United States. These “domestic missions” spaces included people on the frontier who lived in territory the United States did not formally recognize, Indigenous communities, enslaved people, as well as large populations of immigrants who might or might not have known about the teachings of Christianity.

Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves displays how the ecclesiastical body of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in South Carolina attempted to “shepherd” marginalized flocks in the nineteenth century, which mostly occurred in what was considered the South Carolina backcountry, western frontier, and coastal lowlands. This book tells the story of missionaries who attempted to minister to and shepherd racially, ethnically and culturally diverse flocks. But ultimately they violated their own principles of ecclesiology, church membership structures, and even their views on education to accommodate the savage wolves of race-based chattel enslavement, a pursuit of mammon over love of neighbor, and later racial segregation. These mission churches, while providing some opportunities for limited emancipationist experiences, ultimately laid the groundwork for separate but unequal church memberships and would later play a role in “organic separation” or racial segregation in 1874. These shepherds allowed the “savage wolves” of enslavers, their worldview, and their overwhelming desire for mammon at the expense of human life to enter the flock and lead the church to make accommodations for the institution of enslavement and segregation. The antebellum mission churches developed a racialized membership hierarchy that would reverberate into a postbellum separation along racial lines. In short, racial hierarchies in southern Presbyterian domestic mission churches helped pave the way for ecclesiastical racial separatism in 1874, which helped create “the most segregated hour in American life” on Sunday mornings. By the time Plessy v. Ferguson and de jure segregation come along in 1896, southern Presbyterians had been practicing and laying the moral justification for racial segregation for almost half a century.

In 1955, C. Vann Woodward, the great historian of the US South, wrote The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which laid out in almost blueprint fashion the laws, systems, and structures of racial segregation. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it “the historical bible of the Civil Rights movement” because it was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation and because it provided a road map for civil rights activists to begin to attack systems that created racial Page 4 →segregation. Woodward argued that racial segregation in the US South dated to the late nineteenth century and that African Americans and Whites had not been divided before the 1890s. My hope is that this book can offer similar insights for scholars of southern religion and southern Presbyterianism about the Presbyterian systems, church courts, ecclesiastical practices, and laws and that created Christian segregation in 1874, a full twenty-two years before Plessy v. Ferguson. I want us to remember that speaking humans historically have always been together in community and are meant to be together. Humans manufacture systems that create racial separation. The future, as the Apostle John reminds us in Revelation is “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”⁴ In the US South, and in South Carolina in the 1870s, it was church leaders in church courts who made decisions to vote for separation along racial lines. The American Christian church has suffered from the ramifications of this decision ever since

Southern shepherds, PCUS pastors, churches, ecclesiastical bodies, and regional church leaders made accommodations on an antebellum racialized ecclesiology and postbellum racial segregation culminating in an 1874 decision to pursue “organic separation” along racial lines for the entire denomination. Many churches and denominations in the US South advocated for enslavement from a biblical position, and several made theological arguments supporting the institution of enslavement as it existed in the United States. However Presbyterians in South Carolina took this work a step further: They created a church structure and racialized ecclesiology to make accommodations for the institution of enslavement in day-to-day life, practices, church government, and church activities. These accommodations have had reverberations into Reconstruction, the era of segregation, and the Jim Crow south. The accommodations make southern or at least South Carolina Presbyterians, early adopters in the southern landscape on accepting segregation as a practical, “biblical,” and therefore an acceptable practice. Any understanding of trying to discern Dr. King’s quote, “We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America” must start with an understanding of Southern Presbyterian domestic missions and their ecclesiology on race during Reconstruction. The antebellum Presbyterian mission churches had intentionally integrated worship, that worship contained many elements of racial segregation, that worship continued into Reconstruction, and it was formally Page 5 →severed by a church court in 1874. Finally in the years following Reconstruction the Lost Cause put to death and buried what was only severed.

This leadership in South Carolina on segregation has left a legacy that continues into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The PCA or Presbyterian Church in America developed largely as a southeastern denomination that was a “continuing church” out of the PCUS or Presbyterian Church United States.⁵ Often modern disagreements in the denomination dating back to the early nineteen seventies have roots in how antebellum southern missionaries viewed enslaved African Americans and how those views continued into the Reconstruction era and beyond. The PCA was born alongside a long tradition in the PCUS, which consistently viewed African American members as inferior. When a new denomination formed (the Presbyterian Church in America) in December 1973 in Birmingham, Alabama, as a “continuing church” out of the PCUS, the context consisted of several significant civil rights activities of the late 1960s and the desegregation of several schools in the US South. The new denomination also led to the development of small, private, segregationist academies often clothed in religious language. Further many moderate and conservative White pastors were concerned that the PCUSA had moved toward a theologically, biblically, and culturally “liberal” position. These positions also included the PCUSA’s views on race. The ordained African Americans in the PCUSA who were pro-civil rights were often labeled as Marxists or Communists, and the more moderate or conservative pastors delegitimized them as theologically inaccurate. The critique of the White moderate, which King detailed in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, saw these individuals approaching the civil rights movement from a cultural and political position, but certainly not a biblical one. From the modern civil rights movement to today there is continuity over how African Americans, or generally people of color, are treated within southern Presbyterianism.

A part of the historian’s work is to evaluate continuity and change over time. There has largely been a consistent refrain among southern Presbyterians when it comes to issues of race from the antebellum context, up to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and into the twentieth century. Indeed many of the themes explored in this book, such as how the church created an inferior form of church membership for enslaved African Americans and how this continued into the church’s views during the Jim Crow era are examples of this continuity. To continue to see the church’s resistance to be an active agent during the civil rights movement, its resistance to reconciliation movements in the 1980s and Page 6 →’90s as “theologically liberal,” and its ongoing battle with discussions of race even today continue to resonate.

Today (2020–24), the language of anyone discussing race in the church is that they are “woke” (meant as a pejorative) and that they eschew biblical arguments for sociological and historical ones. There have been a few moments like 2002, 2015, and 2016–18, when the PCA passed a resolution on repenting of its connection to enslavement and racism, a personal resolution confessing the denomination’s failures during the civil rights movement, and the creation of the Ad-Interim Committee on Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation to research and give a report to the 2018 General Assembly on its findings. However there has been more continuity rather than change over time.⁶ Indeed the experiences of these missionaries and the actions of southern Presbyterians in the nineteenth century is largely consistent with southern Presbyterian engagement on issues of race into the late nineteenth, twentieth and with few exceptions twenty-first centuries. There has been some needed and long-awaited change. For instance the PCA began as an integrated body at its beginning in 1974. However the denomination has a supermajority White membership; it continues to be resistant to discussions of race since 2020; and it treats those who wish to discuss these topics as potential threats to theological orthodoxy, unity, peace, and the current status quo.⁷ In contrast to how individuals discussing race today are viewed as “woke, progressive, theological liberals,” those discussing race in the nineteenth century were considered “conservative, orthodox, and biblically informed.” Ironically, it was the latter who were truly the theological liberals in that they were reading their racist views onto biblical texts and applying them in an unbiblical manner in the church courts.

In southern Presbyterianism in the nineteenth century, many shepherds ended up letting, as the Apostle Paul warned in Acts 20, “wolves” in among the flock who “will come in among you not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.”⁸ Indeed the Apostle Paul was concerned here with the ways in which pastors might shift the true application of the gospel of Jesus Christ to fit within their specific culture, political ideology, or economic system, thereby marring the gospel of Jesus with a human system with which the gospel must be syncretized. Paul also had in mind those coming into the flock to preach a false gospel. In America the southern Presbyterian Church has excused the abuse of enslaved African Americans to protect the economic system of slavery, the gaining of wealth at the expense of fellow human beings and therefore subjecting fellow Christians to dehumanization and suffering for the pursuit of mammon.

Page 7 →This syncretism, a worshipping of mammon and protecting economic systems over one’s neighbor, protecting a racial hierarchy within the church, and pursuing a political agenda over biblical fidelity was merged with gospel preaching and has largely been consistent with southern Presbyterian rhetoric and action toward people of color since the early nineteenth century. This approach also contained a false gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is completely wrapped up in a love of God; love of neighbor as thyself; and to serve, not to be served. Jesus spoke these words in his first public prsentation, “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him”⁹ A church that preached enslaved people and all their descendants to stay in perpetual bondage because of their race and to buttress systems of racial oppression by making room for them in church in second-class membership because of their race was preaching a false gospel in direct contradiction to Jesus’s own proclamation. It should also be noted that this syncretism had a civil religious component as the pursuit of mammon over love of neighbor are deeply connected with South Carolina’s and later the Confederate States of America’s political goals of protecting enslavement and later perpetuating a Lost Cause narrative into the late nineteenth century. The three were intertwined and southern Presbyterianism will become a place that accepted and upheld the economic, political, and civil religious goals of the Lost Cause.

Ecclesiologically speaking the southern Presbyterian church was a place in which enslaved and free had a distinct and unique status before God, before the elders of the church, and as members based on their race. To be sure White members were preferred, given the highest positions, and “ruled” over members of African American heritage. Non-White individuals were seen as non-Christians or “heathens,” were suitable only for labor, and for the lowest forms of un-ordained ecclesiastical service. Enslaved African American Christians could never be ordained deacons, elders, or pastors with authority and oversight over White members. Finally it would have been unthinkable for White missionaries to challenge southern enslavement as it was practiced in South Carolina. If a pastor taught that enslavement, as it existed in the US South, was unbiblical, and therefore the money gotten from enslavement was to be considered sinful, ill-gotten or connected with human stealing, then the pastor would have been fired, removed, and disciplined. If pastors persisted, then Page 8 →they would have been threatened with violence and likely killed. The powers of wealth, racism, and politics could not be overcome even with the strongest biblical or theological arguments.

Some in the PCA believe that if a church is being faithful to the scriptures, preaching truth, and engaging in the courts of the church judiciously, then all sin can be rooted out by the power and work of the Holy Spirit and dealt with. While this is theoretically possible, what southern Presbyterianism has shown is that without outside actors, activists, or national events, such as the massacre of nine victims at Mother Emmanuel AME (ironically directly across the street from the mission churches featured in the later chapters of this text), the death of Michael Brown, or the murder of George Floyd, the church is largely satisfied with the status quo and will perpetuate preaching that does not address a fixation on love of wealth over neighbor, a commitment to racism over unity and/or an obsession with politics and making sure those politics fit within a “biblical truth” for their particular tribe. It is interesting to note that two of the three actions taken by the PCA (mentioned earlier) were directly after two of the aforementioned events (Mother Emmanuel and Michael Brown).

After Reconstruction, southern Presbyterians would lead the national landscape on legal segregation by voting for racial segregation or what was referred to as “organic separation” in 1874, developing a theology of “racial purity,” fears around “racial amalgamation” (a word created to understand “race mixing” and the dangers of what some would call “mongrelization” of the White race by intermarriage with African Americans), and antagonism toward the civil rights movement. In the last fifty years, Southern Presbyterians have been resistant to cultural changes in racial reconciliation. When they address racial injustice they have referred to those within the church who participate in these activities as “Marxists, social justice warriors” and “woke Christians,” who really are not concerned about the gospel, but are simply activists, radicals, progressives, theological liberals, or the ultimate irony, “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” These are all pejorative terms used within the PCA in the twenty-first century to describe individuals who care about these issues and display empathy toward their neighbors of color.

Indeed it was not until 2015, when Drs. Ligon Duncan and Sean Lucas, supported by Jim Baird,¹⁰ openly stated that the PCA’s founders had no interest in civil rights and failed their African American brothers and sisters in this regard. What followed was a posture of repentance and the work of the Ad-Interim Committee on Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation, whose report was accepted in omnibus at the 2018 General Assembly of the PCA.¹¹ With Page 9 →few exceptions the experiences of Southern Presbyterians over the last two centuries have been consistent regarding injustice toward the marginalized, especially African Americans and Native Americans, in the southern United States.

While the call of the spirit no doubt caused these missionaries to labor among and minister to enslaved people, their understanding of race; their views on the inferiority of African Americans and Native Americans; and the fears of change, racial equality, and loss of political, social and economic dominance inherent within the overwhelmingly White membership overcame any biblical or theological understanding of how Christians should relate to fellow church members of another race. For Southern Presbyterians the pursuit of mammon, protecting a racial hierarchy, and politics predetermined what the status of non-White members in the church would be. These three (greed, race, and politics) make up a sort of “holy trinity of American idolatry” and informed an enslaved person’s membership status in the church. Rather than being an antebellum anomaly, this has been a largely consistent pattern in Southern Presbyterianism from its early inception up to the civil rights movement, with the exception of a few South Carolina Presbyterians like James McBride Dabbs who were active in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Indeed a racially cohesive theology driven by the understanding that Africans were inferior; protecting one’s wealth, status, and social mobility by putting down people of color; and following a specific political narrative on race has been continuous for almost three centuries. This theology of racial cohesion moves from a paternalistic structure during the antebellum period to an attempt at racial equity from 1869–74, only to withdraw from biracial equitable leadership and to buttress a staunch racial hierarchy in the face of post-1874 political change moving toward the creation of a segregated church along racial lines. The “organic separation” vote in 1874 should be seen as an example of Southern Presbyterian churches leading the way or modeling to the region that racial segregation was biblical, acceptable, and the proper way in which the races ought to interact. To be sure, twenty-two years ahead of Plessy v. Ferguson, Southern Presbyterians provided the moral authority the courts and broader public needed to make segregation an acceptable public practice in the US South.

However a tension existed during the early part of the nineteenth century regarding the ambiguous status of enslaved African Americans and Native Americans who attended and became members of nineteenth-century Presbyterian mission churches in the US South. These African Americans and Native Page 10 →Americans were simultaneously experiencing limited freedoms as members in a Christian¹² community and some measured ecclesiastical equalities, while also experiencing the effects of dehumanizing enslavement. Scholars of southern religion have attempted to understand how and why a church could at one point acknowledge one’s humanity, soul, and membership in a religious institution while also buttressing a “peculiar institution” that treated enslaved African Americans not as humans, but as property. In seemingly direct contrast to Galatians 3:28, in nineteenth-century South Carolina, a Christian African American enslaved person was two things at once: both enslaved and free. He or she was both chattel (nonhuman) property and a human who possessed a soul and was “free from sin in Christ.” Such distinctions should not exist in the Christian church or the Christian worldview. Yet in mission churches in South Carolina they did exist and were held in an unbiblical and heterodox tension for more than two centuries.

Enslaved communities in the contexts of an urban space like Charleston, South Carolina, and a frontier space like northeast Mississippi (considered part of South Carolina territory in the very early part of the nineteenth century) were, in some ways, distinct from enslavement in other spaces across the southern landscape. Enslaved African Americans in urban spaces typically had more freedom of movement; more skilled, artisanal tasks; and the ability to interact with a broader swath of people coming in and out of a port city. This environment provided unique opportunities compared to an isolated, rural plantation. Further as an enslaved member of a mission church, the enslaved individual experienced some measure of ecclesiastical support. The individual was not free but might have experienced measured ecclesiastical equalities, which were not apparent in many other spaces across the US South. Similar experiences were also common on the South Carolina frontier. There was a complexity to these spaces in which enslavement and a race-based social hierarchy mixed and existed alongside a variety of uncommon and unexpected opportunities.

Galatians 3:28 is a passage the Apostle Paul used to speak to first-century Greek Christians in Galatia. Later a young missionary from Charleston, South Carolina, named John Lafayette Girardeau used it to speak to nineteenth-century White Southern Presbyterians, defending the tenor and thrust of the biblical position on this issue. In Christ and in the church, no human being should have a substandard status based on his or her race, position in society, or gender. According to the Apostle Paul and to Girardeau interpreting Paul, in Christ they are all one or equals. However the relationship between Page 11 →enslaved African Americans and White Presbyterians in the US South before the Civil War did not, in function or in practice, reflect this interpretation. Indeed most churches, theologians, missionaries, and pastors working in the US South used the Bible to defend slavery and did so adamantly. What is apparent throughout American history, from the Puritans in the colonial era to the segregationists in the 1960s is that the exegesis of this text or interpreting it to mean that all races were equal in Christ was not practiced.

In a slight departure from this reality missionaries like Girardeau used an interpretation of Galatians 3:28 to defend the rights of newly freed African American men to join the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) in full membership with equal membership rights in 1866 and with rights to be elected to positions of full church office in 1869. Likewise the South Carolina missionary T. C. Stuart used these sentiments to grant membership, education, and leadership positions in the church to both Native Americans and enslaved African Americans. However Girardeau and Stuart were not willing to make this argument publicly in 1859 or any time before the Civil War. For instance Girardeau’s mission church in Charleston, called Zion, and Stuart’s mission church in northwest South Carolina (now Mississippi), called Monroe, were composed of Whites, free African Americans, enslaved African Americans, Native Americans, and was a unique space where spiritual freedom, enslavement, and measured ecclesiastical equalities mingled awkwardly together. However neither Girardeau nor Stuart were ever advocates of abolition or freedom of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum context.

Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves is an attempt to understand these missionaries and the Native American as well as African American mission church members in South Carolina. This book’s purpose is to enhance our understanding of the complexity of religion’s role and the institution of slavery in South Carolina and in nineteenth-century religious spaces of multiethnic interaction. Further this work will endeavor to understand Presbyterian mission churches as multiracial spaces with interracial activities between Native Americans, particularly individuals of the Chickasaw nation; enslaved African Americans; Whites; and peoples of mixed ancestry. This book not only focuses on the expanded role of Presbyterian mission churches as spaces that formalized pro-enslavement theology into practice, but also delves into larger discussions of religion, race, gender, and the nature of pro-slavery ecclesiology in the context of nineteenth-century South Carolina. Moreover it also considers the connections of complex relationships forged in an antebellum context and how those relationships bridged the Civil War, continued into Page 12 →Reconstruction and beyond into a well-formulated and robustly articulated Lost Cause ideology.

Indeed, while the Civil War left a tremendous impact on our nation’s history, it did not serve to completely sever relationships forged in the antebellum context. For instance many of the relationships that began at Zion Presbyterian Church from 1850 to 1864 continued in a variety of different ways from 1865 to 1874. Likewise removal of the Chickasaw from Mississippi to Arkansas and Oklahoma left a massive imprint on mid-South Native American culture and history. However it did not destroy relationships formed between missionaries and members in the preremoval era. Figuring most prominently in this work however is the question of race and the role the church played in perpetuating, while also at times questioning, entrenched racial attitudes and perspectives. Finally, human relationships are complex and messy, and this book attempts to understand the complexities of the multiracial relationships forged in the context of nineteenth-century mission churches in South Carolina.

Multiracial mission communities shed light on nineteenth-century perspectives on race, how church membership affected racial identity, and how race changed the status of that membership. Few works have tried to consider the multiracial makeup of both frontier and urban missionary structures as spaces that provided opportunities for interracial ecclesiastical activities based on church membership as well as on the spaces themselves. Further while the historiography is full of scholarship examining pro-enslavement theology, few books examine the way this theology took root in a practiced ecclesiology or theology applied to the nature, structures, and function of the church membership, its polity, and government. This work will display how mission churches were spaces in which a theology of race was applied to church ecclesiological structures to accommodate and make room in the church for pro-enslavement views and therefore separate church activities and membership based on one’s race. Finally it will show that race was not linear in South Carolina Presbyterianism. The fluidity of racial categories, combined with the pragmatic nature of missionary survival on the southwestern South Carolina frontier, as well as in urban spaces, often made missionary churches spaces that both entrenched and occasionally challenged racial hierarchies.

Further few historians have attempted to make connections between antebellum and postbellum periods using mission schools, churches, and ecclesiastical spaces as links providing relationships in the antebellum context, which carried over into the postwar period and into Reconstruction. Similar connections can be made between preremoval and postremoval periods regarding the Page 13 →missionary’s relationship to the Chickasaw. For instance Presbyterian churches for free African Americans in Charleston, set up in 1865, provided glimpses into the agency and autonomy of African American communities apart from White communities but still had a similar membership base, ecclesiastical structure, and even some of the same leaders as antebellum churches under the “enslavement mission” model in the 1850s.¹³ Therefore the connection in the prewar and postwar periods must be examined more closely.

Finally, today, many individuals think conversations on race in the church are new and that church leaders didn’t care about issues like race in the past, but that forwarding the gospel was the only concern. Nothing could be further from the truth. One might even say that nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterians were absolutely obsessed with the question of race and did their best theological gymnastics to defend it and apply it to the life of the church in a thoroughly unbiblical and heterodox manner by imputing their regions’ entrenched economic, political, and racial views onto church structures. Therefore when modern Presbyterians discuss race in the church, it is coming from a long history and tradition of this conversation dating back to the late eighteenth century. In fact nothing is probably more Southern Presbyterian, historically speaking, than talking about race and the church through biblical and theological lenses.

Indeed nowhere is this more apparent than in what John Lafayette Girardeau called “ecclesiastical equality” and what Robert Lewis Dabney called our “ecclesiastical equality of negroes.” Girardeau used this term in 1866 to describe what he believed was equal status between African Americans and Whites regarding church membership and ecclesiastical rights. Indeed Girardeau used biblical precepts to point the Presbyterian Church in the United States toward addressing issues of inequality with regard to church membership for individuals of non-White heritage. Thus ecclesiology and theological principles rooted firmly in antebellum interracial relationships pushed Girardeau’s position on race to one of ecclesiastical equality during Reconstruction. Dabney worked to destroy Girardeau’s position at every point. The two men spent years on this subject in their writing and discourse. This is probably just as much if not more than anyone in the modern Presbyterianism has spent on the topic in the last sixty years.

The historiography included in this book is robust¹⁴ as many of the historical conversations and threads throughout the book cover a variety of subjects ranging from a host of issues tied up with southern history, which make their way into southern religious history.¹⁵ The experiences of religion among Page 14 →southerners¹⁶ is especially central to the work as African Americans, Native Americans, and individuals of European descent as well as individuals with a variety of ethnic ancestral threads. These groups are centrally placed as practitioners of southern religion. The historiography of religion in the South,¹⁷ missions, pro-enslavement ideology,¹⁸ and particularly missions to enslaved African Americans play a central role in the analysis of this context.¹⁹ Further, African American religious experiences in the Atlantic world shed light on nineteenth-century Presbyterian mission churches and provide context for mission churches as biracial communities.²⁰ The eras and topics covered include and speak to historiographies related to the colonial South,²¹ the nineteenth-century institution of enslavement and race,²² southern religion,²³ African American history, Native American history, southern Presbyterian churches,²⁴ and the US South broadly. To deal with all the nuances of these various historiographical debates would be its own book. However one prominent theme throughout the book is examined through the lens of John Boles’s notion of a “limited emancipationist impulse.²⁵ The book explores the ways in which Southern Presbyterians used mission churches as a means of control, but also as spaces in which the enslaved were active agents. As Janet Cornelius argued, African Americans were active participants in these churches and quickly seized opportunities.²⁶ Cornelius also makes the argument that the foundation for post–Civil War congregations have their roots in antebellum mission churches in the South.²⁷ Further, the connection of antebellum mission churches to the Lost Cause was strong as Girardeau and other southern shepherds engaged as Confederate chaplains and later as ministers and practitioners of Lost Cause rhetoric.²⁸ Last, broader historiographical debates dealing with religion,²⁹ race,³⁰ and church membership as it applied to Whites, African Americans, and Native Americans in church mission spaces across US history is instructive of our understanding of the US South.

Indeed, the lives of individuals like Thomas Donnelly, T. C. Stuart, Charles Colcock Jones, John Adger, and John Girardeau, have shown that missions to European immigrants, African Americans and Native Americans upheld a racialized vision for the role of people of color within the church. However at times these mission churches also served as avenues for sympathetic Whites to attempt to mitigate the harsh treatment of enslaved African Americans or Native Americans. Indeed there are many inconsistencies, nuances, and complexities inherent within the study of enslavement missions. As Donald Mathews has stated,

Page 15 →Identified with the efforts of antebellum southerners to vindicate their social system, the mission as a historical institution and idea has suffered from the sentimentality of conservatives and the righteous indignation of radicals. Awareness of class interest, religious self-delusion, and racial fears, however, should not prevent historians from considering the ironies and almost hopeless contradictions that bemired southern evangelicals. If the mission was a movement to impose social control, it nevertheless sprang from some of the best inclinations of White southerners. And if the best was inadequate to deal with social problems, perhaps the monumental quality of the inadequacy is worth remembering.³¹

While no doubt bemired, the example of Presbyterian missionaries in urban and frontier spaces in South Carolina presents similar issues toward Native Americans and the institution of enslavement among southern evangelicals to which Mathews refers. Indeed internal and sometimes external contradictions “bemired southern evangelicals” and the lives and work of Thomas Donnelly, T. C. Stuart, Charles C. Jones, John B. Adger, and John Lafayette Girardeau bear witness to that struggle.³²

Chapter 1 examines the work of Thomas Donnelly at Rocky Creek Presbyterian Church in the South Carolina Backcountry and missions to the peoples of the northeastern section of South Carolina who were largely recent immigrants to South Carolina as well as enslaved African Americans. It traces the movement of a Presbyterian church pastor from Pennsylvania down to South Carolina in 1802 and how the writing of Alexander McCleod influenced the experiences of enslaved African Americans in South Carolina.

Chapter 2 investigates the life of Thomas C. Stuart and the missions to the Chickasaw in western South Carolina. Stuart became one of the earliest missionaries in western South Carolina, which would later become a part of the Mississippi territory. In 1820, the Synod of South Carolina sent Stuart to establish the Monroe Mission, and he served as a missionary to the Chickasaw of northeastern Mississippi for decades. The chapter examines Stuart’s relationships with church members: African Americans, Whites, Native Americans, and those of “mixed heritage.” Later, Chickasaw College grew out of a need for educational institutions outside of Monroe. The chapter traces the ways in which Stuart’s preaching, the ministry of enslaved African Americans, and the work of Chickasaw members complicate our understanding of southern mission churches on frontier spaces.³³

Page 16 →Chapter 3 analyzes the genesis of missions to enslaved African Americans in the southeast by understanding the work of missionary to the enslaved Charles Colcock Jones. The chapter begins with an examination of the father of enslavement missions and his work in Liberty County, Georgia and makes connections between Jones and the later work of John B. Adger out of Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The chapter examines the philosophies of Jones and how his work undergirded the efforts in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Chapter 4 then moves into an in-depth analysis of the early mission work of John Lafayette Girardeau. The chapter then follows the mission from its home on Anson Street to the larger mission structure on Calhoun Street. Examining this antebellum structure of mission churches, interracial ecclesiastical activity, and the system of complex human relationships at the Zion Mission is central to understanding the overall thrust of enslaved missions in South Carolina as it was the largest mission to enslaved African Americans that South Carolina ever produced. The chapter traces the history of the Zion mission church up to 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War as Girardeau would go on to serve in the Confederate Army as a chaplain for the Twenty-Third South Carolina Volunteers.

Chapter 5 explores Girardeau, Zion Church, and the postwar interracial church, which existed from 1866 up to 1874 in Charleston, South Carolina. This chapter addresses Girardeau’s philosophy of “ecclesiastical equality,” and postwar philosophies, for ecclesiastical equality and his work in trying to keep the Presbyterian Church United States together as an integrated body into the late 1870s. Finally the chapter examines how an antebellum multiethnic mission church lead by paternalistic White southern Presbyterians left a space for an autonomous racial, political, and even economic identity among Zion’s African American membership into the mid-twentieth century and beyond.

The book concludes with an examination of Girardeau’s rhetoric and the South Carolina Presbyterian Church’s contribution to Lost Cause ideology toward the end of Reconstruction. The connection between Girardeau’s Lost Cause sentiments and his postbellum work on ecclesiastical equality ultimately serves to reinforce Southern Presbyterian missionaries’ antebellum views on race and incorporates language that is both unbiblical and heterodox. Indeed it is possible that many southern shepherds, including the ones who might have had the best possible intentions, were continuing to let wolves in, disguised as sheep, that would have ramifications on racial segregation for the next century and beyond.