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The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism: Revivalism in South Carolina, 1700–1740

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Thomas J. Little
Thomas J. Little
Affiliation:
Associate professor of History at Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia.
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Extract

Despite the continuing “discovery of southern religious history” and the growing scholarly fascination with southern intellectual and cultural history, historians of the South have devoted all too little attention to the origins of southern evangelicalism in the colonial period. Over the past thirty years or so, they have generally tended to follow the lead of Samuel S. Hill, Jr., arguably the single most important and influential southern religious historian, who concluded in an interpretive survey article that “the history of religion in the South before it was the South … is, in all candor, not very impressive.” In his pioneering Religion in the Old South, for instance, Donald G. Mathews paid but scant attention to the origins of popular Protestantism in the South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. What is more, he focused almost exclusively on colonial Virginia.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 75 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 768 - 808
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

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39. Francis La Jau to Secretary of the SPG, 18 February 1709, 12 December 1712, and 10 August 1713, in ibid., 50, 125, 133.

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85. Smith, , The Divine Right of Private Judgment Vindicated, 49.Google Scholar

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87. Howe, , History of the Presbyterian Church, 1:201–6Google Scholar. Laypeople flexed their muscle in other ways, solidifying the breach between Subscribers and Nonsubscribers in some cases. See “Records of the Circular Church,” Charleston, South Carolina, quoted in ibid., 1:202. Will of Robert Ure [dated 1735], cited in ibid., 1:207,

88. Josiah Smith to Benjamin Colman, 7 November 1735, quoted in ibid., 1:206–7.

89. Howe, , History of the Presbyterian Church, 1:206Google Scholar; Smith, Josiah, A Sermon, Preached at Charlestown, South-Carolina, in the Year 1739, 2nd ed. (Charleston, S.C.: Robert Wells, 1773), 4, 23Google Scholar. See also, Smith, , A sermon deliver'd at Charles-town, in South Carolina: the Lord's Day after the funeral, and sacred to the memory of the Reverend Mr. Nathan Bassett, who exchang'd this for a better Life, June 26th 1738 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1739)Google Scholar. The central issues involved in the subscription controversy were essentially the same in the Synod of Philadelphia, where Presbyterian ministers in the Delaware Valley called on those in northern New Jersey and on Long Island to subscribe to the Westminster Confession. See Alan, Heimert and Perry, Miller, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustraiting the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Berrill, 1967), xxiv–xxxv. There the “manifesto of the revival party, the most influential sermon of the Awakening and perhaps of the century,” became The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740), Gibert Tennent's challenge to the authority of the ministry. Because of this and similar struggles, the Great Awakening escalated into a social, cultural, and intellectual upheaval. Before it had run its course, Americans had questioned religious taxes, the idea of an established church, and the morality of modern, market-oriented behavior, as well as clerical authority.Google Scholar

90. Meriwether, Robert L., The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765 (Kingsport, Tenn.: Southern, 1949), 33–109.Google Scholar

91. Ibid., 43.

92. French-speaking Reformed Protestants, mostly Swiss, gathered a congregation in Purrysburg in 1732; their minister, Swiss Reformed loseph Bugnion, received Anglican re-ordination in London before arriving in the colony: ibid., 40. A Presbyterian congregation was established in Williamsburg, and already by 1736 the “Irish Protestants” had secured the services of a Scotch-Irish minister, Robert Heron. Swiss and German Reformed clergymen, Bartholomew Zouberbuhier, Sr., and Christian Theus, began holding services in New Windsor and Saxe Gotha by the end of the decade. Lutheran and German Reformed congregations in Purrysburg and Orangeburg grew up in the 1730s around lay preachers. Brandenburg judge and physician John Frederick Holzendorf read “Postille” sermons to early German-speaking settlers at Purrysburg: Toggenburg goldsmith John Ulrich Giessendanner, a wayfaring Pietist who had dabbled in mystical Illuminism in Switzerland and Germany, was “called by the people” at Orangeburg to be their resident minister, his congregation consisting of “all kinds of religionists.” Across the colony to the east and north, Welsh Tract Baptists in Queensboro took cooperative action and founded the Welsh Neck Baptist Church in January 1738: ibid., 39–40, 57, 67, 84, 96; The South Carolina Synod of the Lutheran Church in America, History of the Lutheran Church in South Carolina, comp. Fritz, W. Richard (Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1971), 15–30.Google Scholar

93. Ibid., 11–31. W. Richard Fritz was responsible for researching and writing the South Carolina Synod's history of the Lutheran Church through 1803; Meriwether, , The Expansion of South Carolina, 33–76.Google Scholar

94. Faust, Albert B. and Brumbaugh, Gaius M., Lists of Swiss Emigrants in the Eighteenth Century to the American Colonies (Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical, 1968)Google Scholar, quoted in ibid., 12.

95. “Testimony at hearings about John Giessendanner,” 1716, reprinted in Anderson, Hugh George, “The European Phase of J. U. Giessendanner's Life,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 67 (06 1966): 132.Google Scholar

96 “Fragment of Governor Tobler's Diary,” February 11, 1737–March 18, 1737, in “The John Tobler Manuscripts: An Account of German-Swiss Emigrants in South Carolina, 1737,” ed. Cordle, Charles G., Journal of Southern History 5 (February–November 1939): 87Google Scholar (February 17, 1737).

97. Ibid., 87.

98. Zouberbuhier not only suffered furious abuse on the trip over, but when he arrived at New Windsor other reform-minded clergy commented on his lack of “inner warmth and piety” in their correspondence with their colleagues back home, saying privately that his congregation seemed to be as “sheep without a shepherd”: Urlsperger, Samuel, Ausfuhrliche Nachi rich von den Saltzburgischen Emigranten, die sich in Amerika niedergelassen haben, 18 vols. (Halle: Verlegung des Waysenhauses, 1735–1752), 1:2350, 2385Google Scholar, quoted in Fritz, , comp., History of the Lutheran Church, 41–42Google Scholar. Similarly, Joseph Bugnion, a French-speaking Swiss minister who took Anglican orders before leaving London in 1732, was forced to abandon his ministry in Purrysburg in less than a year; he was no more popular in the low-country parish of St. James, Santee, where he was subsequently transferred. In 1735 he was dismissed at Alexander Garden's request. Bugnion's successor at Purrysburg, “a French student” and an understudy of the Anglican-Reformed minister, went the way of his mentor. The laity “chased him away,” charging him with living “a wicked life and of mixing in bad affairs.” A few months later, another re-ordained Swiss Reformed minister, Henry Chiffele, arrived. He was well liked and a vast improvement over Bugnion and his student, but despite his best efforts he simply did not “know the German language very well,” which put him at a distinct disadvantage in the cultural babble of Purrysburg. German-speaking Lutherans and Reformed preferred the services performed by a lay reader, John Frederick Holzendorf. They took their children to the Lutheran pastors across the Savannah River at Ebenezer to have them baptized, and they also went there to get married, Chiffele, “being unwilling and unable to marry them in the German language”: Unsperger, Ausfuhrliche Nachirich, 1:368, 1037, 2162Google Scholar, quoted in Hinke, William J., “The Origin of the Reformed Church in South Carolina,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 3 (12, 1906): 369–71.Google Scholar

99. Fritz, , comp., History of the Lutheran Church, 46.Google Scholar

100. Prior to his leaving Lichtensteig, Switzerland for Marburg, in 1714, Giessendanner, now fifty-four years old, had spent time as an apprentice in Halle, Germany, the epicenter of Pietism. Early on he styled himself a religious “teacher,” facing opposition from both religious and secular officials who forced him to pay homage to the authority of an ordained ministry as well as admit that the new birth did not set men and women above other Christian adherents: Anderson, , “The European Phase of John Ulrich Giessendanner's Life,” 129–30Google Scholar. On the growth and spread of Pietism, see Brown, Dale W., Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1978), 9–136.Google Scholar

101. John Giessendanner to Mr. Paravicini, 23 April 1737, reprinted in Anderson, , “The European Phase of John Ulrich Giessendanner's Life,” 135.Google Scholar

102. Quoted in Hinke, William J., Ministers of the Reformed Congregation in Pennsylvania and Other Colonies in the 18th Century (n.p.: n.p., 1951), 325. Copy available at the Lutheran Theological Seminary Library, Columbia, S.C.Google Scholar

103. Urlsperger, , Ausfuhrliche Nachirich, 1:2174Google Scholar, quoted in Hinke, , “The Origin of the Reformed Church in South Carolina,” 373.Google Scholar

104. Other clergymen were also active and influential. Swiss Reformed minister Christian Theus, brother of colonial South Carolina's most famous portrait painter, came to the colony as a theological candidate. He was ordained in 1739 and settled at Saxe-Gotha, where he ministered to the congregation of St. John's Congarees for over fifty years: Fritz, , comp., History of the Lutheran Church, 58–65Google Scholar. Down the road in Orangeburg, Theus's colleague, the elder John Giessendanner's nephew and namesake, John, was delivering bilingual sermons “to the Inexpressible satisfaction” of his German-Swiss, German, English, and French adherents. He, too, had arrived as a theology student and been ordained in 1739, his uncle having schooled him in theology and all except “Oriental languages.” Shortly thereafter, in 1741, English settlers from Amelia, “observing him to be a Man of Learning, Piety and Knowledge in the holy Scriptures, prevailed with him to officiate in preaching once Every fortnight in English, which he hath Since performed very articulate and Intelligible.” Moreover, “above four score of the Dutch [read Deutch] and English Inhabitants of Orangeburg and the adjoining plantations” signed a formal petition in 1744 after Bartholomew Zouberbuhler, Jr., “applied to the council of the Colony … to secure ordination from the Bishop of London” so that he might propagate “the word of God” in the township. Supporters of the younger Giessendanner were incensed. They claimed that Zouberbuhler, trained in the Orthodox Reformed tradition like his father, had been encouraged “by some wicked Persons, in one part of the Township” who wanted “to kick Mr. Giessendanner out of the church” because he publicly rebuked them for Sabbath-breaking as well as “Great Irregularitys, and disorders”: Journals of the Council and Upper House of Assembly, 1721–75, 38 vols., South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, S. C., vol. 9, March 6, 1744, 139–43.

105. Trachsler, Hans Wernhard, Kurtzverfasste Reiss-Beschreibung eines, neulich aus der in West-Indien gelegenen Landschaft Carolina, in sein Vaterland Zuruckgekommenen Lands-Angehorigen, sant Bericht von dieses Lands Art, Natur, and Eigenschaften (Zurich: Burklischer Druckerey gedruckt, 1738)Google Scholar, quoted in ibid., 373; Rowe, Peter as quoted by Dibble, Samuel, marginal note in Bernheim, Gottfried Deilman, History of the German Settlements and of the Lutheran Church in North and South Carolina (Philadelphia, Pa.: The Lutheran Bookstore, 1872), 113Google Scholar, Lutheran Theological Seminary Library, Columbia, S.C.

106. The story of the Ashiey River Baptists is somewhat unusual, however, because it is rather well documented–exceptionally so for these critical years. Their records, which commence in 1736 when they founded “a Branch of ye visible Church of Christ,” constitute the earliest comprehensive extant records of any Baptist church in the South; a literal quarry of information that can be mined profitably to explore the rise of evangelicalism in the colony. It is in them that one can discern most clearly the decided turn of events at this particular point in time. See “Records of the Ashley River Baptist Church, 1736–1769” (Nashville, Term: Southern Baptist Convention Historical Commission, n.d.), microfilm, May 24, 1736, frame 1. See also my co-edited manuscript with Kegley, Sarah E., “Records of the Ashiey River Baptist Church, 1736–1769,” Journal of the South Carolina Baptist Historical Society 27 (11 2001): 3–32Google Scholar. The manuscript records are now at Furman University, though, unless otherwise noted, all the following references are from a microfilm copy available from the Historical Commission, Southern Baptist Convention, Nashville, Tenn. (Publication Number 1090).

107. Edwards, Morgan, Materials Towards A History of the Baptists, ed. Weeks, Eve B. and Warren, Mary B., 2 vols. (Danielsville, Ga: Heritage Papers, 1984), 2:124–25Google Scholar. See also Sparks, Elder John, The Roots of Appalachian Christianity: The Life and Legacy of Elder Shubal Stearns (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 6–12Google Scholar; and Gardner, Robert G., Baptists of Early America: A Statistical History, 1639–1790 (Atlanta: Georgia Baptist Historical Society, 1983), 14–63.Google Scholar

108. The five-points of Calvinism are unconditional election, limited (particular) atonement, total depravity, irresistible grace, and the final perseverance of the saints.

109. “Records of the Ashley River Baptist Church,” May 24, 1736, March 18, and June 17–18, 1738, frames 1, 6, and 9. The complex story of the various Baptist groups in British America, their theological orientation and relative numbers from place to place and over time, is told clearly and succinctly by Gardner, Robert G., Baptists of Early America, 14–63Google Scholar. See also Benedict, David, A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America, and other Parts of the World, 2 vols. (Boston: Lincoln and Edmonds, 1813), 2.Google Scholar

110. “Records of the Ashley River Baptist Church,” September 17–18 and December 12, 1737, frames 4 and 5. For Susannah Baker, see Francis Varnod's 1726 census of St. George's Parish, which is reprinted in Klingberg, , An Appraisal of the Negro, 58–60Google Scholar, and the analysis in Wood, , Black Majority, 159–66.Google Scholar

111. Townsend, , South Carolina Baptists, 34, n.Google Scholar

112. Edwards, , Materials, 126.Google Scholar

113. For a list of Chanler's publications, see Townsend, , South Carolina Baptists, 34Google Scholar, n.; and 282, n. Chanler attempted to institute the ritualistic “laying on of hands” at the Euhaw Baptist Church in St. Helena's Parish in 1746, “but the thing created disturbance,” and he “desisted from attempting to introduce the rite,” according to Edwards, Morgan in his Materials, 132.Google Scholar

114. See Noll, , Bebbington, , Rawlyk, , ed., “Introduction,” in Evangelicalism, 6.Google Scholar

115. “Records of the Ashley River Baptist Church,” December 12, 1737, frame 5; and June 9, 1740, frame 11.

116. Ibid., June 12, 1738, n.d., September 1742, frames 8, 19, 23, and passim.

117. Ibid., December 11, 1738, frame 9.

118. Ibid., September 10, 1739, frame 10. Will's case was the exception, not the rule. Over the next thirty years only one other member was purged from fellowship in an open, public ritual. What is more, Will was the sole black member disciplined, and the records of the Ashley River Baptist Church confirm the general observation that in southern biracial churches “blacks were not disciplined out of proportion to their numbers; on the whole, they were charged with infractions similar to those of whites; and they were held to the same moral expectations as whites”: Boles, John B., “Introduction,” in Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, ed. Boles, (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 13Google Scholar. See also, Isaac, , Transformation of Virginia, 168–72, 247, 264, 266Google Scholar; 185, 193, which should be read in the context of his “Discourse on Method”: ibid., 321–57.

119. See, for example, Mathews, , Religion in the Old South, 39–80Google Scholar; and Isaac, , Transformation of Virginia, 168–72, 247, 264, 266, 315Google Scholar, and passim. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the current historiographical debate, as presently formulated, over whether individualism “caused” the rise of evangelicalism, in southern religious history: Isaac, ibid., 171, n., emphasizes “the ambivalence between communitarianism and individualism,” which he calls “the principle interpretive revision made to this chapter since its original publication as an article.”

120. (Philadelphia, Pa.: B. Franklin, 1740). Referring to the Stono Rebellion, a small pox epidemic in 1738, and an outbreak of yellow fever in 1739, Whitefield warned southern colonists, “God first generally corrects us with Whips; if that will not do, he must chastise us with Scorpions”: ibid., 16.

121. Heyrman, , Southern Cross, 23. In emphasizing the obstacles revivalists encountered in claiming “the soul of the South,” Heyrman recovers something of the time dimensions involved in the broader rise of southern evangelicalism.Google Scholar

122. Ibid., 9. Compare, for example, Mathews, , Religion in the Old South, 15Google Scholar; Isaac, , Transformation of Virginia, part 2Google Scholar; Bonomi, , Under the Cope of Heaven, 125Google Scholar; Hofstadter, , America at 1750, 204–65Google Scholar; Bridenbaugh, Carl, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1952), 96–97Google Scholar; Boles, , “Evangelical Protestantism in the Old South,” 14–15Google Scholar; and Greene, , “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” Journal of Social History 3 (spring 1970): 200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

123. January 12, 1740.

124. Evangelicalism was not monolithic; it changed from place to place. Still, evangelicalism can generally be described as “a fairly discrete network of Protestant Christian movements arising during the eighteenth century in Great Britain and its colonies.” It included “a consistent pattern of convictions and attitudes,” such as Biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism: Noll, , Bebbington, , and Rawlyk, , Evangelicalism, 6. See also, 39.Google Scholar

125. See Heyrman, Southern Cross, Prologue; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, part 2.