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“Doubts still assail me”: Uncertainty and the Making of the Primitive Baptist Self in the Antebellum United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Joshua Guthman
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Abstract

Though forged in the fires of the early nineteenth-century evangelical revivals, Primitive Baptists became the most significant opponents of the burgeoning antebellum evangelical movement. The Primitives were Calvinists who despised missionaries, Sunday schools, Bible tract societies, and the other accoutrements of evangelical Protestantism. This article contends that a feeling of uncertainty dominated Primitive Baptists' lives, catalyzed their movement's rise, and fueled their strident opposition to the theological and organizational changes shaping churches across the country. For Primitive Baptists, it was their questioning–especially their experience of persistent doubt–that set them apart from evangelicals. The uncertainty that colored Primitive Baptist selfhood motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. It propelled them toward a community of like-minded souls, and it stirred those souls to action as a more ardent brand of evangelical Protestantism crowded church pews. It is in the Primitives' uncertain selves–not in their theology or their socio-economic condition–that we find the most compelling explanation of their movement's unlikely rise.

Keywords

Primitive Baptistsemotionevangelicalconversionmissionary
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Winter 2013 , pp. 75 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2013

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References

Notes

1. Hill, Thomas Sr., letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, October 23, 1841, 313–16Google Scholar; Hill, letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, November 13, 1841, 332–35; and Hill, letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, November 27, 1841, 341–42.

2. By the 1830s, “Primitive Baptists” became the label these believers most often used to identify themselves, although many also retained a fondness for the “Old School” moniker. Most settled on the appellation “Primitive” in order to signify their direct descent from the primitive church—that is, the church gathered around Jesus nearly two thousand years earlier. In both respects, I follow their usage. For more nomenclatural insight, see Newsome, Jerry, “’Primitive Baptists’: A Study in Name Formation or What's in a Word,” Viewpoints: Georgia Baptist History 6 (1978): 63–70 Google Scholar.

3. Revivalists of all stripes used the new measures, though they have been most closely associated with Charles Grandison Finney, who, in 1835, spelled out both his revival techniques and theology in Lectures on Revivals of Religion. See Finney, Charles Grandison, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. McLoughlin, William G. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Finney's life, see Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, Finney, Charles G. and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1996)Google Scholar.

4. I generally follow the Primitive Baptists' terminology because it reflects the way they bifurcated antebellum America's heterogeneous religious landscape. Needless to say, the Primitives' terminology shoves together, under one umbrella, an array of Baptist sects whose members might have been amused or, most probably, outraged to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those whose beliefs they considered heterodox. And yet the Primitives' terminology was not entirely inaccurate. In antebellum America, many Baptists and, indeed, many Protestants embraced a new ethos that was revivalistic, missionary, and leery of orthodox Calvinist theology.

5. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, “The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South: A Study in Regional Folk Culture,” Journal of Southern History 36, no. 4 (1970): 511 Google Scholar. Throughout this article, I have used the term “Calvinist” and its variants as shorthand descriptions of Primitive Baptist theology, but, like that most famous American Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, the Primitives did not often cite John Calvin by name. Nonetheless, Primitive theology drew upon, and was refracted through, a series of Calvinist writers and doctrines. Simply examining the articles of faith for nearly any Primitive church will reveal, for instance, Calvinism's famous five points. In this context, using “Reformed” or “Orthodox” or another brief theological denotation would lead to more confusion than the somewhat imprecise designation “Calvinist.” For more on Primitives’ relationship to the entirety of Calvinist doctrine, see Crowley, John G., “The Primitive or Old School Baptists,” in The Baptist River: Essays on Many Tributaries of a Diverse Tradition, ed. Jonas, W. Glenn, Jr. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2008), 158–81Google Scholar.

6. Lloyd, Benjamin, The Primitive Hymns, Spiritual Songs, and Sacred Poems: Regularly Selected, Classified and Set in Order and Adapted to Social Singing and All Occasions of Divine Worship (Greenville, Ala.: Published for the Proprietor, 1858), 293 Google Scholar; Beebe, Gilbert, The Baptist Hymn Book: Comprising a Choice Collection of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs Adapted to the Faith and Order of the Old School, or Primitive Baptists in the United States of America, 2d stereotype ed. (Middletown, N.Y.: Office of the “Signs of the Times,” 1859), 613 Google Scholar.

7. Mathis, James R., The Making of the Primitive Baptists: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Antimission Movement, 1800-1840 (New York: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar; Taylor, Jeffrey Wayne, The Formation of the Primitive Baptist Movement (Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

8. Hudgins, Ira Durwood, “The Anti-Missionary Controversy among Baptists,” Chronicle 14, no. 4 (1951): 147–63Google Scholar; Miyakawa, T. Scott, Protestants and Pioneers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Sweet, William W., ed., The Baptists: 1783–1830: A Collection of Source Material (New York: Cooper Square, 1964)Google Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, “The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South”; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1890s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Hughes, Richard T. and Allen, C. Leonard, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Burich, Keith Robert, “The Primitive Baptist Schism in North Carolina: A Study of the Professionalization of the Baptist Ministry” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973)Google Scholar; Crowley, John G., Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South: 1815 to the Present (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998)Google Scholar.

9. See, for example, Charles Sellers's landmark synthesis and the separate volume of commentary, especially the essays by Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine, that was published several years later. Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Stokes, Melvyn and Conway, Stephen, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996)Google Scholar. Howe has become Sellers’ fiercest critic. See his What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Jill Lepore's “Vast Designs: How America Came of Age,” New Yorker, October 29, 2007, 88–92, reviews the Sellers- Howe debate. The dispute between Sellers and Howe closely tracks the interpretive disagreements over the origins and character of early nineteenth-century evangelical revivalism. That debate has been vast, but see Johnson's, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar and Hatch's, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar as representative examples of the conflict's interpretive poles. For overviews of that debate, see Johnson, Paul E., “Democracy, Patriarchy, and American Revivals, 1780–1830,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 4 (July 1, 1991): 843–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Curtis D., “Supply-Side and Demand-Side Revivalism? Evaluating the Social Influences on New York State Evangelism in the 1830s,” Social Science History 19, no. 1 (April 1, 1995): 1–30 Google Scholar; and Brauer, Jerald C., “Revivalism Revisited,” Journal of Religion 77, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 268–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. There has been, of course, a third response to the Primitives— namely, to neglect them. Many histories do not mention them at all or mention them only in passing or treat them as unproblematic members of a larger Baptist denomination or evangelical movement. For instance, both Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997) and Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) place Primitive Baptists under evangelicalism's generous canopy, figuring the Primitives as exemplars of southern evangelicalism's adoption of the South's patriarchal social mores. This approach to the Primitives is understandable given both the immense diversity of American Protestantism and Primitives' comparatively small numbers. But the upshot of this orientation, as James Bratt has pointed out when surveying the historiography of antebellum evangelicalism, is that southern evangelicalism begins by implication to resemble the united front of some evangelicals' imaginations—an inevitable, unstoppable force—rather than a movement or movements rife with divisions. Bratt, James D., “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (2004): 65–106 Google Scholar.

11. Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corrigan, John, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 231–32 (emphasis in the original)Google Scholar; Eustace, Nicole, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Rosenwein, Barbara H., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

In American history, the turn toward historicizing emotional expression has been led by Peter and Carol Stearns. See, especially, Stearns, Peter N. and Stearns, Carol Z., “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 no. 4 (October 1, 1985): 813–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Stearns, Peter N., American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Stearns, Peter N., “Emotions History in the United States: Goals, Methods, and Promise,” in Emotions in American History, ed. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 15–27 Google Scholar.

The emotions literature in other fields is vast, but some of the key texts that historians have relied on include Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Wikan, Unni, “Managing the Heart to Brighten the Face and Soul: Emotions in Balinese Morality and Health Care,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 294–312 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lutz, Catherine, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

12. Hollister, Sarah Ann, “From Sister Hollister to Sister Mather, after Reading Her Experience, as Published in a Late Number of the Monitor,” Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Spiritual Monitor 3 (1840): 267 Google Scholar.

13. Watson, John McClaran, The Old Baptist Test; or Bible Signs of the Lord's People (Nashville: Republican Banner Press, 1855), 21 Google Scholar. Watson's phrase comes from 1 John 5:10 KJV.

14. Lick Fork Primitive Baptist Church Record Book, January 1824, Baptist Historical Collection, Wake Forest University; Peter L. Branstetter, “The Life of Elder Peter Branstetter: Experience and Call to the Ministry,” Primitive Baptist Online, <http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/936/70/>. Branstetter, born in Missouri in 1825, wrote his reminiscences in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They were published as Branstetter, Peter L., Life and Travels, Labor and Writings of Elder Peter L. Branstetter (St. Joseph, Mo.: Messenger of Peace, 1913)Google Scholar.

15. The distinction between prayer and watching was a common one. See, for instance, Walker, Martha A., letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, August 28, 1840, 298–99Google Scholar.

16. This seems the intended result. Though Primitive Baptists would disavow the language of intent, would deny that they had any ability to influence their otherworldly fate, the practice of watching seems to have been designed to catch sin before it metastasized or even to prevent its growth in the first place.

17. S. A. Elkins, “The Life and Writings of Elder Peter Branstetter: Character Sketch,” Primitive Baptist Online, <http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/937/36/>. Elkins's reflections originally appeared in Branstetter, Life and Travels.

18. Lawrence, Joshua, “Victorious Grace: Being a Mere Glance of His Experience,” Primitive Baptist, October 23, 1841, 311 Google Scholar. The Primitive Baptist serialized Lawrence's autobiography over five issues in the early 1840s. The original manuscript, drafted in 1812, can be found in the Joshua Lawrence Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

19. Hollister, “From Sister Hollister,” 268.

20. Rebecca Anna Phillips, Led by a Way I Knew Not: Being the Christian Experience, and Reasons for Leaving the Missionary Baptists, and Uniting with the Primitive Baptists, with an Exposition of the Issues Dividing Them … Together with Supplementary Articles on Scriptural Subjects (Pulaski City, Va.: Hurst, 1901), 58.

21. Phillips, Rebecca Anna, The Experience of R. Anna Phillips, of Rome, Georgia, and Her Reasons for Uniting with the Primitive Baptists (Wilson, N.C.: P. D. Gold, 1875)Google Scholar.

22. Phillips, Led by a Way I Knew Not, 1.

23. Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 215 Google Scholar. Mathews contrasts southern whites' experience of being “broken down” under preaching with southern blacks’ experience of being lifted up.

24. Mary Beckley Bristow, Diary of Miss Mary B. Bristow: 1844–1863, Containing a Partial Record of Activities of Sardis Baptist Church, Licking Association in Kentucky, Special Collections, University of Kentucky.

25. See, for example, William Scarborough's letter to his brother, Daniel, who expressed astonishment that William had joined the Primitive Baptists. William Scarborough wrote: “I Read the Scripture prayfully and attentively and knowing from my own feelings if I am a child of god it is free grace alone and unmerited favor on my part for I tryed my own strength till I thought every other man on earth had a better chance for heaven then myself.” William Scarborough to Daniel Scarborough, December 7, 1839, Collection #906, State Archives of North Carolina.

26. Hill, letter to the editor, October 23, 1841, 314, 316; Hill, letter to the editor, November 13, 1841, 333.

27. Moore, J. Taylor, A Biography of the Late Elder Thos. P. Dudley (Occoquan, Va.: Printed at the Sectarian Printing Office by Wm. M. Smoot, 1891), 24–25 Google Scholar. Moore was quoting from Thomas Dudley's 1851 letters to The Signs of the Times. Dudley was born in Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1792.

28. Lawrence, Joshua, “Victorious Grace: Being a Mere Glance of His Experience,” Primitive Baptist, October 9, 1841, 299, 301 Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 302.

30. Lawrence, “Victorious Grace,” October 23, 1841, 340.

31. Arnold Bolch, Jr., letter to the editor, Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Spiritual Monitor 1 (1837): 151.

32. R. D. Hart, “Biography of Elder Joshua Lawrence,” Primitive Baptist, October 28, 1843, 312–16.

33. J. H. Purifoy, “Autobiography,” Primitive Baptist Online, <http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/117/56/>. Purifoy published his “Autobiography” in the Gospel Messenger in 1888; he was born in 1837.

34. Silas Durand, “Fragments: Thoughts in Sickness,” May 25, 1900, Primitive Baptist Online, <http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/439/56/>.

35. James Mathis suggests that, for Primitive Baptists, the period of conviction lasted longer, was more convoluted, and perhaps more acutely felt than for “missionary” Baptists. See Mathis, , The Making of the Primitive Baptists, 127–47Google Scholar.

36. Wesley quoted in Noll, Mark A., America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 335 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 47 Google Scholar; Heyrman, Southern Cross, 34; Corrigan, Business of the Heart, 81. Writing about new-measures revivalism in the North, Richard Rabinowitz makes a similar point—that the revivals promoted a “distinctive cognitive style.” See Rabinowitz, Richard, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life? The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 98 Google Scholar.

38. Joseph Biggs, letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, January 9, 1836, 10.

39. “Minutes of the Proceedings and Resolutions Drafted by the Particular Baptists Convened at Black Rock, Maryland, September 28th, 1832,” in The “Feast of Fat Things,” ed. B. L. Beebe (Middletown, N.Y.: Gilbert Beebe's Sons, 1890), 6.

40. Beecher, Edward, “The Nature, Importance, and Means of Eminent Holiness throughout the Church,” American National Preacher 10, nos. 1 and 2 (1835): 222 Google Scholar.

41. Mark Bennett, letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, February 13, 1836, 42. Bennett's missive was an uncommon example of a Primitive Baptist directly engaging one of the doyens of northern establishment Protestantism.

42. John R. Respess, “The Life of Elder John R. Respess,” Primitive Baptist Online, <<http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/701/36/>. Respess was born in Upson County, Georgia, in 1831. His testimony first appeared in the Gospel Messenger in 1892.

43. Many Primitives described similar scenes. See, for example, Branstetter, “Life of Elder Peter Branstetter,” or Issaac Vanmeter, “The Life of Elder Isaac Vanmeter,” Primitive Baptist Online, <<http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/1538/70/>.

44. See Lawrence's “Victorious Grace” and Watson's Old Baptist Test. This “American Manichaeanism,” as Alexander Campbell termed it, took many forms. For example, Daniel Parker's “Two-Seeds” doctrine, disavowed by most Primitive Baptists, essentially made Satan and God co-equals. See Wimberly, Dan B., Frontier Religion: Elder Daniel Parker, His Religious and Political Life (Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

45. Veritatis, Amans, “A Difference between the Spirit of Christ and Mere Party Zeal,” Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Spiritual Monitor 1 (1837): 6 Google Scholar.

46. Lee Hanks, “The Conflicts of an Orphan,” Primitive Baptist Online, <http://primitivebaptist.info/mambo//content/view/124/36/>. Hanks originally published this account in the Primitive Monitor in 1886. Beebe, Baptist Hymn Book, 613–14.

47. Lloyd, Primitive Hymns, 294; Beebe, Baptist Hymn Book, 614.

48. Abzug, Robert H., Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

49. Taylor, John, Thoughts on Missions (Franklin County, Ky., 1820), 6 Google Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture, 134–35.

50. Cushing Biggs Hassell, Diary, December 11, 1848, 244, Cushing Biggs Hassell Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Joshua Lawrence, “Teeth to Teeth: Tom Thumb Tugging with the Wolves for the Sheepskin,” Primitive Baptist, May 27, 1837, 153; Joseph King, letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, April 23, 1836, 127; Wm. Eblen, letter to editor, Primitive Baptist, May 14, 1836, 142.

51. Lawrence, Joshua, The American Telescope, by a Clodhopper of North Carolina (Philadelphia: n.p., 1825), 6, 8Google Scholar.

52. Joshua Lawrence, letter to the editor, Primitive Baptist, February 13, 1836, 35. That missionaries personally profited from their endeavors was a persistent theme of Primitive Baptist writing. The specimen issue of the Primitive Baptist, for instance, featured a table purporting to show the considerable salaries and fees paid to the agents of the North Carolina Baptist Society for Foreign and Domestic Missions. See Primitive Baptist, October 3, 1835, 3. The conventions of the antimissionary polemic usually did not allow for distinctions to be drawn between missionaries and missions-supporting clergy. But we can do what they chose not to do. We can see that the Primitives' notion of the wealthy circuit rider was off base. In 1840, for instance, Methodist circuit riders had a yearly income of $400 plus payment for “traveling and table” expenses. But the Primitives' habitual concern with well-to-do preachers was not unfounded. In southern towns, at least, pastors, by 1860, boasted an average wealth of $10,600 as opposed to the $2,500 nationwide average for free adult men. There were, however, key denominational trends, with Episcopalians and Presbyterians near the top of the ranks and Baptists and Methodists toward the bottom. See Holifield, E. Brooks, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

53. Richard M. Newport, “Imposition Exposed,” Signs of the Times, April 2, 1834, 134; Hassell, Cushing Biggs to Garrard, William, June 25, 1847, in Friendly Greetings across the Water, or the Love Letters of Elders Garrard & Hassell (New York: Chatterton and Crist, 1847), 17 Google Scholar; Trott, Samuel, “Union of Christ with the Church,” in A Compilation of Elder Samuel Trott's Writings: Copied from the “Signs of the Times” Embracing a Period from 1832–1862, ed. Jacobsson, Marc (Salisbury, Md.: Welsh Tract Publications, 1999), 43. Trott's article was originally published in 1833Google Scholar.

54. Hassell, Cushing Biggs and Hassell, Sylvester, History of the Church of God: From the Creation to A.D. 1885; Including Especially the History of the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association (Middletown, N.Y.: Gilbert Beebe's Sons, 1886), 586, 579Google Scholar.

55. See Burich, “The Primitive Baptist Schism.” If anything, the regional antimissionary faction tended to be somewhat older and own slightly more slaves.

56. Jeremiah 6:16 KJV.

57. Brush Creek Meeting House Record Book, April 30, 1853, Primitive Baptist Library, Elon, North Carolina.