Moderates in Conflict:

Moderates in Conflict:

Enlightened and Primitive Scottish Calvinists in South Carolina, 1760-1860

Robert M. Calhoon

Near Christmas 1834, the Resolutions of the South Carolina legislature arrived in the Abbeville District of South Carolina bearing ominous tidings. As part of a post-Nullification crackdown on racial and sectional moderates, the South Carolina legislature, on December 17, the final day of its session, increased penalties and tightened enforcement of the law that forbad teaching slaves to read.^{^[1]} Judge David L. Wardlow would have been the first person in the

courthouse town of Abbeville to learn of the change in the law, and he must have dispatched one of his cronies to the town of Due West Corner, ten miles to the northeast, to warn the Reverend William Hemphill, minister of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP)—and gloat over the fact that the conservative Scotch Irish Calvinists in Due West had been targeted as a potential breach in the South Carolina wall of white hegemony.^{^[2]} Hemphill probably never forgot the smirk on the lips of Judge Wardlow’s emissary, and decades later vividly recalled the sensation of blood draining from his face as he read, for the first time, statutory language criminalizing the free exercise of religion.

Why did the hamlet of Due West Corner (originally DeWitt’s Corner, a wagon road stop in the 1760s)^{^[3]} emerge in the 1830s as a flash point in the slavery controversy? Due West and the surrounding Abbeville District were an integral part of the Scottish and Scots Irish diaspora. The Old World cultural tensions—that sent thousands of people from various precincts of western Scotland to Ulster during the seventeenth century and tens of thousands of Ulster Protestants to America more in the eighteenth century—were not impulses of the moment. Peoples migrated under the cloud of tensions between tradition and adaptation, between reason and piety, that had gripped Scotland, northern England, and finally Ulster for centuries. The majority of the Due West’s approximately 750 inhabitants had migrated from Ulster to western Pennsylvania in the 1790s and then to South Carolina during the 1820s. There they built a church and established a college and seminary named after the champion of Scottish Calvinist traditionalism, Ebenezer Erskine. Due West was an outpost in a chain of post-Revolutionary Scots and Ulster Scots settlements in the Carolinas, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The oldest of these emigrant communities in Pennsylvania traced their religious lineage back to seventeenth-century Scottish “Covenanters,” and more recently to “Seceder” churches which had broken away from the Church of Scotland in the early 1730s over strict interpretation of the Westminster Confession. Seceders in the Pennsylvania and the Middle West organized the United Presbyterian Church, while those in the Carolinas joined with old Covenanter churches in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to form the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, Hemphill’s denomination.^{^[4]}

Already heavily populated with Scotch Irish families, the South Carolina upcountry contained a sprinkling of Presbyterian settlements wedded to Scottish worship practices like the exclusive singing of Psalms in worship. These practices had beckoned Seceder communities in Pennsylvania as promising places to disseminate pure Scottish Calvinism in the expanding American nation. New to America and new to the South, these strict Calvinists encountered slavery for the first time when they settled in South Carolina. Many soon departed for Ohio and Indiana rather than live with state-sanctioned tyranny while others with less itchy feet reassured themselves that God would protect them from moral contamination from slaveholding neighbors and even guide them in becoming Christian slaveholders.^{^[5]}

At the heart of their communal religious discipline was the requirement that ARP families hold daily devotional services in which all members of the household, slaves included, take part in reading and discussing passages from Scripture. Four years after the South Carolina ban on slavery literacy, Hemphill and sixty-one ARP laymen made their public protest to the legislature. Although they explained that they had withheld complaint in hopes that the Nullification “excitement . . . should have somewhat abated,” more was at stake than prudential silence.^{^[6]} Recalling this period nearly a quarter century later, Hemphill described the wrenching experience of preparing a small community of faith for a confrontation with the state’s power structure. Hemphill discussed with his parishioners the moral and spiritual dangers posed by the new law.

In a typical study session, the ARP laymen and their minister explored the “anxiety” the apostles must have felt amid the “perils” of persecution, and Hemphill reminded them that courage in the face of terror was the very state of mind “that nerved Luther to the task of organizing the great moral revolutions of the sixteenth century, . . . arousing the church from the dark thraldom into which she had fallen.”^{^[7]} To broaden their political base, Hemphill and his elders reached out to ARP laymen in the Long Cane and Cedar Spring communities—hotbeds of Nullification sentiment. (Patrick Calhoun had settled in Long Cane in 1756 and his youngest son, John Caldwell Calhoun had been born there in 1782). What finally emboldened the ARP petitioners from these scattered parts of the Abbeville District to make public witness of their convictions, Hemphill emphasized, was their realization “that this law is offensive to God and has been one cause of his displeasure against us” and a “blot on the record of the state and offense against high heaven.”^{^[8]} In the neighboring Chester District, where opposition to Nullification was slightly stronger than in Abbeville,^{^[9]} one hundred and twenty-three ARP male church members protested at once.^{^[10]} Both of the ARP petitions to the legislature pointed to Article 8 of the South Carolina Constitution which guaranteed the “right of conscience” so long as conscience did not become a mask for “licentiousness” nor a danger to “the peace and safety of this state.”^{^[11]} The ARP petitions turned the peace and safety clause on its head by contending that God bestowed an orderly society only so long as people honored Him with daily prayer, Bible reading, and silent and spoken meditation.

Twelve years later, in 1850, George Grier, a slave belonging to the Reverend Doctor Robert Grier, the President of Erskine College and Seminary, witnessed to the character and purpose of inter-racial devotional gatherings in ARP familes. George Grier^{^[12]} had been hired out for a few days to work for Lemuel Reid, a neighbor six miles south of Due West in the Long Cane community. Although William Hemphill and Robert Grier were, like Reid, Scotch Irish Presbyterians, the Long Cane Presbyterian Church was not ARP; it was what southern Presbyterians called a “General Assembly” church, officially part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). The Long Cane Church boasted among its members the Abbeville District’s most politically influential citizens. While repairing Lemuel Reid’s kitchen, George Grier talked to Reid’s slaves, Abram, Louisa, and Israel, about religion and told them what he had just learned during family devotions in Robert Grier’s home. Responding to debates over the Compromise of 1850 and the reopening of wounds over slavery, Dr. Grier had explained to the members of his household, slave and free, that slavery was surely a great evil that God almighty would not, and could not, ignore. It followed from those premises that God would, in His own good time, act to destroy slavery. Consequently, Dr. Grier told his hushed, attentive family and slaves, the time had come for pious white and black people should begin to prepare themselves to live together, in the fear of God, as equals. Surely, Dr. Grier reasoned, the debates in Washington were a sign of something—almost certainly that the day of reckoning was drawing near. Take hope, George Grier told Lemuel Reid’s slaves! Do not despair. God is on our side. “Working by secret means, . . . God . . . will deliver you from your bondage.”^{^[13]}

George Grier spoke with authority. He had grown up in the Grier family and had received spiritual instruction from Dr. Grier since he was a boy. He was a social middleman, a go-between among slaveholders and slaves in the Due West community. He tended the Grier family garden and did household chores, but Grier did not need George’s services from sun up to sun down. George Grier had the time and autonomy, not only to pursue his trade as a carpenter, but also to function as the leader of the black community in Due West. In both lowcountry PCUS churches and in the larger ARP upcountry churches, black members constituted “a church within a church” in which specially appointed black leaders looked after the spiritual and physical needs of African American congregants. Proscribed from preaching—out of deference to community fears—the leaders of the slave “church within a church” were encouraged by church Sessions discreetly to minister to those of their race. As pastor of the Due West ARP church, William Hemphill loosely supervised George’s ministry. Initially a system of social control, the “church within a church” among South Carolina Presbyterians evolved into something at once socially patriarchal and subtlely ameliorative of racial oppression.^{^[14]} Like conjurers in African religious practice, who dispensed magical cures and served as a medium between divinity and humanity,^{^[15]} George Grier interpreted the mysteries of Calvinist Christianity and tended to the spiritual needs of the nearly two hundred slaves living in or near Due West in 1850.

A classic middleman, transversing racial boundaries, George Grier capitalized on being the nominal property of a college and seminary president, enjoying the confidence of both the Due West Church Session and the church’s black membership, as well as the training he had received in Grier family devotions in the pious use of language, and, by example, the language of discretion. The fact that, according to Lemuel Reid, Robert Grier “hired out” George “as a carpenter”^{^[16]} suggests that carpentry allowed George to support his family; there is nothing in the record to indicate that hiring-out charges went into Dr. Grier’s pocket. As George Grier’s nominal owner, Robert Grier functioned very much like court appointed trustees for free persons of color in Georgia and South Carolina seeking to regulate the lives of free blacks and in the case of those with occupational skills to innoculate free people of color from illegal reenslavement; in Georgia guardianship proceedings, at least one judge was more willing to enlarge a free black man’s autonomy if he practiced a skilled trade.^{^[17]} Accused of endorsing George’s “abolitionist” views and of being “unsound on slavery,” Robert Grier did not deny either charge.^{^[18]} Asked if he would reprimand George, Grier told a local community inquiry that “if I was going to say anything to negroes on the subject, I . . . could not say anything more to the purpose, or suitable, than what he [George Grier] said.” Incredulously, the chairman of the investigating committee, ironically named James Fair, pressed Dr. Grier, “surely you would not [have] told them [Grier’s slaves] that they would be set free,” to which “Dr. Grier replied, ‘They will be free when they die, that is certain.’ ”^{^[19]}

That theological certainty was precisely what George Grier had communicated to Abram, Louisa, and Israel: they would be free when they died, and if, as seemed increasingly likely, God revealed His will that who are in bondage in the American South should be set free, then devout slave holders would be spiritually obligated to honor that freedom here and now. Pressed to dissociate himself from anything George Grier had allegedly said, Robert Grier told the Long Cane inquirers that “we all have to acknowledge that slavery is an evil” and therefore, as a man of God, he prayed continually to be “rid” of it. Throughout the interview, Robert Grier said nothing about his bondsman that he would not have said of a fellow Christian and ministerial colleague. The appropriateness of George Grier’s alleged teaching about slavery and religion, Robert Grier wanted the Long Cane community to realize, was something “we all have to acknowledge.”^{^[20]}

Sharing Robert Grier’s unperturbable dignity, George Grier knew the value, as well as the risk, of letting his confident voice flow through the Reid household and into the still morning air outside of open doors and windows. He was not whispering or being secretive when he told Lemuel Reid’s slaves to take hope and to expect divine deliverance. From outside Reid heard that resonating voice and caught snatches of disturbing language. Positioning himself just outside his back door, approximately thirty feet from the chattering slaves, he listened carefully—to be certain he was hearing what he thought he was hearing. When George Grier regaled Lemuel Reid’s slaves by describing United States Senators (including those with anti-slavery convictions) as “some of the smartest men in America,” Reid could stand it no longer. He burst through the doorway and denounced George for “the doctrine he was preaching.” The words “doctrine” and “preaching” went to the heart of the matter. Reid had laid responsibility directly on Robert Grier, whose devotional homily George had ostensibly been mouthing. And more than mouthing, actually preaching with authority, conviction, and power. Then Reid ordered the black preacher off the premises. A few minutes later George Grier, on his own volition, coolly returned to the front door of Reid’s house, apologised for upsetting Reid, and asked his “forgiveness.” Once again, the operative term was theological. Reid indignantly refused to forgive what he called “a calculated attempt to make my negroes dissatisfied.” The uninvited visitor on the front doorstep equably replied that his comments on slavery were simply views spoken of “in that way, about town.” “[I]n town,” Reid ominously assumed, meant Due West Corner—that nest of ARP apostasy on slavery.^{^[21]}

This apparently local episode had regional and transatlantic political, social, and theological origins. The ARP petitions to the South Carolina legislature, George Grier’s interactions with Lemuel Reid’s slaves and his confrontation with Reid himself, and the ensuing uproar all raised fundamental questions about law, race, religion, and authority:

Among Protestant Christians, people of The Book, did Biblical law take precedence over man-made statutes?

In a political culture that fostered hair-trigger reactions to the debate over slavery in the nation, could slaves, or dissident whites, be prevented from drawing heterodox conclusions about the permanence and legitimacy of the peculiar institution?

Did the polyglot nature of Scots Irish immigration into the South Carolina upcountry compromise white solidarity?

Because these portentous questions push to the periphery of attention routine village discourse and behavior, it is important to embed them in a web of local attitudes and manners.^{^[22]} The twenty-five thousand word broadside, “To the Public,” that Robert Grier published in his own defense on October 1, 1850—printing accusatory letters from local newspapers along with his own lengthy rebuttal and the criminal trial record of George Grier for sedition—did a remarkably good job of balancing structural realities and ephemeral concerns. The leaven in the documentary collage was the account of a visiting investigatory committee of Reid’s neighbors and fellow Long Cane Presbyterian Church church members whose convener (ironically named James Fair) plus Lemuel’s kinsman, Samuel Reid, and Allen Miller attempted, in a very Presbyterian and, by their lights, Biblical way, to determine the truth of Lemuel Reid’s allegations. Perhaps to keep a lid on a potentially volatile dispute, Reid and Grier agreed each to appoint two committee members to an investigating committee and these four to name a fifth. The Long Cane community assumed that Robert Grier would testify, make “his slave, George,” available to the committee, and carry out whatever punishment of George the committee prescribed. When George Grier disappeared and Robert Grier appeared suspiciously unperturbed, the plan for a five member committee collapsed. Reid’s two appointees, his kinsman, Samuel Reid, and Allen T. Miller may well have exercised their right to name a chairman acceptable to both Reid and Grier, by selecting James Fair, a Long Cane church member and an Erskine Trustee.^{^[23]} In any event, Fair presided over the committee of inquiry and took the lead in interrogating Robert Grier with scrupulous courtesy.

Scripture stipulated (Matt. 18:15-17) that if Lemuel Reid felt himself wronged by a fellow Christian, he should first speak lovingly to Robert Grier in private, and failing that, speak to him more formally in the presence of two witnesses. Only if twice rebuffed could Reid appeal to “the church” to adjudicate the dispute. Local circumstances made Matthew 18 awkward to apply in this case. The fact that slaves were involved, and that George Grier’s utterances had, in all probability, raced within hours through local slave quarters, meant that the incident compromised the security of the local white community and that Robert Grier had arguably wronged every white person in the Long Cane neighborhood. The local practice of a five member committee appointed jointly by Reid, Grier, and their four appointees, or as it worked out, two Reid appointees and a committee-appointed chairman, would have reflected the need to maintain social unity and civility within the white community. The committee of inquiry was, presumably the rough equivalent of the aggrieved-person-plus-two-witnesses required by Matthew’s gospel as instigators of the second stage of conflict resolution. Publishing their account of the interrogation of Robert Grier in the Abbeville Banner seemed about as close as Reid’s Long Cane supporters felt they could come in laying the matter before “the church,” because Grier and Reid belonged not only to different churches but also to different branches of southern Presbyterianism. Notwithstanding these procedural difficulties, Calvinist tradition required that Robert Grier be approached by a small delegation of concerned neighbors, and, if need be, arraigned before a local congregation. Furthermore, southern Presbyterian practice stipulated that Lemuel Reid’s allegations become a matter of public record, and finally that Robert Grier should be given a chance to disavow his presumptuous views on slavery and apologise for his lax discipline of “the negro,” or “the slave George,” whose seditious chatter to Lemuel Reid’s slaves had caused so much trouble.

Local communities in the slave South prized a kind of informal due process in those disputes sufficiently serious to jeopardize civic peace.^{^[24]} The Long Cane community’s understanding of due process informed James Fair’s courteous questioning of Robert Grier. Dr. Grier’s sense of due process, in turn, came through in his candor and his perhaps naïve commitment to Christian education. Grier reminded the Fair committee, first, that the evil of slavery should be obvious to any thinking Christian and, second, that freedom through the grace of God awaited all human beings, even African slaves. For his part, George Grier conformed to requirements due process when he returned to Lemuel Reid’s home, knocking on Reid’s front door, to ask forgiveness for any verbal injury he might have unintentionally inflicted and, quick-wittedly to assure Reid that “he meant no harm” in “talking that way”—the way black folks, and conceivably some Due West whites as well, talked when going “about town.” Characterizing his language in Long Cane as Due West town talk was George Grier’s notion of informal, spontaneous, dispute resolution, what Lemuel Reid might reasonably expect as his “due.”^{^[25]}

The very existence of Scottish Calvinist ways of giving adversaries their “due” was symptomatic of a deep fissure in Scottish (and Scottish American) culture between a warrior ideal, which had prevailed until the sixteenth century, a similarly hard-won cosmopolitan veneer, which seventeenth-century lowland Scots imbibed from the northern Renaissance. The conventional wisdom concerning this paradigm shift, J. G. A. Pocock explains, regarded the Enlightenment a “programme for putting an end to religious and civil war by the institution of commercial society in which arms were no longer in private hands.” But, as Pocock proceeds to demonstrate, the martial spirit did not simply evaporate in the warm sunlight of enlightenment; rather the two Scottish ideals remained in creative tension well into the nineteenth century in Scotland and, for that matter, in Ulster and the southern backcountry in North America. In Pocock’s formulation, the critical question was “whether these two ideals, the martial and the polite, could be reconciled” at all.^{^[26]} In the Abbeville District of South Carolina that civilizing process was far from complete on the August morning in 1850 when George Grier went off to do some carpentry work for Lemuel Reid.

Enlightened Calvinism was the urbane admixture of Scottish Calvinist theology and Scottish enlightenment rationalism first concocted by Francis Hutcheson in his lectures on moral at the University of Glasgow in the 1730s, continuing in the work of Hutcheson’s students and admirers like Lord Kames, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. Enlightenment Calvinism matured in the teachings of the Edinburgh moderate literati in the 1740s, 50s, and 60s like Hugh Blair, William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson. Robertson was Principal of Edinburgh University, a historian, and the most creative of Scotland’s mid-eighteenth-century cultural critics. Fascinated with the decay of medieval institutions and impressed with the vitality of Renaissance statecraft, Robertson saw sixteenth and seventeenth century Scotland as a still barbarian society poised on the edge of cosmopolitanism. He feared that the transition would be a time of danger and uncertainty. To teach his students and readers to prepare for it, Robertson substituted the history of manners, especially the manners of clergy, for traditional ecclesiastical history and dynastic history for the history of politics broadly conceived. Robertson thereby popularized the historical outlook of the Italian humanists. He viewed own Scottish Presbyterianism in much the same way as Machiavelli did his Italian Catholicism: as a source of insights into human nature and as a guide to appreciating the power and sometimes the corrosiveness of religious convictions.^{^[27]}

Scottish intellectuals like Hutcheson and Robertson sought to merge, reconcile, and harmonize Calvinism and Enlightenment. But in the process, they provoked the evangelical majority of Scottish Presbyterians to reassert the centrality of traditional Scottish Calvinist piety. John Witherspoon had the credentials to spearhead this campaign by challenging the practice of Scottish aristocrats, rather than church Sessions, to appoint ministers for churches on ancestral lands and to castigate the fondness of bookish preachers for elevating moral philosophy over systematic theology as the standard for belief and conduct. When Robertson complained that Catholic metaphysics “misled” the faithful “instead of embellish[ing] human life and render[ing] it comfortable,” as J. G. A. Pocock recently observed, Witherspoon “doubtless inquired with acerbity whether rendering human life comfortable was all that religion was meant to achieve.”^{^[28]} Called to the presidency of the College of New Jersey in Princeton in 1767, Witherspoon ironically made Scottish moral philosophy the lynchpin of the undergraduate curriculum and within a generation in virtually every American institution of higher learning.

Witherspoon’s lectures on moral philosophy set the standard for moderate political discourse in America. The lectures presented students with an eclectic, distracting mixture of Hutcheson’s ethics and Witherspoon’s own evangelical piety. “The immensity of the divine being,” he told his audience, meant that God’s “agency is equal, universal, and irresistible.

. . . All things are possible with God—nothing can withstand his power.” At the same time, the power of human beings to act virtuously derived from “the will of God, the reason and nature of things, the public interest, and private interest” only so long as none of these sources, not even the divine imperative, was “pushed to an error by excess.” Witherspoon’s ethics were therefore a bounded system operating within constraints of piety, reason, civic duty, and self-interest.^{^[29]}

Witherspoon’s application of that ethic to slaveholding was entirely consistent and predictable; slavery was wrong but abolition was not necessarily a moral imperative: “it is certainly unlawful to make inroad on others unprovoked and to take away their liberty by no better right than superior power,” however, “I do not think there lies any necessity on those who find men in a state of slavery to make them free to their own ruin.” ^{^[30]} Witherspoon’s student, William Graham, taught his moral philosophy students at Liberty Hall in the valley of Virginia that the trade-off between the evil of enslavement and the evil of abolition was itself a place of moral safety: “If they are unfit for liberty, it would do them an injury to set them free. . . . The caprice of man was never made the rule of safety.” ^{^[31]} Condemnations of slavery, Graham contended, were just that—capricious uses of reason and moral sentiment and dangerous abuses of liberty. As slavery became the preferred labor system for up country South Carolina Scotch Irish farmers during the early nineteenth century, their Presbyterian and Baptist ministers followed Graham’s apologetic lead.^{^[32]}

Scottish enlightenment ideas therefore fit into the culture of the middle colonies and the southern backcountry—fit almost too neatly—because both societies were self-consciously provincial and middle class. “The literati of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Richard Sher argues, “were not angry or alienated intellectuals, . . . not bureaucratic state officials, . . . not Freemasons, . . . not high flying dilettantes. . . . Rather . . . they were . . . middle and upper middle class professional men” who were “less witty, less urbane, and often less critical of their country’s religious, political, social, and educational establishments” than their French counterparts. As “leading members of the liberal professions in a ‘provincial’ society,” Sher continues, these teachers, scholars, and clergymen were acutely aware of the liabilities and the advantages of provincialism for a national culture and for their own careers as public intellectuals.^{^[33]} They knew that provincialism marginalized nations, classes, and leaders who lacked the resources and prominence to declare their territory the center of civilization and culture, but that provincialism also gave intellectuals on the periphery of a culture the incentive and the perspective to predict the future and explain the present.

Provincialism was a trade-off. “The proper object of the theory of morals,” Thomas Reid told his students, “is to explain the constitution of the human mind so far . . . as to explain the moral and active parts of the human mind.” By making the human mind the focus of their inquiry, Scottish moral philosophers recognized the limitations of their resources and abilities; they also identified the education needs of their audience for guidance in distinguishing between competing theories of human behavior based on the primacy of “private interest,” “the public good,” those “agreeable to our moral sense,” and those consistent with “the relations of things.”^{^[34]} The life of professional men in provincial societies was an ongoing educational and ethical endeavor teaching them how to apply those private, public, moral, and sociological tests in order to negotiate the tension between rational knowledge and piety. And for Presbyterian writers of the Scottish enlightenment, negotiating provincial tensions meant reconciling Calvinism and enlightenment rationalism so that Scots could take their place—economically, intellectually, religiously, and politically—in the newly united Great Britain and colonial cultural outposts like Charleston, South Carolina.

In contrast with the urbane, nuanced cosmopolitanism of enlightened Calvinism, primitive Scottish and Ulster Scottish Calvinism was the unsophisticated mindset of Scots who feared that absorption into a modern, prosperous, mercantile would erode bonds of kinship, orthodoxy, and tradition in Scottish culture. An example of this brittle religious culture surfaced in 1718 when a Scottish minister, James Hogg, republished the Puritan classic, Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1644-1648) which had drawn an uncompromising line between the covenants of faith and works. Fisher had assured the elect that they were no longer bound to honor the covenant of works. Alarmed by the spread of immorality accompanying the new-found prosperity of lowland Scotland and fearful that denigration of the covenant of works might encourage sinful behavior, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland condemned Marrow and disciplined ministers who instructed parishioners in its tenets. In so doing, the General Assembly provoked a backlash among orthodox clergy who took the name, “Marrow Men,” as a badge of honor.^{^[35]} Their manifesto, Ebenezer Erskine and William Wilson, “Answers . . . to Queries Put to Them by the Commission of the Late General Assembly, 1721,” articulated the traditional Scottish doctrines which tightly bound families, churches, and whole communities into a coherent whole.^{^[36]}

No less than the literary moderates of the Scottish enlightenment, the Marrow Men were also moderate men of ideas seeking to mediate the harsh conflicts that arose from social change. But whereas enlightened moderation was prudential (protective of Scottish society as it sought to participate in the Enlightenment and share in the commercial and political power of the enlarged British state), primitive moderation was principled (primitive Calvinists scrupulously juxtaposed and counter-balanced their Scottish particularity against their Calvinist intellectuality as dual defenses of traditional society). Erskine and Wilson employed the language of Calvinist confessionalism to mitigate rage, provincial insecurity, and human egotism. “The gospel, taken strictly and as contradistinct from the law,” they explained, “fastens a new duty on us [at] the same moment the gospel reveals a new object.”^{^[37]}

In this new Scottish hermeneutic, the gospel, understood as pure grace, “fastens a new duty” on believers at each new juncture in the building of the kingdom of God. New historical circumstances, a new day in Scottish history, required that the Scottish Calvinist community take its spiritual destiny into its own hands. “How can it [the will of the triune God],” Erskine and Wilson asked rhetorically, “lose any of its authority by being conveyed to the believer in such a sweet and blessed channel as the hand of Christ?” Where the mere authority of men was concerned, accommodation of theological differences could, and should, bind society together. The General Assembly demanded that the marrow men declare whether a living a “holy life”—“good works” in Calvinist-Arminian contoversy—was “necessary to a justified person’s possession of glory.” The Marrow men conceded the “necessity” of behavioral holiness in no less than eight respects (acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty, gratitude to God, demonstrating that works are the “native offspring” of faith, being “sure” of one’s election, having “inward peace,” making communication with God possible, to “adorn” one’s “holy calling,” for the “edification of fellow believers,” and for the “security of churches and nations”). But while they conceded that right conduct had those utilitarian social and cultural benefits, they emphatically denied its efficacy in “obtaining eternal happiness.” Only God’s predestined will to save the elect from damnation could procure that blessing, the Marrow men declared as they seceded from the Church of Scotland.^{^[38]} Known as the “Seceders,” these rigid Calvinists organized a new Associate Presbyterian Synod—the ecclesiastical parent of the American ARP Church. Just as Reformed denoted orthodox Calvinism, the name, “Associate,” underscored the collective decision of the orthodox faithful in Scotland, as well as in Ulster, where secession soon spread, to stand together as the people of God.^{^[39]}

The Scottish Calvinists who seceded from the loose-knit Irish Protestant church in the 1730s in solidarity with their orthodox kinsmen in Scotland, were torn between their Scottish past, with its fierce local allegiances, and their new role as a Protestant enclave on a Roman Catholic island. Negotiating between the practical imperative of Protestant unity and the tradition of Calvinist solidarity inherited from their immediate ancestors, some Ulster Scots settled on strict adherence to the Westminster Confession as the basis for moderating their religious zeal and their ethnic exclusivity. Under the influence of the Scottish evangelical Thomas Boston, the Jonathan Edwards of the Seceder churches, the Ulster Seceders became more Catholic than the Pope, more devoted to strict adherence to the Westminster Confession than Puritans in Cromwell’s England or Covenanters in seventeenth-century Scotland had ever been.^{^[40]}

Scots Irish Seceders who began to migrate to America in the 1760s, and whose numbers swelled in the 1780s, found themselves in an unstable religious and political culture.

Like the Covenanters before them, the Ulster Seceders wanted to refight the old world Presbyterian wars in America. The Seceders settled first in Washington County, in western Pennsylvania. During the early nineteenth century moved westward toward Xenia, Ohio and south into upcountry South Carolina. In 1782 the Seceder Churches merged with Covenanters to form the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in America. While nineteenth-century tradition holds that the Seceders had been patriots in the Revolution and the Covenanters Tories, both groups—preoccupied during the late 1770s with the task of preserving Calvinist orthodoxy in America—were less concerned with the Revolutionary struggle than to the surpassing issue of the sovereignty of God. A critical bit of common ground reached in the Seceder-Covenanter merger negotiations, 1779-1782, was agreement “that the civil power originates from God the Creator, and not from Christ the Mediator.”^{^[41]} Because only the elect could be saved by God’s grace, the ARP contended, government of all humankind is a remedy for human depravity—it was law, not grace—and therefore neither republican government nor liberty itself could not be gifts of a gracious, loving God. The issue flared up in Pennsylvania in 1788-89 during ratification debates for the Federal and state constitutions. ARP spokesman, Samuel B. Wylie, faulted the Federal Constitution for not acknowledging the sovereignty of God, for not setting religious tests for officeholding, for not admonishing magistrates to enforce the natural moral law which proceeded not from men but from God, and for implicitly condoning slavery. The Pennsylvania Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of conscience struck the ARP as blasphemous because the document made “conscience a law-giving power superior to God.”^{^[42]}

Constitutionalism and Christian orthodoxy worked in tandem in early America only when their adherents swore allegiance to the common touchstone of moral philosophy. James Madison learned from his teacher, John Witherspoon, that a Calvinist God had, through the instrumentality of Aristotle, had divided men’s moral potentialities into categories of “ethics” and “politics.” Ethics was an expression of an innate benevolence while politics created norms like justice, mercy, self-discipline, and duty to generate disinterested civic behavior. Politics was the necessary self-awareness and consciousness to sustain, up to a point, statesmen when circumstances thrust that role upon them. Each was a compound of human personal desire and collective social inhibition. Constitutionalism held the two paradoxes (the political paradox of appetite for power and fear of self-spawned chaos and the ethical paradox of empowering insight and risky audacity) in fruitful tension. Madison’s constitutionalism, an amalgam of Aristotelian theoretical and empirical observations, was, as Lacy Ford, Jr. argues, consistently “moderate.” The elegance of this schema made it irresistible to a rising nationalist politician like John C. Calhoun who sensed that the ambiguity of the Federal Constitution on matters of ultimate authority provided him with the luxury of choice and greater intellectual autonomy than his contemporaries could enjoy because his mind was more facile than theirs.

Madisonian constitutionalism was not always congenial to Scottish and Scotch Irish theological conservatives. In 1791 an ARP minister in Chester District, South Carolina, took thirteen pages of careful historical and theological reasoning to explain to William Hemphill why the United States Constitution was not a godless document.^{^[43]} But the underlying Scottish Covenanter distrust of any human government remained the bedrock foundation of ARP confessionalism. The churches’ legislative petitions of 1834 and 1838 emphasized the spiritual carnage which ensued when statute law interfered with divine worship and thwarted the work of the holy spirit. “Wherever men are destitute of moral principles,” the Abbeville petition declared, “they are dangerous members of society. But where are those moral principles to be obtained, calculated to render a man safe and trust[worth]y, either as a servant or a citizen, unless it be from the word of God?”^{^[44]}

In contrast with the Covenanters’ hair-trigger sense of religious grievance and the Seceders who did not emigrate to America in large numbers until after the Revolution, the great mass of Scotch Irish, had arrived in the colonies during the first third of their eighteenth century, had participated in colonial politics, had learned the political implications of their own Calvinism and had become comfortable with Revolutionary republicanism. In a word, the main body of Scotch Irish had become Americanized Presbyterians. Because they saw at close range the fissures in the American political order in newly settled areas, the Scotch Irish welcomed American constitutionalism as a source of wholeness and coherence to their communities.^{^[45]}

John Caldwell Calhoun grew up hearing stories of his father’s heroism in the Cherokee War of 1760-61 and the ugly Whig-Tory partisan warfare of 1780-82. “The effect of this mode of life upon a mind naturally strong and inquisitive,” Calhoun later recalled, “was to create a certain degree of contempt for the forms of civilized life and all that was merely conventional in society.”^{^[46]} “A certain degree of contempt”: Sure and unfailing contempt, but only to a “degree.” Calhoun himself had a certain degree of conventionality. Dressed in his black suit, he looked the part of a low country dandy while his Ulster Calvinist intensity burned in his eyes and set his jaw. As a rising political star in the state after 1800, he epitomized the fusion of upcountry passion and low country hateur.

The low country was ready for that hybrid style of leadership in the 1820s in part because Alexander Hewat, minister of First Scots Church from 1763 to 1777, had introduced Charleston to intellectualized Calvinism in the 1760s. Hewat’s research on the history of the colony documented the parallels between Scottish and Carolinian political culture, and his preaching trumpeted the glories of a united and Protestant Great Britain.^{^[47]} As an undergraduate student at Edinburgh University, he almost certainly attended William Robertson’s lectures.^{^[48]} He absorbed what J.G.A. Pocock calls Robertson’s “voice of moderatism, the voice of conservative enlightenment in Scotland . . . working from within, operating to modify the Calvinist Kirk rather than to replace it” and to discover “alternatives” to “Covenanting Calvinism” with its fierce opposition to Anglican religious policy and English rule.^{^[49]}

Hewat saw immediately the combative side of South Carolina society in the conduct of merchants and planters that he labelled, “bold adventurers” who had made their fortunes in rice cultivation and exporting and had then plunged into politics. As adventurers, they “could bear no restraint that had the least tendency to defeat their favorite views and designs.”^{^[50]} Working within the culture to vitiate adventurism, as had his mentor William Robertson in Scotland, Hewat undertook prodigious historical research in search of a via media between refinement and raw energy.^{^[51]} He observed that slaves’ “natural rights as human creatures are entirely disregarded” so that they were “exposed defenseless to the insolence, caprice, and passions of owners . . . without any hope of an end to their toil until the last day of their death.” Yet Hewat’s the antidote for this raw social aggression was not moral condemnation. George Whitefield’s condemnation of slaveholder pride in 1740 struck Hewat as socially irresponsible, and Hewat appreciated the paradox that the very prosperity slavery made possible also made “the people [of Charleston] more agreeable, intelligent, and hospitable” than any other colonial city. It was an accolade Hewat bestowed in his Historical Account of . . . South Carolina and Georgia, written after the hospitable people of Charleston had driven him into exile as a Tory in 1777.^{^[52]}

If Hewat’s conservative Edinburgh moderation was too astringent for the taste of Charleston merchants and low country planters, David’s Ramsay’s republican moderation was just right. A physician, son-in-law of John Witherspoon, and protégé of Dr. Benjamin Rush, Ramsay arrived in Charleston in 1773 and quickly established himself as the state’s foremost public intellectual. Ramsay’s patriotic oratory and his histories of the American Revolution combined the Calvinist concept of human depravity with classical republican concern about preserving a society’s slender store of social virtue. Like Hewat, Ramsay privately condemned slavery during his early years in South Carolina as the evil fruit of “white pride and avarice.” But after Frances Witherspoon died in childbirth and he married Henry Laurens’s daughter, Martha, he could write to a friend in New Jersey, “You speak feelingly for the poor negroes,” and two years later to a friend in the North, “I have long considered their situation. . . . Experience proves that they who have been born and grow up in slavery are incapable of the blessings of freedom.”^{^[53]}

discerns a “sort of gulf between extremists and moderates” which made the proslavery crusade a huge “gamble” for its adherents.^{^[61]} Religion may provide the key to resolving these differences.

By the 1850s, southern Presbyterians began lacing obligatory proslavery sermons with veiled hints that unless slaveholders transformed the peculiar institution from a system of bondage into a covenant of love, God might well withdraw the scriptural sanction for slavery. For Sinha, this “proslavery millennialism” was nothing more than an effort “to make the whole notion of human bondage more palatable than it actually was.”^{^[62]} For William Hemphill and Robert Grier, however, there was nothing palatable about slavery; their political ambivalence arose not from racism but from the quandary of trying in a new and strange land to discern the will of God and the cumbersome task of bringing the doctrine of the church to bear on an intractable moral dilemma.

The theological chasm separating Associate Reformed Presbyterians from the Presbyterians in the South Carolina power structure was the arcane subject of ecclesiology, the nature of the church. “Presbyterianism,” one ARP writer explained, “is not the fugous growth of modern ages,” taking a shot at Witherspoon’s conjoining of rationalist ethics and historic piety. Rather, it is “Jus Divinum, the scriptural and primitive polity” of the early church.^{^[63]} When Americans set about organizing a republican polity in the 1770s and 1780s, they drew on their entire inheritance of ideology, political experience, constitutionalism, and religion. Newly formed Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist, church bodies, as well as the regionally well-established Congregational Church in New England, became models of denominational church governance. Within a generation, national Lutheran, Baptist, and Quaker denominational church judicatories joined in the work of converting and religiously educating a largely Protestant populace. Conscious of their republican social utility, denominational churches felt no compunction about asking government to foster public piety and affirm that the national had providential mission.^{^[64]}

Not all churches, however, accepted the role of pious interest groups or considered reciprocity between church and state a cosmopolitan virtue. Primitive churches, those with historical consciousness dating to the church of the age of the Apostles and the ante-Nicene fathers before 325 AD, were indifferent to the prosperity of the kingdoms of this world. Associate Reformed Presbyterians, and the seceder and convenanter Scottish churches from which they came, were preeminently primitive churches. Alexander Campbell’s Disciples of Christ on North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana proclaimed themselves primitive Christians, and like the ARP in the South “anti-slavery but not abolitionist,” although Campbell’s attempts to unite all primitive Christians into his “Christian Church” deeply offended ARP purists as true keepers of the Scottish Seceder flame. Also primitive in their ecclesiology were Calvinist Baptists (and after a schism in the 1820s-1840s, the Primitive Baptists), Quakers, strict Methodists, Tennessee Synod Lutherans, high church Episcopalians, and some Old School Presbyterians. African converts to Atlantic world and American Christianity syncretically fused African to Christian doctrines so that the Christianity of the slaves’ “hush harbors” was the functional equivalents of the tenets of apostolic Christianity among Americans of European descent inspired by the communalism of New Testament churches.^{^[65]}

Just as a deep divide over the morality of slavery separated the Long Cane PCUS church from its ARP neighbors, virtually all religiously grounded anti-slavery sentiment in the antebellum South emanated from primitive churches. James O’Kelly, the Methodist schismatic, whose Christian connection followers modelled their services and church governance on the Books of Acts, urged the readers of An Essay on Negro Slavery (1789) to “lay all your shoulders to the mountain of slavery, . . . to the destruction of this bloody oppression.” At their second annual meeting, in 1822, the Tennessee Synod Lutherans declared slavery to be “a great evil in our land” and requested legislative emancipation. The North Carolina Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends had a long record of opposing slavery. Though himself a slave owner, North Carolina Episcopal Bishop, Charles Pettigrew, solemnly advised his sons, in 1797 that “to manage negroes without the exercise of too much passion is next to an impossibility” and identified widely prevailent slaveholder rage the work of the devil and an imperative reason to substitute “resolution and firmness” for the “unbridled passion” so often displayed in slaveholder behavior. Otherwise, the elder Pettigrew warned, while male aggression “will grow daily more and more turbulent” until it “renders a man truly a pitiable object.” Old School Presbyterian, Eli Caruthers, quietly taught his Alamance and Buffalo church parishioners that slavery was evil, and, on the Sunday following North Carolina secession, lamented that the Alamance church members who had joined the Confederate Army could not be considered as fighting in a righteous cause. Aloof from the national Protestant consensus that differences over slavery should not disrupt denominational unity and apolitical in their conceptions of government and society, primitive churches and pockets of primitivism in major denominations were freer to articulate the anti-slavery convictions troubling many southerners.^{^[66]}

In 1850, the same year in which George confessed his faith in the liberating love of almighty God, a lone petitioner, the Reverend Robert Fuller, a Baptist minister, and member of the Calvinist Charleston Baptist Association in coastal Beaufort, appealed to the South Carolina legislature “that your petitioner . . . a citizen of South Carolina, . . . has always yielded obedience to her sovereignty and obeyed her laws, and means still to do so. . . . However”—shifting smoothly from the secular to the spiritual—Fuller reminded the legislature that “he owe[d] a higher and paramount allegiance to the laws of God and these laws require him to instruct his slaves so that they may be able to read the Scriptures.”^{^[67]} Fuller illustrated what was ubiquitous about primitive Christianity among portions of the South Carolina low country elite. The son of a wealthy sea islands planter, he graduated from Princeton College in 1843 where he imbibed the Scottish faculty psychology of Thomas Reid, Old Side Presbyterian theology with its emphasis on man’s inability to foreswear sin, as well as Revolutionary values of virtue, citizenship, and concern for the community. Between Princeton and his call to the Baptist ministry, he read law in Charleston with the eminent lawyer, William Henry DeSaussure, where he imbibed the republican language of allegiance in his petition (willingly conceding the legitimacy of the state, promising to be and remain law abiding, and bound to his state by irrevocable obligation) as prelude to his affirming the “higher and paramount allegiance” he “owed to the laws of God” when in violation of state law he taught them to read the Bible.^{^[68]}

This silence on gender was, however, pregnant with implication. When William Hemphill addressed the question of slave literacy and the white mission to the slaves in 1843, in an editorial in the Christian Magazine of the South on “Religious Instruction of Servants,” he mentioned no women at all, and only one man, Charles Colcock Jones, who in Hemphill’s estimation stood almost alone in his devotion “to the work of evangelizing this people.” Jones was, of course, the Princeton graduate and “General Assembly” Presbyterian in Georgia who advocated softening the institution of slavery by uniting masters and slaves in prayer and worship. “The spiritual welfare of servants,” Hemphill declared, “comes under the cognizance of their masters, . . . the heads of households [who] are under obligation to look after the physical comfort and sustenance of those under their roof” and still more to foster “the moral culture and spiritual improvement of children, servants, and all under their authority and protection.” Gathered for worship in ARP families, women, children, and slaves were alike subordinate to the “authority and protection” of male heads of household. Only in “this insulated condition,” Hemphill stipulated, did slaves enjoy spiritual equality and, within the context of the worshiping family, a kind of social equality with other household dependents.^{^[70]}

Hemphill captured the entire religious culture of antebellum Abbeville when he assured white ARP laity that their bondsmen and women participated in daily household devotions an “insulated condition, . . . dwelling in the heart of a Christian community.”^{^[71]} Every social unit in the South Carolina upcountry—white men, white women, children, free men and women of color, enslaved women, enslaved men—lived within confining, if ostensibly protective, cocoons of prescribed behavior. Even white males knew the social limits of their patriarchal authority. Consider the fact that virtually every male head of household, 184 men in all, in the in the Chester and Abbeville ARP churches signed defiant petitions to the legislature—a process achieved in Abbeville only after four years of prayer, Bible study, political discussion, and negotiation. ARP male heads of household discovered in the aftermath of Nullification that they bore shared responsibility to take the heat for the entire conservative Calvinist community by exhausting their legal and political remedy by publicly petitioning slaveholders and nullifiers in the legislature to doff their tall black silk hats out of respect for Bible-reading, praying black and white, slave and free, male and female children of God.

Hemphill’s list of religious responsibilities of male heads of households specified “the spiritual improvement of servants, children, and all under their authority and protection.” Were adult women, specifically wives and mothers, included among the people husbands were supposed to nurture in discipleship? Was there an implied prioritization here? Did listing servants and then children first imply that adult females, among them mothers of children, were less in need of spiritual improvement than anyone else in the household? Or were women simply taken for granted as participants in family devotions? All could well have been the case—the historical record on this matter is opaque. But Hemphill’s subject, that of religious patriarchalism in the South Carolina up country, was so integral to the fabric of daily life that additional inferences about religion and gender can be gleaned from throwing out a wider net.

In his magisterial study of family and community in neighboring Edgefield County, Vernon Burton not only emphasizes the pervasiveness of patriarchalism in the antebellum South Carolina, but he also appreciates that male dominance over everything that happened in a household, including religious practice, had within it a large element of posturing and wish fulfillment. Burton makes three important points. First, he observes that the home became politicized as male citizens touted their power over familial and servile members of the household as qualifications for their exercise of political power: “Women were highly praised . . . for their gentleness, Christian character, and love for husband and family” as backhanded “testimonials to men emphasiz[ing] their leadership and contributions to the community.” Secondly, Burton observes that the celebrated “individualism and independence” of male heads of household was, in the 1850s,becoming increasingly irreconcilable with proslavery demands for conformity among white males; “these elements are reconcilable [only] when considered in a family and community context” in which “women and blacks were excluded from “autonomy.” Only within a “highly complex network of kin and neighborhood relationships” did ideals of “independence and autonomy” make sense. Finally, Burton quotes Edgefield editor, Arthur Simkins’s admission the slaveholding male lived “according to his own ideas of propriety and expediency” subject to no social credo beyond the sanctity of his own social space; he could do what was proper or what was expedient as he liked, and, in this manner, “he jostles no one and no one jostles him.”^{^[72]} Thus when Hemphill explained to his ARP readership, and also to a vigilant wider community, why and how family devotions were a matter of Christian duty, he surely knew that women—and for that matter religiously literate slaves—could not be, in any visible, public way, part of that equation.

Perhaps the most telling point about ARP patriarchal slaveholding surfaced in Abbeville District Court in September 1850 when Lemuel Reid initiated criminal charges of slave incitement against George. The court found George guilty and sentenced him to thirty-nine lashes. There is no evidence that this horrendous penalty was actually inflicted. Confronted with Grier’s probable refusal to allow the brutal whipping of his slave, the court angrily ordered Grier to transport George from South Carolina by October or else the Court would inflict an addition three hundred lashes on George—a death sentence considering that rare cases of punishments of one hundred lashes were usually fatal.^{^[73]} According to oral tradition, Due West Sheriff A. C. Hawthorne, an Erskine Trust, administered the sentence of 39 lashes, presumably with no where near the usual severity; Grier sent George to Mecklenberg County, North Carolina until things quieted down. Both the threats of expulsion of and of 300 additional lashes if George Grier remained in the state were a judicial and political bluff. In testimony to the delicate political balance between the Abbeville power stucture and the ARP enclave in Due West, Robert Grier, as a patriarchal head of household, nullified the District Court judge by ignoring the order to remove George permanently from the state, and making sure that after the sojourn in North Carolina that George remained unmolested by the courts.

In 1865, George Grier, his wife and children, were among 140 black members of the Due West, ARP Church, a black majority in a congregation with 90 white members. By 1869 the black membership had grown to 158.^{^[74]} By this time, a freedman, Thomas L. Young, assisted Hemphill in ministering to black members. Most of them, however, had been George’s spiritual charges. George’s church-within-a-church ministry built a new kind of spiritual household, the very kind of protective family he had promised Lemuel Reid’s slaves that God would provide. Not surprisingly, this fragile tale of racial accommodation did not have a happy ending. Biracial ARP worship in Due West ended abruptly in May 1870 with the organization of a separate black ARP congregation amid rumbling from white church members about Biblical evidence of African inferiority and descriptions of “the Negro” as “a brute.”^{^[75]}

The dispute over slave literacy in South Carolina enriches historical understanding of the moral economy of slave society. Because knowledge was a form of power and education an avenue to empowerment, the handling of knowledge in a slave society raised ethical as well as political issues. “If love of the truth and a care to state and maintain it in the most distinct and precise manner be a characteristic of the church at the time of the Reformation,” William Hemphill’s father, John asked a fellow ARP minister in 1817, “are . . . our own times . . . not remarkable for blending and confounding things in such a manner that distinct testimony is entirely lost in the confusion.”^{^[76]} Primitive Christians like the ARP Hemphills and Calvinist Baptists like Richard Fuller took pains not to blend contrasting doctrines; denominational churches like the General Assembly Presbyterians, in contrast, believed that blending received traditions was an essential step in building a southern Zion and positioning Protestant Christianity to have a decisive impact on southern and American life. Denominational ethics envisioned saturating society with piety so that evil would finally be overwhelmed. Primitive Christian ethics took a much longer view. “As Christians we cannot but desire the universal spread of the Gospel,” William Hemphill declared in a highly controversial “Speech on Colonization.”

We exult in the prospect that the Kingdoms of this world are soon to become the Kingdoms of our high and exalted King and that love and truth and light and liberty are soon to exert their hallowed influence over the whole inhabited world. But we know full well that Africa, though she has long been enslaved, plundered and trodden down, must be enlightened and Christianized, as well as the other portions of the globe, before the millennium can be fully introduced; for “Ethiopia must stretch forth herself unto God” [Ps. 68:31] as well as Asia or Europe, and “this gospel of the Kingdom, hope in Christ, must be preached to all people for a witness unto all nations, and then shall the end come.” [paraphrase of I Cor. 15:24]^{^[77]}

During that indeterminate interval, Hemphill warned his palpably hostile audience, the coming of the Kingdom would occur on God’s timetable, not necessarily at an hour conducive to denominational triumphalism. Colonization, missionary work in Africa, and interracial family devotions in South Carolina were alike human actions taken in accordance with God’s promises to the early church. It was religious controversy in Scotland and Ulster during the early 1730s about the meaning of those promises that made pockets of primitive Calvinism in South Carolina into flashpoints in the slavery controversy.

1 The Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina Passed in December,1834 (Columbia, 1834), 13: “If any person shall hereafter teach any slave to read or write, . . . such person, if a free white person, upon conviction thereof, shall . . . be fined not exceeding one hundred dollars and imprisoned not more than six months. The informer shall be entitled to one half of the fine and to be a competent witness.” For a discussion of the drafting of the new law, see Edward R. Laurens, To the Honorable Whitemarsh B. Seabrook (Charleston, 1835), 7-17.

2 Lowry Ware, A Place Called Due West: The Home of Erskine College (Due West, [1997]) 30-67; Lowry Ware, Old Abbeville: Scenes from the Past of a Town Where Old Time Things Are Not Forgotten (Columbia, SC, 1992), 25-31, 57, 75-76, 81-83. Apparently, no newspaper reported the change in the law, and as there were no lawyers or legislators in Due West, the news must have come from the legal community in Abbeville. Hemphill did not learn of the law in passing or at a later date; he vividly recalled discovering its provisions for the first time in December 1834 when he read the words of the statute, see below, notes 6 and 7.

3 Ware, Due West, 1-11.

4 Ware, Due West, 12-44.

5 Robert Lathan, History of the Associate Reformed Synod of the South, to Which is Prefixed

a History of the Associate Reformed and Reformed Presbyterian Churches (Harrisburg, Pa., 1882), ch. 9-11.

6 Petition to the South Carolina Legislature, Abbeville District, 1838, Files of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina and “Family Prayer,” Christian Magazine of the South, 2 (March 1844), 83-84. For the wider context of religious promotion of slave literacy, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1991), ch. 5.

7 Robert A. Fair, Our Slaves Should Have the Bible: An Address Delivered before the Abbeville Bible Society, . . . July 1854 (Due West: Telescope Press, 1854), 6.

8 Due West Telescope, November 28, 1862.

9 Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (Columbia, S. C., 1988), 139: Chester District vote for Nullification, 59 percent, Abbeville District 64, percent.

10 Petition to the South Carolina Legislature, Chester District, 1835, Race and Slavery Petitions Project.

11 Francis N. Thorpe, ed., Federal and State Constitutions (Washington, D.C., 1909), vol. 6, pp. 1355-1357.

12 Referred to by Abbeville District whites as “George,” or “George, the slave,” or simply as “the negro,” George Grier used both names in 1865 and probably did so in 1850. Robert Grier

only referred to George as “he” in his testimony before the Long Cane committee of inquiry.

13 “To the Public, Due West, October 1, 1850,” col. 1, paragraph 9 and col. 12, paragraph 3, Broadside Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C., “would deliver them from their bondage in Reid’s transliteration of George Grier’s assertion. Robert Grier’s compilation of the controversy over George cited in Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield County, South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1985), 427. See also Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear,” ch. 4.

14 Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990 (Tuscaloosa, 1996), 128-131.

15 Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, 1990 [originally published 1979]), 41-43.

16 “To the Public,” col. 1, paragraph 10.

17 Loren Schweninger and Marguerite Ross Howell, eds., Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks: Series II, Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775-1867 (Bethesda, 2003), 124-126.

18 “To the Public,” col. 2, paragraphs 5 and 6.

19 “To the Public,” col. 2, paragraph 8, affidavit by William Barr, (“would have been set free when they died, that was certain,” in the broadside).

20 “To the Public,” col. 2, paragraphs 5-6.

21 “To the Public,” col. 1-2, paragraph 1.

22 See, Fernaud Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1966), Vol. 1, pp. 21.

23 “To the Public,” col. 2; Ware, Due West, p. 71. On Presbyterian disciplinary practices, see W. D. Blanks, “Corrective Church Discipline in the Presbyterian Churches of the Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 44 (1966), 89-105 and Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South,” pp. 109-112. Indicative of James Fair’s uneasy position as a defended of white supremacy from within the ARP community, is the fact that his son, Robert A. Fair publicly defended the ARP position on slave literacy in 1854, see above note 7.

24 See Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995), 130-135, Randy J. Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773-1876

(Athens, Ga., 1994), ch. 9.

25 See above, notes 18, 19.

26 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government

(Cmbridge, England, 1999), 265-266, 268.

27 Nicholas Phillipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, (Cambridge, 1981). 19-40; R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, eds., The Origin and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1982); and Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Princeton, 1985).

28 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Narratives of Civil Government, 284.

29 Jack Scott, ed., An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon

(Newark, Del., 1982), 98-99, 86.

30 Scott, ed., Annotated Edition, 125.

31 David W. Robson, ed., “ ‘An Important Question Answered’: William Graham’s Defense of Slavery in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 37 (1980), 651.

32 Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 297-302.

33 Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, 10.

34 Knud Haakonssen, ed., Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics (Princeton, 1990), 111-112.

35 Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (New York, 1988), 82-84.

36 Indicative of the powerful grip of Marrow theology on the ARP in South Carolina, Lathan

reprinted the entire Erskine-Wilson response to the General Assembly, History of the Associate Reformed Synod, 32-59 and in chapter 2 provided what remains the best commentary on the document.

37 Lathan, History of the Associate Reformed Synod, 33.

38 Lathan, History of the Associate Reformed Synod, 36, 44-45.

39 Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity, 126-133; Peter Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism: The Historical Perspective, 1610-1970 (Dublin, 1987), 106-108.

40 Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity, 134.

41 Lathan, History of the Associate Reformed Synod, 177.

42 J. William Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (New York, 1990), 110; Samuel B. Wylie, The Two Sons of Oil; or The Faithful Witness for Magistracy & Ministry on a Scriptural Basis. Also a Sermon on Covenanting. Being the Substance of Two Discourses

(Greensburg, Pa., 1803), 39-57.

43 William Findley to William Hemphill, September 6, 1791, Hemphill Family Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C.

44 Abbeville Petition, 1838.

45 Robert M. Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740-1861 (Columbia, S.C., 1988), 92-95; G. S. Rowe, Thomas McKean: The Shaping of an American Republicanism (Boulder, 1978), 5-13, 26-29, 46, 232, 404-406; Fred J. Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783-1837 (University, Ala., 1980), 36-37, 52-55,

Job Johnson to Robert Johnson, Dec. 5, 1784, in A. C. Davis, ed., “ ‘As Good a Country as Any Man Needs to Dwell In’: Letters from a Scotch Irish Immigrant in Pennsylvania, 1766, 1767, and 1784,” Pennsylvania History, 50 (1983), 313-322.

46 [John C. Calhoun], Life of John C. Calhoun (New York, 1843), 4. See also Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, 175-185; Lacy K. Ford, Jr., “John C. Calhoun and the Southern Political Tradition,” in Charles W. Eagles, ed., Is There a Southern Political Tradition? (Jackson, Miss., 1996), 3-26.

47 Geraldine Meroney, “Alexander Hewat’s Historical Account,” in Lawrence Leder, ed., The Colonial Legacy (New York, 1972), 135-163.

48 Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 72.

49 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Narratives of Civil Government, 302.

50 Robert M. Weir, South Carolina: A Colonial History (Millwood, N. Y., 1983), 61.

51 Meroney, “Alexander Hewat’s Historical Account,” 146, 150. On Hewat’s moderation, see Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 73.

52 Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, 128-129.

53 Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, 183.

54 Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, 183-184.

55 [Calhoun], Life of John C. Calhoun, 5; on Robertson as a conduit of Florentine historiography, see Felix Gilbert, “Editor’s Introduction,” William Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe (Chicago, 1972), xx-xxii.

56 Walter B. Edgar, “Some Popular Books in Colonial South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 72 (1971), 178. Waddell may have obtained his copy of Robertson,

Charles V from John Murray of Ninety-Six who had been a Trustee of First Scots Church when Hewat wasHe

Hewat was minister or from a member of the Cambridge Friendly Society for the Encouragement of Literature which met in Ninety Six, George Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina (Columbia, 1883), Vol. 2, p. 221, Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina (Kingsport, Tenn., 1940), 127, “John Murray,” Walter B. Edgar and N. Louise Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Vol. 2, The Commons House of Assembly, 1692-1775, p. 489, and Eric Robert Papenfuse, “The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 87 (1997), 7.

57 Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, 184-185.

58 Petition to the South Carolina Legislature, 1835, Chester District, Race and Slavery Petitions Project.

59 William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1966), 201, 206.

60 Chester Petition, 1835.

61 Marisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000); Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism; William W. Freehling,

The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), 286.

62 Sinha, Counter-Revolution, 92.

63 Review of Thomas Smyth, Presbytery and Prelacy: The Scriptural and Primitive Polity from the Testimony of Scripture, the Fathers, the Schoolmen, the Reformers, and the English and Oriental Churches, in Christian Magazine of the South, 2 (1843), 188.

64 Robert M. Calhoon, “Religion, Moderation, and Regime-Building in Post-Revolutionary America,” in Eligha H. Gould and Peter Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming.

65 Walter H. Conser, Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America (Macon, 1984), ch. 6-7; Robert M. Calhoon, “Jacob Stirewalt and the Doctrine of Ministry,” in Lutheranism with a Southern Accent, Proceedings of the Lutheran Historical Conference, 1994 (1998), 85-100; “The Moderate Mold,” in David Edwin Harrell, Quest for a Christian America: The Disciples of Christ and American Society to 1866 (Nashville, 1966), 126-129; Eva Jean Wrather, ms. biography of Alexander Campbell, ch. 9, “Always Anti-Slavery but Never an Abolitionist,” Eva Jean Wrather Papers, Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Nashville, Box 14, folder 237; Robert M. Calhoon, “Lutheranism in Early Southern Culture,”

in H. George Anderson and Robert M. Calhoon, eds., A Truly Efficient School of Theology: The Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Historical Context, 1830-1980 (Columbia, 1981), 11-17; Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven, 1986); Diana Hochstedt Butler, Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1995); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), 263-277.

66 Robert M. Calhoon, “An Agrarian and Evangelical Culture,” in Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson, eds., The North Carolina Experience: An Interpretive and Documentary History (Chapel Hill, 1984), 181-183, 187-188; “Eli Caruthers,” vertical file, Presbyterian Department of History, Montreat, North Carolina.

67 Petition to the South Carolina Legislature, Beaufort District, Dec. 9, 1850, Race and Slavery Petitions Project.

68 “Robert W. Fuller,” History of the Baptist Denomination in Georgia, with Biographical Compendium and Portrait Gallery of Georgia Baptist Ministers and Other Georgia Baptists

(Atlanta, 1881), 218-220; on Fuller’s undergraduate education, see Ronald D. Kerridge, “Answering the Trumpet to Discord: Southerners at the College of New Jersey, 1820-1860, and their Careers,” 46-48, 64-85, Senior Thesis, Princeton University, 1984; on Fuller’s legal training and intellect, see Benjamin F. Perry, “William Henry DeSaussure,” in Stephen Meats and Edwin F. Arnold, eds., The Writings of Benjamin F. Perry (Spartenburg, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 173-176.

69 District Court Petitions of Margaret Gaines, June 11, 1852 and Philip Cromer, June 5, 1856, Abbeville District, Race and Slavery Petitions Project, provide context on attitudes toward race, gender, and slavery in the Abbeville District. In 1848 Margaret Gaines sold two slaves to Arthur Wilson for a promissory note for $90.12. Wilson took the slaves to Mississippi and never paid her the promised price. In 1852 she asked the Abbeville Court to secure the return of her property. In 1856 Philip Cromer asked the same court to protect the interests of Lucinda Jame Cannon, a minor, who had inherited both money and slaves—a woman, Violet and six children, from her deceased mother. Lucinda’s aunt and guardian, Louisa Pace, had married Aiken Brazeal, a bankrupt. Cannon sought to replace Louisa Brazeal as Lucinda’s trustee.

70 “Editorial—Religious Instruction of Servants,” Christian Magazine of the South, 1 (September 1843), 188-190.

71 “Editorial—Religious Instruction of Servants,” 189.

72 Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions, 99-103. On male and female social realms, see 9, 119, 128, 130, 133, 137; on patriarchy and autonomy, see 8, 23, 55-56, 166; on the social construction of patriarchy, see 13, 25, 27, 40, 145, 164, 187, 189; and on patriarchy among African Americans, see 230, 242, 255-258.

73 “To the Public,” Appendix, col. 6, paragraph 8; Cf. Lowry Ware, “The Burning of Jerry: The Last Slave Execution by Fire in South Carolina?” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 91 (100-106 and Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana, 1990), 233-235.

74 Ware, A Place Called Due West, 99; Lowry Ware to the author, Jan. 6, 1992.

75 Lowry Ware and James W. Gettys, The Second Century: A History of the Associate Reformed Presbyterians, 1882-1892 (Due West, 1983), 112, 115.

76 John Hemphill to John Lind, April 28, 1817, Hemphill Family Papers, Special Collections Dept., Duke University Library, Durham, N.C. (emphasis added).

77 William H. Hemphill, “Speech on Colonization” (circa 1840), Hemphill Family Papers.