ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Randy Sparks for being the most responsive dissertation advisor a graduate student could hope for, giving notes that consistently made this project better. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Emily Clark and Laura Rosanne Adderley, for their thoughtful feedback through this process. Thanks to funding from the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University and the Episcopal Women’s History Project I had the opportunity to visit many archives throughout the South and meet quite a few helpful archivists and research librarians who made the experience even more rewarding. I also have the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to thank for funding my final year of uninterrupted writing, for which I am eternally grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Ed for the emotional support and dedicate this work to all the active churchwomen in my family, especially Laura, Jackie, Lydia, Helen, and Jacqueline. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………...………ii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1……………………………………………………………………………..23 Preparing for Public Life in the Church: Religious Leadership and Benevolent Activism at Female Academies CHAPTER 2………………………………………………………………………..……78 Nurseries of Female Piety and Benevolence: The Gulf South’s Free and Enslaved Sunday Schools CHAPTER 3…………………………………………………………………………....142 “Her Piety Was a Living Oracle”: Public Speaking and Service in the Meetings of the Church CHAPTER 4……………………………………………………………………...…….215 Time, Talent, and Treasure: Female Stewardship of the Church CHAPTER 5……………………………………………………………………………287 “Last at the Cross and First at the Tomb”: Female Benevolence and Missionary Activism CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………...…….366 Claiming a “Public Sphere of Usefulness” BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………378 iii 1 INTRODUCTION In 1854 Thomas Savage, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in the Gulf Coast town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, submitted two items to the national Episcopal Board of Missions: a sketch of their new Gothic-style church drawn by his wife Elizabeth (Figure 1) and a report which credited a group of churchwomen with its construction and furnishing. When a guest preacher from Natchez, William Giles, visited Pass Christian in 1848, he called together a meeting of citizens interested in erecting a church building, but only, as Savage explained, “at the suggestion of a few pious ladies.”1 Over the next few years, while the male members of the congregation elected a vestry and collected a meager sum of subscriptions, the women of the church formed themselves into a church aid sewing society. The sewing society raised over $2,000 for church construction— almost the entire cost of the building—as well as $580 for a new organ, all by selling their sewing projects and collecting donations. As Savage explained it, “To woman, first and foremost in every good work, we are indebted under God, for the origin, progress and completion of this enterprise,” and “nor will they stop till a parsonage shall have been erected and the destitute places of the earth shall feel the benefit of their efforts.”2 These women prompted the initial discussion to build a church, organized their own church aid society, fundraised, made furnishing decisions and purchases, and continued to support 1 Board of Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church, The Spirit of Missions 19 (New York, 1854), 5. 2 Ibid., 7. 2 the physical expansion of their denomination in Mississippi and in missions abroad. Several churchwomen, including Elizabeth Savage, also taught at the church’s Sunday school and female academy, preparing the next generation of women for public service in the church.3 Women brought the institutions of modern, mainstream Protestantism to Pass Christian. This picture of late antebellum public female activism challenges the prevailing historical narrative of southern Protestant development. Women were the majority in congregations throughout nineteenth-century America and yet southern scholarship continues to locate antebellum women’s religious roles within the domestic sphere and treat public religion as equivalent to the male-controlled spaces of ordained pulpits and elected church offices.4 Using Mary Kelley’s more inclusive definition of the public as the “social space between the family and nation state,” this project rejects a male-public and female-private binary, one that privileges male authority.5 It maps a broader cultural geography of Protestant “lived religion” beyond the family circle and the church pew and 3 "Episcopal Female Seminary, Pass Christian, Mississippi," Church Herald (Vicksburg, MS), December 23, 1853; Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, Journal of the Thirty-second Annual Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Mississippi, (Natchez, 1858), 69-70. 4 Donald Mathews has argued that in nineteenth-century America, “churches were organizations of women and for the South, in the particular, “whether in Alabama or South Carolina or Virginia, about 64 percent of each congregation was female,” in “Women’s History/Everyone’s History,” Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, vol. 1, ed. Hilah F. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981), 42, 31. For more on women as the church majority, see Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: Norton, 1984), 213. Richard Rankin argues that this is true even for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the South in Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen: The Religion of the Episcopal Elite in North Carolina, 1800-1860 (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1993), xiii. For black women as the majority in most black and biracial antebellum churches, see Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 162. 5 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3. 3 highlights where white women and free and enslaved women of color found purpose, identity, and power through religious duty.6 This project looks closely as the often-ignored Gulf South of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana from the late 1820s to the eve of the Civil War—the period in which mainstream Protestant denominations including Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches established themselves permanently in the region.7 In this new map of the Protestant landscape of the Gulf South, women’s public religious practice and leadership appears in the female academy and the Sunday school class; the revival and the plantation mission to the enslaved; the choir practice and the temperance rally; and the meetings of female benevolent, church aid, and missionary societies. The female sewing society of Trinity Episcopal Church, Pass Christian was not exceptional; throughout the Gulf South women served as modern Protestant apostles and activists. Like the early apostles of the New Testament, they responded to calls to evangelize and expand denominational presence through their schools, churches, and societies.8 Ultimately, the public religious activism of white women and women of color 6 David Hall introduced used the term “lived religion” in 1997 to describe religious practice as something not separate from, but intricately connected to secular everyday experiences and social structures. It replaces the older phrase “popular religion” which Hall argues brings up negative connotations like folklore and superstition and implies an antagonistic relationship with elite or official religious culture. See David D. Hall, introduction to Lived Religion in America: Towards a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), vii-xiii. 7 The author uses the term “Gulf South” to refer specifically to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This project focuses on the four largest Protestant denominations in the South at the time— Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians—and does not address in detail dissenter sects like the Primitive Baptists, Cumberland Presbyterians, and Disciples of Christ. 8 In its broadest definition, “apostle” refers to an “ardent supporter” of a cause or a person “sent on a mission” and in its narrowest, to the twelve original disciples and early followers of Jesus (namely, Saint Paul the Apostle) who first spread the Gospel. See Merriam-Webster, s.v. “apostle,” accessed December 7, 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apostle. 4 transformed the region from a frontier missionary field into the home of established, mainstream Protestant denominations. Women and Southern Religion – Historiography and New Directions The idea of men and women’s “separate spheres” has shaped scholarship on religious practice in nineteenth-century America since the 1960s. Barbara Welter’s work on prescriptive literature in New England identified “The Cult of True Womanhood,” which idealized female “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity,” and placed a woman’s religious role firmly within her “proper sphere,” at home as passive moral influence over her husband and religious teacher to her children.9 Other scholars began to make similar conclusions about women’s religious lives in the antebellum South, confined to the domestic circle and underpinning a general patriarchal suppression