The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865

The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865

University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 1-1-2013 Christ and Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865 Ryan Lee Fletcher University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Fletcher, Ryan Lee, "Christ and Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1417. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1417 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CHRIST AND CLASS: THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN THE SOUTH: 1760-1865 A Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History The University of Mississippi by RYAN LEE FLETCHER MAY 2013 Copyright © 2013 by Ryan Lee Fletcher All rights reserved ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the emergence, practices, religious culture, expansion, and social role of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the American South from 1760 to 1865. The dissertation employs three major research methodologies by: (1) centralizing the role of social class in the Episcopal Church's history, (2) seriously considering the Episcopal Church's distinctive theology, and (3) quantifying the connections that linked the Episcopal Church to the South's economic structures prior to the Civil War. Archival research, periodicals, and published records related to the Protestant Episcopal Church provided the primary evidence used in the formulation of the dissertation's interpretations and conclusions. Many historians of the early American South depict evangelical Protestants as the preeminent religious movement in the region following the American Revolution as the Protestant Episcopal Church stagnated and supposedly became relegated to the region's cultural periphery. "Christ and Class" aspires to complicate such analyses by elucidating how the Protestant Episcopal Church's potency in the South during the pre-Civil War period should not be measured by its inferior membership numbers in comparison to the region's other denominations, but rather the institution's vitality hinged upon the social power and devotion of its planter-class communicants. ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to the loving memory of my best friend, who will always be remembered— Prince Nicholas XVII. iii ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES VHS: Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia LV: Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia SCL: South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina MDAH: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi AEC: The Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas SSCUVA: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia JDLS: Jessie Ball duPont Library, Sewanee, Tennessee iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Producing a dissertation is a collective endeavor. Countless archivists and librarians in Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas offered their amazing professional talents without which this dissertation would never have materialized. I also express my appreciation to the University of Mississippi's Graduate School for generously affording me invaluable research fellowships. I am most thankful for both Dr. Jeffrey Watt and Dr. Joseph Ward for meeting with me on various occasions to address my questions related to the religious dimensions of early modern Europe. Dr. Charles R. Wilson, Dr. Sheila Skemp, Dr. Ted Ownby and Dr. Kathryn McKee demonstrated both prodigious patience and unwavering support throughout the entirety of their service on my dissertation committee. I could not have selected a better committee. All members of my committee enriched and improved the following dissertation from its original form. I am solely responsible for all of my dissertation's insufficiencies, but to the extent that "Christ and Class" has intellectual virtue it is due in large measure to my committee's insightful and sagacious advice. Professor Wilson deserves special recognition as my advisor and mentor. I am unable to contemplate any professional honor that could be more impressive than the remarkable opportunity of the last six years to be one of Dr. Charles R. Wilson's students. Adequate words escape me so I will just add to Dr. Wilson that my gratitude for your many years of counsel and guidance will be "without end." Finally, Mom, Dad, and Jennifer thank you for the persistent reminders of why I entered graduate school, especially at the moments "when sorrows like sea billows" rolled. I am indebted to a family that provided me with a lifetime of preparation, because a dissertation sometimes requires the dogged work-ethic of a farm kid. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER OR SECTION…………………………………………………………………………PAGE A COLLECT FOR THE PLANTERS: AN INTRODUCTION……………………………………..…….1 CHAPTER ONE: THE VINEYARDS OF THE VESTRY…………………………………….……...…16 CODA: EPISCOPAL REPUBLICANISM AND GEORGE WASHINGTON …………………………77 CHAPTER TWO: THE COTTON COMMUNION……………………………………………….….….94 CODA: WILLIAM NEWTON MERCER--A COTTON COMMUNICANT………………………….151 CHAPTER THREE: COME TO THE WATERS-- ENGENDERING EPISCOPALIANS………..…..165 CODA: SHADOWVESTRYWOMAN ELIZA MAGRUDER……………………………………..…..231 CHAPTER FOUR: PARISHES OF PATERNALISM …………………………………..……..………237 CODA: JOHN PAYNE--THE SOUTH'S OTHER BISHOP…………………………………….……..302 CHAPTER FIVE: THE ORTHODOXIES OF RENAISSANCE………………….……………………312 CODA: LEONIDAS POLK'S PILGRIMAGE TO PINE MOUNTAIN ……………………………….367 A CONCLUDING COLLECT: THE CAMPBELL THESIS…………….………………………..……380 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………..402 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………..440 vi LIST OF DIAGRAMS, FIGURES, AND TABLES DIAGRAMS, FIGURES, AND TABLES PAGES TABLE I.1: ESTIMATED CHURCH ADHERENTS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1776-1850…………2 FIGURE 1.1: PEW PROPERTY AT POHICK CHURCH …………………………………………...…86 FIGURE 1.2: POHICK CHURCH AND CHRIST CHURCH…...……………………………………….87 TABLE 2.1: SOUTH CAROLINA CROP PRICES PER POUND …………………………………….129 DIAGRAMS 2.1-2.11: MAPS OF THE COTTON COMMUNION……………………………….136-146 TABLE 4.1: BISHOP NATHANIEL BOWEN'S BIBLE VERSES OF PATERNALISM……..………291 TABLE 5.1: SECCESION DATES IN THE EPISCOPAL SOUTH…………………………………...362 FIGURE C.1: "THE DWELLERS IN APPALACHIA"………………………………………………...385 FIGURE C.2: TRANSITIONAL SOUTHERN BISHOPS………….………………………. ………...386 vii A COLLECT FOR THE PLANTER CLASS: AN INTRODUCTION The Collect for the Third Sunday After Epiphany: Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities and in all our dangers and necessities stretch forth thy right hand to help and defend us through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —The Book of Common Prayer (1789) A quarter of a century has elapsed since John B. Boles heralded the "discovery" of southern religious history. In the intervening decades, the historiography related to southern religion has experienced what might be called an evangelical turn. Historians of southern religious history, with few exceptions, have connected evangelicalism to every aspect of the pre- Civil War South. The evangelical turn in the scholarship has produced "thick" and rich descriptions of every religious facet of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gender, slavery, and politics have been the three major themes that have received extensive attention from scholars of evangelicalism in the South.1 For understandable reasons, a historiography with such 1 John B. Boles, "The Discovery of Southern Religious History," in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 510-548. On gender and Protestant evangelicalism see for example: Christine Leigh Heyrman Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt Cynthia Lynn Lylerly Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; and Stephanie McCurry, 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). On slavery and Protestant evangelicalism, see for example: Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Albert J. Raboteau Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988). On politics and Protestant evangelicalism, see for example: Mitchell Snay, The Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schism and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon: Macon University Press, 1985); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 1999). For more on "thick description," see Clifford

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