1775 (35 page)

Here is a framework. Of the roughly 250,000 or so migrants, including
women and children, who came to the southern backcountry between 1760 and 1776, perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 would have been baptized or nominal Anglicans. Actual church-attending Anglicans would have been many fewer. Another 50,000 to 80,000 of the incomers would have been nominal Presbyterians, Regular Baptists, Lutherans, or German Reformed, but most would have faced difficulty finding a church near enough to attend. At least 100,000—doubtless including a sizable element of ex-convicts, indentured servants and runaways,
banditti,
drifters, as well as lapsed German and Irish Catholics (in a Protestant culture)—would have been essentially unchurched.

Thus the opportunity for the humbler sects and denominations that proselytized through itinerants and scoffed at learning and position. Far more than Presbyterians—and in immediate terms, much more than Methodists—this favored Baptists, especially the low-status Separates. By the mid-1770s, an expanding membership further abetted Baptists’ influence both in new-constitution making and in setting conditions for military enlistment. By the end of 1776, all four southern colonies, now states, were moving down the road to disestablishment. The shift was most gradual in Virginia. Its provincial Declaration of Rights, adopted in 1776, recognized religion as a private matter of individual conscience; then a law enacted in 1777 suspended the Act for the Support of the [Anglican] Clergy. Complete disestablishment, however, did not come to Virginia until 1787.
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Elsewhere it came more easily. The North Carolina constitution, adopted in 1776, disestablished Anglicanism and called for complete separation of church and state. By 1777, South Carolinians had prepared disestablishment provisions to be included in the 1778 state constitution. Georgia’s new legal framework of 1777 provided for free exercise of religion, disestablished the Anglican Church, and replaced the old colonial parish structure (Christ Church, St. Johns, et al.) with new counties.

Baptist civic and military collaboration with the Revolution varied from colony to colony. Patriots in Virginia, by and large favoring disestablishment, were flexible enough that Baptists understood an arrangement could be reached. Besides religious liberalization, agreements were worked out under which Baptists would serve together in individual companies, holding religious services and sometimes having preachers as their captains.
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In South Carolina, Baptists split during the 1775 civil war. Regular Baptists in the longer-settled low country were mostly allied with other dissenters and vestry Anglicans in the Patriot coalition. Upcountry South
Carolina, however, had clusters of radical and Tory-leaning Separate Baptists, several of whose leaders had come from the section of North Carolina where radical Baptists and fallen-away Quakers had helped to nurture an unusual politics. In the area between the Saluda and Broad rivers, as we will see, a concentration of Separate Baptist churches was a center of backcountry neutralism and Loyalism.

Separate Baptist Zealots, Presbyterian Radicals, and Methodist Tories

No one can pursue the role of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist splinters and factions in the Chesapeake and southern backcountry during the American Revolution without wading into quicksands of interpretation and political correctness. Nevertheless, because the backcountry itself was so important to the war in 1775–1776 and then again in 1780–1782, some wading is necessary.

In South Carolina, before later chapters examine the local civil war politically and militarily, it is necessary to elaborate the interplay of religions in choosing sides. Likewise, before subsequent pages amplify the failure of the ex-Regulators of North Carolina to rise on the king’s behalf in 1775–1776, more attention must be paid to the denominations involved. Fortunately, some revealing detail is within reach.

Through much of the nineteenth century, and up until the 1960s and 1970s (in some cases, even more recently), scholars from the mainstream of Southern Baptist religion and culture—at universities like Furman and Mercer, and at institutions like the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the North and South Carolina Baptist Historical Societies—dealt reasonably candidly with the extreme behavior of early Separate Baptist preachers and congregations in the Carolinas.
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These extremes dated back to the 1760s and 1770s
before
the Separates were drawn into more acceptable conduct by the Baptist church mergers in southern states and related cultural transformations of the late 1780s and 1790s. Southern Baptists are now by far and away the largest religious denomination in the Carolinas, and publications in recent decades have minimized the Separates’ initial religious and political behavior. Baptists are hardly unique; other Protestant denominations have also tidied up with respect to the decade of the Revolution.
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The newly active Methodists, whom we will revisit in the Chesapeake region, were not a major presence in the northern or southern backcountry.
Their seeming Toryism in eastern Maryland—pro-British missionaries and occasional interference with Patriot militia recruitment—was less of a problem in Virginia.

Separate Baptist activity in the South first unfolded in the North Carolina Piedmont after the arrival in 1755 of New England missionary Shubal Stearns. He and his brother-in-law, Daniel Marshall, established a church at Sandy Creek, east of what is now Greensboro. In just seventeen years, a network of 42 new churches and 125 ministers developed from that small beginning, making the Sandy Creek church “the mother of all Separate Baptists.”
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Separate Baptists, whose beliefs also reflected and bred dislike of civic authority, helped to nurture the North Carolina Regulator movement. This came about through the overlapping Sandy Creek Association, founded in 1766 to confront local corruption and encourage rural political activism.
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Although not a member, Stearns kept in close touch. Following the Regulators’ defeat at the Battle of Alamance, fought just a few miles away in 1771, troops under the order of Governor Tryon devastated this section of the Piedmont. The membership of the Sandy Creek Separate Baptist Church plummeted to 14 from 600 as residents fled. Tryon, who led the reprisals, charged that the majority of rebellious farmers were Baptists and Quakers.
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This was probably true, but the interaction of Baptist New Lights and Quaker Inner Lights in the North Carolina backcountry told only part of the tale. The Pennsylvania-fed population of the Piedmont also included two other faiths with mystical and pacifist overtones: Dunkards, Moravians, and loosely affiliated sympathizers of German background. The Regulator movement also bore some of their imprint, according to one of its closest researchers.
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No group so unusual—or so unmilitary minded—was likely to reassemble to fight under Loyalist auspices.

A hundred-odd miles to the southwest, many of the same population groups—Pennsylvanian and North Carolinian, Scotch-Irish, German and English, Presbyterian and Baptist—had also been pouring into the South Carolina backcountry. Churches were few, and denominational lines were melting. Larger numbers of Scotch-Irish were disaffecting, and here again the influence of Shubal Stearns was at work, albeit through preacher Philip Mulkey, whose preachings went far beyond those of his early mentor.

Just as Stearns seeded a large group of Separate Baptist associations in Piedmont North Carolina, Mulkey did so in South Carolina, beginning in 1759 or 1760. Older histories of South Carolina Baptists identify his Fairforest
church as the first in a network of Separate associations that rapidly spread through that province’s backcountry.
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Their locations, collected and marked in one old map, can be shorthanded as the area lying between the Broad and Saluda rivers. It is no coincidence that Revolutionary war buffs use this same shorthand to describe the regional stronghold of Loyalists and would-be neutrals during the South Carolina civil war of 1775.

Distaste for Mulkey was one of the few criticisms voiced by Anglican Woodmason and also by Richard Furman and Oliver Hart, the two leading (but non-Separate) Baptists on the Patriot side in 1775 and 1776. Mulkey was later excommunicated by establishment Baptists, who in 1790 warned against him for adultery, perfidy, and falsehood. It is undisputed that his churches seem to have embraced the more controversial practices usually shunned by Regular Baptists—love feasts, laying on of hands, washing feet, and kisses of charity—and “elderesses and deaconesses” were found.
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In Woodmason’s eyes, Mulkey and his colleague, Joseph Reese, were men of considerable but perverse influence.

Baptist historians have concluded that Mulkey—to whose political activities in 1775 we will later return—“was probably a loyalist or carried non-resistance far.”
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For the moment, though, theology deserves priority. The troublesome aspect of Separate Baptist activity, apparent as the Revolution unfolded in New England and the South, was its occasional tendency to revisit the extremes of previous wartime radical Protestant sects—the Anabaptists of Münster during the German religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the Ranters, early Quakers, familists, and Baptists of the English Civil War years.

These groups’ recurrent theological transgression was antinomianism—derived from the Latin
anti,
which means “against,” and the Greek
nomos,
which means “law.” One form of antinomian excess was belief that those who had received divine grace were absolved from observing normal laws and moral restraints. A second lay in caricature extension of the Protestant concept of the priesthood of all believers. God and Christ, the argument went, were present in all those saved and reborn, and perfection was possible during life. Sin came from the imagination—it was an upper-class plot to suppress the poor—and during the English Civil War, Ranters “defended from the pulpit the view that adultery, drunkenness, swearing, theft, could be as holy and virtuous as prayer.”
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Clearly, the ex-Revolutionary soldiers who joined the Come-Outers and Merry Dancers in backwoods Maine during the 1770s had an antinomian tint,
as did the Separates in remote New Hampshire and Vermont, being conspicuous rebels against civil authority as well as state-supported churches. The American backcountry of the 1770s was the perfect nursery, much like remote northwest England in its earlier role as a radical refuge and breeding ground during the 1640s and 1650s. Was Mulkey’s South Carolina backcountry a similar incubator? At first blush it would appear to put the
a
in antinomian, but hardly any Separate Baptist church records remain. Many of these congregations and chapels did not survive the war. In South Carolina, a half dozen minor battles were fought near Baptist chapels—Stevens Creek, Horn’s Creek, Mobley’s, Belin, and Little River—suggesting that they might have been targets or rallying points.
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Sectarian offshoots of Presbyterianism also had a considerable effect on revolutionary politics and loyalty in the backcountries of both Carolinas. Consider the oddly named “Catholic Presbyterian Church,” organized in upcountry South Carolina just before the Revolution. Its name did not mean
Catholic
as in “Papist,” but
Catholic
as in “universal.” The goal of Reverend William Richardson was to unify, or at least keep on speaking terms, the various splinter and seceder groups spawned in the acrimony of eighteenth-century Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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Fifty miles to the west, Robert and Patrick Cunningham, Loyalists influential in the South Carolina backcountry, came from a family that “had struggled for religious liberty in Scotland before migrating to Virginia in 1769.”
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But perhaps the most important Presbyterian zealotry in the backcountry, at least with respect to events in 1775, involved the Covenanters of Mecklenburg County, just across the North Carolina border. What their leaders stood for, albeit oversimplified, was a belief that the obligations of the seventeenth-century Scottish League and Covenant passed down through the generations. In their eyes, these old covenants rendered unlawful the subsequent kingship of eighteenth-century British monarchs. Alexander Craighead, the most influential pre-Revolutionary preacher in what is now metropolitan Charlotte, was censured by Pennsylvania Presbyterians in the 1740s for what were seen as near-treasonable views. He then left Pennsylvania and went next to Virginia, and then from 1756 to 1766 built a large Mecklenburg following. These strong-minded Presbyterians, in turn, dominated the Mecklenburg assemblage of May 20, 1775, which passed the famous, but also widely doubted, resolution known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. We will touch on it again in looking at Congress and the many “near-declarations” that came before the one on July 4.

If the Mecklenburg Declaration is legitimate, rather than partly spurious, then Thomas Jefferson may have paraphrased its language rather than vice versa. Here its radical and peculiar Presbyterian origins are extremely relevant. They support the argument that the Mecklenburg Declaration was real, not faked. But they also suggest the probability that the delegates—who had convened amid the excitement of just hearing news of Lexington and Concord—soon reconsidered their potentially treasonable language. They may have watered it down into the merely belligerent document that appeared eleven days later as the Mecklenburg Resolves. Aroused Scotch-Irish sectarians could have written the first version; and canny Presbyterian lawyers and businessmen could have rethought its wisdom.

Did the renewed civil war in the Carolina backcountry of 1780–1782 have important religious aspects and overtones that continued the enmities of 1775–1776? Almost certainly, but few records survive.

Convicts, Runaway Servants, and Incipient Crackers

Dr. Samuel Johnson, a high Tory, famously called Americans “a race of convicts.”
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Although Johnson grossly exaggerated with respect to the entirety of the thirteen colonies, it is true that roughly 50,000 British convicts were transported to America between 1700 and 1775 and most went to Virginia and Maryland. Both colonies, justifiably indignant, between 1719 and 1772 together passed a half dozen laws to exclude, levy duty on, or interfere with these shipments. All were rejected by the Crown.
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Benjamin Franklin wished that the colonies could repay Britain appropriately—by shipping back rattlesnakes.