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The historical background of
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The Historical
Background of Religion
in South Carolina

Annual Address before the Upper
South Carolina Conference Histori
cal Society in Greenville, S. C, No
vember 14, 1916, and before the
South Carolina Conference Histori
cal Society in Florence, S. C, No
vember 28, 1916. :: :: ::

By DAVID DUNCAN WALLACE, Ph. D.
Professor of History and Economics
in Wofford College

Published by the Order of
the Societies

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The Historical Background of
Religion in South Carolina

ANNUAL ADDRESS
Before the Upper South Carolina Confer
ence Historical Society in Greenville, S.
C, November 14, 1916, and before the
South Carolina Conference Historical So
ciety in Florence, S.C., November 28, 1916

By DAVID DUNCAN WALLACE, Ph. D.
Professor of History and Economics
IN Wofford College

PUBLISHED BY THE ORDER OF
THE SOCIETIES

OFFICERS

DR. M. L. CARLISLE, President
DR. J. L. STOjKBS, First Vice-President
REV. J. B. TRAYWICK, Second Vice-President
REV. A. E. DRIGGERS, Secretary-Treasurer
DR. D. D. ¦WAiX.ACE, Curator

7

The Historical Background of Religion
in South Carolina.

In the brief space of an evening's address we cannot
hope to do more than point out the principal influences that
have given our religious development its own peculiar char
acter and to glean some lessons not without value perhaps for
the future. i
Practically from the settlement of the province there
were strong Episcopalian and Presbyterian bodies and a small
Baptist organization. About the time of the Revolution the
Methodists I entered in a humble, but earnest way. The broad
currents of our religious history have accordingly been de
termined by these four groups. In seeking to trace the rela
tive growth and the respecti-ve contributions of these groups
and understand the reason of their fluctuating fortunes, I
shall speak primarily as a student of South Carolina history,
rather than as a member of any one denomination.
THE EPISCOPAL ESTABLISHMENT
Though two-thirds of the first settlers of South Caro
lina were ^ dissenters from the Church of England,' the Pro
prietors ordered the Episcopal Church to be supported by
law in the province. The e^vils of a union of church and state
immediately appeared in bitter conflicts, Culminating in an
aet which lasted for a few years excluding from office all who
could not swear that they had not taken communion with any
dissenting denomination within a year, though it did not re
quire them to swear to having taken it in an Episcopal Church,
and as a matter of fact many of them never took it at all.
Dalcho quotes an Episcopal minister of the period as saying
that eleven of the twenty lay commissioners for trying and
ejecting ministers never communed.
Churches were built and ministers paid for the Episco-
iHowe, I, 68, 71; Rivers, 462.

4 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
pal party out of the public treasury, a,nd the wealthy and
zealous Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts, incorporated in London in 1701, supported missionaries
and schools in the province. As late as 1710 the Presbyterians
numbered 45 per cent., the Episcopalians 42 1-2 per cent.,
the Baptists 10 per cent., and the Quakers 2 1-2 per cent.*
The material, social, and political advantages of the establish
ment told in its favor, so that the Presbyterian Dr. Hewatt
wrote of the decade 1730 to 1740 :
"By this time the Episcopalian form of divine worship
had gained ground in Carolina, and was more countenanced
by the people than any other. The zeal for the right of pri
vate judgment had much abated, and those prejudices against
the hierarchy, which the first emigrants carried from England
with them, were now almost entirely worn off from the suc
ceeding generation. To bring about this change, no doubt
the well-timed zeal and extensive bounty of the Society, in
corporated for the propagation of the gospel, had greatly
contributed. At this time the corporation had no less than
twelve missionaries in Carolina, each of whom shared of their
bounty. Indeed, a mild church-government, together with
able, virtuous, and prudent teachers, in time commonly giva
the establishment in every country a superiority over all sec
taries. Spacious churches had been erected in the province,
which were pretty well supplied with clergymen, who were
paid from the public treasury and countenanced by the civil
authority, all which favored the established church. The
dissenters of Carolina were not only obliged to erect and up
hold their churches, and maintain their clergy by private
contributions, but also to contribute their share in the way
of taxes, in proportion to their ability, equally with their
neighbors towards the maintenance of the poor, and the
support of the establishment. This indeed many of them
considered as a grievance, but having but few friends in the
provincial assembly, no redress could be obtained for them.
Besides, the establishment gave its adheren-ts many advanta
geous privileges in point of power and authority over per
sons of other denominations. It gave them the best chance of
iCarroU, II, 260.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS S
being elected members of the legislature, and of course of
being appointed to offices, both civil and military, in their re
spective districts. Over youthful minds, fond of power,
pomp and military parade, such advantages have great
weight."^ If the Presbyterians could have held their fellow-relig
ionists, many congregations of whom settled in the province
from Prance, Switzerland, and Germany, they would have
maintained their original numerical superiority; but these
had no grievance against the Church of England for per
secutions in the old country. Moreover the South Carolina
Presbyterians sought to force upon them a definite set of ar
ticles which lacked for the Frenchman and German the
precious blood-bought sentimental and historical associations
which endeared them to the Presbyterians of England and
Scotland. The whole thing seemed too exclusively Scotehy;
and nobody ha^ ever been able to look on the Scotch in just
the same way that they look upon themselves. Individually
and by congregations, ministers included, the foreign Presbyte
rians generally embraced the Episcopal faith with its mate
rial, social, and political perquisites. A notable exception is
the little Huguenot church in Charleston, which still main
tain^ a native French Protestant minister and adheres to its
CaMnistic creed — the only remaining congregation of its de
nomination in the United States.
Thus the Episcopalians came during the first fifty years
of South Carolina history to occupy a position of social, eco
nomic, and political prestige before which even the rich, re
spectable, and numerous Presbyterians of colonial days were
overshadowed. The socially and politically ambitious, in ad
dition to the merely religious, flocked into their ranks and
established a tradition of connection with government of
which echoes are occasionally heard even to this day. In
1797, the Episcopal Convention of South Carolina resolved
that its delegates to the National Convention of the church
should be Rev. P. M. Parker and also the members of Congress
from South Carolina or sueh of them as should be in Phila-
xdelphia at the time; and in 1787 the Convention had to ad-
iHowe I, 219, 220.

6 HISTORilCAL ADDRESS
joum for several days, as every lay delegate was absent "in
consequence of their indispensable attendance in the legisla
ture." The tone of sueh a church was naturally quite aristo
cratic. About 1772 Lieutenant-Governor Bull reported to
the British government that in the Episcopal Church the dis
gusting spectacle of the plate passed for contributions is
never seen as( among the. dissenters. An interesting illustra^
tion of class distinction is given by Dalcho. ' ' Stephen Bull, ' '
he says, "who lived in (the) vicinity (of the Sheldon Church)
usually in-vited as his guests on the Sabbath, the more re
spectable part of the congregation who attended the di^vine
service; while his overseer, by his direction, and at his ex
pense, likewise entertained the rest."' What an idyllic scene,
never to return to us, in whose days it is impossible to get
the laboring class even to attend the same church with pro
fessional and business men, and when the mere fact that a man
can with any savor of credibility be called "an aristocrat"
is the heaviest handicap that he can carry in politics.
Gen. MeCrady asserts that no other cemetery in America
contains so many distinguished dead as St. Philip's Church
yard in Charleston. Certainly few churches could afford at
one time such a list of distinguished names as were signed to
the farewell letter of this congregation on the retirement
of their aged minister, Dr. Alexander Garden: Henry Lau
rens, David Deas, Governor James Glen, Hector Berenger,
i^« Beaufain, Wm. Wragg, Robert Brewton, Rawlins Lowndes,
David Graeme, Christopher Gadsden, John Moultrie, Gabriel
Manigualt, Isaac Holmes, Robert Pringle, Charles Pinckney,
Andrew Rutledge, John Paul Grimke, Miles Brewton, Thomas
Shubrick, Henry Middleton; besides a large number of rich
and eminent merchants and others whose names are not fa
miliar to us today because they were not in public life.^
THE SPREAD OF PRESBYTERIANISM
The Episcopalians did not spread into the back country,
but very early the numerous and zealous, Presbyterians did.
As the Scotch and Scotch-Irish pushed into the strip of
iDalcho, 383-4.
2Dalcho, 173-4.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 7
country between tide water and the fall line, they carried
their religion very near the front. The case of the North Ire
land Presbyterians who settled Williamsburg is typical. In
1732 they made their way through the trackless forest to the
point where Kingstree stands and built their cabins amid
howling wolves and dangerous Indians. Mr. Gavin Wither
spoon, "meeting his neighbors one day, this conversation is
reported to have taken place: Witherspoon, 'WuU, we must
have a minister. ' 'WuU, Mr. Wotherspoon, wha wuU ye get to
be your minister?' 'Wull, wha but Mr. WuUuson (Willison) o'
Dundee?' 'But the minister must have a muckle sight o'
money for his li'ving.' 'An' that ye must gie him,' says
Mr. Witherspoon. 'An' how much, Mr. Wotherspoon, will ye
gie?' ' Ten pounds, ' was the ready reply. 'But Mr. Wother
spoon, whar'U ye git the\ ten pounds?' 'WuU, if wus comes
to was, I e'en can sell my cou^'says he." And' so they called
their first minister four years after their settlement.
Twenty years later Braddock's defeat sent a great stream
of settlers, largely Presbyterians, from Pennsylvania and
western Virginia down across South Carolina. From Lan
caster and York counties they spread southwestwardly across
the province in a veritable blue streak, if we are to believe
the story about the color of their stockings.
The friends at honte did not forget them, and for many
years ministers froin the British Isles and ministers and
missionaries from the Synod of New York and Philadelphia
covered the up-country with their fruitful labors, so that in
a few decades Presbyterian missionaries were being sent from
that region into other parts of the province and westward far
beyond its bounds.' Though the coUege bred and perhaps
overly constrained Northern Presbyterian missionaries failed
sometimes to understand the Southern backwoodsman's tastes
and openings for approach so well as the native uneducated
Baptist preacher with his "holy whine," described by Dr.
Broadus with such a fine combination of humor and sympa
thy, yet he did a good and lasting work.^
iHowe, I, 338-9.
2The "holy whine" ¦was not confined to th© hackwoods Baptist
preacher. Dr. Broadus' entertaining and philosophical account
of it (Sermons, 245-6) is as follows: "When men spoke td cro-wds

8 "' HISTORICAL ADDRiBSS
The blue streak of Presbyterian migration cut just be
low the later Spartanburg and Greenville court houses; and
though it early threw out feeble branches north of these
points, it was almost a hundred years before these two vil
lages had a Presbyterian meeting house — ^Spartanburg in
1843 with eight members, and Greenville in 1849 with only
eighteen members a year later.'
The thoroughness ¦with which both the Presbyterians and
Baptists, particularly the former, had permeated the back
country in 177& is indicated by tha fact that when the Rev
olutionary Council of Safety wished to rouse that section to
unite with the coast in resistance to Great Britain, they sent
(along with that fiery son of liberty, William Henry Dray
ton, the most eminent Presbyterian and the most eminent
Baptist minister in Charleston. The readiest access to the
backswoodsmen was through the meeting houses of these de
nominations, and in them these powerful preachers proclaim
ed the gospel of liberty, true to the great traditions of their
denominations interpreting Scriptural freedom as being both
spiritual and civil.
The coming of these determined, quiet, Psalm-singing,
theology-chopping, educating, liberty-loving, tyrant hating
Presbyterians was one of the determining factors in the mak
ing of the up-country. They established Mt. Zion CoUege
at Winnsboro in 1785 ; they contributed large sums to Prince
ton Theological Seminary and soon founded their own in
in the open air, on Bi high key, with great excitement for a long
time, the overstrained voice ¦would relieve Itself by rising and fall
ing, as a person tired of standing will frequently change positions.
This soon became a habit with such men, and they would be Im
itated by others, being regarded as the appropriate expression
of excited feeling. The same causes produce the same sing-6ong
tone in the loud cries of street venders in our cities. But the
whine of the preacher, associated for many ignorant hearers with
seasons of impaseioned >appeal from the pulpit, and of deep feeling
on their part, has become a musical accompaniment which grat-
fies and impresses them, and like a tune we remember from
childhood, revives the memories of "joys that are passed, pleasant
land mournful.' Why should we wonder at all this? Extremes
meet. What Is the 1111011189, which modern ritualist in this coun
try so much admire, but Just another species tit holy whine, origi
nating long centuries ago in very similar natural causes to those
Just stated, and impressive to some people now by reason of its as
sociation with what is old and venerable in devotion?"
'Howe, II, 747, 756.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 9
Columbia. Little Bethesda Church in York county in the fif
ty years following 1804 with an average membership of one
hundred and sixty, produced eight ministers, thirty physi
cians, and thirty lawyers.' They supplied so many presi
dents and professors to the South Carolina CoUege and to
coUeges in the North and West as seriously to cripple their
evangelical labors; and from the first they wrote down their
history so fully and systematically that I halfway suspect that
the recording angel served his apprenticeship as stated clerk
of a Presbyterian General Assembly. Remembering Calvin's
interpretation of the fourth commandment that the injunc
tion, ' ' Six days shalt thou labor, " is as binding as the clause
forbidding labor on the seventh, the expression ' ' a rich Pres
byterian" has become a proverb.
THi: REVOLUTION AND DISESTABLISHMENT.
Moving forward to the time of the Revolution we are in
the presence of an event which stirred society too deeply for
its effects to be confined to politics and government. Its lib
eral and humanizing principles derived largely from con
temporary French philosophy, came also tinctured with
French deism.
The upper classes particularly were strongly per-
ated with such ideas for several decades, until the great re
vival of religion in the early nineteenth century began to
turn the tide. The puritanical Presbyterians naturally with
stood the strain better than their more wealthy, easy-going,
and politically afiBliated Episcopalian brethren, and the Bap
tists and Methodists then lived so little in the intellectual
currents of the times as to be less in danger. The most dra
matic incident in connection with the history of deism in our
State was the case of Dr. Thomas Cooper, the president of
the South Carolina College in about 1830. A large part of
the ruling class in the legislature stood staunchly by him in
the face of the attack led by the learned and influential
Presbyterian clergy earnestly seconded by the Baptists and
Methodists, until the dwindling numbers of the students led
to his being transferred to the duty of codifying the laws of
'Howe, n, 681-a.

10 HISTORICAL ADDiBESS
the State since the earliest times — a task performed with such
ability and scholarly fidelity as to put the historian and the
la^w^er forever in his debt.
But to return to the period of the Revolution. The dis
senters' dissatisfaction with the established church was in
flamed by the revolutionary ideas set free by the conflict be
tween the colonies and England, and the liberalism in the air
brought them many recruits from the Episcopal Church it
self. The leader was William Tennent, the Presbjiierian pas
tor who had been sent to enlist the backwoodsmen for Hb
erty. It is fortunate that the movement for disestablishment
in South Carolina was led by this earnest minister in the in
terest of true religion and justice instead of as in Virginia
at the same time by the deistical Thomas Jefferson as the dis
believer in Christianity and church altogether and the im
placable foe of what he and his school termed "a hireling
clergy." The aristocratic Episcopalians who had inaugurated the
Revolution in South Carolina on political principles in em
ploying the leading Presbyterian and the leading Baptist
minister of the province to enlist the dissenting back-country
men had incurred a debt which they were now called upon to
pay. Mr. Tennent had sent a petition throughout the State,
securing thousands of signatures for disestablishment. Chris
topher Gadsden, Episcopalian, but radical revolutionist, in
troduced the petition in the legislature, and on January 11,
1777, Tennent, says Gov. McCrady, "made an exceedingly el
oquent and able speech" in its behalf which is notable in the
annals of religious liberty in South Carolina.
Laws, said Tennent, "which make odious distinctions
between subjects equally good ought not to be tolerated. The
law acknowledges the society of the one as a Christian Church
— ^it does not know the others at all. Under a reputedly free
government, licenses for marriage were refused to any but the
established clergy. The law builds superb churches for the
one — it leaves the others to build their own. ***** ^he
sums advanced by the public treasury for the support of the
Church of England for the ten years preceding the 31st of De
cember, 1775, amount to 164,027 pounds, 16 shillings, 3 pence.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 11
The expense for the year 1772 was 18,031 pounds, 11 shil
lings, 1 penny. The religious estate, dra'wn more or less from
the purses of all denominations by law, would probably sell
for 330,000 pounds.' If the dissenters have always made
more than half of this government, the sums taken from their
pockets ***** must amount to more than 82,013 pounds
"within the ten years aforesaid ; and the very large sum of their
property in glebes, parsonages, and churches, lies in the pos
session and improvement of the Church of England. Mean
while the established churches are but twenty in number,
many of them very small, while the number of dissenting
congregations are seventy-nine, and much larger, and would
pay 40,000 pounds annually could they be furnished "with
a clergy * * * * Would it content our brethren of the Church
of England to be harely- tolerated,, that is not punished, for
presuming to think for themselves? * * * *. it was not
the three pence on the pound of tea that roused all the virtue
of America. It is our birth-right that we prize. *****
With the new constitution, let the day of justice da^wn on
every rank and order of men in this state. Let us bury what
is past forever. (Let the Episcopal Church, he says, keep all
the splendid endowment of lands and buildings that it has.)
******** By some it is said to be dangerous to grant
this request at the present time. But are we reduced to that
situation that it is dangerous to do common justice? Will
the danger arise from the dissenting denominations? No; it
answers the prayer of their petitions. Will the danger arise
from the Church of England ? I have' the pleasure of know
ing too many of them to think so. Many of them have sign
ed the petition. Many more have declared their sentiments
in the most liberal terms. ****** yield to the mighty
current of American freedom and glory, and let our State
be inferior to none on this "wide continent in the liberality of
its laws and in the happiness of its people. "^
Tennent 's principle triumphed by a small majority, and
the constitution of 1778 abolished every vestige of favor to
ahy one denomination.
iHe says, spelling it out below,, three hundred eighty thousand
pounds.
2How«, I, .370-1. . ; .

^

>

12 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
A few words must be given to the further Revolutionary
activity of the Presbyterians, already doubtless the most
numerous denomination in the State, and save for the coast
country aristocracy, much the most influential. Says
Johnson of a certain man in his Traditions of the Revolu
tion, he was "a Presbyterian, and like all of that faith, his
religion placed him on the side of freedom. ' ' This is a slight
exaggeration, for some members joined the Tories, though
after the war they usually found it so unpleasant in their
old church that they went off to the Baptists and Metho
dists, hoping perhaps to find more religion and less Whig
politics. Presbyterian elders seemed to have been almost ex-officio
lieutenants and captains in the Whig militia, and to be a
prominent ruling elder well nigh amounted to a major's, a
colonel's, or even a brigadier's commission. "Elder McJun-
kin" soon rolled from the tongue no more naturally than
"Major McJunkin," and Elder Andrew Pickens was soon
more familiar as General Pickens. Patriotism was mingleil
with prayer, as when Scotch-Irish John Miller preferred his
petition in these words, ' ' Good Lord, our God that art in heav
en, we have great reason to thank thee for the many favors we
have received from thy hands, the many battles we have won.
There is the great and glorious battle of King's Mountain,
where we kilt the great Gineral Ferguson and took his whole
army; and the great battle of Ramsour's and Williamson's and
the ever memorable and glorious battle of the Coopens, where
we made the proud Gineral Tarleton run doon the road hel
ter-skelter; and, good Lord, if ye had na suffered the cruel
Tories to bum Belly Hell's (Billy Hill's) iron works, we
would na have asked ony mair favors at thy hands. Amen."'
Doubtless Elder Miller 'a Bible was well thumbed at the
Song of Deborah, and well it might be, for the Revolution
supplied many a Deborah among our noble women. Such
was the wife of John Simpson, pastor of Fishing Creek Pres
byterian Church who took his gun and fought with the troops.
He was sought one bright Sunday morning by a band of
British soldiers. His wife fled with her four children to
iHowe, I, 512, n.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 13
the orchard, while the men burned the house and the study
in the yard. Rushing into the latter after the soldiers' de
parture, Mrs. Simpson, at the cost of painful burns, saved
two apronfuls of her husband's books. Going to a neigh
bor's house for her confinement four weeks later, she remained
there for a few days, when she boldly returned to her de
stroyed home and took up her residence in a small
outhouse that had escaped destruction. One day a band of
Tories, some wearing her husband's clothes, came to the
place and strutted up and down before her, asking if they
were not better looking men than her husband, whose scalp
they promised soon to bring her. But Mr. Simpson finally
brought his scalp home himself, and for years after the Rev
olution continued to preach to the congregation to whom his
and his family's heroic conduct had endeared him.' Rev.
John Harris, a Presbyterian preacher in the upcountry, used
to preach during the Revolution with a rifle standing be
side him in the pulpit, and his ammunition pouch hanging
from his neck.2 So active were these men that "the enemy
had sworn vengeance against the Presbyterian clergy." (lb.
511.) EARLY BAPTIST HISTORY
One of the most striking features in the religious history
of the State is the supereession^ in numbers at least, of the^
unrivaled primacy of the Episcopal and Presbyterian bo'd-
ies in the 18th century by the Baptists and Methodists in the
19th. Entering the province in about 1683, the low-country
Baptists were tintil after the Revolution weak in numbers and
tom by factionalism and heresy. (Furman 5, 6, and 7, n. ,
Howe Ij 124, 199.) By about 1735, says Furman, the church
was nearly extinct; but in consequence of Mr. Whitfield's
preaching, a revival took place and many joined it. At this op
portune time there arrived from Philadelphia Rev. Oliver
Hart, a man of consecrated character and statemanlike ability.
Realizing from his northern experience the benefits of co-ope
ration, he formed in 1751 the Charleston Baptist Association,
IHowe, I, 511, passim.
aHowe, I, 441, passim.

14 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
consisting of four churches.' Every forward movement was
almost surely his in suggestion or execution. He was in effect
a veritable bishop of the Biaptists ; and so great was his work,
says Furman, that the South Carolina Baptists of the time
considered his advent as a special interposition of Pro"vi-
dence. ' '2
About 1755 Separate Baptist organized in the back-
country and for many years refused all assoeiation with the
regulars except on complete surrender by the latter,^ though
the regulars ultimately prevailed.
Friendship, the oldest church in the old Broad River
Baptist Association, was founded in 1765.* From the first
the Baptists grew more rapidly in the upper country; though
they made no phenomenal gains until after the Revolution,
while on the coast they still languished. In 1773, the Char
leston Assoeiation counted only eight churches and three
hundred ninety members.^ The Association in 1793 lamented
"the declension of religion" and appointed a day of fasting
and prayer "for a genuine reformation among the people;"*
and so on, until a happy change occurring, we read in the cir
cular letter of 1803 that "within a few years past, after
a long ¦wintry season, God has, in a wonderful manner re
vived religion among us." (lb., 161.) This was the begin
ning of the great revival over a large part of the United
States among many denominations which was to start the
churches on their great mid-century career of transform
ing, elevating, and refining American life and character.
EARLY METHODISM IN SOUTH CAROLINA
We come now to the entrance of our own denomination
into the history of South Carolina It is not implied that there
was no zeal or religion in other churches previous to the advent
¦of the Methodists; but it is indisputable that their entrance
inaugurated, by example, inspiration, and leadership, an era
of unprecedented evangelical activity and purifying which
iLogan, 3.
2Furman, 7-8.
SFurman, IS-U.
^Logan, 107.
^Furman, 14.
spurman, 24.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 15
extended quicltly to the Presbyterian and Baptist bodies, and
ultimately to others. Hence their coming is one of the cardi
nal events in the history of the State, as of the nation.
Whitefield preached in St. Philip's Episcopal Church
in Charleston in 1738, but two years later was out of favor
with the establishment for neglecting ritualistic forms. Af
ter a mournfully ridiculous trial in his absence for doing the
same thing in Charleston in the 18th century that Christ
and the Apostles did in Palestine in the first. Rev. Alexander
Garden, commissary of the bishop of London, condemned
Whitefield in his ecclesiastical court and even preached
against him from the text, "These that have turned the
world upside down are come hitherto also," overlooking in his
heat the fact that those against whom this charge was made
were Paul and Silas, and the coiners of the phrase are .said
by the sacred -writer to have been "the Jews which believed
not, moved with envy, ' ' and " certain lewd fellows of the bas
er sort." Perhaps Whitefield 's text in reply was no more le
gitimately applicable, but at least they were the words used
by the apostle to the neglected of his day in describing the
opposition which he encountered: "Alexander, the copper
smith, did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to
his works." At all events both Paul and Whitefield dili
gently continued to turn the world upside do^wn and the op
position of the coppersmiths and commissaries hindered them
little. Joseph Pilmoor in 1773, like Whitefield, left no organiza
tion, and so the fruits of their labors were reaped by the Bap
tists and Congregationalists, whose pulpits were furnished
them with great liberality. Asbury founded a church and
left a preacher in charge in Charleston in 1785, and in 1787
the South Carolina Conference was created. Just as a long
blue steak of Presbyterianism was flung across the State
from York and Lancaster southwesterly by the coming of
the Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania and Virginia, so the con
stant joumeyings of Asbury, Coke, and their helpers along
the road from the North painted the Pee Dee country a beau
tiful Methodist drab, which it is still proud to retain.
There is no surer test of the spirituality of a church than '

16 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
its power to supply its o^wn ministers. At a time when other
denominations were almost entirely dependent upon ministers
from the outside. South Carolina was beginning to swarm
with native Methodist preachers. While others were care
fully guarding against "deluded mechanics and ignorant en
thusiasts creeping into the pulpit," Methodism was calling
George Dougherty from river raft and farm to become
almost immediately one of the lights of the American pulpit,
preceded and followed by a yet unbroken line of splendid
workers. The Methodist preacher introduced a new emphasis, a
new viewpoint, a new ideal, a new experience — new to the
cold, skeptical eighteenth century, but in fact the oldest thing
in the Christian religion. "Jacob Bar, once a Continental of
ficer," says Dr. Chreitzberg, "heard (James Jenkins); half
atheist as he was, he said, 'He must be a god himself, or a
servant of God.' " Verily an apostolic succession of the val
id sort, or better, straight from the great Ordainer himself by
the laying on of the spirit rather than of the hands. The athe
istic officer became a local Methodist preacher and left a suc
cession of good Methodists to this day. (Chreitzberg, 75.)
The peculiar strength of the Methodist organization, as
Dr. Chreitzberg puts it, lay in the fact that it "never wait
ed for the people to call the preachers, but quite the re-
verse-nfor the Ereacher to call the people." (lb. 106.) It
penetrated uninvited localities containing no embodied Bap
tist or Presbyterian group. A tribute to this system was
the practice of the Presbyterian Synod of appointing some
strong preacher "to itinerate," as they put it, for a certain
number of months in certain sections, but the lack of work
ers led to its abandonment about 1810.
An interesting testimonial to the influence of Wesley's
followers is the comment of a visitor to this country shortly
before the year 1800 that the Presbyterian preachers were
"quite Methodistical." The new spirit injected by Metho
dism is illustrated by the fact that ten persons were con
verted at an Annual Conference in 1792, at a time when the
Episcopal Convention in South Carolina was stiU accustom
ed to go through all its business without religious exercises.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 17
We converted men at Conference then ; now we have histor
ical addresses to tell about it. — 'We had no history to tell then ;
have we no unconverted men left to convert now ?
Ramsay in his History of South Carolina, writing in 1809,
testifies: "That great good has resulted from the labors of
the Methodists, is evident to all who are acquainted ¦with tne
state of the .country before and since they began their evan
gelism in Carolina. Drunkards have become sober and or
derly ; bruisers, bullies, and blackguards meek, inoffensive and
peaceable, and profane swearers decent in their conversation."
The thirty years following the year 1800 saw phenom
enal growth in the young Methodist giant. The South Car
olina Conference increased 394 per cent, in preachers, 819
per cent, in charges and 740 per cent, in white members, and
almost 1500 per cent, in negroes.' In 1825 it was already
the most numerous denomination in the State.2
CIVILIZING AND CHRISTIANIZING
Having sketched the progress of the four great histor
ic denominations of the State, past and present, into the be
ginning of the 19th century, we*may glance at the woids; of
civilizing the still quite barbarous frontier. Romancers have
so possessed our imagination that we have little conception
of the coarseness, and often gross wickedness, of large mass
es of the American people a century and a quarter ago.
Frontier conditions were general from the fall line of the
rivers to the mountains, and spots of revolting heathenism
and corruption in the older sections were abundant enough.
Incidents of inhumanity are frequent in the journals of our
early preachers, such as countrymen slamming their doors
in the faces of itinerants and leaving them to freeze in the
snows of winter nights; and Charleston mobs almost pump
ed George Dougherty to death, misused other preachers, and
repeatedly stoned Methodist churches in the city, even dur
ing the sessions of Conference.' Rev. Hugh McAden, a
Presbyterian missionary, relates that in 1755 he preached
forty-five miles west of Waxhaws "to a number of those poor
iChreitzberg, 306.
^Mills' Statistics.
3Did latter In 1788 «

18 HISTORICAL ADDRESS '
baptized infidels, many of whom I was told had never heard
a sermon in all their lives before, and yet several of them
had families ! ' ' He relates ' ' an anecdote told him here by an
old gentleman, who said to the Governor of South Carolina,
when he was in those parts, in treaty with the Cherokee In
dians, that 'he had never seen a shirt, been in a fair, heard
a sermon, or seen a minister in all his life.' Upon which the
governor promised to send him up a minister that he might
hear one sermon before he died. The minister came and
preached ; and this was all the preaching that had been heard
in the upper part of South Carolina before Mr. McAden 's
visit, at least according to his account.'
Illustrations might be multinlied of the nicturesoue.
devil-may-care, illiterate heathenism scattered aU over the
State at a much later date than this. Bishop Capers, for
instance, relates organizing the nucleus of the Cooper River
Circuit in 1811, ¦within ten or twelve miles of Charleston,
where, he says, the people had not heard a sermon by any
minister of "any denomination for many years before-"^
With coarseness and much immorality and drunkenness
went an almost African superstition. When the following
incident could occur among the Presbyterians of Waxhaw
Church in 1772, what must have been conditions in less fa
vored communities? The pastor, an unbalanced ascetic, was
found dead in his house ¦with a bridle around his neck. To
save the church from scandal, the leaders suppressed the in
disputable fact of the suicide- The beautiful widow whose
heart had doubtless been sufficiently starved by union with
her mournful companion, remarried in a year, and the story
of the violent death also leaked out. Mediaeval superstition
and Puritanical indignation at the devout and excellent
lady's early and happy remarriage combined to exact a hor
rible test of her innocency. The body of her first husband
was exhumed from its repose of more than a year beneath
the earth and she was forced to touch the unrecognizable
corpse, to prove her guilt of his death by its bleeding or her
innocence by the contrary .' Witches were believed to abound
'Howe, l, 187.
2Life of Capers, 141.
SBowe, I, 416, et seq.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 19
in Fairfield County in 1792'; and as late as 1813 or 1814, a
case actually was tried in which an old woman living in Ches
terfield was accused of mistreating a girl in Lancaster Coun
ty by diabolical arts and riding her from town to town as a
horse.' Bishop Capers in 1810 amazed a Methodist congre
gation in Darlington County by braving the powers of dark
ness in excluding from class meeting an old woman believed
to be a witch.2
The condition of the poor in neglected corners of the
State shortly after the War of Secession is vividly portrayed
by Father O'Connell, a Catholic missionary, in the following
description of a community in Oconee County, though due
allowance must be made for his rather unsympathetic atti
tude. Horned cattle, he says, are the chief form of wealth.
They range the hills and mountains in great numbers, and
early in the fall the drovers arrive from the low country and
make extensive pu~rchases at about ten dollars a head, and
drive them to Augusta or Charleston.
"The inhabitants are improvident, inclined to indolence,
and consequently in need of the necessaries of life in many
instances ; the possession of a rifle, a peck of meal, and a dog
for the chase seems to limit their ambition.
"Sadly deficient in morals, the Civil Rights Bill was for
them a superfluous legislation, and the di^vorce law a post-
factum attempt at legalizing a pre-existing condition com
monly prevailing, and popular by general observance. Woe
to him who attempted to become an informer ! A speedy de
parture for quarters unknown was his only safety. . Some
preachers claim two calls, one for the pulpit, and the next
to save some particular congregation for v/hich the particular
indi^vidual is alone fitted; to this benighted region none re
ceived the. second call."
. Father O'Connell relates that on a, visit to this region
in 1870 he preached to an interested congregation of simple
folk from breakfast time till noon. There was in the audi
ence, "A young man who wore a new pair of boots. He was in
sensible, to any other object, and, by stretching himself and all
'MoCrady, I, 451. See Statutes at Large, iS. C, II, 739-43.
2Life oif Capers, 117.

20 HISTORICAL ADBUESS
imaginable twistings, riveted the attention of the invidious
mountaineers, who were chiefly shod in Adam's leather.
"Noticing with no small degree of curiosity that about
a third of the audience leant on crutches, or limped on walk
ing canes, I enquired the cause and found it to be rheuma
tism. It is the prevailing complaint, confining some to bed for
years, and keeping numbers on the rack during the decline
of life. The causes are very obvious; their houses are ex
tremely primitive, with rickety doors and stoppages, con
structed of rough logs, loosely covered overhead with boards,
and searched by every passing gale. The enormous pile of
wood burning and crackling on the unlimited hearth, while
it scorches the front, leaves the shoulders and rear to shiver
in the surrounding snow and rain."'
The jerks, the barks, the jumps, and other emotional ex
travagances which accompanied the great revivals of the
early part of the nineteenth century can be better understood
in the light of the conditions of grossness, violence, fanati
cism, superstition, emotionalism, and illiteracy among which
they arose. MISUNDERSTANDING AND OPPOSITION
It was among these rough masses that the Methodists first
did by far the greater part of their work, and among them
that the Baptists likewise chiefly labored. The old estab
lished church left them almost untouched; the Presbyterians
to a greater extent than any other denomination cut through
all the strata of society, retaining a strong hold among the
wealthy, conservative, and well-born of the coast and the poor
men of the backwoods. The Methodists early attracted a
small contingent of the upper classes. In fact the first to
join in Charleston was a substantial merchant. Bishop Ca
pers was decidely well-bom and aristocratically connected,
and relates that his three step-aunts of the distinguished
Wragg family were "Methodists of the very first model."
Capers, says Samuel Leard, "was the orator par excellence
of our Conference, and did more than any other man to give
his beloved Methodism caste and power among the wealthy and
lO'Connell, Catholicity in the Oarolinas and Georgia, 335 passim.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 21
refined classes of South Carolina."' Many another man and
woman of high position was converted by Methodist preach
ers whose family associations took them into other churches,
as is interestingly illustrated in the case of Chancellor Job
Johnstone. His friend, Dr. 0. B. Mayor, Sr., relates this of
the Chancellor in one of the long talks that marked their in
timacy :
' ' It has been comparatively but a short time since I had
any regard for religion," said the Chancellor. "The change
in my -views took place in the course of one night. It was
while I and my family were residing near to the Methodist
Church. One evening, •**¦*** attracted by the sing
ing in the church, I agreed to a proposition of my ¦wife to at
tend the services. It was not long after we took our seats be
fore the preacher began his sermon. He was one of those
uneducated men, so common at that time in that denomina
tion, and certainly one who was little calculated to make an
iinpression upon me. But, strange to say! while I consid
ered his discourse as an unmeaning raht, I became possessed
by a feeling which I cannot describe. It was an emotion that
held . possession of me with increasing tenacity, until, in the
depth of the night, my sighs awoke my ¦wife. 'What is the
matter?' she asked me. I tried to explain to her my state of
mind, but could not do so fully. 'Oh, my dear husband!' she
exclaimed. ' I know what it is. It is the Holy Spirit ! Thank
God! Thank God!' "
And so the Presbyterians got a valuable member by the
Methodist route.
The fair start of the Methodists with the well-to-do was
rudely arrested by the church 's strong condemnation of slavery
under Bishop Coke's leadership. Soon to the natural bating
of poor and peculiar people were added fear, hatred, and
violence against a supposed ¦wide-spreading Abolitionist so
ciety. As late as 1807 a Methodist pastor was mobbed in his
church in Charleston ; and the same year the city guard fully
armed and uniformed surrounded Bethel Church during ser
vice, the captain entered with drawn sword and ordered the
congregation to disperse.2 The propertied classes fell rapidly
'Chreitzberg, 315.
^Chreitzberg,^ 97.

22 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
away and the work continued among the lowly. With time
we regained the confidence of the former; and though now
we have our rich and distinguished, yet to this day most
Methodists, personally and individually considered, have more
faith in the future than pride in the past. Well that it is
so; for the future is inevitable and the past is irrevocable.
THE RUIN AND RESURRECTION OF THE EPISCO
PALIANS
Face to face with the open road of the 19th century, we
are confronted with the problem of why one denomination
forged ahead and another fell relatively behind. Let us ex
amine the forces -which have brought about such extensive
changes. The Episcopal establishment at the outbreak of the Revo
lution appeared to be flourishing. Of the twenty clergymen
then in office, only five took sides against the colonists;' but
as the war ravaged the country, many of the churches were
ruined and the pastors departed. Her endowments destroyed,
her membership in many instances impoverished, the class
to which she had been accustomed to minister permeated with
Jeffersonian deism, or at the least worldly difference, the two
crutches snatched away on which she had been accustomed
to lean, the public treasury and a foreign ministry, she lay
prostrated for years and well-nigh perishing. At the conven
tion of 1785 only eight churches were represented, only three
by a minister, which is typical for the next twenty- three years.
After five years without a convention following 1798, a spec
ial effort to assemble the clergy to elect a Bishop and transact
other important business brought clerical representatives
from only four parishes and laymen from seven others — elev
en churches out of twenty-six.2 In 1810 reports could be ob
tained from only ten churches out of the twenty-six, giving
only 738 communicants, over.a fourth of them being negroes,
and three-quarters of the total living in the city of Charles
ton. Beginning in 1806 the clergy appeared to have begun to
iDalcho, 206.
2The Journal for 1810 names twenty-six churches composing th*
diocese.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 23
awaken. In that year a religious character was given to the
body by a resolution that the convention should be opened
daily with prayer and a sermon preached on the first day. Six
years later the communion was added to the opening exer
cises, and from that time eVery few years saw some small
forward step.' But even in 1818, when reports were obtain
ed from twenty out of twenty-six churches, there Were bare
ly over eleven hundred white communicants.2 Only two
churches had been established outside the old pre-Revolu-
tionary parishes, and the one in Columbia itself was receiv
ing heavy aid as a mission. Passing strange it is that the most
aristocratic of our churches should have so much more to be
proud of in her present than in her past.
RELATIVE DE'CLINE OF THE PRESBYTERIANS
Passing now to the other three denominations in the early
Vears of the nineteenth century, we find that they seem to have
held about the same numerical strength in 1810 ; but since that
time the two great popular denominations have grown so as
to leave the Presbyterians equal to hardly a third of the Meth
odists or a fourth of the Baptists. The relative decline of
this grand old church appears to have been due to the insis
tence on an educated ministry, the consequent impossibility
of supplying ministers in sufficient numbers, congregational
dissensions, dissipation of energy in theological controver-
.sies, and the failure of a rigid, enthusiasm-chilling, fatalistic
predestinationism to appeal to the masses. Ramsay's testi
mony in 1808 regarding Orangeburg can be verified by in
stances from all over the State. "From the want of preach
ers of their own denomination," he says, "the descendents of
the old stock are falling in either with the Baptists or the
Methodists, according to the neighborhood in which they live.^
¦ Howe's minute history of the Presbyterian church is full
of passages like the following: "This church (the first of any
denomination in Richland County) had occasional preaching,
but became extinct as a Presbyterian church and the neigh
borhood became the seat of a Methodist church and congrega-
lOf. Journals for 1806, 1807, and 1809, e. g.
2journals in Dalcho.
3Howe credits this, I, 494. Statisticar account of Orangeburg —
Ramsay, Vol. II, Appendix.

24 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
tion." Of another near Winnsboro, he says: "The organiza
tion has long since passed away and been superceded by that
of another denomination." So Aimwell, for years without a
. pastor, became extinct about 1820 and the building fell to the
Baptists. After 1815, "Neither New Hope nor Mount Hope
appear any more." A pathetic picture of disintegrating con
gregations and dying organization. The Presbytery of South
Carolina, embracing about a third of this state, reported in
1799 twenty-eight congregations supplied with ministers and
twenty-nine unsupplied.'
Serious as was the dearth of Presbyterian ministers, it
was made severer by the considerable proportion of their
leading men accepting positions in the South Carolina Col
lege and in classical schools and colleges all over the country
at the very time when many of their churches were dying for
the lack of ministers, thus earning a splendid tribute to their
scholarship and ability, but draining the resources of the
church as an evangelizing force. The Methodists then had
few qualified for such positions; but they realized the peril
of losing those few from the pulpit. When it was proposed in
1835 to take Dr. Capers into the faculty of the South Car
olina College to counteract the influence Dr. Cooper had
left (or rather, I have been led to think, to placate the public
outcry). Bishop and Conference alike insisted that he could
not be spared from the pulpit except to institute a thorough
reform of the college in the interest of religion and morals as
president. Another check to Presbyterian progress was their early
abandonment of camp meetings. In the great revival of 1802
to 1804, they were active in using this wonderful new means
of reaching the people, frequently took the lead, and co-op
erated cordially with the Methodists and Baptists. But even
then the camp meeting was endorsed in the Presbytery of
South Carolina by only a two-thirds vote; some congrega-
gations and ministers refused to participate, and in a few
years the denomination gave them up.2
The fact that from 1831 to 1835 eight ministers felt ob
liged to decline the calls of the Presbyterian Church in Co-
'Howe, I, 494; II, 282, 249. 252; I, 660.
SHowe, II, 146, quoting A. Giles.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 25
iumbia, and the ninth man served only one year, suggests the
waste of energy from factional quarrels. Following 1806, too,
the denomination was vexed for many years by the heresies
of an able and popular minister who drew off many individ
uals and a number of congregations.'
The case was even worse with the Associate Reformed
Presbyterians, the Scotch mind seeming to take a mournful
pleasure in making itself miserable in that way. Their his
torian, Dr. Lathan, asserts that it was a constant effort for
the different varieties to keep up the distinction of their cro
chets of difference, and says that "no one can blame other
denominations for cultivating the field which the Associates,
Associate Reformed and Reformed Presbyterians, in their
divided state, could not cultivate. "2
THE GREAT BAPTIST GROWTH
We come now to one of the most impressive facts in South
Carolina religious history, the phenomenal growth of the Bap
tists in the last seventy-five years. America is individualis
tic; the South is more individualistic than the North; South
Carolina has been the most individualistic even of Southern
States. Our attachment to local self-government in all re
lations is extreme. A commonwealth that staked so much on
the sovereignty of the individual State could not fail to be
attracted by a system of church government based on that
same principle. Though always insisting on the absolute
separation of Church and State, yet the South Carolina Bap
tists appear to me to associate their church and non-church
life very close by, as, e. g., in their well known emphasis upon
the religious denomination of public school teachers. The
violence of their revulsion from Rome purged them of every
vestige of a sacrosanct tendency to withdraw the church to
an other worldly pedastal. Logan's history of the Broad Riv
er and King's Mountain Associations takes one closer to the
life of the people just as it is than any other religious his
tory I know.
In fact Congregationalism asserted itself in the formative
period of our history in every church, proving how strong is
•Howe, II, 158.
2Lathan. 361; 299.

26 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
the tendency of South Carolinians in that direction. The
Methodists had to contend with Hammett's secession in 1792,
which set an example of congregational sovereignty that
alarmed Bishop Asbury and was several times followed later.
But for the strong personality of Asbury the Methodists in
America might have become considerably congregational. The
South Carolina Episcopal churches had for years before the
Revolution exercised virtual congregational independence by
electing ministers as temoprary supplies for ten or twenty
years, so as to defeat the Governor's right of appointment;
"and it is probably owing to this," lamented Governor Glen
in 1748, "that the Governor is not prayed for in any parish,
although the assembly is prayed for during its sittings, a state
of things," he says, "unprecedented in America."'
Even the South Carolina Catholics had to be whipped se
verely into line; for they not only baffled their clergy, but
defied one bishop (O'Connell, 144), and later even forbade
the use of the church to their great Bishop England and re
duced him to say mass in a neighboring shed.
Illustrations of the same extreme teneneies among
Presbyterians are unnecessary, but they are numerous and
significant and extend for practically a hundred years after
the Revolution. These considerations all help to explain why the Metho
dists are so much stronger in the North and the Baptists in
the South. They brought the Baptist faith and practice into
particularly close touch with the South Carolina way of do
ing things ; and the church must keep in touch with the peo
ple, their interests, their views, even their prejudices and limr-
itations, if it is to draw them. Dr. Lathan 's pride and loyal
ty may be admirable in the fact that the Reformed and the
Associate Reformed Presbyterians "have retained more of
the Scotch type of Presbyterianism as it existed prior to
the reign of Charles II, than any other branch of the Presby
terian Church in America, while every other denomination
of Christians became, at an early period, Americanized. "2
But is necessarily suggests the query. Why is it any worse to
iWallace's I(aurens, 37.
2Lathan, 417.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 27
A^mericanize the church than to Scotchicize, or, as we might
say, scotch it ?
We may observe that this problem of adjusting the
church to the traditions, prejudices, ideals, and history of the
people among whom it must work has a very important bear
ing upon the great question of unification which now con
fronts our o^wn church.
Another powerful weapon in the great Baptist campaign
has been their position on the mode bf baptism; a formula
easily grasped by the simplest mind; a spectacular ceremony
powerfully appealing to the eye and imagination; a ritual
readily complied with but not repeated to satiety; it satisfies
at once the deep human craving for ritualism and a definite
thing to hold to, and leaves its participants free to indulge
their hostility to excessive ritualism. A readily understood
slogan, an admirable organization for propaganda, close touch
¦with the extreme democracy and individualism pf our peo
ple, intense denominational loyalty, — these are the human
qualities that will make any organization go ; and the zeal
and intelligence with which the Baptists have used thfm will
repay attention.
HOMOGENEOUS PROTESTANTISM
With even this rapid review, we must be impressed with the
homogeneous Protestantism of the Christian church in South
Carolina. Father O'Connell testifies that in no diocese had
Catholic bishop and clergy worked more faithfully, but that
outside" a few spots, it seemed labor lost. During the sixty-
eight years preceding, he says, "only about fifty influential
families have joined the church in the three States" of Geor
gia and the Carolinas. In "The New Century" (CathoUc), of
Washington, D. C, Rev. P. L. Duffy, of Charleston, warmly
defends Catholicism in South Carolina against the reflection
of the editor on its zeal ; and right conclusively does he prove
that the lack of Catholic growth has been on account of other
causes than the lack of zeal in the clergy or liberaUty in the
laity. ' ' There is scarcely a civilized country in the universe, ' '
concludes Father O'Connell, "where there are so few Cath
olics and where the faith is less Imown than in the upper re-

28 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
gion of South Carolina." "In the absence of migration it will
take ages to bring the inhabitants to the knowledge of the
truth. Heresy has so, hopelessly debauched the minds of its
followers. "'
THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY
A mass of Protestant Christians to homogeneous, inextri
cably intertwined in all the affairs of life among a more than
usually homogeneous population, will inevitably conform in
many particulars to the life of the population in ways that
interfere with the purity of the Christian religion. It is an
insidious danger to which the church has been exposed in aU
ages, from the time when she adopted images. Virgin wor-
{ship and invocation of saints as suitable to the intelligence
of vast barbarian accessions whom she hoped to Christianize
after receiving, to the time when she reversed her traditions
of a thousand years by giving, her support of human slavery
lest she lose the power of doing good in a slave-holding society.
I have heard a Southern Methodist bishop praise the courage
and moral perception of William Lloyd Garrison and grieve
at the fact that ministers of the gospel brought them
selves to justify human slavery from God's word; but it was
long after others had solved this problem against our protest.
Bishop Asbury records of his preacher Hammett: "He has
gained a sufficiency of money to procure a plantation and
stock it with slaves, though no one was more strenuous against
slavery than he while destitute of the power to enslave. "2
The whole heartbreaking history is contained in these
few words. Thc more lukewarm or compromising a denomina
tion in its defense of the institution, the less did it grow in
numbers in the South. Governor J. H. Hammond wrote Cal
houn in 1845 that he considered the Methodists so sound on
slavery that he had had a station established at his home, sup
ported it entirely, and was building them a church at a cost
of $1,200.3 Dr. Lathan records with pride the strong opposition
among the Associate Reformed Presbyterians of South Caro
lina to slavery and the fact that the "Synod of the South
lO'Connell, 295-6, 325, 329, 326.
2Shipp, 289.
aCalhoun's Letters, 1049.

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 29
never at any time made a deliverance on the subject of sla
very."' We all know what happened to the Associate Re
formed Presbyterians. In 1822 the great Dr. Furman, at the
order of the South Carolina Baptist State Convention, ad
dressed to the Governor a letter defending slavery and ex
plaining the duty of Christians towards their slaves. And we
all know what happened to the Baptists.
Let it be understood that in presenting this mournful
feature of the historical background of our religion, I am not
presuming to condemn the) good and great men who in 1844
and 1845 severed the organic connection of Southern Metho
dists and Baptists with their co-religionists in the North. They
were all by that time very deep in the mire prepared for
them by the greed of their ancestors, who, except for brief
periods of prudential prohibition, welcomed every British and
New England slave ship and sent out every one they could
equip themselves, and by the common failure of the churches
in general in the face of a self-interested property-owning
class which none of them dared to offend. It is hard to see
how Christ's injunction on paying taxes, which they quoted
as "leaving unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" and
professed to obey, would have justified acquiescence in an evil
institution because protected by law any better than it would
have kept the church's hands off the liquor traffic bfecause
similarly protected by law. But when she flung to the winds
any idea of leaving the matter to Caesar and lent her holy
sanctions and became Caesar's servant to defend his ancient
wrongs, against which -even deistical philosophers were cry
ing aloud, she sadly impaired her authority as the light bearer
of the world. How often has the pure gospel put in motion
forces that later must sweep out of their way the organized
body of imperfect human beings calling itself the church
which the world has captured and bound hand and foot!
HIGH STANDARDS AND INFLUENCE
After all this study, what of the church ? Has she pro
gressed or retrograded across this historical background ? One
of the surest tests is the capacity to produce a ministry. For
the first hundred and twenty-five years. South Carolina was
iLathan, 326, 359-62.

30 HISTORICAL ADDKBSS
in a sense almost entirely missionary ground. The Episco
palians ordained their first native-born minister in 1795; in
1791 only 15 per cent, of the up-country Presbyterian preach
ers were native. The Baptists were stiU largely served by im
migrants, and the Methodists at first, of course, entirely so.
The Baptists, through their congregational right of ordination,
early put forth a considerable uneducated ministry; the
Methodists soon followed; and after 1800 the native Presby
terian and Episcopal pastors greatly increased, though the
number of these from Great Britain and the North contin
ued considerable untU about 1845. The debt which South
Carolina owes in her higher life to New England in partic
ular can never be calculated.
Not only has the f ruitf ulness of the South Carolina church
in bearing her own ministers greatly increased, but the moral
character of the ministry, Protestant and CathoUc aUke, seems
certainly to have improved in every denomination. Almost
all our South Carolina church historians amaze us by the fre
quent record of the fall of ministers in the so-called "good
old days." Then, as now, when the dc'vil went fishing for
a preacher he generally baited his hook with a woman or a
bottle; and the splendid and noble gifts that have been led
to ruin and' disgrace by these enticements make the heart
bleed. As a young church in the full tide of revival fervor
with ministers practicing a ceaseless inquisitorial watchful
ness over each other, it was natural that the early Methodist
body should have been less afflicted with unfaithful pastors
than other folds which had had longer time to collect black
sheep. From 1792 through 1825 the expulsions from the
whole American Methodist ministry averaged annually less
than one in six hundred, a proportion Avhich greatly improv
ed after 1805, as a consequence doubtless of the great revival.
Small as this proportion, the expulsions from our o-wn Confer
ence to the present day have been far smaller, and almost half
of them were during the fifteen years beginning with the
War of Secession and ending with Reconstruction, which
suggests the reaction of war's disorganization and politics'
corruption upon the character of even quiet ministers.
In the matter of temperance the church, and the world

HISTORICAL ADDRESS 31
) ¦
following her, has made great progress. Before the Revo
lution ministers of all denominations except Methodists were
condemned only for immoderate drinking. "It was objec-
tingly said on the inauguration (of Arthur Starr) to the el-
^ dership of (Bethesda Presbyterian Church in York County
in 1794) that he was not a substantial man ; and the explana
tion was that he did not own a distillery." Poor Elder Starr I
So poor that he had to buy his liquor instead of making it on
his own place like a man of substance, as an, elder ought al
ways to be. Howe relates that the pastor of a poor church
in Pendleton at this period received his salary in subscriptions
ranging from 12 1-2 cents to five dollars, a bushel of corn, or
a gallon of whiskey, and it is not stated what the parson did
¦with the whiskey.'
By 1830 the churches in the up-country began to bestir
themselves against intemperance. The Baptist Church on the
borders of North and South Carolina had a most remarkable
experience in its warfare against the great evil. The temper- ,
ance element had been active for many years whep the
conflict came to a dramatic crisis in 1859. The King's Moun
tain Association adopted a resolution to withdraw from any
church that "holds a member who buys, sells, or drinks as a
common beverage any kind of intoxicating spirits." Says
the historian of the Association, Re-v. John R. Logan, ' ' This
proceeding on the subject of temperance proved like a very
explosive bomb-shell or disrupting fire brand, almost causing
the apparent destruction of the very life of the Association
by the time of its next annual assemblage." The anti-tem
perance minority seceded and organized "The Constitutional
King's Mountain Baptist Association," and in general, says
Logan, "showed themselves unworthy of the name of Bap-
tists." 0 Constitution! Constitution! what crimes are com
mitted in thy name ! Bankrupt indeed is the ancient wrong
that does not seek to hide under thy broad shield.
In 1866 a reunion was established by the majority's voting
that their resolution of 1859 was unconstitutional, and that
the fight on liquor should in the future be conducted by the As-
iHowe, II, 379.

32 HISTORICAL ADDRESS
sociation by moral suasion only and otherwise left to the in
dividual Churches.'
In Sabbath observance, moral standards, purity of life,
whatever may be the alarming features of the times, the e^vi-
dence is overwhelming that the church has wonderfully ele
vated, refined, and humanized the life of the people in ad
dition to her primary, mission of saving souls since the days
of the Stamp Act, when obscene poems and vulgar jests en
tered the highest homes in South Carolina through the Char
leston newspapers, filthiness of mouth was a gentleman's
characteristic, and raising one family by Sarah in the big
house and another by Hagar in the cabin, lea^ving one's o^wn
flesh and^ blood to be administered upon as part of the chattels
of an estate, hardly received a frown. The more Puritan
cliurches, while exerting this influence on the world, have
modified their o^wn strictness in some respects, illustrating
again how close is the touch between the church and the peo
ple and what are its benefits and dangers.
The influence of the church on society at large is more
powerful today than ever before. The disrespect with which
she and her ministry were frequently treated a century ago
by public men would today retire such men to private life.
In some parts of our country she lacks unfortunately any
strong hold upon the masses; but the question is, did she
ever have it ? And in our own South Carolina there are tens
of thousands tacitly hostile or grossly indifferent who never
place themselves voluntarily under her influence. But I am
persuaded that her power for good is greater in
South Carolina than in most States and greater in this one
than it ever has been before. The vast issues, the difficult
problems, and the immense populations of the present over
whelm the imagination with the herculean labors that face us ;
but a knowledge of the great work the church has accomplished
in the past and an understanding of the way she did it teach
that the same consecration and intelligence will make the fu
ture still more glorious. i
'Logan 181, 202 passim.

Constitution of the Historical Society

Article 1. Name.
This Association shall be called the Historical Society of the
Upper South Ca,rolIna Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal
Church, South. Artlclie II. MembersliI^, Dnes, Etc.
Section 1. Every preacher in full connection -with the Upper
South Carolina Conference shall be eligible to membership in this
Society, and may be elected, by acclamation, at any meeting. Each
member shall pay an annual fee of twentynfive (25) cents for tho
maintenance of the work of the society.
Section 2. Any layman, living within the bounds of the Confer
ence, shall be eligible to membership, and may be elected by ac
clamation, at any meeting upon the payment of twenty-five (25)
cents; and his membership may be continued by the annual pay
ment of a similar sum.
Article III. Officers, Itlanagiers, Etc.
Section 1. The interests of this Society shall be under the isu-
pervislon of a President, two Vice-Presidents, Secretary and
Treasurer, and a Curator for both Conferences in South Carolina,
who shall discharge) the duties usually pertaining to such offices;
said officers shall be elected' quadrennially at the sessions of the
Annual Conferences next preceding the sessions of the General
Conference. Section 2. The officers, of this Society shall also constitute a
Board of Managers, who shall have charge of all the Interests of
the Society ad interim, and shall arrange for the annual meetings,
nominate the annual lecturiBr, and attend to all matters usual to
Executive Boards. Artiote IT. Meettngs.
Section 1. This Society shall meet at least annually, during
the sesflions of the Upper South Carolina Conference, for the
purpose of hearing lectures, Bermone, etc., and transacting the

34 CONSTITUTION
business usually pertaining to such organizations. All papers
read before the Society shall be considered its property and held as
such. The time and place of meeting shall be designated by the
President. Section 2. The President, upon the request of ten members, may
call a special meeting, designating time and place, whenever the
Interests of the Society may be promoted thereby.
Section 3. The meeting at Conference shall be the regular an
nual meeting of the Society. Article T. Object.
The object of this Society shall be to collect and preserve all
valuable Information in connection with the rifle and progress of
Methodism within the bounds of the Upper South Carolina Confer
ence and elsewhere;! also objects of curiosity and interest In the
form of manuscripts, books, pamphlets, medals, portraits, and any
thing else that may be of Interest or value.
Article VI. Property, Mnsenm, Etc.
Section 1. The property of this Society shall be deposited at
Wofford College in a room maimtained by this Society and the
Society of the South Carolina Conference for their purposes, and
kept by the Curator. Each article shall be properly nimibered and
labeled, the name, date, etc., to correspond with a like entry upon
a register to be kept for that purpose by the Curator. All the
property of the Societies shall b6 In charge of the Curator, who
shall make an annual report to the Society of the general condition
of said property, etc. No property shall be sold or given away or
any wise disposed of except by order of this Society.
Section 2. The property of this Society shall be open to inspec
tion, under such rules and regulations as may be adopted by the
Board of Managers; and in no case shall any article of any kind
be removed from the museum except by written consent of the
/Board of Managers; and a book ahall be kept by the Curator show
ing receipts for all such borrowed articles, and the date of their
return. Article VII. Cliange in Constitution.
This Constitution may be altered or amended at any annual
meeting of the Society by a vote of two-thirds of the members
present.

YALE UNIVERSITY

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