Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina

Fred E Witzig

Description

A vivid portrait of a Scottish religious leader and the South Carolina colony he helped shape

When Alexander Garden, a Scottish minister of the Church of England, arrived in South Carolina in 1720, he found a colony smoldering from the devastation of the Yamasee War and still suffering from economic upheaval, political factionalism, and rampant disease. It was also a colony turning enthusiastically toward plantation agriculture, made possible by African slave labor. In Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina, the first published biography of Garden, Fred E. Witzig paints a vivid portrait of the religious leader and the South Carolina colony he helped shape.

Shortly after his arrival, Garden, a representative of the bishop of London, became the rector of St. Philip's Church in Charleston, the first Anglican parish in the colony. The ambitious clergyman quickly married into a Charleston slave-trading family and allied himself with the political and social elite. From the pulpit Garden reinforced the social norms and economic demands of the southern planters and merchants, and he disciplined recalcitrant missionaries who dared challenge the prevailing social order. As a way of defending the morality of southern slaveholders, he found himself having to establish the first large-scale school for slaves in Charles Town in the 1740s.

Garden also led a spirited—and largely successful—resistance to the Great Awakening evangelical movement championed by the revivalist minister George Whitefield, whose message of personal salvation and a more democratic Christianity was anathema to the social fabric of the slaveholding South, which continually feared a slave rebellion. As a minister Garden helped make slavery morally defensible in the eyes of his peers, giving the appearance that the spiritual obligations of his slaveholding and slave-trading friends were met as they all became extraordinarily wealthy.

Witzig's lively cultural history—bolstered by numerous primary sources, maps, and illustrations—helps illuminate both the roots of the Old South and the Church of England's role in sanctifying slavery in South Carolina.

Sujets

• Social Activists
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Plantations in the American South
• Slavery among Native Americans in the United States
• House slave
• Political science of religion
• Atlantic World
• Quietism (Christian philosophy)
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Itching ears
• Suffix (name)
• Latitudinarian
• Province of South Carolina
• Southern Colonies
• State
• Antinomianism
• Slave rebellion
• Atlantic slave trade
• Abolitionism
• Slavery
• Puritan
• Politics
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Baptists
• Religion
• Oppression
• JR
• Martin Luther King

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178463
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina
Sanctifying
SLAVERY POLITICS
in South Carolina

THE LIFE OF THE
Reverend Alexander Garden, 1685-1756
FRED E. WITZIG

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-845-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-846-3 (ebook)
Front cover images: istockphoto.com
(Top) PeopleImages and (bottom) rodjulian
For Nancy
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
BIRTHPLACES
Chapter 2
ACQUAINTANCES
Chapter 3
FRIENDSHIP
Chapter 4
DALLIANCE
Chapter 5
ENGAGEMENT
Chapter 6
MARRIAGE
Chapter 7
TILL DEATH DO US PART
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
This is the story of an extraordinary relationship between the eighteenth-century colony of South Carolina and the Church of England minister Alexander Garden, the colony s chief representative of the official church of the global British Empire. These two partners were born a generation apart, Garden in the valley of the Dee, on the southern boundary of Aberdeenshire in Scotland, or so rumor has it, and the Carolinas in the investment and political offices of London. Initially skeptical of each other, they soon became fast friends and enjoyed a long and prosperous relationship until Garden died in 1756, approximately twenty years before South Carolina became one of the United States.
The man and the colony needed each other; certainly they seemed made for each other given the harsh realities of their time. Garden emerged out of historical obscurity in 1720-barely anything can be known of him before then-when he migrated from the British Isles to Charles Town. South Carolina at that time was recovering from the bloodbath of the Yamassee War of 1715-18 and experiencing political and economic adjustments that would convert it from an economy based on trade with Indians to one resting firmly on the backs of slaves laboring in rice and indigo plantations. For the next thirty-six years the two partners would weather monstrous hurricanes; the Great Fire of 1740; five outbreaks of yellow fever and periodic swells of malaria, smallpox, and typhus; a political revolution against colonial proprietors; the economic booms and busts of the Atlantic economy; and endemic strife with their Spanish neighbors in Florida. Internally relations between European settlers and Native Americans after the Yamassee War never relaxed entirely, and whites and blacks often came to blows, with colonial America s largest slave uprising erupting in South Carolina in 1739. In the midst of the particularly difficult years of 1739-42, the colony s religious affairs were convulsed by the evangelical Great Awakening that famously swept the Atlantic Seaboard. Through all of these travails, Garden provided steady leadership that not only helped guide the colony to prosperity but also bestowed upon him a considerable portion of that prosperity.
Alexander Garden was a minister in the Church of England and a husband, father, friend, religious administrator, and spiritual pastor. For these tasks he hardly needed a colony, or at least not specifically South Carolina. His homeland in the British Isles would have sufficed, as would any of the British colonies and particularly the baker s dozen along the coast of North America. There the Church of England struggled to fill its pulpits with ministers acceptable to independent-minded colonists and adaptable to the environmental vagaries of the New World. Garden, though, also nurtured dreams of material wealth, social power, and aristocratic privilege. To realize those dreams he became a slave master, a land speculator, a doyen of high society, and a pioneer in slave education. For those dreams and those tasks he needed the fresh and fertile soil of the slave colony of South Carolina, which, it turned out, badly needed someone with his administrative skills, his spiritual credentials, and the strength of his personality to impose religious legitimacy upon its more carnal pursuits. Together they accomplished remarkable feats of resilience, ingenuity, and force of will. Both achieved great fame while accumulating immense material wealth notable among their peers.
Yet one cannot help but wish that things had turned out differently for them, that they had charted some other course for their lives than the one they took. In retrospect, Garden and his white neighbors appear to have been blinded to a debilitating moral defect-slavery-that caused them immense struggles and even threatened their very existence. That Garden and his friends prospered anyway is the cause of any glint of admiration readers might feel for their resilience, ingenuity, and force of will, but that they refused to deal with the moral defect offends modern moral sensibilities and constrains approbation of their achievements. Perhaps, perhaps , upon hearing their story the reader will conclude that it is too much to expect them to have recognized their faults, that their failings were too much shared by everyone of their own era and of all of the ages before them, and that their posterity should therefore recognize their true greatness as forgers of a civilization and founders of a nation. Or perhaps the reader will reckon their story nothing but a tragedy, a horrific tale of exploitation and abuse. In the case of the latter, the true heroes will be found among those exploited and abused, who as such deserve admiration. In such a twist of the tale they become the protagonists, and Garden and his friends the antagonists. Or perhaps it is enough simply to tell the story and wonder at the dilemmas and complexities of human existence.
Telling Garden s story is not an easy task. Garden seldom spoke of his own life, feelings, or inclinations. Most of what he wrote that survives is in the form of personal correspondence related to his position as the leader of the Church of England in South Carolina. The writing style is businesslike in its efficiency, and the content is almost always about other people. Almost no correspondence between Garden and his friends or relatives survives, and no diary has been found. The sources that speak of his character and personality come almost exclusively from those who did not like him or his leadership. Their sentiments do match the images that can be teased out from his letters, the paper trail of legal documents concerning his business dealings, and bits and pieces of observations of Garden offered occasionally by his friends. However, if the historian wants to know the reasons for why he did anything, for instance the internal motivations for working hard to buttress the institution of slavery, he left little behind with which to work. It is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt when he did bequeath the benefit of his thoughts. Some of his behavior seems to have been downright mercenary; for instance, he sided with wealthy parishioners and business partners, who could sabotage his career, when they slandered his ministerial colleagues, whom he was supposed to treat fairly. Without a better glimpse into his mind, it appears that he tended to be imperious in his role as the bishop of London s deputy in the Carolinas in order to advance his own interests. However, he also faithfully and selflessly served the poor and the sick in a deadly climate, nearly wore himself to physical incapacity traveling to fill empty pulpits, and started the first organized slave school in the South. He was the undisputed leader of a generation of Anglican ministers who turned a weak and culturally insignificant Church of England in South Carolina into a major social force, for good and for bad. The point is, little material exists with which to peer into his heart and soul and render a final judgment of the man, especially since he lived in a time very different from the twenty-first century in its labor arrangements, social hierarchy, and hazardous climate. Most of what is left to examine are the consequences, not the motivations, of his actions.
The biographer Roger Lundin offered something of a theoretical framework appropriate for dealing with the problem of understanding Garden using limited sources. Lundin rejected reductionist biographies that sought a single key that will unlock the secret of a life, be it economic determinism, sexual drive, or some other factor or theory to be latched onto for its supposed explanatory power. Rather, the meaning of a life is to be found in the whole of the life, from its beginning to its end, said Lundin, and not only in the life itself but the life in the larger context, of its historical setting. Such sensitivity to the competing claims in any particular historical context is a necessity for understanding fairly and creatively and justly another human life. In this light, making simple assertions about Garden s motivations and values, especially without attending to the cultural forces around him, appears particularly unwise and unjust. The fact that Garden left behind little self-reflection demands such a contextual approach. 1
For these reasons the chapters that follow are something of a dual biography taking as its subjects the man Alexander Garden and his colony of South Carolina. Vignettes about his wife, his parishioners, and others at the end of each chapter, after the first chapter, seek to evaluate Garden s personal relationships from the perspective of each of the people with whom he interacted most intimately. Garden sometim