Wrestlin' Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country

By Erskine Clarke

An important introduction to the efforts of whites to evangelize African Americans in the antebellum South
 
First published in 1979, Wrestlin’ Jacob offers important insights into the intersection of black and white religious history in the South. Erskine Clarke provides two arenas—one urban and one rural—that show what happened when white ministers tried to bring black slaves into the fold of Christianity. Clarke illustrates how the good intentions—and vain illusions—of the white preachers, coupled with the degradation and cultural strength of the slaves, played a significant role in the development of black churches in the South.
 
From 1833 to 1847, Reverend Charles Colcock Jones served as an itinerant minister to slaves on the rice and cotton plantations in Liberty County, Georgia. The aim of Jones, and of the largely Puritan-descended slave owners, was to harvest not only good Christians but also obedient and hard-working slaves. At the same time, similar efforts were under way in cosmopolitan Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston permitted blacks to worship only under the supervision of whites, and partially as a result, whites and blacks worshiped together in ways that would be unheard of later in the segregated South.
 
Clarke examines not only the white ministers’ motivation in their missionary work but also the slaves’ reasons for becoming a part of the church. He addresses the important issue of the continuity of African traditions with the religious life of slaves and provides a significant introduction to the larger issues of slavery and religion in the South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817388461

Book preview

Wrestlin' Jacob

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Series Editors

David Edwin Harrell,

Jr. Wayne Flynt

Edith L. Blumhofer

Wrestlin' Jacob

A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country

Erskine Clarke

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa and London

Copyright © 2000

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  •  08  07  06  05  04  03  02  01  00

Originally published in 1979 by John Knox Press as Wrestlin' Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clarke, Erskine, 1941–

     Wrestlin' Jacob: a portrait of religion in antebellum Georgia and the Carolina low country / Erskine Clarke.—Reprint ed.

         p. cm.— (Religion and American culture)

         Originally published: Atlanta : John Knox Press, c1979.

         Includes bibliographical references and index.

         ISBN 0–8173–1040–1 (alk. paper)

     1. Afro-Americans—Georgia—Liberty County—Religion. 2. Slaves—Religious life—Georgia—Liberty County—History—19th century. 3. Liberty County (Ga.)—Church history—19th century. 4. Jones, Charles Colcock, 1804–1863. 5. Afro-Americans—South Carolina—Charleston—Religion. 6. Slaves—Religious life—South Carolina—Charleston—History—19th century. 7. Charleston (S.C.)—Church history—19th century. I. Title. II. Religion and American culture (Tuscaloosa, Ala.)

BR563.N4 C57 2000

277.58'733—dc21

99–053046

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8846-1 (electronic)

In memory of

Edward Lowe Clarke, Mildred Dent Clarke, Lois Clarke

O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, day's a-breakin';

I will not let thee go!

O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, day's a-breakin';

He will not let me go!

O, I hold my brudder wid a tremblin' hand;

I would not let him go!

I hold my sister wid a tremblin' hand;

I would not let her go!

O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin' limb,

He would not let him go!

O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin' limb,

De Lord will bless my soul.

O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, [etc., etc.]*

*Slave Songs on a Mission, Southern Christian Advocate [Charleston, S.C.], VII (December 29, 1843), p. 114.

Contents

Introduction to Reprint Edition

Preface

Acknowledgment

Introduction

ONE: THE PLANTATION

1. The County of Liberty

2. They Lifted Up Their Voices and Wept

3. More Than Guards, Guns, and Bayonets

4. A Plantation Pastor

TWO: THE CITY

5. The Capital of the South

6. If These Be Brothers . . . 

7. A Slave's Sabbath

8. A Charleston Zion

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Introduction to Reprint Edition

When Wrestlin' Jacob was published in 1979, it came at a time of growing scholarly and popular interest in Southern religion. The reissuing of Wrestlin' Jacob two decades later—as a part of The University of Alabama Press's series Religion and American Culture—provides an opportunity for reflections about the reasons for the interest and for a brief review of scholarly developments in the field.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s and the role of religion in the movement challenged old stereotypes about religion in the South. African American churches and church leaders were at the center of the civil rights struggle. Hymns were sung on streets and courthouse steps, lunch counters became pulpits for the expression of Christian convictions, and a nonviolent spirit drew deeply from the traditions of the black church. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail—one of the most important addresses in U.S. religious history—and his vision of a Beloved Community were profoundly theological. At the same time, the resistance of the white Southern community to the movement was perhaps lodged most firmly in white churches, and the ideological foundations of the resistance contained important religious and theological elements. Religious leaders, however, were also conspicuous among the few Southern whites who openly supported the movement, including white ministers who were run out of town for suggesting that Christian faith demanded justice for African Americans.¹ In such a context new questions emerged about the relationship between religion and Southern culture and about the role of race in shaping the religious life of the South.

Events in the 1970s also encouraged a new interest in Southern religion, especially the emergence of evangelicalism as a political force in American life. Who were the evangelicals? Where did they come from? And how did they fit into a cultural context many had regarded as increasingly secular? The recognition that many of the evangelicals were from the South turned attention toward the region and toward the religious traditions of its people.

By the 1970s religion in the South was thus beginning to be seen as more complex and nuanced than previously presented by influential interpreters. H. L. Mencken, for example, had summarized in the 1920s a sophisticated contempt for the South and Southern religion as a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists. Such contempt had found more extended expression in William J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941) in which Southern religion was portrayed as a kind of primitivism deeply rooted in the swamps of a Southern psyche.² To be sure, Mencken and Cash, despite their hyperbole, had pointed to picturesque aspects of Southern religious life. But the pictures they had painted seemed jaundiced and inadequate by the late 1960s. Competing impulses within Southern religious history invited investigation and called for interpretations that took into account the diversities and complexities of a vast region of the country.

This investigation was inaugurated by Sam Hill's Southern Churches in Crisis (1967), followed by a collection of essays Hill edited in Religion and the Solid South (1972). This same year (1972) saw the publication of John Boles's The Great Revival, 1787–1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind, a seminal study of Southern evangelicalism. In 1977 came Donald Mathews's Religion in the Old South, followed the next year by Albert Raboteau's now classic Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. Brooks Holifield's The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860, also published in 1978, presented an intellectual tradition in Southern religious history long ignored and forgotten.

Numerous scholars, building on these earlier works, have probed during the 1980s and 1990s particular aspects of religion in the South. Some have examined subregions and together have pointed to the diversity of religious life in the South. The social and cultural distances of the South appear when reading together Randy Sparks's study of evangelicalism in Mississippi (On Jordan's Stormy Banks), Deborah McCauley's Appalachian Mountain Religion, and my own Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country. More than miles separate the Carolina low country, the rolling hills and delta of Mississippi, and the mountains of Appalachia.³

Other scholars have explored denominational histories in ways that move beyond earlier chronicles of institutional development and triumph. An important example is Wayne Flynt's critical but sympathetic Alabama Baptists.⁴ William E. Montgomery's Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Religion in the South, and Stephen Ward Angell's Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Religion in the South are recent studies of African American religion that incorporate much denominational history but also move beyond to larger questions of African American religious experience.⁵

The recognition of religious diversity in the South has not deterred some scholars from seeking common themes in Southern religious life. This quest has often focused on the Civil War, its coming and its aftermath. Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause and Mitchell Snay's Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South are important examples.⁶ In both of these studies, race looms as a central theme in Southern religious life—as indeed it does in almost all studies of religion in the South, however narrowly focused. For this reason the study of slavery and religion has been and continues to be fundamental for understanding the religious life of the region.

Overlapping the renaissance of Southern religious studies has been the rapidly expanding field of slavery studies. Important books since 1970, in addition to Raboteau's, that focused directly on slave religion included Mechal Sobel's Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith and Margaret Washington Creel's "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs.⁷ Studies of slave community and culture also began in the 1970s to include important chapters on the religion of the slaves. Notable among these were Eugene Genovese's magisterial Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South, and Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.⁸ Larry E. Tise, on the other hand, has explored in depth white religious assumptions in his Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840.⁹

Two large questions of slavery studies would have important implications for religion in the South. First has been the question of continuity with traditional African religions and cultures. To what extent did the religious life of slaves reflect traditions brought from Africa and to what extent were those traditions broken or destroyed by the traumas of the middle passage and the oppression of slavery? These questions were being vigorously debated before the 1960s and played a part in the subsequent studies of religion in the South.

On one side of the debate have been those who have seen a strong link between traditional African religion and the religious life of African American slaves. River baptisms, the ring dances of the Georgia and South Carolina sea islands, folk tales, the conjurer's magic, basket making, and the slave songs of African Americans were all said to have their origins in West Africa. The best known early advocate for such continuity was Melville J. Herskovits. In The Myth of the Negro Past he presents evidence of African survivals in almost all areas of African American life. Herskovits emphasized a cultural unity in West Africa and pointed to such shared cultural phenomena as patrilocality, hoe agriculture, and corporate ownership of land.¹⁰ For Herskovits and his followers, to understand African American religious life, and in particular the religious life of slaves, one must understand an African heritage that had been kept alive beneath the heavy oppression of slavery and racism. An example of a more recent scholar who has emphasized the importance of the African religious tradition is Sterling Stuckey, especially in his Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America.¹¹

On the other side of the debate have been those who have insisted that the middle passage, together with the degradations of slavery in North America, constituted a violent rupture with an African past. Moreover, it has been argued that the diverse cultural traditions of West Africa were too closely linked to particular localities and to particular tribes to be successfully transmitted to the new and hostile world of North American slavery. The disruptions of kinship organizations along with the removal from sacred places meant religious myths and cults lost their religious significance. An early and forceful advocate of this position was E. Franklin Frazier. In a 1953 lecture titled The Religion of the Slave, published later as a part of his Negro Church in America, Frazier began by insisting: In studying any phase of the character and development of the social and cultural life of the Negro in the United States, one must recognize from the beginning that because of the manner in which the Negroes were captured in Africa and enslaved, they were practically stripped of their social heritage.¹² More recently, Orlando Patterson has expanded the Frazier argument by pointing to the social death of slaves. Patterson has argued in a number of important studies that enslavement and transportation to the plantations of the New World brought isolation to individual slaves and the disintegration of traditional cultures among the enslaved. The consequences of this social death, Patterson insists, have reached deep into African American life in the twentieth century, including African American religious life.¹³

Most contemporary scholars have sought a middle way between these two positions. They have found significant expressions of the African heritage informing a new African American Christianity, but that heritage has been transformed by the centuries-long experience of black Americans. Charles Joyner, for example, found in his study of a South Carolina slave community a remarkable cultural transformation. From a diversity of African beliefs and a multiplicity of African rites and practices Joyner saw emerging a distinctive Afro-Christianity that voiced the slaves' deepest ancestral values as they responded to a new and constricting environment.¹⁴ In a similar manner, Albert Raboteau concluded in his study of slave religion, It was not possible to maintain the rites of worship, the priesthood, or the ‘national’ identities which were the vehicles and supports for African theology and cult organization. Nevertheless, even as the gods of Africa gave way to the God of Christianity, the African heritage of singing, dancing, spirit possession, and magic continued to influence Afro-American spirituals, ring shouts, and folk beliefs. That this was so is evidence of the slaves' ability not only to adapt to new contexts but to do so creatively.¹⁵

Raboteau's concluding note about the creativity of African Americans points to the second large question of slavery studies that has important implications for religion in the South—What was the impact of slavery on the slave? This question obviously is closely related to the first large question about continuity with Africa, but it focuses more sharply on the slave's ability to respond to the degradations of slavery. In 1959 Stanley Elkins set the agenda for the debate that would follow his seminal study, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life.¹⁶ Elkins argued that slavery was so brutal, that the methods of control instituted by slave masters were so effective, that slaves were reduced to mindless Sambos, comparable to the brainwashed inmates of concentration camps. Elkins's intent was to point to the power and brutality of slavery, but his work carried the implication that slaves lacked the internal strength and communal resources to maintain their self-respect or to create a distinct African American cultural tradition. Was slave religion then simply an accommodation by submissive slaves to the evangelizing efforts of whites who wanted to use religion as a powerful means of social control?

The debate that followed the publication of Elkins's book—and other works that followed its arguments—was inevitably influenced by the social and cultural issues before the U.S. public in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁷ By the late 1960s, as the civil rights movement faded, many black leaders were moving toward Black Power and black separatism. They turned toward their African American past for inspiration and found there not Sambos but a people who had resisted the oppressions of whites and who had forged a rich cultural tradition in the fires of slavery. George Rawick put it this way: While from sunup to sundown the American slave worked for another and was harshly exploited, from sundown to sunup he lived for himself and created the behavioral and institutional basis which prevented him from becoming the absolute victim.¹⁸ Eugene Genovese argued that white paternalism provided slaves with the necessary space to develop their own culture, and John W. Blassingame insisted that the social organization of the quarters was the slave's primary environment which gave him his ethical rules and fostered cooperation, mutual assistance, and black solidarity.¹⁹ Within such free space as the quarters at night, a distinct African American religious tradition—heard most clearly and powerfully in the spirituals—is said to have emerged out of the sufferings and courage of black slaves.

The revisionists such as Rawick, Genovese, and Blassingame were met by renewed challenges in the 1980s to their position. Peter Kolchin, for example, noted that many of the revisionists' works are studded with evocative terms—‘solidarity,’ ‘community,’ ‘kinship ties,’ ‘communal consciousness,’ ‘culture’—that seem to suggest life as a slave must have been an enviable experience.²⁰ No one has been more vehement than Orlando Patterson in insisting that slavery caused immense injury to its victims, even social death, with consequences especially devastating for the black family.

Since the 1980s, however, various historians have found slavery to have included negotiated relationships. Slaves, recognizing the owners' need for their labor, were able to negotiate certain practices that over time became customs. Prominent among these customs, for example, was the task system slaves were able to negotiate in the rice-growing regions of the South. Once a task was completed, slaves' time was their own. On their own time, slaves were able to tend their own gardens, raise their own pigs, make their own baskets, and develop a rich African American cultural tradition that included religion as an integral part. Recent studies that have pointed toward slavery as a negotiated relationship—varying from time to time and place to place—include Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America and Philip D. Morgan's Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry.²¹

Southern whites and their religious life have, of course, been a part of many of these slavery studies. In addition, there have been growing numbers of works that have given major attention to the religious life of whites as an important element in the South's intellectual and social history. My own Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 explores a strong intellectual tradition that sought a middle way between what the tradition regarded as extremes on slavery and race.²² Eugene Genovese in recent years has turned his considerable historical prowess to an analysis of the white Christian South in The Southern Tradition, The Southern Front, and A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South.²³

The reissuing of Wrestlin' Jacob provides an introduction to the efforts of whites to evangelize African American slaves and the response of African Americans to those efforts. By focusing on two locations—Liberty County, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina—the study explores both a rural, plantation setting and an urban center of Southern society. As such, Wrestlin' Jacob can serve as a primer to the larger questions of more recent historical scholarship. What continuity with African traditions can be seen in the religious life of slaves in Liberty County and Charleston? What was the nature of that continuity and how did the slaves themselves and contemporary whites think about the question of continuity? Clearly the slaves studied in Wrestlin' Jacob were not Sambos nor had they suffered social death under the brutal oppression of slavery. Vital slave communities were present among both the Gullah of Liberty County and the urban slaves of Charleston. While the phrase negotiated relationships is not used in the study, the realities indicated by the phrase are clear, especially in regard to slave responses to white preaching. Charles C. Jones's preaching to slaves, for example, was limited by what he learned the African Americans would not tolerate. At the same time, the harsh realities of slavery are clearly seen in the church records with their notations of sold away and the consequential destruction of slave families. Larger issues of slavery and religion in the South can thus be addressed by close attention to these particular communities.

Notes

1. Donald W. Shriver Jr., ed., The Unsilent South: Prophetic Preaching in Racial Crisis (Atlanta: John Knox, 1965).

2. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941), 296–99.

3. Randy J. Sparks, On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Deborah Vansau McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995); and Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996).

4. Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).

5. William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); and Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

6. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); and Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

7. Mechal Sobel, Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); and Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

8. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

9. Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1987).

10. Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (1924; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 81–85.

11. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

12. In one volume, E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Church Since Frazier (New York: Schocken, 1974), 9.

13. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

14. Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 141.

15. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 92.

16. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 81–139.

17. See Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

18. George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972), xix.

19. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3–158; and Blassingame, The Slave Community, 41.

20. Peter Kolchin, Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective, Journal of American History 70 (December 1983): 581.

21. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1998); and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

22. Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 165–99.

23. Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Eugene Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); and Eugene Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The