The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina

By Louis P. Nelson

Intermingling architectural, cultural, and religious history, Louis Nelson reads Anglican architecture and decorative arts as documents of eighteenth-century religious practice and belief. In The Beauty of Holiness, he tells the story of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina, revealing how the colony's Anglicans negotiated the tensions between the persistence of seventeenth-century religious practice and the rising tide of Enlightenment thought and sentimentality.

Nelson begins with a careful examination of the buildings, grave markers, and communion silver fashioned and used by early Anglicans. Turning to the religious functions of local churches, he uses these objects and artifacts to explore Anglican belief and practice in South Carolina. Chapters focus on the role of the senses in religious understanding, the practice of the sacraments, and the place of beauty, regularity, and order in eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The final section of the book considers the ways church architecture and material culture reinforced social and political hierarchies.

Richly illustrated with more than 250 architectural images and photographs of religious objects, The Beauty of Holiness depends on exhaustive fieldwork to track changes in historical architecture. Nelson imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina and its role in public life, from its early years of ambivalent standing within the colony through the second wave of Anglicanism beginning in the early 1750s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807887981

Louis P. Nelson

Louis P. Nelson is associate professor and chair of the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia.

Book preview

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I - Constructing Material religion Material Religion

Chapter 1 - THE CITY CHURCHES

Chapter 2 - THE DIVERSITY OF COUNTRIES, TIMES, AND MEN’S MANNERS

Chapter 3 - BUILDERS AND BUILDING CULTURE

PART II - Belief and Ritual in Material Religion

Chapter 4 - SENSING THE SACRED

Chapter 5 - THE SACRAMENTAL BODY

Chapter 6 - THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

PART III - Material Religion and Social Practice

Chapter 7 - CAROLINA IN YE WEST INDIES

Chapter 8 - ANGLICAN ARCHITECTURE AND CIVIC ORDER

Chapter 9 - PULPITS, PEWS, AND POWER

PART IV - Revolutionary Changes to Material Religion

Chapter 10 - BUILDING THE HOLY CITY

CONCLUSION

APPENDIXES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Publication of this book has been made possible by a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN PUBLICATION DATA

Nelson, Louis P.

The beauty of holiness: Anglicanism and architecture in colonial South Carolina / Louis P. Nelson. p. cm.—(The Richard Hampton Jenrette series in architecture and the decorative arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN978-0-8078-3233-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

eISBN : 29-4-000-01961-5

1. Anglican church buildings—South Carolina—History—18th century.

2. Architecture, Colonial—South Carolina.

3. Anglican Communion—South Carolina—History—18th century.

4. Material culture—South Carolina—History—18th century.

5. South Carolina—Religious life and customs.

I. Title.

NA5230.S68N45 2009

726.5’80975709033—dc22 2008029866

cloth 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

For Kristine

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The foundations for this book were laid several years ago, during the many excursions to and conversations about South Carolina’s rural parish churches with my then-boss and now-colleague Jonathan Poston. I began working for Jon in 1991, and his enthusiasm for and encyclopedic knowledge of South Carolina’s early architecture launched the intellectual journey that has resulted in this book. Jon’s commitment to the examination, preservation, and interpretation of greater Charleston’s historic architecture ignited in me a deep desire to explore these buildings in great detail and to ask questions about how they worked.

After working with Jon, I went to graduate school, where this project received the support of a University of Delaware Competitive Fellowship, for which I am most grateful. While at the University of Delaware, I had the pleasure of working with a host of great scholars and mentors. I owe a great debt of thanks to my dissertation advisor, Bernie Herman. My work has benefited from Bernie’s broad understanding of early America and his thoughtful criticism of historical method. Because of Bernie, I am a better writer and a more critical thinker. A number of other faculty members played a hand in shaping the way I think about buildings and historical method, including J. Richie Garrison, Damie Stillman, Perry Chapman, and Wayne Craven. While at Delaware, I also benefited from innumerable conversations with friends and colleagues, including Anna Andrzejewski, Jeroen van den Hurk, Cindy Falk, Pat Keller, Tom Ryan, Pam Sachant, Karen Sherry, Ryan Smith, and especially Jennifer Amundson and Jeff Klee.

There are a number of scholars and friends who have shaped my understanding of early American architecture. Carl Lounsbury introduced me to the rigors of fieldwork and has been a great mentor in the study of religious architecture. My work with Carl in the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and England has had a profound impact on this book. I have also spent untold hours recording buildings with Ed Chappell, Willie Graham, and Mark Wenger. From them I learned the benefits of very careful attention to the smallest of details. And I am honored to have had various portions of this book read by Cary and Barbara Carson and Catherine Bishir. All three have helped me frame and communicate my arguments. A handful of scholars also read portions of this manuscript with an eye to material religion and American religious history. David Morgan, Sally Promey, and John Fea all helped to focus my attention on the complexities of religion and its interpretation. I feel a great debt of gratitude to the untold hours these folks have invested in me and my work.

I offer a special note of thanks to two eminent scholars who served as external readers for this book. The first is Peter Williams, whose work has for decades served as the keystone in the study of American church architecture. His strong support for this book was an encouraging vote of confidence. Gretchen Buggeln has patiently and carefully read many drafts of the book and has always offered highly constructive criticism. Our countless discussions about my work over the years have been enormously helpful; this book is far better than it might have been without her critical eye and broad knowledge of the field. I am very grateful to have found a kindred spirit in Gretchen.

Research on this project was generously supported by the good folks at many institutions, without whom I could not have completed it. A Lois F. McNeil Fellowship gave me the opportunity to spend many months researching and writing in the library and collections of the Winterthur Museum. Special thanks go to Neville Thompson, whose knowledge of the Winterthur Library was of extraordinary assistance. I am also much in debt to the great collections and remarkable intellectual resources of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA). As a Summer Institute fellow, then independent researcher, and finally institute faculty member I have had the remarkable opportunity to research in the gold mine that is th eMESDA research collections. Sally Gant, John Bivins, Brad Rauschenberg, Johanna Brown, and Martha Rowe all offered continuing support for my research, and now, under the new leadership of Robert Leath and Daniel Ackerman, I look forward to many years of productive research and writing on the early South with the team at MESDA.

The final draft of this book was made possible by a year-long Mellon Research Fellowship at the Newberry Library. While at the Newberry, Sarah Long, Woody Holton, Martha Pollak, Hannah Rosen, Carla Mazzio, Elizabeth Wright, Mathew O’Hara, and especially Sarah Pearsall all commented on passages and portions of the manuscript. The opportunity to spend a year refining my manuscript and expanding major portions of the book among such luminaries was priceless. I would also like to thank the staffs of the South Carolina Historical Society, the Charleston Museum, the South Caroliniana Library, the Thomas Cooper Library, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Library of Congress, Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Institute of Jamaica, and the Jamaica Archives. Working with Graham Long at the Charleston Museum has been particularly productive. Special thanks also go to the staff of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Charleston, who endured my persistent rummaging, photocopying, and photography. Alex and Pamela Quattlebaum frequently opened their home to me during research trips to Charleston. They are dear friends and are part of what makes Charleston the great city it is. And finally, I am grateful to David Perry and the staff of the University of North Carolina Press, who together have transformed my motley manuscript into a beautiful book.

The final stages of this work have benefited enormously from my recent years spent teaching at the University of Virginia. The year at the Newberry Library was made possible by a U V A research sabbatical, and summer research in the Caribbean was supported by a summer research grant given by the School of Architecture. The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts also supported the production of this book with a generous grant. My work has benefited from both critical feedback and production assistance from a number of students, especially Daniel Ackerman and Josi Ward, who both invested innumerable hours in this book, and the many students of my seminars in Early American architecture. While here at U V A, I have had the pleasure of sharing my work with two eminent scholars of the early South, Maurie McInnis and Dell Upton. In addition to serving as reader and advisor, Maurie’s award-winning book on antebellum Charleston raised the bar for historical work on southern art and material culture. I hope this book meets with her approval. And lastly, Dell, the author of that other book on Anglicanism, provided immeasurable support during our years together at U V A. Dell has been a great colleague, mentor, and friend, and in his departure for University of California, Los Angeles, he will be sorely missed.

My family has also been a great support through this process. I can never repay my father for taking a month off from work to help me document churches and church ruins in the backcountry of Jamaica—in August. It was a hot and harrowing experience, but one we will both remember with fondness for years to come. My children have endured many quick excursions to see yet one more historic building. But the greatest thanks go to my wife, Kristine, for her amazing patience and understanding through the many years invested in this book. No words can express my gratitude for her love and support.

INTRODUCTION

Long may it remain, a monument to the refinement and piety of an age and a generation that have long passed away.¹ With these words, the Reverend Drayton concluded his sermon for the 165th anniversary and rededication of the remote parish church of St. James, Goose Creek (FIG. 1.1). He stood amidst the monuments surrounding the early colonial church, preaching to a congregation of a thousand or more. Mounted over the door behind him, a rustic arch read, A temple shadowy with remembrances of the majestic past; and over the pulpit inside was written, Gently, without grief, the old shall pass into the new. In 1876—among the final and most difficult years of Reconstruction—Drayton and his congregation were clinging to the glory of their colonial past in the midst of a tumultuous present.² Their choice to do so in the yard of a colonial church was not accidental; as early as the antebellum years, South Carolina’s colonial churches had become icons of the state’s golden age.³ Because it had served one of South Carolina’s wealthiest colonial plantation parishes and had remained largely unchanged since the early eighteenth century, St. James, Goose Creek, was a place dense with evocative power, a favorite of Victorian romantics.

FIGURE I.1 Early twentieth-century postcard entitled St. James, Goose Creek Church (Printed by A. F. Doscher and Sons, Charleston; author’s collection)

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In a city and a region steeped in the memory of its colonial past, the power of this church to evoke a gentler and more refined age persisted into the twentieth century.⁴ In the 1930s the Colonial Dames erected a perimeter wall preserving the building and its site. Both Robert N. S. and Patti Foos Whitelaw (d. 1974 and 1998, respectively), Samuel Gaillard Stoney (d. 1968), and Albert Simons—some of the most ardent defenders of Charleston’s early architecture and culture—selected this remote churchyard as their final resting places (FIG. I.2).⁵ Even more recently, the Society of Colonial Wars donated funds for the church’s preservation, and, supplemented by other generous gifts, the building has undergone an extensive restoration program and stands today in an extraordinary state of preservation.⁶ Together with other colonial churches in South Carolina, St. James, Goose Creek, has a remarkable power to evoke in her visitors images of refinement and piety of the past. But, as is always the case, much of that power depends on assumptions and perceptions that visitors bring to such places rather than on historic realities.

The Beauty of Holiness reaches past the romantic mythologies of the present and the recent past to engage the realities and complexities of South Carolina’s colonial history. In response to Enlightenment ideas about order and beauty, the threats of evangelical fervor and slave rebellion, and the broader cultural and political currents in the British Atlantic world, South Carolina’s Anglicans fashioned a beautiful and rational spirituality, underscored by a complex and subtle vitality often overlooked by historians. An essential window into this time and place is the extensive body of material things that survive, every bit as much documents as the letters and sermons that shared their cultural space. This book begins by examining carefully the material production of early Anglican culture; buildings, grave markers, communion silver, and other objects of early Anglican practice stand at the center of this study. But it is not content to tell the stories of these objects as disconnected artifacts, as nothing more than beautiful and evocative antiques; this book locates the meaning of these things in the cultures of their production and use. The beauty of these objects is not valorized on its own merit but as an extension of the beauty of holiness that shaped early Anglican belief. Simultaneous changes in grave markers and church architecture signaled a shift of popular belief and practice, which often differs from official theology in significant ways. If this book locates Anglican material religion in the context of local religious culture, it also positions South Carolina in the broader context of the Greater British Caribbean. The history of early South Carolina is often discussed in relation to the Caribbean, but few studies follow through on that claim by placing South Carolina at the northern edge of this broader region. In short, by examining the early Anglican churches of South Carolina together with their associated objects of religious ritual and belief in a context that reaches beyond the sometimes artificial borders of North American British colonialism, The Beauty of Holiness is an architectural history, a religious history, a study of material culture, and a study of place.

FIGURE 1.2 View of churchyard, St. James Church, Goose Creek (Photo by author)

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In traditional American architectural history parlance, the buildings that populate these pages would be described as Georgian. The majority of these buildings postdate the rise of George I (the first of the Hanoverians) to the throne in England in 1714, and they adhere to the stylistic features often used by American architectural historians to describe Georgian buildings. They have elevations that adhere fairly closely to the bilateral symmetry that governs Georgian architecture. Large, classically proportioned windows and doors open through elevations that are usually capped with a classical cornice. Restrained, balanced, and classical, these buildings are often explained first and foremost as expressions of political philosophy: Georgian architecture is heralded as a Whig ideological statement generated by Whig-Tory conflict in England and Anglicization (a product of political and economic stability and increasing cultural sophistication) in the American colonies.⁷

Yet, there are problems with broad interpretations of Georgian architecture. The first is that the concept of a Georgian architecture did not exist in the eighteenth century. There are no contemporary accounts of a patron or builder consciously selecting to do something in the Georgian style. It is a style invented by modern historians to classify English architecture that corresponded with a prominent historical era.⁸ Another problem is that Georgian architecture is shaped dramatically enough by local practice to undermine any sense of a cohesive style. The meaning of early American buildings often described as Georgian is rooted not in any broad stylistic expression but in the local context. While there may be some widely disseminated principles governing the organization of elevations, materials, ornamentation, building technologies, and planning principles, most buildings described as Georgian in the American context have far more to do with local rather than international impulses.⁹ Instead of perpetuating interpretations that see colonial Georgian buildings as derivative of cosmopolitan norms, this book examines colonial architecture as a document of place.

Such a method has generated a number of critical interpretive themes and has insisted on an investigative method that reaches beyond architecture as artifact to engage the entire material landscape of religious belief and practice. The chapters that follow demonstrate the vitality and complexity of eighteenth-century religious life, an oft-overlooked season between the fervency of the seventeenth-century doctrinal disputes and the emotive enthusiasm of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. While it is very true that the Enlightenment transformed religious belief and practice in the eighteenth century, it is not true that it trumped religion entirely. Religious belief responded to Enlightenment thought in many ways, and it persisted—however quietly—throughout the eighteenth century. Precisely because of its unexceptional nature—and therefore its tendency not to surface in the documentary record—eighteenth-century religious life lends itself to interpretation through material culture. Whereas sermons, tracts, and colorful firsthand accounts offer extensive commentary on hotly debated issues and practices in other centuries, among the best evidence of eighteenth-century religious life are the surviving material cultures. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, churches, grave markers, and communion silver articulated in material form the beliefs that framed everyday life. Early church architecture spoke to the proximity of heaven and the supernatural world, while in later iterations, buildings spoke to the theology of beauty that stood at the center of Enlightenment Anglicanism. After an outline of the historical circumstances that shaped Anglican churches in early South Carolina, this introduction will summarize some historical themes that regularly resurface throughout the study, move to a discussion of method and the interpretive implications of material religion, and close with an outline of the chapters to follow.

ANGLICANISM PLAYED A CENTRAL ROLE in South Carolina’s colonial history. References to the political establishment of the Church of England in South Carolina appear as early as the colony’s Fundamental Constitutions (1669). The failure of South Carolina’s Colonial Assembly to ever ratify the Constitutions, however, meant that for the first decades of the colony’s history, there was no legislation on church-state relations and no established church—a fact celebrated by the colony’s large non-Anglican population. Despite their ambivalent standing, Anglicans coalesced into a Church Party in the opening years of the eighteenth century. Finally, in 1706, they passed the Church Act, establishing the Church of England as the state church and dividing the colony into ten parishes (FIG. I.3).¹⁰ Through the majority of the colonial era, these new parishes were served by clergy sent to South Carolina and elsewhere in the colonies by the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).¹¹ As local representatives of the state church, Anglican parishes became political districts, and Anglican vestries were given the responsibility of ensuring regular worship in the parish church and caring for the poor in their parish.¹² The Church Warden’s Account Books for St. Philip’s Parish is a continual log of services extended to the poor, from coffins and spices for a Christian burial to blankets and clothes to defend against the cold.¹³ In 1738 the vestry of St. Philips advertised that whereas the number of Poor and Sick daily encreases, and the Charge (as well as Difficulty) of providing Lodgings, Nurses, Etc., is very extraordinary . . . the Church Wardens have hired an House and provided proper Attendance for the Reception of all such as are real Objects of Charity. ¹⁴ Visitations of the sick consumed much of the week for many of the colony’s ministers. These responsibilities were not limited only to the city parishes. In the rural parish of Prince Frederick’s, the vestry imposed a tax on slaves to raise money to support the poor and sick of the parish.¹⁵ Parish vestries occasionally served in a legal capacity in the defense of the poor, inquiring into and correcting injustices.¹⁶

FIGURE I.3 Map of the historic Anglican parishes of South Carolina (Map taken from The Barbados-Carolina Connection [Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1988]; reproduced with permission)

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Justified in large part by their role in public service, the establishment status of the Church of England also opened public coffers for the construction of new Anglican churches. In the years following 1706, Anglican churches began to rise in six of the newly established parishes.¹⁷ Between 1708 and 1740, the white population of the colony expanded almost fivefold, and in an effort to keep pace with the growing population, the Colonial Assembly quickly established four additional parishes in 1730.¹⁸ The result of this population boom during the early decades of the century was a generation of church construction that persisted from 1706 through the late 1730s. These early churches exhibited a notable degree of variation in materials, planning, and scale. While St. James, Goose Creek, is a brick structure in the form of a compact rectangle, many of its contemporaries are cruciform in plan, while others are of timber frame construction (see appendix 1). The churches of the opening decades of the century demonstrate the variation and experimentation that one might expect to find in a newly colonial context.

The years 1739 to 1741 were a period of crisis for the colony and its established church. In 1739 a handful of slaves initiated the Stono Rebellion, the colony’s most threatening eighteenth-century slave revolt (ultimately, it was unsuccessful). The next year, a great fire burned to the ground a substantial portion of the capital city of Charleston, displacing hundreds and necessitating a massive rebuilding campaign. In these same years, the very popular Anglican revivalist preacher George Whitefield brought to the colony a style of preaching and a theology of personal conversion that directly challenged the importance of a quiet piety and participation in the sacraments, mores of the established church. Whitefield’s preaching had both religious and political implications for Anglicanism in South Carolina. Integral to Whitefield’s critique was his teaching that slavery—the foundation of South Carolina’s wealth—was an abomination. The Stono Rebellion, the burning of the capital city, and the preaching and popularity of Whitefield and his converts—nearly simultaneously crises—had a dramatic impact on the politics and practice of the Anglican Church in South Carolina. They caused a chronological break between the early and later colonial church, a division with implications for building practice, popular theology, and local politics.

By the early 1750s, Anglicans began a second wave of new parishes and new church construction, and by the late 1760s, the number of parishes in South Carolina had doubled from the original ten to twenty.¹⁹ In this second wave, South Carolina’s Anglican architecture began to coalesce into a fashion-conscious form that best suited their circumstance, and it would be these buildings—buildings that survive in far greater numbers than their earlier counterparts—that shape the persisting popular perception of colonial churches in South Carolina. St. Stephen’s Church in Berkeley County is an excellent example of these later buildings (FIG. I.4). Built of brick on the plan of a compact rectangle, with central openings flanked by symmetrically disposed windows on three of the four elevations, their larger scale, brick construction, and classical vocabulary established a far more consistent form than their earlier counterparts. The details of their design reflect some familiarity with fashionable architecture in London. Their broad, open interiors and elevated, sophisticated pulpits are simultaneously gestures of cosmopolitan fashion and material forms distinctively suited to their political, social, and (especially) theological circumstances.

FIGURE I.4 St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County, 1762-69 (Photo by author)

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A close relationship between church architecture and popular religious thought is the critical assumption driving much of the inquiry that shapes the chapters of this book. How, for example, did the tensions between revelation and reason as sources of religious authority play out in the space of the church? Over the course of the century, Anglicans increasingly used regular and beautiful as descriptors to celebrate their churches. While we might be tempted to impose our own understanding of these terms on the past, what did they mean to the eighteenth-century mind? To what extent did Neoplatonic philosophies find their way into the popular imagination? Did the slow demise of supernaturalism and the rising Enlightenment emphasis on empiricism mean that later colonials understood the church differently from their earlier counterparts? Ranging from belief to practice, the church was also the site of innumerable events of great personal consequence—baptisms, communion services, funerals—yet we know very little about how these events unfolded in the space of the church or in the lives of participants. This book examines Anglican church architecture as a medium for shifting popular theologies and as the setting for sacramental liturgies.

Not all that took place in the church was motivated by piety; the church was also a vehicle for the expression of social, racial, economic, and political power. For example, one’s place in the church—literally, one’s pew in the church interior—was a significant signal of status in the community. The context of political tensions between Anglicans and other Protestants in early South Carolina also plays an important role in shaping the architecture of Anglicanism in the colony. In the opening decades of the century, tensions centered on the political authority of Anglicans over other dissenting denominations, primarily Congregationalists (called Puritans in the seventeenth century). It is important to recognize that the distinctions between South Carolina’s Anglicans and Congregationalists were largely in their church governance and in their views on the relationship between church and state. Anglicans embraced a close relationship between the church authorities and the hierarchy of state, while Congregationalists were highly suspicious of church-state relations and preferred governance at the congregational level rather than at a national level. While the two also differed in their views on the number and celebration of sacraments, their beliefs on foundational issues such as salvation and the sovereignty of God were fairly closely aligned. The arrival of evangelicalism—largely Baptists and Presbyterians but including some Anglicans—in the middle decades of the century, however, introduced a very different kind of contest. The emotionalism associated with conversion among evangelicals implicated the very salvation of those Anglicans who could not claim a similar experience. Both of these contests, explicitly political in the first and theological in the second, elicited responses from Anglicans, responses that often took material form.

The Anglican Church in South Carolina was a church inextricably linked to its place, but it was a place at the margins of (1) a region defined by agricultural economics dependent on the exploitation of land and people, and (2) an expanding empire centered on the cosmopolitan capital of London.²⁰ An examination of their architecture suggests that early Anglicans positioned themselves as the landed gentry of an expansive region that can be loosely described as the Greater Caribbean. As a building erected by recent émigrés from Barbados, for example, St. James, Goose Creek, raises very interesting questions about connections between Anglicanism in South Carolina and the Caribbean. But as the century unfolded, Anglicans in South Carolina were increasingly enamored of cosmopolitan fashion and sought to integrate aspects of this newly fashionable expression into their architecture and material culture. This book ranges broadly across these and other subjects by enlisting Anglican architecture and other objects of material religion as historic documents of the complexities of faith, life, and practice in early Anglicanism.

The study stands on a foundation of exhaustive fieldwork; each building and object has been examined and recorded in the field (see appendixes 1-4). The chapters that follow investigate architecture, gravestones, communion silver, and other minor arts as a historic record of the complexities of eighteenth-century religious practice and belief. From the discipline of material culture, this study assumes that objects are an essential window into everyday life. Individuals rarely speak or write explicitly about everyday places and objects, but the absence of such direct commentary does not mean such objects were void of meaning. Writing about the veracity of objects over texts in the writing of cultural history, Jules Prown has observed that certain fundamental beliefs in any society are so generally accepted that they never need to be articulated.²¹ Objects of material culture become the unintended record of everyday life in ways that written documents cannot. It seems only appropriate, then, to apply the methods of material culture to questions of popular religious belief and practice.

Weaving evidence from buildings and many other material expressions of religious culture together with the documentary record, this book offers three interconnected and overlapping narratives, each comprised of three chapters, and a concluding chapter on the reconstitution of the church after the Revolutionary War. The first part, titled Constructing Material Religion, explores the architectural processes that shaped the churches of eighteenth-century South Carolina. Chapter 1, The City Churches, examines the specific London design sources for three South Carolina churches and highlights the cosmopolitan fluency demonstrated by Anglicans in eighteenth-century South Carolina. The Diversity of Countries, Times, and Men’s Manners uses a broad geographic survey of the English colonial world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to throw into high relief the distinctively local nature of colonial Anglican churches in South Carolina. The final chapter in this section, Builders and Building Culture, reviews the processes of church design, financing, and construction in South Carolina. Together, these three chapters locate Anglican churches in the tensions between the local and the cosmopolitan that shaped so much of colonial life in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Turning attention to the religious functions of the Anglican churches, the chapters in part 2, Belief and Ritual in Material Religion, examine Anglican belief and practice in South Carolina. Sensing the Sacred explores the ways early eighteenth-century Anglican architecture perpetuated seventeenth-century theologies and ways of knowing. The Sacramental Body examines church liturgical centers as stages for Anglican ritual and theologies of the body. And finally, The Beauty of Holiness introduces an Anglican theology of aesthetics constructed in response to changes initiated by the widespread embrace of reason and scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century. These three chapters demonstrate the significant investment of religious thought made by Anglicans in their material environment and questions antimaterialism and other assumptions about popular Anglicanism in the American colonies.

As a counterpoint to Belief and Ritual, part 3, titled Material Religion and Social Practice, examines the ways Anglicans used their material environment to shape and control their social, economic, and political circumstances. The first chapter, Carolina in Ye West Indies, locates South Carolina’s planter elite in the larger context of the Greater Caribbean. Narrowing from region to colony, Anglican Architecture and Civic Order considers the architecture of the church as a claim to political power in the religiously diverse context of colonial South Carolina. Moving from colony to parish, Pulpits, Pews, and Power moves inside the church to examine the ways architecture shaped the social and political relationships of congregational life. These three sections are concluded by a chapter titled Building the ‘Holy City,’ which reaches past the American Revolution and the disestablishment of Anglicanism to revisit many of these same issues, as Anglicans reconstituted themselves as Episcopalians and former Dissenters began to enlist architecture to mark their place in the new nation.

Vernacular architecture and material culture are windows into a complex world of overlapping spheres of knowledge and experience: popular faith and belief; local politics; parish life; local building cultures; institutional theology; the social, racial, and economic hierarchies of the Atlantic Rim; and cosmopolitan ideals, to name just a few. It is my hope that this book demonstrates to scholars of religion, architecture, and material culture that much is to be learned from the oft-overlooked material religion of early America.

PART I

Constructing Material religion Material Religion

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Chapter 1

THE CITY CHURCHES

In June 1753 the Gentleman’s Magazine published an engraving of the west prospect of St. Philip’s Church in Charles Town, South Carolina (FIG. 1.1).¹ Shade and shadow exaggerate the monumentality of the building’s three giant-order Tuscan porticos, while engaged pilasters carrying a continuous cornice extend the classical order to the body of the church. Rising from behind the porticos, a tall cupola of two octagonal stages supports a dome, a square lantern, and a cock weathervane.² St. Philip’s was far superior in finish and scale to the tenements, small shops, and houses that lined the streets of the colonial city (FI G. 1.2). A description accompanying the image praised the building as one of the most regular and complete structures of the kind in America. The design was sent to us from Charles Town, where it has a very advantageous situation, at the upper end of a broad and extensive street.³ The engraving, completed sometime before 1737, was probably sent to London by Charles Woodmason, a prominent South Carolina Anglican minister who in the subsequent edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine published a poem extolling Carolina as a Second Carthage where Domes, temples, bridges, rise in distant views / And sumptuous palaces the sight amuse.⁴ When recounting domes and temples, the poet-priest certainly had in mind the soaring cupola and triple porticos of St. Philip’s. Woodmason was not alone in his praise for the building. Writing just prior to the completion of the new church in 1722, South Carolina’s Anglican clergy celebrated the church as not paralleled in his Majesty’s Dominions in America.⁵ Published in a London monthly, the west prospect of St. Philip’s asserted an architectural sophistication at the fringe of empire that must have surprised the magazine’s cosmopolitan readership.

Standing on the highest point within the city walls, St. Philip’s cupola reigned over Charleston, and its southern portico dominated the city’s principal north-south street (FIG. 1.3). As evident in the 1739 Ichnography of Charles-Town, the church of St. Philip’s was easily the principal building in this colonial town, the capital of a colony with an estimated 20,000 white and almost 40,000 enslaved black inhabitants by 1740.⁶ The church stood at the northern end of the city in blocks that were in the early eighteenth century still fairly open; just to the northwest stood the colony’s powder magazine. The blocks immediately to the south were densely constructed with merchants’ houses, shops, tenements, and warehouses nearest the wharfs. While some of the wealthiest might leave a multistoried private house like the few evident in the 1739 Bishop Roberts’s view of Charleston, most Anglicans who came to the church for regular worship departed domestic settings of only a few very plain chambers, often shared with a number of other people. Three- and four-story brick tenements with multiple, irregularly located doors and often unstable wood balconies projecting overhead lined the street and stood cheek by jowl with warehouses and unassuming frame shops less than ten feet wide. Rising from the midst of this landscape, St. Philip’s seemed wholly other. More than sixty feet wide and seventy feet long, the church occupied a more prominent place than any other space in the real or imaginary landscape of the majority of Carolina Anglicans.

FIGURE 1.1 Engraving titled St. Philip’s Church in Charles Town, South Carolina (Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1753)

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FIGURE 1.2 Thomas You, St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, ca. 1760 (South Carolina Historical Society)

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Begun in 1711, St. Philip’s was the first of three Anglican churches erected in colonial South Carolina that demonstrated the remarkable cosmopolitan fluency of this remote outpost of the British Empire. Together with St. Michael’s, also in Charleston (1751-62), and Prince William’s Parish Church (1751-53), in a remote plantation parish, St. Philip’s was one colonial example of a revolution in elite Anglican church design. In 1711 Parliament passed an act for building fifty new churches in London and her immediate environs, initiating a flurry of discussion and debate among English architects and clergy about appropriate design for Anglican churches. While only fourteen new churches were built in London as a direct result of this act, the process of formulating the urban Anglican church informed an extraordinary number of new churches rising in cities throughout the British Empire.⁷ In London and elsewhere, these new churches often boasted substantial masonry construction, steeples, and porticos as markers of their participation in an emerging cosmopolitan identity.⁸ But in Charleston, as in her counterparts on the English mainland, Anglican church designers turned to London churches not as ideal models to be replicated but as fashionable design sources for consideration in local construction. The architectural histories of these three South Carolina churches suggest a complex design process shaped by numerous individuals drawing from a multiplicity of sources. From the new city churches in London to theological discourses on precedents for form and ritual and the design challenges of integrating the church into the public sphere, Anglicans in colonial South Carolina integrated multiple sources and responded to diverse challenges as they raised these three markers of South Carolina’s emerging cosmopolitan identity.

FIGURE 1.3 Detail of W. H. Toms, The Ichnography of Charles-Town at High Water, 1739. St. Philip’s is designated A on the plan (lower right).

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ON MARCH 1, 1711, South Carolina’s General Assembly passed an act charging six church commissioners with the responsibility of erecting a new brick church in their city to replace their first building, a smaller wooden church standing near the city gates, then about a quarter century old.⁹ The commissioners were empowered to receive subscriptions and to purchase and to take a grant of a town lot or lots . . . and to build the Church of such height, dimensions, materials, and form as [the commissioners] shall think fit.¹⁰ The act also established taxes on rum, slaves, and other merchandise to support construction. Of those six commissioners, one was the Reverend Dr. Gideon Johnston, the Anglican commissary in the colony and minister to the city parish, and five were prominent lay Anglicans: William Rhett, Alexander Parris, William Gibbons, John Bee, and Jacob Satur. The commissioners selected a new site at the northern end of the city—the highest point within the city walls—for the erection of their monumental brick church.

The church as it was begun in 1711, however, differed greatly from the building that opened for services in 1723 and was finally completed in 1733. In the spring of 1713, with the building shell under way, Gideon Johnston sailed for London carrying a list of complaints about various acts of the Carolina Assembly that had injured the Privileges of the Clergy.¹¹ The letter was addressed to both the bishop of London and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. As part of their report on the state of the church in the colony, the clergy mentioned that Anglicans are now building a large brick Church at Charles Town 100 foot long in the clear and 45 broad.¹² The church as it was completed in 1733, however, measured seventy-four feet by sixty-two feet, with a western vestibule measuring thirty-seven by sixty-two. In the midst of construction, the church had been fundamentally redesigned.

Fairly soon after he arrived in London, Johnston received the news that a hurricane had extensively damaged the unroofed shell of the new church in Charleston, causing £100,000 damage to the building.¹³ According to another report, the church was blown down and demolished by a furious Hurricane.¹⁴ This first hurricane in September 1713 was followed by another in November of the following year. After hearing the news of the second storm, Johnston noted in a letter to the S P G that the new brick church had been ready to roof, but that it is now considerably damaged by this storm, ye windows broken and shattered to pieces. Another commentator noted that after the 1714 hurricane, only the water table remained of the building’s long northern and southern walls.¹⁵ Undaunted, Johnston desired to make a second effect, and design, please God to prevent a like accident, to carry it to its former height, I hope people will be so charitable to assist me in so good a design.¹⁶ After learning of the destruction of the incomplete St. Philip’s, Johnston turned his efforts to procuring subscriptions for ye building a church in his parish among ye merchants trading to that place. Without support from London merchants, Johnston noted, it is not possible to finish [the church].¹⁷ When Johnston returned to Charleston in the fall of 1715, he commented that nothing has been done to our new Church since its being blown down by the Hurricane.¹⁸ The church remained a ruined shell for another five years; the outbreak of the Yemassee Indian War diverted funds and workmen from the church reconstruction to fortification projects.

In December 1720 the Assembly finally turned their attention to the reconstruction of St. Philip’s by passing an act to effect the completion of the church.¹⁹ In addition to instituting another rum tax to help fund construction, the act appointed a second set of five commissioners, this time all lay Anglicans: Thomas Hepworth, Ralph Izard, William Blakeway, Alexander Parris, and William Gibbon.²⁰ Parris, the royal treasurer from 1712 to 1735, was the only commissioner named in both 1711 and 1720 and appears to have been a central figure in the construction of the church.²¹ In Parris’s 1736 obituary, the South Carolina Gazette indicated that he had very much at heart the building and finishing the present Church in Charles-Town, and was not wanting either by persuasion or example to do all that in him lay to compleat the same.²²

The work of the second set of church commissioners was also greatly encouraged by the arrival of Francis Nicholson as royal governor of South Carolina in May 1721. The Anglican clergy of the colony wrote to the S P G in 1722: It is chiefly owing to his great example that generous encouragement he hath been pleased to give to do good a work, that the new Church of St. Philip’s Charles City . . . is now in such forwardness that in a few months we hope to see it fitted for Divine Service, a work of that magnitude, regularity, Beauty and stability as will be the greatest monument of this City, an Honor to the Whole Province.²³ From his involvement in the city plans for both Williamsburg, Virginia, and Annapolis, Maryland, and major building programs in South Carolina and other colonies, Nicholson’s reputation in architecture has been well established.²⁴ While governor of South Carolina, in fact, he contributed to the completion of the New Church of England in Boston (Christ Church).²⁵ Not only did the governor own a personal pew in the completed St. Philip’s, but his personal motto, Deus mihi Sol (God is my sun), also appeared over the central arch of the north nave arcade of the new church.²⁶ That same motto appeared on the capital building in Williamsburg, which was built during Nicholson’s tenure as governor of that colony.²⁷ Although the rebuilding program of 1720 included some portion of the ruined shell and the reconstruction was under way before Nicholson’s arrival in 1721, the governor certainly had a hand in shaping the final design of the church and driving it rapidly toward completion.²⁸

The monumental church begun in 1720 and completed by 1733 was unlike anything else in the British American colonies.²⁹ The Gentleman’s Magazine engraving and numerous other representations allow an accurate reconstruction of the building’s finished design. A 1739 plan of the city demonstrates how the church thrust into the street, asserting its southern portico as the visual terminus of the major east-west axis of the city (see FIG. 1.3). A eulogy to the building after its destruction by fire in 1835 explained: Running completely across the direct line of the street, [St. Philip’s] seemed from either end to close it entirely; and presented to the eyes, on both sides, a noble ornament to that section of the city.³⁰ An early nineteenth-century image by William Hall showing the church from the southwest depicts the cupola or steeple rising from behind a portico, an arrangement predating by a few years James Gibbs’s celebrated arrangement of these forms at St. Martin-in-the-Fields (FIG. 1.4). Rising at the end of Charleston’s major lateral thoroughfare, the tall cupola of St. Philip’s dominated the cityscape. Both the Gentleman’s Magazine view and Hall’s painting distinguish between the true columns of the northern and southern porticos and the squared piers of the western portico. An arched opening allowed access into the portico through the solid wall that spanned from the end piers to the church walls. Tall, arched windows alternated with monumental engaged pilasters along the side elevations.³¹ The pilasters supported a cornice, which in turn carried a wooden balustrade that had been removed by the early nineteenth-century painting.³² Behind the balustrade rose a Dutch or gambrel roof that abutted the tall east-end wall.

FIGURE 1.4 William Hall, St. Philip’s Church, ca. 1820 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church)

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The vestry minutes of St. Philip’s Church, which begin in 1732 and run continuously thereafter, contain numerous references to the building’s design. As early as 1736, the building’s exterior was covered in a coat of roughcast (lime mortar mixed with sand and gravel aggregate) in emulation of stone masonry, and by the later eighteenth century, the exterior had been painted a stone color.³³ One visitor described St. Philip and St. Michael’s Church of England, Large Stone Buildings with Portico’s with large pillars and steeples.³⁴ Another described the public buildings in Charleston as plaistered over so well on the outside to imitate stone that I really took them all for stone buildings at first.³⁵ The walks around the church along the northern and southern elevations, the floors of the porticos, and that of the vestibule (belfry), were all paved in Purbeck stone.³⁶ The very large windows that opened into the interior of the church were a combination of both fixed leaded lights above and sash below.³⁷ The cupola of the church was designed from the outset to include both a clock and a bell, and gilding covered the cock that capped the top of the lantern.³⁸

The interior of the church was equally lavish. The doors under the western portico opened into a spacious vestibule surrounded by fourteen monumental Doric columns.³⁹ Three openings gave access from the vestibule and its side chambers into the nave; doors closing off the vestibule from the nave were not installed in these openings until the early nineteenth century.⁴⁰ An extraordinary level of detail about St. Philip’s is preserved in John Blake White’s painting of the interior from the west, painted soon after the church’s destruction by fire (F I G. 1.5).⁴¹ Two arcades divided the interior into a central nave and two side aisles. The church commissioners used tall Corinthian pilasters carrying a running Corinthian cornice to organize the arcade in a manner similar to the Tuscan pilasters and cornice of the exterior. The crest of each arch was ornamented with a winged cherub carved in relief. In the 1820s Frederick Dalcho described the inscriptions above the central arch of each arcade: "Over the center arch on the south side are some figures in heraldic form representing the infant colony imploring protection of the King. . . . Beneath the figures is this inscription: Propius res auspice nostras . . . . Over the middle arch on the north side is this inscription: Deus mihi sol, with armorial bearings, or the representation of some stately edifice."⁴² White’s view also includes the many memorials mounted in the church, but especially on the pilasters. There is no evidence from the vestry minutes, however, that any of these predate the 1770s. From the arcades with their march of Corinthian pilasters sprang a soaring barrel-vaulted ceiling. The aisles of the church were paved in a checkerboard of red and black tiles.

White’s painting also preserves critical information about the design and placement of the liturgical fittings. He represents a pulpit surmounted by a sounding board or tester at the east end of the building, just north of the central aisle. This pulpit had been installed in the early nineteenth century; the eighteenth-century pulpit was taller but stood in the same location.⁴³ The nave terminated at a low rail, projecting forward from the eastern end and defining a chancel, which was also raised two steps above the floor of the nave. Over the chancel, four huge tablets hung within an architectural frame ornamented with carved work. A sun occupied the center of the cornice above and urns terminated each end, while a very large fanlight rose above. In 1721 Arthur Middleton and James Moore wrote to Archbishop Wake, asking him to solicit Communion silver and an altarpiece from His Majesty.⁴⁴ The large but fairly simple altarpiece represented in White’s painting does not appear to be of London manufacture. The east end of the church remained without any altarpiece as late as 1746, when the vestry ordered the east end to be plastered.⁴⁵

FIGURE 1.5 John Blake White, Interior of St. Philip’s, 1835 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Charleston)

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A reconstructed plan of St. Philip’s suggests both its monumentality and its complexity (FIG. 1.6). Eighty-eight box pews filled the floor of the church.⁴⁶ A number of references to the group of pews surrounding the pulpit indicate that these were at various times reserved for the governor, the king’s officers, and masters of merchant ships. The latter may have been THE CITY CHURCHES 21 the result of Johnston’s solicitations in 1714 from London merchants with South Carolina interests. In 1732 new galleries provided sixty additional pews for those who desired them but did not have the opportunity to purchase them on the floor. While the location of the stairs to the gallery remains uncertain, access to the galleries was likely gained by stairs that originated in the chambers flanking the vestibule. Vestry minutes indicate that the stairs were fully enclosed with vertical batten walls, lighted by internal windows, and closed with a door.⁴⁷ In a closet underneath the stairs, the vestry stored the bags and buckets of a fire engine.⁴⁸ On a scale unlike anything else in the early eighteenth-century South, and with a sophisticated design that further distinguished it from the colonial landscape, St. Philip’s Church was a building unparalleled in the British colonies.

FIGURE 1.6 Reconstructed plan of St. Philip’s (Drawing by author)

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As it was reconstructed between 1720 and 1723, St. Philip’s demonstrates an acute awareness of Queen Anne’s 1711 initiative to build fifty new churches in London. Resident in that city from the summer of 1713 to the fall of 1715 for the very purpose of raising money for the construction of a city church, Gideon Johnston found himself surrounded by debates over Anglican church design. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a season of explosive growth for London. The near completion of Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1710, and the collapse of the roof of the medieval St. Alphege’s Church in Greenwich in the same year, turned attention from the reconstruction of city churches burned out by the Great Fire of 1666 to the need for new churches in London’s expanding suburbs.⁴⁹ In 1711 Parliament passed an act for building fifty new churches in the cities of London and Westminster and the suburbs thereof. The act extended a coal tax to support the task of design and construction of the new churches and named fifty-two men—Anglican clergy, politicians, prominent citizens, and a small number of architects—as commissioners to undertake the task.⁵⁰

In many ways, the new St. Alphege’s Church in Greenwich, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and the first of these new London churches to be completed, exemplifies the newly fashionable architectural vocabulary that differentiated this new wave of church design from earlier generations of churches (FIG. 1.7).⁵¹ While the building’s tightly laid ashlar masonry continues the practice established by Christopher Wren’s earlier London churches, the double tiers of windows secured within a monumental order of pilasters standing on a plinth and carrying a weighty cornice are more characteristic of the eighteenth-century churches. Rather than stacked ranges of classical orders—a use of classicism that predominated in the seventeenth century—eighteenth-century architects and builders preferred giant or monumental orders that were raised the full height of an elevation. The juxtaposition of the monumental classical elements adheres to an increasingly familiar system of relationships and proportions derived from antique sources.⁵² Similar to the more fashionable Georgian townhouses of the 1720s and 1730s, the upper level of windows are larger and more pronounced, taking the form of a piano nobile.⁵³ At the east end, the engaged pilasters become freestanding columns supporting a classically proportioned pediment. This employ of classical detailing—according to rigorous, almost archaeological criteria—characterized fashionable architecture of the first