Christianity and Race in the American South: A History

By Paul Harvey

The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, and water—from St. Augustine on the shores of Florida’s Atlantic Coast to the swampy mire of Jamestown to the floodwaters that nearly destroyed New Orleans. Determination, resistance, survival, even transcendence, shape the story of race and southern Christianities. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey gives us a narrative history of the South as it integrates into the story of religious history, fundamentally transforming our understanding of the importance of American Christianity and religious identity.

Harvey chronicles the diversity and complexity in the intertwined histories of race and religion in the South, dating back to the first days of European settlement. He presents a history rife with strange alliances, unlikely parallels, and far too many tragedies, along the way illustrating that ideas about the role of churches in the South were critically shaped by conflicts over slavery and race that defined southern life more broadly. Race, violence, religion, and southern identity remain a volatile brew, and this book is the persuasive historical examination that is essential to making sense of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226415499

Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey is author of Freedom's Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era.

Book preview

Christianity and Race in the American South

Chicago History of American Religion

A Series Edited by John Corrigan

Martin E. Marty, Founding Editor

Also in the series:

The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America

by Robert C. Fuller

Christianity and Race in the American South

A History

Paul Harvey

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41535-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41549-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226415499.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harvey, Paul, 1961– author.

Title: Christianity and race in the American South : a history / Paul Harvey.

Other titles: Chicago history of American religion.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Chicago history of American religion

Identifiers: LCCN 2016011420 | ISBN 9780226415352 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226415499 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Southern States—Religion. | Southern States—Race relations.

Classification: LCC BR535.H379 2016 | DDC 277.5/08089—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011420

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Charles Reagan Wilson,

a friend and mentor,

and

for my sisters and brother,

Gayle, John, and Jan

Contents

INTRODUCTION / The Transcendental Blues of Southern Religion

ONE / Proud and Undutifull: Religion, Violence, and Death in the Early South

TWO / Tumults and Distractions: The Revolutionaries and the Revivalists

THREE / Being Affected Together: Revivalism, Slavery, and Empire

FOUR / Was Not Christ Crucified?: Race and Christianities in the Antebellum Era

FIVE / That Was about Equalization after the Freedom: Religion, War, and Reconstruction

SIX / Death Is Ridin’ All through the Land: Race and Southern Christianities from Segregation to Civil Rights

SEVEN / Trust God and Launch Out into the Deep: Civil Rights and the Transformations of Southern Religious History

EIGHT / They Don’t Have to Be Poor Anymore: Politics, Prosperity, and Pluralism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

The Transcendental Blues of Southern Religion

In the darkest hour of the longest night

If it was in my power I’d step into the light

Candles on the altar, penny in your shoe

Walk upon the water—transcendental blues

—Steve Earle, Transcendental Blues (2000)

This book begins and ends with water, tragedy, and survival. It opens at Saint Augustine, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, and at the swampy mire of Jamestown, Virginia. Competition between European powers and England spurred these settlements. Early Virginians planted a colony in a microenvironment that virtually guaranteed death for the great majority in a land that eventually became the American South. These colonists set a pattern, too, for the combustible mix of conventional piety and unconventional avarice that powered much of southern history from the seventeenth century forward. From Jamestown grew the wealthy and powerful slave society that would lead a nation into its bloodiest war.

Four hundred years later, in August 2005, floodwaters nearly destroyed the city of New Orleans. The deluge was long foretold by those who knew anything about the city’s inadequately constructed system of levees and water diversion canals. Largely man-made forces (interacting with environmental conditions and economic realities) had created a region that could produce incredible wealth and an intellectual and cultural life that defined a nation’s sensibility. But the disaster following Hurricane Katrina revealed a level of racial and social inequality that belied the myths upon which that culture rested. Ten years later, the public response to the murders of nine African American worshipers in Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015 suggested the regional transformations of race and religion that had occurred from the 1950s to the present.

Determination, resistance, survival, and sometimes even transcendence shape the story of race and southern Christianities, as narrated in this book. Yet from the eighteenth century forward in particular, a broadly shared set of southern Christianities could not escape the deep social hierarchies that defined—and often warped—people’s lives, their hopes, expectations, and daily realities. Rather, southerners justified, fought against, and transformed those social hierarchies through religious idioms. They were divided by shared faiths that fundamentally shaped how they saw the world and whether they believed they could change that world. Their world in turn shaped a blues sensibility of struggle, despair, and pain but also produced a transcendental religious culture that transformed the region and fundamentally influenced American ways of spiritual expression.

Christianity and Race in the American South: A History is a narrative history of race and southern Christianities from the late sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It draws from a wide variety of sources, including archaeological evidence, demographic analyses, theological expositions, church records, memoirs and literary works, oral histories, newspapers and other periodicals, diaries and letters, musical lyrics, and other kinds of documentation. The book surveys the multitude of ways southerners have recorded their religious arguments, ideas, visions, dreams, practices, and expressions.

Engaging in a deliberately selective narrative, Christianity and Race in the American South proposes its own periodization of southern religious history over the last four centuries, one that encompasses southern stories from early Virginia to the present. The book integrates the early South into the story of regional religious history. In doing so, this work suggests ways to understand the evolution of the region’s historical religious identities. It does so through tracking how the South and its religious traditions changed over time, how a particular form of regional religious identity became the normative narrative of that South, and then how that narrative transformed through the idioms of the very religious traditions that had created it. The region’s history placed diverse peoples in rigidly defined and often brutally maintained hierarchies and then asked them to search for the transcendental together. Thus, southern religion has been a world of the transcendental blues.

Race and southern Christianities shaped, and were shaped by, a constantly evolving regional identity. Contrary to popular views, the South has never been parochial; it always has been a part of a much larger world. At times, particularly during the nineteenth century, it exercised disproportionate political and economic power in the United States. Therefore, southern identity cannot be restricted to the era when Jesus was our Savior and cotton was our king, as the country songwriter Billy Joe Shaver put it.¹ Rather, this book suggests when, how, and why the South became a region as defined by its religious practices. It then examines key moments of transformations when the interaction of race and southern Christianities with political and economic developments created new cultural worlds. It concludes by sketching the ongoing story of a regional religious identity within a global South that, in its growing pluralism, harkens back to the early South.SN

This book focuses as well on the paradoxes of southern religious history from Jamestown to the present. One example is how the region has played a central role in fashioning a globalized world economy (including a circulation of people, as well as goods) while maintaining a tribal provincialism marked by hostility to outside ideas and agitators. A shared faith arose within a society of stark class and racial divisions. A regional culture arose that looked inward even as it exercised an immense global impact. A religious culture defined by its Biblicism and piety sacralized astonishing levels of human cruelty. That same society nurtured human artistic creativity that burst through religious shibboleths. In few other places did such a diverse mixture of religious ideas and expressions result in a dominant establishment at once so productive of extraordinary cruelty and generative of explosively artistic forms. The Solid South was internally riven. In those cracks arose spiritually charged expressions that came to define American culture.

†

Since Donald Mathews’s 1977 classic Religion in the Old South, studies of Christianity in the South have gone in two basic directions. Both are incorporated into this book. An older scholarship focused on the cultural captivity of whites, seeking explanations for the often-violent resistance to the civil rights movement. More recently, historians have included black voices in shaping the narrative. Thus, in Religion in the Old South white theologians and evangelical believers are the major actors; other historical subjects surround them but are acted upon rather than acting themselves. More recent scholarship has integrated the voices of whites and blacks, masters and slaves, and the powerful together with the relatively powerless. The result has been new social histories that connect religious belief, social structure, and individual behavior. Christianity and Race in the American South extends that approach into the entire sweep of the religious history of the South, including into the preevangelical era. The longevity of this narrative provides new perspectives on conceptions of southern religion.²

Diverse other southern stories also shaped the narrative of southern religious history. These range from the Powhatan Confederacy in early Virginia to Moravians in North Carolina, Cherokees and Creeks in the early national Southeast, Spiritualists seeking insights from mediums in New Orleans and elsewhere, and Catholics throughout the region. From early Virginia and Maryland to colonial Florida to antebellum Georgia, the South was, like much of early America, an ethnically and religiously motley region. Religious interactions among peoples from Europe, Africa, and the Americas especially defined the early South. A narrative overdetermined by evangelical dominance misses the fluidity of and the disjunctures contained within this story. The South originated as a polyglot region, changed with surprising swiftness into a religious region dominated by white and black evangelical Protestants, and more recently has begun to return to its origins as a multireligious and multiracial zone.

Thus, this book historicizes the term southern religion by placing evangelicalism within its proper historical context. Examining this longer duration of the region’s religious history foregrounds, for example, periods in which Native religious practices, French and Spanish Catholicism, and African/Islamic influences were central rather than peripheral. Evangelicalism was a religious upstart in the eighteenth-century South. It was a rising movement by the time of the Revolution and then a culturally central presence (albeit with many challengers) in the antebellum era. Appearing culturally dominant from the Civil War era to the mid-twentieth century, it now exists as an important tradition within a region that still statistically has something of an evangelical belt but is rapidly diversifying.³

Religion in the American South emerged as part of a globalized, transnational movement of peoples from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Prior to about 1820, African slaves constituted the single largest group of migrants arriving on American shores. Enslaved people employed a variety of strategies and developed new forms of religious expression in acculturating to their lives on the new continent. At the same time, they were at the very bottom of an international globalized economic order that empowered some of the greatest wealth-producing machines—sugar and cotton plantations, for example—that had ever existed in human history. Enslaved people experienced social deaths and entered a world where they were without history and without honor. But over the course of the evangelical revolution, Africans contributed religion expressed as bodily movement, communal rituals, and emplaced interactions with the natural world. Peoples of African descent thus exerted an immense influence even over those who believed them to be lacking in honor.

Early modern English and European settlers in North America shared a world of wonder and a sense of embodied practices with Africans who were ostensibly heathen while they were Christian. This became clearer as evangelical Awakenings reached the South in the later eighteenth century. In this religious movement, Scots Irish communal rituals of immanent transcendence merged with African notions and practices of bodily expression. In a sense, Africans helped teach an entire culture a different way of experiencing religion in and through the body. Consequently, religious seekers adopted, if unconsciously and insensibly, ways of enacting relationships with transcendent beings. These actions synthesized learned motor behaviors from vastly disparate parts of the world to invoke ritually powerful emotions. Even in a Protestant-dominated region as the American South became, religious expression has been embedded, embodied, and environmentally patterned. This is true whether we are talking about scattered Anglican churches in eighteenth-century Virginia, African American praise houses in the nineteenth century, or suburban megachurches in contemporary Tennessee.

Much of the scholarship in American religious history is bound by belief and doctrine. Religious studies scholars have usefully critiqued the Protestant bias in the historical study of religion. But here is the paradox: in American religious history it is difficult to conceive of a place other than the American South where religious expression is more about embodiment and emplacement. Part of the story of religion as more than belief in the American South is the struggle to contain religious experience within right belief. And it is a history centrally featuring the constant pushing of religious experience beyond those boundaries, into embodiment and through embodiment, into the larger channels of American culture.⁴ This is the history that produced the transcendental blues of southern religion.

Christianity and Race in the American South takes short snapshots of the world of southerners who worshiped lustily at camp meetings even as they bought and sold slaves at the market; who invented much of American popular culture even as their dominant religious institutions were among the most vociferous critics of that popular culture, precisely because it was so bodily expressive; whose practices involved bodily movements in particular embedded spaces obscured or hidden from dominant powers; and whose poorer residents, white and black, gave voice to apocalyptic visions far removed from the gospel of progress. In the twentieth century, if southern churches slumbered in cultural captivity, southern culture held the nation captive. People responded to the elemental force of its blues, country, and gospel music, its evocation of the most fundamental emotions of human life, and its literary grapplings with the most profound questions of race and American history. These literary, poetic, and musical productions drew from many sources, of course, but always were embedded in both a blues sensibility and a biblical history and lore.⁵

†

Terms such as community have long defined southern culture. And in a recent survey of what (if any) generalizations still hold true for the South, journalist and author Tracy Thompson concludes that a particular tribalized form of community and an emotional religiosity still characterize regional culture. Thompson writes that the box of southern identity has two constants, the two great institutions that have defined the limits of the available contents: evangelical religion and slavery. And yet, the part of the box of southern identity represented by those two is shrinking. While the past is never dead, sometimes it does seem past, or amenable to change. If the South won’t be defined by the Confederacy, then what will define the region? The most important element, Thompson suggests, is a sense of community forged under the conditions that obtained in the South. Despite the suburbanization of the South, the region still bears the imprint of that deep sense of community and an almost tribal definition of kin.⁶

That may be the case. Yet from Jamestown to the present, wrenching, sweeping, community-altering change is a central theme of southern history. And religion has acted as a vital agent of those transformations. From a global seventeenth century subregion of the Caribbean world, to the massive internal migrations that formed the South of the antebellum era, to the fundamental and astounding upheavals (to use Abraham Lincoln’s words) wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the civil rights struggle and cultural explosions of the twentieth century, to the ongoing experiment in increased pluralism and prosperity balanced alongside certain ways of life and religious practices still disproportionately represented in the region, southern cultural history always has been intertwined with the formation and re-formation of religious identities. This book narrates and interprets key selected moments of that history. In doing so, I hope it deepens an understanding of the constructions and transformations of race and Christianities in the American South.

ONE

Proud and Undutifull: Religion, Violence, and Death in the Early South

Before the South was evangelical, it was largely not Christian. Before the South turned inward and provincial, it looked outward toward a multicultural world. Before it developed a separate cultural and political identity, it was part of a larger colonizing project whose economic entrepôts were in the Caribbean rather than on the North American mainland.¹

The South’s evolution from a polyglot homeland of varied Indian chiefdoms and struggling European outposts to a world of plantations run by powerful slave owners and worked by nearly four million slaves involved a transformation of its religious culture. If an observer in 1700 had picked a location that would in future decades and centuries become famous as the Bible Belt, he or she likely would have chosen Massachusetts or Connecticut. Virginia, with its struggling tobacco economy, would not have been selected, nor would have Florida and its frequently beleaguered Spanish missions, the Caribbean outpost and Indian-slave-trading center at Charles Town, the Creek and Choctaw shatter zones in the Mississippi valley, the Catholic refuge of Maryland, or North Carolina and its medley of Quakers, Moravians, Catawbas, skeptics, and indifferent backcountry traders.²

Native religious practices, Christian and Islamic traditions of widely varying origins, spiritual worlds based on West and Central African beliefs, and irreligion and indifference coexisted in this early South. They competed with each other in start-up enterprises from hell like Virginia, in Spanish colonial outposts such as Florida, and in precarious French experiments in attempting to create some semblance of what continental Europeans conceived of as civilization in the bayous and swamplands of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.

During these years, religious allegiance was up for grabs. No one could have known who would end up as the victor in a multipolar world where Native peoples as well as European colonial competitors to the English possessed advantageous geographic positions and cultural alliances. No one foresaw the way in which the religious cosmologies and practices of early Anglo-Americans would meld into an evangelical enthusiasm that eventually marked the region indelibly. And finally, none but a few religious visionaries would have understood this troubled European experiment as the eventual base for an Anglo-American empire of slavery and liberty.

Americans later discerned divine plans in this entire process. But contemporaries witnessed the way colonial Christianity fostered and extended Iberian, French, and Anglo-American imperial powers. In the period from the establishment of Saint Augustine by the Spanish in Florida (1565), to the settlement of Jamestown (1607) and Charleston (1670), to the Stono Rebellion (1739), historical currents and imperial contests pressed against each other as they headed toward as-yet-uncertain end points. Arguably, the least likely of those destinations would have been an evangelical empire dominated by an Anglo-American slaveholding class whose ideology depended on the extension of Christian civilization even to the slave quarters.

This chapter and the next, covering the period from Jamestown through the American Revolution, narrate a portion of how that outcome began to emerge by the late eighteenth century. They also point to the surprisingly accidental and precarious process by which the outward-looking global South of the seventeenth century over time began to form an identifiably distinct religious culture that turned inward.

La Florida

Thanks to their vast expansion into and wealth in silver and slaves from Mexico and Central and South America, the Spanish and Portuguese established the advantage in the early South. In the northern reaches of their early empire, Florida was a key outpost on the North American continent. Florida blocked English expansion, Spanish imperial theorists believed, and thus defended the one true faith against heretics and heathens. It also proved valuable in servicing Spain’s more important colonies in the Caribbean. King Philip II ordered Menendez de Aviles to deal with the threat of French settlement in La Florida. He did so, cold-bloodedly, in 1565, overrunning the French settlement at Fort Caroline and executing most of the survivors of a French shipwreck who washed ashore at Saint Augustine. The Spanish Crown also encouraged the establishment of missions wherever the Spanish Empire reached. Conversion was to foster and further conquest.³

The Franciscans saw La Florida as a testing ground for their missionary enterprise. They could scarcely have picked a less promising spot. Spanish ideas of Roman Catholic ritual depended on settled towns for the imparting of sacraments. In 1568 Father Juan Rogel labored to teach the Calusa Indians the catechism. He disapproved of their visits to burial grounds to ask the advice of the spirits of the departed. The Calusas, Rogel noted, told me to leave them alone; they did not want to listen to me. He bribed them with handouts of corn, but when the food ran out, so did the Indians.⁴

Throughout the seventeenth century, the number of Spanish missions grew in La Florida. Persistent conflicts with the Natives, both Christianized and those who resisted the gospel, hampered any effective mission system. Hostile Indian responses to Christianity in the seventeenth century culminated when the Guales of Florida burned down the largest early mission and killed several friars. What have we to hope for except to become slaves? asked the Guale leader of the revolt. Conversion efforts then extended into the interior and Panhandle regions of Florida. These initially appeared to have some success, in part because the Spanish adopted ceremonial gift-giving rather than coercion and condemnation as their conversion strategy. Also, the friars learned to honor the lineage and inheritance patterns of Natives. Friars established doctrinas, essentially mission villages where resident priests instructed the Indians of local chiefdoms, and visitas, where friars visited satellite villages of more distant places to say Mass. Missions moved westward from the Atlantic coast into the interior of La Florida, numbering twenty-three by 1616. By the 1620s, ten additional ones reached as far northward as the Santa Catalina mission on Saint Catherines Island off the coast of present-day Georgia. By midcentury, about forty doctrinas served about 15,000 Indians. Eighty-five percent of them were in Apalachee, in the present-day Florida Panhandle.⁵

Beginning in the 1630s, the Spanish focused their efforts among the Apalachee in present-day northern Florida. They extended gifts of Spanish products to Apalachee leaders, who saw a promise of access to power as well as material goods. By the 1640s a Spanish deputy governor took up residence to represent the interests of the Crown in a part of the province located far away from Saint Augustine. Boats carrying goods from Apalachee to Havana and Veracruz evaded the taxes required when going through Saint Augustine. Smuggling by soldiers and friars also brought considerable wealth to northern Florida. Hostility toward the demands of the Spanish exploded again in 1647, when mission work in Apalachee halted following the assassination of three Franciscans stationed there. Led by non-Christian Apalachee and Chisca Indians, the 1647 rebellion resulted in the burning of several missions and a huge ensuing battle between a Spanish army and thousands of Indian warriors. The Franciscans blamed that revolt on Spanish soldiers and secular rulers, who had made exorbitant demands for tribute and labor from Indians. The Spanish military shot back that the religious demands imposed by the friars, including the cessation of Native religious customs, had enraged Native Floridians and caused them to revolt.

Eventually Spanish military forces regained control. They provided the protection necessary to extend the mission system during the second half of the seventeenth century. Padres from this era taught Natives how to use the products of European civilization and Christianity, including iron nails for construction. The Spanish built large wooden crosses to replace the ball game poles that historically dominated the central portion of Indian villages. At one mission, an organ pumped out sacred music. At the most successful missions, Indians learned to read Spanish, recited the Ten Commandments and Seven Deadly Sins, and flagellated themselves during Holy Week in remembrance of the suffering of the Christian Savior. The Indians also served as human pack mules for Spanish goods, with Indian porters required to carry seventy-five pounds of cargo on long journeys to and from Saint Augustine. On one such journey, two hundred Apalachee Indians departed, but only ten returned. The rest starved to death. Little wonder that one group of non-Christian Indians, when queried why they would not convert, replied that Christian Natives were effectively enslaved.⁶

The high point of the missions at midcentury would not survive the alliance of European competitors and non-Christian Indians from the north and west, whose raids on Apalachee villages became more frequent toward the end of the century. By then, the colony was a patchwork of indigenous villages of shifting rivalries and alliances. When the Apalachees took up Catholicism, they used alliances with the Spanish to ward off enslavement of themselves and captured people from rival tribes instead. This failed to stem the rapid decline of their regional power.⁷

From the north, the Yamasees, later to fight their own brutal war against the English, attacked Apalachee and other chiefdoms and villages in Florida, seeking slave captives for sale in South Carolina. Soon the raids grew so effective that some Apalachees joined the Yamasees and other rival groups, recognizing that the Spanish could no longer effectively protect them. The English also made alliances with the Muscogulge, a branch of the Apalachees who had moved eastward and lived in the dangerous territory between Carolina and Florida. In 1702 British and Muscogulge troops attacked north Florida and, in the words of a contemporary, "destroy’d the whole Country, burnt the Towns, brought all the Indians, who were not kill’d or made Slaves, into our own Territories, so that there remains not now, so much as one Village with ten Houses in it, in all Florida, that is subject to the Spaniards."8

By 1706 the interior of northern Florida had been abandoned, and the system of missions and visitas had virtually disappeared. Spanish efforts returned to protecting their forts along the Atlantic coast. Millennial dreams of Christianizing Natives had perished. Meanwhile, Indians in La Florida had been drawn into a geographically extensive slave trade. This massive exchange system in Indian bodies, centered in Charles Town, compelled a horrific expansion of slaving wars that helped to depopulate the Southeast. Between 1670 and 1717, somewhere between fifteen to thirty thousand people, or at least half the total number of Native slaves sold through Carolina, hailed from La Florida. Through the trade in slaves, Florida ironically supplied much of the material for what economic success early South Carolina experienced.

While the Florida mission system collapsed, the Spanish presence nevertheless consistently menaced the English to the north. The Spanish lured slaves from the English colonies with promises of freedom in exchange for service in the Spanish military. The results would be felt especially during the fight for colonial dominance on the southeastern seaboard and in the interior of North America in the eighteenth century. That struggle would become part of an apocalyptic vision of English-Protestant versus Spanish-Catholic conflict, the battle that surely would (many contemporaries thought) determine the future of Christendom.

Race, Religion, and the Colonization of Early Virginia

The Spanish presence in the New World also fostered English desire for exploration and colonization. Virginia presented many opportunities for the English, who were eager to establish a viable outpost in North America following the earlier adventures of explorers such as Sir Walter Raleigh, as well as a small band of Jesuits and an Indian convert who arrived from Cuba in 1570. Early settlers possessed numerous reasons for colonization. They sought to advance Protestantism and the national interest of England, as well as their own profit. By the early seventeenth century, long experience with colonizing and ruling Ireland convinced English investors and propagandists that the best way to transfer a social order and transform a Native population was to plant a tightly controlled colony of people forced to be virtuous by strict oversight. The first Charter for Virginia, from April 1606, delegated lands to English settlers in the hopes of spreading Christianity and civility to those who yet lived in miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God. Later charters repeated the aim of at once pursuing political and economic aims and Christian goals. When you advance religion, you advance together with it Your owne profit, an Anglican minister reassured members of the Virginia Company of London.⁹

The conventional designation of Virginia as the mercantilist money colony and New England as the religious settlement understates the sense of religious identity of those who envisioned the settlement of the early South. Some early Anglo-Virginians arrived with ideas of Christianizing the New World. Corporate financiers in England funded English settlers, who were to propagate the true faith and reinforce the English empire against its Catholic competitors. They linked religion and civilization and looked to the world of the supernatural to explain their mission, justify their wars and conquests, and comprehend how God would have them govern the world.

Virginia’s leaders reinforced their prayers and pleas with the harsh punishment for sins outlined in the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, first codified in 1611–12 as an attempt to enforce order in the desperately struggling young colony. The Lawes prescribed oral daily prayers, forbade impious statements against the king or the Christian religion, and punitively penalized an array of other types of misconduct, whether taking corn from another person’s ground, practicing sodomy, or blaspheming God (this latter offense being met with the punishment of a bodkin through [the] tongue). The code outlined curses against enemies within and external to the colony. Colonial leaders quickly published the laws so that potential investors in the Virginia Company knew what kind of order had been established.¹⁰

Grim reality soon dashed millennial expectation. Early Jamestown was a death trap; over 80 percent of early settlers died. Placed in a singularly infelicitous location, dogged by mosquito- and water-borne diseases, attacked by Natives (whom they often attacked first), and peopled by a troublesome class of Englishmen, the fort at Jamestown drove men to despair. Virginia governor John Smith, the intrepid English adventurer whose self-aggrandizing but extensive writings provide an indispensable source for the early history of Virginia, realistically assessed the character of many early settlers vis-à-vis the grandiose hopes expressed in Virginia’s charters: Much they blamed us for not converting the Salvages, when those they sent us were little better if not worse. One early colonist, Hugh Pryse, ran out one day in the winter of 1609–10 and cried out, There is no God! If there was, he said (according to the 1625 remembrance of an early governor of the colony), he would not allow the sufferings of the settlers to continue. Pryse got his comeuppance the next day when Native people killed him and a companion. Afterward, wolves disemboweled Pryse’s corpse.¹¹

God’s lesson for Mr. Pryse, and for everyone, was unmistakable. Virginians, like New Englanders, knew that events in the natural world communicated divine messages. Virginia was a wilderness where Satan ruled heathen societies. John Smith portrayed Indian religious practices as subservience to Satan. Indians fashion themselves as neare to his shape as they can imagine, he commented. Many of his descriptions of the Devill probably refer to the ambiguous trickster figure Okee, a god (or perhaps a number of figures grouped under that name) solicited and given offerings as part of Powhatan agricultural ritual ceremonies. Within this world of Indian religious ritual, Smith could see the figure only as a singular Satan.¹²

Bodily decorations and coverings of Native Virginians suggested their consorting with the demonic. One English observer saw a Native man wearing through ear piercings a half-yard-long green and yellow snake, which while lapping her selfe about his necke oftentimes familiarly would kisse his lips. Native religious structures and practices horrified English observers. With their singing, chanting, and use of incense in rituals and festivals, Indian religious customs reminded Protestant Englishmen of papist ritualists or of English witches. One English minister insisted that until their Priests and Ancients have their throats cut, there would be little hope of converting Native peoples in the Chesapeake.¹³

Frequent violent conflicts with the Natives quickly soured the English Virginians on some of their earlier visions of their own city on a hill. Theirs was more like a settlement set upon a swamp. Anglo-Indian conflict in 1622 decimated the English population (by about one-third) and destroyed most of the English possessions west of Jamestown. Stockholders and settlers alike considered themselves the blameless victims of a murderous attack in that year. Edward Waterhouse, an early English chronicler of the colony, explained that the English had hoped to entice Natives to observe Christian ways. That kindness had been met by violence. The unprovoked massacre of English settlers gave the English the right to destroy them who sought to destroy us. Englishmen would gain victory "by force, by surprise, by famine in burning their Corne, by destroying and burning their Boats, Canoes, and Houses, . . . by pursuing and chasing them with our horses, and blood-Hounds to draw