The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (The Richard Hampton Jenrette Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts)

The Beauty of

HOLINESS

T H E R ICH A R D H A M P TON J E N R ET T E Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts

The Beauty of

Holiness Anglicanism & Architecture in Colonial South Carolina Louis P. Nelson T H E U N I V E RSI T Y OF NORT H CA ROLI NA PR ESS Chapel Hill

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

© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed and set in Bembo by Rebecca Evans Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-INPUBLICATION 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. ISBN 978-0-8078-3233-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 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.S68N452009 726.5v80975709033—dc222008029866 cloth12 11 10 09 085 4 3 2 1

For Kristine

This page intentionally left blank

CONT ENT S

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PA RT I Constructing Material Religion 1. The City Churches 13 2. The Diversity of Countries, Times, and Men’s Manners 57 3. Builders and Building Culture 113 PA RT I I Belief and Ritual in Material Religion 4. Sensing the Sacred 141 5. The Sacramental Body 175 6. The Beauty of Holiness 217 PA RT I I I Material Religion and Social Practice 7. Carolina in Ye West Indies 253 8. Anglican Architecture and Civic Order 279 9. Pulpits, Pews, and Power 309 PA RT I V Revolutionary Changes to Material Religion 10. Building the “Holy City” 333 Conclusion 365 Appendixes 369 Notes 387 Bibliography 447 Index 475

This page intentionally left blank

ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

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 the MESDA 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 x

ACKNOWLEDGMENT S

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 UVA 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 UVA, 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 UVA. 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.

ACKN OWLEDGM ENT S

xi

This page intentionally left blank

I NTRODUCT ION

“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. I .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.

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

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

F IGURE I.2 View of churchyard, St. James Church, Goose Creek (Photo by author)

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. 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 IN TRODUCT IO N

3

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 4

INTRODUCTION

F IGURE 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)

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 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 IN TRODUCT IO N

5

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. 6

INTRODUCTION

F IGURE I.4 St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County, 1762–69 (Photo by author)

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 IN TRODUCT IO N

7

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 8

INTRODUCTION

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 IN TRODUCT IO N

9

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.

10

INTRODUCTION

PA RT I

Constructing Material Religion

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1 T H E CI T Y CH U RCH E S

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 (FIG. 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’

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

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

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. 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 T H E CITY CHURCHES

15

F IGURE 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).

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. 16

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

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 SPG 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 T H E CITY CHURCHES

17

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 SPG 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 18

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1. 4   William Hall, St. Philip’s Church, ca. 1820 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church)

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. 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 T H E CITY CHURCHES

19

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 (FIG. 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 20

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

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

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 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 T H E CITY CHURCHES

21

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

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. 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 22

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

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

F IGURE 1.7 Nicholas Hawksmoor, St. Alphege’s Greenwich, 1714 (Reprinted from Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches: Architecture and Theology [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000]; reproduced with permission)

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 half of the eighteenth century. Essential to its authority as a fashionable aesthetic was its dissemination from the cosmopole throughout the British Empire via prints and architectural treatises. However, when Johnston was in London, these churches were not yet fashionable, for neither St. Alphege’s nor its counterparts had yet been built. But their architectures were being hotly debated. The early 1710s, the years prior to the completion of these London churches, was a season of great debate over the proper form of a city church. In the years immediately following the establishment of the church commission, two notable architects, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and one clergyman, George Hicks, drafted recommendations for the design of these new churches. The recommendations of the two architects focused largely on the location, exterior form, and materials of the new churches.⁵⁴ Vanbrugh argued that the churches should be isolated on their site, free from adjacent buildings. Such a location not only gives them “Respectfull Distinction & Dignity which Churches Always ought to have,” but it also offers easy access and serves as a “great Security from Fire.” Churches, Vanbrugh believed, should also be placed in such a manner that their exterior form might be viewed “to the best Advantage, as at the ends of Large and Strait Streets, or in the Sides of Squares and Other open places.” As a result of their prominent locations, Wren argued, “those fronts as shall happen to lie most open in view should be adorned with porticos, both for beauty and convenience; which, together with spires, or lanterns...may be of sufficient ornament to the town.” Vanbrugh extended the importance of the tower from civic ornament to religious signifier: every church should have a tower “to shew at a distance what regard there is in [that place] to Religious Worship.” From his extensive experience with church design, Wren determined that the ideal Anglican church would be designed as an auditory, seating no more than 2,000, with all seats located within “50 feet distant before the Preacher, 30 feet on each side, and 20 behind the pulpit.” He went on to say, “By what I have said, it may be thought reasonable that [a] new Church should be at least 60 Feet broad, and 90 feet long, besides the Chancel at one End, and the Belfry and Portico at the other.” As Peter Guillery has recently shown, however, Wren’s emphasis on these auditory proportions was not entirely original; there were in the London suburbs a 24

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

handful of earlier seventeenth-century churches that already exhibited the essentials of the auditory plan.⁵⁵ The recommendations submitted to the commissioners by Rev. George Hicks, an important biblical scholar, turned greater attention to liturgical concerns and interior fittings.⁵⁶ Hicks strongly recommended that churches align east-west in the ancient tradition, a defense he raised in support of most of his recommendations. Hicks also stressed the importance of a walled precinct surrounding the church that included houses for various church officials. On the interior of the church, Hicks argued for fonts near the western entrances and chancels raised two or three steps above the floor of the nave. The chancel should be “free from all fixed seats, but have such as may easily be brought in at the time of the H[oly] communion for the communicants to kneel at with their faces towards the altar.” He also disapproved of high box pews, which allow “the occasion of much deplorable irreverence” and “occasion the less devout to look, who it is that comes in.” In their place, Hicks recommended long narrow pews, “that but one row of people can sit in them,” and benches in the aisles “for the poorer common sort.” A number of factors suggest that these three letters were circulated fairly widely in elite Anglican circles in London. Wren’s letter was considered significant enough by his son to have been published many decades after his death. Not only do multiple copies of Vanbrugh’s letter survive, but it also appears to have elicited a direct written response in the form of Hicks’s letter, which also survives. These letters evidence a much larger dialogue about the appropriate nature of Anglican church design that animated London circles in the years immediately prior to Gideon Johnston’s arrival in the city. Considering all of these recommendations and adopting most, the committee of church commissioners, appointed in 1711, adopted a set of resolutions on the design of new churches in the summer of 1712.⁵⁷ On the forms of church exteriors, the commissioners agreed that the churches were to stand on open, prominent sites, graced with both porticos and steeples. On the plans of the churches, the commissioners indicated that each church should have a large space at the western end of the building for parish business. The chancel was to be raised three steps above the floor of the nave, and the font should be large enough to allow for dipping when so desired. The pews should all be of equal height, with seats facing the Communion table and low enough for all to be seen either sitting or kneeling. The middle aisle was to have moveable seats for the “lower sort” that would slide under the pew seats when not in use. But evidence for an animated debate about church design is not limited only to the three surviving letters and the commissioners’ resolutions. In the same years that the commission was considering recommendations and drafting resolutions on church design, they also hired a handful of London architects to begin producing plans and wooden models of proposed church designs.⁵⁸ A substantial number of drawings that overlay the proposed situation of a church on an existing site survives in the Lambeth Palace Library T H E CITY CHURCHES

25

F IGURE 1.8 Plan for church (Fulham Palace Papers, MS 2750-43, Lambeth Palace Library)

F IGURE 1.9 Plan for church (Fulham Palace Papers, MS 2750-57, Lambeth Palace Library)

collections. Two examples from this set of drawings illustrate the range of plans then under consideration (FIGS. 1.8 and 1.9). By the summer of 1714, a number of these architectural models had been completed.⁵⁹ The models were housed in chambers in Lincoln’s Inn rented by the commission, where one Englishman attended a 1714 meeting of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Before the meeting, Ralph Thoresby “looked at the curious and noble models of many churches proposed to be built; this pleasant room being where the Commissioners meet upon that account in the forenoon...[a]nd this Society in the afternoon.”⁶⁰ By 1733 architects had completed seventeen models.⁶¹ Although none of the models survive, a 26

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1.10   T. L. Donaldson, Ten Models for the 1712 Church Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, 1835 (Reprinted from Howard Colvin, “Fifty New Churches,” Architectural Review 107 [1950])

nineteenth-century architect, T. L. Donaldson, drew plans of ten of them, and C. R. Cockerell drew elevations of two others (FIG. 1.10). Donaldson indicated that the interior fittings were “accurately and minutely modelled and...easily seen, as the roofs were fitted with hinges, so as to lay open the interior.”⁶² After 1733 the seventeen models were transferred to Westminster Abbey, where they were housed for at least a century. The design and construction of city churches commanded a great deal of attention in the years Gideon Johnston was resident in London. Two eminent English architects and at least one respected clergyman and scholar had drafted recommendations for church design. Weighing the recommendations of each, the full commission had by the summer of 1712 drafted a set of resolutions intended to guide the construction of the new churches. London’s leading architects had been at work building a set of models giving T H E CITY CHURCHES

27

form to proposed church designs. By 1714 a number of these models were housed in chambers jointly occupied by the church commissioners and the SPCK (the sister organization of the SPG, the organization to which Johnston was reporting). The close connections between the church commissioners, the SPCK, the SPG, and the bishop of London meant that the architectural program for the new churches must have been a regular topic of conversation among the London clergy and other leading Anglicans. Before Johnston departed London, the walls of St. Alphege’s, Greenwich, the first of these new churches, had been completed, and five others were begun.⁶³ It is almost inconceivable that during his two-year stay in London, Johnston had not participated in numerous discussions about the design of city churches. The final form of St. Philip’s reflects a number of design features promoted during these London discussions. The most obvious instance is the use of not one but three monumental porticos, features that had been so strongly encouraged by both Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh and included in the commissioners’ final resolutions. It is possible that the highly unusual arrangement of the triple porticos of St. Philip’s is a literal interpretation of their resolution that “there be handsome Porticoes [plural] at the West end of each Church.”⁶⁴ Instead of conforming the church to the existing urban plan, the commissioners for St. Philip’s chose to disrupt the city’s grid plan and position their church porticos as the visual terminus of the major northsouth avenue through the city. As celebrated in the Gentleman’s Magazine description, St. Philip’s “has a very advantageous situation, at the upper end of a broad and extensive street.” The restructured proportions of the nave appear to respond to Wren’s recommended dimensions for auditoria; after 1720 the nave of the church was dramatically reduced from 100 feet by fortyfive feet to a much more compact seventy by sixty-two feet. The church plan also includes a western vestibule, which answered the commissioners’ desire that “there be at the West end of each church, a convenient Large Room for Parish business.” In many ways, the form and plan of St. Philip’s reflects the debates over church design in London just a few years earlier. The rules and recommendations drafted by London architects, clergy, and church commissioners, however, established only a building program; colonial builders turned to a wide array of printed visual sources as they sought to implement that program. The design source for the cupola appeared in one of the earliest and most important of the English architectural pattern books, Colin Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1715). After plans and elevations of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, and an original design for a church in Lincolns Inn Fields in London, Campbell included a plan and elevation for Thomas Archer’s then-incomplete church of St. Philip’s in Birmingham (1709–25) (FIG. 1.11). While far less sophisticated than its English model, the design of St. Philip’s cupola bears close resemblance to Archer’s (compare to FIG. 1.1). Both rise in two tiers capped by a dome carrying a lantern. The lower, much larger tier is in each case multisided with arched openings in the faces flanked by pilasters at the corners. While 28

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1.11 Thomas Archer, St. Philip’s, Birmingham, 1708–15, west elevation as published in Colin Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715, plate 11 (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

the cupola on Archer’s church has only four sides and that in Charleston has eight, the complexity of the Archer design as printed in the volume could easily have been mistaken for an octagonal form. As in the colonial example, the upper tier in the Archer design is far less substantial than the lower, and it carries a clock face. Supporting St. Philip’s cupola is a church body that also bears remarkable resemblance to Archer’s church. Large arched windows alternating with giant-order pilasters punctuate the tall walls of each. Archer’s use of a giant order to encase and organize the entire exterior was such a novelty in English church design that its use in Charleston almost certainly derives from the plates in Campbell or the London church models.⁶⁵ While the Gentleman’s Magazine image shows a balustrade only at the base of the cupola, other images and numerous references in the vestry minutes suggest that the walls of St. Philip’s were capped with a wooden balustrade in much the same way as in Archer’s design, which obviously provided a number of essential design features.⁶⁶ The world of visual sources in early South Carolina was not, however, constrained only to English Protestantism. Charles Woodmason, the clergyman who probably sent the west prospect of St. Philip’s to London, also described that church some years later as depending on a wholly unexpected source: in 1766 he noted that St. Philip’s “was built from the model of the Jesuit Church at Antwerp.”⁶⁷ Now known as St. Carolus Borromeus Church, the Jesuit church in Antwerp was built between 1615 and 1621 under the direction of both Father Aguilonius and Brother Peter Huyssens, with Huyssens probably responsible for the majority of the design.⁶⁸ The interior of the church was painted separately by Sebastian Vrancx and Jacob Peeters in the seventeenth century, and the model mentioned by Woodmason might have been an engraving of either Vrancx or Peeters’s painting (FIG. 1.12).⁶⁹ While the arcades are doubled in the Belgian church and only single in the colonial example, both churches have a basilican plan, with the aisles divided from the nave by classical arcades that support a prominent cornice from which springs a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Whereas the double arcade of the European model has true Doric columns and entablature supporting true Ionic columns, the provincial example replaces the columns with solid piers faced with Corinthian pilasters. It is also worth noting that the running frieze of the upper order in the Belgian church bears a great resemblance to that gracing the entablature in the colonial church. The builders of St. Philip’s might also have looked to the numerous prints of the building that inspired the Antwerp church: Vignola’s Il Gesu in Rome. A 1684 print of the façade together with an interior perspective reveals that the Charleston church has more direct correspondences with the church in Rome than does the church in Antwerp (FIG. 1.13). The print of Il Gesu represents the nave elevation as a single arcade faced with a Corinthian order complete with pilasters and cornice in a manner much closer to the Charleston church than the multiple orders of the Antwerp church. The church of St. Philip’s might have depended on Il Gesu in one other way as well. The 1739 30

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1.12 Jacob Peeters, Interior of Saint Carolus Borromeus Church, Antwerp, 1615–21

Roberts’s view of the city of Charleston is the only image to illustrate the building’s eastern elevation (FIG. 1.14).⁷⁰ The end wall of the building might be an attempt to emulate the exuberant west front of the Jesuit church, with its large centralized classical doorframe and its double tier of entablatures, columns, and piers supported by plinth blocks. A similarly designed façade appears also at the east end of the Anglican Christ Church in Philadelphia, begun in 1727 (FIG. 1.15). What none of these design sources provide, however, is a visual source for the most distinctive design feature of St. Philip’s: its three monumental T H E CITY CHURCHES

31

F IGURE 1.13  Vignola, Il Gesu, Rome (Reprinted from Rudolf Wittkower and Irma Jaffe, eds., Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution [1972], fig. 15b)

porticos. Such an arrangement was entirely original in contemporary church design. As already suggested, it is possible that the three porticos are simply a literal interpretation of the London church commissioners’ resolution that there be “handsome Porticoes to each church.” It is possible that they derive from the multiple porticos of Andrea Palladio’s so-called Villa Rotunda, the design of which had been available in printed form since the late sixteenth century (FIG. 1.16). The use of a domestic source on an ecclesiastical structure, however, seems unlikely. But there was one ancient building with which 32

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1.1 4 Detail of Bishop Roberts, Prospect of Charles Town, 1735–39 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

F IGURE 1.15 Detail of the east end of Christ Church, Philadelphia, 1727–44 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 1.16 Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture (London, 1714), book 2, plate 13 (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

seventeenth-century Anglicans were widely familiar that might have provided a precedent: the Temple of Jerusalem. The interest in ancient prototypes for modern designs is evident in the works of those architects building new churches in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In his “Discourse on Architecture,” Christopher Wren examined a wide range of ancient buildings, but he devoted significant attention to the Temple of Jerusalem. As demonstrated by his “Basilica for the Primitive Christians,” Nicholas Hawksmoor was also deeply concerned with ancient precedents for contemporary church design.⁷¹ As Pierre Du Prey has demonstrated, concern for ancient church history as a model for the formulations of church practice extended also to late seventeenth-century clergy. Leading Anglican divines studied the subject, often preaching and publishing as well, putting ancient prototypes at the fingertips of clergy throughout the British Empire.⁷² Early South Carolina libraries include numerous references to such volumes, including Josephus’s The History of the Jews, Lewis’s Hebrew Antiquities, William Cave’s Primitive Christianity; or, The Religion of the Ancient Christians in the First Ages of the Gospel, Joseph Bingham’s Origines Ecclesiasticae, or The Antiquities of the Christian Church, and others.⁷³ Interest in the ancient history of the church, including its Jewish precedents, could be found on both sides of the Atlantic. Late seventeenth-century authors were well aware of earlier studies of these subjects. In 1631 the Jesuit scholar Juan Bautista Villalpando published De Postrema Ezechielis Prophetae Visione, one of the most extensive accounts of the Temple of Jerusalem. In that volume, Villalpando included a plan of the temple that would be one of the most widely circulated representations of the building in the seventeenth century. His plan included a series of three spaces, a vestibulum, a sancta, and a sancta sanctorum (FIG. 1.17). When compared with the plan of St. Philip’s, these have distinct correspondences with the vestibule, nave, and chancel of the South Carolina church, but also with most city churches of this early eighteenth-century period. The building footprint also implies that its exterior elevations were ordered by a series of pilasters that alternate with windows in a manner evident on St. Philip’s. More significantly, however, the vestibulum is flanked by two side chambers, and these three chambers are accessible from the north, south, and west in a manner correspondent with the porticos of St. Philip’s. This pattern of access is perpetuated in other early representations of the temple. Among the earliest visual representations printed in an English volume, Joseph Meade’s 1643 plan established a visual formula for the temple that was intended by Meade and defended by later theologians as an appropriate model for contemporary church architecture (FIG. 1.18).⁷⁴ Although Meade precedes the sanctuary with an inner court and not a vestibule, the essential pattern of access remained the same. The formula established by Meade persisted in later plans, such as that published by Humphrey Prideaux in his The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews (London, 1716), a volume found in numerous South Carolina libraries (FIG. 1.19). T H E CITY CHURCHES

35

F IGU R E 1.17  Juan Bautista Villalpando, De Postrema Ezechielis Prophetae Visione, 1631 (Courtesy, Glasgow University Library)

F IGURE 1.18  Joseph Meade, A Plot of the Temple and the Courts, 1643 (Courtesy, the British Library)

F IGURE 1.19 Humphrey Prideaux, “Ichnography of the Temple of Jerusalem with a Description of the Same,” in The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews (London, 1716), plate opposite 1:112 (Courtesy, the British Library)

In Prideaux’s plan, in fact, the three gates of the inner court are represented as three inverted porticos. A mention of triple porticos at the temple even surfaced in Wren’s lengthy discussion of the Temple of Jerusalem in his unpublished “Discourse on Architecture.” Writing about the outer court—the Court of the Gentiles—Wren noted that “Herod built the Atrium Gentium...to be a triple portico [with] thick Pillars of the grosser Proportions.”⁷⁵ Given the intense interest in ancient models, and the Temple of Jerusalem in particular, among Anglicans, it is not impossible that the South Carolina church commissioners sought to model their new church on the plan of the Temple of Jerusalem. The triple porticos of St. Philip’s, which appear to T H E CITY CHURCHES

37

be unique in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and European church design, might be porticos framing their vestibule in emulation of the ancient temple. The possibility that the church commissioners understood their vestibule to be an “Atrium Gentium” of sorts is reinforced by the early practice in St. Philip’s of relegating blacks to the vestibule.⁷⁶ In this way, the vestibule functioned to separate races in ways consistent with the ancient atrium of the Gentiles. Opened for services by 1723 and completed a decade later, the church of St. Philip’s was a building conversant in the most current discussions of church design in London. Its scale and plan emulate those rising in these same years in the new suburbs surrounding the cosmopolitan capital. Aspects of the design derived from a multiplicity of visual sources, from prints to architectural pattern books and possibly to historical and theological treatises. It is no surprise that in 1774 the church was described as “a grand church, resembling one of the new Churches in London.”⁷⁷ Fully aware of their provincial location, the church commissioners of St. Philip’s used the architecture of their new city church to demonstrate a cosmopolitan fluency unmatched by seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century colonials anywhere else in the British Empire. THE COMPLETION OF ST. PHILIP’S IN 1733, however, did not mean that South Carolina’s cosmopolitan aspirations subsided. On February 8, 1751, the parish of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston petitioned the Governor’s Council to erect a second Anglican church in the city. The great increase in the number of inhabitants in Charleston and the inability of the parish church of St. Philip’s to contain the city’s Anglicans, they argued, necessitated dividing the parish and erecting a new church.⁷⁸ On June 14, 1751, Governor James Glen signed the bill into law, charging nine church commissioners with the responsibility of erecting the new edifice. The rare survival of extensive construction-era documentation and early vestry minutes for St. Michael’s allows a close examination of the complex and evolving design process of St. Michael’s Church, one of America’s most acclaimed colonial churches (FIG. 1.20).⁷⁹ Three days after the governor signed the parish’s 1751 Act of Establishment, the church commissioners of St. Michael’s placed an advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette, announcing that there “will be wanted for the said building, a large quantity of Bricks, Lime, fresh water Sand, Cyprus and Pine Timber, Plank, Boards, and Laths.”⁸⁰ The commissioners preferred to solicit “as many proposals as [possible] from different tradesmen, rather than Agree with one Particular person.”⁸¹ From the outset, it was assumed that St. Michael’s would be a very large, brick church built on the then-vacant site of the first St. Philip’s. The demolition of large portions of the early eighteenth-century city walls by the 1750s and the ensuing expansion of the city meant that the first St. Philip’s site was no longer at the city gates, but now at the city center.⁸² On October 23, only four months after the foundation of the parish, 38

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1.2 0 St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, 1752–61 (Photo by author)

the commissioners for St. Michael’s Church informed the public that they had “agreed on a plan for the same.” In the same advertisement, they made a call for bricklayers and carpenters, asking them “to apply to Isaac Mazyck and Benjamin Smith, Esqrs. in whose hands the plan is lodged.”⁸³ It was a design with which they were very pleased. At the outset, there appeared such a “general disposition for the building of the said Church, & Steeple in a Stately, Spacious, & Elegant manner...according to the present Plan” that they foresaw few problems raising the necessary funds.⁸⁴ In 1752 the church commissioners of St. Michael’s estimated the cost of the “Church, Pews & Steeple...the Plan of which Church with a Steeple for a Ring of Bells was accordingly agreed upon by the said commissioners” to be £30,000.⁸⁵ In the T H E CITY CHURCHES

39

Act of Establishment for the parish of St. Michael’s, the church commissioners were promised half of the estimated cost for the new church from public coffers. The other half was to come from the public subscription of pews. By October 1752, the commissioners had decided on a grand plan for the new church, one they knew would be extraordinarily expensive. The elite status of the men who occupied the post of church commissioner is probably best demonstrated by a brief review of the commissioners appointed to the task of erecting St. Michael’s Church in Charleston. These fifteen men were almost all wealthy merchants or attorneys resident in the city who led very active public lives.⁸⁶ Of the fifteen, only one, Edward Fenwick, was first a planter. Othniel Beale, William Bull II, Fenwick, Isaac Mazyck, Thomas Middleton, Charles Pinckney, and Benjamin Smith were among the wealthiest men in South Carolina.⁸⁷ Gabriel Manigault loomed over them all, however, as the richest in the colony. But these men were not just wealthy; they each had a vested interest in Charleston’s cosmopolitan identity. Ten of the commissioners held substantial mercantile interests in Charleston and three were prominent attorneys in the city. All fifteen commissioners were active in the colony’s political life as representatives in the Commons House of Assembly; most represented more than one parish over the course of their public career. Four of them—Othniel Beale, Edward Fenwick, Charles Pinckney, and George Saxby—served on the Governor’s Council during the construction of the church, while William Bull II served as lieutenant governor and Gabriel Manigault as the royal treasurer. Collectively, these men represented the most politically prominent personalities in the colony and the most affluent residents of the city. That only seven of the fifteen men who served as church commissioners at St. Michael’s were later listed as pewholders highlights the fact that the construction of an Anglican church was as much an endeavor of the public as of the parish.⁸⁸ Aware they were erecting a landmark building for the city, the commissioners of St. Michael’s turned to a range of new design sources not available to the commissioners of St. Philip’s. One of the most accessible sources would have been the collections of the Charleston Library Society, Charleston’s leading intellectual institution, of which at least nine of the commissioners were members. Seventeen South Carolina gentlemen—almost all merchants, attorneys, or other professional men—founded the society in 1748, only three years before the commencement of the church’s building program, “to save their descendants from sinking into savagery as a result of their remoteness.”⁸⁹ Five of the commissioners—William Bull II, Gabriel Manigault, Thomas Middleton, Charles Pinckney, and Benjamin Smith—played leading roles in the founding or governance of the society. The library, which by 1778 housed over 6,000 volumes, served as a center for intellectual life in late colonial South Carolina. As members of the society, these men would have had access to a wide variety of published architectural literature.⁹⁰ A 1770 list of the books in the collection includes works by architects Sir William Chambers, James Gibbs, John Harris, Batty Langley, and William Pain, among 40

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

others.⁹¹ At least seven of the fifteen commissioners are also known to have traveled to London sometime in the 1720s or 1730s. While in London, these men would have had the opportunity to inspect firsthand the city churches of Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, James Gibbs, and Thomas Archer. They might also have examined the many models constructed by Hawksmoor, Gibbs, and Archer for the 1711 Commission for the Building of Fifty New Churches.⁹² The first reference to the design of St. Michael’s appears in the February 22, 1752, description of the elaborate cornerstone ceremony: “The church will be built on the Plan of one of Mr. Gibson’s Designs; and, ‘tis tho’t, will exhibit a fine Piece of Architecture when completed: The Steeple being designed much larger than that of St. Philip’s.”⁹³ The identity of the Mr. Gibson cited in this account has been the subject of much discussion.⁹⁴ Some local historians have suggested Robert Gibson, the South Carolina surveyor who in 1765 authored Gibson’s Theory and Practice of Surveying. Notations made in 1856 by Gibson’s youngest daughter in a family copy of that volume notes in the margins that Gibson “was 28 years old when he layed the corner stone” of St. Michael’s.⁹⁵ But the cornerstone was in fact laid by the royal governor, who was attended in a grand ceremony by “several of the Members of His Majesty’s Hon. Council, and other Gentlemen.” The account of the ceremony then indicates that “a Stone was then laid by each of the Gentlemen that attended His Excellency.” That notation probably suggests nothing more than Gibson’s presence at the ceremony. The generally accepted interpretation of this statement is that the body of designs from which the commissioners made their selection was misidentified through a journalistic error. In saying “Gibson,” it is argued, the author most likely intended to reference the 1728 publication of English architect James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture. The phrasing of the sentence “built on the Plan of one of Mr. Gibson’s Designs” implies that the commissioners selected one design from many, as they might from a pattern book. The striking similarity of the massing of St. Michael’s and Gibbs’s designs for St. Martin-in-theFields (FIG. 1.21), published in his architectural pattern book, substantiates this interpretation. Both buildings have a rectilinear body fronted by a western portico, above which rises a tall, elaborated steeple. The elevations of both are articulated with engaged pilasters alternating with two tiers of windows. The only significant difference in massing is that at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the western portico continues the roofline of the body of the church, whereas at St. Michael’s the western portico is smaller. In plan, both churches have a rectangular nave, prefaced by a vestibule flanked by stair halls, fronted to the west by a monumental portico, and terminated at the east by a shallow chancel recessed from the nave. The early references to the steeple, “being designed much larger than that of St. Philip’s,” further implicates Gibbs’s volume as an obvious design source. In his book, the architect had published a series of optional designs for steeples, codifying the visual formula of a steeple, a feature that by midcentury had become an essential element of Anglican T H E CITY CHURCHES

41

F IGURE 1.21   James Gibbs, “A Design for St. Martin’s in the Fields,” A Book of Architecture (London, 1728), plate 7 (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

church design. The cupola of St. Philip’s had been completed well before the publication of Gibbs’s book; the vestry of St. Michael’s seized upon the new design source as a way of bettering the celebrated design of the older church. The conformity of St. Michael’s to the basic Gibbsian formula leaves his architectural pattern book as an obvious visual source. But, like St. Philip’s, the commissioner’s design for St. Michael’s was not simply a provincial copy of a cosmopolitan design. It departed from the designs published in Gibbs’s volume in at least one significant way: the original plan of the church called for two monumental porticos, one centrally located on each of the northern and southern elevations. An entry in the vestry minutes of St. Michael’s from 1764 indicates that the foundations for this northern portico projected from the body of the church twelve feet,⁹⁶ suggesting that these side porticos were designed on the scale of the portico now to the west: “The Church Wardens acquainted the vestry that they had got about £280 Subscribed towards the building a handsome palisade fence, and a Pair of Large gates on the North Side of the Church upon which it was agreed that the fence should project from the Church as far as the extent of the foundation of the Portico originally intended and to be continued on a strait line, from East to West.”⁹⁷ Other vestry minutes demonstrate that the foundations for these porticos had been laid in as the walls of the building began to rise. In the summer of 1789, the vestry directed Bernard Downey, a bricklayer, to “build a parapet wall [in the churchyard] from the old foundations on the North and South sides of the said Church,” indicating that a similar portico had been started on the southern side of the building as well.⁹⁸ These porticos signal the commissioners’ own creativity by distinguishing the design of St. Michael’s from St. Martin-in-the-Fields while establishing a formal visual correspondence with the building intended to stand just across the street. On the same day in 1751 that Governor Glen signed the bill to erect the new church in Charleston, he also signed a bill for a new statehouse. From the beginning it was assumed that these buildings would occupy two of the four corners of the square that was intended to become the central square of the city, today the intersection of Meeting and Broad Streets (FIG. 1.22). On March 3, 1752, the journal of the Common House records a comment relating the two new buildings. Having found the northwest corner of the square too sandy to support the new statehouse, the committee recommends that the site be moved to the northeast corner. On the new site, the proposed statehouse would look south across Broad Street to the site of the new church: “Your Committee further begs leave to represent as their Opinion that the properest Place for erecting the said Building [the statehouse] in that Square will be across Meeting Street with the Front to extend twenty Feet on Broad Street including the Portico. And your committee having been inform’d that the Plan designed for that Building was one hundred feet square, have had the Ground they have here recommended admeasured & find that it will leave forty Feet between the Portico’s of St. Michael’s Church, and that of the State House.”⁹⁹ T H E CITY CHURCHES

43

F IGURE 1.22 Edmund Petrie, Ichnography of Charleston, South Carolina (1788). On the plan, St. Michael’s is building “F,” the statehouse is “G,” and the market building labeled “H” stands on the site originally suggested for the statehouse. The older St. Philip’s is “N.”

This passage indicates that the committee for the erection of the statehouse was familiar with the plans for the erection of the new church, and that those plans called for a northern portico. Since Benjamin Smith was a member of both building commissions, it is only reasonable to assume that the commissions of the two buildings would have conferred about their respective designs. If construction of the church foundations had begun, the commissioners of the statehouse could easily examine the foundations of the new church as they considered the design and placement of their own building.¹⁰⁰ From the outset, the design of St. Michael’s included prominent northern and southern porticos, one of which was to correspond to a prominent portico intended for the new statehouse under construction in these very same years just across the street. In choosing to include these side porticos on their design, the commissioners might have been responding to local practice. As the next chapter will demonstrate, the principal entrances into South Carolina churches had been through the center of the northern or southern elevations since the opening decades of the century. St. Philip’s, for example, even had prominent doors in these locations in spite of its triple porticos at the western end. There was even some local precedent for sheltering these center doors with porches or porticos; the first church in St. Thomas’s Parish, for example, had “a handsome porch on each side, upon Columns.”¹⁰¹ But given the cosmopolitan literacy of the church commissioners of St. Michael’s, local precedent probably weighed less heavily than London models. Unlike Gibbs’s published designs, none of which have side entrances, a majority of the models designed by other London architects did include such entrances, and a handful of these included side porticos as well. In his designs for St. Alphege’s in Greenwich, Nicholas Hawksmoor considered a variety of design options to shelter the side entrances. As built and as represented in an early engraving, St. Alphege’s had monumental transverse wings enclosing stairs and ornamented with a series of four engaged pilasters on each elevation, emulating a projecting portico (see FIG. 1.7). Similar side porticos with either engaged pilasters or freestanding columns appeared on Hawksmoor’s St. George’s, Bloomsbury (1720–30), Hawksmoor’s early design for Christ Church, Spitalfields, and Thomas Archer’s St. John’s, Westminster (1714–28).¹⁰² While the basic massing of the church and the design of the steeple seem to derive from Gibbs’s pattern book, the use of monumental porticos on the sides of the building more likely derives from other London churches and/or their architectural models.¹⁰³ Some months before construction began on the church, the location of the courthouse and its relationship to St. Michael’s had been reconsidered, eliminating the possibility of facing porticos on the two public buildings. Even so, the laying in of portico foundations indicates that the side porticos remained a part of the design through the early stages of construction. Sometime after the construction of the church had begun, however, St. Michael’s commissioners abandoned the two side porticos—but retained the T H E CITY CHURCHES

45

doors—and erected only the one portico on the west, resulting in a design that more closely approximate Gibbs’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Such was the weight given to the new churches in London, in fact, that even the roof trussing system installed by Samuel Cardy in St. Michael’s was understood to have London precedents. In a 1766 commentary on Anglicanism in South Carolina, Charles Woodmason indicated that “St. Michael’s Is a New built Church from a Model of that of Greenwich being Truss’d Roofd and no [interior] Pillars.”¹⁰⁴ As discussed in a later chapter, Cardy’s use of a closed truss with a single unbroken cord allowed him to span the width of the church without interior columns. Such a feat of engineering was associated in London with Hawksmoor’s widely celebrated St. Alphege’s. In St. Alphege’s, Hawksmoor had achieved an open, uninterrupted interior unmatched by those churches built in the previous generation by Wren. Hawksmoor’s truss for that church, in fact, had been published by Batty Langley in 1740. In St. Michael’s, Cardy opted for a truss system that was simpler in design and necessitated a steeper (less classical) roof slope. The fact that the column foundations were not removed until after the roof was in place, however, reflects the commissioners’ uncertainty about the ability of the new truss to span such a width. In a landscape with very few large buildings, spanning sixty feet without internal support must have been eyed with suspicion. The importance of St. Michael’s trussed roof and its emulation of St. Alphege’s did not go unrecognized. The commissioners were certainly proud of their design; on June 4, 1752, they paid a bill from Mortimer Sarrazin, a local engraver, who had been hired to engrave a copper plate of the church and to run 500 impressions.¹⁰⁵ It is unfortunate that not one of these images survives; as an image produced in the summer of 1752, it probably included the side porticos, giving the western elevation of the church an appearance not unlike that of St. Philip’s, excepting, of course, the steeple of which the commissioners were so proud. But the change in design necessitated the execution of a second set of engravings by Thomas You without the side porticos. In 1764 You advertised that he had a “Copper-plate view of St. MICHAEL’S CHURCH, Charles-Town, drawn by himself and neatly engraved in London.”¹⁰⁶ Once the church commissioners had settled on a design, they set out immediately to raise funds for the new church through pew subscriptions, which they solicited by advertising in the South Carolina Gazette and through personal application. Although the initial public response resulted in substantial subscriptions, the commissioners had great difficulty collecting any of the money. In their first request for funds from the governor, they explained, “Many subscribers inform us that they expect to see the work in some forwardness before they pay their respective subscriptions and many other Persons will not subscribe until they see the work begun.”¹⁰⁷ As a result, they considered the project “altogether at a stand” unless the governor supplied £3,500 to procure materials and to cover initial labor costs. By the early months of 1752, 45,000 bricks had arrived on the building site and the 46

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

governor had agreed to continue his support of the project. The church records indicate that this was the first of three £3,500 grants awarded from the public treasury by the governor in 1752.¹⁰⁸ The arrival of 110,000 bricks between June 23 and August 20, 1752, suggests that the walls of Charleston’s new city church were rising by late summer of 1752.¹⁰⁹ The governor awarded a fourth grant in April 1753 and a £1,000 grant in January 1754, fulfilling the promised total of £15,000. After significant progress had been made in 1752 and 1753, construction lagged; by 1755 the building was far from complete. Work on the church came to a standstill, and the steeple remained incomplete. In April of that year, the commissioners wrote to the governor to explain that the “building of the Body of the said Church and Steeple to the pitch it was then carried had wholly exhausted the whole sum of £15,000 which by Law was appropriated.”¹¹⁰ In September 1755, the governor awarded another £3,500 out of the Beacon Fund, since the new steeple would double as a harbor signal. The completion of the steeple appears to have consumed a majority of Cardy’s time and energy up to the summer of 1757. In June 1757, the Assembly awarded the final grant from public funds (£13,156) for the completion of the building’s interior, bringing the public investment in the church to £31,656. By 1759 and 1760, funds from pew subscriptions began to find their way into the coffers of the church treasury, to a total income of £21,877, or about two-fifths of the building’s total cost.¹¹¹ In his obituary of 1774, Samuel Cardy was described as “the ingenious Architect, who undertook and completed the Building of St. Michael’s Church in this town.”¹¹² In a colony where the vast majority of buildings— even substantial public buildings—have no record naming an architect, this obituary could be interpreted as a happy survival of one building’s author. That notion, however, projects the professional status of nineteenth-century architects onto the building practices of the eighteenth century. Although architectural history is prone to want an individual personality to celebrate as architect, the story of St. Michael’s, like those of its colonial counterparts, is far more complex.¹¹³ The design and construction of St. Michael’s clearly demonstrates that a great many people were involved in the building program. Drawing on both local precedents and cosmopolitan models, the original commissioners established a design on paper. The commissioners hired Cardy as a carpenter to execute a number of individual projects for the church—including the roof-framing system—and to oversee the construction process. With the shell completed and roofed, the commissioners contracted with Cardy to supervise other master-craftsmen in the construction of the interior fittings and the finishing details on both interior and exterior. By 1762 the church would stand complete, not the work of one man, not just a provincial copy of the famed St. Martin’s in London, but as one of the most sophisticated and rightfully celebrated churches erected in early America. In 1745 Anglicans in the remote reaches of St. Helena’s Parish, led by fellow planter and then–lieutenant governor William Bull, petitioned T H E CITY CHURCHES

47

F IGURE 1.23 Prince William’s Parish Church, Beaufort County, ca. 1751 (Photo by author)

the Colonial Assembly for the establishment of a new parish, initiating a process that ultimately produced one of the most significant designs in the eighteenth-century colony (FIG. 1.23).¹¹⁴ In response to their petition, the Colonial Assembly passed an act that established the parish of Prince William and appointed Lieutenant Governor William Bull, his son Stephen Bull, Robert Thorpe, James Deveaux, and John Greene as building commissioners. In 1747 the commissioners received fifty acres from the widow of Landgrave Edmund Bellinger for the new church and parsonage, locating the parish church immediately adjacent to Sheldon plantation, the Bull family seat in the new parish.¹¹⁵ By 1751 the commissioners had settled on a plan for the new church and had begun construction. Glazed headers mark out the same year in large numbers on the exterior of the eastern elevation.¹¹⁶ With the shell of the church complete by 1753, the commissioners requested funds from the Assembly in that year to finish and adorn the interior and to sell the pews.¹¹⁷ A decade after its completion, Charles Woodmason described the church in Prince William’s as “the second best Church in the Province, and by many esteem’d a more beautiful Building than St. Philip’s. It is far more elegant than St. Michael’s, & is beautifully pew’d and Ornamented.”¹¹⁸ To achieve such high accolades, the parish church of Prince William’s must have been a remarkable building. The church has long been associated with the Bull dynasty of planters in Prince William’s Parish.¹¹⁹ William Bull I, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor from 1738 to his death in 1755, played a major role in the establishment, funding, and construction of the parish church. In December of that year, Rev. William Langhorne wrote that he had “read Prayer’s and preached twice to a numerous congregation assembled...at the Honerable [sic] William Bull’s House....He is now building a very handsome brick church which 48

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

will be finished in a few months; for which he has been at the trouble to collect a subscription and contributed very largely himself.”¹²⁰ Bull had also applied to the SPG requesting that the parish be provided with a minister as an established mission of the society.¹²¹ William I’s financial support of the Anglican Church in South Carolina was the realization of his long-held interest in seeing the Church of England well established in the colony.¹²² In recognition of his prominent role in the church, William Bull I was buried under the chancel of the new church in Prince William’s. His two sons, Stephen Bull and William Bull II, were similarly active supporters of the Church of England. In 1736 Stephen was listed among the commissioners for two new chapels south of Charleston, one at Beach Hill in St. Paul’s Parish and another on the south side of the Combahee River near Hoopsa Neck, in the parish of St. Helena’s. William Bull II, the younger of the two brothers, served as a building commissioner for the new parish church in St. Michael’s in Charleston in the very same years that the new church in Prince William’s was being built. As the walls of the church in Prince William’s were rising in 1751, the commissioners for St. Michael’s were finalizing the plans for the new city church. William Bull II (lieutenant governor from 1759 to 1775) lies in the churchyard of Prince William’s under an elegant English chest tomb.¹²³ Like its two urban counterparts, the church in Prince William’s was a compact auditory. Doors in the center of the western, northern, and southern walls all provide access into a single fifty-foot-by-thirty-five-foot chamber (FIG. 1.24). A large venetian window opened through the eastern elevation and illuminated the interior chancel.¹²⁴ No evidence survives for the placement of the pulpit along one of the interior walls, suggesting that the pulpit

F IGURE 1.24 Plan of Prince William’s Parish Church, ca. 1751 (Drawn by Carl Lounsbury)

was probably freestanding amid the pews. Four monumental columns stand detached at the western end of the building and rise the full height of the church walls. The outermost of these align with six engaged columns that march down each of the long sides. Four engaged columns along the eastern elevation answer the four columns of the western portico. The church was probably covered by a single, fairly shallow gable roof that began as a projecting portico supported by the western columns and continued in a straight course eastward along the length of the building. There is no evidence that the church had foundations supporting a tower or steeple. Completed in the mid-1750s, the church was burned by the English in 1779. Although the church stood as a ruined shell for almost a half century, it was rebuilt in 1825, and a plan from that reconstruction gives some indication of the building arrangement in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the church was burned again by Union solders in 1865 and stands today as a brick ruin. The church in Prince William’s Parish took the form of an ancient Roman temple. An interest in the architectural traditions of ancient Rome, and later ancient Greece, fueled the English and French imagination through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Much of this interest derived from the expanding body of knowledge about ancient architecture. By the eighteenth century, great numbers of gentleman enthusiasts traveled to Italy on grand tours, archaeological expeditions uncovered the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculanaeum, and architects began to publish views and plans of ancient sites with increasing frequency. But the design of Prince William’s Parish Church was not derived from the firsthand inspection of an ancient Roman building. Born in South Carolina, William Bull never completed a grand tour. Although he was an incredibly important political figure in the early eighteenth-century history of the colony, even serving as acting governor for six years, Bull never departed American shores. Bull was not entirely original in his desire to build a church in the form of an ancient temple. Temple-form churches surfaced regularly in the designs for Queen Anne’s London church-building campaign of the 1710s. The records of the Church Building Commission include receipts paid to James Gibbs in 1713 for a model of a church “with a colonnade round it of Ionic Order,” which was probably the model described as “with peristilium” in a later list.¹²⁵ At least two models with hexastyle porticos in the Roman manner joined Gibbs’s fully peripteral temple fashioned after an ancient Greek temple. One of these was Gibbs’s model of the first and unexecuted design for St. Mary-le-Strand, which was fronted by six freestanding columns at the front while engaged columns surrounded the nave in the manner of Prince William’s. Since William Bull’s sons, William Bull II and Stephen, were in London at the prestigious Westminster School in the 1720s, one scholar has suggested that the church in Prince William’s depends on Gibbs’s model.¹²⁶ William Bull II’s appointment as a church commissioner for St. Michael’s demonstrates some interest in church architecture, and it has even been suggested that Bull had many personal connections to James Gibbs.¹²⁷ 50

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 1.25   Colin Campbell, “Church in a Vitruvian Style,” in Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 2, plate 27. The plate includes elevations, a section, and a plan (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

But William Bull need not have looked as far as London for inspiration for his Roman temple-church. Surely tapping into the discussions for new church designs taking place in London, Colin Campbell included in his Vitruvius Britannicus a “New Design of my Invention for a Church in the Vitruvian Stile” (FIG. 1.25). Although the Campbell church was designed on a grander scale than the colonial example, the essential form of the building is similar. The projecting porch supported by freestanding columns, the church body surrounded by engaged columns, and the very large eastern window lighting the chancel are shared by both Campbell’s design and the colonial church. In a discussion of his design, Campbell argued that his church closely T H E CITY CHURCHES

51

emulated the forms and ideals of the “Ancients,” who were “contented with one continued Pediment from the Portico to the Pastico,” whereas modern designs have “no less than three [porticos] in one side.” Campbell continued by arguing that those designs that depart from this model “must be imputed either to an entire Ignorance of Antiquity; or a Vanity to expose their absurd Novelties, so contrary to those excellent Precepts in Vitruvius, and so repugnant to those admirable Remains the Ancients have left us.”¹²⁸ Campbell’s close approximation of ancient Roman architecture as he understood it heightens the importance of identifying the church design in his pattern book as in the “Vitruvian” style. Surely Bull must have been pleased that, like Campbell’s, his design closely emulated those of the ancients. But if Bull looked to the Campbell design as inspiration to build a church in the form of a Roman temple, he might also have examined ancient sources. The plan of the colonial church appears to be modeled directly on a Roman temple in Tivoli as published by the sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio in his The First Book of Architecture, which appeared in English in the London edition of 1611 (FIG. 1.26).¹²⁹ Although Doric, not Ionic like the ancient model, the four freestanding columns supporting the pediment and six columns engaged to each long side of the “cella” of Prince William’s Church exactly duplicates the plan of Serlio’s temple at Tivoli. The four engaged columns that appear on the rear elevation of the temple at Tivoli and in the South Carolina church, but not in the Campbell design, suggests that Bull integrated design features from both sources in his church. Situating himself squarely in the tradition of the English gentry interested in appropriating the classical past as source material for contemporary design, William Bull, encouraged by the interest in temple-form churches emanating from London, found the temple in Tivoli an appropriate ancient source. While there appears to have been significant interest among the architects working for the commission in building a modern church on the model of an antique temple, no such church built on such an explicit antique model was ever constructed in eighteenth-century London. The modern Vitruvian temple, which captured the imagination of James Gibbs, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Colin Campbell, and others, was realized not in London but in the remote corner of a distant colony. As a result, Prince William’s was also the first American building on American soil modeled on an ancient Greek or Roman temple, predating Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia state capitol building by almost three-quarters of a century.¹³⁰ It appears, in fact, that the church in Prince William’s Parish was among the first Roman temple-form buildings in the entire British Empire.¹³¹ In the archaeological vein of mideighteenth-century English neoclassicism, the church in Prince William’s was also among the earliest attempts to adapt the plan of an antique building to a modern use. The design for the church in Prince William’s, the first enclosed temple-form building in English or American architecture, is an important and largely unrecognized contribution to archaeological neoclassicism in English and American architecture of the eighteenth century. 52

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

THE ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIES of the churches in St. Philip’s, St. Michael’s, and Prince William’s Parishes upset in many ways the traditional narratives that characterize early American architecture. The first is the imposition of a nineteenth-century architectural professionalism onto colonial building culture.¹³² The design history of these churches refutes the tendency to assign the name of an architect to architecturally sophisticated colonial buildings. Many discussions of St. Michael’s have focused on the identity of “Mr. Gibson,” and the search for the architect of St. Michael’s has even led scholars to suggest the names of individuals who never traveled to South Carolina. Such groping about for the name of an architect fundamentally misunderstands the eighteenth-century design process. As the narratives of design and construction of both St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s demonstrate, neither building had a single person who could claim authorship of the design. In each case, the design was the by-product of a body of elite commissioners functioning in the contemporary mode of gentleman-architect common among their English counterparts. Furthermore, the designs of these buildings demonstrate a creativity and imagination that undermine the persistent narrative that characterizes colonial architecture as fundamentally derivative in nature. This is well demonstrated by the compilation of a multiplicity of visual sources for the design of St. Philip’s and the realization of a sophisticated temple-form design at Prince William’s in the remote reaches of a rural province. On one level, these buildings were highly fashionable in the sense that they sought consciously to emulate the materials, forms, and details of cosmopolitan models—in the case of St. Philip’s, many decades before a flair for fashion characterized colonial design in other colonies. But on another level, this drive for fashionable architecture was in practice far from simple derivation. Drawing from architectural pattern books but also from print sources and possibly illustrations from historical and theological treatises, the commissioners for St. Philip’s designed an entirely original church. The commissioners for St. Michael’s depended heavily on a recent architectural pattern book, but they adapted the design to respond to the specific conditions of their site by including in the original design side porticos that answered an intended portico on the courthouse across the street in an attempt to define the city’s civic center. William Bull supported in his plantation parish the construction of a church in the form of a Roman temple, something that leading architects in London were unable to accomplish in the same years. South Carolina’s church commissioners were not mere copyists; they made selective design choices by combining, eliminating, and transforming features from a variety of sources, often with highly original results. One final misconception about colonial architecture refuted by the history of these churches is that American architecture necessarily suffered from a colonial time lag. The use of a monumental portico on St. Philip’s was not only a revolutionary design for colonial English architecture; it was also at the cusp of English church-design practice. Inigo Jones had introduced the T H E CITY CHURCHES

53

F IGURE 1.2 6   Sebastiano Serlio, “Plan of the Roman Temple in Tivoli,” The First Book of Architecture (London, 1611) (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

monumental portico to British ecclesiastical architecture in his designs for St. Paul’s, Covent Gardens (1630–31), and St. Paul’s Cathedral (1633–40), but these were exceptional buildings even in London. Because of their constricted sites, none of Wren’s post-fire churches boasted projecting monumental porticos. The monumental portico became a common feature in Anglican church architecture only in the second and third decades of the eighteenth century, at the same time the plans for St. Philip’s were being realized. By the time they appeared on St. Philip’s, monumental porticos had only been used regularly on London’s city churches for about a decade. And, finally, the construction of a true temple-form building at Prince William’s Parish in South Carolina in 1750 was in fact an extraordinarily progressive design, unmatched until Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia state capitol early in the following century. The parish churches of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, however, were not simply remarkable colonial designs; they positioned the emerging port city of Charleston among the cosmopolitan centers of the British Empire. As Peter Borsay has noted, the first six decades of the eighteenth century saw the erection of new churches in over thirty English towns.¹³³ The completion of such a church was an important signal of the emerging city’s economic health. St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s are rightfully understood as two examples of the new city churches that marked the cosmopolitan status of the eighteenth-century city in England or her colonies. Together, the Charleston churches, King’s Chapel in Boston (1749–54), and Christ Church in Philad©elphia (1727–54) are evidence of this renascence in the colonies. These buildings crowned colonial cities in ways that Thomas Archer’s St. Philip’s in Birmingham (1709–15) and James Gibbs’s All Saints in Derby (1723–2…5) signaled the rising economic importance of their own mainland cities. As signals of the “public regard for religion”—to recite the words of John Vanbrugh—these buildings often incorporated towers, cupolas, and monumental porticos. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a monumental Anglican church with a steeple, portico, or both became a hallmark of the thriving English city. London readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine would surely have been surprised by the sophistication of the new church in provincial South Carolina. That was exactly the desired response. In advertising South Carolina as a Second Carthage, Charles Woodmason sought to undermine assumptions about the primitive nature of the colonial built environment among the magazine’s cosmopolitan readership. As narratives of colonial architecture that embrace derivation and style-lag models persist, contemporary scholars have as much to learn as Woodmason’s London readers. But Charleston’s two city churches and the cosmopolitan fluency they demonstrated were not universal in the colonial landscape of South Carolina’s Anglican churches. Others, erected in the colony’s rural plantation parishes, held fast to architectural traditions that had defined rural parish-church design in England for decades and even centuries. 56

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

Chapter 2 T H E DI V E R SI T Y OF COU N T R I E S, T I M E S, A N D M E N ’ S M A N N E RS

Sheltered in long stretches by a canopy of live oak trees and Spanish moss, U.S. Highway 61 follows an ancient path northwest from Charleston toward the rice plantations that once lined the Ashley River. About twelve miles out from the city, the church of St. Andrew’s Parish stands on a slight rise (FIG. 2.1). Begun as a simple rectangle in 1706 and expanded in 1723 to a cruciform plan, St. Andrew’s contains the oldest building fabric of any church in South Carolina. White-painted stucco covers the brick walls, rusticated quoins mark their corners, and arched windows light the interior. Double doors, arched like the windows, open at the ends of the northern, southern, and western wings, each beneath a small circular window. Inside, rows of boxed pews and a raised pulpit at the crossing approximate eighteenth-century forms, while the marble basin of the eighteenth-century baptismal font rests on an elaborate nineteenth-century cast-iron stand (FIG. 2.2). Tall, arched tablets carrying sacred texts dominate the eastern chancel, and a vaulted ceiling rises over the entire interior. Fundamentally different from its urban counterparts in Charleston, the rural parish church of St. Andrew’s shows little

F IGURE 2 .1 Southern elevation of St. Andrew’s Church, Charleston County, begun 1706 and expanded 1723 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .2   Interior of St. Andrew’s Church, Charleston County, begun 1706 and expanded 1723 (Photo by author)

concern for contemporary design practice in London. But it also differed in significant ways from other rural parish churches in the South Carolina. The variation of architectural form among early parish churches like St. Andrew’s demonstrates the extent to which designers and builders experimented with diverse English church-building traditions as they gradually shaped a local tradition of Anglican church architecture in South Carolina over the course of the eighteenth century. Just outside the walls of St. Andrew’s lies another fairly early remnant of Anglican material culture, the 1721 chest tomb of Elizabeth Nairn (FIG. 2.3). The ledger stone is richly ornamented with the Nairn family crest, and the epitaph below identifies her two husbands and the children she bore by each, offering detailed information about the military and political feats of the men in her family and absolutely no commentary specific to Elizabeth. Measuring six and a half feet by three and a half feet and a full four inches thick, the marble slab was probably ordered from London. In many ways, this marker is typical of those erected to the memory of elite Anglicans in the early eighteenth century, not only across South Carolina but also across the British Empire; similar early eighteenth-century markers can be found in Virginia, the Caribbean, and England. But over the course of the eighteenth century, South Carolina’s Anglican churchyards would take on a specifically regional character, as markers began to identify the graves of those below the most elite classes and the colony’s Anglicans began to turn to New England gravestone carvers and eventually to local providers in addition to London sources. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the material culture of Anglicanism in South Carolina had taken on a very specific local character. This chapter will introduce first the broad regional patterns in architecture, then the grave markers, and finally Communion silver. 58

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

The importance of local preference in Anglicanism was officially articulated as early as the sixteenth century: “It is not necessary that traditions and ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly alike, for at all times they have been diverse, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners.”¹ By including these words in the 1571 foundational document “The 39 Articles,” the fathers of the Anglican Church understood that the local church took a multitude of forms as it was realized in a multitude of local circumstances. The colonial practice of locating design responsibility with church commissioners in each parish generated a diversity of forms among churches in early colonial South Carolina. The churches erected between 1706 and the 1740s took one of three different forms (see appendix 1). The majority were longitudinal in plan, meaning that they had a fairly narrow width that accommodated a single aisle flanked by rows of pews against the building’s longer walls. A few of the larger churches took the form of a compact rectangle, with a width accommodating multiple aisles. Often these churches had interior columns to support the broad roof-framing system necessitated by their width. Still others, like St. Andrew’s, were cruciform in plan. Most of the churches of this plan were the result of wings added to a smaller, longitudinal building. The liturgical planning of church interiors was similarly varied. While most churches included both an eastern chancel and a pulpit within the body of the church, their form and placement were not consistent from building to building. As the century progressed, however, churches in rural parishes began to demonstrate a greater uniformity than their predecessors. By the second half of the century, church builders preferred the compact rectangle over the cruciform and longitudinal plans. Later churches also exhibit a shared architectural vocabulary largely unknown to earlier generations of

F IGURE 2 .3 Chest tomb of Elizabeth Nairn, 1721, St. Andrew’s Church, Charleston County (Photo by author)

church builders. New rules of proportion and classical details, made available to colonial builders through architectural pattern books, distinguished later eighteenth-century churches from the vast majority of buildings then standing in South Carolina. From the experimentation of the first generation emerged a tradition of Anglican churches in the third quarter of the eighteenth century that was distinctly South Carolinian. The first church to house Anglican worship in the colony’s rural plantation parishes was not in fact built by Anglicans. A large population of French Huguenots, having fled their homeland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, settled on the banks of the Santee River and erected a wood church on a brick foundation sometime before January 1701.² The significant differences between English and French framing traditions probably distinguished the French church from its slightly later English counterparts. Even though the French continued to dominate the parish, this French building became the parish church of St. James, Santee, after the passage of the Church Act in 1706. In 1723 the parish of St. James, Santee, was still described as comprised “chiefly of French Refugees, conforming to the Church of England.”³ Before long the English were building their own churches in the colony’s rural parishes. By 1702 Anglicans in Goose Creek had erected a wooden church that was described soon thereafter as “too little and not solid” and was torn down by 1714.⁴ Just a few years after their counterparts in Goose Creek, Anglicans in St. Thomas’s Parish built a small square church of cypress, 30 feet on a side, on a rise near the Cooper River called Pompion Hill. In 1728 this church was described as “well furnished with a pulpit, a pulpit cloath, and a Cushion, a Reading Desk, convenient seats, a Communion Table, a Table Cloath and Table Linnen.”⁵ The church had been built “at the charge of the neighborhood and by the peculiar assistance of the Rt. Honorable Sr. Nathaniel Johnson Knight (deceased) at that time governor, and since kept in repair by voluntary contributions.”⁶ Just as the French church on the Santee became a parish church after the 1706 Church Act, so too this building became a chapel in the parish of St. Thomas and St. Denis. The chapel remained in use until the 1760s. These three—the French church on the Santee, the chapel in Goose Creek, and the chapel on Pompion Hill—comprised the entirety of church construction in South Carolina’s rural parishes between the foundation of the colony in 1670 and 1706. The passing of the Church Act in 1706, however, initiated the first concentrated church-building campaign: the design and construction of six rural parish churches. But these half-dozen pioneering churches, most quite small, would soon be insufficient for the colony’s expanding population. South Carolina’s rapid population growth in the early decades of the eighteenth century necessitated the erection of new churches and additions to many of the first six buildings in the 1720s and 1730s. By the late 1730s, the first generation of church building had drawn to a close. The brick church begun in St. Andrew’s Parish in 1706 and enlarged to a cruciform plan in 1723 illustrates nicely the essential design features of these 60

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 . 4 St. Andrew’s Church, Charleston County, 1706 (Reconstructed plan by author)

F IGURE 2 .5 St. Andrew’s Church, Charleston County, 1706; enlarged 1723 (Drawing by Carl Lounsbury)

early Anglican parish churches.⁷ The long western arm of the now cruciform church is the shell of the 1706 building, described some years after its construction as “40 feet long and 25 broad, built of brick, the roof of pine, with 5 small square windows in it, and not near finished in the inside” (FIG. 2.4).⁸ Two doors gave access to the building’s interior, a larger six-foot-wide “great” door to the north and a smaller three-foot-wide door to the west.⁹ Archaeological evidence suggests that a small door in the southern wall opened into a wooden vestry room appended to the south side of the church. Scars in the exterior western wall of the church suggest the possibility that a frame porch stood at the western end of the building. Small square windows, now obliterated by larger, arched openings, lighted the interior of the church. In 1723 the parish began an enlargement of the church “in the form of a cross” that transformed the building in significant ways (FIG. 2.5). The COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

61

wood vestry room and porch had been removed. As described by the parish minister William Guy soon after the completion of the addition, the ceiling was “well arch’d and plaister’d,” suggesting that the first church might not have been so finished. He also commented on the large east window and the window on each side of the chancel, suggesting that the entirety of the east wing served the church as a chancel. He was pleased that all the church windows were “neatly arch’d and well glaz’d.” The differentiation between the larger northern and smaller western doors was also eliminated as each of the northern, western, and southern wings had large, arched double doors. He closes his description of the new church by mentioning that the entire exterior was to be roughcast, probably in an effort to mask the differences between the brickwork of the original church and the addition.¹⁰ ONE OF THE SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES between the designs of the 1706 St. Andrew’s and the church after its 1723 expansion is the changing patterns of access. The 1706 church had both a great door and a little door differentiating access into the church. This is a pattern evident in other early churches in the colony. The 1714 church in St. James, Goose Creek, has what is clearly a great door opening through the west elevation, while smaller doors open through the two longer sides of the building. The northern and southern elevations of the first church in St. Thomas’s had doors sheltered by a “handsome porch, upon columns,” while only a little door with no porch accessed the building through the west. While the location of the great door differs, these earliest buildings exhibited a hierarchy of access. Such hierarchies persisted through the century in other colonies; churches in Maryland and Jamaica, for example, continued to use architectural differentiation as cues to hierarchies of access. But such hierarchies would not persist in South Carolina. By 1723 St. Andrew’s included three large doors—one in each of the northern, southern, and western wings—and all three were identical in design. Such uniformity of access quickly became characteristic of churches in South Carolina. By the second quarter of the century, design ideals associated with Georgian aesthetics—uniformity, bilateral symmetry, and a classical vocabulary—came to dominate church design in South Carolina. The preference in the 1723 addition to St. Andrew’s for large, “neatly arch’d and well glazed” windows instead of the small square windows of its 1706 predecessor quickly became standard for Anglican architecture in South Carolina (see FIG. 2.1).¹¹ Arched windows were so important to the vestry of Christ Church Parish that their 1711 list of items “still wanting to finish ye Parish Church” included “altering and Arching” the windows, which evidently had been installed by the carpenters as flat-topped.¹² These early arched windows could be either semicircular as at St. Andrew’s or segmental and semicircular as at Strawberry Chapel, begun in 1739 (FIG. 2.6). The first type is an arch comprised of only a segment of a circle as seen over the doors of Strawberry Chapel, while the latter is a full half circle. Although the semicircular arch would become widely favored over the segmental by 62

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .6 Strawberry Chapel, Berkeley County, begun 1739 (Photo by author)

midcentury, this emphasis on the arched form for church windows persisted. In 1770 the specifications for St. David’s Parish Church in the Carolina backcountry noted that “all the windows [are] to be arched.”¹³ The arched form defined the shape of early eighteenth-century church ceilings as well (see FIG. 2.2). All but one of those Anglican churches erected in South Carolina before 1750 featured a barrel-vaulted ceiling, and the one exception may have been altered.¹⁴ These arched forms for windows, doors, and ceilings were nearly universal features of Anglican architecture in the colony. While typical in its embrace of uniformity among elevations and its arched windows, doors, and ceiling, the intended design of St. Andrew’s was to include a western tower, a traditional English parish church form largely abandoned by rural parish churches in South Carolina. In his letter of 1727, Guy acknowledges the receipt of a small bell “to be hung in the steeple when that is built.”¹⁵ Since before the Norman Conquest of 1066, single towers had marked the western ends of many English parish churches. This ancient tradition became an essential signifier of the English parish church that, together with the chancel screen, survived the Reformation (FIG. 2.7). While essential to the traditional formula of the rural parish church, towers were expensive undertakings and often the last part of the church to rise. In eighteenth-century South Carolina, western towers appeared only on town churches; St. Helena’s, Beaufort (before 1737), and St. George’s, Dorchester (tower, 1751), are two examples (FIG. 2.8). An early nineteenth-century account suggests that the intended tower on St. Andrew’s was never realized, although the recent renovation uncovered scars that seem to suggest that some large frame structure stood at the western end of the building. It is possible that St. Andrew’s was outfitted for a short time with a wooden tower. If so, it was the only tower erected on a remote parish church in South Carolina. COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

63

F IGURE 2 .7   Willen, Buckinghamshire, 1679–80 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .8 St. George’s, Dorchester Church Tower, 1751 (Photo by author)

The complete absence of building stone in the South Carolina Lowcountry meant that Anglicans seeking to erect substantial and more permanent masonry churches embraced the brick masonry traditions of southern England; in this way, they were distinguishable from other structures of the rural landscape. Built of brick in a region dominated by wooden and often earthfast buildings, colonial Anglican churches exhibited the finest architectural detailing. Corners trimmed with rusticated quoins and sophisticated door-and-window surrounds characterize the earlier eighteenth-century churches, while tightly laid brickwork, classical pilasters or columns, and large well-proportioned fenestration were typical in later decades. Fully plastered interiors under elaborate vaulted ceilings were filled with paneled pews and finely finished pulpits and altarpieces. While such refinement corresponded with the brick houses of the wealthiest elite, the typical planters’ houses and agricultural complexes that dominated plantation parishes were quite different. A 1772 view of Hartford Plantation shows a two-story house graced only with a low piazza adjacent to the outhouses, dairy, store, shop, overseer’s house, barn, and Negro houses (FIG. 2.9). The structure on the far left is an earthfast shed covering the saw pit. The refinement of St. James, Goose Creek, was a far cry 64

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .9   Detail of 1772 plat of Hartford Plantation by Joseph Purcell (Private collection; photo by author)

from these utilitarian structures. Later praise for colonial Anglican churches was surely correct to suggest they were “monuments to refinement.” And through the majority of the eighteenth century, Carolinians worshipped in churches and chapels “fit for the decent performance of Divine Service.”¹⁶ Of the six churches initiated as a result of the Church Act of 1706, five were brick. Masons laid the bricks of St. Andrew’s in alternating courses of headers and stretchers, a brick-bonding pattern called English bond (FIG. 2.10). The favored brick-bonding pattern through the seventeenth-century, English bond became increasingly regularized in both brick size and coursing pattern as the century progressed.¹⁷ By the middle of the seventeenth century, English masons began to replace English bond with Flemish bond, and by the early eighteenth century Flemish bond was the favored bond for elite buildings in both England and her colonies.¹⁸ More complicated and expensive than English bond, Flemish bond alternates stretchers and headers in each course. Through careful alignment of the courses, masons achieved a pattern whereby each stretcher was surrounded above and below and flanked on each side by a header (FIG. 2.11). Although now covered by a coat of nineteenth-century stucco, St. James, Goose Creek, originally exhibited walls of the more sophisticated Flemish bond. The concern for surface finish evident in the patterning of Flemish bond appears also in the glazed headers of contemporary South COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

F IGURE 2 .10 Detail of English bond at 7–9 Stoll’s Alley, Charleston (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .11 Detail of Flemish bond at the Grimke Tenement, 1752, Charleston (Photo by author)

65

F IGURE 2 .12  Charles Fraser (American, 1782–1860), Church in St. James’s Parish, Goose Creek, from untitled sketchbook, 1796–1805 (ca. 1800), watercolor and ink on paper (Image courtesy of Gibbes Museum of Art/ Carolina Art Association)

Carolina houses, such as Exeter (ca. 1712) and Archdale Hall (ca. 1706–10). The use of these darker, glassy headers to enliven wall surfaces with a rich and regularized pattern became common in England by the second half of the seventeenth century and might have been used on some of the earliest churches, but it was largely nonexistent by midcentury. Both St. James, Goose Creek, and the 1723 addition to St. Andrew’s employ elaborated masonry details including water tables and stringcourses, quoins to trim windows, doors, and corners, and plaster or brick cornices to cap the wall (FIG. 2.12).¹⁹ These architectural features appear commonly throughout the seventeenth century in England and were often constructed of stone or specially shaped bricks rendered in stucco. Although St. Andrew’s does not have a water table, both it and St. James have stringcourses, cornices, and quoins. Obviously proud of the finish detailing on his new church in St. James, Goose Creek, the Reverend Ludham described his church in 1723 as “built of brick cornered with plaister work in imitation of Hewed Stone, as are 3 Door cases Wst No & So and 9 handsome arched Windows are plaistered answerably.”²⁰ Similar details appear on a handful of early planters’ houses, including Brick House on Edisto Island, begun in 1725 (FIG. 2.13). This particular early masonry tradition is well exemplified in the only later eighteenth-century example of English-bond construction. In 1767 St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish began the construction of a church, and the final product, which now stands in ruins, was something quite unlike most of its contemporaries (FIG. 2.14). Not only are the walls of the church laid in English bond, but heavy rustication also surrounds the segmental (not semicircular) arches of the central doors and trims the edges of the building in quoins. The entire elevation is carried by a heavy water table comprised of four courses of molded bricks. From its bonding pattern to its quoins and heavy water table, the brick masonry of St. John’s, Berkeley, emulates quite 66

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .13 Brick House, Edisto Island, begun 1725 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .1 4 St. John’s, Berkeley County, begun 1767 (Photo by author)

closely the masonry that characterized the earliest brick churches in the colony. But by the 1760s, such an expression stood out as distinctly—almost consciously—out of date. Beginning in the middle decades of the century, South Carolina’s masons began to shed many of these expressive details, favoring instead a restrained and classicized aesthetic that would distinguish later churches in South Carolina from both earlier churches and churches from other colonies. Church builders of the opening decades of the century built in both English and Flemish bond. Church builders from the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century preferred Flemish bond almost universally and dispensed with the color variation and intentional patterning and other decorative techniques often found in the masonry of early buildings. The rusticated quoins and projecting water tables found on St. James, Goose Creek, and COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

67

F IGURE 2 .15 St. James, Santee, Charleston County, 1764–66 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless)

other early buildings, for example, are largely dropped from the lexicon of masonry options by midcentury. Later churches exhibit a remarkable consistency in the color of their bricks and in the precision and regularity of their Flemish-bond masonry. The highly regularized Flemish-bond masonry of St. James, Santee, begun in 1768, is typical of churches from the second half of the century (FIG. 2.15). The finish mortar between the bricks is laid in a struck joint, using a straightedge to create a tight grid of horizontal and vertical lines. The bricks are highly regular in size, and their warm gray/brown color demonstrates little variation, creating the impression of a consistent plane of masonry. The building has no projecting water table, the arches over the doors and windows do not project past the wall plane, and the corners of the building are not adorned with quoins. The semicircular arches over the windows and doors for all of these later churches are fashioned out of the same bricks as the wall in a manner quite unlike Virginia arches, which are often fashioned from rubbed bricks contrasting in color with the wall. Unlike the cornices of the earliest churches, which were usually built up in stucco, the cornice on St. James and other buildings of its era are usually much larger and fashioned of wood. The masonry adheres tightly to a set of aesthetic principles that establish a regular, plain, and uniform appearance. These later churches also use molded bricks for the capitals and bases of the columns and pilasters that often ornament the exteriors. The molded bricks used by the mason to create the complex curvature of the column bases and capitals at St. James are typical of the churches from the middle and later eighteenth century. Especially molded for this purpose and fired separately from the rest, these bricks often vary in color from those of the walls. Although the majority of churches were brick, a few were built of other materials, usually wood. The only surviving frame church from the colo68

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .16 St. David’s, Cheraw, begun 1770 (Photo by author)

nial period is St. David’s, begun in 1770 (FIG. 2.16). Prince George’s Parish began in 1726 the construction of a parish church described as “a Wooden fabric, but very decently raised.”²¹ Similarly, the builders of the 1749 frame church in remote St. Paul’s in Augusta, Georgia, just across the Savannah River, boasted, “The frame of the church is of wood so strong that it will last for many years. Between the studs is a wall of clay eight inches thick supported in the center of that clay with a piece of wood three inches thick set into the studs by a groove.”²² The church in Augusta might not have been fundamentally different from a church built in the 1730s or 1740s by Germans in Orangeburg, South Carolina, described as “of wood and clay, in much the same manner as chimneys are when made of clay.”²³ The German church became an Anglican church in 1749 when the minister took orders in the Church of England. Although none of these churches survive, records suggest that frame chapels of ease were built in a number of parishes over the course of the eighteenth century.²⁴ In St. John’s, Berkeley, the new town of Childsbury had by 1728 “a Chappel of Ease to the Mother Church, built of wood, and which will contain 100 people.”²⁵ After just over a decade, however, the parish minister indicated that this wood chapel had “decayed and gone to ruin.” In its place, the parish was then designing to replace it with the brick chapel that still stands on the site (FIG. 2.6).²⁶ The dense pine stands of the backcountry meant that log construction was an easy option for those Anglicans most remote from the Lowcountry. The minister in St. John’s, Berkeley, reported that sometime before 1764 the residents in the upper reaches of his parish “rais’d a logg-house of ab’t 20 by 30 for a place of worship.”²⁷ But this is the only reference to the use of log for an Anglican church or chapel. The surviving mid-eighteenth-century shell of a tabby chapel on St. Helena’s Island illustrates the experimentation by a handful of church commisCOUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

69

F IGURE 2 .17   Chapel on St. Helena’s Island, ca. 1750 (Photo by author)

sioners with a building material entirely foreign to construction in England (FIG. 2.17). Tabby was a mixture of sand, lime, oyster shells—abundant on the coastal Sea Islands—and water poured into a plank framework in much the same way as concrete.²⁸ The rusticated window surrounds and the surviving column that originally supported a western porch indicate that this material was covered in roughcast and scored to approximate stone. With the help of these details, builders produced a well-finished building, which differed very little in final appearance from one of brick and roughcast. In 1770 the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal ran an advertisement for someone willing to undertake “the building of a Chapel of Ease on Edisto-Island; the Walls to be of Tabby Work.”²⁹ As suggested by the St. Helena’s chapel and the Edisto Island advertisement, Anglicans in remote coastal regions of the Lowcountry experimented with building materials easily supported by local resources. Many Anglican church builders sought to disguise the materials of their churches, covering their buildings in a coat of roughcast.³⁰ The most prominent use of this material, of course, was the use of roughcast on the two city churches in an explicit attempt to emulate the grand stone churches of London. One visitor to Charleston in 1774 described the two city churches as “plaistered over so well on the outside to imitate stone that I really took them all for stone buildings at first.”³¹ Another described “St. Philip and St. Michael’s Church of England, Large Stone Buildings with Portico’s with large pillars and steeples.”³² But roughcast was not limited to Charleston. In 1727 the parish of St. Andrew’s used roughcast to mask the differences between the masonry of the 1706 original church and the 1723 cruciform addition and to approximate the appearance of stone construction (see FIG. 2.1). Similarly, the builders of the chapel on St. Helena’s coated their rough70

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

walled tabby with scored roughcast in emulation of stone. The church of St. James, Goose Creek, and Strawberry Chapel in St. John’s, Berkeley, are also coated in roughcast, although in these cases the treatment likely dates from the early nineteenth century (see FIG. 2.6). But roughcast was not used exclusively on brick or tabby buildings. In 1723 the vestry of Christ Church Parish had their frame church “Ruff Cast,” upgrading its appearance from frame to stone.³³ The builders of the frame church in St. Paul’s in Augusta described their new building in 1749 as covered in “rough cast with Lime and gravil appearing like stone.”³⁴ South Carolina’s Anglicans employ of roughcast realized two related goals. First, and in the earlier uses of the material, roughcast served to mask the less-than-desirable appearance of frame and tabby buildings while also giving a uniform appearance to those brick buildings expanded by later additions. But, by the middle of the century, roughcast emulating stone signaled South Carolinians’ recognition of the fashionable use of ashlar masonry on churches and other elite public and private architecture in London and fashion-conscious centers throughout the British Empire. Consider, for example, the words of one architectural commentator writing on London in 1766: “No public edifice ought to be built with brick unless it is afterwards stucco’d, for a mere brick face in such buildings always makes a mean appearance.”³⁵ As residents in a port city with regular intercourse with London, Charlestonians were well aware of the fashion for coating brick buildings in roughcast to achieve the desired effect of stone construction. St. Andrew’s Church as it stood expanded in 1723 reflected many of the essential design features that characterized eighteenth-century church architecture in South Carolina. The uniformity of its elevations and its use of semicircular windows and doors typified church design in the colony throughout the century. The extension of the arched form to the ceiling was also typical, but, as this chapter will eventually demonstrate, only for the first half of the century. Its construction in brick was common, but both its English-bond masonry and its roughcast finish would fall from favor by the later eighteenth century, to be replaced by simpler and more highly refined Flemish bond. And finally, its original design included a western tower, a typical feature of medieval and post-Reformation English church design that would be dropped from the lexicon of design options in rural parishes in South Carolina. THE LONGITUDINAL PLAN of the 1706 St. Andrew’s derived from the traditional rural parish church of England. Langley Chapel, erected in 1601 in Shropshire—with a length well more than twice its width—typifies proportions for rural parish churches in seventeenth-century England (FIG. 2.18).³⁶ Similar proportions found at St. Mary’s in Avington, Hampshire, erected as late as 1768–71, indicate that these linear proportions, described by Nigel Yates as the “traditional Anglican plan,” persisted well into the eighteenth century.³⁷ This longitudinal organization of Anglican churches was the most COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

71

popular plan in South Carolina into the 1740s. Although they do not survive, at least three other churches begun in 1706 were very similar in scale to St. Andrew’s, with plans approximately twenty-five feet wide and between thirty-five and forty feet in length.³⁸ In the forty-five-by-twenty-five-foot church erected in Prince Frederick’s Parish in 1726, a long, central aisle running from west to east between banks of pews against each of the long walls emphasizes the church’s longitudinal orientation.³⁹ The 1732 pew rates for Christ Church Parish are listed under the headings of “North Isle” and “South Isle,” suggesting that the interior of the twenty-four-foot-wide brick church constructed in that parish in 1727 was similarly organized.⁴⁰ Of the fifteen churches erected in South Carolina between 1706 and 1750, at least eight had longitudinal footprints with widths less than thirty feet. But this plan was not universal in the colony; seven other churches broke from the longitudinal tradition. The much larger fifty-by-forty-foot church in St. James, Goose Creek, has an interior width that accommodated three internal aisles (FIG. 2.19). The wide interior of St. James was organized

F IGURE 2 .18   Langley Chapel, Shropshire, 1601 (Drawn by Dell Upton)

F IGURE 2 .19   St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Drawn by Carl Lounsbury)

around “two rows of round timber pillars, painted marble.”⁴¹ Archaeological evidence suggests that while those columns still in the church might be these pillars, their position has shifted, suggesting that the roof was at some point reconstructed. An early description of the church indicates that it had both “pews and benches in a neat and regular manner,” but evidence from the brick walls indicates that in its original inception, the church did not have pews adjacent to the exterior walls. The church probably had two blocks of pews flanking a central east-west aisle, with side aisles running along the exterior walls and benches filling the western end of the church. The gallery that occupies the western end of the building was in place by 1727. Popularly called Strawberry Chapel, the brick chapel in St. John’s, Berkeley, is a compact rectangle measuring approximately forty-two feet by thirty-two feet (see FIG. 2.6). These broad proportions were also evident in a number of other early but long since demolished churches. The church begun in St. John’s, Berkeley, in 1710 was also a large church, measuring forty-seven by thirty-four, and it too probably had interior columns supporting the wide roof span. The church erected in St. John’s, Colleton, between 1734 and 1744 had two east-west aisles leading from western doors to a cross aisle not far from the eastern chancel, dividing the interior into a more complex warren of pews than in the longitudinal churches. Critical to the design of a large, compact auditory free of interior columns was a rising confidence in roof-framing systems. The framing system installed by Samuel Cardy in St. Michael’s was a landmark for carpenters in the colony. By November 1753, the building shell was roofed and 25,000 bricks were removed from the interior, taken up from “the Foundation laid for the Columns in the Interior part of the Church.”⁴² In the commissioner’s original design, St. Michael’s was intended to have rows of columns supporting the roof like its sister church, St. Philip’s. Prince George’s Church in Georgetown—nearly contemporary with St. Michael’s and of a similar scale—employed a trussed roof-framing system that depended on a row of interior columns that is probably similar to the roof originally intended for St. Michael’s (FIG. 2.20). In this system, a king-post truss stands on a tie beam that adjoins rafters on either side, and queen posts rise from the interior columns and intersect the principal rafters below the intersection of the tie beam supporting the king post. Trusses similar to this system appeared in the plates of Francis Price’s highly influential The British Carpenter, published in 1733.⁴³ Plates M and N of that volume were dedicated to trusses for churches and illustrate trusses similar to that used to roof Prince George’s (FIG. 2.21). The major difference between the two is that in Price’s systems, the queen posts, not the principal rafters, carry the tie beam supporting the king post.⁴⁴ The advantage of this system, of course, is that the absence of a continuous tie beam allowed the interior arched ceiling to rise well above the height of the exterior walls.⁴⁵ But in exchange, these trusses required interior supports. In St. Michael’s, however, Cardy installed a truss system with two queen posts carrying the tie beam for the king post, which rested directly on a tie beam that spanned COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

73

F IGURE 2 .2 0  Roof trusses for Prince George, Winyah, 1745–53 (above), and St. Michael’s Church, 1752–61 (below) (Drawings by author)

the entire width. Because it was a single, closed-truss system, it provided the rigidity necessary to span the building’s sixty-foot width. These churches with broader, more compact planning found their genesis in a very different church-planning tradition, one that emphasized the importance of the sermon. Since the longitudinal plan often left those located in the seats at some distance from the pulpit and unable to comprehend the words of the sermon, compact churches emerged as an option that better facilitated the preaching of the Word to the entire audience. Precedent for compact auditory is not found among the rural parish churches of the late seventeenth century but among the new urban churches of the later seventeenth century. The popularity of the compact auditory among Anglicans has often been linked to the massive church-building program necessitated by the 1666 Great Fire of London.⁴⁶ The erection of over fifty-one churches—most designed by Christopher Wren—resulted in the first large-scale Protestant church-building program in England since the Reformation. In his churches, Wren established a cosmopolitan model that redefined the Anglican church as a more centralized, compact chamber in which every seat was within earshot of the pulpit.⁴⁷ In his 1712 letter discussed in the previous chapter, Wren argued it was important “in our reformed Religion...[that] all who are present can both see and hear.” Anglican churches “are to be fitted for Auditories,” he continued, enabling “all to hear the Service, and both to hear distinctly and see the preacher.”⁴⁸ He stated that in a church not more than sixty feet wide and ninety feet long, a voice might be heard “50 feet distant before the Preacher, 30 feet on each side, and 20 behind the Pulpit.”⁴⁹ Wren presumed that the appropriate proportions for auditory churches was 74

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .21 Trusses for churches from Francis Price, The British Carpenter (London, 1765), plate M (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

about one by one and a half—a church no more than 50 percent longer than it was wide—and that the pulpit was to stand somewhere in the midst of this space.⁵⁰ This kind of compact planning, however, was almost unknown before the eighteenth century among rural parish churches where the longitudinal model prevailed.⁵¹ The rarity of this plan, a compact auditory, in rural parishes in England only highlights the significance of its use in the rural parishes of St. James, Goose Creek, and St. Johns, Berkeley, in remote and provincial South Carolina. In addition to the longitudinal and auditory traditions, the third early church plan took the form of a cross, like the 1723 expansion of St. Andrew’s (see FIG. 2.4). St. Andrew’s was one of three cruciform additions to smaller parish churches built in the colony in the 1720s and 1730s.⁵² In 1721 the parish of St. Paul’s complained in a petition to the Assembly that “the number of the inhabitants, and of the members of the Church of England were so much increased, that their Parish Church was too small for them, and that for want of room, some were forced to stand without the door, and others hang at the windows.”⁵³ The thirty-five-by-twenty-five-foot church, begun only in 1706, COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

75

F IGURE 2 .22  Plat of St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, chapel of ease, ca. 1724 (South Carolina Historical Society)

was already too small for the greatly expanding population of the parish. The Assembly granted the parish permission to erect an addition, which in its final form was cruciform. In 1734 the parish of St. George’s began a program to enlarge their church. Like St. Andrew’s, the expanded church was “seventy feet long by thirty feet wide, in shape cruciform.”⁵⁴ But the cruciform plan was not always a result of an addition. In 1724 the wealthy parish of St. James, Goose Creek, constructed a chapel to better serve the parishioners who lived distant from the parish church. The minister described it as “in length 60 feet in breadth 22. It bears the form of a cross and is 40 feet broad in the cross.”⁵⁵ A plat of the land upon which the church was constructed confirms the cruciform shape of the chapel (FIG. 2.22).⁵⁶ Unlike the traditional longitudinal plan and the compact auditory, the cruciform plan had few correspondents in contemporary church construction in England. In his exhaustive study of Anglican churches in England, Nigel Yates comments that cruciform churches, or T-plan churches, were rarely built by English Anglicans between the Restoration of 1660 and the beginning of the Oxford Movement in the 1840s.⁵⁷ Cruciform plans were so rarely built in England in these years, in fact, that Yates points to the survival of a number of examples in colonial Virginia as notable exceptions to the rule.⁵⁸ Although there is no evidence for a cruciform church in Virginia’s seventeenth-century records, Anglicans began building cruciform churches in that colony in the early eighteenth century with notable frequency.⁵⁹ The exceptional appearance of the cruciform plan in Virginia was not, in fact, so exceptional but one sampling from a much larger regional building tradition. The cruciform plan was a preferred church-building model for late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Anglican churches not only on the southern mainland, but also in Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica. In 1660, for example, the vestry of St. John’s on the island of Barbados 76

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .23 Vere Church, Clarendon, Jamaica, 1682, with early eighteenth-century tower (Photo by author)

began the construction of a new stone church, probably replacing a wooden building. The church was designed with a western porch and a projecting chamber chancel to the east. In 1675, however, a devastating hurricane extensively damaged the body of the church. One of the only changes made to the building design in the ensuing reconstruction was the addition of two transverse wings, projecting to the north and south off the longitudinal building, which served to buttress the long side walls of the church. Similar changes are evident elsewhere in the region. In 1682 Clarendon Parish on Jamaica completed a longitudinal building sixty-two feet long and twentyeight feet wide (FIG. 2.23). Soon thereafter, the parish erected a monumental tower in the middle of the long southern wall, dislocated from its traditional position at the west end of the building. Begun in 1689, the original core of the Valley Church on Antigua followed the common English plan of a long narrow church. But in the decades following its completion, two transverse wings were added to the northern and southern elevations, buttressing the long unsupported wall spans of the longitudinal church (FIG. 2.24). If these three examples are indicative of broader patterns of construction, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the transformation of the traditional longitudinal planned church into a cruciform. In embracing such a form, Anglicans in the Caribbean might have been seeking out ways to buttress the long sidewalls of their traditionally longitudinal churches in the volatile Caribbean climate.⁶⁰ The power of hurricane-force winds was well known in South Carolina and the Caribbean. In 1675 a major hurricane overwhelmed Barbados, extensively damaging all of the churches on that island.⁶¹ Devastating hurricanes COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

77

F IGURE 2 .24 Valley Church, Antigua. Period I: 1689; Period II: eighteenth century; Period III: twentieth century (Drawn by author)

also hit other English islands at a rate of about one per decade through the first half of the eighteenth century.⁶² But hurricanes were not circumscribed to the Caribbean Islands. South Carolina was battered by hurricanes in 1686, 1700, 1713, 1714, and 1728. Although at the northern fringe of the region, significant hurricanes also struck the Virginia coast in 1667, 1693, and 1713. In 1712 a hurricane left Jamaicans with “the most melancholy and dismal Prospect, many houses in the Towns as well as in the Plantations blown down, others uncovered, and none without some Damage.”⁶³ A hurricane the next year “continued for 12 hours. Had the two rivers on both sides of Charles Town (South Carolina) been joyned for sometime that place would now be destroyed. Besides the significant loss of life, there was much damage to our Fortifications, houses, barns, and Plantations.”⁶⁴ The incomplete shell of the new church in Charleston had been “blown down and demolished by a furious Hurricane” in 1713, and a chapel on James Island “had been blown down in a hurricane” in 1730.⁶⁵ Although English colonists observed that the traditional building technologies of their African slaves often fared quite well in hurricanes, they generally believed that masonry walls survived high winds far better than frame construction.⁶⁶ As early as the 1660s, Rochefort wrote that in the Caribbean “there 78

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .25 St. Anne’s, Sandy Point, St. Kitts, eighteenth century (Photo by author)

are many very fair houses of Timber, Stone, and Brick, built after the same manner as those in their own Countries, save that for the most part they are but one or two Stories high at most, that they may the more easily resist the winds, which sometimes blow in those parts with extraordinary violence.”⁶⁷ The late seventeenth-century governor of the Leeward Islands reported that in Charlestown, Nevis, there are “good dwellings and storehouses, built with country timber, not exceeding 60 feet long and 20 broad, story and a half, the ‘Hurri-Canes’ having taught people to build low.”⁶⁸ It was not accidental that the buildings on seventeenth-century Nevis were no more than twenty feet wide. In addition to reducing the building height, builders also noted the importance of reducing the height and width of the roof. An eighteenthcentury Barbadian planter noted the greater structural stability of buildings with narrow widths and smaller roofing systems. “Houses,” Philip Gibbes wrote, “are weaker in proportion as they are wider, & less able to resist High winds.”⁶⁹ An early eighteenth-century commentator on Jamaica indicated that two-story houses on a raised basement were “disapproved of, because they seldom are known to stand the shock of an Earthquake, or the Fury of a Storm.”⁷⁰ As suggested by the rounded buttresses on the early tower of St. Anne’s, Sandy Point, on St. Kitts Island, church builders began to build with hurricanes in mind by the end of the seventeenth century (FIG. 2.25). By the closing years of the seventeenth century, Anglicans in the Greater Caribbean recognized the structural stability of low masonry walls and narrow COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

79

F IGURE 2 .2 6 Painting of St. Catherine’s, Spanishtown, Jamaica, 1712–14 (Courtesy of the Caribbean Foundation)

building widths; the churches they began to build on the cruciform plan in the early eighteenth century buttressed the long side walls while simultaneously enlarging the size of the building. While St. John’s on Barbados, Vere Parish Church on Jamaica, and Valley Church on Antigua are examples of late seventeenth-century longitudinal buildings buttressed by wings in the eighteenth century, examples of single-build cruciform plans abound from the first three decades of the century in the Leeward Islands, Jamaica, South Carolina, and Virginia.⁷¹ Cruciform churches, with their narrow roofs, shorter wall spans, and twelve mutually buttressing, ninety-degree corners, may have seemed a more stable option than the longitudinal plan, with its long spans of unsupported walls, or broad auditory churches, with their broad, heavy roof systems. The significance of the cruciform church as a structurally stable design is best demonstrated by the fact that the greatest density of cruciform churches in the region appeared on the island of Jamaica, the colony most battered by devastating natural disasters in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.⁷² In the two decades following the 1692 earthquake, Anglicans in Jamaica undertook the erection of three new urban churches: St. Andrew’s Half-Way-Tree, begun in 1692; Kingston Parish Church, begun in 1701; and St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown, begun in 1712 (FIG. 2.26). All three were cruciform. A plaque placed over the western door of St. Catherine’s after 80

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .27   St. Peter’s, Port Royal, Jamaica, 1725 (Plan by author)

its dedication reads: “This Church dedicated to ye service of Almighty God was thrown downe by ye dreadfull Hurricane of August ye 28th Anno Domini MDCCXII, and was by ye Divine Assistance, through ye Piety and at ye expense of ye Parishioners, more beautifully and substantially rebuilt.” In rebuilding their church, the vestry was certain that their new cruciform church was not only more beautiful but also more substantially rebuilt, better able to withstand the next hurricane. Following these three churches, almost five out of every six churches newly built on the island in the eighteenth century were cruciform.⁷³ In 1725 the vestry of St. Peter’s in Port Royal, Jamaica, began the fourth church erected by that parish in the course of only fifty years. The three earlier structures on the site had all collapsed under a regular battery of natural disasters, including the 1692 earthquake and hurricanes in 1712 and 1722. In an effort to erect a church that would better withstand the natural disasters that had beset their earlier churches, the parish erected a compact church on the plan of an extended Greek Cross measuring eighty feet east to west and seventy-two feet north to south. The walls of the 1725 cruciform building are over four and a half feet thick at ground level—far more than necessary to support the roof of a fairly small cruciform church that spans only twenty-six feet (FIG. 2.27). The thickness of the walls approximates that used by builders of powder magazines rather than churches; in this, their fourth COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

81

church, the vestry was determined to erect a structure that could withstand natural catastrophes. The selection by the vestry of St. Paul’s of a cruciform plan was only one instance of a pattern that defines Anglican church construction in the Greater Caribbean in the very late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Similar plans could be found throughout the region, from Barbados to Virginia. Together with the traditional longitudinal and the compact auditory, the cruciform plan was one of three plan types erected by Anglicans in South Carolina. THE DEPENDENCE OF ST. ANDREW’S on English church-building traditions extends from its building materials and exterior form to the planning of its interior. A remarkable set of letters from an early parish priest, Ebenezer Taylor, and the vestry of St. Andrew’s to the bishop of London offer significant insight into the arrangement of the building’s interior. These letters from minister and vestry—each complaining about the other—reveal a bitter dispute over theology and liturgical practice. The clergyman’s Presbyterian tendencies, the vestry argued, allowed him to treat “the character of the Blessed Virgin Mary in so scandalous a manner as chilled the very blood of his hearers.”⁷⁴ Accusing the vestry of flirting too closely with Roman Catholicism, Taylor called various members “Jacobites.” Fearing for his physical safety, Taylor on one occasion refused to step up into the pulpit; he was certain some “mischievous” person had loosed the sounding board above so that it would fall on his head as he preached. Later in the letter, Taylor complained that someone had broken the pegs on the board near the pulpit upon which he hung his coat and hat. For their part, the vestry accused Taylor of, among other things, “removing the pulpit from the proper place and placing it before the communion table,” which stood at the eastern end of the building.⁷⁵ Since it seems unlikely that the minister moved the raised pulpit with a sounding board described by Taylor, he had probably moved the portable lectern that served as a reading desk. After the Restoration and the restructuring of the Church of England in 1662, the separation of pulpit from the Communion table as two distinct liturgical centers became the established practice. But not all English Protestants conformed to this practice. Combining the pulpit and the table into a single center was common among Presbyterians and other English Dissenters. Taylor’s liturgical changes in St. Andrew’s were so scandalous an act as to ignite a war of words that ended in the expulsion of the minister. The raised pulpit described in Taylor’s letter probably stood just inside the larger, northern door. The vestry’s letter demonstrates a deep concern for the distinction between the pulpit and the Communion table, a distinction they might have intended to manifest in the form of a chancel screen. Evidence of the building’s brick shell suggests that the east end of the building was subdivided from the rest by a large wooden sill possibly intended to carry a chancel screen, a wooden permeable barrier with a central gate often found in seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Anglican churches in 82

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .2 8 Late Medieval Rood Screen, Ranworth, Norfolk County, England; the rood or crucifix originally rose from the upper rood beam but was removed in the Reformation (Photo by author)

England. While the letters indicate that the chancel was floored in brick, no mention is made of the flooring in the rest of the church. Besides these liturgical centers, the narrow interior of the church was probably filled with a variety of seating organized on either side of an east-west aisle. The location of the large great door to the north suggests the probability of a north-south cross aisle as well. The distinction between the nave and the chancel, possibly reinforced by a chancel screen, perpetuated a long tradition in English church architecture. The chancel screen was a post-Reformation descendent of the medieval rood screen. Usually comprised of solid lower panels carrying an ornamental framework that in turn supported a substantial crucifix flanked by the Apostle John and the Virgin Mary, the medieval rood screen was simultaneously a barrier to physical access and a frame for visual consumption of the sacrament of Holy Communion (FIG. 2.28).⁷⁶ This structural division manifested the theological distinction of the clergy as mediators COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

83

between the laity and God. In pre-Reformation theology, Communion was the partaking of bread and wine that had been mystically transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. The sacrificial nature of the sacrament was reinforced by its celebration at a stone altar. The Communion service, performed in Latin and unintelligible to the vast majority of the laity, was celebrated by the clergy within the chancel while the laity remained in the nave, participating in Communion audibly (although unintelligibly) and visually through the frame of the rood screen. One of the central tenets of the Protestant Reformation was the priesthood of all believers, diminishing—but not eliminating—the distinction between the clergy and the laity. On the Continent and in Scotland, the most fervent Protestants dispensed with the chancel entirely, often closing off the chancel or subdividing the church into two spaces used by two different congregations. Usually a large single space dominated by a central pulpit, these buildings reflected the new role of the clergy as a leader among equals. In these churches, Communion was given no dedicated space but celebrated at long tables flanked by benches brought into the space of the church for the sacrament. These Protestants interpreted the sacrament of Communion as a meal—the Last Supper—partaken at a table in Communion by the church, not a sacrificial ritual at an altar where the elements were dispensed by the clergy only to a few. Unlike their continental counterparts, most Protestants in England preserved the two chambers. The nave with its pulpit was the space for preaching and the common prayer, and the chancel remained a chamber dedicated to the celebration of the Communion service; but after the Reformation, communicants entered into the chancel with the clergy for the celebration of Communion at a wooden table (FIG. 2.29). The chancel was now a space differentiated from the nave by function, not spiritual hierarchies. Even so, not all English Protestants agreed on the proper forms for the celebration of the sacrament. Debates raged in the 1630s over the practice of turning the table “altarwise” (standing flush against the rear wall of the chancel) or “tablewise” (standing east-west, detached from the east wall but within the body of the chancel). Often turning the table altarwise went hand in hand with surrounding the table with a rail, an act that was intended to protect the sanctity of the Communion table from the profane—especially dogs, which were regularly brought to services. These two options represented differing theological interpretations of the sacrament, differences that had political implications. Archbishop William Laud (d.1645) and other bishops more sympathetic to Roman Catholicism sought to reinvest Communion with greater sacrificial theology and insisted upon altarwise and railed tables. The more popular alternative, “tablewise,” reinforced the interpretation of Communion as a memorial meal rather than the reenactment of sacrifice and was embraced by the more fervently Protestant. A tablewise arrangement allowed the table to be surrounded by benches, and Communion was taken seated in a manner not unlike their Continental and Scottish brethren. The 84

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .2 9   Communion table from St. George’s, Portland, Dorset, 1754–66 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .3 0 Detail of Communion benches, Langley Chapel, Shropshire, 1601 (Photo by author)

chancel in Langley Chapel (ca. 1601), for example, has benches lining the walls on three sides surrounding the table but also provides kneelers, allowing communicants to sit or kneel as their conscience dictated (FIG. 2.30). In the English context, the division between high (more Catholic) and low (more Protestant) theologies were manifest not by the presence or absence of a chancel but by the position of the table within the chancel. As a result, a vast majority of English Protestants worshipped in churches that preserved the two chambers of the medieval church, although the division represented COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

85

F IGURE 2 .31 Detail of chancel screen, All Saints, Farley, Wiltshire (ca. 1690) (Photo by author)

a distinction between separate liturgical functions, not divisions between clergy and laity. In this way, post-Reformation Protestantism in England transformed the medieval rood screen into a chancel screen dividing the nave from the chancel. The “idolatrous” rood was, or course, removed and often replaced by the royal coat of arms.⁷⁷ Late seventeenth-century Anglican theologians, in fact, defended the retention of screens by arguing that doing so perpetuated ancient or primitive forms of Christianity.⁷⁸ The chancel screen was a common church fitting until the early eighteenth century. In St. Andrew’s in South Carolina, such a screen would probably have been a simpler version of that installed in English churches of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (FIG. 2.31).⁷⁹ Similar examples were also found in the colonies. There is evidence for a screen in the 1680s Newport Parish Church in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, and in three early churches in Christ Church Parish, Middlesex, Virginia.⁸⁰ A 1719 screen survives in the Devonshire Parish Church in Bermuda. Chancel screens were not uncommon in Anglican churches of the seventeenth century or even the eighteenth century in both England and its colonies. While at St. Andrew’s the distinction of the chancel from the nave might have been accomplished through a chancel screen, many South Carolina churches followed an English tradition of building a projecting chancel, 86

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .32 Wheatfields, Oxfordshire; note the structurally distinct chancel (Photo by author)

structurally smaller than the body of the church (FIG. 2.32). St. George’s, Dorchester, begun in 1719, measured “50 feet long and 30 broad” plus “the setting out of the chancel 15 foot by five.”⁸¹ St. Helena’s Parish Church, begun in 1724, was thirty feet wide and forty feet long, “the length from the west end to the Chancel”; and “the Chancel is 10 feet square.”⁸² The structural distinction of the chancel was implied as well in the plan of St. Andrew’s after its cruciform addition of 1723 (see FIG. 2.5). The minister described the easternmost projection as “a handsome chancel 12 feet long and 24 ft. wide.” The chancel had “a large east window, well glaz’d, with two others, on each side of the communion table,” and there were “ten more windows, vis. 5 on each side of the body of the church.” Only one table that is convincingly an early South Carolina Anglican Communion table has survived (FIG. 2.33).⁸³ The collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts includes an early table, dated between 1690 and 1720, that has long been associated with the Broughton family and thought to be a dining table. Yet dining tables in these early decades were usually gateleg tables. As a form, the stretcher table—so called because of the horizontal stretchers that connect the legs and provide structural support—is usually made of pine or another common wood and is associated with work spaces like kitchens. The single exception is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

87

F IGURE 2 .33 Broughton table, 1690–1720 (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts)

F IGURE 2 .3 4 Detail of early eighteenth-century chancel with altar rail, Wheatfields, Oxfordshire (Photo by author)

Communion table, which takes the form of a stretcher table but, because of its elevated function, usually employs better woods, like mahogany. The interpretation of the Broughton dining table as a Communion table is further reinforced by the tight connections between that family and the construction of a new church in 1710 in their parish of St. John’s, Berkeley. Colonel Thomas Broughton (1668–1737) “very generously adorned” the church and “made a Communion Table.”⁸⁴ This may very well be that table. Most of the early churches in South Carolina surrounded their Communion table with an altar rail (FIG. 2.34). A few years after they began their church in 1707, the vestry of Christ Church Parish turned their attention to “Rayling in the Communion Table.”⁸⁵ By 1714 St. John’s, Berkeley, had “a Chancel Railed in.”⁸⁶ The minister of the parish church in St. Thomas’s also noted that his church had a “Communion Table neatly railed in.”⁸⁷ A chancel rail was also erected in those churches with projecting chancels. The minister of St. Helena’s Parish, which had a projecting chancel, was pleased that the Communion table in his church was “Decently railed in.”⁸⁸ The railed altar had become commonplace in England by the end of the 88

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

seventeenth century. The return of the monarchy in 1660 brought a certain degree of consistency to both the celebration of Communion and English chancel architecture.⁸⁹ This was especially true after the Act of Toleration of 1689, which legally recognized Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and other Dissenters from the Church of England. One of the practices that emerged in this period that distinguished Anglicans from the now legally recognized Dissenters was an arrangement championed by Laud and his bishops in the decades before the Commonwealth: the installation of a rail surrounding an “altarwise” Communion table on at least three sides. By the late seventeenth century, however, the use of the rail had lost its association with early seventeenth-century partisanship and had become a point of distinction between a church and a dissenting meetinghouse. Although chancel screens persisted into the eighteenth century, they waned in popularity under the widespread practice of fencing the table with a rail.⁹⁰ The visual distinction of the chancel and its Communion table highlighted the first of two important liturgical centers; the early letters from the minister and vestry of St. Andrew’s clearly indicate that the church was also outfitted with a raised pulpit. By 1717 if not well before, the minister in the small 1706 church in St. Andrew’s read the service from the reader’s desk and preached sermons from the raised pulpit surmounted by a canopy, which was probably positioned immediately adjacent to the northern door.⁹¹ The pulpit was a popular fitting in English parish churches by the late medieval period, when they were typically located near the rood screen, immediately inside the nave. The large number of pulpits surviving in England from the fifteenth century suggests that the sermon was gaining in importance and churches were giving the sermon its own liturgical center even before the Reformation.⁹² Both before and after the Protestant Reformation in England, pulpits were often small and portable, designed to be moved around the church as needed (FIG. 2.35). The Reformation’s emphasis on preaching, however, dramatically increased the pulpit’s importance in the church. Seventeenth-century Anglicans devised a distinctive liturgical center for the leading of the service: the triple-decker pulpit (FIG. 2.36). In 1604 Canon 82 of the Church of England ordered that, in addition to the pulpit, “a convenient seat be made for the minister to read service in,” distinguishing the reader’s desk from the pulpit, which was reserved for preaching the sermon.⁹³ In many cases, a second lower desk served as a clerk’s desk, from which the clerk led the congregation in responses and sometimes singing as well. These three fixtures—the pulpit, the reader’s desk, and the clerk’s desk—were as early as 1619 combined into a single liturgical center.⁹⁴ Socalled triple-decker pulpits were fairly common by the time Anglicans began building churches in early eighteenth-century South Carolina. By 1714 the Reverend Maule reported that his parish church of St. John’s, Berkeley, had not only “a handsome pulpit” but also “a reading Desk, [and] clerks pew.”⁹⁵ There was no fixed location for the pulpit in the South Carolina church interior. The most common location for the pulpit in narrow churches like COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

F IGURE 2 .35 Detail of seventeenth-century pulpit, Malverly, Shropshire (Photo by author)

89

F IGURE 2 .3 6   Triple Decker Pulpit, Christ Church, Lancaster County, Va., 1732–35 (Photo by author)

the 1706 St. Andrew’s was either adjacent to the main door or in the center of the long wall opposite the principal entrance. A 1732 record of pew rents for Christ Church parish suggests that the pulpit likely flanked the central, southern door.⁹⁶ In broader churches, the pulpit was often located somewhere in the midst of the space. The hook that carried the tester of the original pulpit in St. James, Goose Creek, for example, suggests that it originally stood adjacent to the southeastern column of the interior, positioning the pulpit next to the central aisle of the church. Reflecting the general disinterest in church baptisms among Anglicans 90

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

of the period, a font installed near the door of the 1723 St. Andrew’s was the only such fixture to appear in either the documentary or physical evidence from any of the earliest churches in South Carolina. Symbolizing the entrance into the church through baptism, the font in the English medieval church normally stood near the primary entrance, usually at the west end or in the entry porch, a tradition that persisted in some seventeenth-century churches in England and her colonies (FIG. 2.37).⁹⁷ In his description of the 1723 expansion of St. Andrew’s, William Guy notes that his new cruciform church includes “a decent font...intended to be placed on a pedestal, 3 steps high in a semicircle at the entrance of the church.” Although a nineteenth-century pedestal now supports it, the marble basin of the font survives. But such interest in the font would be unique in the early colony. After the chancel and the pulpit, the font was clearly the least important of the three liturgical centers among South Carolina’s Anglicans. Although the general disinterest in fonts distinguished South Carolina churches from their English counterparts, differentiation of the chancel from the pulpit in the midst of the nave were liturgical arrangements that reinforced South Carolina’s dependence on English precedent. By the second half of the eighteenth century, South Carolina had generated its own distinctive tradition of church building.

F IGURE 2 .37 Baptismal font in entry porch of St. John’s, Holetown, Barbados, 1684 (Photo by author)

ON THE CREST OF A HILL in the community of St. Stephen, sixty miles north of Charleston, stands a large brick church very different from the early eighteenth-century church of St. Andrew’s (FIG. 1.4). Begun in 1762 and completed seven years later, St. Stephen’s Parish Church measures forty feet wide and fifty feet in depth. A regular march of engaged pilasters alternates with large compass-headed windows around the exterior. Tall double doors, surmounted by compass-headed transom windows, open through the center of three elevations. The tripartite form of a venetian window opens through the center of the eastern elevation. The pilasters carry a deep wooden cornice, its height and form carefully fashioned according to ancient classical proportions. Rising from the cornice on the east and west ends is a pair of tall curvilinear gables punctuated only by a small bull’s-eye window. Flanks of eastward-facing box pews fill the church floor (FIG. 2.38). Near the west door and under the western gallery is the marble basin of a baptismal font. A polygonal pulpit with two fluted piers carrying a canopy stands in the northeast corner of the church, and a large altarpiece dominates the east end of the building. Tripartite in form like the venetian window that opens through its center, two tall text panels bearing the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed flank the window. The arched ceiling of St. Andrew’s has in this later church been replaced by a tray ceiling with coved sides rising to a modillion cornice that frames a flat rectilinear panel. In many ways, St. Stephen’s is an exemplar of the parish churches erected in South Carolina in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The increased populations in many of the larger parishes also necessitated the construction of chapels of ease—additional chapels in a parish used for COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

91

F IGURE 2 .3 8 Interior of St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County (Photo by author)

occasional worship (see appendix 2). In addition to their new parish churches, at least fourteen parishes built chapels of ease that functioned much the same as churches, except that clergy led services in chapels on a less regular basis and chapels did not enjoy the political status of the parish church. Many parishes erected chapels because a majority of their population lived many miles from the parish church. The great distances between these buildings usually meant that divine service could only be realized at one or the other on any given Sunday. In the instance that the chapel of ease had been initiated by the parish vestry for the convenience of the inhabitants of the parish, service often alternated between the two buildings, with the festival and fast days always held at the parish church. For example, Lewis Jones of St. Helena’s Parish wrote that in addition to his parish church in Beaufort, “there are two chappels of ease at the two extreme points of the parish, distant one from the other about 30 miles in which I preach constantly every 3rd Sunday.”⁹⁸ In an extraordinary instance in the early life of a parish, the Reverend Osborn of St. Bartholomew’s was in the 1710s officiating at five different locations in his very large parish.⁹⁹ Often, however, chapels were built by private patronage, and the parish clergy were under no obligation to serve these chapels frequently. Writing from St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish in 1764, Rev. Levi Durand informed the SPG of “a great number of poor settlers in the upper part of the Parish” who had “rais’d a logg-house of ab’t 92

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

20 by 30 for a place of worship.” Even though “there are many more hearers than the building will contain,” he is only able to attend to them once in two months, for “it would displease the Majority of the Parish if I went oftener.”¹⁰⁰ John Fordyce in All Saints Parish visited one distant chapel only once each year.¹⁰¹ The churches constructed by Anglicans in the third quarter of the eighteenth century differed from those of earlier decades in a number of ways, establishing a cohesive group of buildings exhibiting uniformity unknown in the colony in earlier decades. Experimentation with longitudinal, square, or cruciform plans abated as the compact, rectangular auditory came to the fore as the preferred plan. In fact, four churches erected after 1750—the parish churches in St. Stephen’s and Prince William’s and the two chapels in St. Bartholomew’s at Pon Pon and Edmundsbury—shared external dimensions, approximately thirty-five feet in width and fifty feet in length. While others are slightly larger or smaller in size, the vast majority of the churches from this period exhibit highly regularized proportions, with a length approximately one and a half times the width. The broader widths of these later churches accommodated two if not three east-west aisles. Although the arrangement of the pews in St. Stephen’s has been changed slightly, they comfortably occupy the floor of the church together with three east-west aisles. Two parish churches were even more substantial. After their 1710 church burned in 1755, the parish of St. John’s, Berkeley, replaced their earlier—and relatively large— forty-seven-by-thirty-four-foot church with a new building (begun in 1767) that measured sixty feet by forty feet. The new church in Prince George’s, Winyaw, in Georgetown, begun in 1753, at fifty feet wide and eighty feet long was much larger than these others, and it too was organized around three internal east-west aisles. The smallest building completed in these decades was the diminutive chapel on Pompion Hill. Of all these churches, only the largest, Prince George’s, included internal columns; church builders of this generation felt comfortable spanning widths up to thirty-five feet without intermediary support, ten feet wider than the average church of the earlier decades. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, church builders no longer perpetuated the traditional English plan of the longitudinal church, nor were they concerned about the structural stability promised by the cruciform plan. Some of the motivation to adopt these larger, boxy church forms might have been financial in nature. Beginning a church with an ample square footage from the outset was by the later eighteenth century a far more efficient use of funds than the expansion of smaller churches with additions. The thirty-five-by-twenty-five-foot church in St. Paul’s Parish, begun in 1706, was expanded in the 1720s with £500 from public coffers and £1,000 in private subscriptions.¹⁰² Yet, in 1731 another subscription of £1,800 was raised to complete the expansion, bringing the total cost of the large cruciform addition to £3,300.¹⁰³ By contrast, the 1760s vestry minutes of St. Stephen’s Parish record that this church—measuring forty-five feet by thirty-five COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

93

F IGURE 2 .3 9  Pompion Hill Chapel, Berkeley County (Photo by author)

feet—cost approximately £1,600 to erect; even large and highly elaborated St. John’s, Berkeley, also built in the early 1760s, cost approximately £4,000, only slightly more than the addition to St. Paul’s three decades earlier.¹⁰⁴ Churches of the third quarter of the century exhibit the popularity of organizing exterior elevations according to classical rules of proportion, often including pilasters or columns supporting a projecting pediment or a large wooden cornice. The full-scale porticos of the churches in St. James, Santee, or Prince William’s Parishes and the engaged pilasters of the church in St. Stephen’s Parish are excellent examples of the widespread popularity of classical forms on later eighteenth-century Anglican churches in the colony (see FIGS. 2.15 and 1.21). By the second half of the eighteenth century, there emerged a typical church type in the colony: a compact auditory encased in architectural details and governed by design principles associated in the colonies with pattern-book architecture of the middle decades of the century. In addition to building much larger and broader churches, Anglican church builders from later in the century abandoned the chamber chancel and the vaulted ceilings of previous decades. Instead of deep articulated chancels, third-generation builders preferred to carve the chancel out of the rectangular space of the nave, or to contain it within a very shallow niche that projected only slightly past the eastern wall. Like the chapel at Pompion Hill, a few churches erected in this period were built with external chancels, and a few older buildings received new external chancels (FIG. 2.39). A shallow curved chancel was incorporated into the design for the city church of St. Michael’s, the chapel of ease at Pompion Hill, and chancels were also added 94

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

to the parish churches in Christ Church Parish and Prince George’s, Winyaw, in Georgetown in these decades. These later articulated chancels differ from their earlier counterparts in a number of ways. First, they take the internal form of a semicircle sheltered by a half dome situated within a squared brick shell, a shape not evident in the chancels of earlier decades. Unlike earlier chamber chancels, which had windows on all three walls, each of these has only a single window. Furthermore, these later chancels are significantly smaller than their predecessors. Whereas the chamber chancel in the 1723 cruciform church of St. Andrew’s was twenty-four feet wide and twelve feet deep, that in the 1763–66 chapel on Pompion Hill is only twelve feet wide and eight feet at its greatest depth. Although windows continue to utilize the arched form, its importance for ceilings wanes as tray ceilings replace the earlier barrel-vaulted ceilings in all churches of the later generation (FIG. 2.40). The appearance of the tray ceiling in church architecture in South Carolina parallels its midcentury appearance in other public buildings and the domestic architecture of Charleston’s

F IGURE 2 . 40 Detail of tray ceiling, St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 . 4 1   Pon Pon Chapel, Colleton County (Photo by author)

emerging oligarchy. The 1746 specifications for Charles Pinckney’s new house include a description of the tray ceiling in his dining room.¹⁰⁵ The 1767 contract for the construction of the new Exchange and Customs House would also specify a “coved ceiling.”¹⁰⁶ The fashionable status of the tray ceiling in St. Stephen’s was understood even as late as the early nineteenth century, when it was noted that the ceiling “is finished in the same style as that in St. Michael’s, in Charleston.”¹⁰⁷ Compact churches erected in brick with only slight chancels and interiors with tray ceilings all became components of a shared Anglican architectural vocabulary in the colony. One other prominent architectural detail that appears only on these later churches is the curvilinear gable. Although they do not appear to have been used on early eighteenth-century churches, curvilinear gables appear on the later churches of Prince George, Winyaw, St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Pon Pon Chapel, and probably the now-lost chapel at Edmundsbury (FIG. 2.41). Curvilinear gables made their appearance in English architecture in the early seventeenth century, appearing on prominent English houses of these decades, but they are notably absent from the deluge of early eighteenth-century architectural literature.¹⁰⁸ Such gables enjoyed popularity in English construction through the Great Fire of London of 1666, but by the end of the seventeenth century they persisted in only provincial contexts. The 1739 Roberts’s view of Charleston and the extant Othniel Beale House 96

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

demonstrates that such gables appeared on South Carolina houses in the early eighteenth century (see FIG. 8.2). If curvilinear gables were out of fashion in London by the 1690s, they appear with some frequency in Virginia, South Carolina, and the English Caribbean well into the eighteenth century. As church builders in South Carolina began to erect more substantial buildings during the second half of the eighteenth century, they found in the locally familiar form of the curvilinear gable an ornamental solution to the problem of masking the steep and wide profiles of large roof-framing systems. By the 1750s Anglicans in South Carolina were building churches that differed markedly from their predecessors and included far less variation in plan, form, materials, and ornament, generating a local vernacular that demonstrated “the diversity of countries, times and men’s manners.” The gravestones erected by South Carolina’s Anglicans in their parish churchyards also changed over time, and there are some distinctive patterns among these more personal expressions of Anglican material religion. By far the most spectacular monuments to appear in the churchyards of South Carolina’s Anglicans are the intricately carved chest tombs, sophisticated objects of distinctive English manufacture. Elizabeth Nairn’s chest tomb in the churchyard of St. Andrew’s Parish is the oldest Anglican example of this form in South Carolina (FIG. 2.3). In a manner typical of its form, Nairn’s monument is raised on a stepped platform and has four large tablets—one on each face—separated by highly sculptural corner blocks. A boldly sculptural or scalloped form supports a fluted “shaft” carrying a classical architrave. Together with the side tablets, these corner blocks support the broad slab or ledger stone that carries the Nairn family heraldic shield and a long epitaph that defines her through the biographies of her husbands and sons (FIG. 2.42). Chest tombs were a marker form of English manufacture that distinguished the most elite and powerful families in Anglican parishes from Virginia through South Carolina and across the Caribbean. The churchyard of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, has a rich collection of chest tombs. The majority of these follow a fairly standard formula, with flat tablets separated by bulbous corner blocks carrying a ledger slab. The most spectacular of Bruton’s chest tombs has elaborated corner blocks with gadrooning below and an egg-and-dart mounding above at each of the four corners (FIG. 2.43). On the primary elevations, these frame drapery (carried by cherubs) that only partly masks a skull—a clear reference to the resurrection. In many ways, Peter Lee’s 1701 chest tomb in the churchyard of St. John’s on the Caribbean island of Antigua speaks to the near ubiquity of this form among the English elite in the colonies (FIG. 2.44). Lee’s monument already follows the formula embraced by later examples and, although much earlier than the Virginia example, has the same trope of a thin veil suspended by cherubs; yet on this example, the skull is replaced by a table carrying an open book of life. The most remarkable collection of Anglican chest tombs in South Carolina consists of three Bull family tombs, dating from the 1760s, in the churchyard of Prince William’s Parish Church (FIG. 2.45). The tomb COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

F IGURE 2 . 4 2 Detail of Elizabeth Nairn chest tomb, St. Andrew’s Parish Church, Charleston County (Photo by author)

97

F IGURE 2 . 43  View of chest tomb in Bruton Parish churchyard, Williamsburg, Va. (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 . 4 4 Peter Lee chest tomb, 1701, churchyard of St. John’s Parish, Antigua (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 . 45  View of Bull chest tombs, churchyard of Prince William’s Parish, Beaufort County (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 . 46 Detail of Mary Bull chest tomb, Prince William’s Parish, Beaufort County (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 . 47 Charles Bernard chest tomb, St. James churchyard, Montego Bay, Jamaica, 1790 (Photo by author)

erected for John Bull (d.1767) and his wife Mary (d.1771) is ornamented with a remarkably delicate floral frieze. The chest tomb of their daughter Mary Middleton (d.1760) has spectacular hairy paw feet not unlike those found on contemporary furniture forms (FIG. 2.46). The chest tomb as a memorial form, however, seems not to have persisted in popularity into the later decades of the eighteenth century. The Bull monuments from Prince William’s Parish churchyard, all dating from the 1760s, are the latest Anglican examples in South Carolina, and the same is generally true in Virginia and the Caribbean, where most examples predate 1750. A singular exception is the spectacular Charles Bernard tomb (d.1790), carved in Bristol, England, and erected in the churchyard of St. James in Montego Bay, Jamaica (FIG. 2.47). Here the corner blocks are replaced by tall, elegant “gothick” panels, framing tablets richly ornamented in expressive rococo, vegetal detail. A grapevine frieze supports the ledger stone, which itself is COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

99

F IGURE 2 . 48  William Rhett grave slab, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston, 1723 (Photo by author)

trimmed in ballflowers. Yet as spectacular as this example might be, it is the exception to the rule: the chest tomb was largely abandoned as memorial form in the second half of the eighteenth century. An alternative form that appears alongside chest tombs in the early decades but persists throughout the century is the simple slab, or ledger stone, without the side panels and corner blocks of the more elaborated chest tomb. In the earliest examples, ledger stones, like their chest tomb counterparts, often exhibit the deceased’s family crest. One of the very earliest examples of this form in South Carolina is that memorializing Thomas Nairn (d.1718), second husband of Elizabeth Nairn, discussed above. Unlike his wife’s ledger stone, which has a long epitaph and a bold heraldic shield, Thomas Nairn’s stone is extraordinarily plain, carrying little more than his name and dates of birth and death. But many are not so plain. Those ledger stones that include some visual features beyond the text are of two types. Most, like the 1723 stone of William Rhett in the churchyard of St. Philip’s in South Carolina, include the family crest (FIG. 2.48). But the stone marking the burial of John Lawrence (d.1718/9) features skulls and a winged hourglass, signifying the quick passing of time (FIG. 2.49). The near ubiquity of iconography on grave markers 100

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 . 49 John Lawrence ledger stone in St. Catherine’s, Spanishtown, Jamaica (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .50 Detail of John Lawrence ledger stone, St. Catherine’s, Spanishtown, Jamaica (Photo by author)

of this period across the British colonial empire is nicely demonstrated by the close similarities between the winged hourglass and skull on the early eighteenth-century ledger stones of both John Lawrence in St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown, Jamaica, and Elizabeth Shubrick’s in the churchyard of St. Philip’s in Charleston, South Carolina (FIGS. 2.50 and 2.51). Benjamin Smith’s stone, erected in the churchyard of St. Philip’s in Charleston after his death in 1770, highlights another means of distinguishing a ledger slab (FIG. 2.52). His is raised on a box tomb covered in two tiers of granite and accessed on either side by two granite steps. The lowest tier has evidence of an iron fence that once encircled the slab. Like the chest tombs, these ledger slabs are found marking the graves of the parish elite from Virginia through South Carolina and across the Caribbean. In their use of one particular marker type, however, South Carolinians distinguished themselves quite markedly from their counterparts in Virginia and the Caribbean. From the 1710s through the end of the century, by far the most common form of grave marker in South Carolina was the upright headstone. Of the 191 markers dated to the eighteenth century in Anglican churchyards in South Carolina, 130 of them (68 percent) are COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

101

F IGURE 2 .51  Detail of Elizabeth Shubrick ledger stone, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .52   Benjamin Smith ledger on raised base, St. Philip’s Churchyard, Charleston, 1770 (Photo by author)

GR A P H 1.  Distribution of Grave Marker Types across South Carolina during the Eighteenth Century

upright headstones. In Graph 1, the distribution of memorial types across South Carolina is represented decade by decade. While the total number of surviving markers certainly increases sharply over the century, the relative proportion of headstones in any decade is always fairly strong, reaching as high as 79 percent in the 1740s. The reason for such a plethora of upright 102

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .53   Millicent Jones headstone, Bruton Parish churchyard, Williamsburg, Va. (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .54 Nathaniel Kent gravestone, St. Thomas Parish Church, Kingston, Jamaica (Photo by author)

headstones in South Carolina appears to be the direct importation of slate stones of New England manufacture beginning as early as the 1710s. These are numbers markedly different from other Anglican colonies. The majority of those few headstones that survive in the churchyard of Bruton Parish, like the 1751 stone to Millicent Jones, are simple forms that appear to be of local manufacture (FIG. 2.53). Unfortunately, the state of preservation of churchyards in the Caribbean is poor to say the least, eliminating any possibility for a comprehensive study. Yet even in the most intact of these churchyards, St. John’s on the island of Antigua, the survival rate of headstones is far less than those in South Carolina; of the seventeen monuments that date to the eighteenth century, only three are upright headstones. Examples of these same New England carved slates appear in both Jamaica and Barbados, but in each case the stones mark the burial of a New Englander; Nathaniel Kent’s stone in Jamaica reads very prominently that he was from “Marshfield in New England,” while John Bainsford’s in Barbados notes that he was a Boston native (FIG. 2.54). As markers of New England identity, these stones never became widely embraced by Anglicans in the Caribbean. By contrast, the New England gravestone became so ubiquitous in South Carolina by the 1730s and 1740s that it became an integral part of the material culture of Anglicanism in South Carolina.¹⁰⁹ COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

103

GR A P H 2 . Relative Popularity of Gravestone Images in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina

Following the patterns outlined by James Deetz in his study of New England gravestones, the earliest examples are crested with a winged skull, a form that appears in New England in the late seventeenth century. Among markers in Anglican churchyards, the winged death’s head—a skull with wings such as that on the Thomas Baker marker—is the marked preference through the 1740s, outnumbering the winged soul’s head four to one before 1750 (FIG. 2.55 and Graph 2).¹¹⁰ In the 1750s, however, Anglicans largely abandoned the traditional death’s head as memento mori in favor of a winged soul’s head (FIG. 2.56).¹¹¹ The winged soul’s head was nearly the exclusive option among Anglicans by the 1770s. There is no documentary record that directly illumines the relationship between South Carolina patron and New England carver. George Allen, a New England stone carver temporarily in Charleston, advertised in 1787 that he had “Slate Tomb Stones and Gravestones, of an excellent quality, which he will furnish with inscriptions only or ornament with coats of arms, crests, or other sculpture.”¹¹² Certainly, then, by the later decades of the eighteenth century, patrons could select from a stock of blanks. If blanks were sent to South Carolina, it seems clear that local carvers were prepared to engrave the epitaph as early as the 1730s, when David Merry advertised that he would cut letters in tombstones. John Saxon and Richard Baylis also advertised themselves as stonecutters working in the area in the 1730s.¹¹³ In some ways, South Carolina patrons demonstrated preferences simply through their selection of one carver over another. Presumably, patrons communicated directly with the New England carver of their choice. In 1773 John Bull, a gravestone carver from Newport, Rhode Island, temporarily in residence in Charleston, advertised that he was taking orders for stones.¹¹⁴ As Diana Combs’s study of early gravestones in colonial South Carolina makes clear, various New England carvers had distinctive styles and iconographic preferences. Furthermore, New England carvers began signing the stones they sent to South Carolina as early as the 1730s, surely 104

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .55   Thomas Baker headstone, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston, 1737 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 2 .56 Jane Postell headstone, St. Philip’s Churchyard, Charleston, 1786 (Photo by author)

in an attempt to attract more patrons who liked their work. Since many of the early stones were signed by various carvers, South Carolina patrons may have shown some agency over the design of gravestone art by preferring one carver over another.¹¹⁵ The participation of South Carolina patrons in the designs of New England carved stones, however, is made explicitly clear in the strong preference among South Carolinians for portrait stones; they appear in Charleston earlier and in greater numbers than in New England.¹¹⁶ The degree of individuation among these portraits suggests that carvers were not working from prints and mezzotints in their production of portrait stones.¹¹⁷ If some patrons were going to the trouble of commissioning a copy of a portrait for replication on a gravestone, it is surely safe to suggest that others were attentive to the forms and figures that were to grace the markers of their deceased loved ones. The best evidence, however, for the agency of patrons is the notable difference in the timing of the transition between death’s heads and soul’s heads. The new image predominated in South Carolina’s Anglican churchyards by the 1750s, whereas the same was not true in New England until the 1780s (see Graph 2).¹¹⁸ The transition from the death’s head to the soul’s head appears to have taken place twenty to thirty years earlier in Anglican South Carolina than it did in Congregational New England. Anglicans also began to replace the winged head with a portrait of the deceased by the 1750s, right in the moment when they were no longer satisfied with the death’s head but the winged soul had not yet become the decisive alternative. If New England carvers were simply sending stones with no sense of the preferences of their South Carolina patrons, the timing of the changes should correspond far more closely. The early transition in South Carolina is a strong indication COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

105

F IGURE 2 .57   Wooden grave board of Mary Anny Luyten, St. Michael’s churchyard, 1770 (Photo by author)

that New England carvers were aware of some preferences on the part of their southern patrons. While the majority of South Carolina’s surviving grave markers are in fact of New England manufacture, then, their faster embrace of changing iconography suggests some agency over design on the part of the southern patrons. The dramatic increase in the number of surviving grave markers over the course of the eighteenth century as represented in Graph 1 certainly points to the increasing availability of such monumental expression by a wider swath of the population. Yet a quick comparison between the number of surviving monuments for a single decade and the death and burial rates recorded for that same decade are a striking reminder that the opportunity to memorialize a loved one with a stone grave marker was available only to the very wealthiest of South Carolinians. The burial register for the city parish of St. Philip’s in the 1740s (from 1740 to 1749) records 1,194 burials, yet only thirteen monuments with death dates from the 1740s survive in St. Philip’s churchyard. Part of this remarkable disparity—only 1 percent of the deceased have a surviving marker—is the fact that many eighteenth-century markers were wooden. Remarkably, two cypress grave markers from Anglican churchyards survive; both take the form of a grave board (FIG. 2.57). These two are a rare survival of the many more that probably marked eighteenth-century burials across the colony but no longer survive. Another factor is that most burials were unmarked. Through the 1740s, St. Philip’s Parish included the entirety of the city of Charleston, yet not all those who died in the city were buried in the churchyard. The block of the city now bounded by Broad, Logan, and Queen Streets was, in the early eighteenth century, the burying ground for the destitute and less fortunate (FIG. 2.58). In addition to these burials, the 106

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .58   Detail of Ichnography of Charleston (1739), showing public burying ground at the top of the plan on a peninsula

site also housed a powder magazine and the workhouse for the city’s poor. This is probably where the majority of the 1,194 St. Philip’s burials were deposited, most without any marking at all. Unlike grave markers, which follow some distinctive regional patterns, South Carolina’s Communion silver was fairly consistent with Anglican Communion silver across the colonial British Empire. Since the meaning and performance of the sacrament was more hotly debated in the seventeenth century, the variety of forms enlisted for Communion was more widely varied than in the eighteenth century, when greater uniformity of forms signaled greater uniformity of practice. Unlike Virginia, whose Communion vessels included not only chalices but also canns and tankards—reflections of their additional century of Anglican practice—South Carolina’s Communion silver appears to have been fairly consistent. The Communion sets assembled in the early eighteenth century in South Carolina included almost exclusively the silver standing cup, a small salver or paten, a large flagon or COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

107

F IGURE 2 .59  William Grundy, London, Prince William’s Parish Church Communion set, including chalice, paten, flagon, and alms basin, 1753–54 (Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina; photo by Keith Leonard)

F IGURE 2 .6 0 William Shaw II of London, silver English tankard, St. Stephen’s Parish Church, 1763 (St. Stephen’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

two, and an alms plate (FIG. 2.59). Anglicans interchangeably referred to the chalice as the “cup” and the paten as a “salver.” The only exceptions in either the documentary or material record are a French Huguenot beaker and a silver English-made tankard owned by St. Stephen’s Parish and dating to the early 1760s (FIG. 2.60). The production of colonial parish silver in the earliest decades of the eighteenth century was dominated by Charleston silversmith Miles Brewton, who worked for at least three South Carolina parishes between 1707 and 1725 (FIG. 2.61).¹¹⁹ Those parish vestries who chose not to hire Brewton, the leading local silversmith, turned either to Boston or London. Christ Church Parish turned to Boston silversmith John Edwards, and their surviving chalice is a beautiful cup with a boldly gadrooned bowl (FIG. 2.62). By the later 1720s, however, the vast majority of South Carolina Communion silver was being ordered from a variety of silversmiths in London. Even in the early eighteenth century, London silver forms set the standard for Anglican parishes across the empire. While the various detailing on these pieces might differ—for example, the Edwards chalice is far more ornamental than the Brewton chalice—the basic forms, sizes, and materials of eighteenth-century Anglican Communion silver changes very little from place to place or over time. While Communion silver was fairly consistent and closely modeled on English forms, the gravestones erected by South Carolina’s Anglicans were in some respects very similar to those scattered across the southern and Caribbean colonies of the British Empire. When possible, the wealthiest and most powerful in any parish erected a chest tomb, a clear signifier of their status in the social hierarchy of the parish. The wealthy also elected to mark burials with 108

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 2 .61   Miles Brewton, chalice for St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish (Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina; photo by Keith Leonard)

F IGURE 2 .62 John Edwards, Boston, chalice for Christ Church Parish, ca. 1705 (Christ Church vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

a ledger slab, especially after the 1760s, when the chest tomb had fallen from favor. But unlike their counterparts in Virginia or the Caribbean, Anglicans in South Carolina also embraced a tradition of raising upright headstones, the majority of which were sent to Carolina from New England. While the forms and ornamentation on these slate stones was certainly the result of traditional New England practice, there is some evidence that South Carolina patrons had some agency over the designs of their stones through the selection of the carver and, in some cases, through explicit directives in the order. South Carolina’s Anglicans seem to have preferred the winged soul’s head over the winged skull as early as the 1750s, a decade that also saw the dissolution of the traditional profiles of gravestones and the rise of portraiture. The earliest upright stones were usually a winged skull in a semicircular tympanum over a square tablet, while those of the later decades were a winged soul’s head or a portrait in a complex curvilinear tympanum. These forms would not change again until the 1790s, when local carvers began producing stones from marble with an entirely new set of visual motifs. Similarly, the churches that these stones surround experienced some changes over the course of the century. The churches erected by Anglicans in South Carolina before 1750 demonstrate a notable variation in form; Anglicans in these earliest decades experimented with a variety of building traditions in determining not only the form, but also the materials, finishes, architectural details, and planning of their churches. These distinguishing traditions even shaped the selection and installation of building materials. Unlike the bright red bricks of Virginia, South Carolina’s bricks are a brown/gray. Even though masons in both colonies used Flemish bond, COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

109

those in South Carolina eschewed the rubbed-brick detailing preferred by Virginians. The early colonial churches of South Carolina exhibit a greater variation in form than either Virginia or Maryland, the two other mainland colonies with substantial numbers of early eighteenth-century churches. The traditional, longitudinal plan appears in South Carolina, but the proportional dimensions are never greater than two to one, a fact that distinguishes them from the longitudinal churches that dominate early Virginia, for example. As Carl Lounsbury has suggested, the preference for longitudinal churches in Virginia is a by-product of that colony’s early settlement date and the imprint of that form on the landscape left by a century of construction.¹²⁰ Without the deep impression of the longitudinal plan in their landscapes, South Carolina and Maryland more freely embraced more recent planning practices introduced by Christopher Wren in his late seventeenth-century London churches. Significantly, rural parishes in these colonies began building churches on this model well before their counterparts in England, where, like Virginia, the longitudinal tradition persisted. Another practice that more closely associates the buildings in South Carolina with those in Maryland is the option of the articulated chancel, a feature that only once surfaces in Virginia churches—and only then in a parish that borders Maryland.¹²¹ But here again regional variations play a role in shaping the local church: the exterior forms of articulated chancels in South Carolina are rectilinear, while those in Maryland are generally curvilinear. In addition to the traditional and the auditory plans, Anglicans in South Carolina also began building cruciform churches in the 1720s. While the variation in plan types and the embrace of the articulated chancel seems to ally Anglican architecture in the two younger colonies of South Carolina and Maryland, the embrace of the cruciform plan in South Carolina and Virginia suggests that Anglicans in these two colonies identified more closely with Anglicans in the Caribbean, where that form appears with notable frequency. The Anglican architecture of the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century in South Carolina is frequently described as Georgian. St. Stephen’s Church bears many of the distinguishing characteristics that signal the arrival of Georgianization: neat and plain wall surfaces, bilateral symmetry, an embrace of geometry and mathematical proportions, and the employ of architectural classicism. Much of this new architectural language was learned through the wave of architectural literature emanating from England by the second decade of the century. As demonstrated by the numerous commentaries describing Charleston and its environs as closely emulating London and its fashions, South Carolinians enlisted classical architectural details from these pattern books with far greater frequency than did their counterparts in Virginia or the Caribbean. Even though Georgian architectural ideals were an international phenomenon introduced through the expanding print culture of the eighteenth century, the final forms of Georgian architecture in any locale were ultimately shaped by local circumstances. The local conditions that determine the availability of materials shaped Anglican churches 110

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

in South Carolina in ways decidedly different from their counterparts in Virginia. The shift to larger auditory churches, for example, led South Carolinians to hide their larger roof-framing systems behind curvilinear gables, details that were decidedly out of fashion in England by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Such regional variation was a direct result of the local generation of designs and materials and a traditional building culture that incorporated the work of both elites and free and enslaved artisans, the subject of the next chapter.

COUNTRIES, TIM ES, AN D MEN ’ S MANNERS

111

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3 BU I LDE RS A N D BU I LDI NG CU LT U R E

Positioned above the chancel window of St. Stephen’s Parish Church is a curious signature, two perpendicular bricks inscribed with fine lime mortar (FIG. 3.1). The horizontal brick reads, “W Axson 1767,” naming a cabinetmaker who played a key role in the design and construction of the church and the year of its completion. Drawn from contemporary print sources, the vertical brick includes a caricature of Freemasonry, the mysterious fraternity with roots in the guilds of ancient masons (FIG. 3.2). The crossed square and compass below William Axson’s name confirms the cabinetmaker’s membership in the organization. Such a bold self-promotion by an artisan only a generation before would have been unthinkable, suggesting that by the second half of the eighteenth century, the roles of artisans and commissioners as church designers was beginning to shift. South Carolina’s Anglican churches provide an extraordinary opportunity to explore transformations in traditional building culture in colonial America. To what extent were artisans like Axson designers of colonial churches, and to what extent did his identity as a Freemason shape his career? From the beginning of the century, a small group of local elite men was selected by the parish vestry to oversee the building process. Taking the vestry’s instructions regarding the location, size, and building materials, these commissioners began by translating those expectations to a plan on paper. In considering the form and details of the new church, the commissioners consulted with other builders, visited other churches in the region, and consulted the most recent architectural literature. They then took responsibility for the delivery and approval of all building materials and contracted with the various tradesmen essential to the construction of a large public building— carpenters, masons, joiners, plasterers, and glaziers, among others. The commissioners remained intimately involved with the process from the drafting of a plan to the completion of the building. But this model for construction management was slowly transformed over the course of the century. By later decades, commissioners began to negotiate not with multiple craftsmen but with a single undertaker, who contracted with the commissioners to oversee the entire project for a set rate. Simultaneous with the rise of the undertaker, certain artisans found greater success in an increasingly competitive market by demonstrating fluency in architectural fashion and becoming tastemakers

F IGURE 3 .1 William Axson signature brick at St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County, 1767 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

F IGURE 3 .2   Samuel King, “A Freemason Form’d out of the Materials of His Lodge,” 1763 (Courtesy of the Lodge of St. Andrew, A.F. and A.M., Boston, Massachusetts)

in ways their predecessors were not. While the relative contributions to the process changed over time, vestrymen, church commissioners, undertakers, and artisans all played a role in shaping the architectural character of the Anglican church in South Carolina. From the outset, the one group who had almost no say in the church design process was the clergy. The SPG, the London society who sent missionaries to colonial parishes and sustained them with annual support, stipulated that a parish have a church and residence for the missionary. As a result, a majority of the earliest churches were constructed prior to the arrival of the minister. Even though the minister had no role in construction, English tradition gave him responsibility for the upkeep of the chancel.¹ In 1737 four pews were constructed in the chancel of St. Philip’s.² Before the vestry ordered the construction of these pews, however, they sought the approval of Alexander Garden, then minister of the parish. Garden gave the approval with the restriction that the pews not be sold but rented, providing a source of income for the regular upkeep of the chancel and its fittings. The limited involvement of clergy in the design and construction of churches in these early years persisted through the century. In only rare instances in the history of Anglican church design in eighteenth-century South Carolina did 114

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

clergy have any significant role in the design or erection of a church.³ Even in these instances, the clergy’s role appears to have been encouragement for the construction of a new church or an addition, not actual participation in the design process. Another individual conspicuously absent from this process is the architect. While Charles Chassereau advertised in the South Carolina Gazette in January 1735 that he was “newly come from London...[and will] draw Plans and Elevations for all kinds of buildings...perspective Views of prospects, of Towns, or Gentlemen’s Houses or Plantations,” his name never appears in any church records, or any early building records for that matter.⁴ A careful examination of eighteenth-century building culture in South Carolina demonstrates that the search for single authorship for colonial Anglican churches is a futile process. The term “architect” surfaced only at the very end of the century, and even then it was a title of unstable meaning. Eighteenth-century building culture in the colonies, as in all traditional building cultures, was the product of a wide variety of individuals, many playing multiple roles. The absence of lengthy contracts and detailed sets of architectural drawings through most of the century demonstrates that the fine details of building design were worked out on site and depended heavily on traditionally defined and widely recognized conventions. The “architects” of these churches were planters, carpenters, masons, glaziers, and other skilled artisans, each negotiating their way through the building process, each contributing to the final design. THE PRACTICE of locating the responsibility for the design and construction of a church in eighteenth-century South Carolina with a small group of church commissioners found its origins in the Church Act of 1706, which named twenty-two “church commissioners” to implement the act and to oversee the construction of six churches.⁵ But these men did not plan these first churches as a collective undertaking. Design and construction were the responsibility of one or two commissioners working with representatives of the parish elite.⁶ The building of the first church in the parish of St. Paul’s, for example, “was wholly recommended to [the] care and management” of Hugh Hext, Robert Seabrook, and Thomas Foxer.⁷ Hext and Seabrook were commissioners named in the Church Act; Foxer was a planter in the parish. After the completion of the first six churches, the design responsibility reverted entirely to local commissioners drawn from the parish’s highest social and economic class and numbering anywhere from four to fifteen.⁸ The nine commissioners appointed to erect St. Stephen’s Church in 1762 were all planters on the south side of the Santee River with plantation properties not far from the church; five of the nine represented St. Stephen’s in the Commons House of Assembly. One of the most important responsibilities of church commissioners was raising the large sums of money to support construction. A handful of documentary references from ministers’ letters, public records, and vestry BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

115

accounts offer some insights into the variable costs of erecting these buildings. Near £2,000 was not enough to complete the very large—fifty feet by thirty feet—brick parish church begun in 1719 in St. George’s Parish, Dorchester, while it was assumed that £200 would be enough to erect a small frame chapel of ease in the same years.⁹ One minister complained in 1740 that even though bricks were now ready to begin construction on his new church, the people of his parish “are not come to a resolution about the dimensions of the Church.”¹⁰ Surely discussions of cost factored into these deliberations. Building materials also played a role in determining cost; the timber frame churches erected in Christ Church and Prince Frederick Parishes in the 1720s each cost in the neighborhood of £1,000, while their brick counterparts in the same decades were usually twice that amount. By the third quarter of the century, church construction cost significantly more; the very large sixtyfoot-by-forty-foot brick church in St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish, begun in 1763, was estimated to cost over £4,000.¹¹ Yet even these amounts seem more than reasonable given the extraordinary sum of £53,500 paid to erect St. Michael’s Church in Charleston, begun ten years earlier.¹² While commissioners in the later eighteenth century were paying more than their earlier counterparts, and those constructing brick churches expended almost twice as much as those building in wood, the scale and degree of elaboration expended on a city church was far greater than any of these other differences. Even though the Church of England was recognized as the state church after 1706, the funding schemes used to build churches in South Carolina differed from those in England or her older colonies of Virginia or Barbados. In England, buildings were often funded entirely by raising a rate, or property tax, on the landowners in the parish.¹³ Given South Carolina’s significant religious diversity, Anglicans in the younger colony preferred to avoid Dissenters’ inevitable objections to direct public taxation in support of the established church. Instead, South Carolina’s Anglicans preferred to request support directly from the Colonial Assembly and to solicit individual benefactions. Eventually, private subscriptions linked to pew sales replaced the solicitation of substantial gifts from select individuals. The most direct means of raising funds for parish-church construction was solicitation of the Colonial Assembly. The practice of supporting church construction through acts of the Assembly found its genesis in the Church Act, which designated £2,000 for the construction of six new parish churches in the colony. The political support of Francis Nicholson and later governors meant that the Colonial Assembly continued to allot public funds for the construction of parish churches into the middle decades of the century. In 1722, for example, the cruciform addition to the parish church of St. Andrew’s received an allotment of £400 from the Assembly.¹⁴ But not all Anglican churches were built on public funds. The vestry in St. John’s, Colleton, erected their new church entirely at their own expense.¹⁵ To complement direct public support, parish churches in port cities often received funds levied on imported goods. Duties on all goods—except 116

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

slaves—imported into Georgetown in the early 1740s, for example, supported the erection of the new Anglican church in that town.¹⁶ While the Church of England enjoyed the vast majority of public support for church building, such support was on rare occasion extended to Dissenters as well. As a result of damage inflicted by a 1731 hurricane, for example, the Assembly extended £1,000 and £500, respectively, for the repair of the Presbyterian and Baptist meetinghouses in Charleston.¹⁷ Anglican church construction was strongly encouraged in the 1720s by the arrival of Francis Nicholson as royal governor in May of 1721. As a charter member of the SPG and as governor of Virginia, Nicholson was well known for supporting the relationship between church and state in the colonies. His reputation had so preceded him that Rev. William Guy wrote to the society four months before his arrival that “news arrived...that Gen. Nicholson is ye person nominated by ye Regency [for governor]....This gives me hopes that we shall quickly se ye province and ye Church flourish.”¹⁸ Guy was right; Nicholson’s political support of the Church of England resulted in the public funding of numerous building programs in the short five years of his term. Within his first year in office, Nicholson convinced the Colonial Assembly to grant significant financial support to four building programs in rural South Carolina, including the erection of a church in the new parish of Prince George’s and additions to the churches in St. Paul’s, St. Andrew’s, and St. George’s.¹⁹ Nicholson also extended substantial personal gifts to the construction or repairs of the churches in Prince George’s, Christ Church, and St. Helena’s Parishes.²⁰ In June 1723 the vestry of Christ Church Parish wrote to Nicholson: “We esteem it one of ye great Blessings of Heaven that we live under ye auspicious Influence of such an affectionate and generous gov. whose noble conduct and administration guides this province with ye best of Laws and adorns it with ye purest of Religion.”²¹ By all accounts, Nicholson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Church of England in the colony, and his encouragement certainly facilitated Anglican church-building programs in the 1720s. By the late 1730s, all established parishes were outfitted with a parish church and some with chapels of ease as well. Chapels of ease were often established by acts of Assembly, and on occasion they also received public support. When they did, it was typically in larger, frontier parishes that did not have a critical mass of Anglicans in a single region of the parish. This was the case in three parishes in the late 1720s and 1730s—St. Bartholomew’s in 1725; St. James, Santee, in 1731; and St. Paul’s in 1736. In each, the Assembly forwarded public funds for the erection of a chapel or multiple chapels of ease in a parish where no single parish church could conveniently serve the majority of potential congregants. Most chapels, however, were not supported with public funds. In 1723 the Reverend Hunt told the SPG that “some [of his parishioners] are 15 miles distant from the Church. This has occassioned some of ye Parishioners to build a neat Chappel at their own charge.”²² Like Hunt’s chapel, most chapels of ease were paid for completely by private benefactions. BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

117

Church commissioners working to erect a new parish church usually found that public support was rarely sufficient; individual benefactions were essential to the completion of churches in colonial South Carolina.²³ The cost of building the church in St. James, Goose Creek, for example, had been “chiefly defray’d at the generous cost of Arthur Middleton, Esqr. and one or two of the wealthier Parishioners.”²⁴ Middleton’s contributions to his parish church must have been substantial, as his parish church was often celebrated as the finest erected in early South Carolina. As a result of another private donation from parishioner and church commissioner Thomas Broughton, the interior of St. John’s was fitted with “a handsome pulpit, reading Desk, clerks Pew, Communion Table, and a Chancel Railed in.”²⁵ Soon after the completion of the church in St. George’s, the Reverend Varnod penned the most complete record of funding for a church-building project. “As there is not in this parish...above five gentlemen of any considerable estate,” Varnod reported, “the Parishioners were not able to build the church at their own expense.” The Assembly contributed £333, followed a few years later by a second allocation of £466. Additional donations from “Gentlemen in this and other parishes” amounted to £1,196.²⁶ In St. Paul’s Parish, subscribers donated £2,800 between 1720 and 1730 for the expansion of their church to a cruciform plan. Like Anglicans in most parishes, Varnod found that the public funds had to be supplemented with private donations. As incentive, these singular benefactors typically received the largest and best pew in the church. As local elites in a traditional building culture, church commissioners were also familiar with architectural production on many levels, and they were capable of planning a building prior to construction. Many oversaw the design and construction of buildings on their own plantations, while others produced building materials on their plantations or hired out their skilled slaves. The practical experience of overseeing local construction projects meant that most men appointed to a church commission by the Colonial Assembly brought to the project a certain degree of architectural competency.²⁷ As they began deliberating among themselves about the form and detailing of the church under their charge, church commissioners certainly spent time visiting other churches in the colony and consulting the most recent architectural literature. As described in chapter 1, the most fashionable churches turned to London models and to the most recent architectural literature as they generated their own designs. Church commissioners with smaller budgets and usually working in more remote locales often turned to their more refined neighbors for source material. For example, the pulpit of the new church in remote St. David’s Parish, contracted in 1770, was to be built “after the model of George Town Pulpit as near as possible it can be done by the Workmen.”²⁸ In a similar vein, the ceiling in St. Stephen’s Parish Church was described as modeled on that in St. Michael’s Church in Charleston.²⁹ But as the discussion of the chancel window and reredos of St. Stephen’s Parish Church discussed later in this chapter makes evident, 118

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

these more remote churches were not unfamiliar with the available architectural literature. While commissioners in all circumstances turned to this literature, it was the emulation of local examples that worked to establish a constrained set of options that would, by the second half of the century, establish a recognizable regional vocabulary of discrete forms, materials, and details that would differentiate Anglican churches in South Carolina from their counterparts in Virginia and the Caribbean. Once they had deliberated on various forms and details, church commissioners began drawing plans of their intended buildings.³⁰ As early as 1723, Guy enclosed a “Model” of his church in a letter to the SPG.³¹ In 1752 an advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette informed the public: “THE Commissioners for Building a new church in Charles-Town, have agreed on a plan for the same....[Any] person willing to furnish materials for the same, are desired to apply to Isaac Mazyck and Benjamin Smith, Esqrs. in whose hands the plan is lodged.”³² In 1768 the vestry of All Saints Parish advertised that “a plan of [the new church] may be seen in the Hands of Josiah Allston,” one of the commissioners.³³ In the 1770s commissioners in St. John’s, Colleton, even produced a drawing for a simple, wooden chapel.³⁴ Commissioners and vestrymen were even competent to draw designs for liturgical fittings. Some years after the construction of their church, the vestry of St. Michael’s designed for their new church “a neat [font] of an Oval form to stand upon a Mahogany frame and to run upon Brass Casters.”³⁵ Seven months later, the vestry communicated to their correspondent in London that they desired a “Canopy of the Font [with] a Brass Dove Gild’d and weighted with a proper Line and Cord agreeable to the Inclos’d Draught and Instructions.”³⁶ Such plans were not, of course, limited to churches but were produced for many major building projects. In 1765 Peter Manigault wrote to Ralph Izard about his design for the latter’s new Charleston house: “Inclosed you have a plan of the new house in Ch Twn as you did not seem to be very fond of the plan agreed on before you went away. I have ventured to substitute another in its place.”³⁷ Architectural drawings produced by church commissioners were an essential component of church-building design in colonial South Carolina. The survival of a 1749 plan for St. Paul’s Church in Augusta, Georgia, immediately across the Savannah River from South Carolina, is a rare example of an architectural drawing for a church from this period (FIG. 3.3). This example includes not only a floor plan, but also a southern elevation and site plan. The plan specifies details such as the scale and building materials, the location of the pulpit, the arrangement of the pews, the general features of the elevation, and the landscaping. The frame of the church is of wood so strong that it will last for many years. Between the studs is a wall of clay eight inches thick supported in the center of that clay with a piece of wood three inches thick set into the studs by a groove. The outside is rough cast with Lime and gravil BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

119

F IGURE 3 .3   Architectural drawings of St. Paul’s, Augusta, Ga., 1749 (Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, University of South Carolina Library)

appearing like stone. The inside is plaistered white wash’d and arch’d, the roof supported by two columns as per plan which we propose to have handsomely ornamented. We do likewise when we are able, intend to underprop the church with brick as it appears by the plan, but at present it is only supported with Loggs of lasting oak, which is the only part that does not answer to the view.³⁸ While it is not advisable to project the program of this one example on the working drawings produced for churches throughout the colonial period, this surviving example demonstrates that church commissioners were 120

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

able to articulate through drawings a significant degree of detail about the design of their churches. Some commissioners felt so much ownership over the design of their church that they signed their work. A tile over the west door of St. Andrew’s Church (ca. 1706) bears the initials of Jonathan Fitch and Thomas Rose, the building’s commissioners. This practice continued throughout the century. The 1751 tower at St. George’s, Dorchester—complete with stuccoed pilasters and an octagonal third stage—has bricks to either side of the western door reading, “I.S. Esqer, 1751” and “H. M. Esqer, 1751” (FIG. 3.4). While the identities of I. S. and H. M. remain uncertain, their status as esquires indicates that they were certainly gentlemen and probably church commissioners. In many cases, vestrymen—who frequently served as church commissioners—were involved not only in the design of the building but also as purveyors of materials. In 1764 the church commissioners for St. Stephen’s Parish contracted with Joseph Palmer—himself a church commissioner—to manufacture 150,000 bricks for their new church. In April of the next year, the commissioners met at the church to inspect the bricks. To Palmer’s dismay, the commissioners determined that his bricks were “intirely too Bad and are not Proper for Building a Church.”³⁹ One year later, the commissioners tried again by hiring another commissioner, Charles Cantey, to produce the same number of bricks, “the size of the moles [molds] to be equall in Bigness to Mr. Zach. Villepontoux’s”—suggesting that one of the defects in Palmer’s bricks was their size.⁴⁰ The specification that Cantey’s bricks be of the size produced by Zechariah Villepontoux was not inconsequential. Villepontoux, a prominent South Carolina brick maker, had a decade earlier produced the majority of the bricks for St. Michael’s Church in Charleston, and his nephew, Francis Villepontoux, was the mason hired by St. Stephen’s to lay Cantey’s bricks.⁴¹ As individuals familiar with architectural design and construction, church commissioners felt qualified to evaluate the quality of building materials and even, on occasion, provide those materials. Vestrymen were also responsible for erecting a wide range of buildings on parish properties, and they described everyday buildings with an extraordinary degree of specificity. An early vestry house still stands near the church of St. Thomas and St. Denis; it was described in 1728 as “a small brick house with a Chimney in it, the floor paved and the room furnished with a convenient Table and seats for the use of the vestry” (FIG. 3.5).⁴² Vestrymen were also charged with constructing, usually on a parcel some distance from the church, the parsonage and its various ancillary buildings. In 1745 Joseph Dupre, who had also served as a vestryman for Prince Frederick’s, was charged with building at the parsonage in that parish “a kitchen and wash house 25 by 12 a framed house and floor’d above throughout, boarded with featheredg’d boards and a staircase.”⁴³ In 1753 the vestry of St. John’s, Berkeley, hired a carpenter to build “a Barn of 32 feet long 10 feet high and 18 feet wide with a shed of 12 feet” for the parsonage of that parish.⁴⁴ The vestry of St. John’s, Berkeley, also erected at their parsonage in 1751 a brick BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

F IGURE 3 . 4 “H. M. Esqr 1751,” on tower of St. George’s, Dorchester (Photo by author)

121

F IGURE 3 .5  Vestry house for St. Thomas Parish, Berkeley County, before 1728 (Photo by author)

“Kitchen Wash house and Dairy...the whole to be 42 feet long and 16 feet wide with a double chimney.”⁴⁵ As men who designed and erected similar building types on their own properties, vestrymen and church commissioners were very familiar with the design and construction programs of both churches and everyday buildings. In deciding how to manage the construction of their church, commissioners had one of two options: either they could manage the entire project themselves, or they could hire an undertaker who would contract to manage the project. The earliest church commissioners preferred to manage the construction themselves. Guy, the minister of St. Andrew’s Parish, wrote in 1722 that “the commissioners appointed by the vestry to carry on ye enlargement of the said church have agreed with workmen who are now making bricks and preparing the timber etc.”⁴⁶ In 1755 the commissioners for the construction of Prince George’s Parish Church advertised for bids from joiners, carpenters, plasterers, tillers, glaziers, and painters.⁴⁷ Under this model, commissioners inspected the quality of the building materials and ensured that these tradesmen conformed their work to the plan. But increasingly over the course of the century, vestries preferred to place the responsibility of the project in the hands of an undertaker. In 1731 “Mr. Mackuen,...was the only gentleman in [St. Paul’s] Parish that was willing to undertake the work [of building the church], and he was so forward to serve the Church that he offered to provide the materials and workmen and give his own attendance without any consideration for his trouble.”⁴⁸ After midcentury, this particular arrangement had become the standard. In 1768 the vestry of St. Luke’s Parish advertised that they “are willing to agree with any person who will undertake to find materials and build the same [the church] of brick, 122

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

thirty-six by fifty-four in the clear.”⁴⁹ In rare instances, the undertaker also provided the architectural drawing for the church. The vestry minutes of St. David’s Parish record in 1770 that “Thomas Bingham doth hereby undertake and promise to build the said Parish Church Agreeable to a plan by him delivered.”⁵⁰ By the 1750s and 1760s, the undertaker was responsible for procuring building materials, hiring the necessary tradesmen, and overseeing the day-to-day operations on the building site. Undertakers were normally paid in only a few installments, occasionally at the beginning of the project but more frequently at midproject and upon completion. Mr. Bromby, the undertaker of the new church in St. Mark’s Parish in 1788, was to be paid £175 for the job, half at the raising of the frame and the other half upon completion.⁵¹ Such arrangements required undertakers to maintain stable credit to bridge what could be years between payments.⁵² While the earliest undertakers were gentlemen, most later undertakers were mechanics who had established enough capital to undertake such a project. With the employ of the mechanic-undertaker in the later eighteenth century came much more detailed contracts. As commissioners handed over greater responsibility for the church to mechanics, they felt the need to articulate their expectations in greater detail and to pen a legal document outlining those expectations in the event of a legal dispute. In 1770 St. David’s Parish contracted with carpenter Thomas Bingham to build a new church.⁵³ The opening language of the contract communicates the document’s legal status: “Witnesseth that for and in consideration hereafter Mentioned the said Thomas Bingham doth hereby undertake and promise to build...” The final clause further indicates that the completed church “shall be inspected and must be approved of by the commissioners” before the contract was considered fulfilled. The contract specifies details of construction, materials, and finishes. The frame church was to be fifty-three feet long and thirty feet wide. The roof was to be “hipt from the Upper Collar Beam at both ends and to be covered with nineteen inch Juniper Shingle.” Bingham was to provide “thirteen windows...contain[ing] eighteen lights each of a glass twelve by ten.” Three windows above the western gallery were “to contain eighteen lights each of glass eight by ten.” The contract described the size of seats and aisles, the shape and finishes of windows and shutters, the various woods to be used, and other details. The commissioners were to select “All plain Colours” for the painting of both the interior and exterior. Bingham was to build a “neat stair case bannistered,” and a “neat Communion Table.” Such specificity demonstrated less confidence in the on-site design process that had characterized church building in earlier decades of the century. The specificity of this contract, together with its (now-lost) drawing, demonstrates the emergence of a more professionalized building culture. It also points to the increasing importance of the contract as a binding and legal record of agreement between builder and client. The appearance of much more detailed building contracts is related in part to the rise of the undertaker. As clients gave greater control of the design and construction BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

123

process to a single individual, they felt the need to articulate their expectations in more careful detail.⁵⁴ In an increasingly complex building culture, both sides depended on specificity in the instance of a later disagreement over, or misunderstanding of, the intended design. IF CHURCH COMMISSIONERS planned new buildings and often contracted to supply building materials, it was their slaves who actually constructed the buildings. In some cases, slaves who worked on the construction of churches did so as unskilled laborers. In 1734 the vestry of Prince Frederick’s paid a local planter for “two negroes to attend the Plasterers.”⁵⁵ In St. George’s Parish in 1734, Varnod indicated that the work on his church was progressing but had been “layd aside till the crop was in,” indicating that field laborers played a significant role in the construction of the church.⁵⁶ He also remembered that during an earlier construction program, the church commissioners “sent some of their negroes in order to carry on more Speedily the building of the church.”⁵⁷ By no means, however, were enslaved workers always unskilled labor; slaves were often highly skilled carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, cabinetmakers, painters, glaziers, and even gold- and silversmiths.⁵⁸ As early as 1735, the widow of John Stevenson, the painter of St. Philip’s Church, advertised that she had “two Negroes to hire out by the Day that understand painting very well.”⁵⁹ One of these might have been Malborough, who was described in a 1750 mortgage by Stevenson’s son as a “painter and Glazier by trade.” Malborough served as security for the bond.⁶⁰ Master carpenter William Axson, who worked on a number of later eighteenth-century churches, owned Cato, Pompy, and Jeffrey, three enslaved carpenters that certainly played a significant role in his architectural production.⁶¹ One late eighteenth-century observer noted the number of skilled slaves in Charleston owned by tradesmen implied that “many of the mechanics bear nothing more of their trade than the name.”⁶² Working as day laborers, carpenters, bricklayers, glaziers, painters, and other tradesmen, South Carolina’s enslaved majority built the colony’s Anglican churches. A rare record of the work of blacks in church construction appears in the ledger for the building of St. Michael’s Church. Between April 1755 and June 1757, master carpenter Samuel Cardy oversaw a team of carpenters ranging in size from three to ten for the completion of the church’s steeple. In the week of November 6, 1756, for example, Cardy hired “5 White men carpenters, 3 Negro Carpenters, and 2 Negroes turning the wheel.” Most carpenters in his hire worked six days a week, but the inconsistency in some months suggests that many were hired to help Cardy complete a specific task. While the ledger distinguishes between white and black, it does not separate slave from free. Cardy hired white carpenters for 59 percent of the 2,509 workdays recorded in the ledger and black carpenters for the remaining 41 percent, even though white carpenters received £2 per day and black carpenters received half as much. The schedule also indicates that this work was seasonal; 83 percent 124

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

of the total workdays fell in the six months between September and February. Cardy’s carpenters—black and white—found almost no work on the St. Michael’s site in the summer months of June and July. Enslaved and free blacks, both skilled and unskilled, played a central role in the formation of South Carolina’s Anglican architecture, but the record of their contributions is rare. Unfortunately, the ocean of individuals who actually labored to see these buildings rise on their site remains the most obscure. ARTISANS LIKE WILLIAM AXSON and the many men who worked for them—black and white, slave and free—played an important role in the design of churches. While church commissioners planned the building and undertakers often managed the project, the remainder of the design decisions were negotiated on-site or left up to carpenters, joiners, masons, and other artisans. Carpenters designed and executed floor- and roof-framing systems. Masons laid up brick walls according to certain bonding patterns with water tables, quoins, and jack arches atop openings. They determined the sizes of windows and doors and positioned them in walls according to carefully considered proportional relationships. Joiners finished doors, pews, galleries, pulpits, desks, and Communion tables in a manner that satisfied their clients’ expectations.⁶³ While the names of these artisans seldom found their way into the surviving historical record, a few early accounts provide a glimpse into the lives of some. Vestry minutes of St. Philip’s in Charleston record one set of payments in 1726 to artisans and builders associated with the construction of their church. Thomas Weaver, a carpenter, received £766, easily the largest payment. An officer in the South Carolina Society, Thomas Weaver was well established in Charleston.⁶⁴ In addition to his carpenter’s and joiner’s tools, his inventory includes coffin furniture and materials for painting and glazing, suggesting an involvement in other trades.⁶⁵ He also invested in building speculation, advertising houses in Charleston for sale or lease. Some were as large as “a house with 4 Rooms on a Floor, with a good Kitchen and other Conveniences, there being 12 rooms in all, with good water and a pump.”⁶⁶ Weaver’s shop included a handful of apprentices who frequently ran away.⁶⁷ In 1734 Weaver advertised for the return of the fifteen-year-old John Petty; six years later, for one-eyed William Amy; and the next year, for Andrew M’Clenning, an Irish apprentice.⁶⁸ Possibly frustrated by these departures, Weaver began apprenticing his slaves in the mid-1740s.⁶⁹ Among other artisans, two woodworkers and a painter assisted Weaver in the construction of St. Philip’s. House carpenter George Lea received £26 for assisting Weaver in the design and construction of the church’s roofframing system.⁷⁰ William Watson, a cabinetmaker and joiner, ran a King Street business, offering coffins, “Tables, Chest of drawers, Buroes, etc.” He probably oversaw the making of pews, doors, window sash, or such fittings as the pulpit and the clerk’s and reader’s desks. He was paid £19 for his work.⁷¹ Charleston painter and glazier John Stevenson—paid £8 for his work at the BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

125

church—trained at least two of his four slaves in the trade and let them out for hire.⁷² After his death in 1735, John’s widow advertised that she “continues the same business after the best manner and very reasonable.”⁷³ Most of these artisans were Anglicans involved in the life of St. Philip’s Church. Carpenter Thomas Weaver was married in that parish and had four of his five children baptized there as well.⁷⁴ Though they were married in St. Andrew’s Parish in 1741, carpenter George Lea and his wife were buried in the churchyard of St. Philip’s.⁷⁵ Joiner William Watson also attended St. Philip’s church, where he was married and where his three daughters were all baptized.⁷⁶ John Stevenson, the painter of St. Philip’s, was married in the church in 1720 and owned two pews.⁷⁷ The only non-Anglican in the list was the Congregational gunsmith and clock maker Joseph Massey, who received £120 for work on the church and was probably the only person in Charleston capable of assembling the clock for the church cupola.⁷⁸ The South Carolina Gazette memorialized Massey as “universally beloved and esteemed for his Ingenuity.”⁷⁹ Massey also printed the first currency in the colony and owned numerous books on mathematics.⁸⁰ Certainly in the early decades of the century, church commissioners hired artisans who were regularly involved in the life of the parish. By the later eighteenth century, the practice of certain trades had become dominated by particular families. In the rural parishes northwest of Charleston, for example, a small coterie of artisan/undertakers dominated church building in the 1760s. In 1763 the vestry of St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish agreed with two men to build a new chapel of ease on Pompion Hill in their parish. Zachariah Villepontoux received £3,000 to erect the building shell and William Axson £1,000 “to finish and adorn the Inside in a decent and compleat manner.”⁸¹ A few years after Villepontoux and Axson completed Pompion Hill Chapel, Villepontoux’s nephew Francis joined with Axson to build the parish church of St. Stephen’s. In 1767 the vestry paid “Axson and Pontoux” slightly more than £510 for the woodwork and £538 for the brickwork.⁸² The appearance of Axson and Villepontoux’s names on church signature bricks of the 1760s and later is especially revealing of these craftsmen’s increasingly important role as designers (FIGS. 3.1 and 3.6). These signature bricks are usually located in prominent and visible locations, generally adjacent to or over doors, and as signatures they advertised the work of master artisans as purveyors of genteel design. After midcentury, signature bricks became an important advertising tool as artisans promoted themselves in an increasingly competitive market.⁸³ Both the Axsons and the Villepontouxs were by the 1760s well-established artisan families with connections to the Anglican Church, a factor that continued to play a role in their selection to build these churches. The William Axson who executed the fittings and woodwork in Pompion Hill and St. Stephen’s came from a family of carpenters and joiners. One William Axson lived in Charleston and advertised himself as in partnership with Stephen Townsend as cabinetmakers in 1763.⁸⁴ Over the course of his life he had

F IGURE 3 .6  “F. Villepontox Ser 7 1767,” on St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County (Photo by author)

126

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

acquired a comfortable living, with debts owed to his estate worth over £1,300.⁸⁵ In his will, he bequeathed a brick house to his two eldest sons and an equivalent sum to his youngest son. A different William Axson, a joiner, lived in St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish and might have been a nephew of the older cabinetmaker of the same name. Not only did Axson have his three children baptized in the parish church of St. Thomas and St. Denis, but he also advertised missing “1 silver tankard and salver marked I H S,” suggesting that he had a close relationship with the Anglican Church.⁸⁶ Zachariah Villepontoux, the mason for Pompion Hill Chapel, was a member of a Huguenot planter family who lived in these parishes for generations.⁸⁷ Pompion Hill was not his first commission for the Anglican Church; he had a decade earlier provided a majority of the bricks for the construction of St. Michael’s Church in Charleston. Even though Villepontoux advertised himself as a brick maker in the South Carolina Gazette, he owned over 2,500 acres in Craven County and was a public figure of local prominence. He served as a churchwarden for St. James, Goose Creek, in 1751–52 and represented the parish in the Commons House of Assembly.⁸⁸ While erecting the church for St. Stephen’s Parish, he also served that parish as a churchwarden. William Axson and Zachariah Villepontoux came from established families prominent in their trade, and both had connections to the church; their success in the building trades depended heavily on name recognition and interpersonal connections. But the selection of artisans in the later eighteenth century depended also on their ability to negotiate the emerging role of the master craftsman as tastemaker. Whereas the minister of St. John’s, Berkeley, complained in 1714 that his new church rose slowly due to “the Scarcity of workmen,” later church commissioners could advertise for competing bids from undertakers and artisans.⁸⁹ While early eighteenth-century artisans worked to a standard described as neat and workmanlike, later artisans recognized that fluency in architectural fashion gave them an edge over their competitors.⁹⁰ In 1742 commissioners from St. John’s Parish agreed with Thomas Cheesman to complete a pulpit, desks, and pews in a “substantial, neat, and workmanlike” manner.⁹¹ Yet in 1776, Rev. Alexander Garden was pleased that his vestry had commissioned a “new and genteel” pulpit.⁹² In 1777 the parish of St. John’s, Berkeley, advertised for “Any tradesman who is capable of executing a genteel Altar piece for this Church.”⁹³ By the 1770s, as gentility and fashion became important standards in the building trades, “neat” and “workmanlike” were no longer sufficient for work commissioned by the Anglican Church. One of the most important sources of knowledge about genteel building design, or “architecture,” was the rising tide of English architectural treatises. Although the tradition of publishing pattern books dates to the Renaissance, and numerous European examples survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the second decade of the eighteenth century saw the publication of a steady stream of architectural literature in England. These books fell into two broad categories. The first group were large folio volumes published BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

127

F IGURE 3 .7   William Axson’s altarpiece, St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County, 1767 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

by both practicing architects and gentlemen amateurs. These volumes were generally limited to plans and elevations of great houses.⁹⁴ The most popular volume to include churches was James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture, published in 1726, which included a number of church designs, including variations on steeples. The impact of this volume on St. Michael’s in Charleston has already been demonstrated in a previous chapter. The second category were smaller, less expensive volumes intended for use by builders and artisans in the execution of architectural details such as cornices, column proportions, and door and window design. As exemplified by William Axson’s altarpiece in St. Stephen’s, architectural pattern books became an important design source for genteel liturgical fittings in rural churches (FIG. 3.7). Axson’s altarpiece takes its form from the numerous altarpieces in architectural pattern books published by Batty Langley, William Pain, and Robert Morris (FIG. 3.8).⁹⁵ All three of these London designers followed a standard formula, a tripartite design with a segmental arch or pediment capping the central bay. The design closest in form to Axson’s altarpiece, one by Batty Langley, positions the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles’ Creed on smaller tablets flanking the Decalogue crowned with a cherub. Fluted Ionic pilasters supporting an Ionic entablature rise at each end of the altarpiece, and engaged Ionic columns frame the central bay. A pediment over the central bay contains a heavenly scene of cherubs and clouds. Axson’s altarpiece follows this formulaic composition but adapts the design as he saw fit. 128

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 3 .8 “Ionic Altar Piece,” in Batty Langley, The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs (London, 1740), plate 110 (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

Architectural pattern books established a new formula for genteel design, but master artisans were by no means bound to these designs. South Carolina vestrymen turned to these volumes not as catalogs for duplication but as sources of inspiration, resulting in colonial designs that rarely replicate exactly the image on the page. Variations between colonial forms and pattern-book designs, therefore, do not reflect an incapacity for design on the part of the vestry, but rather the opposite. Colonial vestrymen and the master craftsmen who worked for them were designers in their own right; variations from published images reflect the creative solutions of craftsmen and their patrons. For example, Axson’s design differs from the pattern-book models in a number of ways. Rendering the skills of a carver unnecessary, Axson replaced the Ionic order with the Doric. Dispensing altogether with the Decalogue, Axson’s altarpiece includes only the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed on tablets in the flanking bays. A large venetian window, by the 1760s typical for South Carolina chancels, dominates the enlarged central bay, and sunbursts stand in for Langley’s heavenly scene. With clear quotations from London designs yet reformulated to suit local preference, Axson’s altarpiece was an exemplar of genteel design. But the broadest impact of this new wave of fashion-conscious architectural literature was not in the design of whole buildings or even the citation of new liturgical forms, but in the “correct” implementation of classical architectural vocabulary and the drive toward mathematical proportion. The carver Anthony Forehand submitted to St. Michael’s Church a written BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

129

F IGURE 3 .9  Batty Langley, The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs (London, 1740), plate 31 (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

description of a new altarpiece that he proposed to ornament the chancel. Forehand used an extraordinary array of classical terms, including “intablature,” “modillions,” “ovolo,” and others. He also cited specific decorative motifs, such as “egg and anchor,” and an “inriched chinies [Chinese] frett” that demonstrated his own fluency and that of his readers in the fine details of architectural finish.⁹⁶ The extensive detail in this description—especially the Chinese fret for the tabernacle—betrays Forehand’s mastery of the language of genteel design. Renaissance mathematical formulations came to govern architecture in England by the early eighteenth century. Of a church published in Colin Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, for example, Campbell writes that the nave of the church measures fifty-four feet by seventy-four feet, “which is a diagonal proportion.”⁹⁷ He further notes that various measurements of the building are all related by proportion; the thickness of the exterior walls together with the engaged columns, for example, are one-sixth of the building width. Similar concern for mathematical proportions appears in eighteenth-century churches in South Carolina through the relationship of the overall dimensions. The footprint of St. Stephen’s Church is thirty-six by forty-five, a proportional relationship of four to five. The new church in St. John’s, Berkeley, measured forty by sixty, proportionally two to three. The exterior dimensions of a building were important because mathematical proportion had the capacity to realize beauty. The differences between St. James, Goose Creek (1707–19), and Pompion Hill Chapel (1763–66) demonstrate the influence of classical proportions and 130

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 3 .10 West door of St. James, Goose Creek, Parish Church, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 3 .11 South door at Pompion Hill Chapel, Berkeley County, 1763–66 (Photo by author)

detailing of the new architectural literature on work executed by craftsmen. As a general rule, eighteenth-century architectural pattern books espoused door proportions with a height twice the width or slightly taller, even for double doors (FIG. 3.9).⁹⁸ The double door at the west end of St. James has a width more than half its height (FIG. 3.10). The southern door of Pompion Hill Chapel, conversely, is almost exactly twice as high as its width (FIG. 3.11). Whereas the builders of St. James felt no pressure to do so, the builders of Pompion Hill constricted their double doors significantly to adhere to the basic two-to-one proportions espoused in eighteenth-century pattern books. Similar rules of proportions governed windows. The shuttered portions of the windows at Pompion Hill are a common proportional measure, with the height of the window one and three-quarters times its width. The windows of St. James have a height that measures far more than twice their width, proportions foreign to the new architectural literature.⁹⁹ South Carolina’s post-1750 churches also began to embrace a handful of architectural details and finish that established greater visual uniformity among these buildings. Although the majority of windows on the first-generation churches were arched, the shape of that arch could be either segmental or semicircular, as seen on Strawberry Chapel, begun in 1739 (see FIG. 2.5). By the 1750s, however, the segmental arch all but gives way to the more geometrically uniform semicircular arch. Furthermore, the use of classical vocabulary took on greater archaeological accuracy. The independent pilasters framing the western door of St. James, Goose Creek, are replaced in the later BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

131

churches with orders governing the arrangement of the entire exterior. A true classical portico complete with rounded and classically proportioned columns fronts each primary elevation of St. James, Santee (compare FIGS. 3.10 and 2.13). At St. James, Goose Creek, a simple plaster molding at the top of the wall serves as a cornice and answers the molded water table below. While both buildings quote classical architecture in their design, classical design at St. James was conceived as the quotation of specific details, not a set of proportional principles and the “correct” implementation of classical elements that govern the entirety of the building. THREE ARTISANS played a leading role in the design of St. Michael’s Church, an exemplar of genteel design in colonial South Carolina, and their story speaks explicitly to the rising importance of craftsmen as both undertakers and tastemakers in South Carolina (FIG. 1.16). In May 1752, after the commissioners of St. Michael’s had completed a design for the church, they hired master carpenter Samuel Cardy. Recently arrived from Dublin, Cardy had a great deal of construction experience but little social or financial capital in Charleston.¹⁰⁰ Serving the church commissioners as a master carpenter, Cardy assembled doors and windows and framed out floors.¹⁰¹ He designed the venetian and the “Egyptian” windows in the chancel. He assisted the masons by assembling moulds for the specially shaped bricks of the columns and prepared centers for all the masonry arches. He also erected a machine that allowed the elevation of bricks for the construction of the steeple and constructed specially shaped brick molds and centering for brick arches. Cardy was also paid a salary to oversee the daily operations on the building site, but as a manager he did not fulfill all of the traditional responsibilities of an undertaker. Undertakers typically regulated the flow of materials and finances; St. Michael’s church commissioners reserved that task for one of their own. The commissioners paid Samuel Prioleau, a wealthy Charleston merchant and owner of a majority of the city’s wharfs, a salary of £200 per year to serve as a clerk.¹⁰² He monitored the flow of materials to the building site and kept the finances in order. The church commissioners’ daybook, which notes the arrival of building materials to the construction site through the course of the project, was begun before Samuel Cardy was hired onto the project in May 1752 and was written in a hand almost identical to that of Prioleau. Many of the surviving subcontractors’ bills from the early years are signed, “Examined, Samuel Prioleau, clerk.” Five years later, however, Cardy submitted a bid for the completion of the church interior. The agreement included: “Pewing the church, erecting the gallerys and pews...agreeable to the plat, organ loft, pulpit compleat agreeable to the design, great doors to the steeple, circular and plain ceiling all through the Building, two great stayr cases and the door ways leading to the gallerys, large cornish and frett in the ceiling, windows seats and lining to all the windows, and compleating the portico.”¹⁰³ This bid marked a turning point in the carpenter’s relationship to the project. Instead of being paid a 132

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

salary as an overseer, Cardy now submitted a single, extensively detailed bid to be paid in whole. Since the new agreement for the interior gave Cardy responsibility for the completion of the project, he became the undertaker. Cardy approved the work of other artisans, supervised their payment, and was held responsible for completing the job in a timely manner. But even as the undertaker, Cardy’s authority was subject to the design preferences of the commissioners. The interior was completed “agreeable to the plat,” and a design had been drawn for the pulpit; the commissioners approved both prior to the start of work. In August 1759 the commissioners reconsidered the design of the interior “and agreed and directed Mr. Cardy to place [the Pulpit, Desks, and publick Pews] in the following manner Vizt, The pulpit and the reading and Clerk’s Desks to join each other, and to be on the Southside of the middle Isle.”¹⁰⁴ Even though Cardy served as the undertaker, the church commissioners retained responsibility for major design decisions. To help him complete the interior, Cardy hired two other Charleston artisans: Thomas Elfe, of the cabinetmaking partnership of Elfe and Hutchinson, and Henry Burnett, a London-trained carver. Together with Thomas Hutchinson, Elfe operated a large cabinetmakers’ shop in Charleston and was already by the late 1740s a very prosperous cabinetmaker in the colony.¹⁰⁵ Burnett, a house and ship carver, had “recently arrived from London” in April 1750. Like many London-trained artisans, Burnett was well aware that familiarity with fashions in the cosmopolitan center would lend him credibility as a tastemaker.¹⁰⁶ Under the direction of Cardy, Elfe was responsible for all the turned work and a small amount of casework. His work ranged from the sixty-one dozen “drops” (guttae) necessary for the Doric order around the church exterior to the newels and banisters for the stairs leading to the pulpit, the stairs to the desk, and the very large staircases at the west end. The stairs, in fact, incorporate work by Cardy, Burnett, and Elfe and Hutchinson. Cardy erected the case supporting the stairs, Elfe and Hutchinson turned the banisters, and Burnett carved the brackets (FIG. 3.12). So while the church commissioners provided the essentials of the design and governed the arrangement of the interior, many of the details of the building’s architecture were left to the discretion of artisans. While working under Cardy, Burnett carved capitals and cherubs for the steeple, capitals for the columns supporting the galleries, and flowers for the portico, but his crowning achievement was the church’s new pulpit (FIG. 3.13). One of the stipulations of Cardy’s contract with the commissioners was that he install a “Pulpit compleat agreeable to the design.”¹⁰⁷ While the record does not indicate whose hand actually produced the drawing for the pulpit in St. Michael’s, Burnett’s involvement with the pulpit’s finest details suggests that the carver was a likely candidate. As a master artisan newly arrived from London, Burnett surely possessed the necessary skills to plan and design the pulpit even if the vestry reserved the right to approve the design prior to its execution.¹⁰⁸ BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

133

F IGURE 3 .12 Stairs in St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, 1752–61 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 3 .13 Pulpit in St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, 1752–61 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

Like Axson’s altarpiece in St. Stephen’s, Burnett’s pulpit approximates the eighteenth-century pulpit type published in Batty Langley’s 1740 The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs, but it is far from a copy (FIG. 3.14).¹⁰⁹ Although the colonial example most closely approximates Langley’s design for a hexangular pulpit, the many departures from any single published design highlights the role of the colonial craftsman’s autonomy and ingenuity.¹¹⁰ The domed canopy with six independent ribs carrying a “pine apple” finial, the fluted Corinthian columns carrying the canopy, and the six scrolled brackets carrying the pulpit case are all design elements absent from pattern books. While the form of the pulpit was common, the finish details work together as an original design.¹¹¹ 134

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 3 .1 4 “Hexangular Pulpit,” in Batty Langley, The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs (London, 1740), plate 114 (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

Working together on St. Michael’s, Cardy, Burnett, and Elfe used this important public commission to establish or further their careers as leading artisans in the colony. Burnett was well aware that his experience in London lent him a certain cachet with a colonial clientele. While working on St. Michael’s, Burnett received a number of smaller domestic commissions, including the spectacular staircase in Peter Leger’s new house, only a few blocks from the church (FIG. 3.15). Thomas Elfe also saw his work at St. Michael’s transform his standing in the city; as a later chapter will demonstrate, he was the only artisan to claim a pew on the floor of the church, surrounded by the colony’s most powerful families. In the case of Samuel Cardy, working at St. Michael’s allowed him to refashion his identity from master carpenter BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

135

to “architect.” In 1759, as St. Michael’s was rising, Cardy purchased a house on Archdale Street. The document of sale records Cardy’s profession as “carpenter.” Yet the very next month, Cardy described himself as an “architect” in a lease of part of the Archdale land.¹¹² Cardy’s self-identification as architect would be one of the first uses of that term in South Carolina, the introduction of a professional identity previously unknown in the colony.¹¹³ Whereas Cardy wished to be called architect, his contemporaries, largely unfamiliar with the profession, understood him to be a carpenter. Yet by his death in 1774, Cardy’s bid for status as a professional tastemaker, not an artisan, had been realized: his memorial in the South Carolina Gazette described him as the “ingenious Architect” of St. Michael’s.

F IGURE 3 .15   Detail of stair in Peter Leger House, Charleston (Photo by author)

136

THE ARCHITECTURAL REFINEMENT of South Carolina’s Anglican churches was a shared concern of both commissioners and artisans, and the regular meetings of the Freemasons were one of the few social occasions that drew these men into contact with one another.¹¹⁴ While English Freemasonry often separated practicing artisans from the social and political elite who had adopted the forms of brotherhood without practicing the trades, the exact relationship between South Carolina’s two lodges—Solomon’s Lodge and the Provincial Grand Lodge—remains uncertain. Above the western door of St. Stephen’s Church, an incised brick reads “SL Guild,” with a crossed compass and square between. “SL” were the initials for Solomon’s Lodge. The use of the term “guild,” a society of practicing artisans, probably indicates that the membership of Solomon’s Lodge included a large contingent of artisans. The Grand Provincial Lodge, established before 1739 and reestablished in 1754, appears to have been composed largely of nonartisan elites, but there is no evidence to suggest an explicit distinction.¹¹⁵ Elite Anglicans, including Benjamin Smith, Charles Pinckney, James Graeme, William Bull, and Samuel Prioleau, were prominent members of both lodges.¹¹⁶ One account indicates that by 1772, South Carolina Freemasonry was at least 200 strong, a large community drawing together gentlemen church commissioners and artisans who wished to work for them.¹¹⁷ Through rituals, sermons, and membership, Freemasonry enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Anglican Church in South Carolina. While there is no evidence in any of the church records of the celebration of the Festival of St. John the Evangelist, South Carolina’s Freemasons celebrated the day in 1738 with great fanfare. The day was “ushered in with the firing of guns at sunrise from several ships in the harbour with all their colours flying.”¹¹⁸ Later in the day, the city’s Masons, “properly clothed with the Ensigns of their Order, and Music before them,” traveled through the city visiting prominent members of their order. After processing to church to attend divine service, they proceeded to hear a “very eloquent speech of the usefulness of [Masonic] societies, and the benefit arising therefrom to mankind.”¹¹⁹ Sermons celebrating the Freemasons, such as the surviving example in the papers of Anglican minister Robert Smith, were common CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

among eighteenth-century Anglicans.¹²⁰ In 1762 the South Carolina Gazette carried an advertisement proposing the printing of “An anthem, and an Ode for voices and Instruments, Composed by Benjamin Yarnold, Organist of St. Philip, Charles Town, South Carolina: Being the same that was performed before the ancient Fraternity of Free-Masons, at the installation of the Homn. Benjamin Smith, Esq. Grand Master in South Carolina.”¹²¹ In 1778 the Freemasons announced that “several prayer books stamped on the outside with gold letters, (Solomon’s Lodge No. 1)” had been removed from the two pews in St. Michael’s Church, owned by Solomon’s Lodge.¹²² Freemasonry hovered at the margins of the Anglican Church throughout the latter decades of the colonial era. One of the central tenets of Freemasonry was fluency in the rules of architecture and geometry. As a result, the Freemasons surely played a critical role in the formation of later Anglican architecture by preaching the gospel of architectural regularity. Consider, for example, the 1732 bylaws for St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia: “That since the excellent Science of Geometry and Architecture is so much recommended in our ancient constitutions, Masons being first instituted with this Design...total ignorance of this Art is very unbecoming a Mason...we therefore conclude that it is the Duty of every member to make himself, in some measure, acquainted therewith.”¹²³ Benjamin Smith, one of the church commissioners of St. Michael’s, was a leading man in the colony on the subject of architecture.¹²⁴ He served on numerous building commissions, most notably the State House (also begun in 1752) and the 1767 Commission for Building the Exchange, Customs House, and the Watch House.¹²⁵ In addition to his early post as the grand master of Solomon’s Lodge, Smith also served as grand master of the Provincial Grand Lodge in 1743, Provincial senior grand warden in 1754, and grand master again in 1762.¹²⁶ Paul Douxsaint, treasurer of the Provincial Lodge in 1754, was a prominent subscriber to St. Michael’s Church in 1759 and was later a church commissioner for the new parish church in St. James, Santee, erected in 1768.¹²⁷ The involvement of many prominent Freemasons as undertakers, commissioners, or master craftsmen for Anglican churches in the 1750s and 1760s suggests that this secretive fraternity played a significant role in advancing the refinement of Anglican church architecture and the careers of artisans like Axson.¹²⁸ THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION of church architecture in early South Carolina was a highly decentralized process. The architecture of the Church of England in these provincial parishes was shaped almost exclusively by local laity. Not only were church designs generated locally and not sent from England; English-educated clergy also had almost no say in the design process. Even though the Church Act established a body of commissioners to oversee the establishment of the church, a handful of elite from the parish took on the responsibility for overseeing the design and construction of churches. Design and construction became even more localized after the BUILDER S AN D BUILD IN G CU LTUR E

137

1720s, when the church commissioners named in the Church Act played almost no role in the design and construction process. Through the majority of the century, local church commissioners were responsible for generating a design, procuring building materials, and hiring individual artisans. By the middle of the eighteenth century, church commissioners placed the construction of the church in the hands of an undertaker, a single individual responsible for overseeing the entire construction process, and gradually the undertaker took on a greater role in the design process as well. Critical to a thriving career as a master craftsman in the later eighteenth century was the perception that the artisan was capable of providing genteel—that is, fashionable—designs. One of the most important sources for architectural fashion in the Anglican churches of eighteenth-century South Carolina were pattern books, especially Langley’s The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs. Joiners and other master craftsmen turned to these pages for design inspiration. As members of the Freemasons, an organization actively involved in Anglican life and church design throughout the middle and later decades of the century, artisans and those local elites who served as church commissioners found common ground. Freemasons played an important role in shaping church architecture by defining among patrons, craftsmen, and undertakers a shared architectural language that centered on classical literacy and geometric regularity. This tradition of localized design and production generated a distinctive collection of churches across the South Carolina landscape, a set of buildings that for many would open a fissure through the veil between the earth and the heavens.

138

CONSTRUCTING MATERIAL RELIGION

PA RT I I

Belief and Ritual in Material Religion

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4 SE NSI NG T H E SACR E D

Not long after the death of her nineteen-year-old son Benjamin on January 17, 1718, Sarah Seabrook sent for a stone to mark his grave near their church in the South Carolina plantation parish of St. Paul’s (FIG. 4.1). Like many of her contemporaries, Sarah ordered a stone from New England, since South Carolina had neither the raw materials nor the artisans to produce headstones.¹ Standing little more than fourteen inches tall, the stone followed the formulaic geometry of most slate markers in the colony. A square tablet carries the vital information about Benjamin, including his date of death, family associations, and age. Two arch-topped side panels filled with abstracted organic motifs flank the tablet, and a large, semicircular tympanum with a winged head crowns the stone. The foot of the stone had been driven into the clay, encasing his corpse, while the tablet above reads, “Here lyes ye Body of Mr. Benjamin Seabrook...” The rectilinear shape of the tablet reinforced the popular association of the square and the number four with things mortal or temporal: the Early Modern body had four humors (blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy); the earth had four cardinal directions and four elements (fire, air, water, and soil); land was quantified by the acre; and the year had four seasons.² The inscription of “ye Body” into the hard, flat surface of the stone analogized the act of depositing Benjamin’s mortal remains into the cold, hard earth. As the visual counterpoint to the square, a semicircular tympanum rose above the tablet. Where the square tablet reported the events of Benjamin’s mortal life, the circular tympanum presented the hope in things unseen. Like most Early Modern Protestants, the Seabrooks viewed heaven in entirely theocentric terms. Since heaven was about God’s perfection, his eternity, and his immutable nature, the circle became its obvious geometric signifier.³ The winged head filling the tympanum was not an angel but Benjamin’s immortal soul rising from his body and ascending toward the cope of heaven, while the firmament separates to invite his passage.⁴ In this gravestone, shape, word, and image visualized the traditional Christian belief that South Carolina’s Anglicans heard repeatedly from their pulpits: “Death is no more than a separation of Soul and Body; it is a separation of a fond couple.”⁵ During the rites for the burial of the dead, Anglicans heard, “There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.”⁶ Fusing the square with the circle, Benjamin Seabrook’s marker signified a door—“death’s door” to use

F IGURE 4 .1   Benjamin Seabrook gravestone, former St. Paul’s Parish churchyard (Photo by author)

F IGURE 4 .2 Section through Prince George, Winyaw, Georgetown (Drawing by author)

a contemporary expression—a liminal threshold occupying two spaces or spheres of existence and simultaneously neither.⁷ Seabrook’s headstone, and the scores of others like it found in Anglican churchyards throughout early South Carolina, materialized a gate, a breach in the veil between earth and heaven, body and soul, time and eternity.⁸ Although New England artisans crafted this stone, the implications of its form was not lost on Anglican patrons, whose early eighteenth-century theology was not far removed from that of their more northerly Protestant neighbors.⁹ As Sarah Seabrook was awaiting the arrival of the gravestone to mark her son’s burial in remote St. Paul’s Parish, Anglicans in the colonial capital of Charleston were in the midst of building the grand city church of St. Philip’s (1711–23).¹⁰ In the interior of St. Philip’s, a tall arcade on either side of the nave carried a soaring barrel-vaulted ceiling, mirroring the archover-square formula of contemporary headstones (FIG. 1.5). Just as the arched tympanum was ubiquitous on Anglican headstones, so too the barrel vault soared over their church interiors (FIG. 4.2). Of those Anglican churches erected in South Carolina before 1750, all but one included a barrel-vaulted ceiling over rectilinear box pews. Just as the square and circle of the gravestone signified a temporal gate, the rectilinear nave and the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the church constructed a space where the thin veil separating earth from heaven was parted, a space where—like the threshold of death—mortals met the divine.¹¹ The geometric continuities between arched tympani and barrel-vaulted ceilings evince a shared theology, a conscious extension of the gravestone’s two-dimensional symbolic liminality between time and eternity, earth and heaven, and the mortal and the divine to the very real three-dimensional space of the church.¹² 142

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 4 .3   Ceiling of St. Agnes, Cawston, Norfolk, ca. 1400–1500; cherubs line the cornice and angels stand on the ends of the hammer beams (Photo by author)

Benjamin Seabrook’s headstone and the interior of St. Philip’s Church suggest that early eighteenth-century Anglicans enlisted the material to manifest religious belief. Although Early Modern Catholics were certainly more explicit in their material expressions of religion, Protestants also manifested their faith in the material world, but in subtler ways. Consider, for example, the words of Augustine of Hippo, an early church father and theological hero of the Protestant reformers: “We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used...so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,—that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.”¹³ The material world was as much a lens into the invisible things of God for some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglicans as it was for Augustine; the arched tympanum of Seabrook’s gravestone is just the beginning of a rich world of signs, symbols, sounds, and smells that animated early eighteenthcentury Anglican life. ARCHED TYMPANI and barrel-vaulted ceilings depended on a material theology widely recognized by Early Modern Christians; both signified the heavens. South Carolina’s Anglican church builders used a barrel-vaulted ceiling to represent the presence of God in continuity with their Catholic past. Late medieval church builders decorated the ceilings of their churches with angels to visualize the fact that the church occupied a unique place at the intersection of heaven and earth (FIG. 4.3). These buildings were consecrated as the “House of God”; God’s presence there was substantive. Post-Reformation Anglicans enlisted the geometry of the vaulted ceiling to S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

143

accomplish the same effect by conflating the heavens as the celestial firmament, with heaven as the residence of God. While the circular form of the ceiling signified the eternity of God, that shape also recalled the Ptolomaic understanding of the cosmos, a view that persisted well into the eighteenth century. In the Ptolomaic scheme, all celestial bodies “rotated about the earth in complex but predictable patterns, each in its own crystalline sphere.”¹⁴ Seemingly ignorant of Copernicus’s observations, for example, the definition for “Heaven” in editions of the Dictionary of Arts and Science, published into the 1740s, described it as an “azure transparent orb.”¹⁵ In a common rhetorical gesture, one seventeenth-century Anglican divine conflated both physical and spiritual understandings of heaven when he described the Anglican church interior in this way: “the nave represents the visible or lowest heaven or paradise; the lights shining aloft, represent bright stars; the circling roof [is] the firmament.”¹⁶ The divine origins of the arch in early eighteenth-century culture extended also to contemporary philosophy. In 1712 the widely read aesthetic philosopher Joseph Addison argued that “the figure [shape] of the rainbow does not contribute less to its magnificence, than the colors to its beauty.” He continued by citing Ecclesiasticus: “Look upon the rainbow, and praise Him that made it; very beautiful it is in its brightness; it encompasses the heavens with a glorious circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it.”¹⁷ Eighteenth-century Anglicans were well aware of these geometries; one South Carolina minister writing in 1727 was pleased that his newly built church included “a well arch’d ceiling.”¹⁸ The arched form of the barrel vault, ubiquitous in Anglican churches in early South Carolina, depended on a rich tradition that associated those forms with the sacred and the heavens. From the earliest decades of the eighteenth century, Anglicans in South Carolina selected arched windows to light the interiors of their churches. Although the 1706 church in St. Andrew’s Parish had only “five small square windows,” a major 1723 expansion and renovation replaced those with “a large east end window,” and twelve others were “all neatly arch’d and well glazed.”¹⁹ The presence of arched windows was so important to the vestry of Christ Church Parish that in a 1711 listing of items “Still wanting to finish ye Parish Church,” the vestry included the expense of “altering and Arching” the windows, which evidently had been installed by the carpenters as flattopped.²⁰ The arched shape of the windows at St. James, St. Andrew’s, and eventually Christ Church would quickly become standard on all churches in the colony. Once in place, this emphasis on the arched form for windows in Anglican churches persisted throughout the century; in 1770, for example, the vestry of St. David’s Parish Church in the Carolina backcountry specifically noted in the contract of agreement with their builder that “all the windows [are] to be arched.”²¹ The use of the arched form for ceilings and windows for Anglican churches was not unique to South Carolina; it was common throughout the early eighteenth-century British Atlantic. In the widely influential The British 144

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 4 . 4   Portia Trunholm, “Old Dorchester Meetinghouse,” 1884 (Photo by Keith Leonard)

Carpenter (1733), for example, Francis Price published three trusses for use in churches; all three assumed barrel-vaulted ceilings (see FIG. 2.21). Assuming a correspondence between the windows and ceiling, Price offered one truss that allowed for the barrel vault to be “an exact semi-circle, as it may best fall out to suit the windows.”²² Although arched windows were essential to the architecture of eighteenth-century Anglicanism in South Carolina and throughout the British Atlantic world, they had a particular resonance in South Carolina, where imported New England headstones reinforced the theologies of these geometric forms. The ubiquitous use of arched windows by Anglicans stands in sharp contrast with the vast majority of other English Protestants—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and others—who consciously embraced the arch for their gravestones but almost universally rejected this form in the construction of their meetinghouses. Such decisions were entirely consistent with their theological embrace of the ascent of the spirit to the heavens in death and their theological rejection of the descent or special presence of God in the place of worship. In the town of Dorchester, South Carolina, transplanted New England Puritans erected a substantial square brick building sheltered by a pyramidal roof soon after their arrival in 1695 (FIG. 4.4). S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

145

F IGURE 4 .5 Charles Fraser (American, 1782–1860), Meeting House in Prince William’s Parish, from untitled sketchbook, 1796–1805, watercolor and ink on paper (Image courtesy Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association)

On the main façade, a central double door was flanked by windows crowned with fashionably rusticated but flat jack arches. In 1741 the Charleston Baptists erected a large brick meetinghouse with a tall pyramidal roof and an elevation illuminated by square and flat-topped windows. The use of flat-topped windows in the Stoney Creek meetinghouse is particularly striking, since the congregation freely adopted the use of the arched form in their grave markers (FIG. 4.5). While these Protestants were perfectly comfortable embracing the theological argument manifest in grave markers that death was the threshold between mortality and eternity, they resoundingly rejected the use of the arch on windows, which implied the sanctity of the space. The tendency of Dissenters to reject arch-topped windows continues to the very end of the century.²³ In 1752 the Dorchester congregation left South Carolina for Midway, Georgia. Forty years later, they erected a very large meetinghouse. Although the building boasted a fashionable cupola, it still employed flat-topped windows and a flat interior ceiling (FIG. 4.6). Also in the 1790s, the Charleston congregation of Bethel Methodist Church erected a meetinghouse with three doors surmounted by flat transoms on the main 146

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 4 .6 Midway Congregational Church, Midway, Ga., 1792 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 4 .7 Old Bethel Methodist Church, Charleston, 1797–98; the portico was added in the late nineteenth century (Photo by author)

elevation and a parade of flat-topped windows down its long sides (FIG. 4.7). As Carl Lounsbury has argued, the use of window forms to distinguish between Anglican churches and other Protestant meetinghouses was evident throughout the British Empire until the closing decades of the eighteenth century.²⁴ While the use or rejection of arched windows might have had financial motivations—they were certainly more expensive than flat-topped windows—the form surely functioned to differentiate Anglicans from Dissenters and also had deep popular theological resonance. The use of the arched window by Anglicans, and the correspondent rejection of the same form by other English Protestants, was tied to their conception of the place of worship as a “church,” a sacred space set apart specifically for worship. Conversely, most Dissenters rejected the use of the term “church,” preferring to call their places of worship “meetinghouses.” This practice communicated two points of doctrine. First, the “church” was not the building, but the body of believers. For most Protestants, the church was the “gathered church”: “The Church planted or gathered is a company or number of Christians or believers, which by a willing covenant made with S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

147

their God, are under the government of God and Christ, and keep his laws in one holy communion: because Christ hath redeemed them unto holiness and happiness for ever, from which they were fallen by the sin of Adam.”²⁵ Since Dissenters used the term “church” to mean the gathering of covenanted believers, they used “meetinghouse” to name the place designated for their congregational and governmental meetings. Second, and more important for our purposes, Dissenters argued fervently that the omnipresence of God undermined the belief that he was somehow more present in the place of worship.²⁶ Kevin Sweeney has noted how New England Calvinists used the plain character of meetinghouses to consciously deemphasize the religious nature of the community’s space. Even though profound spiritual transformation took place in the meetinghouse, it was a space no more sacred than any other.²⁷ Even though these Protestants were perfectly comfortable embracing the theological principal that the grave marker materialized the threshold between mortality and eternity, they resoundingly rejected the notion that the place of worship was a sacred place, a distinctive threshold between the mortal and the eternal. By contrast, Anglicans held to the model of a national church, in which Christianity was an inherited birthright of baptized Englishmen. Since the doctrine of the national church claimed all baptized Englishmen as Anglicans, the term “church” was not specifically construed to mean the congregation of believers, as was true for other Protestants.²⁸ As a result, the term “church” continued to be used to identify the place of worship, and the use of the term often imputed to the building a subtle sanctity as a place set apart; arched windows played a role in reminding viewers—Anglicans and Dissenters alike—that the building was a church. Anglican vestries were acutely aware that they set out to erect buildings with “such decency as becomes the House of God.”²⁹ A common edifice would not befit the purpose, especially given the traditional Anglican practice of the consecration of a church by a bishop, setting it apart exclusively for divine worship. Understanding their churches as sacred spaces, early eighteenthcentury Anglicans sought to distinguish them from the spaces beyond, but the absence of a bishop from the colonies meant that Anglican churches could not be formerly consecrated as they were in England. Even so, South Carolina’s Anglicans found ways to mark the sanctity of their churches. Writing soon after the 1706 Church Act had initiated numerous church-building programs, Francis LeJau asked that the bishop of London offer some direction about “what must be done for the consecrating of those new churches.”³⁰ No response from the bishop left congregations free to mark the occasion in a number of ways. The vestry of St. James, Goose Creek, for example, agreed on July 14, 1719, that their new church was to be “set apart from all Temporal Uses, and wholly appropriated to and for the uses aforesaid [Divine Worship] for ever” (italics mine).³¹ Just a few years prior, the vestry of St. Paul’s Parish declared that their new church building had been “set apart for ye publick worship of God.”³² In what was probably a common practice, the minister 148

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

of St. John’s, Berkeley, “preached a Sermon suitable to that occasion” of the completion of his new church in 1711.³³ That same practice resonated in a Robert Smith sermon, in which he defended the “special setting apart some distinct place, and consecrating it for solemn prayer and divine service.”³⁴ In the absence of a bishop, early Anglicans in South Carolina found a variety of ways to communicate the sanctity of their churches. Vestry pronouncements and sermons became rites that audibly declared the space sacred. Even though Anglicans—together with all Protestants—recognized the omnipresence of God, they simultaneously asserted that God was more present in the sacred space of the church.³⁵ In his early eighteenth-century commonplace book, South Carolina Anglican Alexander Keith wrote a brief prayer intended to be recited before approaching the church for service. It reads, “O Lord, I am every where in thy Presence and under thy Eye...but thy special Presence and Face is in thy Temple.”³⁶ In this prayer, Keith communicated a mystery of the Anglican experience: God was indeed omnipresent, but the church at the time of corporate worship was an especially holy place. In his book of daily devotionals, Edward Brailsford wrote that he entered the church in great humility: “But as for me I will come into thy house in the multitude of thy mercies, and in thy fear will I worship toward thy holy Temple.” As Brailsford approached the church, he believed that he, as a sinful man, was about to enter into the presence of Almighty God.³⁷ Brailsford fully recognized that not everyone in the church approached the building in this manner: “Pardon everyone who hath not prepared Himself according to ye Preparation of ye Sanctuary.”³⁸ In a rare notation by a layman from the mid-eighteenth century, James Ellerton, a schoolmaster and middling planter, noted in his journal that the Reverend Millichamp, the rector of Ellerton’s local Anglican parish, preached a sermon entitled “Reverence My Sanctuary.”³⁹ A few years later, the rector of St. Philip’s would write and deliver a sermon on a passage from Ecclesiastes: “Keep thy foot, when thou goest into the House of God.”⁴⁰ A decade later, Charles Woodmason barred his congregation from bringing dogs into the church. They are not only “very troublesome” but also “an affront to the Divine Presence...to mix unclean things with our service.”⁴¹ While his need to bar dogs from services demonstrates the fact of their presence, it also suggests that in his mind, and surely in the minds of others, dogs profaned the sanctity of the space. For both the laity and the clergy, the church was a sacred place in their everyday landscape. Horton Davies has discussed at length the seventeenth-century debates between Catholic-leaning High Anglicans, who defended the numinous quality of the church building, and Puritan detractors, who rejected it based in part on the doctrine of the omnipresence of God. Not only did Puritans not consecrate their buildings; they also felt free to hold both religious and civic meetings in the same space. As John Walsh and Stephen Taylor have made clear in the introduction to their recent study, eighteenth-century Anglicans generally preferred the broad theological middle road between S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

149

Catholic and Puritan extremes.⁴² The reconstitution of Anglicanism in the late seventeenth century largely set aside these debates. Even though most decidedly rejected the Catholic theology of transubstantiation, the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, the vast majority of Anglicans did not go as far as to reject entirely the numinous presence of God in the church. It seems safe to suggest that most Anglicans shared to some extent the sentiments espoused by the seventeenth-century text painted near the door in the parish church in Stokesay, Shropshire: “How dreadful is this place. This is none other but the House of God. This is ye gate of heaven. Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God and be more ready to hear than to give ye sacrifice of fools.”⁴³ Just as the barrel-vaulted ceiling signified the heavens to those worshipping inside, the compass-headed windows of its exterior proclaimed the sanctity of space to outside observers. Simultaneously, the rejection of the arched window was also burdened with theological meaning; the elaborate, rusticated flat arches over the windows of the Dorchester meetinghouse could very easily have been arched, but they were not. While arched windows were certainly more expensive than flat-topped ones, the fact that Dissenters who dogmatically rejected the doctrine of the special presence also universally rejected the arched window suggests that the theological implications of this particular geometry were broadly understood in English culture. After all, the conscious rejection of a form grants just as much meaning to that form as does its embrace. But the signification of sanctity was certainly not the sole reason for the installation of arched windows in South Carolina’s Anglican churches. Surely, another prime motivator was fashion. Just as Anglican church builders recognized the fashionable use of stucco to emulate stone and the correct employ of classical details, they also understood that in cosmopolitan design, arched windows were usually reserved for churches. Although the opening decades of the eighteenth century saw some London builders using a subtle segmental arch on domestic structures, the practice throughout the century was generally to reserve arched windows for churches and use only straight arches on domestic architecture.⁴⁴ Arched windows were certainly the fashion for churches. An exception to this rule, of course, was the introduction of the venetian window in the middle decades of the century, a form found equally on churches and elite houses. While the venetian window was well suited as a chancel window, it was equally well suited as a signature detail on a country house or elite townhouse. In this way, the venetian window’s highly fashionable associations directed the mind to London rather than the heavens. While the venetian window was more concerned with fashion than with faith, it is important to recognize that the employ of the simple arched window on churches can and should be seen as a useful coincidence between fashion and theology, with neither functioning to the exclusion of the other. It is also important to recognize here that visual signification of the arched form was not absolute but context dependent.⁴⁵ Arched windows, in other 150

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 4 .8 Thomas Heyward House, Charleston, 1771 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1977)

words, only commented on the doctrine of the special presence when they appeared in contexts that raised the question: places of worship. Although arched windows appear only on churches in early South Carolina, by the middle of the century, taller arch-topped windows often illuminated domestic stair landings (FIG. 4.8). Since the context of the domestic staircase did not raise the question of the sanctity of space, however, the arched window did not imply those meanings. Only the context of a church or meetinghouse raised the question of sanctity, and in the case of both flat and arched windows, geometry bore the responsibility of communicating an answer. It is also important to recognize that while the arched form on grave markers and church ceilings signified specifically the intersection of earth and the heavens, those specific associations were not universally applicable. The use of the form on church windows and, as will be discussed later in this chapter, tablets bearing sacred texts suggests that the form conveyed more general S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

151

meanings as well. In these contexts, the shape withdrew from the more specific associations of spatial liminality to convey a generalized sanctity and spiritual authority. But even these more general meanings were palpable to contemporary observers; through the majority of the eighteenth century, the sacred signification of the arched form in the context of a place of worship clearly distinguished the Anglican theology of sacred space from other Protestants who decried the very idea. The use of the arched form to signify the sacred raises questions about another religiously loaded shape: the cross. There remained after the English Reformation significant disagreement among Protestants about the use of the cross as a religious symbol. Together with other Protestants, Anglicans rejected the use of the cross as a reverential image for use during the worship service. It did not appear among Anglicans or other Protestants as a fixture on the altar or as the finial to a steeple, for example, until the mid-nineteenth century.⁴⁶ But some Anglicans persisted in the use of the cross in less explicitly iconic ways. In the Anglican liturgy, making the sign of the cross on one’s body by touching the head, chest, and then both shoulders was an important devotional act whose theology was realized most clearly in the baptism of a child. Immediately after the baptism, the minister holding the child proclaimed, “We receive this Child into the Congregation of Christ’s flock, and do sign him with the sign of the Cross; in token, that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the world, and the devil.”⁴⁷ Making the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead claimed the child as a member of Christ’s church and sealed his or her membership forever. Making the sign of the cross also had a popular usage that fell outside official Anglican theologies: English folk culture taught that crossing oneself was one means of warding off evil spirits.⁴⁸ Such actions were associated by some with their Catholic past and, as a result, many English Protestants objected to making the form of the cross over one’s body. In a lengthy diatribe against the abuses of nonconformists to “the set forms of worship” in the Anglican service, Charles Woodmason describes one particularly accommodating minister who did not require his congregation to use “the sign of the Cross excepted desir’d.”⁴⁹ Another Anglican minister complained, “We are often importuned by some who are not full conformists, to baptize their Children without...the sign of the Cross.”⁵⁰ As both these objections imply, some Protestants expressed concerns about the idolatry and superstitious beliefs surrounding the sign of the cross, while others defended its use. Even so, many Anglicans in South Carolina freely utilized the act of crossing oneself as a ritual act in weekly worship, the quarterly sacrament of Holy Communion, and especially baptism. Given the Anglican investment in the ritual efficacy of the sign of the cross, the use of that shape for planning South Carolina churches seems not insignificant. The inscription of a cross on the land is most common in the form of interior crossing aisles. Since most of South Carolina’s churches 152

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

had doors on the north, west, and south walls with an eastern chancel, the aisles of the interior connecting these formed a cross, as in the case of the “cross Isle” in St. Philip’s (see FIG. 1.6).⁵¹ In other instances, the crossing of the church determined the form of the entire building. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Anglicans in South Carolina erected four cruciform churches either by additions or in a single campaign.⁵² Begun in 1727, the chapel of ease in the parish of St. James, Goose Creek, was one of the largest chapels constructed in the colony, measuring sixty feet long by twenty-two feet wide, with a chancel approximately ten feet deep (see FIG. 2.22). Additions to St. Paul’s Parish Church (begun in 1722), St. Andrew’s Parish Church (begun in 1723), and St. George’s in Dorchester (begun in 1734) all transformed small rectangular buildings into much larger cruciform churches (see FIG. 2.5). The cruciform shape of these buildings was not lost on contemporaries; one was described as bearing “the form of a cross,” while another was described as enlarged “in the form of a cross.”⁵³ The cruciform shape resurfaced in the early nineteenth century in the first church in Columbia, South Carolina, built on the plan of a cross by the Protestant Episcopal Society for the Advancement of Christianity in South Carolina.⁵⁴ In their desire to distinguish or set apart their newly constructed churches, Anglicans revealed a theological parallel between the baptism of a child and the consecration of a church. Both were ritual acts of inscription that extended a claim about the spiritual indwelling of God—one in a person, the other in a building. Making the sign of the cross on the forehead of a child consecrated him or her for service in the church. Popular belief, however, extended to this act the preservation of the child from evil. Similarly, the use of a cross in the form of the church might have been seen as consecrating the land upon which it stands and protecting it “against sin, the world, and the devil.”⁵⁵ Together with the arched form of ceilings and windows, the cross might have symbolized—even actualized—the sanctity of the church. ANGLICANS IN SOUTH CAROLINA also reached past the geometric signification of the sacred through arched ceilings and windows and cruciform churches by also symbolizing the invisible supernatural. Cherubs stood at the apex of each arch in the nave of St. Philip’s and over the chancel window in St. Andrew’s, and they flank an open Bible above the chancel window in St. James, Goose Creek (FIGS. 1.4 and 4.9). In each case, angels visualized a heavenly host indwelling a space situated between heaven and earth.⁵⁶ The use of cherubs or angels in the architecture of the church to represent the presence of the host of heaven had roots in centuries of English practice, but it was a visual symbol that persisted in common use after the Reformation. As the 1640s journal of Suffolk Puritan and iconoclast William Dowsing makes very clear, the painted images of cherubim were still very common in the worship spaces of mid-seventeenth-century England. While Dowsing and other iconoclasts worked feverishly to destroy such “superstitious images,” other Anglicans were freely incorporating angels in the ornamentation of S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

F IGURE 4 .9   Chancel window of St. Andrew’s Parish Church, 1723 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by C. O. Greene, 1940)

153

F IGURE 4 .10 Ceiling of Bromfield in Shropshire, 1671 (Photo by author)

their new churches.⁵⁷ The ceiling at Bromfield in Shropshire, for example, was painted in 1671 with an array of clouds, winged cherubs, streamers bearing scriptural passages, and a large triangle encircled in a ring of clouds (FIG. 4.10). The ceiling of Staunton Harold, erected in Leistershire in 1652–65, also emulates the heavens.⁵⁸ Rows of angels on or near the ceilings of many seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century churches in the colonies demonstrate the extension of this tradition across the Atlantic.⁵⁹ The nave and chancel ceilings of two Boston churches, Christ Church (begun 1722) and Trinity Church (begun 1727), were both ornamented in the early eighteenth century with cherubs peering down through clouds.⁶⁰ Similar cherubs also graced the ceilings of a few early Anglican churches in Virginia.⁶¹ In 1677 the vestry of Petsworth Parish in Virginia paid Thomas Powell “for draweing the Cherubin” in their church at Poplar Spring.⁶² Like their medieval predecessors, early eighteenth-century Anglicans visualized the church as a space created by mortals but occupied by God and the heavenly host. The visualization of cherubs in the space of the church was only the most explicit reference to the invisible supernatural that animated Anglican belief in early South Carolina. The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century view of God was something very different from the image of a gentle and benevolent deity often projected by later Anglicans. Popular Anglicanism during the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century understood God as both sovereign and interventionist in nature.⁶³ Theories of divine causation, for example, are evident among South Carolina Anglicans well into the eighteenth century.⁶⁴ In response to her faith in a sovereign God, Eliza Pinckney, South Carolina’s premier mid-eighteenth-century diarist, told herself as her brother lay dying, “Hush, ’tis the almighty’s will.”⁶⁵ Mrs. Thomas Broughton told her son to “remember you depend on the allmighty for all things.”⁶⁶ God’s intervention was painfully evident in his “punishing hand.” Writing in 1747, the minister of Christ Church Parish complained that because of the sins of the colony, God was sending “Pestilential Diseases amongst men and beasts, which yearly sweep away [a] number of both.”⁶⁷ While this view of God as a righteous judge surfaced in jeremiads through the eighteenth century and beyond, in the first half of that century, the colony’s more pious lay Anglicans were quick to see the hand of God in both preservation and destruction.⁶⁸ The iconography on early eighteenth-century headstones in Anglican churchyards reinforced this view of the sovereignty of God. Benjamin Seabrook’s 1718 marker with its winged head was in one way quite unusual. The winged skull rising from the grave of Elizabeth Fowler was far more typical of imagery in Anglican churchyards of the early eighteenth century (FIG. 4.11). In the context of death, the skull had for centuries symbolized the death of Adam’s race by sin. The winged skull reminded the living of the inevitability of death as a memento mori, and it also was a statement about the hope of resurrection from death to new life through faith in Christ. The winged skull reminded the viewer that by death, the soul would rise to either S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

155

F IGURE 4 .11   Elizabeth Fowler grave marker, St. Philip’s Churchyard, Charleston, 1750 (Photo by author)

eternal joy or eternal damnation. Peter Benes has argued that the winged skulls on New England headstones represented “the invisible and immortal spirits which were separated from their bodies by the event of death.”⁶⁹ Carefully examining Puritan theological treatises, David H. Watters has demonstrated that the winged skull found commonly on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century gravestones was an image prophetically referencing the general resurrection of the dead at the time of Christ’s return.⁷⁰ This resurrection would be followed by the judgment of souls, whereby the elect would enter into the joys of heaven and the damned would descend to hell. Whatever the specific interpretations of this image by South Carolina Anglicans, the winged skull was certainly a reminder of the inevitable separation of the body and the soul at death. While there seems little reason to doubt the interpretation of the winged skull as some reference to the soul or ghost of the deceased, the actual location of the soul after death seems not to have been so clear.⁷¹ Two sermons written by the same South Carolina Anglican minister, for example, offer differing views on the subject. In one sermon he relays that “at the last day, the eve of the general judgement, [God] shall restore all the dead now buried and corrupted in their graves, to a new life; for I am the resurrection and the life.”⁷² But in another sermon, written only two years later, the same minister implies that resurrection to new life is immediate: “May the Almighty God with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of this flesh, are in joy and felicity, grant that we may die the death of the righteous, and with them be partakers of joy and felicity, infinite and unspeakable—joys that are to last evermore.”⁷³ The ambiguous location of 156

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

the soul after death in popular belief perpetuated the centuries-old tradition that the disembodied souls of the deceased occupied the natural realm in real time. Ghosts were one of the most common apparitions in the spiritually animated world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Together with spirits of the dead, Early Modern theology also believed in a palpable and imminent Satan that “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”⁷⁴ A grotesque, horrifying horned figure with full knowledge of the natural world and the capacity to take on human form, the medieval conception of Satan and his minions survived the Reformation. One historian of Early Modern England argues, “The battle with Satan and his hierarchy of demons was a literal reality for most devout Englishmen.”⁷⁵ A rare eighteenth-century depiction of Satan hung in the Anglican parish church in Williamsburg, Virginia. Depicting “talons & beaks &c in the midst of horrible flames,” the image offered one viewer a “dreadful idea of the Old Wretch and his place of abode.”⁷⁶ Often termed the “black man,” Satan and his minions freely prowled the eighteenth century.⁷⁷ Although Anglicans would slowly abandon the palpable nature of evil over the course of the eighteenth century, Satan remained a powerful, very real force among evangelicals. As late as the 1770s, one young South Carolina Methodist recalled seeing “with my bodily eyes a ghostly appearance,” and on another occasion he “saw the devil who appeared very furious.”⁷⁸ Satan was not the only manifestation of evil. In South Carolina’s highest court in 1706, Nicholas Trott offered a rousing defense for the real presence of witchcraft.⁷⁹ As chief justice of South Carolina, Trott was a distinguished voice of authority in the colony. He held honorary doctorates from both Oxford and Aberdeen; he owned the largest personal library in the colony at the time; and he was a founding commissioner of Anglicanism in the colony.⁸⁰ And Trott was not alone in his convictions. Francis LeJau, the most prominent Anglican clergyman in South Carolina during the early decades of the century, described “a notorious malefactor evidently guilty of witchcraft and who has killed several persons by the Devil’s help.”⁸¹ “An Acte against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and dealinge with Evill and Wicked Spirits,” which was added to South Carolina law in 1712, demonstrates the persistence of supernatural evil in the eighteenth-century imagination.⁸² Into the opening decades of the eighteenth century, well-respected Anglicans in South Carolina expressed confidence in the real power of witches.⁸³ Contrary to the persistent assumptions that the Reformation and the Enlightenment effectively divorced the natural from the supernatural worlds, belief in witches, folk magic, and conjuration continued into the eighteenth century at many levels of English society.⁸⁴ Joseph Glanvill, a member of the Royal Society and a moderate Anglican, published a scientific defense for the real presence of demons and witches in the late seventeenth century (FIG. 4.12).⁸⁵ In 1718 the prominent English Anglican Francis Hutchinson published An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft, in which he cited almost thirty works written since 1660 defending the real presence of witches. EnS EN S IN G THE S ACRED

157

F IGURE 4 .12   Detail from Joseph Glanville, Saducismus Triumphatus; or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (London, 1681) (Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

glish historians are generally in agreement that into the early eighteenth century, the English persisted in their belief in witches, ghosts, and other “forces of darkness.”⁸⁶ More specifically, William M. Jacob has discovered belief in witches well into the eighteenth century in his study of English Anglicanism. Herbert Leventhal has argued the same for their colonial counterparts.⁸⁷ If early Anglican life was animated by the power of supernatural forces—both good and ill—such knowledge was only reinforced in South Carolina by the beliefs and practices of the enslaved African cultures that surrounded Anglicans. Accounts indicate that certain elements of African 158

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

cosmology, including haunts (spirits of the dead), hags (disembodied spirits of witches), and plat-eyes (evil spirits capable of taking many forms), survived the Middle Passage and became part of both traditional and Afro-Christian belief systems in South Carolina.⁸⁸ For Trott, LeJau, and probably many other early Anglicans, supernatural manifestations of evil were alive and well in early eighteenth-century South Carolina. In a world shaped by an interventionist God and haunted by palpable evil, the use of cherubs as architectural ornament was not mere decoration. It was, in fact, nothing less than the visualization of the invisible supernatural. The cherubs stationed over each window of St. James were a spiritual defense against the very real presence of evil (FIG. 4.13). Such apotropaic devices were common not only in European practice but also among the enslaved Africans in colonial America. The practice among the enslaved of wearing a pierced silver coin around their ankle as spiritual protection of their body from malevolent forces was fairly widespread.⁸⁹ Similarly, glass beads and cowrie shells have been interpreted as African charms to protect living quarters from similar attack.⁹⁰ Excavations of African burials in the Caribbean often produce talismans and other objects interpreted as protective devices.⁹¹ English colonials were not only aware of but also responsive to such African practices. As Christopher Fennel has argued, “Much of the material culture of African American folk religious traditions was likely recognizable and meaningful within the conjuration traditions of many European Americans.”⁹² As a case in point, the spiritual animation of the graveyard, for example, was recognized by both Africans and Europeans. Fear of the spirits of the dead among slaves meant they avoided such places at night.⁹³ Because of its spiritual potency, grave dirt was a common ingredient in the African conjurer’s bag.⁹⁴ Similarly, their white masters shared a belief in the spirits of the dead haunting burial grounds into the late eighteenth century.⁹⁵ Anglican knowledge of the spiritual world of their slaves increased their own awareness of supernatural evil, making all the more palpable the sanctity of the church. The Africans’ penchant to defend themselves and their spaces against spiritual invasion was shared by their English masters, although the means often differed from those employed by Africans.⁹⁶ Robert Blair St. George has demonstrated how the anthropomorphic imagination of seventeenthcentury New Englanders led to fears of invasion of both their houses and their bodies by evil spirits.⁹⁷ He describes how residents of seventeenth-century England and New England inscribed or imbedded various objects into and around the structure of their house to guard against supernatural attack. In a practice that echoes the “witch bottles” commonly found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses in England, shoes and boots were believed to conjure and contain the devil. “When placed in walls near windows, doors, or under hearths,” St. George tells us, “they might trap an evil spirit as it was trying to enter the house.”⁹⁸ The apotropaic power of shoes and other objects extended also to the image of the cherubim. In 1695, for example, Samuel S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

F IGURE 4 .13 Cherubs over exterior windows, St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

159

F IGURE 4 .1 4  Detail of summer beams in Bacon’s Castle, Surry County, Va., ca. 1665 (Photo by author)

Sewell of Boston, a leading justice in Salem’s witchcraft trials of only a few years earlier, placed cherubim heads on his gateposts in order to protect his house from supernatural invasion. St. George locates the responsibility of supernatural protection in cherubim carved on structural members of the early New England house. Such practices were not unknown in the South. A bent King James I farthing found in the context of a seventeenth-century English domestic site in Virginia, for example, might have been intended as a charm protecting the house.⁹⁹ The decorative carving at the crossing of summer beams in Bacon’s Castle in Virginia (ca. 1665) might for some viewers have been an eye of God protecting chambers from evil spirits, just as the cherubs did in more northerly examples (FIG. 4.14).¹⁰⁰ The world of early South Carolina was no less gripped with fear of supernatural evil. A cherub with extended wings sheltered the Baker family crest—a visual surrogate for the family—mounted above the entrance into Archdale Hall (FIG. 4.15).¹⁰¹ Other cherubs guarded the archway that led from the public hall into the private chambers of the house (FIG. 4.16). The early eighteenth-century Izard plantation house at the Elms was ornamented with “plaster-headed house-hold gods.”¹⁰² Together with African haunts, hags, and

F IGURE 4 .15 Exterior view of Archdale Hall, Summerville, 1706–10 (Charleston Library Society)

F IGURE 4 .16 View of the Hall, Archdale Hall, Summerville, 1706–10 (Charleston Library Society)

plat-eyes, English witches, the spirits of the dead, and Satan himself lurked throughout the Carolina Lowcountry. As a place associated with the spirits of the dead, the graveyard that lay just outside the walls of the church was, of course, of particular potency. While those angels on the inside of a church visualized the heavens, those above the exterior windows functioned for many as apotropaic guardians of the sacred space within.¹⁰³ IN ADDITION TO THE SIGNIFICATION OF GOD through arched windows and the symbolic representations of angels, the presence of God in the space of St. James Church was equally evident in the visualization of the scriptures. Above the chancel window of St. James, Goose Creek, the scriptures appear both in the form of an open Bible flanked by cherubs over the window and in the scriptural passage that seems to spill from the holy writ on both sides (FIG. 4.17). “GLORY TO GOD ON HIGH ON EARTH PEACE GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN ” is written in bold, capital letters, following the window architrave and exaggerating the semicircular profile of the window. This particular passage, raised high above the chancel, is only the most visible of a series of passages; the others—lower and less visible from a distance—were more likely intended for the eyes of communicants approaching the chancel and will be addressed in the next chapter. For early Anglican viewers, this visualization of the scriptures would have represented something far more powerful than simply words. As William Graham has argued, “For Christians ‘the word’ is theologically and functionally not a written text but the living, spoken message of the Gospel.”¹⁰⁴ The opening passages of the Gospel of John remind us of the complex theology of “the Word” in Christianity: S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

161

F IGURE 4 .17   Chancel window of St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by Carl Lounsbury)

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This fluidity of meaning was particularly true for those who learned to read using Early Modern primers, where the page was typically organized with objects or figural scenes immediately adjacent to narrative texts, reinforcing the notion that words were a surrogate for the things or concepts they represented.¹⁰⁵ Anglicans seized on the analogous relationship between Christ and “the Word,” and in doing so, words—whether read, heard, or simply seen—were vested with sacred power and sacred presence. The use of a scriptural passage on the window of St. James is a rare colonial survival of a common seventeenth-century Anglican practice in the motherland. In most surviving English examples, the written text is often located near the chancel, the pulpit, or the font in an effort to reinforce the biblical authority of the sacraments or the sermon. The walls near the altar in Stokesay in Shropshire, for example, are painted with a tabernacle surrounding the words, “Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine which I have mingled forsake ye food...[lost]” (FIG. 4.18). Near the pulpit, the walls read, “As new born Babes desire ye milk of ye word that ye may grow thereby.”¹⁰⁶ In 1710 Keighley in Yorkshire was beautified with “many Scripture sentences (besides the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments) fit for that holy place.”¹⁰⁷ So, while these wall texts in St. James, Goose Creek, are unique for early South Carolina, they were not so in the larger world of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Words appeared most commonly in two other locations in early eighteenthcentury churches. The most explicit was the presentation of essential texts on tablets in or near the chancel. The large wooden tablets in St. Andrew’s Parish Church present these texts in a typical fashion (FIG. 4.19). The presentation of the Decalogue was proscribed by Canon LXXXII of the Church

F IGURE 4 .18  Detail of painted text, Stokesay, Shropshire, seventeenth century (Photo by author)

162

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 4 .19 Detail of altarpiece, St. Andrew’s Parish Church (Photo by author)

of England, but in practice the commandments were often accompanied by the creed and prayer.¹⁰⁸ In visual communion with the arched profile of barrel-vaulted ceilings, compass-headed windows, and slate grave markers, the tablets containing these words were always vertical and arch-topped, conveying the divine source of the texts they contained. Drawing on the familiarity of the tablet form in seventeenth-century churches, the shape, size, and often gilt lettering of the tablets mounted on the walls of the church usually within or above the chancel reinforced the authority of these as the Word of God (FIG. 4.20). The divine authority of words would also have been visible in the large folio books used during the service by the minister, the smaller, quarto books that comprised the parish library, and the similarly sized personal books owned by the wealthiest Anglicans. The most pronounced and most sacred of books was, of course, the parish Bible. While a smaller, fairly plain Bible would have sufficed, most parishes made certain that their church had S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

163

F IGURE 4 .2 0   Detail of painted Decalogue, Stokesay, Shropshire, seventeenth century (Photo by author)

F IGURE 4 .21 Cover page of Book of Common Prayer, St. Philip’s Church, 1760 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church; photo by author)

an “elegant Folio Bible.” The common usage of a “Great Bible” implied that these parish copies were larger and more visually imposing than private or personal copies.¹⁰⁹ The authority of the word contained in the scriptures was visually manifest in the size and fine finish of these Bibles.¹¹⁰ The next most important book was the Book of Common Prayer, from which the liturgy of the service was read. Most parishes had one or more copies, often folio but sometimes smaller as a way of conveying its secondary status (FIG. 4.21). Sixteen parishes also owned libraries, most commonly books of sermons but also treatises on theology or church history.¹¹¹ Already by the closing years of the seventeenth century, the parish of St. Philip’s owned a theological library that included 233 titles.¹¹² In 1723 St. James, Goose Creek, listed a library of twenty-nine titles. A more typical catalog of books owned by Christ Church Parish in 1751 lists fifteen volumes, ten of which were folios.¹¹³ The much larger collections of volumes owned by ministers—the rector of St. James, Goose Creek, had a personal library of 230 volumes—suggests that in most cases, these smaller parish libraries were not only owned by the parish but 164

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

also remained in the church.¹¹⁴ The vestry of St. Stephen’s paid in 1754 for the construction of “a place under the Pulpit to lock up the Books.”¹¹⁵ The commissioners in charge of building St. Michael’s made a point to include a bookcase in the churchwardens’ pew.¹¹⁶ As a result, a number of other books owned by the parish might have been found on the interior of any church. It is also clear that a number of Anglicans in a service brought private books with them to church.¹¹⁷ Gideon Johnson complained in 1715 that since a recent hurricane destroyed the church books, the congregation is “obliged to make use of our Private Books.”¹¹⁸ Religious books were by far the most common category in personal libraries of the early South, with the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and The Whole Duty of Man (an enormously popular Anglican devotional reprinted continuously through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) almost “omnipresent.”¹¹⁹ Words were so powerful in early Anglicanism that the visual consumption of words played an important role in Anglican worship. The implied presence of the author carried a gravity that our text-inundated culture has lost. In his discussion of early Virginia, Rhys Isaac reminds his readers of the visual authority of formal documents in a widely illiterate culture where text was not yet common.¹²⁰ William Graham concurs: “We have little access to the sense of awe and respect before the physical copy of any text that prevailed in ages...in which a book was (is) a rare thing, and a scriptural book often the only book.” As words penned by God, scriptural passages in part or the Bible in whole took on the sensuous presence of divine “aura.” Describing sacred images, David Morgan defines aura as “a presence or power that impresses upon the viewer the authenticity, veracity, or authority of whomever or whatever the image depicts.”¹²¹ In an Early Modern Protestant context, sacred words would have had similar “aura,” especially for the illiterate majority who could certainly see and hear but not read.¹²² The presence of holy writ in the space of the church would have been perceived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in ways very different from what we might imagine. In his study of hearing in early America, for example, Leigh Eric Schmidt has explored what he calls a “modern hearing loss,” suggesting that words had a power that we no longer recognize.¹²³ In a culture that still read out loud, written words were, as Graham has argued, “a repository of the vocal words of an author.”¹²⁶ Variations in typeface, by extension, implied intonations of voice.¹²⁵ In the passage lining the chancel window of St. James, the use of all capital letters emphasizes the passage as the loud, declamatory pronouncement of the heavenly host announcing to the shepherds the birth of the Christ child. When seeing holy writ, the Early Modern viewer would not have given it silent intellectual consideration as we might; he or she would have seen and heard the voice of God.¹²⁶ For eighteenth-century viewers and hearers, writing was an extension of speaking, and written words in the form of the Decalogue, scriptural passages painted on the walls, or the Great Bible implied—even realized—the presence of the author. S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

165

THE COMMINGLING OF SIGHT AND SOUND as vehicles for imputing divine power to words serves as a useful reminder that all five senses contributed to ways of knowing the divine in Early Modern Anglicanism. This was particularly true in a pre-Enlightenment world animated by the supernatural and things unseen. To fully understand the material dimensions of religious belief and practice, material-culture scholarship must unseat the tendency to favor sight to the detriment of the other senses. There is some evidence that smell played an important role in early Anglican religious belief and practice. Writing of his parish church in St. John’s, Berkeley, in 1714, the Reverend Maule was pleased that it had “a handsome pulpit, reading Desk, clerks Pew, Communion Table, and a Chancel Railed in; all made of Cedar.”¹²⁷ Of his church in Beaufort, the Reverend Jones boasted in 1728, “We have a pulpit and desk and also 6 pews and a communion table decently raised in, all of cedar.”¹²⁸ In the same year, the Reverend Hassell described that his church in the parish of St. Thomas and St. Denis had “a handsome Pulpit Reading Desk some Pews a Communion Table neatly railed in all of Cedar Wood.”¹²⁹ An abundant resource in the Carolina Lowcountry, cedar was widely used in early furniture making and seems to have been an integral part of the furniture of most early churches. But if it was so common, why did ministers seem so eager to identify its use in their churches?¹³⁰ Assuming practical availability fails to acknowledge the poetics of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century meanings that implicated the most common objects, forms, or materials.¹³¹ Cedar was distinctive in that it emitted an easily identifiable scent. Writing of the “odiferous and fragrant Woods” thriving in Carolina in 1682, one writer commented on the “lofty Pine” and black walnut, which was “esteem’d” for its rich grain, but it was the cedar he described as “sweet smelling.”¹³² Another wrote in 1700, “Tables, Wainscots, and other necessaries are made [from cedar] and esteemed for their sweet smell.”¹³³ Cedar’s strong scent was highly evocative. Writing to a friend in the spring of 1742, Eliza Pinckney wondered “how I could in this gay season think of planting a Cedar grove, which rather reflects an Autumnal gloom and solemnity than the freshness and gayety of spring.” In the same letter, Pinckney reiterated her sense that a cedar grove conveyed “solemnity,” certainly a characteristic that Anglicans thought appropriate in their churches.¹³⁴ This association with solemnity might have motivated James Childs in the 1730s to enclose the church square in his newly laid-out town of Childsbury with a hedge of cedar.¹³⁵ An olfactory response to the abundance of cedar in the early Anglican interior emitted from pews, liturgical fittings, and architectural ornament would have distinguished the church from other spaces. For those Anglicans versed in the scriptures, cedar’s solemn scent would have also evoked the deep theological resonance of the Cedars of Lebanon, much revered in the Old Testament and repeatedly lauded as the most majestic of all trees. But cedar had more explicitly architectural associations. The Old Testament repeats on numerous occasions the fact that Solomon’s Temple in 166

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

Jerusalem was finished in cedar: “The cedar paneling inside the Temple was carved with gourds and flower blossoms. Everything was cedar; not a stone could be seen.” Even the altar table was cedar, finished with gold.¹³⁶ Anglicans might also have known that cedar had important ritual functions as well.¹³⁷ In the Hebraic law outlined in the book of Leviticus, cedar wood is an essential component of a ritual designed to purify—make sacred—a house.¹³⁸ In this way, the use of cedar in a church interior might have shared functions with the inscription of the cross in the church building and the mounting of cherubs over its windows: the assurance of spiritual purity. The biblical significance of cedar was not unfamiliar to eighteenth-century Anglicans in South Carolina. In a sermon on the importance of the Temple, Robert Smith, minister at St. Philip’s, expounded on the moment when David realized “how shamefully unreasonable it was that [I] should dwell in a house of Cedar, but the ark of God within curtains.”¹³⁹ Smith connects the cedar of David’s house with grandeur, strength, and stability by contrasting it with the ephemeral nature of the tent sheltering the Ark of the Covenant. Cedar’s powerful scent and biblical significance meant that it often remained unpainted. In an early instance of the use of paint, the vestry of Prince Frederick’s Parish ordered the interior finishes of their parish church to be painted in 1740, although the altar and the pulpit were only polished.¹⁴⁰ In 1744 the Reverend Durand was pleased that the pews of his church had in 1744 been “newly glazed and painted,” but again the liturgical fittings remained unpainted.¹⁴¹ The importance of cedar, however, waned as the century progressed. The pulpits in both St. Michael’s and Pompion Hill are fashioned out of red cedar, but both were covered in a red vermillion wash that would have darkened their appearance.¹⁴² Even though this use of a vermillion wash also had biblical allusions, the vestry was more concerned that the wash gave the pulpit a more fashionable “Mahogany colour.”¹⁴³ Other pulpits from the later eighteenth century abandoned cedar altogether. Those erected in St. Stephen’s and Prince George, Winyaw, for example, are both walnut. By the later eighteenth century, the theological importance of cedar gave way to fashion. But for early eighteenth-century Anglicans, the finishing of a church’s interior fittings in cedar was of great significance: its scent would have evoked solemnity, purity, and majesty, virtues that distinguished the church from other buildings in the built environment of early South Carolina.¹⁴⁴ Together with cherubs, arched windows, and the Word (seen, spoken, and heard), the scent of cedar proclaimed that the early eighteenthcentury church was a space set apart, distinguished from everyday places and uniquely occupied by God. From the solemnity of a cedar grove to the Cedars of Lebanon and the paneled interior of Solomon’s Temple, the strong scent of cedar might have drawn upon a variety of associations to impute sanctity to the space of the church. THE SANCTITY OF THE ANGLICAN DIVINE WORSHIP SERVICE was time specific, and one of the most important means of initiating sacred time S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

167

was ringing a bell. Descriptions of the new church of St. Philip’s boasted as early as 1712 that it was to include a ring of bells, but the parish had difficulties obtaining one to their satisfaction. The single bell that arrived in 1750 “sounds as from under a Dunghill and is so low, that it can scarce be heard at the distance of two or three hundred yards.”¹⁴⁵ The vestry was sufficiently disappointed in its impotent ring to return it to its English manufacturers. The South Carolina Gazette announced in 1762 that a subscription was under way to purchase a set of bells for the then-incomplete church of St. Michael’s; the church would soon thereafter boast a fine ring of eight bells.¹⁴⁶ But bells were not limited to Charleston; they were an essential fixture for parish churches in smaller towns and plantation parishes as well. The parish churches in Georgetown, Dorchester, and Beaufort all had bells from an early date. These bells might have been sufficient to ring through the town, but they certainly would not be heard throughout the miles of plantations that surrounded it.¹⁴⁷ Even the rural church in the plantation parish of St. Andrew’s had a “small bell” as early as 1727.¹⁴⁸ The ringing of bells on Sunday morning distinguished cities, towns, and more populated Lowcountry parishes from the backcountry, where even in the early nineteenth century, “No pleasant sound of church-going bells is echoed from their heights [of hills] and through the vallies.”¹⁴⁹ In addition to the practical function of calling the faithful to worship, the bell marked the transition from natural to sacred time. Although René Descartes had in the early seventeenth century proposed a mechanistic restructuring of the cosmos governed by absolute (or clock) time—whereby all time was conceived as the continuous progression of equal units—clock time was less important than natural time and sacred time in eighteenthcentury life.¹⁵⁰ For a culture whose majority had little access to personal timepieces, natural time—the seasons, the tides, the rising and setting of the sun—governed life. In 1739, for example, no persons were allowed to offer for sale meats or other provisions “before the ringing of the Market Bell at Sun rising.”¹⁵¹ Well into the nineteenth century, the beginning of the plantation workday was marked by the ringing of a bell.¹⁵² Interrupting natural time was sacred time, a sequence of “indefinitely recoverable and repeatable” events that were usually initiated by the ringing of a bell.¹⁵³ The constant repetitious nature of the liturgy meant that each Anglican service occupied a place unbounded by time; the sacred space of the service was a timeless moment that stood outside the cyclical events of natural time or the linear march of clock time.¹⁵⁴ As a result, time was essential to realizing the sacred in Anglican worship. While the architecture of the early Anglican church visualized its function as an opening between the visible and the supernatural, the sanctity of the space was not immutable. The palpable presence of the divine realized during the service depended on the rhythm of sacred time. The ringing of the bells to initiate the service functioned as a temporal threshold that worked together with the physical threshold of the church walls to mark the sacred. 168

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 4 .22 Detail of John Dunstall, Plague Scenes of 1655. This detail shows a man ringing a bell before a coffin passing through the streets of London (Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge University)

While bells also participated in structuring the order and hierarchies central to Anglican parish life (a topic that will be addressed further in chapter 8), bells in the early eighteenth century might also have retained some of their ancient use as a defense against evil spirits and demons (FIG. 4.22). The inscription on one early English bell includes a list of its responsibilities. Many of them are not surprising: “I praise the true God, call the people, assemble the clergy...” But the engraver also included in this list “toll for funerals, subdue the thunder flash...[and] drive away plague.”¹⁵⁵ The ring of a baptized medieval bell was understood to be the voice of God, and the tolling of a bell could ward off disease and thunder, believed to be the effect of demons clashing in the skies.¹⁵⁶ Even though Protestant church fathers had worked feverishly for over a century to eliminate such beliefs, some of these functions survived the Reformation.¹⁵⁷ One English bell inscribed in 1705 boasted that it caused “the return of fine weather.”¹⁵⁸ Richard Rath reminds us that sounds in colonial American “had a tangible power we no longer grant them.”¹⁵⁹ This was certainly true for early South Carolinians. In July 1740, James Ellerton recorded the effects of a powerful storm that damaged an incomplete house he was helping to construct. Although “lightning took fire in the chitchen,” it was thunder that “split the east chimney [and] broke the sashes in the cedar room and passage.” Seeing the supernatural in this storm, a relieved Ellerton attributed the limited damage to God’s mercy.¹⁶⁰ Into the early eighteenth century, the ringing of a bell was also believed to facilitate such mercy.¹⁶¹ In a South Carolina example, the hand bells rung by the sexton at the 1705 funeral of Elizabeth Sindrey might have been intended to drive away demons hovering around the deceased.¹⁶² Belief in the supernatural power of bells persisted as late as 1766, when Edward Weyman was paid for ringing a “coffin bell” as part of his duties as an undertaker.¹⁶³ But such supernatural associations were on the demise in the eighteenth century, and the principle responsibility of the bell was to call the faithful to worship and mark the transition from natural to sacred time. S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

169

F IGURE 4 .23   Detail of flaming hearts over the west door to St. James Parish Church (Photo by author)

F IGURE 4 .24   Detail of flaming hearts from Edward Brailsford’s devotional, ca. 1710 (South Caroliniana Library)

ANGLICANS IN SOUTH CAROLINA enlisted visual markers to reinforce the audible distinctions between sacred and natural or clock time. The row of flaming hearts over the door into St. James, Goose Creek, visualized the “utmost religious fervor” associated with that symbol in the Christian tradition (FIG. 4.23).¹⁶⁴ It was, of course, the collective fervor of the gathered faithful together with the imminence of the Godhead that bestowed upon the church its sacred nature.¹⁶⁵ This specific symbol of religious devotion extended the manifestation of the sacred from space of the church to devotional time in the manuscript devotional of Edward Brailsford, where rows of flaming hearts initiate morning and evening prayers (FIG. 4.24).¹⁶⁶ These hearts reminded the reader that it was religious fervor that realized the sacred in the time of the devotional, just as it was the gathered faithful that manifest the sacred in the space of the church. 170

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

The religious implications of time were not just limited to hours of worship; sacred time was also linear, bounded at one end by Creation and at the other end by Christ’s return. The construction of a church steeple offered a unique opportunity to make reference to this understanding of the bounds of time shared by all Christians. Together with the Charleston meetinghouses of the Scotch Presbyterians and the French Huguenots, the steeples of St. Helena’s in Beaufort, St. George’s in Dorchester, and St. Philip’s in Charleston were all surmounted with a cock, the traditional symbol of watchfulness and vigilance (see FIG. 1.1).¹⁶⁷ As the animal familiarly burdened with announcing the arrival of the day at the rising of the sun, the cock was understood to represent the hopeful anticipation of the dawning of a new age. The symbolic relationship between the returning Christ and the rising sun draws from an Old Testament prophecy in Malachi, “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness rise with healing in his wings.”¹⁶⁸ While steeple bells marked the initiation of the sacred liturgy, the cock reminded observers also of linear time bounded by the eventual return of Christ. IN MANY WAYS, the architecture of St. Philip’s Church, completed in 1723, was the summation of early Anglican belief in South Carolina. In the nave, a strong cornice divided the stable, architectonic space of the nave walls from the curved vault that covered it (FIG. 1.5). The lingering scent of rosemary and the thin lines of wax that ran down some of the pews might have evidenced a recent evening funeral. A soaring arcade with a large cherub stationed at the crest of each arch divided the nave from the flanking side aisles. The barrel vault joined with the cherubs to remind believers that in this space, only a thin veil separated earth and heaven. The eastern wall rose solid behind the chancel up to the cornice, displaying only four huge tablets with Holy Writ and other sacred words of the faith in gold lettering over a black field. On these tablets, the believer saw the voice of God. Rising above the cornice on the east end was an abbreviated parapet that hid the base of a very large semicircular window. In the instance that the viewer missed this window as an explicit reference to the rising sun/Son, the parapet before had a sunburst inscribed with “I H S,” the first three letters of Ihsus, the Greek name for Jesus and a common Christological monogram in Protestantism. Making reference to the divine drama of the Lord’s Supper, a pair of drawn curtains flanked the semicircular window (FIG. 4.25).¹⁶⁹ A drawn curtain appeared also in an early eighteenth-century Anglican church in Virginia. Below the interior cornice of that church “were fragments of the plaster, extending farther down at the corners, and representing an immense curtain drawn back. I remember seeing what was part of a very large curtain and tassel. Mama said there used to be an angel just where the curtain was drawn on one side, with a trumpet in his hand, and rolling on toward him were vast bodies of clouds with angels in them.”¹⁷⁰ Like the barrel vault and the symbolic cherubs, the drawn curtain referenced the immediacy of God in the space of the church. The unveiling of S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

171

F IGURE 4 .25  Detail from John Blake White, Interior of St. Philip’s, 1835 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church)

Christ in the space of the church was a theme realized in a number of ways, not least of which was the removal of a napkin from over the elements at the time of the Eucharist. The ultimate source for this image, however, was the curtain described in the Old Testament as veiling the Holy of Holies— the innermost sanctum and residence of God—in the Temple of Solomon. The great interest in the Temple of Solomon both by seventeenth-century Anglican theologians and eighteenth-century Freemasons would certainly have generated in South Carolina’s laity a degree of fluency in the forms and details of the temple.¹⁷¹ The lingering scent of cedar and the grand architectural setting of the nave interior work together with the image of the curtain to recall biblical visions of Solomon’s Temple deeply inscribed in the imagination of believers.¹⁷² 172

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

The New Testament narratives describe the Crucifixion of Christ as rending this curtain in two, dissolving the separation between God and His people. It was maybe that event that gave the open curtains of St. Philip’s their most powerful referent. The drawn curtain could represent the unfettered communication between humanity and divinity—the withdrawing of the veil—that was realized in the space of the church. But the withdrawing of the curtain might also be a temporal reference. Together with the cock that surmounted the cupola outside, the use of the trumpet in the Virginia church and the implications of the “rising Son” in St. Philip’s imply that the drawn curtain references the end of human time and the Second Coming of Christ. In many ways, the architecture of St. Philip’s embodied the deepest Anglican beliefs in the imminence of God and the sacred dramas of earth and heaven, time and eternity. To most contemporary viewers, St. Philip’s must have seemed a “Building of God—a House not made with hands—Eternal in the Heavens.”¹⁷³ AFTER HIS DEATH, Benjamin Seabrook no longer needed his corporeal body—he was fully spirit—but those he left behind depended on sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch to access the sacred in a world bounded by space and time. In early South Carolina, where the supernatural was imminent, the experience of religion was richly sensorial. Arched windows, ceilings and grave markers, cruciform plans, and the words of Holy Writ manifested the sacred in space and became signs of God’s imminence in the natural world. Seeing these together with cherubs and cocks, more explicit symbols of the Christian faith, made visible the invisible realities of supernatural beings and sacred time. But vision was only one window into the sacred. As Peter Hoffer’s Sensory Worlds in Early America (2003) demonstrates, the other senses were equally powerful ways of knowing and shaping cultural experience.¹⁷⁴ The scent of cedar drew upon a variety of associations—both natural and biblical—to sense the sacred in the space of the church. The sound of the church bell inaugurated the sacred in time. The touch of the chalice and the taste of wine commingled God and communicant and drew together the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. As a result, sound, smell, taste, and touch rent the thin veil between the natural and supernatural worlds in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The centrality of scriptural revelation as a way of knowing, and the importance of the senses in detecting the invisible world of the supernatural, meant that early colonial America was densely metaphoric. In his remarkable examination of colonial culture in New England, Robert Blair St. George has argued that “in seventeenthcentury New England...word and thing were inextricably linked, referentially interdependent, constantly implicated in each other’s ways of making meaning.”¹⁷⁵ But this dense web of inter-referential words, shapes, and images was not unique to Puritan New England. Metaphors blending word and image, sound and shape, the natural and the supernatural were powerful ways of making sense of the spiritual world of early Anglicanism as well. S EN S IN G THE S ACRED

173

Depending largely on written evidence, scholars have generally assumed that Enlightenment thought began drawing Anglicanism away from revelation and toward reason in the late seventeenth century.¹⁷⁶ The material culture of early eighteenth-century Anglicanism in South Carolina suggests otherwise. Anglicans continued to invest their buildings and grave markers with a theology focused on the proximity of heaven and the activity of the supernatural. The architecture of early eighteenth-century Anglicanism simultaneously realized and reflected the rich, sensuous, and spiritually animated world that survived from the seventeenth century. Ghosts, demons, and witches roamed the landscape as Anglicans sought ways to defend the House of God from spiritual attack. While church walls defined the sacred in space, their bells established temporal thresholds of sacred time. Church interiors manifested the cope of heaven as Anglicans petitioned a very imminent God, whose voice was heard in the scriptures and seen on church walls. This spiritually animated view of the world among Anglicans, however, would not survive the eighteenth century. Later eighteenth-century church builders replaced barrel-vaulted ceilings with more fashionable tray ceilings; cherubs disappeared from the ornamental programs of churches; texts were relegated to books and proscribed panels on the chancel; cedar was supplanted by mahogany. By the second half of the eighteenth century, a new form of Anglicanism had emerged, an Anglicanism that favored reason over mystery, natural evidence over supernatural activity, and the (visibly consumed) beauty of holiness over the densely metaphoric world of shapes, symbols, sounds, and smells of early Anglicanism. Those changes, and the emergence of this new theology, are the subjects of chapter 6. Bridging both halves of the century, however, were the sacraments and the sermon. The corporate realities of these life stages played a central role in Anglican life, and it is to the place of the sacraments in the church body that we turn our attention in the next chapter.

174

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

Chapter 5 T H E SACR A M E N TA L BODY

A diminutive but graceful white marble baptismal basin once stood in the small chapel now called Pompion Hill (pronounced “pun-kin hill”) (FIG. 5.1). The sunburst or glory laid out in brick in the crossing square in the very center of the church floor suggests that the font was originally intended to rise from that crossing, the middle of three liturgical centers: pulpit, font, and chancel (FIG. 5.2). Standing tall on the western wall of the church is one of the most spectacular Anglican fittings to survive in South Carolina (FIG. 5.3). Working with an unidentified carver, the carpenter William Axson designed and completed the pulpit for the chapel between 1763 and 1766. Rich with inlay and carved detail, the raised hexagonal case is supported by a graceful stem. Surmounting the case, a tester carried by fluted Corinthian columns is crowned with an alighting dove. The third liturgical center was the chancel at the east end, positioned directly opposite the pulpit. The critical liturgical object in this chancel was likely the silver chalice fashioned in 1711 by Charleston silversmith Mile Brewton for the parish of St. Thomas (FIG. 5.4).¹ The chalice takes the form of a standing cup, emulating a popular seventeenth-century domestic form. A large, hollow foot hammered from sheet stock carries a stem fashioned from two cast halves. An hourglass profile, incised rings, and a central knop give the stem a distinctive elegance. Like the foot, the deep and broad bowl with its gently curved lip took its shape under the careful and tedious taps of Brewton’s hammer. Marking the completion of the chalice and signaling the parish’s pride of ownership, “Belonging to St. Thomas Parish in South Carolina Anno Dom: 1711” rings the bowl in bold Roman text. Not only is the chalice the oldest dated example of southern silver, but it is also a remarkable testament to the importance placed on high-quality Communion vessels only decades after the foundation of the colony. These three liturgical artifacts, we might assume, were instrumental in the sacramental lives of a congregation. Yet this raises an interpretive problem, because eighteenth-century Anglicans are not often described as deeply religious.² Anglican churches in Virginia, for example, have been depicted as centers of elite hegemony with rote liturgies and mumbled sermons dry enough to bore even the most patient congregant. Such interpretations are not without evidence. South Carolina’s newly arrived Anglican commissary—the

F IGURE 5.1 Interior of Pompion Hill Chapel, Berkeley County (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Frances Benjamin Johnson)

F IGURE 5.2 Plan of Pompion Hill Chapel, Berkeley County (Drawn by Carl Lounsbury)

F IGURE 5.3 William Axson, pulpit in Pompion Hill Chapel, 1763–66 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Thomas T. Waterman, 1939)

F IGURE 5. 4 Miles Brewton, St. Thomas chalice, 1711 (Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina; photo by Keith Leonard)

colonial representative to the bishop of London—leveled a vitriolic assessment of his flock: “The people here,” Johnston wrote, “are the vilest race of men upon the earth. They have neither honour, nor honesty, nor Religion enough to entitle them to any tolerable Character.” They are, he believed, “the most factious and seditious people in the whole world.”³ The commissary was not alone in registering grievances. Charles Boschi, the minister serving South Carolina’s St. Bartholomew’s Parish, complained that much THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

177

of his congregation “go through [and] fro’ continually out of chapel, and serve punch in time of sermon or prayer.”⁴ Serving St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish, William Durand complained in a letter that one of the leading men in his parish laughed at him out loud during a sermon in which he proved the divine origins of the scriptures.⁵ Another Anglican minister, finding himself in dispute with his vestry, discovered his preaching desk smashed to splinters in the churchyard and later absented his post for fear that the pulpit canopy had been loosed so as to fall on him while he preached. If such commentaries are to be taken as typical, Anglican church life appears to have done little to instill piety in congregations. Such colorful commentary, however, has overshadowed the regular faith and worship practiced by large numbers of colonial Anglicans.⁶ Divine worship and the preaching of a sermon were standard weekly fare—and on occasion both morning and evening services on Sundays—in South Carolina’s Anglican parish churches.⁷ In the city parish of St. Philip’s, worship was held not only twice on Sundays, but also on Wednesday and Friday mornings, only without the sermon.⁸ Similar schedules were maintained for brief seasons in a few of the rural parish churches as well—in one case in the absence of a minister.⁹ One clergyman described his congregation as “Sober, well inclined people, kind and obliging to their late minister, diligent in attending the word of God, and desirous of all good instruction.”¹⁰ South Carolina’s Anglicans worshipped God in the church, and they also petitioned Him through fasting. In response to a serious drought in August 1720, for example, Governor Nathaniel Johnson called for a day of prayer and fasting; one minister observed, “The greater part of my Parishoners...came readily to church on the fast day, and indeed most of the churches were fuller than usual.”¹¹ Neither was such religiosity among Anglicans reserved for just public events; the letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney is dense with references to scripture and divine providence. The letterbook of South Carolina statesman Henry Laurens is similarly replete with sincere pietistic references.¹² Despite the characterization of early Anglicans as impious or at best indifferent, many if not most approached the church service with the religiosity evident in the manuscript book of devotions belonging to one South Carolina Anglican: “Being now in thy presence, O God, give me grace to entertain heavenly meditations, and seriously to attend to thy sacred word, and obediently to practice the same, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”¹³ Another misconception is that regular Anglican worship was practiced only by the colonial elite. The 1740 journal of the middling Anglican James Ellerton indicates, for example, that in the month of March he attended church on three Sundays, and being away from home on the fourth he attended a Baptist meeting.¹⁴ Services were also regularly attended by a small percentage of the colony’s enslaved black majority. In 1724 Francis Varnod, the rector of St. George’s Parish, reported that forty to 50 parishioners regularly attended Sunday services, “besides 25 or 30 of Mr. Skeene and Mr. Haguey’s Negros.”¹⁵ John Wesley recounted in his journal for 1736 that in attending service at St. 178

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

Philip’s, “I was glad to see several negroes at church.”¹⁶ Even so, most studies of Anglican efforts to convert slaves have described their attempts as a failure.¹⁷ To be sure, the relationship was a difficult one. The extent to which slaves participated in church life lay almost entirely in the hands of their owners. A report of the entire clergy drafted by Commissary Johnson to the SPG summarizes the situation: “Masters of slaves are generally of opinion, that a slave grows worse by being a Christian; and therefore instead of instructing them in the Principles of Christianity which is undoubtedly their duty, they malign those that attempt it. This, I say is the case of most Masters; however, I must not forget to do justice to some, who have distinguished themselves by a contrary Practice, and are very eminent for the care they take about their slaves in matters of Religion.”¹⁸ Expressing a similar sentiment, Richard Ludham complained that it was “almost impracticable to convert any but here and there a favorite house slave.”¹⁹ Even so, a small number of blacks were an integral part of the church. Francis LeJau taught the catechism to slaves.²⁰ Minister’s records suggest that many of the adults baptized or married in the church were slaves, even if those baptized comprised only between 3 and 5 percent of the total population.²¹ William Guy wrote of the baptism of five slaves in the church who gave “a pretty good account of their faith...before the publick congregation in my church.”²² Thomas Hasell, rector of the parish of St. Thomas and St. Denis, was pleased to report in 1729 that he had “married a Negroe couple Publickly in the Church, the Man Free, the woman a Slave; both Baptized by me formerly.”²³ In those parishes whose colonial ministers recorded the number of black and white communicants, approximately one-third of those surrounding the Communion table were black.²⁴ Under the advisement of their parish ministers, some slaves learned the catechism and often chose to celebrate Christian baptism and marriage in the parish church. By the end of the century, slave attendance at Sunday services had its own social dimensions. Timothy Ford noted in his journal that he traveled six miles to church, where his enslaved traveling companion Billy “meets with many of his friends and relations.”²⁵ While we can know far less about their experiences in Anglican churches, South Carolina’s slaves occupied these spaces, participated in worship, and shaped the experiences of their white masters in distinctive ways. Colonial Anglican churches in South Carolina were centers of regular and sincere religious practice, and it is the charge of this chapter to examine Anglicanism’s corporate material religion. SCHOLARS OF EARLY AMERICAN material culture have done little to understand the relationship between the material world and sacramental practice. With only a very few exceptions, discussions of Communion silver, for example, focus on the artisans who generated these objects or, less frequently, on the social and political implications of gifting Communion silver. We have yet to establish an understanding of their theological and spiritual implications. How did they integrate with the Anglican liturgy of THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

179

the Holy Communion? What was the spiritual importance of their material, their form, and their ornament to the communicant? These same questions extend also to baptismal fonts and pulpits. In what ways were these objects burdened with religious meanings no longer obvious to the contemporary viewer? How were these objects part of a larger sacramental theology that shepherded the congregation through mortal life and prepared them for life eternal? The shared form of the Communion chalice, the pulpit, and the baptismal basin was a result of their shared function; each was a vessel designed to contain God’s grace, offered to His people in the form of wine, water, or the Word. In the space of the Anglican church, the dispensation of grace took place in a very real, material world and implicated very real, physical bodies. Anglicans enlisted the material to mediate between the transcendent and the corporeal.²⁶ Early Modern Protestants struggled profoundly with the place of the body in theology and practice. The most explicit example, of course, is the fact that Protestants, including Anglicans, were very clear about their rejection of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, or the supernatural transformation of the Communion elements into the actual body and blood of Christ. The opening oath in the vestry minutes of Christ Church Parish in South Carolina makes this point quite clearly: “We underwritten doe Sollemnly and Sincerely in the presence of God Profess, Testifie and Declare that we doe believe yt in the Sacrement of the Lords Supper there is not any Transubstantiation of ye Elements of Bread and Wine into the Bodey and Blood of Christ at or after ye Consecration thereof by any person wtsoever.”²⁷ Centuries of conflict in England and across Europe had centered in part on this commitment to the absence of the real body and blood of Christ in Communion. But even if Christ’s body was not present, the body—both metaphoric and real—played a critical role in Anglican worship. Together with other Christians, Anglicans regularly spoke of the congregation as the Body of Christ. But this body had two distinct manifestations. As described to one South Carolina congregation, the church was composed of the “Church above, the Church Triumphant in Heaven; and the church below, the Church Militant on Earth.”²⁸ The Church Militant was the body of believers. The opening lines of Psalm 45, read each Sunday from the Book of Common Prayer, captures well this collective identity: O Come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving; And shew ourselves glad in him with psalms. (emphasis added) Understood to be the church under reconstruction after the Fall, however, the Church Militant was a body rife with sin. For this reason, believers gathered regularly to petition for forgiveness for their collective sin and to praise God with “one voice.” But the fallen nature of the Church Militant also meant that there was division in the ranks, both between denominations 180

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

of the Church—made explicit in the Reformation—and within any local gathering. As articulated by one South Carolina minister: “For as we have many members in one body, so, in a spiritual sense, we Xtians being many, Tho’ distinguished by the world into Rich and Poor, are one Body in Christ; and every one members of one another.”²⁹ The fact of sin meant that the Church Militant would not and could not be free from internal hierarchies and distinctions.³⁰ Complete unity and equality in the church was reserved for the Church Triumphant, divorced from this world, fully redeemed, and free from sin. The Church Triumphant was a church—a corpus—hoped for but not yet seen. A second meaning of the body in Anglican worship built upon the sinful condition of individuals in the Church Militant. In Christian theology, sin was often described as originating in “the flesh.” In the words of South Carolina Anglican Alexander Keith, “O JESUS strengthen Me to resist and subdue my Flesh, that in both my soul and in my Body I may glorify Thee.”³¹ Implicit in this statement is that Keith’s soul, converted to the faith and claimed by Christ, was naturally inclined to glorify God. The problem lay in his flesh— that mortal part of him. In Anglicanism, the regularity of the prayers and the corporeal nature of the sacraments of baptism and Communion—washing the real body and consuming a metaphoric body—were designed to discipline and refine “the flesh.” A prayer before Communion from the same devotional book nicely captures the corporeal nature of the sacrament: Make Me wash with my tears what is polluted in my Ways and cleanse in Christ’s Blood what I wash in my Tears: O Lord in a Bath of this Water warmed in the Blood flowing from a sinners Bleeding heart and Saviour’s Bloody side, shall I not be clean if I wash. Pierce my Heart, O Lord, yt I may repent, open my Heart, yet I may believe, so that I may wash and be clean.³² Another prayer, published in the South Carolina Gazette in 1735, uses different words to make the same distinction: “Let me always apply myself, to resist Nature, to assist Grace, to keep thy Commandments, and to persevere in them to Salvation.”³³ While this author uses “Nature” for the flesh and “Grace” for the work of God, the distinction remains the same. Realized in these prayers is the continual process of rooting out sin from the flesh in the pursuit of Christlikeness. In the eighteenth century, this process fell under the broad rubric of “improvement,” which described the process of moral refinement. Anglicans believed that the process of improvement was actuated by participation in the personal disciplines and liturgies of the church and a spiritual proximity to God, the latter always a result of the former. Eighteenth-century preaching on improving the church abounded in architectural metaphor. Charles Woodmason, for example, was deeply offended when a local Baptist minister accused him of being “a Mason who built on rotten foundations; and rais’d Buildings only of Straw and Strubble, and daub’d with untemper’d mortar, and would never make any Strong buildings THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

181

for Christ.”³⁴ This emphasis on the corpus, the body, in Protestant theology manifested a body/building metaphor that established deep spiritual correspondences between the place of worship and the congregation gathered within. When traveling south of Charleston, Timothy Ford commented to his enslaved traveling companion Billy “that I thought the spirit had not lately visited this parish; the Shattered & forlorn condition of the Church gave but too much room to question their zeal.”³⁵ The body/building metaphor also allowed the building to function as a surrogate for the community in both encouraging and confrontational strategies.³⁶ On one Communion Sunday, a group of Dissenters “left their Excrements on the Communion Table” of a backcountry chapel.³⁷ Fully recognizing the sanctity of the space, these Dissenters defiled the church in an explicitly corporeal way. As we might expect from a tradition steeped in the body/building metaphor, the church building was the locus for corporate worship and individual prayer and repentance.³⁸ The baptismal basin and its water symbolized induction into the Church Militant. The pulpit framed the word of God and its right interpretation. And in the chancel, Communion silver set the table for the mystical feast in which the repentant communed with the living God. None was unique to Anglicanism in South Carolina, but none can be understood outside the specifically Anglican practices and beliefs that animated objects with agency and meaning. South Carolina’s Anglicans enlisted the architectural fittings of their church interiors—fonts, pulpits, and chancels—to negotiate their understanding of and relationship to the corpus—both corporate and corporeal—as they pursued sanctification in this world and membership in the Church Triumphant in the next. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FONTS survive in only a handful of churches or chapels in South Carolina. Writing about his newly enlarged church in 1727, William Guy described “a decent font on a pedestal, 3 steps high in a semicircle at the entrance of the church.”³⁹ Although it now rests on a nineteenth-century cast iron pedestal, the colonial marble basin survives (FIG. 5.5). The placement of the font near the entrance was an ancient tradition long predating the Reformation. This particular location signified baptism’s role as the point of entry into the Christian life. A half century later, the vestries of St. Michael’s and St. Stephen’s chose similarly to locate the font in their new church near the western entrance. The London-made font in St. Michael’s is an oval basin of marble supported by a mahogany pedestal. Covering the basin is a canopy attached to “a Brass Dove Gild’d and weighted with a proper Line and Cord” to allow the canopy to be lifted easily (FIG. 5.6).⁴⁰ As the canopy was lifted, of course, the counterweight in the form of a dove descended, symbolizing the descent of the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of baptism. In designing this font, the vestry of St. Michael’s was in no way suggesting originality. Rather, they were demonstrating their familiarity with hundreds of years of English tradition. Yet, of all the Anglican church-building programs in eighteenth-century South Carolina, only St. Andrew’s, St. Michael’s, and 182

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.5   Baptismal basin from St. Andrew’s Parish Church, ca. 1727, on a nineteenth-century stand (St. Andrew’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

F IGURE 5.6 Font in St. Michael’s, Charleston (Photo by author)

St. Stephen’s appear to have been outfitted with baptismal fonts.⁴¹ St. Philip’s Church, always the model of the decent performance of Anglican ritual in the colony, did not have a font in the eighteenth century. The fact that “the church was in want of a Font” was not even noted until 1819.⁴² While Anglican canon law required a stone font, Protestant reformers continued to critique the font as a Catholic intrusion well into the seventeenth century, and as a result of these criticisms, fonts were by no means universal in the English church of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁴³ The preferred alternative was a silver basin, and by the eighteenth century, many churches that had a font actually used the font as a stand and container for a basin holding the water. The absence of fonts, however, did not mean that THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

183

baptisms were infrequent or that they were not an important sacrament for South Carolina’s Anglicans. Baptism was the sacrament of introduction into the church. Most Anglicans agreed that baptism was a sign of the covenant between humankind and God, but there was general agreement that the sacrament did not cleanse sin.⁴⁴ As a result, most official statements on the sacrament focus on its role in integrating the candidate into the church. Article XXVII of the ThirtyNine Articles, the official professions of Anglican belief, stated that “Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from other that be not Christened: but it is also a sign of regeneration or new birth, whereby...they that receive baptism rightly, are grafted into the Church.”⁴⁵ Simply stated, the sacrament of baptism defined membership in the Church Incarnate (alternative language for the church on earth).⁴⁶ Anglicans understood that neglecting the sacrament of baptism might have eternal consequences. “Being taken very ill of a fever,” wrote one minister of a man in his parish, “he sent to me, & openly declared to me that he had never been baptiz’d.” Facing death, the man “most earnestly desir’d to have that holy sacrament admitted to him.” After examining his knowledge of the sacrament, the minister “straightway admitted him to Baptism.”⁴⁷ But baptism only secured admission to the Church Incarnate. Only those who received the sacrament rightly, by which the fathers meant they adhered to the other church sacraments, could hope to transition from the Church Incarnate to the Church Triumphant. Baptism was, above all, intended to be a corporate sacrament celebrated by the whole church. The liturgy for the public form of baptism presumed a temporary reorientation of the church interior toward the font near the door of the church. Like the sacrament of Communion, where the faithful gathered around, in, or near the chancel, the gathering of the Church Incarnate around the font was the presumed context for the liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer specified that baptisms should be held on Sundays, “when the most Number of People come together.” The first reason for this was so that the greatest number of people can testify to the receiving of the child into the church through the sacrament. The second, however, was that in the baptism, each member of the church body might “be put in remembrance of his own Profession made to God.” The service began with a charge to the church to petition God that the child might become “a lively member” of the church. Following this and other prayers, the minister read a passage from the Gospel of Mark, which highlights Christ’s admonition to his disciples to “suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not,” a not-so-subtle theological defense of infant baptism. A series of scripted questions regarding the fundamentals of the faith were then asked of the child’s godparents as a means of determining their sufficiency for the tasks of spiritual nurture. After another series of prayers ending in the consecration of the water, the minister then asked the godparents to name the child. The minister dipped the child into the water or poured water over his or her head, saying, “I baptize thee, in 184

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Sealing the baptism with the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead, the minister announced the “grafting” of the child into “the Body of Christ’s Church.” The service closed with admonitions to the godparents that the child was to learn the fundamental texts of the faith—the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, and the Ten Commandments—and should ultimately come to learn the catechism as preparation for approaching the Lord’s table in the sacrament of Communion. The baptism of an adult differed little from that of a child, except that a communicant in the congregation presented the intended instead of godparents and the person to be baptized answered their own questions. Adult baptism required that the baptismal candidate be fully literate in the Anglican understanding of the sacrament, which usually meant instruction in the church catechism. William Dunn reported that he had recently baptized “ten infants and four white adult persons and five more are waiting baptism which are not yet qualified for it.”⁴⁸ The baptisms of slaves also required some training in the catechism. Francis LeJau wrote, “I do what I can for the Instruction of my Parishioners, chiefly the children, the servants, and the slaves, some of which are soon to be baptised.”⁴⁹ The minister in St. George Parish reported in 1723, “I Christ’d Sunday last an Anabaptist woman, with her Daughter of two years old and a boy of 2 years old and also 3 Negro Children.”⁵⁰ The few ministers who reported marrying slaves in the church also reported that they had been previously baptized, and the same would certainly have been true of those taking Communion. Baptisms of slaves, as noted by LeJau, were not uncommon in the earlier decades of the eighteenth century; increasing silence on the subject in the documentary record suggests that slave baptisms were far less common in the later eighteenth century. Yet, baptisms of slaves and of white adults were far fewer than those of white children. One minister, for example, reported that in the past year he had baptized twenty-two infants and one adult.⁵¹ In these cases, baptism was generally a private celebration practiced in the home from silver bowls enlisted for the purpose (FIG. 5.7).⁵² In addition to the liturgy for public baptism, the Book of Common Prayer also included a liturgy for private baptisms in the home, a liturgy that was intended to be celebrated only under extenuating circumstances. Although home baptisms had been the English Protestant practice for centuries, the Book of Common Prayer argued that private baptisms did not fulfill the purpose of the sacrament, which was meant to induct the newly baptized into the church community, the body of believers. Ministers were instructed that children were not to be baptized at home except “when need compelled them so to do.” In the liturgy for home baptism, the service was limited to the actual baptism; all the preparations, prayers, questions, and admonitions were to take place the following Sunday during the service, returning the baptism to the context of the gathered church. South Carolinians were well aware of the importance of the distinction between these THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

185

F IGURE 5.7  William Abdy, silver bowl with provenance as domestic christening bowl, London, ca. 1801–2 (The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina; photo by Charlotte Crabtree)

services but often ignored them. Alexander Garden, for example, complained that another South Carolina minister had administered “the sacrament of Baptism, and in the publick form in a private house, contrary to the canons and rubricks of the church.”⁵³ Summarizing the standard practice for most rural ministers, William Orr informed the SPG in 1744, “I often travel 20 or 30 miles to Baptize children at the Houses of their Parents.” Orr continued that this was “hardly to be remedied in country parishes, where people live so many miles from the church.”⁵⁴ Rural families argued that practicality demanded the minister travel to the house rather than the infant, with the entire family, travel to the parish church, and this quickly became the norm in South Carolina.⁵⁵ Home baptisms were standard for all the rural parishes, but they were even the inclination in the city churches.⁵⁶ In 1725 the rector of St. Philip’s wrote to the SPG, “By the divine assistance, [I] brought my Parish to tolerate good order and conformity in most things to the laws and Rules of the Church; particularly to bring their Children to Church for public Baptism.”⁵⁷ These trends parallel the general rise in private baptisms throughout the English empire over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While many claimed health and convenience as the reason, the increasing attention paid to performance and display suggests otherwise. In many ways, the rise of private baptisms was only one part of the increasing degrees of exclusivity practiced by the elite in Early Modern England; a private baptism allowed the family to circumscribe the guest list to their socioeconomic counterparts.⁵⁸ Even so, home baptisms were among the most significant occasions in the Anglican practice of home worship. Regular—even daily—household and individual worship was not an uncommon practice among early eighteenthcentury Anglicans.⁵⁹ Writing before the construction of many churches in South Carolina, one early minister described officiating “in some of the Planter’s houses or in the summer under some green tree in some airy place made convenient for Minister and people.”⁶⁰ Before the construction of the 186

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

parish church in St. Bartholomew’s Parish, their rector, the Reverend Marston, “constantly every Lord’s Day had a Congregation and read the Service of the Common Prayer Book, and preach’d at some Gentlemens House upon the Ashupee River.”⁶¹ Governor Nathaniel Johnson invited Samuel Thomas to officiate daily morning prayer for his family and his neighbors in his house on the Cooper River.⁶² Thomas would later recount that the opportunity to attend to a single community so consistently meant that many “set up the worship of God in their own families to which duty they had been perfect strangers.”⁶³ In one early letter to the SPG, John Norris indicated that since he lived in an area of the colony that was not yet served by a minister, he and his neighbors “make our humble address to God at home in such manner & form as the Liturgy of our Church directs.”⁶⁴ The notion that the home was an extension of the parish church was more easily recognized in the early decades of the century, when families were more clearly identified by religious affiliation. Before the middle of the century, for example, certain families were decidedly Anglican (Pinckneys, Bulls, Manigaults, and Smiths) and others were dissenters (Elliotts, Lynches, Fenwicks, and Bees). In most cases, the head of the household, who generally governed the many individuals involved in household economics, could easily set aside time for household devotion.⁶⁵ Family identity in the earlier eighteenth century was linked to denominational identity, so marriages between families of different denominations were rare. By the end of the eighteenth century, reported David Ramsay, “marriages between persons of different denominations became more common and excited less wonder.”⁶⁶ Such strong family-denominational identity extended to the church. Unlike Virginia, where individuals were separated by gender, seating in South Carolina churches was by household. Just as some Anglican families gathered for house devotions in the earlier eighteenth century, the pew reconstructed that community in the context of the gathered church. These families probably practiced regular family worship at home using one of the many available devotional guides. Private devotional guides and other religious volumes were more abundant in personal libraries in South Carolina than any other category of books. The most popular of these Anglican devotional guides, The Whole Duty of Man, was among the most common books in colonial South Carolina libraries.⁶⁷ The full title of one devotional book, printed in Oxford in 1689, communicates the importance of the discipline of both congregational and personal prayer among Anglicans: The Common-Prayer-Book, The BEST COMPANION In the HOUSE and CLOSET as well as in the TEMPLE, or A Collection of Prayers out of the Liturgy of the Church of England, most needful both for the whole Family together, and for every single person apart by himself. In the words of one English minister, “A man’s house was a little oratory where the master prayed himself with all his family, and read a portion of Scripture.”⁶⁸ The survival of Edward Brailsford’s 1710–14 manuscript quarto of devotions provides a unique glimpse into the home worship of an early South THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

187

F IGURE 5.8 Pinckney baptismal gown, mid-eighteenth century (The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina; photo by Charlotte Crabtree)

Carolina Anglican. The manuscript opens with an extensive private devotion entitled “Morning Prayer,” followed by an equally extensive “Evening Prayer.” After these two prayer services, Brailsford included thematic prayers to be used each day of the week. On Wednesdays, for example, Brailsford focused on “Repentance.” Thursday’s subject was “Faith, Hope and Charity.” Saturdays were dedicated to “Perseverance.” A significantly longer series of prayers for Sunday suggests that his Sabbath worship began at home. Following the Sunday prayers are topical extraordinary prayers to be read on any occasion and prayers “Proper for the Entrance into and Progress in the HOLY CHRISTIAN LIFE.” Brailsford’s devotional book ends with copies in what appears to be his own hand of short family prayers for morning and evening. Brailsford’s 1729 will suggests that this was only the most personal of a large devotional library. His “Books (particularly those of piety and devotion) I would as near as may be have Equally Divided amongst my said sons John, Joseph, Morton and Samuel.”⁶⁹ The private devotional manual of Edward Brailsford is a rare manuscript survival of what was a common book type among early Anglicans. Home baptisms were important events celebrated by immediate and extended family. Ann Ashby Manigault noted in her diary: “Dined at my sons. The children were baptized.”⁷⁰ Thomas Pinckney’s mid-eighteenthcentury white satin christening gown and blanket further suggests that the wealth of the elite was enlisted to convey the significance of this event (FIG. 5.8).⁷¹ In the case of Thomas Pinckney, the baptism would have been a rich feast for the eyes: the child in a linen gown, covered by the satin robe and wrapped in a satin blanket, against the flowing white surplice or black coat of the minister, and a bowl selected from the family’s silver.⁷² The celebrations afterward could not have differed much from those following an 1803 home baptism described in Jamaica: “After the ceremony, cake, wine, &c.; all the 188

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.9   Crouch children marker, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston (Photo by author)

servants had the same; and, in short, health and happiness was drank to the dear little Christian, with every demonstration of affection and joy.”⁷³ The fact that the baptism was warmly celebrated in the home did not diminish the sacred nature of the sacrament. Among the community gathered for the sacrament would certainly have been the child’s godparents, individuals other than the parents but usually selected from the family to assist the parents in the spiritual nurture of the newly baptized. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, in the years following the baptism of Thomas and her other children, felt the responsibility “to be careful both of their souls and bodys, to watch over their tender minds; to carefully root out the first appearing and buildings of vice, and to instill piety, Virtue, and true religion into them.”⁷⁴ That children were a regular contingent of the congregation is suggested in a sermon on church order, where the minister instructed his congregants, “Keep your children as quiet as possible. If they be fractious, Carry them out at once.”⁷⁵ Once baptism introduced the child into the church body, it was the responsibility of the parents to raise the children in the context of regular worship. As one of the more celebratory events in home worship, baptism was often overshadowed by the colony’s high rate of infant mortality. The unusual triple marker erected by Charles and Mary Crouch in St. Philip’s churchyard memorializes three children under the age of two (FIG. 5.9). While the cost of this memorial was out of the reach of most parents, the regular loss of young children was a painful reality of most families in early South Carolina. Of the 186 burials recorded in St. Philip’s registry for the year 1745, fortytwo were children. Demonstrating the sickliness of the summer, over half of those children died between May and August. In a place and time that knew an extraordinarily high infant and child mortality rate, infant baptism was a sacrament that brought comfort to generations of parents. As part of the ceremonial grafting of the child into the church, baptism announced THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

189

F IGURE 5.10 Detail of the case, pulpit in Pompion Hill Chapel, Berkeley County, 1763–66 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 5.11 Underside of the canopy, pulpit in Pompion Hill Chapel, Berkeley County, 1763–66 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Thomas T. Waterman, 1939)

the name of the child, recognizing the individuality of the child’s soul and bestowing identity on him or her as part of a family and a community. ONCE BAPTIZED INTO THE CHURCH, one of the most important means for the refinement—or sanctification—of the Christian was a sermon delivered from the pulpit. Constructed largely of cedar but with exotic woods used for inlaid and carved components, the hexagonal pulpit of Pompion Hill rises well above the seats that fill the chapel floor (see FIG. 5.2). The sunken face of each panel of the pulpit case is trimmed with a carved egg-and-dart molding, and the central panel of the pulpit also exhibits an inlayed IHS in a sunburst pattern that echoes the glory in the crossing square on the floor (FIG. 5.10). A run of elegantly detailed leaf designs carved in full relief circles the base of the box and marks the transition between the box and the graceful stem that supports the entirety of the pulpit. Two fluted Corinthian columns rise from the rear of the box and support the canopy or tester. The underside of the canopy bears an inlaid sunburst surrounding a trigram in a glory (FIG. 5.11). Echoing the form of the counterweight on St. Michael’s baptismal font, a dove carved in the round alights on the peak of the tester. The pulpit visually dominates the interior of the chapel. The pulpit form and ornament was burdened with significant symbolic meaning that worked to assert the authority of the speaker. A dove alighted on the peak of the tester, representing explicitly the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost. The dove was an important symbol, for it bestowed spiritual authority on the one component of the weekly service that was not drawn directly from 190

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

the scriptures. Anglican ordination assumed years of study, which included training in biblical exegesis. It was only through this training that the Anglican minister was considered worthy to interpret the scriptures and to formulate a sermon. The pulpit elevated the minister above the congregation, physically locating him as the mediator between God and the congregation. The emphasis on preaching distinguished Anglicans in South Carolina from the small High Anglican tradition in England, which favored prayer as the most important element of the service.⁷⁶ The oft-repeated characterizations of eighteenth-century Anglican sermons as long, dry, and uninspired might not have been as typical as is assumed. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that many eighteenth-century Anglicans found deep nurture in the content of their preacher’s sermons and the popularity of the Anglican service centered on the sermon.⁷⁷ This appears to have been the case in South Carolina as well. The vestry of St. Philip’s wrote of Richard Clark in 1759 that he was “admired as a preacher both in Charlestown and London....When he preached the Church was crowded, and the effects of it were visible in the reformed lives of many of his hearers.”⁷⁸ The early eighteenth-century minister Francis LeJau reported that his church building could not contain all those who came to church, and many stood outside the doors and windows. Other reports from the early eighteenth century suggest that LeJau’s parish was not unique. Another was pleased that after distributing copies of the Book of Common Prayer, his parishioners “don’t fail to bring them pretty constantly to Church and decently joyn in their parts of Divine Service according to the form and manner proscribed by our Liturgy.”⁷⁹ Brian Hunt was pleased that “there are Several worthy Families in this Parish eminent here for Piety and ye people in general are well inclined to religion so that I have a full congregation every Lord’s Day.”⁸⁰ The journal of Anglican Ann Manigault suggests that she occasionally selected a place of worship because of the preacher.⁸¹ Sometimes it was the sermon topic that attracted interest. Eliza Lucas Pinckney relayed to a friend, “I did not receive your letter in time or should certainly have come to town to hear the Sermon, on a subject so new to me.”⁸² In another instance, she wrote to her husband that their parish minister “has entertained us very agreeably on things of a divine nature, but you may not be inclined to three sermons a day.”⁸³ In rebuking a friend for laziness, she divided her argument “into heads like a Sermon,” followed by three points that substantiated her argument. If Pinckney’s counterparts were even remotely as attentive as she was, Anglicans in South Carolina enjoyed the presentation, content, and rhetorical structure of eighteenth-century sermons. When Anglicans could not hear a sermon delivered in person, they often read from the many available printed collections. In a distant portion of one parish, Anglicans had erected a small chapel and paid their schoolmaster “a small salary to read to them the liturgy and a Sermon out of Tillotson’s works” each Sunday.⁸⁴ Printed sermons of John Tillotson, William Beveridge, and numerous other Anglican divines appeared frequently in private libraries and in locales destitute of a preacher; THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

191

they were certainly opened on Sundays.⁸⁵ Clergy even commented on each other’s preaching. When passing through St. James, Santee, in 1773, the Presbyterian minister Joseph Pilmore reported he “heard a useful sermon, on the necessity of prayer.”⁸⁶ The extensive collection of surviving eighteenth-century sermons of South Carolina minister Robert Smith demonstrates a wide range of subjects. In typical fashion, most of his sermons derive from a single passage of scripture but then outline those points about the passage he wished his congregation to consider. Intended to present essential religious truths in a clear, practical, and accessible manner, Smith’s sermons follow a format described as the “plain” style of preaching typical of most eighteenth-century Anglican sermons.⁸⁷ The carefully scripted Anglican sermon differed significantly from the enthusiastic preaching of evangelicals, and even some Anglicans, caught up in the fervor of the Great Awakening. One sermon of George Whitefield, for example, was described by Josiah Smith in the South Carolina Gazette: “The Pulpit seem’d almost to be the tribunal, and the preacher himself, if the Comparison may be pardon’d, the Great Judge, cloathed in Flames, and adjudging a guilty world to penal fire.”⁸⁸ Such excitement of emotion was not how most Anglicans understood grace to be dispensed in the sermon.⁸⁹ Anglican sermons were intended to be well-structured and polished, clear and articulate, orthodox and dispassionate. The presence of the Holy Spirit was found in the content and structure of the sermon, not in enthusiasm and passionate delivery. The eighteenth-century Anglican sermon, well-ordered and dispassionate, was delivered from an elevated pulpit that clearly signified the authority of the preacher to interpret the Word of God. The beauty and refinement of the pulpit visualized the balanced logic and structure of the sermon. The canopy over the preacher’s head conveyed the authority of his position in the great responsibility of preaching. And the dove alighting on the top symbolized the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the minister and in the words of his sermon. Even though it was the most important event of the service, the sermon was only one aspect of Sunday worship. In his 1724 report to the bishop of London on the condition of his parish, the Reverend Mr. Pouderous described a typical Sunday service in his parish of St. James, Santee: “I officiate about eleven the clock the divine service, I read the common prayers and explicate the catechism and we sing the psalms. I preach a sermon.”⁹⁰ Depending on the “Order for Morning Prayer” in The Book of Common Prayer, Anglican services followed a fairly predictable sequence.⁹¹ The service opened with the congregation kneeling during a general confession of sins, preceded by a series of short exhortations to humility and repentance taken from the scriptures. “I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me,” from the Psalms, is one example of an opening exhortation. Following the confession, the minister delivered an absolution from sin. The congregation— still kneeling—then repeated the Lord’s Prayer, followed by a Psalm. Often 192

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.12 Detail of minister’s pew and reading desk, Pompion Hill Chapel (Photo by author)

a line of the Psalm was read or sung by the minister and the congregation followed with the next. The minister, then standing, would read from the Old and New Testaments, leading the congregation in a Psalm or hymn after each. These readings were followed by a standing recitation of the Apostle’s Creed, often inscribed on the tablets mounted behind the Communion table for those who could read. The service ended with the common prayers for peace, grace, and those in authority, offered by the minister, all kneeling. The delivery of the sermon followed the prayer service. Since the pulpit was reserved exclusively for the preaching of the sermon, this liturgy required another location in the space of the church from which to lead prayers. The grandeur of Pompion Hill’s pulpit distracts from the fact that the pulpit was designed only as one component of a larger liturgical center. The unpainted mahogany pulpit stands within a minister’s pew, defined by low painted and paneled wainscot walls, a single hinged gate, and a small raised book ledge centered on the east-west axis of the church (FIG. 5.12). Together with a small bench or stool behind, this ledge functioned as a reader’s desk and is a rare survival of what was a common form in South Carolina. The entirety of the morning prayer service was conducted from the reading desk, which was often one component of a three-part liturgical program. Seated in the upper reading desk, the minister was generally responsible for directing the service, leading the confession, prayers, and creed, and reading the scriptures. From the lower desk, the Anglican parish clerk initiated hymns and psalms. The two Charleston parishes, St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, both more populous and outfitted with far grander churches, included separate THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

193

F IGURE 5.13  Plan of St. James, Santee, Charleston County (Drawn by Carl Lounsbury)

reading and clerk’s desks. That distinction even occurred on rare occasions in the plantation parishes; both St. John’s, Berkeley, and St. John’s, Colleton, were outfitted with both a clerk’s and a reader’s desk. But in most cases the minister served simultaneously as minister and clerk, and as a result, separate desks for the reading of the liturgy and the leading of the psalms was unnecessary. Like Pompion Hill Chapel, the majority of churches and chapels in South Carolina had only a single desk, interchangeably called the reading and clerk’s desk. Filling the floor space of Pompion Hill Chapel is a set of freestanding benches unique to Anglican churches in South Carolina. The more typical formula for seating in the eighteenth century was a mixture of box pews for the wealthier of the congregation and forms or benches for the poor. Typical for the eighteenth century are those pews surviving in the parish church in St. James, Santee (FIG. 5.13). While the pews on the north side were reworked in the early nineteenth century to accommodate the installation of the larger north-side chancel, those pews on the south side preserve their original eighteenth-century form and arrangement. The original south-side pews do not embrace a uniform orientation. Driven largely by convenience of access, some of the pews run in a north-south direction, while others run east-west. Constructed of two tiers of raised-panel wainscot not unlike the minister’s pew of Pompion Hill, the pews differ in that they have a raised wooden floor that elevates the occupants’ feet off the brick floor of the church. The vertical backs of the pews in St. James, comprised of the backsides of the rails, stiles, and panels, are uneven. The seat of the pew is often little 194

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.1 4 Detail of pews in St. James, Santee, Charleston County (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1977)

more than twelve inches deep, and the arrangement of the benches within the same pew suggest that individuals sitting together were often facing in three different directions (FIG. 5.14). The result of this and other pew arrangements was a congregation scattered throughout the church facing many directions, heightening the importance of hearing the sermon and diminishing the importance of seeing. The more privileged sort came into the church aware that the next hour or more would be spent in a manner that we today might think quite uncomfortable. Stepping up into the pew, they were likely to take a seat that did not face the pulpit, forcing them to crank their neck up to ninety degrees in order to see the minister. Sitting down, they would feel the uppermost rail of the pew against their upper back, with no other support offered by the perfectly vertical pew back. Furthermore, slouching was made very difficult by the narrow width of the pew seat. Kneeling for prayer, if they found such an activity theologically acceptable, took place on the wood floor of the pew. Those that could afford the luxury might have brought a cushion for sitting and kneeling. Those of lesser status would occupy only a bench at the very back of the church or along its side walls, or they stood through the entire service. Individuals who could not afford to occupy a pew were generally seated on benches that differed little from the benches lining the walls of a pew. The similarities, however, ended there. The seats for the poor rested directly on the brick floor of the church, were not surrounded by raised wainscot walls, and were located in the least desirable locations of the church—usually THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

195

at the western end, in the aisles, or in the gallery. Typical forms were also quite different from the benches that now occupy the interior of Pompion Hill Chapel. The elaborated profiles of the Pompion Hill benches and their tall, gently sloping backs distinguish these from eighteenth-century seating, which had a vertical back if any back at all. Through the reading of the service, the pews and benches of the church interior were the stage upon which the believer would direct their body through a liturgy that depended heavily upon kneeling. One minister instructed his congregation that those arriving late should “tread softly—nor disturb any who are on their knees or are intent on their devotions.”⁹² During the opening prayers of the service, the congregation found themselves on their knees on the bare floor, on a cushion, or on a prayer board. Ebeneezer Taylor complained in 1718 that someone had stolen “the Board on which I used to kneel, and made me kneel on the bare Bricks.”⁹³ As each individual knelt, he or she acknowledged not only their humility in the presence of Christ, but also their submission to the authority of the church and their minister, its representative. Eighteenth-century sermons were also heard from either pews with vertical backs or backless forms that rarely faced the pulpit. In a time when comfort pointed to material wealth and not physical ease, the physical rigors of the Anglican liturgy gave corporeal expression to spiritual disciplines.⁹⁴ THE MOST SIGNIFICANT of the spiritual disciplines was the Lord’s Supper, also called the Holy Communion and the Eucharist, a sacrament that unfolded in the chancel of the church.⁹⁵ The protruding, rectangular chancel of Pompion Hill Chapel became on the interior a curved niche covered by a half dome (FIG. 5.15). Four fluted pilasters rose from a plain wainscot to carry an entablature and visually frame the venetian chancel window. The fluted pilasters and full entablature surrounding the venetian window on the exterior ornamented the interior as well. The blank spaces between pilasters may well have been intended to hold tall tablets emblazoned with the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, and the Decalogue. Although the curved niche served to house the Communion table, the majority of the chancel was internal to the space of the chapel. An altar rail of turned balusters protruded from the eastern wall but was reduced in size during the nineteenth century. Recent investigations have indicated that the wood of the chancel was stained dark in the eighteenth century and not painted like the rest of the church interior, further highlighting and distinguishing the chancel from the nave. The directives found in the Book of Common Prayer regarding the setting for Holy Communion were fairly simple: “The Table at the Communiontime, having a fair white Linen Cloth upon it, shall stand in the body of the Church, or in the Chancel....And the Priest shall stand at the North Side of the Table...[with] the people kneeling.”⁹⁶ The service began in a manner very similar to morning prayer: with a series of prayers, preparations, and scripture readings, followed by a sermon. After the sermon, the priest was to 196

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.15 Chancel in Pompion Hill Chapel (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Thomas T. Waterman)

“place upon the table so much Bread and Wine as he shall think sufficient,” and those intending to partake in Communion were to be “conveniently placed for the receiving of the Holy Sacrament.” The essential elements for the celebration of Communion, then, were a space for the communicants to gather, a Communion table, and vessels to contain the elements. The Lord’s Supper was a sacrament central to the life of the pious Christian and shrouded in the mysteries of God’s grace. The Thirty-Nine Articles clearly rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—or the mystical transformation of the bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ—but Anglicans similarly rejected the Puritan conception THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

197

of Communion as a purely commemorative sacrament. One the one hand, the Thirty-Nine Articles taught that “the body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner,” a view that refutes transubstantiation. Yet this is followed immediately by the instruction that “the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith,” suggesting that the faithful participation in the sacrament did in some way allow the believer to receive the body of Christ.⁹⁷ In the words of an Anglican devotional manual, it was “the most sublime duty of Christianity, the compendium of religion, the best opportunity for repentance, the highest exercise of faith, and the strongest engagement to our charity.”⁹⁸ Throughout the century, partaking of Holy Communion was not something undertaken lightly. It was offered in most parishes only four times a year: Easter, Whitsunday (Pentecost), one Sunday in the fall (often near September 29, the feast of St. Michael), and Christmas. Communion was important enough to the parish of St. Andrew’s that in a letter to the bishop of London, parishioners accused their rector of “not giving notice of the fasts or Feasts of the Church, not administering the Holy Sacrament on Christmas.”⁹⁹ Another minister was pleased to write, “I had a greater number of Communicants Christmas Day than ever had been here before.”¹⁰⁰ Preparation for Communion began at least a week prior, when the minister delivered a sermon dedicated to the spiritual preparation for the sacrament. Intended communicants would often fast during some portion of the week prior to Communion Sunday. Like the preparation for baptism, the decision to participate in Communion was reviewed by the rector of the parish. Many other Protestants, particularly Presbyterians, used Communion tokens to distinguish those who had prepared and had been approved by the elders to partake. One South Carolina Presbyterian wrote in 1772, for example, that he had met with the minister and after the preparation sermon had “received a token as usual to come to the table.”¹⁰¹ While Anglicans did not use Communion tokens, ministers did often discuss the decision to partake in Communion with individual members of their congregation. For example, the minister in St. John’s, Berkeley, in the 1760s described “an elderly woman who had never communicated before, a new parishioner. I had some previous talk with her, she gave me a satisfactory acct of the nature of the Lord’s sacrament.”¹⁰² In a common Anglican practice, this rector examined the doctrinal knowledge of those who wished to participate in the sacrament to confirm their preparation. The preparation for and gravity of Holy Communion meant that only a small portion of the congregation participated in the sacrament. In 1723 the bishop of London requested ministers in the colonies to report on the spiritual conditions of their churches. Together with a handful of other reports from early in the century, these offer a rare glimpse at the number of Carolina Anglicans who celebrated the sacrament of Communion. In an extraordinary instance, Bryan Hunt of St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish, reported 198

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

that eighty communicants received the sacrament on Easter in 1723.¹⁰³ A few decades earlier, Francis LeJau reported that Communion at St. Philip’s drew only twenty-three from a congregation of approximately 600 adults.¹⁰⁴ Although the proportional relationship between hearers and communicants varied widely, the 1724 report of the Reverend Mr. Le Pierre, minister to the parish of St. Thomas and St. Denis, was the median of recorded instances for South Carolina in the eighteenth century. In a congregation that ranged from fifty to seventy persons, he expected between twelve and twenty communicants.¹⁰⁵ His report of approximately one communicant for every four members of the congregation seems to have been the average for South Carolina reports during the first half of the eighteenth century. If in fact this estimate is close, a 20 percent communicant rate in South Carolina would be significantly higher than the returns in some regions of the English mainland.¹⁰⁶ What seem like small percentages by contemporary standards—when open Communion is standard practice—should not be interpreted as a low view of the sacrament. In one eighteenth-century sermon from South Carolina, the preacher rebuked his congregation from being “strangely fearful” about participating in the sacrament.¹⁰⁷ Most Anglicans assumed participation in Communion required formidable preparation, while some even feared “damnation through unworthy reception.”¹⁰⁸ The significance of the Lord’s Supper was so great that in many instances, potential communicants were deterred from the sacrament by a fear of participating in an unworthy manner.¹⁰⁹ Approaching the chancel for the Lord’s Supper was not undertaken lightly. The documentary record clearly indicates that some percentage of that Communion body was black.¹¹⁰ In 1724 Francis Varnod was pleased to report forty communicants, “17 being Negros.”¹¹¹ Like other early Anglican ministers, Francis LeJau worked hard to prepare slaves for Communion. He encouraged those planters unwilling to allow their slaves to attend church to consider those slaves “admitted to our Holy Communion who behave themselves very well.”¹¹² As Robert Olwell and Jonathan Nelson have suggested independently, there is strong evidence for the successful integration of a small percentage of blacks into Communion of the Anglican Church in the colonial South. Robert Olwell argues that the characterization of the efforts of the Anglican Church to convert and integrate slaves as a dismal failure depends on a “misconception of how the Anglican church actually functioned and a false assumption that mass conversion of the entire slave community was what the church establishment desired.”¹¹³ The presence of blacks at the Communion table had significant implications for the community gathered at or in the chancel. In Communion, participants were to approach the table in humility and in full awareness of their sinful state and their dependence on God’s mercy. Thus, communicants found that they were for a brief season all in the same state, with no distinctions separating one from another.¹¹⁴ The bread and cup was a vehicle of God’s THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

199

mercy shared equally by all participating in the sacrament. The liturgy of the Lord’s Supper and the rich setting of the Communion table, as equally available to slaves as to their owners, meant that for a brief time, whites and blacks were not masters and slaves but redeemed sinners equally beholden to the mercy of God. For many slave owners, the notion of entering into a community in which they and their slaves stood on equal footing was simply inconceivable. In a 1711 letter, Francis LeJau summarized an all-toocommon response of congregants to the practice of communing with slaves: “@‘What!’ said a lady; considerable enough in any respect but in that of sound knowledge; ‘Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to heaven, and must I see them there?’ [And] a young gent had said some time before that he is resolved never to come to the holy table while slaves are received there.”¹¹⁵ For many Anglicans, the fact of equality at Communion was simply more than they could bear. The community achieved at the Lord’s Supper and the cleansed state of the communicants were, however, temporary. After Communion, the enslaved returned to their labor and masters to their houses, and soon after their sacrament, all returned to their state of sin.¹¹⁶ This was for house slaves a meal entirely different from dinner in their master’s house, where they did not share the same table but, in the words of one observer, “surround the table like a cohort of black guards.”¹¹⁷ For a small handful of slaves, Communion was a rare instance in which power relationships central to South Carolina society were fundamentally upset. An event of such gravity required an appropriate setting. Prior to the completion of his congregation’s new church, Thomas Morritt, the rector of Prince George’s Parish, had for some time performed weekly services in a local tavern attended by “much disorder and confusion.” Although he was willing to continue with weekly services in the tavern, Morritt refused to celebrate Communion there: “I cannot think of administering the Sacrament to them in such a place.”¹¹⁸ In the minds of South Carolina’s eighteenth-century Anglicans, the Lord’s Supper was of such consequence that it demanded an orderly, reverent, and appropriately solemn setting. The distinction between the Communion service and the weekly morning prayer service was manifest in the traditional distinction of the chancel from the nave. One of the most common features distinguishing the chancel was a large chancel window. The chancel of the 1723 cruciform addition to St. Andrew’s, for example, was lighted by “a large window, and another on each side of the Communion Table.” By the middle decades of the century, South Carolina’s churches assumed that an expensive tripartite venetian window would light the chancel. Another means of enriching and distinguishing the chancel was through variations of floor coverings. The chancel of the parish church in St. John’s, Berkeley, was “floored with Glaz’d Dutch Tile of Two colours.”¹¹⁹ In St. Michael’s, “the half-dome...was blue, representing the firmament with clouds floating in it. At the peak was a glory, a golden sun with golden beams radiating into the dome.”¹²⁰ Chancels were also often elevated by a few steps above the body of the nave. 200

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

The visual distinction of the Anglican chancel signaled the Lord’s Supper as the central event of Anglican piety. In the early seventeenth century, for example, Foulke Robarts associated the place of the body in the church with the participation in the sacraments and, ultimately, with spiritual condition. As there be several ranks of people professing Church unity, so they have their places in their several distances. Some are unworthy to come within the doors of the church and therefore are to stand without. Some are fit to be received in, to be baptized; some to be instructed in the grounds of religion and to repair with the rest of the congregation. All which is done in the nave and body of the church. And as men profit in knowledge and a working faith, to discern the Lord’s body, they are admitted into a higher room, where the sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus Christ is to be administered at the holy table in the chancel, which divideth it from the rest of the church.¹²¹ It was no mistake that drawn curtains surrounded the lunette window above the altarpiece of St. Philip’s or that the half dome of the chancel of St. Michael’s was painted in emulation of the sky with a gilt glory at its apex. It was the charge of the chancel to convey the drama and the mystery of the Holy Communion. In this space, the believer communed with God. The words of one South Carolina rector summarize the sacrament: “Through this sacrifice we receive perfect remission of sin, which is only pardonable thro’ Him.”¹²² The importance of architecture in preparing the communicant for the gravity of this event is nowhere made more explicit than in the texts that fill the architraves and lintels in the chancel of St. James, Goose Creek. The chancel in the new church in St. James, Goose Creek, was described in 1727 as “decently beautified with paintings and gildings grave and commendable” (FIG. 5.16).¹² These texts participate with the minister to lead the communicant through the critical theology of the Lord’s Supper.¹²⁴ The passages found high on the northern and southern architraves—those texts visible from the pews in the body of the church—assist in the spiritual preparation for Communion. As the communicant is exhorted by the minister to confess his or her sins and to approach the table in humility, the architecture is a reminder of the humility of Christ, who is the believer’s model. The north architrave reads from Acts 8:32: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter and, like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth” (FIG. 5.17). These words remind the communicant of the redemptive theology of the sacrament: Christ—innocent as a lamb—submitted to crucifixion as atonement for the sins of the world. The southern architrave speaks the words of John the Baptist, who in his role as prophet first proclaimed Jesus to be the Christ, the earthly manifestation of God: “Behold ye Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world.” These words remind the communicant that although Anglicans did not embrace transubstantiation, they still believed that Communion was more than simply an act of remembrance; Christ was fully present in the elements of the Lord’s Supper. One sacraTHE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

201

F IGURE 5.16   Chancel of St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

ment sermon explained, “By eating of [the sacrament] we are admitted to the unity, communion and fellowship with God the Father and...we are admitted to communion with the Son and mystically incorporated into Him.”¹²⁵ Redemption and the real presence of Christ were essential points of theology that Anglicans had to affirm so as not to partake in Communion in an unworthy manner. At St. James, the architecture made those points clearly to those preparing for the sacrament. Taken from Matthew 11:28, the text on the lintel of the central window assured the repentant of the benefits of Communion with Christ: the forgiveness of sins and eternal rest in God. It reads, “Come unto me all ye who labour & are heavy laden for I am meek 202

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.17   Detail of text in St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 5.18   Detail of text in St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

and lowly in heart and ye shall find rest unto your souls” (FIG. 5.18). Because of its low position, this text was most easily read once the communicant was kneeling before the table, engaged in the mysteries of the sacrament, communing with Christ.¹²⁶ The majority of Anglican churches in eighteenth-century South Carolina also used a Communion rail to enrich and define the chancel, a practice that appeared after the Restoration but did not become widely embraced until the very end of the seventeenth century.¹²⁷ The most conspicuous example in the colony was that in the city church of St. Philip’s. After the fashion practiced in most of the new city churches in London, St. Philip’s had a very large chancel, defined by a low rail that projected from the eastern wall of the church deep into the body of the nave (see FIGS. 1.4 and 1.5). The depth of St. Philip’s chancel allowed the table to stand out from the wall, probably reflecting its designers’ discomfort with the placement of the table “altarwise,” or against the rear wall, a practice associated with a higher-church, Laudian tradition.¹²⁸ It is probable that in most early instances, “railed in” refers to rails that project from the eastern wall in the manner of St. Philip’s. They might, however, mean a Communion table set out from the eastern wall some distance and surrounded on all four sides by a rail in the manner illustrated in the 1749 plan for St. Paul’s Church in Augusta, Georgia (see FIG. 3.3). An example of this more radical liturgical arrangement survives in the church in Lyddington THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

203

in Leicestershire, England. In this arrangement, the altar rail simply defines the table, not a larger section of the church identified as a chancel. In the case of St. Paul’s, Augusta, and possibly some of the other early churches, communicants gathered at the table for Communion kneeling at the altar rail that tightly constrained it on all four sides. This was not an uncommon Communion arrangement, illustrated in The Communicant’s Guide, published in 1682 (FIG. 5.19).¹²⁹ In this illustration, in fact, the altar table itself remains along the rear wall, and the rail surrounded by the communicants surrounds an open space occupied by the priest. Some of South Carolina’s earliest small rectangular churches might have had a similar arrangement. The first generation of church builders in South Carolina appear to have had a great interest in building churches with chambered chancels projecting from the body of the church in a manner that resembles the older traditions of English parish churches rather than the auditory city churches of Christopher Wren. St. John’s, Colleton, erected between 1734 and 1744 and featuring a square nave and an appended square chancel, is an excellent example. The church of St. George’s in Dorchester, begun in 1719, was fifty feet by thirty feet, “besides the setting out of the chancel 15 foot by five.”¹³⁰ St. Helena’s in Beaufort, begun in 1724, measured forty by thirty feet, with a ten-foot chancel extending beyond.¹³¹ A projecting chancel was an implicit feature of the four cruciform parish churches that all appeared in these decades. In most of these instances, the structurally defined chancel served as a chamber, usually fifteen or more feet wide and at least ten feet in depth.¹³² The spatial distinction of the chancel served to heighten the sense of community at the time of the Lord’s Supper. When the scale of the building program could afford it, South Carolina building programs included structurally distinct chancels that moved the Communion service into its own chamber. The structurally distinct chancel created a space occupied by the communicants for the duration of Communion, which was celebrated in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries after the rest of the congregation had departed the church.¹³³ Anglican communicants gathered together with the minister in the chancel following the offertory for the entirety of the service.¹³⁴ This practice created a temporal break between the prayers that opened the service, when all were seated in their pews, and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, when only the communicants processed into the chancel from the otherwise empty church. Communicants knelt for quite some time at the altar rail during the liturgy of the sacrament, while the minister knelt within. The Communion rail surrounding the table or the chamber chancel functioned to create a community that occupied a space distinct from the body of the church. In churches with projecting chancels, the communicants processed to or into the chancel and knelt around three sides of the Communion rail for the duration of the Communion service. The frontispiece of The Whole Duty of the Communicant, published in 1681, shows a grand version of a chamber chancel with an internal, three-sided Communion rail (FIG. 5.20). Whether 204

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.19   Plate from The Communicant’s Guide (London, 1682) (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

F IGURE 5.2 0   Frontispiece from Whole Duty of Communicant (London, 1681) (Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

in its own chamber as in St. John’s, Colleton, or simply projecting from the eastern wall, the large, U-shaped rail projecting from the eastern wall allowed the communicants to gather on at least three sides of the altar table. In each instance, the architectural distinction between the nave and the chancel served to highlight the spiritual distinction between the communicants and the rest of the congregation. Just as the sacrament of baptism distinguished an infant as a member of the community, so too did the Eucharist create a community by distinguishing between communicants and the rest of the congregation. For those who partook of the Lord’s Supper, the setting of the table matched the grandeur of the chancel. Even though the table was of very good quality—the table in St. Michael’s parish church was a mahogany frame carrying a marble slab—it was not intended to be seen during Communion.¹³⁵ The “fair white linen cloth” specified in the liturgy of the service was generally understood in South Carolina to be only the top covering for the Communion table. Most parishes had both “a Cloath and Linen for the Communion Table.”¹³⁶ As in the case of the “handsome large Damask Table Cloth” in St. Helena’s Parish church, the table cloth was frequently a gift from a parishioner, occasionally as a set with a pulpit cloth and cushion.¹³⁷ The THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

205

F IGURE 5.21   Robert Peake, alms plate for St. Philip’s Church, 1711 (St. Philip’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

F IGURE 5.22  Robert Peake, flagon for St. Philip’s Church, 1711 (St. Philip’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

206

table cloths were usually described as “large,” meaning that they reached to the floor on all four sides. In most instances, the table cloth for Communion was damask, but broad cloth and velvet cloths were not unknown. In only two instances is the color of the table cloth identified; like the preferred color for pulpit cloths, both were crimson.¹³⁸ St. Philip’s Parish Church in Charleston owned the finest set of table linens. A 1738 account includes “Two Large fine Damask Table Cloths” and also “Two pieces Damask Linning containing six yds and a 1//4.” One of the large table cloths was given a year earlier by a parishioner and measured an immense “Four Yards in Length and Three Yards in Width.”¹³⁹ In addition to their table cloths, the parish also owned “One Piece Fine Diaper containing Eight Yards,” which served as the linen.¹⁴⁰ Diaper was a common term for a fine, light, patterned fabric, often white. It is these table coverings that appear on the table in the John Blake White painting of the interior of St. Philip’s (see FIG. 1.26). The presence of the dressed Communion table indicates that the minister in the pulpit is delivering a sermon in preparation for the sacrament of Holy Communion. In what was probably a fairly common practice, diaper or linen lays over the Communion silver during the early portions of the service, hiding it from view. The vessels containing the elements—chalices, flagons, and patens—rest on top of large damask table cloth covered by the eight yards of diaper, which would be removed once the communicants gathered at the chancel for the Communion service. Like many other parish churches, St. Philip’s also had a set of napkins used to cover the consecrated elements.¹⁴¹ It is, of course, no surprise that St. Philip’s would boast the finest set of table linens; it is also no surprise that many of the rural parish churches celebrated Communion for years before they owned appropriate table coverings.¹⁴² But it is important to keep in mind that in these preparations, Anglicans in South Carolina were not quite as fervent about the pageantry of Communion as were many of their counterparts across the Atlantic. The English practice of decorating the church for Christmas, for example, only appears in the South Carolina records by the opening years of the nineteenth century.¹⁴³ The Communion plate beautifully ornamented the dressed table. In July 1710 Rev. Gideon Johnston, the rector of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, wrote to the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel concerning a recent gift of £30 to his church. Colonel and Madame Rhett offered the funds in order to provide the church with “a handsome set of Church Plate of the neatest fashion, as far as that sum will go.”¹⁴⁴ The minister then turned to his London superior to “get the Plate made after what fashion you think.”¹⁴⁵ The secretary enlisted London silversmith Robert Peake to craft the set. Each of the solid silver pieces bears the inscription, “The Gift of Coll. Wm. Rhett to ye Church of St. Philip, Charles Town, South Carolina.” The resulting set—alms plate, flagon, and chalice and paten—represents some of the best early English silver in South Carolina. The alms basin was circulated through the congregation to gather a collection for the poor of the parish BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

(FIG. 5.21). The flagons were used to hold a larger quantity of wine than could be contained by a single chalice (FIG. 5.22). In instances when the wine was diluted, a second flagon held water. The chalice and paten were used to distribute the consecrated elements (FIGS. 5.23 and 5.24). The sets of Communion silver in Anglican South Carolina differed significantly from those in Congregational New England, where variations in forms and materials within a single service reinforced social and political hierarchies during the feast.¹⁴⁶ This employ of forms or materials to distinguish between social or racial hierarchies is not evident in eighteenth-century South Carolina. As ritual objects, Communion silver pieces assisted Anglicans in realizing this most significant of sacred events. The first Communion vessel that would have appeared in the service was the alms basin, a large plate circulated during the offertory. The alms plate would have encouraged the communicant to give financially to the needy, just as Christ gave of himself sacrificially for the church. The collection of alms from the congregation to be given to the poor of the parish was the first act of Communion, signaling the sacrament as not only “the highest exercise of faith,” but also “the strongest engagement to our charity.” Almost always included in sets of Communion silver, the alms plate represented Christ’s charge to the church to feed the hungry and defend the poor. The surviving churchwarden’s account book demonstrates that the vestry of St. Philip’s, the largest city parish, was regularly involved in meeting the material needs of the poor of that parish.¹⁴⁷ The same was true of rural parishes. For example, Prince Frederick’s in 1744 helped to defray the expenses of parishioner John Onion and his wife as they struggled through a time of great sickness.¹⁴⁸ The parish of St. Thomas and St. Denis supported for some years “eight poor children who are furnished with clothes and boarding.”¹⁴⁹ As preparation for Communion, the alms plate served to remind the congregation of the self-sacrifice central to the life of the Christian, an echoing of the ultimate act of self-sacrifice made by Christ. The extraordinary quality of South Carolina’s surviving chalices reinforces the importance of their role in the spiritual life of communicants, those few who chose to “taste and see that the Lord is Good.”¹⁵⁰ In a common practice in South Carolina, the vestries of St. Paul’s and St. Thomas’s parishes ordered chalices—and only chalices—near the completion of their churches in the opening years of the eighteenth century (see FIG. 5.4).¹⁵¹ Just prior to Easter 1717, the vestry of Christ Church Parish made note of their only piece of Communion plate, a silver, Boston-made chalice (FIG. 2.62).¹⁵² Almost thirty years later, the vestry recorded that their only piece of Communion silver was still that single silver chalice.¹⁵³ The significance of the chalice was made perfectly clear by the vestry of St. Stephen’s when they paid over £43 for an English-made chalice and only £25 each for their two alms plates, objects that actually required more silver to manufacture.¹⁵⁴ In eighteenth-century Anglicanism, the chalice most frequently took the form of a standing cup and the paten a small, plain plate. Derived from the smaller Roman Catholic chalice, the larger bowl of the Anglican standing cup had long been associated THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

F IGURE 5.23 Robert Peake, chalice for St. Philip’s Church, 1711 (St. Philip’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

F IGURE 5.24 Robert Peake, paten for St. Philip’s Church, 1711 (St. Philip’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

207

with the Protestant commitment to opening full Communion to the laity by serving the elements to all prepared to partake in the sacrament.¹⁵⁵ Reflecting their shared function, the inverted paten was often intended as a lid to the chalice. As the single object mentioned in the scriptural passages describing the Last Supper, the chalice was the most important piece of Communion plate, which meant it was often the first piece obtained by the parish. After the minister broke the bread, he raised the cup and repeated the prayer of consecration. The minister then offered the chalice to each of the communicants, who, taking the cup “into their hands,” partook of its contents. Through sight, touch, and taste, the chalice participated in the transformation of the soul. As communicated by the Book of Common Prayer, the Holy Communion was “received in remembrance of [Christ’s] meritorious cross and passion, whereby alone we obtain remission of sins, and are made partakers of the kingdom of heaven.”¹⁵⁶ In his book of private devotions, Edward Brailsford would confess to God that before he approached the table for Communion, he was fully aware of his need for repentance. His prayer confessed that he was “freely willing to part with these [sins] forever, and to part even with those Darling Lusts that have heretofore been as dear to me as my right eye.”¹⁵⁷ The words of the Eucharistic prayer set the stage for the event: “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed though his most precious blood: and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us. Amen.” For the minority of Anglicans who participated, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was central to the regeneration of the believer; through this most mysterious of sacraments, the believer experienced forgiveness. In a very real way, it was the chalice that made possible forgiveness and sanctification. Although the chalice reminded the communicants most directly of Christ’s words in the upper room, as a physical object rooted in historical time, it manifested memory on other levels as well. Reaching beyond the Last Supper, the chalice reminded the communicant of another manifestation of the body of Christ: the church. Holy Communion was not just a sacrament with Christ but with each other as well. This was made evident in the fact that all communicants shared a common cup. Set apart from others (and even other Anglicans) as a community, surrounding the table in the chancel, the communicants shared the chalice. The extraordinary frequency with which residents of the eighteenth century drank from common vessels meant that they understood more easily than we the community constructed by such vessels.¹⁵⁸ The inscription of the parish name on the chalice reinforced this collective identity. As a result, the chalice became the visual focus of Communion as the single object offered by the church and shared by all communicants. But “the church” was not limited to just the Church Militant, those temporally present; it extended to include the Church Triumphant as well.¹⁵⁹ In the midst of Communion, in fact, the Book of Common Prayer offers a prayer 208

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

for the church in both manifestations. Prior to the consumption of the elements, the communicants implore God “to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord.” During the same prayer a few moments later, they pray also for the Church Triumphant: “for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace, so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly Kingdom.” As Robert Smith explained in one sacrament sermon, “By this communion here upon Earth, the Church militant is united with the triumphing Saints in Glory.”¹⁶⁰ Smith understood the materiality of the sacrament to facilitate communion between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. In a different sermon, he used church buildings to construct a consciousness between the present and the past. “Buildings,” argued Smith, “are lasting monuments.” They remind the living “how warm was the zeal to promote the honour of God” among past generations. They had built churches, “Excited by [God’s] commands, exhortations and many examples that followed them.” Smith commends his audience that these same buildings, now artifacts of past generations, remind the present age that “no less are we obliged” to persist in the forms of prayers and thanksgivings “they excellently compiled at first.”¹⁶¹ For Anglicans, material culture—buildings, Communion silver, and, as the next chapter will demonstrate, grave markers— was a conduit of sacred memory. In some instances the memory of the Church Triumphant took on a distinctive specificity. In 1742 the vestry minutes of St. John’s, Berkeley, noted in their minutes the receipt of “a silver Cup Gilt with a case belonging to it” (FIG. 5.25). They recorded that this cup was an important reminder of a significant event in the history of Protestantism: “This cup was brought to this country by the Dr. Rev. Lessou formerly Minister of the French congregation in this Province and the said cup was formerly used by the Protestants in France before the Persecution.”¹⁶² This beaker—a form otherwise alien to Anglicanism in the colony—reminded South Carolina’s Anglican communicants of a specific place and moment in history, France during the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But by evoking a different time and place, the distinctive form and history of this beaker reminded communicants of a moment in the past and their own place in the grand narrative of the Church Militant, working in time but governed and directed by an eternal God.¹⁶³ This cup breached ethnic and denominational barriers to evoke the virtues and perseverance of Christians persecuted for their faith.¹⁶⁴ At this sacrament, the faithful entered into sacred time and joined in Communion not just with God, but with all Christians, past and future.¹⁶⁵ Very few of the early eighteenth-century chalices purchased by parishes as their first Communion vessel were replaced or refashioned to more current taste through the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The preservation of these early forms suggests that they functioned in comparable if less articulate ways to the French chalice. As later generations of Anglicans came to appreciate newer fashions in silver, and as they abandoned the silver THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

F IGURE 5.25   French silver beaker, St. John’s, Berkeley County, late seventeenth century (St. John’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

209

F IGURE 5.2 6   Set of king’s silver, St. Philip’s Church (St. Philip’s vestry; photo by Keith Leonard)

standing cup for domestic use, these early eighteenth-century chalices came to evoke a conscious antiquity. Sacred artifacts that remain in continuous use inevitably become burdened with the responsibility of bridging time between generations of believers, joining together the Church Militant with the Church Triumphant. Just as the French chalice reminded communicants of the faith of past generations of Protestants, so too the aged forms of these chalices evoked earlier generations to mid- and late eighteenth-century Anglicans. This important connection with the past was even inscribed explicitly on the outside of many chalices. The chalice that opened this chapter, for example, reads: “Belonging to St. Thomas Parish in South Carolina Anno Dom: 1711.” The most overt function of this engraving was, of course, for the identification and protection of this valuable object. But over time, the chalice reminded the Church Militant of their relationship to each other and to the Church Triumphant. Chalices inscribed with the name of the parish certainly put the communicant in mind of their role both as an individual and as a parish in God’s “universal Church.”¹⁶⁶ In some instances these engraved chalices were part of a much larger set intended to demonstrate the dependence of the Church of England on the English government, and on the king, the ultimate head of the church. As one might expect, the two city parishes have sets that demonstrate this most explicitly. The Rhett silver at St. Philip’s would just a few decades later be supplemented with another full set of altar plate—two flagons, chalice and paten, and an alms basin—presented to the church by George II (FIG. 5.26). In 1762 colonial governor Thomas Boone furnished St. Michael’s with a complete set of London-made Communion silver—two large tankards, a chalice and paten, and a large alms plate—all engraved, “The Gift of his Excellency Thomas Boone, Esqr. Governour of this Province to the Church of St. Michael Charles Town So. Carolina 1762.” 210

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.27   George Roupell, Peter Manigault and His Friends at Goose Creek, ca. 1760 (Winterthur Museum purchase)

This practice was not limited to official representatives of government. As Dell Upton has demonstrated, the local elite also gifted church silver to demonstrate the dependence of the local church on their benevolence, a reflection of their importance within that local community. “In return for their gifts [of communion plate],” Upton tells us, “the gentry expected not only recognition, but the kind of treatment they received at other gentlemen’s houses.”¹⁶⁷ More generally, Robert St. George explains that gifting functioned as “calculated acts of largesse.”¹⁶⁸ Understood in this way, the gifting of silver corresponded directly to social status, remembered through domestic rituals of dining and drinking. But while the gifting of Communion silver might seem an explicit act of self-aggrandizement, the importance of Communion plate as signifiers of local authority can be overstated.¹⁶⁹ In a drawing of gentlemen conversing in late eighteenth-century South Carolina, for example, a man seated at the end of the table offers a cup to one seated along the side in a moment strikingly reminiscent of Communion, where the minister offers the cup to the communicant (FIG. 5.27). Identical sets of chairs and cups signal a common status among those present—excepting the slave standing asleep—much like the shared status among those partaking Communion. At both tables— THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

211

dining and Communion—material culture reinforced the exclusivity of the gathered. In some instances, the donor of Communion vessels did not even choose the form of the object, and in many cases it was the vestry who drafted and paid for the inscription.¹⁷⁰ In his 1726 will, for example, Ralph Izard bequeathed £10 “to buy a convenient piece of plate for the use of the Congregation at Goose Creek for ever when they celebrate the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.”¹⁷¹ Izard left it to his executors to select and commission the object and to the vestry to decide if it was to be inscribed in his memory. Furthermore, the social power of these objects was circumscribed by the fact that they appeared in most instances only four times a year, and when they did, they sat at such a distance that inscriptions were largely illegible. In those parishes with a full complement of tablecloths, the linen often covered the silver before the offertory and small napkins covered each piece after the delivery of the elements. As a result, the only individuals with the opportunity for close inspection of the Communion plate were the communicants, the small proportion of those present who actually approached the table for Communion. The vestry may have intended inscriptions on Communion silver to evoke the selflessness essential to a healthy community by reminding communicants of the donor’s benevolence, a virtue practiced in the giving of alms, which immediately preceded and prefigured the sacrament (FIG. 5.23). In a culture long on memory, a person’s public character—their piety, charity, and benevolence—may have long outlived them and become associated with certain objects in the parish bearing the mark of their lives. For example, the vestry of St. Philip’s commissioned a silver plate as a gift for their former rector, Alexander Garden, “as a testimony of their true respect and cordial affections they bear him for his exemplary life and constant labours in the cause of virtue and religion.”¹⁷² They said this explicitly in the inscription engraved on the plate, but also in selecting the form. The large silver plate was not dissimilar from an alms basin, the visual form that most directly evoked the sacrificial giving required of the Christian life. Following an ancient practice within English Protestantism of gifting silver to commemorate notable acts of service or experiences in Christian fellowship, this plate became for the congregation an explicit reminder of the life and work of a beloved minister.¹⁷³ Dominated by objects that bridged the past and the present, mortal and eternal, the visual impact of the set table must have been striking. Anglicans knew the power of the eye to distract, and so the Communion table remained veiled during the prayers and sermon that preceded the sacrament. After some time of preparation and anticipation, the bright silver plate, rich crimson damask cloths covered in light and intricately woven diaper, must have overwhelmed the senses in ways captured by a plate from A Persuasive to Frequent Communion or other treatises on the significance of Holy Communion in the life of the Anglican (FIG. 5.28). Separated from the rest of the congregation, the communicant had been invited to enter into the 212

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 5.2 8 Cover plate from A Persuasive to Frequent Communion (Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

immediate presence of the Godhead. Kneeling at the rail of St. James, Goose Creek, the communicant saw the words of God inviting them to lay their burden on him and rest. Anglican Alexander Keith understood God’s presence in Communion in immediate, tangible terms: “Thy Chair and Seat is at thy table.”¹⁷⁴ God was present at the table, and it was only by the sacrifice signified by the Communion silver and their contents that such a fleeting intercourse between the mortal and the divine was made possible. Captured in the titles of devotional manuals such as The Divine Banquet (1700), the most explicit metaphor of the meal pointed not to the dining table of the elite but to the wedding feast of the risen Christ and his bride, the church. At Communion, the Church Militant would for a moment taste the eternal feast of the Church Triumphant. One South Carolina minister described what the Anglican would find at the Eucharist: A Table more richly furnished, than all your former life of luxury and intemperance ever partook of ! Here, you shall taste how sweet and gracious the Lord is! And be possessed at once of all things that can make you happy: of joy, of peace, fulness & security; for this is the Table that he has prepared against them that would trouble us, says holy David; I.e. against the Devil & his agents. Here, as the wise Man tells us, eat your bread with joy & drink your wine with a good heart; for your filthy raggs shall be changed into a wedding garment, & your souls shall be joyful in your God, who hath cloathed you with the garment of salvation.¹⁷⁵ Through this feast, Keith proclaimed, the Christian could partake of those gifts of the soul that no money could buy: joy, peace, fullness, and security. By this feast, the forces of evil were defeated. And at this feast, the resurrected Christ joined his bride, the church, and the filthy rags of the Church Militant were transformed into the wedding clothes of the Church Triumphant. THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

213

IN ANGLICAN THEOLOGY, sanctification of the church body—both corporate and individual—took place both through the preaching of the Word and the participation in the sacraments of baptism and Communion. In each, the free gift of God’s grace was dispensed to his people, transforming them into a greater likeness of Himself. The continuity of forms between the font, the pulpit, and the chalice—all vessels raised on a pedestal or stem— suggests that these objects shared the common function of dispensing God’s grace to his people. The baptismal basin contained the water that signified entrance into the Church Militant. The raised case of the pulpit contained the preacher, whose words convicted the sinner and sanctified the faithful. The beauty of its craftsmanship manifested the grandeur of God’s word. The descending dove over both pulpit and font represented the active presence of the Holy Ghost. The standing cup of the chalice contained the blood of Christ, which washed the sinner clean and most explicitly foreshadowed the eternal feast, the final communion of the bride and the Son of God. Each visualized the promise that by commitment to the service and sacraments of the Church Militant, they might shed their natural state of sin and achieve the regularity and beauty that characterized the Church Triumphant. The material culture of Anglicanism was designed to contain and convey the immaterial grace of God. But the ritual practice of South Carolina’s Anglicans changed over the course of the eighteenth century, and Anglicans used their material environment to mediate their changing ideas about the place of the body—both the corporate and the corporeal—in Anglican life. By the middle and later eighteenth century, the practice of home devotions in South Carolina seems to have waned. In 1773 Joseph Pilmore was told that even among the more pietistic Presbyterians, “family prayer was very uncommon in Charles Town.”¹⁷⁶ Reflecting concern for the demise of this spiritual discipline, Benjamin Smith drafted a sermon in 1767 challenging Anglicans to preserve home and family worship. He delivered the sermon in St. Philip’s on numerous occasions over the next thirty years.¹⁷⁷ There are also no references in the documentary record of home worship among Anglicans in South Carolina later in the century. Also by the middle decades of the century, small and middle-sized private libraries began to show greater diversity of subjects than those of the early century, which were occupied largely by religious material.¹⁷⁸ The piety of family-focused home worship waned as the century unfolded. This pattern is mirrored by changes in baptismal practices. As the century progressed, private baptisms became less frequent as the ceremony moved from the home to the church. It was not until 1756, for example, that the vestry of St. Philip’s finally ordered a “painted copper basin of eight quarts”— probably painted enamel—for the use in the baptismal sacrament.¹⁷⁹ Prior to that date, they had no vessel dedicated to the celebration of baptism. Such material changes are echoed in the documentary record. The memorandum book of the Reverend Dr. Jenkins, rector of St. Michael’s, records that in 1781 and 1782 he celebrated sixty-four baptisms. Significantly, only sixteen 214

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

of these were private.¹⁸⁰ But even as church baptisms became more popular, the legacy of the eighteenth-century private baptism domesticated these public celebrations. Writing in 1866, the Reverend Trapier, a former rector of St. Michael’s, informed his readers that by the early nineteenth century, “Baptism was always administered at the Chancel from a silver bowl placed on the Communion Table, while an antique font of large dimensions, coeval with the Church and dating back a hundred years, had been at the main door of the Church, unused for generations.”¹⁸¹ St. Michael’s and many other congregations adopted the silver christening basin, with its origins in home baptisms, as the preferred mode for public baptism.¹⁸² While surely this reflects the greater convenience and comfort of celebrating the baptism from the chancel of the church, it is important to note that congregations did not simply move their older font to the more convenient location; they preferred the silver bowl, with its domestic connotations, over the institutional associations of the marble font. The regular practice of home baptisms during the early eighteenth century suggests that Anglicans understood the household to be an extension—a local manifestation—of the parish church community. As the century progressed, however, greater numbers of individuals owned pews in both Anglican churches and dissenting meetinghouses, eroding the denominational identities of families.¹⁸³ Furthermore, references to Communion in the later decades of the century suggest a decline in the participation in the sacrament. In 1766, for example, Charles Woodmason complained that “there are but a few Communicants, in any congregation.”¹⁸⁴ Evidenced in changes in home devotion, baptismal practice, and the increasingly complex religious identities of families, Anglican devotional life seems to have migrated more completely to the space of the church over the course of the century. One of the central reasons for these changes was a slow erosion of the corporate theologies so central to the early Anglican Church by the rising importance of the individual over the corporate. The decline in family devotions is only one gauge of the decline in corporate theology over the course of the eighteenth century. As the eighteenth century progressed, Anglican popular theology and practice reflected a greater awareness of the significance of the self, a philosophical theme explored in depth by Enlightenment authors, embraced by Anglican theologians, and complicated by the flames of the midcentury revivalism that swept the colonies. In many ways, the personal emotionalism that fueled the so-called Great Awakening was founded on the significance of the individual rooted in Enlightenment thought. While embracing the latter, Anglicans defined themselves against the former. But in doing so, the theology of the Church Incarnate, so central to the sacraments, faded as the authority of the self and new ways of knowing the world remade popular Anglicanism. The next chapter focuses more carefully on the new functions of Anglican architecture and material culture imposed by changes in belief and practice introduced in the eighteenth century—changes that would transform Anglicanism in profound ways. THE S ACRAMEN TAL BODY

215

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6 T H E BE AU T Y OF HOLI N E SS

A large venetian window illumines the shallow semicircular and arched chancel of Charleston’s St. Michael’s Church (1752–61) (FIG. 6.1). While the decorative stenciling, Tiffany window, and other ornamental work dates from the early twentieth century, the form of the chancel and its elegant wrought-iron rail survive intact from the colonial period. A genteel, freestanding pulpit rises before the chancel, elevating both the minister and his sermon. A panel-fronted gallery supported by fluted Ionic columns stands on three sides of the chamber and elevates an organ to the west, opposite the eastern chancel and pulpit (FIG. 6.2). Scores of boxed pews fill the floor of the church, while a tray ceiling—a broad flat plane with deep coves on all sides—soars high above. From the elegance of its pulpit to the full resonance of its organ and the bold Greek fret of its tray ceiling, St. Michael’s was an exemplar of grace and beauty in the colony. St. Michael’s was also a harbinger of change. The cherubs ornamenting the interiors of earlier churches disappear from the sanctuary of St. Michael’s and all later churches as explicit representations of the supernatural fell out of favor among later Anglicans. At the apex of the genteel pulpit, a pineapple replaced the traditional dove, shifting the symbolically loaded finial from a representation of the third person of the Trinity to an icon of Charleston hospitality.¹ “Pineapples which are in great perfection and abundance from the West Indes,” one eighteenth-century visitor noted, “are the common desert of this season; whenever I dine out they appear on the table.”² St. Michael’s was also the first church in the province to reject the barrel vault in favor of the more fashionable tray ceiling. The barrel vault’s sacred geometries, which had so powerfully animated early eighteenth-century church interiors, waned over the course of the century. The vast majority of the colony’s churches erected after St. Michael’s installed a tray ceiling instead of the older barrel vault.³ St. Michael’s Church is rightfully described as the epitome of Georgian architecture in South Carolina, and it is in this context that the building is often described. Making clear visual reference to London’s St. Martin-in-theFields, St. Michael’s is frequently enlisted to articulate the derivative nature of elite British architecture in the American colonial context. By extension, its meaning is rooted in the politics of emulation—colonials seeking social

F IGURE 6.1 Interior of St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, 1752–61 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

and political affirmation by reproducing, however poorly or successfully, the models found in the cosmopolitan center.⁴ And there is no question that these readings are accurate; they are just incomplete. By placing St. Michael’s in its rightful context as a place of worship, the building becomes something far greater than simply an icon of American architectural history. The architectural changes at St. Michael’s gave material expression to the monumental transformations in eighteenth-century Anglican belief and practice. Over the course of the century, common sense philosophy tempered belief in supernatural activity, while the presence of God in everyday Anglican life became less immediate, less palpable.⁵ Together with witches and demons, angels dropped from the lexicon of “reasonable” faith. Popular Anglicanism also became a faith more interested in the moral virtues that guided the 218

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 6.2 Interior of St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, 1752–61; the current organ dates from 1910 but includes the case and a few pipes from the organ installed in 1767 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Louis I. Schwartz, 1963)

Christian; supernatural activity, heaven, and hell were not often addressed.⁶ Waning belief in supernatural activity among Anglicans corresponded to their rising interest in scientific empiricism. Anglicans became increasingly familiar with the scientific examination of the heavens, undermining the traditional efficacy of the ceiling-sphere-heaven sign integral to the barrelvaulted ceiling. As a result, Anglicans adhered less firmly to their earlier practices of signifying the heavens in the space of the church. Anglicans of the midcentury saw things quite differently from their predecessors. St. Michael’s was not without its own material theologies. Engaging an ancient philosophical tradition, later Anglicans understood earthly beauty to be a shadow of its divine original. Born in the Godhead, beauty had the capacity to reveal the divine and reform the soul. Such Neoplatonic THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

219

philosophies were part and parcel of the theological moderation—named Latitudinarianism by contemporaries—birthed by the Cambridge Platonists. By midcentury, Latitudinarianism held broad sway over popular Anglican belief.⁷ Reflecting a deep concern for the power of aesthetics, this new tradition had implications not only for Anglican architecture but also for musical performance and ritual practice.⁸ While Anglican sermons declared the beauty of holiness, the spaces in which they were delivered belied the holiness of beauty. Over the course of the century, parish music became significantly more complex as the congregation began to sing in parts accompanied by an organ. As a result of these shifting theologies, divine worship became more performative, even theatrical. By midcentury, noncommunicants remained in the church to witness the beauty of the Holy Communion, consuming it visually and aurally if not literally. The aesthetics of the Anglican church became both an agent of and evidence of the sacred in the lives of the congregation. Beauty was a Christian virtue, especially in a world so clearly ravaged by the deformity of sin. IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY South Carolina, barrel-vaulted ceilings reflected the continuing popularity of Ptolomaic mapping of the cosmos, where heavenly bodies and their orbits were contained in concentric spheres surrounding the earth. The empiricism central to the work of René Decartes and other early seventeenth-century scientific thinkers had not yet trumped traditional ways of knowing.⁹ But by the end of the century, the Cartesian had replaced the Ptolomaic. Much of this change on the popular level related to the public dissemination of scientific empiricism.¹⁰ Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Newtonian view of the universe, where the earth was understood to be just one of many independent objects suspended in the vastness of space, was coming into popular currency. Into the middle of the eighteenth century, heaven was described as an “azure transparent orb.” That phrase, however, was dropped in science dictionaries printed after the 1750s. One 1759 edition describes heaven as “the expanse of the firmament, surrounding our earth, and extending every way to an immense distance.”¹¹ Fluency in the language of scientific empiricism would abound as the century unfolded. As early as 1739, one Mr. Anderson advertised in South Carolina that he was available to deliver philosophical lectures explaining “the Doctrines of the Globes, and Science of Geography.”¹² By 1772 Robert Wells had available for sale in South Carolina maps of “THE HEAVENS and EARTH faithfully enumerated and delineated according to the latest Observations” (emphasis mine).¹³ Whereas early eighteenth-century Anglicans understood the barrel vault to accurately represent the heavens, their later more empirically minded counterparts vested less confidence in symbolic representation. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the work of Descartes, Copernicus, and Galileo slowly found their way into popular currency.¹⁴ By extension, it was in the eighteenth-century that anthropocentrism came to dominate the popular view of the universe in Protestant thought. As a result 220

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

of these changes, the sphere-heaven sign so important to the visual formation of early eighteenth-century Anglicanism lost its cultural currency. The empirical charting of the cosmos and the earth and the adoption of rational analogies between analytic geometry and knowable space shattered the traditional mapping of heaven and earth, unhinging the visual signification of the cope of heaven in the barrel-vaulted ceiling.¹⁵ Contingent with this new empiricism was a waning belief in hell and the relegation of supernatural activity to superstition. As the century progressed, Anglican ministers expressed greater concern that their laity no longer believed in Hell. Levi Durand would write as early as 1743 that many in his parish believe “that there is no such thing as eternal Damnation.”¹⁶ Robert Smith some years later preached a sermon against those who “in speculation have imagined that only the good and just shall rise.”¹⁷ By the 1790s the vestry of St. Philip’s Church voted to strike the phrase “descended into Hell” from the Apostle’s Creed.¹⁸ Such actions would hardly have been conceivable only a generation before. Whereas cherubs ornament both the interiors and exteriors of early eighteenth-century Anglican churches, cherubs “cut on the keystone on the upper order of the steeple” of St. Michael’s—both physically and visually distant—are the last employ of that symbol in South Carolina Anglican churches.¹⁹ This diminution of supernatural beings appears in both architecture and theology. As references to angels and demons surfaced less frequently in Anglican sermons by the late eighteenth century, the grip of the palpable supernatural on the popular imagination slowly waned.²⁰ Lingering supernaturalism became a clear and present danger in 1741. In that year, the wealthy white Anglican Hugh Bryan, a disciple of George Whitefield, was visited by an “Angel of Light” and began to prophesy that God would deliver the slaves through another uprising.²¹ Soon thereafter, Bryan “came to working miracles and lived for several days in the woods barefooted and alone and with his pen and Ink to write down his prophecies.”²² By 1742 Byran had been forced by the legislature to retract his prophecies. “I hope he will be a warning to all pious minds,” Eliza Pinckney would write, “not to reject reason and revelation and set up in their stead their own wild notions.”²³ For Anglicans in South Carolina, Bryan’s belief in divine communication and an “Angel of Light” had to be nothing more than mental delusion. The cherubs guarding the windows of the colony’s earliest churches were replaced by loaded weapons brought to church on Sunday, the one day of rest given to slaves.²⁴ Suspicion of supernatural activity is evident also in the decreasing imminence of God in the space of the church. In the early eighteenth century, Alexander Keith knew that God’s “special Presence and Face is in thy Temple.”²⁵ God’s presence was imminent, even palpable, in the space of the church. The church was a liminal space of overlapping spheres where mortal and divine commune, a space simultaneously shared by earth and heaven. Conversely, Pinckney, writing in 1759, hoped that her prayers “are pious enough to reach heaven,” emphasizing the great distance between the temporal and the eternal THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

221

in her spiritual mapping of the cosmos. In a gradual process that took the whole of the century to realize, the early eighteenth-century commitment to the invisible supernatural and the immediacy of God in the space of the church was a casualty of eighteenth-century empiricism. But even in this context, the religious significance of Anglican architecture did not diminish. As they loosed their grip on the supernatural, Anglicans invested their buildings with visual qualities that now had the power to reshape the soul. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLICANS in South Carolina used very specific words to describe church buildings that met with their approval. St. Philip’s Church, for example, was often described as a work of “regularity, beauty, and stability.”²⁶ Commissary Bull described the rural parish church in St. James, Goose Creek, as “neat and regular.”²⁷ In South Carolina and throughout the British Empire, eighteenth-century Anglicans consistently described church buildings as “regular.”²⁸ Regularity was not a natural state in the eighteenth century; it implied a consistency of form or action that was the result of submission to a rule superior to natural inclinations. In the eighteenth century, the word “regular” still retained connotations derived from ancient association with monastic orders; a regular was a person “subject to, or bound by, a religious rule.”²⁹ Shades of this definition are apparent in the request by the vestry of St. Helena’s Parish for a minister with “a studious turn and regular deportment.”³⁰ The congregation assumed that the minister’s regular deportment would be the result of his commitment to religious rule. But regularity as a religious virtue was not limited to the clergy; in 1763, for example, Levi Durand was pleased with his “very regular congregation.”³¹ In a similar vein, the Reverend Morritt wrote of the “constant communicants” in his congregation.³² Probably referring to the orphan children supported by the parish of St. Philip’s, the vestry noted in 1756 that “a proper person is wanted to keep the children in order in time of divine service.”³³ Regularity was not yet part of their character. Conversely, Pinckney, whose own life was praised as “regular, placid, and uniform,” wrote in one letter that she sought to “follow the scripture rule.”³⁴ Regulating the passions played a critical role in governing the “moral sense.” Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of faculty psychology taught that personal actions were hierarchically organized according to “faculties.”³⁵ Mechanical responses, over which there was no conscious control, comprised the lowest of actions. Emotional impulses—the passions—were described as animal powers and associated with the natural, the flesh. Moral virtues were associated with the highest faculties, whose origins were located in the divine. Rational religious thought—that most closely associated with the divine nature—reined over the passions. Pinckney demonstrated her knowledge of faculty psychology when she admonished her younger brother to “keep the sacred page always in view” and to “remember that the greatest conquest is over your own irregular passions.”³⁶ In his diatribe against Whitefield’s preaching in Charleston, Alexander Garden complained that 222

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

“the ears and Passions, not the understandings, of the Lower sort, Specially Dissenters, were taken.”³⁷ Conversely, when cultivated, the moral sense could produce the virtues that defined one as a “Christian.” Pinckney would write to her brother that “religion and Virtue” are so closely connected, “that so far as we deviate from one we lose the other.”³⁸ To the eighteenth-century ear, Levi Durand’s “regular congregation” had subjected themselves to the rule of the church and had cultivated a refined moral sense manifest in Christian virtues. Since its reconstitution in the seventeenth century, the Anglican liturgy had been understood as a regimen designed to instill regularity.³⁹ Bishop Beveridge, a late seventeenth-century Anglican divine, summarized its efficacy: Whatsoever good things we hear only once, or now and then, though perhaps upon hearing them, they may swim for a while in our brains, yet seldom do they sink down to our hearts, so as to move and sway the affections, as it is necessary they should do in order to our being edified by them; whereas by a set form of public devotions rightly composed, we are continually put in mind of all things necessary for us to know or do, so that it is always done by the same words and expressions, which by their constant use, will imprint the things themselves so firmly...[that] they will still occur upon all occasions, which cannot but be very much for our Christian edification.⁴⁰ Beveridge’s concern was for a consistency that lingered not in the mind but burrowed deeper into the person’s affections, edifying or reshaping the moral sense. Many defenders of the liturgy believed that repetition of holy words and reverential gestures inculcated virtue in ordinary believers.⁴¹ The power of a regular liturgy to edify the soul was understood by South Carolina’s Robert Smith when he argued that God was best worshipped “when men have a good form of sound words, and a decent orderly way of addressing themselves to Almighty God; where the worship is grave, solemn, and intelligible.” Charles Woodmason described the Anglican sacraments as “perform’d with great Decency & Order.”⁴² The sound, orderly, or regular form of words was central to faithful worship. Smith defended these qualities in worship by asserting that only then might people “reasonably conclude that God [who shares these qualities] is with them.”⁴³ If seventeenth-century Anglicans believed that the liturgy, constant and regular, would transform the moral sense, their eighteenth-century counterparts vested architecture with the same agency. The relationship between regularity and moral formation, evidenced in the repetitive nature of the liturgy, depended on broader assumptions about the power of mathematics to order and regulate. The liturgy integrated the religious and moral implications of regularity with a second meaning of the same word that depended on proportion, repetition, or modes of measure; “ratio” and “rational” have the same epistemology.⁴⁴ Writing in 1633, THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

223

for example, Francis Bacon argued that the regularity of mathematics had the capacity to “fixe” the “wandering” mind.⁴⁵ The seventeenth-century philosophical discourses of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury—incidentally, the most prominent of South Carolina’s founding Lords Proprietors—probably best articulated the place of regularity in the moral sense: “The Case is the same in the mental or moral subject....[T]here necessarily results a Beauty or Deformity, according to the different Measure, Arrangement, and Disposition of their several parts. So in Behaviour, and Action, when presented to our Understanding, there must be found, of necessity, an apparent Difference, according to the Regularity or Irregularity of the Subjects.”⁴⁶ The mathematical nature of regularity meant that its ability to refine the moral sense was applied broadly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English architecture. English architectural theorists had articulated the spiritual power of architecture since at least the early seventeenth century. In The Elements of Architecture (1624), Sir Henry Wooten described the Church of Santa Giustina in Padua: “In truth a sound piece of good Art, where the Materials being but ordinarie stone, without any garnishment of sculpture, doe yet ravish the Beholder (and hee knows not how) by a secret Harmony in the Proportion.”⁴⁷ The significance of mathematical harmony in churches is immediately apparent in Wooten’s description. The beholder is awed in an interior devoid of sculpture or any overt symbols of divine or supernatural presence. Wooten’s theories about the power of proportion were not original, of course, but deeply rooted in Renaissance architectural theory. The writings of Andrea Palladio, a sixteenth-century Italian architect, were critical for disseminating Renaissance notions of proportion in the English colonies. English builders celebrated English reprintings of his Four Books of Architecture as the voice of authority in architectural design. Palladio opens his final book, dedicated to “Temples,” by stating, “If upon any fabrick labour and industry may be bestowed, that it may be comported with beautiful measure and proportion; this, without any doubt, ought to be done in temples.”⁴⁸ He goes on to say that builders should erect churches “in such a manner, and with such proportions, that all the parts together may convey a sweet harmony to the eyes of the beholders.”⁴⁹ By the early eighteenth century, the English architect and theorist Robert Morris had published his “Lectures on Architecture,” which expounded upon the significance of harmonic proportions for establishing room dimensions.⁵⁰ By the eighteenth century, English architects vested their buildings with the power to shape the moral sense. In a treatise widely used by builders in England and its colonies, Batty Langley directly correlated architectural orders with the virtues of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty. Nicholas Hawksmoor, the preeminent designer of eighteenth-century English churches, argued that architectural geometry pointed to God the Creator.⁵¹ In his King’s Circus in Bath, England, John Wood the Elder inscribed in stone certain aspects of the Anglican devotional, The Whole Duty of Man.⁵² In enlisting the power 224

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

of architecture to transform the moral sense, South Carolina’s Anglican church builders were simply embracing broader assumptions about the moral power of architecture. Mathematical proportions were important not just because they produced regular buildings and orderly observers, but because they manifested the character of God. In 1752 a South Carolinian writing under the pseudonym “Archeologus” published an essay in the South Carolina Gazette that argued ideal geometries could be found in a man with arms and legs outstretched, a restatement of an argument made by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.⁵³ Reconfiguring the “Vitruvian Man” as the biblical Adam, the author informs his reader that the origins of ideal geometry were found in the man “that to Eve appeared in just proportion and symmetry.” The author relays to his readers that if the limbs of the first man were outstretched in various directions, the tips of his fingers and toes inscribed symmetrical shapes, generating “the Circle, the Geometrical Square, and properties of straight lines.”⁵⁴ Archeologus’s assessment implies that since proportion was manifest in the first man—“the most sublime instance of Divine Architecture”—a careful study of proportion and geometry in architectural design would best realize divinely proportioned buildings. That these ideas informed the Anglican church-building process in the colony is born out by the fact that Archeologus identifies himself as a “Free Mason,” an organization with intimate connections to eighteenth-century Anglican church-building projects in South Carolina. Furthermore, he indicates at the close of his essay that he seeks to “improve the most noble art of Geometry,” to achieve his final purpose, which is “to adore the Grand Architect of the Universe.”⁵⁵ How better to worship God through geometry than to build churches that realize divine proportion? It was no accident that Levi Durand described “a very neat and well finished chapel” in his parish of St. John’s, Berkeley, wherein “assembles a regular and devout congregation.”⁵⁶ It was by design that the orderly nature of the liturgy, together with the disciplined regularity of architecture, had manifested a “regular” congregation. The exacting proportions of windows or the centrality of doors conjoined architecture and liturgy to see irregular passions conform to regular virtue. By embracing the affective power of their spaces, Anglicans enlisted architecture as a helpmate to the liturgy. Right proportion and architectural harmony worked together with “the set forms of public devotion” to “sway the affections” and assist with the “conquest over the irregular passions.” Just as the term “upright” simultaneously implicated one’s posture and moral stature, Anglicans conflated material and moral regularity.⁵⁷ Regularity was a virtue invested in buildings so that it might be realized in believers.⁵⁸ The moral power of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Anglicanism extended from the liturgy and its architectural setting to new forms of music that gave “regularity” additional dimensions of meaning. To the seventeenthand eighteenth-century ear, the new emphasis on rhythm created a music THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

225

F IGURE 6.3   John Playford’s setting of “Manchester” to Psalm 102, Old Version, 1677

that was powerful and harmonious.⁵⁹ The most common form of music in the seventeenth-century Anglican liturgy was the practice of lining out the Psalms.⁶⁰ In this mode of church music, the parish clerk read or sung a line of the Psalm and the congregation followed, singing the same line to one of a handful of popular tunes.⁶¹ In the larger city churches, the voice of the parish clerk was particularly important for this reason. In 1770 the parish of St. Philip’s advertised for “any Discreet Sober Person and Qualified with a Good Voice for leading and able to go through the office of Clerk of Said Parish.”⁶² Most rural South Carolina parishes, however, rarely employed a clerk. Bryan Hunt, for example, served his parish as both minister and clerk, “there being no fit person for a Clerk at Church or Chappel.”⁶³ The clerk or minister selected the tune from what by the seventeenth century had become a handful of a dozen or so options with names like Norwich, St. David’s, Southwel, and York.⁶⁴ These tunes had a simple, declamatory character with repetitive rhythms and one note per syllable, a musical structure that clarified each word and emphasized the text over the music (FIG. 6.3). Lining out the Psalms to popular tunes did not require any books and meant that the entire congregation could participate. This mode of church singing persisted in the Carolina backcountry into the late eighteenth century, when one minister told his congregation, “Those among you who have not the tunes we do now, or shall sing, and are desirous of them, I will write them out.”⁶⁶ An 1809 manuscript choirmaster’s book from St. Michael’s Church includes a number of the more prominent and familiar examples and simple tunes bearing local place names like “Tradd Street” and “Charleston,” 226

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 6. 4 “Charleston” from Jacob Eckhard’s choir book of 1809 (Courtesy, St. Michael’s Church)

which are strong evidence for a tradition of these kinds of tunes in colonial Charleston (FIG. 6.4).⁶⁶ Although the practice led to embellishments and departures, it generally ensured that the congregation was singing together as a single body.⁶⁷ The repetitive tunes and the alternation of identical lines between the clerk and the congregation in this manner of psalmody served as the musical counterparts to the regularity that Anglicans celebrated in their liturgy and their architecture. Echoing efficacious repetition within the liturgy and the visual regularity of architecture, the moral reformation implied in this particular musical practice can be traced back to the long-standing Pythagorean understanding that music had the capacity to “realign the arithmetic coordinates of the self.”⁶⁸ In defense of responsorial Psalms, one minister reminded his congregation, “It is supposed that we are fitting and training up ourselves here for Heaven, for the Heavenly Service by our reasonable service.” Using words that suggest architectural parallel, he continued that this form of singing the Psalms was “a laudable and edifying way of worshipping God, it is necessary as our service is ordered” (emphasis mine).⁶⁹ THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

227

F IGURE 6.5  Anthem I from Chetham’s A Book of Psalms, p. 98

A new mode of church music described by contemporaries as “regular singing” began to replace the oral tradition of lining out the Psalms in the early eighteenth century.⁷⁰ In the seventeenth century, the performance of sophisticated liturgical music was limited largely to cathedrals, while parochial music was intended to be “simple, intelligible, and easily attainable by the ear.”⁷¹ In the opening decades of the eighteenth century, the dependence on familiar tunes for lining out the Psalms was slowly replaced by singing both Psalms and anthems from printed musical compositions. In 1710, for example, Virginian William Byrd wrote in his diary that his Anglican parish “began to give in to the new way of singing Psalms.”⁷² The new repertoire of music was usually organized in three or four parts and printed together with the words, producing much more sophisticated, aesthetically rich musical arrangements (FIG. 6.5). The “regularity” of this music depended on new rules for performance that imposed musical symmetry, metric discipline, and a harmonic balance between vocal parts.⁷³ The introduction of established musical notes changed the dynamics of church singing by introducing musical rule and order. Complex musical structures printed on the page in parts assumed musical literacy, breaking down the uniformity of the congregation implied in the earlier practice. 228

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

The adoption of more complex musical performance was expanded significantly through the publication of new parish music collections. Foremost among these was John Chetham’s A Book of Psalmody (1718), through which he hoped “to better improve this excellent & useful part of our Service, to keep up an uniformity in our Parish-Churches, and bring them as much as may be to imitate their Mother Churches the Cathedrals.”⁷⁴ Writing from South Carolina in 1726, Bryan Hunt boasted “understanding psalmody [I] have brought the people to sing tolerably, whereas before I came they did not sing well.” Echoing Chetham’s words, Hunt reformed psalm singing “so [that] delightful part of God’s worship may not be wanting.”⁷⁵ Hunt was training his parishioners to sing “regularly.” By the middle of the eighteenth century, the extemporaneous elaboration of traditional popular tunes—common in the absence of printed music—would be criticized as irregular; by midcentury, singing teachers were advertising in the South Carolina Gazette to teach psalmody and church music.⁷⁶ Conforming to the rule of music became increasingly important as regular singing introduced musical discipline to Anglican worship. Music was a central aspect of worship in the eighteenth-century Anglican service and joined with the architecture to elevate the soul to things holy. While the practice of lining out the Psalms elevated the words of the scriptures above the music, “regular singing” enlisted musical complexity by introducing vocal parts and complex harmonies as a medium for the contemplation of the divine. “Music,” wrote Eliza Lucas Pinckney, “has something of a divine original [archetype] and will, as Mr. [ Joseph] Addison observes, doubtless be one of the imployments of Eternity.” She continues in hopeful expectation that the music that moves her so deeply is only a shadow of heavenly anthems: “Oh! How ravishing must those strains of music be in which [is] exerted the whole power of harmony.” Slightly misquoting Milton, Pinckney writes of angels in her celebration of music: Their golden harps they took harps ever tuned that glittering by their side like quivers hung and with preamble sweet of charming symphony they introduced the lasting song.⁷⁷ Pinckney makes an important point when she observes that music in heaven will employ the “whole power of harmony.” The practice of comparing earthly and heavenly music in the eighteenth century depended on a vision of heaven as “the place where the Christian’s senses were perfected, glorified, and transformed, where the pilgrim’s quest after the purity and exquisiteness of perception was fulfilled.”⁷⁸ Music was an even more sensitive index of the divine than objects or architecture since it was loosed from the material.⁷⁹ Like Archeologus’s celebration of geometry, Pinckney understood that musical regularity emulated the divine. The simultaneous emergence of regular architecture and regular singing in the early eighteenth century was not coincidental. Both depend on THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

229

a poorly articulated but increasingly powerful theology of aesthetics in popular Anglicanism that found its roots in seventeenth-century thought. Seventeenth-century Anglican architecture was sacred because it had the capacity to manifest the divine. From the early eighteenth century, church and church music became agents of and evidence of the divine original and, by extension, of Christian moral refinement. By the early eighteenth century, the regularity, uniformity, and proportion evident in ritual, architecture, and music united in Anglican practice to reshape the moral sense and assist with the “conquest over the irregular passions” in the formation of regular lives. WHILE THIS MATERIAL and aural emphasis on regularity and its efficacious role in the lives of believers appeared in the 1710s and persisted right through the century, mid-eighteenth-century Anglicans expanded upon regularity by exploring its greater manifestation: beauty. Emphasizing a decisively positivist view of God’s goodness and beauty, Charles Pinckney’s 1758 will directed his executors to fund two sermons a year on Wednesdays in May and November to be presented in St. Philip’s “on the glorious and inexhaustible subjects of the Greatness of God, and his Goodness to all his creatures.”⁸⁰ These and other exhortations would take place in spaces increasingly described as “beautiful.” Timothy Millichamp was pleased in 1743 that his parishioners were then “beautifying the church in an handsome manner.”⁸¹ Echoing this same proclivity toward beauty, Prince William’s was described in 1766 as “beautiful, elegant, and well ornamented.”⁸² Even the builders of the timber-frame church erected just across the Savannah River in Augusta, Georgia, hoped to have the columns on the interior “handsomely ornamented.”⁸³ But this material examination of beauty was unique to Anglicanism; George Milligen Johnson indicated in 1763 that the meetinghouses of Charleston’s Dissenters were “neat, large, and convenient...[but] too plain to merit particular Descriptions.”⁸⁴ Like regularity, beauty carried a spiritual burden. In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times, a book that appeared in a number of South Carolina libraries, Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of South Carolina’s first Lords Proprietors and namesake of the two prominent river systems that form the Charleston peninsula, argued that the beautiful and the good “are one and the same.”⁸⁵ For Shaftesbury, the Platonic correlation between the two meant that visual beauty was a useful means of understanding things divine: “@‘Tis the improving MIND, slightly surveying other Objects, and passing over Bodys, and the common Forms, (where only a Shadow of Beauty rests) ambitiously presses onward to its Source, and views the Original [again, an archetype] of Form and Order in that which is intelligent.”⁸⁶ Reinforcing the power of this analogy in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mind, Shaftesbury never deviated from “the analogy between the perception of external beauty by the senses of sight and hearing, and the perception of moral beauty by the moral sense.”⁸⁷ Francis Hutcheson, the premier philosopher of aesthetics in 230

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

early eighteenth-century England, also took up the argument that beauty directed the viewer to consider the Godhead.⁸⁸ Just as seventeenth-century arguments for empiricism did not immediately reshape everyday life, so too it was with Neoplatonic principles of aesthetics. These ideas became increasingly more familiar to Anglicans as the eighteenth century progressed, finding clear expression in South Carolina by the mid-eighteenth century. The well-respected minister of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston wrote an entire sermon sometime in the 1760s dedicated to contrasting the “Beauty of Holiness and the Deformity of Sin.” The idea of sin as deformity was central to Neoplatonist Christianity, aspects of which can be found in Plato’s own writings.⁸⁹ In writing on this theme, Smith was part of a larger transformation of Anglicanism represented well by the popularity of Thomas Bisse’s The Beauty of Holiness in the Common-Prayer (1716).⁹⁰ Bisse, Smith, and many other Anglicans had embraced the Platonic association between the beautiful and the good, and in doing so they constructed a theological defense for architectural beauty. By the 1750s and later, regularity in structure was foundational for visual beauty in similar ways that regularity of virtue was essential to the beauty of holiness. The increasing interest in beauty found expression in “beautiful” organ accompaniment to “regular” church music. While organs were largely relegated to cathedrals in seventeenth-century England, the congregation at St. Philip’s was singing hymns to an organ as early as 1731.⁹¹ Their organ had two parts: a “Great Organ” with sixteen stops and the “Choir organ” with eight stops (FIG. 6.6).⁹² At least four other churches—St. Michael’s in Charleston, St George’s in Dorchester, and the churches in the plantation parishes of St. Andrew’s and St. John’s, Berkeley—had organs by the 1760s.⁹³ In 1768 St. Michael’s Church paid over £500 sterling to purchase a Johann Snetzler organ, which was at the time the second-largest organ in British America.⁹⁴ Even St. Paul’s Church in remote Augusta, Georgia, had a “Genteel Organ...[and] a proper hand to perform on it” by 1763.⁹⁵ Whereas organs were a rarity in the seventeenth century throughout the Anglican world, they were becoming increasingly common by the middle of the eighteenth century.⁹⁶ Beautiful music was not confined to church interiors. In 1762 the vestry of St. Michael’s purchased a ring of eight bells, four of which were to be attached to the steeple clockworks.⁹⁷ The new clock was to “strike the Hour on the largest Bell and the quarters on 4 Bells, as the Royal Exchange in London.”⁹⁸ The new ring of bells at St. Michael’s was one of the most notable features of the new church for Charleston visitor Pelatiah Webster, who remarked on them specifically in his 1765 journal.⁹⁹ St. Michael’s was not the only church with a ring of bells; by 1766 St. George’s in Dorchester had a set of four bells.¹⁰⁰ Although the vestry of St. Philip’s had begun a subscription for a ring of six bells as early as 1739, by the 1760s they still had only two.¹⁰¹ Since the eight new bells of St. Michael’s were to be installed “in a strong iron frame the 3 great wheels to be 30 inches diameter the rest in proportion to the pinions hardened, with ropes, weights, pullies,” they were well outfitted THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

231

F IGURE 6.6 Detail of organ in Thomas Middleton, Interior of St. Philips, 1835 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church)

for the ancient English art of change ringing.¹⁰² Turning the entire bell in a wheel created much greater reverberation than simply striking it with a clapper. While the ring installed included only six bells, each was outfitted with a “stay or stopper to prevent their tumbling” and to allow more precise ringing. Attached to a wheel, the bell also reached a horizontal position where the mouth of the bell was pointed directly at the louvers in the walls of the steeple. A reference in 1767 to a team of “ringers” suggests that fairly soon after they were installed, the peal of bells were actively employed in change ringing.¹⁰³ Complementing the musical complexity offered by the organ, the ring of eight bells installed in St. Michael’s elevated the solitary tone of St. Philip’s bell to a musical melody that resonated throughout the city every quarter hour and more complex arrangements using all eight bells on Sundays or other occasions.¹⁰⁴ Together with its new organ, St. Michael’s introduced to the soundscape of early Charleston the beauty of music on an unprecedented scale. The musical qualities of the bell soon overshadowed its earlier association with superstitious practices. 232

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

The interest of St. Michael’s in music did not manifest in a vacuum. Charleston developed a rich tradition of church music in the eighteenth century. In 1737 Charleston printer Lewis Timothy published the first hymnal of the famous hymn writer Charles Wesley, an evangelical Anglican. The city parishes had talented and well-paid organists. The organist at St. Philip’s from 1737 to 1750 was Charles Theodore Pachelbel, son of the more famous Johann Pachelbel. Immediately after the Revolutionary War, St. Michael’s Parish claimed two musicians who were also composers of hymns and Psalm music—organist Peter Valton (1740–84) and minister Henry Purcell (1742–1802). Before coming to Charleston in 1764, Valton had played as deputy organist at the King’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey and St. George’s, Hanover Square, in London, and by 1768 he would advertise his first opus in the South Carolina Gazette. Their joint efforts realized the first church choir in South Carolina, followed quickly by a choir at St. Philip’s. By the closing years of the century, Charlestonians could count on hearing concerts in church featuring selections from Handel’s Messiah and other major compositions. Such musical performance was a major transformation from early eighteenth-century psalmody.¹⁰⁵ Demonstrating the spiritual efficacy of the arts was the sermon-writing practice of Richard Clarke, minister of St. Philips’s from 1755 to 1759. A testimony written by the vestry on behalf of Clarke offers high praise. They described him as a man of “gravity, diligence, and fidelity.” They claimed that “he was more known as a theologian beyond the limits of America than any other inhabitant of Carolina.” Furthermore, he was “admired as a preacher both in Charles-town and London.” The vestry attributed the power of his sermons to the fact that they were “often composed under the impressions of Music.”¹⁰⁶ Clark’s vestry understood that music was an agent used by the Holy Spirit to shape his sermons much in the same way that Anglicans believed regularity and beauty in architecture begat holiness. Not all Anglican architecture, however, was beautiful. The town of Beaufort was described in 1766 as having “the very meanest Church in it.”¹⁰⁷ In the 1750s the roof framing of the church in St. Helena’s was both exposed and in disrepair, falling far short of the colony’s standards for beauty.¹⁰⁸ To Anglicans—who freely called their places of worship “churches” and were comfortable describing the church as the house of God—beauty mattered. Neither was all music beautiful. The vestry minutes of St. Philip’s record that it was the responsibility of the minister to “suppress all light and unseemly Music; and all indecency and irreverence in the Performance; by which vain and ungodly Persons profane the Service of the sanctuary.”¹⁰⁹ The popular embrace of light and unseemly music continually vexed Anglicans. On numerous occasions during his work in the backcountry, Charles Woodmason recounted that instead of coming to church, some individuals spent Sunday at home, singing “Hymns and Spiritual Songs—whereby their Hearts are greatly inflam’d with Divine Love and Heav’nly Joy, and makes the H[oly] G[host] be shed abroad in their Hearts.” He continued that these individuals THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

233

kept away from Anglican services “because these Hymns and Tunes are not permitted in the Church.”¹¹⁰ While he criticized what were certainly simple and popular songs, it is important to realize that Woodmason’s commentary is theological in nature. Woodmason is not critiquing the words of the songs, but the emotional response to the tunes. Under the rubric of faculty psychology, his reference to “inflam’d” hearts associated these songs with the passions. Since the passions were born of the flesh, they had the capacity to lead the believer astray from theological orthodoxy. But this is not to suggest that eighteenth-century Anglicans were devoid of emotional response in worship, because emotion was indeed very important to them. Refined and regulated emotional responses to beauty were divinely inspired, whereas unregulated passions, derived from base or even bestial sources, were not only indecent but also irreverent. When Pinckney expressed her heightened emotional response to the “power of harmony,” she articulated an appreciation for the beauty of music that, however imperfectly, approximated the beauty of the divine. Since perfect beauty resided in God alone, the more refined, beautiful, harmonious, or regular an object of art, architecture, or music, the more fully it realized the nature of God. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BUILDERS recognized that architecture facilitated or deadened sound quality and they designed their buildings accordingly. The relationship between architecture and the soundscape of the Christian liturgy has an ancient history. The complex spaces of the medieval church established a sequence of reverberations that created a fullness of sound that reinforced the mystery and awe central to pre-Reformation theology. Conversely, the simplicity of Protestant spaces created a clarity of voice critical to a religion of the Word. Alexander Garden complained that the preaching of a fellow minister “is but little service. He preached once for me, and tho’ I sat in the Reading Desk, yet could not hear one sentence of his Sermon.”¹¹¹ Such performances were unacceptable. In an effort to help preachers amplify their voice, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pulpits positioned a flat surface immediately above the preacher’s head (FIG. 5.11). An early South Carolina vestry recognized the importance of this feature for amplifying the voice of the speaker when they contracted with a carpenter to build “a Pulpit and Sounding Board.”¹¹² Anglicans understood that vocal clarity was an important function of the sermon, and they vested the pulpit canopy with the responsibility of amplifying the sermon. But as the eighteenth-century progressed, amplifying the sermon was only one of the many functional demands imposed on the architecture of the church. The complexity of regular singing, the introduction of organs, and the increasing attention paid to the beauty of music imposed new demands on the later eighteenth-century church interior. The practice of designing spaces that best facilitated musical performance surfaced in the English context as early as the late seventeenth century, when Thomas Mace published the 234

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 6.7 Illustration for music room design in Thomas Mace, Musick’s Monument (1676) (Reproduced by arrangement with Broude Brothers Limited)

design for an octagonal music room in his 1676 Musick’s Monument (FIG. 6.7). Attention to the shape of the room was important, Mace informed his readers, because “a Good Room will make [Instruments] seem Better and a Bad Room, Worse.”¹¹³ Mace argued that a room best suited musical performance when it had an “Arch’d Seiling...Plain, and Very Smooth” with an open interior and walls free from ornamental work so that “Sound has Its Free, and Un-interrupted Passage.”¹¹⁴ Such practical recommendations were realized in the music rooms of early eighteenth-century London.¹¹⁵ One of these, Hickford’s Great Room near Piccadilly, was the most fashionable place for music in London by the mid-eighteenth century. Arched on all four sides rising to a flat plane, the ceiling in Hickford’s Great Room was a tray ceiling.¹¹⁶ It is very possible that the builders of St. Michael’s knew that its own coved tray ceiling rising over an uninterrupted interior would have diminished musical reverberation far more successfully than the earlier barrel-vaulted ceiling of St. Philip’s, which channeled sound from the west-end organ down the length of the nave, creating a disruptive and reverberating echo off the chancel wall.¹¹⁷ Greater sensitivity to the soundscape was certainly a motivation for abandoning the barrel-vaulted ceiling and likely one motivation for abandoning the THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

235

F IGURE 6.8  Detail of Communion rail, St. Michael’s (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

longitudinal and cruciform plans of the earlier decades of the century for the single space of a more compact “auditory.” Changes in liturgical practice over the course of the century might also have transformed the church interior. In the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, most if not all of the communicants gathered in a chamber chancel for the Communion service. Chancels of the later eighteenth century, however, either protrude into the body of the church or were housed in shallow apses (see FIGS. 6.1 and 5.4).¹¹⁸ The Communion rail in St. Michael’s, for example, does not project into the nave but simply spans the opening of the chancel (FIG. 6.8). This shift in material form corresponds to changing liturgical practice.¹¹⁹ By the middle of the century, the entire congregation began to remain in the church to observe the Communion service, and communicants remained in their pews with the rest of the congregation through the prayers and exhortations, approaching the chancel only to actually partake of the elements. The practice of surrounding the table—so essential to creating the community in earlier celebrations of the sacrament—had been abandoned as communicants now knelt in a straight line before the altar table. Under these new liturgical conditions, vocal projection from the chancel to communicants in their pews became a practical challenge. The shallow, curved chancel of later eighteenth-century churches functioned as a sound shell, projecting the voice of the minister speaking in the chancel to the entire congregation. Underneath the tray ceiling, the organ at the west and the curved chancel at the east became acoustic centers in a space far better equipped to clarify and amplify the sacred sounds of the liturgy. In addition to serving as a sound shell, the tall, arched chancel also became a dramatic frame for the visual consumption of Communion by the entire 236

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

congregation. Similarly, altarpieces in South Carolina’s later eighteenthcentury churches also became more visually interesting as two-dimensional compositions. The triple composition of the venetian window in St. Stephen’s Parish Church (1767–69) is echoed in the overall composition, with its gabled central portion pierced by the window carried by flanking flat-arched sections framing the tablets (see FIG. 3.7). With wide, shallow Communion rails, shallow chancels, or an architecturally sophisticated reredos mounted against flat east-end walls, the later eighteenth-century chancel shrank from three dimensions to two as it shifted from a chamber for the gathering of a community to a frame for the visual consumption of a performance. By the end of the eighteenth century, pews began to orient toward the chancel, offering direct lines of sight to a larger proportion of the congregation. As seeing became more important, Anglicans began to express greater discontent when they did not enjoy a clear view of the service. A number of those who owned pews in the galleries of St. Michael’s Church requested the vestry alter the galleries since they were not even able to see the minister in the high pulpit.¹²⁰ A decade later, the vestry of St. Philip’s allowed Jacob Motte to erect a monument against one of the church pillars under the assumption that the new monument “does not obstruct the sight of the pews contiguous.”¹²¹ Seeing the beauty of the service was now of great importance. The changes made by the builders of St. Michael’s transformed the Anglican church interior to a space dedicated to the visual and aural beauty of the liturgy, music, and sacraments. The tray ceiling reduced the reverberations experienced by the congregation in St. Philip’s, whose organ suffered under the great barrel-vaulted ceiling. As clergy were faced with the responsibility of projecting their voices from the chancel to a large audience, the architecture of the church began to approximate theatre design.¹²² It is not beyond the scope of possibility, in fact, that the choice to install a tray ceiling and abandon interior supports in the design of St. Michael’s might relate to the design of the new theatre then rising in the city.¹²³ Unfortunately, the similarities of St. Michael’s to the new theatre cannot be confirmed since neither the theatre nor descriptions of the building survive. THE ENTHUSIASTIC EMBRACE of aesthetics to shape the moral sense distinguished the sacred architecture of the Anglicans from the consciously plain meetinghouses of Dissenters through most of the eighteenth century, and it is in the dissenting critique of Anglican forms that we best understand the power of Anglican architecture.¹²⁴ The vehement Methodist Francis Asbury derided Charleston’s “steeplehouses,” bells, and organs as “contrary to the simplicity of Christ.”¹²⁵ Penuel Bowen, a Congregationalist visitor to the city immediately after the Revolution, described for a Boston friend Charleston’s two Anglican churches: “They accord to my material sensations, being efforts and effects of great cost and ingenuity. They appear without and within quite superb and grand, tho neither gothic and heavy. The Furniture is rich and good and the organs large and full. One of them especially is finely played THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

237

and the assemblies of people large and splendid and well behaved too.” Bowen observed his own response to the rich aesthetics of the church and the impact of these aesthetics on “the assemblies,” a term denoting audience rather than congregation. As he continued, however, he expressed the conflict between the effect these churches had on him and his own theology, which rejected the agency given to church aesthetics by Anglicans: “I will own to you Sir these things have and always had an agreeable effect on the sensitive, nay the feeling part of Devotion in me. You will lampoon the idea if you please and beat it out of me if you can please....I am too much a materialist.”¹²⁶ The “feeling part of Devotion” that had tempted Bowen was a critical aspect of Anglican worship through the course of the eighteenth century. As Anglicans sought to refine their passions, the regularity, beauty, and holiness they sought for themselves were realized through liturgy, architecture, and music. What was the practical effect of introducing beauty into worship? While religious services have since the founding of the church been a place for the reification of social and political status in a community, the theological emphasis on regularity in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century did little to entice those on the religious margins to services. Regularity was understood largely in theological terms and had little resonance outside the faith. As churches became more architecturally fashionable spaces over the eighteenth century and Anglicanism began to foreground the role of beauty in worship, churches and their worship had far greater potential to attract those interested largely in the aesthetics of the event, even aesthetics divorced from theology. This explains, in part, the increasing tendency of noncommunicants to remain in church during the Communion service. Yet in South Carolina, the beauty of holiness was in part an illusion in a landscape marred by the ugly realities of slavery. The demise of belief in supernatural evil slowly shifted the danger of the “black man” from a palpable Satan to South Carolina’s enslaved black majority.¹²⁷ While discussions of the dangers of slavery lingered on the periphery of life in the early decades of the century, the horrors of the institution and anxieties about the black majority were mounting.¹²⁸ As early as 1723, fear of insurrection meant that whites prevented large numbers of slaves from gathering at the church.¹²⁹ The plot of an alleged insurrection was uncovered in 1730. Seven years later, the South Carolina Gazette published a letter from Antigua that described a series of conspiracies led by slaves who had intimate connections with local Anglican churches. The account even asserts that slave leaders had administered the sacraments “according to the Rites of the Bishop’s Church.”¹³⁰ Two years later, South Carolinians would experience their own conspiracy: the Stono Rebellion and its brutal suppression. On a September Sunday in 1739, twenty slaves raided a warehouse that held small munitions and began heading south toward Charleston, although their goal was probably the freedom promised to escaped slaves by the Spanish in Florida. The uprising was squelched before they reached Charleston, although their numbers had multiplied four- or fivefold by that time. Even though only twenty-five 238

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

whites were killed, the Stono Rebellion redefined the colony’s race relations. Soon thereafter, George Whitefield, who advocated the abolition of slavery, taught huge crowds that the rebellion was God’s retribution for Charleston’s decadence. By 1740 Whitefield had come into open conflict with Alexander Garden, the Anglican commissary in the colony. While the issues of their debates were largely theological, the institution of slavery fueled the conflict. As a result, powerful planters increasingly discouraged Anglican ministers from addressing the institution of slavery.¹³¹ Following the increased racial segregation of domestic sites in the later eighteenth century, the bodies of blacks were also relocated in the space of the church.¹³² Although as many as one-third of the communicants in the Anglican Church in the early decades of the century were black, there is only one record of blacks taking Communion between 1740 and 1810, suggesting that the earlier drive to draw blacks to the Eucharist had waned.¹³³ Although blacks continued to attend Anglican services, their place in the splendid assemblies praised by Bowen was increasingly marginal after midcentury.¹³⁴ In 1773, for example, the vestry of St. Michael’s ordered that slaves were no longer to sit in the aisles of the church but were to observe the service from the galleries or the vestibule, effectively removing black bodies from the heart of the congregation.¹³⁵ One early nineteenth-century author noted that the 1750s gallery in St. Andrew’s Church was “originally intended for those who had no pews, but afterwards appropriated for People of Color.”¹³⁶ Whereas Francis LeJau taught the catechism to slaves in the church on Sundays at the opening of the century, by the middle decades, Alexander Garden worked to open a school for blacks, removing them from the space of the church.¹³⁷ The disappearance of enslaved blacks from the Anglican communion persisted into the next century. In the journal of the 1810 convention of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, blacks were communicants only in the two urban parishes of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s and in the Georgetown parish church of Prince George, Winyaw.¹³⁸ Not a single plantation parish recorded a black communicant. By that same time, St. Philip’s Parish Church had purchased “two small pewter plates for collecting donations of persons of color on Sacramental days” (the first mention of pewter in the records of South Carolina Anglicanism), now enlisting even base metals to distinguish between black and white.¹³⁹ In South Carolina, the drive for greater beauty in worship sought to counterbalance the ugliness of the sin of slavery, a sin without which such lavish beauty was not possible. IF THE CHURCH and its architecture, music, and liturgy was designed to refine the moral sense and to instill the beauty of holiness, the churchyard was understood to evidence those changes. Epitaphs, headstone iconography, and the profiles of headstone tympani all highlight the importance of beauty in the lives of later eighteenth-century Anglicans. Early eighteenth-century epitaphs generally summarized only the deceased’s biographical information (see FIG. 2.57): THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

239

Here Lies buried the Body of Mr. Thomas baker Who was 12 years & 6 Mo. Sexton of St. Philip’s Church In Charlestown Decd. Ye 27th of November 1737 In ye 53 year Of His Age Here lies but The body of C A T H E R I N E WA R D E N Daughter of Mr. William & Mrs. Margaret Warden who departed this life Augt. 9th 1749 in the 18th year of her Age This is true because early eighteenth-century Anglicans were still largely invested in a theological system in which people had little or no agency in the process of their own salvation; since God drew unto himself His elect, salvation could not be earned.¹⁴⁰ The most significant temporal manifestation of election was the participation in the spiritual disciplines of the church. As Rev. Mr. Daniel Dwight’s 1748 headstone indicated, he “departed this life in Peace...[he] died in the safe Communion of the Church of England.” The texts of longer epitaphs were usually consumed with explicating an individual’s public identity—political and civic identity overshadowed personal virtues. For example, William Rhett’s 1722 stone at St. Philip’s described him as a “Principall officer of his Majesties Customs in this Province, He was a Person that on all occasions promoted the public good of this colony, and severall times generously and successfully ventured his Life in defense of the same” (FIG. 2.48). While discussions of virtue appear, they are usually subservient to a litany of public offices. As the century wore on, however, epitaphs became increasingly descriptive of personal character. In 1765, for example, Martha Chalmers’s children described her as “truly religious and patiently submissive....A most Affectionate wife and Mother and so eminently desirous and frugal in her family that in these respects she could be excelled by none. Ever sincere in her Friendship, Benevolent to all and Charitable to the Poor” (emphasis in original). John Mackenzie was described on his 1770 stone as “agreeable...a most affectionate and tender husband, A humane master, of a soul sincere...and a temper remarkably frank.” By the later eighteenth century, virtue was no longer a product of God’s grace but was generated by the “moral sense” that when cultivated through good works could produce the personal morality that defined one as a “Christian.” In 1743 Levi Durand, minister of St. Andrew’s Parish just outside of Charleston, complained of what he saw as doctrinal decay in his parish. Abandoning the earlier tenants of a universal judgment, many in his parish, 240

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 6.9   Gravestone of William Augustus, St. Michael’s churchyard (Photo by author)

GR A P H 3 . Relative Popularity of Gravestone Epitaphs in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina

he lamented, had embraced “Latitudinarian Principles: that Religion is only Priest-craft...that Mankind will be punished only proportionally to their crimes.”¹⁴¹ Durand expressed concerns that his congregation had loosed sin from its traditional status as a universal human condition and was now associated with individual acts—“crimes.” The antithesis of the crimes committed by Durand’s congregation were the acts of virtue they increasingly celebrated on the grave markers. As new Anglican theology placed less emphasis on the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, human virtue became the central measure of the Christian condition. As Patricia Bonomi argues, “If God became more remote, the moral system of Jesus, widely studied and appreciated for its simplicity, continued central to the Anglican code.”¹⁴² Other changes in gravestone art later in the eighteenth century point to the increasing significance of the individual and individual virtues. Most stones dating into the 1760s began with the phrase “Here lies the body of,” focusing by implication on the departure of the soul. By the 1780s, however, the majority of epitaphs began by emphasizing the individual’s persona while alive by replacing “Here Lies the Body of ” with “In Memory of ” (FIG. 6.9).¹⁴³ As Graph 3 demonstrates, the popularity of “Here lies the Body of ” was in clear decline by the 1770s, the same decade that saw the increasing popularity of “In Memory of.” Between the 1760s and the 1780s, the language of the Anglican grave marker underwent a notable change that signaled a larger transformation in the social and spiritual function of the grave marker. In a subtle but theologically significant change, the focus shifted from the generous actions of a sovereign God toward damned humankind, to the human act of remembering the virtues of those who sought to be named among God’s elect. The gravestones erected by South Carolina’s Anglicans also reveal some transformation in visual referents over the course of the eighteenth century. As suggested in chapter 2 and demonstrated in Graph 1, the death’s head of the THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

241

F IGURE 6.10 Anna Scott headstone, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston (Photo by author)

F IGURE 6.11 Harriott Prior headstone, Prince George churchyard, Georgetown, 1793 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 6.12 William Brown headstone, Prince Frederick churchyard, 1780s (Photo by author)

early eighteenth century gave way in the middle decades of the century to the winged soul’s head. The death’s head, the product of seventeenth-century visual culture, communicated the expectant resurrection of the dead by the grace of God. The agency for resurrection lay entirely with God. The winged soul’s head carried increasingly personal connotations by implying that the soul of this particular person would rise again—a step beyond memento mori, a generic reminder that the dead would rise.¹⁴⁴ While some scholars have interpreted these winged heads as cherubs, most have suggested that they are at least some combination of angel and soul, if not exclusively a soul.¹⁴⁵ The virtues so important to the authors of later eighteenth-century epitaphs were the textual evidence of beautiful souls imaged in the tympanum. The two alternative interpretations are nicely contrasted by the English carved mid-eighteenth century headstone for Anna Scott and the locally carved late eighteenth century stone for Harriet Murray Prior. The Anna Scott stone in St. Philip’s churchyard breaks from the New England conventions in a number of ways, not least of which is the placement of the inscription in a circular tablet. Above the tablet, three winged figures that are clearly cherubs appear to frolic in a resurrection morn of fresh flowers (FIG. 6.10). Murray’s marker, on the other hand, has a winged head wearing a Geneva collar, a specific reference to her symbolic role as a member in the priesthood of all believers (FIG. 6.11). Under this schema, an angel atop the headstone makes little theological sense; angels did not wear Geneva collars. This late eighteenth-century, locally manufactured stone suggests that through the eighteenth century, the winged head atop the stone was often understood among South Carolina’s Anglicans to represent 242

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 6.13   Mary Dart headstone, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston, 1752 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 6.1 4 Thomas and Frances Prue headstone, St. Philip’s churchyard, Charleston, 1769 (Photo by author)

a winged soul. William Brown’s 1780s New England carved headstone is one of a group of later stones that represent the winged figure wearing the crown of righteousness, a sign of the believer’s condition after redemption— further evidence for this theologically specific interpretation (FIG. 6.12).¹⁴⁶ In a very careful examination of the dialogue between word and image in eighteenth-century Congregationalism in New England, David Watters has argued that the shift from death to life—from a winged skull to the winged head—celebrated in theological terms the beauty of the redeemed soul.¹⁴⁷ The division between the spiritual and the material intrinsic to Platonic thought assumed such a distinction. As the beauty of holiness began to transform church architecture, headstones began to evidence the effects of such beauty on the souls of individual believers. The interpretation of the winged head as the soul of the deceased also finds support in the proliferation of portraits that appear on headstones in these middle decades of the century, such as the portrait on Mary Dart’s 1752 headstone in the churchyard of St. Philip’s (FIG. 6.13). These portraits respond in part to the rising importance of empiricism. Emerging as an alternative to the soul effigy, an unseen theological construction dependent largely on faith in things yet to be, the portrait was a knowable representation of things that have been. The twin marker of Frances Prue (d.1769) and her son Thomas (d.1767) nicely demonstrates the shared responsibility of the portrait and the soul effigy; Thomas Prue’s soul effigy was just as much a personal representation as Frances’s portrait (FIG. 6.14).¹⁴⁸ Another significant change in headstones lay in the abandonment of the simple contrast between the temporal square tablet and the eternal archTHE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

243

F IGURE 6.15   Jeremiah Theus (American, 1716–74), Colonel Barnard Elliott, Jr., ca. 1766, oil on canvas (Image courtesy of Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association, 1930.001.0007)

topped tympanum so critical to the visual culture of early eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Beginning in the 1750s, an increasing number of headstones employed a complex classical profile of cavettos, cymas, and ogees instead of the simple arched profile used since the opening decades of the century. Mary Dart’s stone, with curvilinear profile and portrait, certainly signals a midcentury shift in the meanings and social functions of grave markers (FIG. 6.13). By the 1760s, one-half of the surviving headstones in Anglican churchyards employed some profile other than the simple arched top. Just as Anglicans abandoned the barrel vault, so too the meanings behind the geometric opposition of the square tablet and the arched tympanum of headstones lost popular currency by midcentury. After midcentury, the function of the headstone as a cosmic portal from time to eternity eroded. This change signaled not only the collapse of the temporal/celestial mapping of the cosmos but also the increasing importance of beauty in Anglicanism. The far more sophisticated tympanum profiles that emerged in the second half of the century framed the beauty of the portrait or the soul in ways akin to the richly ornate and beautifully gilded frames that surround Jeremiah Theus’s portraits of contemporary Charleston sitters (FIG. 6.15).¹⁴⁹ The use of a frame on these headstones is significant; since the Renaissance, frames admitted the constructed nature of the representation.¹⁵⁰ As a portrait, these headstones constructed specific representations of the deceased, representations best suited for emulation by those left behind. They more clearly carried the responsibility of preserving the deceased individual’s virtues and identity. 244

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

F IGURE 6.16 View of early nineteenth-century headstones in St. Michael’s churchyard, Charleston (Photo by author)

By the end of the colonial era, the theological work of the earliest gravestones had taken on an increasingly social function. After 1750 a soul effigy or a portrait roundel occupied the tympanum in almost every Anglican headstone and an increasing number abandon the simple arched profile. By 1770 the death’s head—nearly universal before 1740—was replaced almost entirely with the winged soul effigy. Beginning first with the shift from death’s head to soul’s head in the 1750s and reinforced by the slightly later shift from “Here lies the body of ” to “In Memory of,” the function of the Anglican grave marker was changed over the course of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Whereas the earlier stones signaled the theological implications of death, the new stones undertook the responsibility of marking the significance of the individual and remembering the virtuous beauty of the deceased (FIG 6.16). The significance of this change is signaled not only by changes to text, form, and iconography but also by the sheer number of headstones erected after the 1750s (Graph 1). The mid-eighteenth-century drive to construct and preserve memory was a powerful force realized in headstones through text, shape, and image. It is no accident that the rising interest in individual presentation paralleled the rise in literacy among Anglicans of Enlightenment authors who celebrated the importance of individual identity. The seventeenth-century writer most central to the popularization of this new mode of thought was John Locke.¹⁵¹ Locke argued for the centrality of human experience and empirical investigation over scriptural revelation in the Christian’s study of God.¹⁵² As a result, Anglicans began to explore more intensively the role of personal identity in the Christian scheme.¹⁵³ Like many of her contemporaries who owned copies of Locke’s work, Eliza Pinckney opened Locke “over and over to see wherein the personal Identity consisted.”¹⁵⁴ THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

245

The very different cultural work accomplished by these new headstones also created new meanings for the churchyards they occupied. Writing about her lost husband, Eliza Pinckney wrote in 1760, “Sacred be his ashes and his memory.”¹⁵⁵ Pinckney’s extension of sanctity to his physical remains leads us to ask questions about the changing cultural work performed by the church burial ground. Quite evident in the midcentury vestry minutes of a number of South Carolina parishes is the desire to distinguish the churchyard as a public space. For example, the vestry of St. John’s Berkeley expressed their desire to set the churchyard apart when they noted in 1748, “Enclosing the Churchyard has often been spoken of and still lies undone.”¹⁵⁶ In 1757 the vestry of St. Philip’s determined that all private gates into the churchyard were to be shut up.¹⁵⁷ Ten years later, they would no longer allow the paling in of private plots. By the early nineteenth century, the vestry of St. Philip’s paid for paved churchyard walks to allow for easy circulation through the churchyard.¹⁵⁸ Over the course of the century, Anglicans in South Carolina began to conceive of their churchyards as public spaces rather than the earlier conception of burial grounds as aggregations of privately owned plots. Anglicans also began to express greater interest in the visual appearance of their churchyards.¹⁵⁹ Although the vestry of St. Philip’s did not comment on the condition of the churchyard for over two decades, in 1757 they ordered the sexton to “keep all horses out of the Church Yard and have the same cleared from the filth now in it and kept clean for the future.” The church vestry determined that using the churchyard as a litter dump and horse pasture was no longer acceptable. This concern for cleanliness extended also to the condition of individual markers. In March 1773, the vestry of St. Philip’s found that the erection of headstones and wooden monuments in the churchyard resulted in a disheveled appearance. As a result, they “Unanimously Resolved that no person or persons be hereafter allowed to erect or repair the same in the said yard but that they may have liberty to place them even with the surface of the earth, or against the wall of the yard.”¹⁶⁰ The vestry of St. Michael’s passed a similar resolution the following month.¹⁶¹ Through the later eighteenth century, vestries were regularly calling on individuals to repair family markers in an attempt to maintain visual uniformity in the churchyard. Ministers noticed this increased attention paid to the material culture of death and responded with sermons that hoped to return attention to death’s theological implications. In his 1765 Easter sermon, for example, Robert Smith linked Christ’s rising from the tomb with the raising of the dead at His return at the end of time: Since this rising from the dead is to be certain and universal, let us not be over sollicitous about the place or manner of our burial: for all the general conflagration, all tombs and monuments will be defaced; all ground will sink into one chaos of confusion when the pillars of the earth give way and the whole fabrick of the world becomes its own funeral pile. Of what import is it where we die or where and how we are buried. Tis of 246

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

more importance how we have lived...[than] whether we have a ground sepulchre or no sepulchre at all.¹⁶² But such sermons did not stem the tide of attention paid to the churchyard, which became so complex that an extensive report on the various church regulations that govern the churchyard appeared in the vestry minutes of St. Philip’s in 1825.¹⁶³ These changes point to the churchyard as a space sanctified by the congregation’s collective virtue. This increased concern for the appearance of the churchyard and the attention paid to individual markers during the third quarter of the eighteenth century was contemporaneous with marked changes in headstone iconography and text. In the same decades that vestries began to clean up their churchyards and make them more accessible, Anglican headstones began to replace the death’s head with the soul effigy, and epitaph introductions shifted from “Here Lyes the Body of ” to “In Memory of.” Mary Dart’s 1752 stone, with a portrait oval in the center of a complex curvilinear profile, demonstrates the beginning of a profound change. Her stone has a simple statement following the facts of the epitaph: “Much Lamented.” Dart’s stone is no longer looking forward, focused on the eternal life of the soul. It highlights the temporal life of the deceased and participates in the process of memory and mourning that accompanied that loss. Instead of pointing forward to Mary’s union with God, the stone now focuses on Mary’s relationship to those she left behind. After the 1750s, the churchyard became the stage for sentimental memorial. In a funeral sermon of 1767, the minister of St. Philip’s used the language of comportment to defend the sentimental expression of grief. God will “pardon a tear dropt at a Parents and relations shrine,” he wrote, “but let not our tears be immoderate....[W]ell tempered sorrow is allowable and becoming.” A few lines later he warned against letting loose “the passion of grief.”¹⁶⁴ The tempered sorrow evidenced by mourners at the tomb of a departed loved one was a witness to the regulation of the passions and beauty of Christian virtues proclaimed in headstone iconography, epitaphs, and profiles. It is no surprise that by the 1770s, complete sentimental poems began to appear after the standard information of the epitaph. By the end of the century, a deep emotionalism reframed the grave marker and the graveyard.¹⁶⁵ The later eighteenth-century churchyard became both a means of preserving Christian virtue and a stage for its performance. By the 1790s, “In Memory of ” was quickly being replaced with “Sacred to the Memory of,” now clearly communicating the fact that the churchyard had been sanctified by its memorial responsibilities (see Graph 3). Clean, accessible, and filled with reminders of Christian virtues, the churchyard was by the end of the century a public space dedicated to individual contemplation and personal reformation. There is little evidence for the practice of visiting the graves of deceased loved ones before the late eighteenth century.¹⁶⁶ One can easily imagine the horror of an early nineteenth-century writer that the churchTHE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

247

yard of St. James, Goose Creek, was “open to the beasts of the field.”¹⁶⁷ The disregard for the churchyard evident in the early eighteenth century had been upset entirely one century later, when both the appearance of the yard and the language of its grave markers indicated that it was a sacred space, a space designed to communicate the importance of both individual and collective virtues in the formation of Christian community. Eighteenth-century Anglicans in South Carolina enlisted their material world to negotiate rationalism, common sense philosophy, and other tenants of Latitudinarian Anglicanism. Aware of Newton’s vast universe, Anglicans divested themselves of a symbolic geometry that linked the church with the immediacy of the supernatural. Embracing an ancient Platonic connection between the aesthetic and the moral sense, regularity manifested order while beauty invited a search for something greater than itself.¹⁶⁸ Architecture took on a new role in the eighteenth century as the regular and the beautiful in the liturgy, architecture, and music became agents of moral refinement. In the previous century, such benefits were derived from participation in the sacraments alone. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the practice of home devotions declined as the sacrament of baptism migrated from the home to the more spectacular setting of the church chancel. In another shift, Anglicans remained in the church to witness the sacrament of Communion, even if they were not participating. Since communicants no longer collectively occupied the chancel, they became an imagined community. By 1763 the sacrament had become an event witnessed by so many that Robert Smith felt compelled to emphasize the fact of community to his communicants at St. Philip’s. All those participating in the sacrament, he argued, “are part of the Household of Faith, who profess themselves followers of the blessed Jesus, united into one body, and by the strictest bonds of Love and purity.”¹⁶⁹ Architecture and ritual practice no longer made this point self-evident. The chancel had been transformed from a chamber to a proscenium as congregations became assemblies, visually and aurally consuming the beauty of the liturgy and the Communion. As virtues became the evidence of Christian faith, headstones and church steeples placed less emphasis on God’s imminence and more on the beauty and identity of the individual. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglicans in South Carolina underwent a subtle transformation in theology that had profound implications for belief and worship.¹⁷⁰ As scientific empiricism threw into question the agency of the supernatural, Anglicans found greater distance between themselves and the Godhead. Simultaneously, this drive toward empiricism drew on an ancient philosophical tradition gaining currency in elite Anglican circles that recognized beauty as evidence of holiness. As a result, the arts— architecture, music, and ritual—became a powerful lens into the nature of God. Virtues, an empirical gauge of beauty in the individual, were evidence of the Christian. As beauty moved to the center of Anglican religious culture, certain places that best exemplified beauty—and by extension best exemplified the holiness of God—were sanctified, set apart from the rest. Whereas 248

BELIEF AND RITUAL IN MATERIAL RELIGION

early eighteenth-century churches were sacred because they manifested the presence of the divine, later churches and churchyards were sacred because they reflected the nature of God. Significantly, this emphasis on beauty as an objective property of things, buildings, and people persisted through the majority of the eighteenth century. God implanted a sense of beauty in the faithful so that they might recognize grace, which in the later eighteenth century had both aesthetic and theological dimensions.¹⁷¹ The design and construction of St. Michael’s Church signaled that Anglicans had embraced a theology of aesthetics that celebrated the virtuous and the beautiful. By the middle of the century, Anglicans began constructing self-consciously beautiful buildings that reflected their changing conceptions of God. Not only were these buildings beautiful, but they were also stripped of the superstitions that so densely animated the churches of previous generations. It is true, of course, that many of these visual refinements are part of a larger transformation of British architecture in the eighteenth century toward a refinement of form often described as the Georgian aesthetic. So it cannot be said that Georgian architecture was a product of the theological changes discussed here. But it is also true that these changes carried a specific burden in the context of Anglican theology and practice. Anglican architecture donned Georgian refinements for specific purposes. But Anglican expressions of beauty had social dimensions as well. In embracing beauty and reason, these churches began to separate whites from the growing black majority that surrounded them, people who were enmeshed in the ugliest realities of the age and who—in an act of self-preservation—retained a vital belief in the supernatural. Evaluated by the new theologies, slaves were neither beautiful nor regular. Religious belief and practice—however idealist—is always implicated by the social and political context in which it operates. The next few chapters explore more fully these dimensions of Anglican material religion—the use of the church to reify political, economic, social, and racial authority.

THE BEAUTY OF HOLIN ES S

249

This page intentionally left blank

PA RT I I I

Material Religion and Social Practice

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7 CA ROLI NA I N Y E W E ST I N DI E S

Not far from the strip malls of South Carolina Highway 52 stands an ancient church still protected from suburban sprawl by a sheltering wood (FIG. 7.1). An architectural frontispiece of pilasters, entablature, and pediment surrounds the large double door of the brick building’s striking facade. Tall, arched windows open through each of the four elevations, rusticated quoins of plaster trim each of the building’s corners, and the gable ends terminate in the clipped profile of a jerkinhead roof. Dedicated in 1719 but begun some years before, St. James, Goose Creek, is the most well-preserved early church in South Carolina, and it survives as an important testament to the colony’s earliest heritage.¹ Due to its dense population of Barbadian emigrants in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Goose Creek has long been associated with the Caribbean. The so-called Goose Creek Men were a party of fervent Anglicans who played a significant role in the passage of the Church Act and other church-state politics in the early colony. By extension, the architecture of St. James has long been celebrated for its “Caribbean

F IGURE 7.1   Exterior view of St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

character.” In an effort to accentuate its heritage, for example, the church was repainted in 1931 “after a fashion still used in the British West Indies.”² The restored painting scheme colored the body of the church a light red, which has since faded to pink, and the quoins and woodwork were painted white, giving the building the particular mix of pastel walls and bright white trim that to the modern eye is particularly “Caribbean.”³ Although the historical connections are quite secure, the extent to which the architecture of St. James derives from this early Carolina-Caribbean connection—twentiethcentury painting schemes aside—remains largely unexamined. Is St. James the Caribbean church its historians have so long imagined? The logical place to begin answering that question is, of course, Barbados.⁴ But when the form and character of St. James turns out to be quite different from churches in its presumed cultural hearth, the nature of “Carolina in ye West Indies,” as it was often described in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, must be more complex than derivative models suggest.⁵ St. James does, in fact, have strong connections with its counterparts in a much broader landscape described by historians as “the Greater British Caribbean,” a region ranging from Barbados, north through the Leeward Islands, South Carolina, and Virginia, and west to Jamaica.⁶ By the early eighteenth century, this region was characterized by a recognizable class of hereditary elite fashioning themselves after the English landed gentry. This newly established class enlisted heraldic imagery, segregated entrances, and even the cruciform plan of their church to reify their social and political status in and authority over the plantations of the Greater British Caribbean. THE HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS between South Carolina and Barbados have been well documented. Historians have long recognized that a majority of the large landholders in seventeenth-century South Carolina, including the Colleton, Drayton, Middleton, Gibbes, Bull, and Lucas families, were the younger sons of estate holders in Barbados. But emigration from Barbados was not limited to the upper echelon. In fact, approximately 54 percent of all white immigrants who came to South Carolina in the first two decades after English settlement were from Barbados.⁷ South Carolina’s parish system of government was modeled on that of Barbados, and seven of the ten parishes established in Carolina by 1716 share names with correspondents in the older Caribbean colony.⁸ There are even direct connections between Anglican families in the two colonies. Writing in 1714, the Reverend Maule, minister of St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish, indicated that “ground whereon the Church is Built was a free Gift of the Landgrave Colleton’s in Barbadoes.”⁹ This Landgrave Colleton was from the same family as the “Major Generall Colletton” who oversaw the construction of a parish church in St. John’s on Barbados in the 1660s. Compelling arguments have also been made that South Carolina’s agricultural system, especially the legislation regulating slaves, depended on a Barbadian model. Citing the steady trade between Carolina and Barbados, the foremost historian of this colonial connection, Jack Greene, has argued 254

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.2 Detail of St. Michael’s from Samuel Copen’s 1695 Prospect of Bridgetown in Barbados

that the cultural connection between the two persisted into the eighteenth century, well after the tide of Barbadian immigration subsided.¹⁰ Under a model of cultural dissemination, Anglican churches in South Carolina should resemble in some ways those of Barbados. In both form and character, however, the churches of Barbados were quite different. Samuel Copen’s 1695 Prospect of Bridgetown in Barbados includes one of the few representations of a seventeenth-century Barbadian church (FIG. 7.2). Completed in 1665, St. Michael’s Parish Church stands in the capital city of Bridgetown and survives today, albeit in a much altered state.¹¹ The tall brick church was rectangular in plan, broad enough to accommodate two rows of interior columns supporting the steeply pitched gable roof. The church had a south porch with a vestry room above. Tall, arched windows punctuated the long elevations, which were trimmed by a crenellated parapet. The vestry minutes indicate that by 1682, the great east window—not visible in the Copen view— had been replaced with a protruding chancel. A square brick tower, also with a crenellated parapet, was added to the west end in 1712–15.¹² Characterized by external porches and chancels and internal chancel screens and trimmed by “gothic” crenellations, this seventeenth-century church on Barbados seems worlds away from the formal clarity and classical simplicity of St. James. In fact, the engaged columns of the surviving seventeenth-century south porch on St. James, Holetown, seems to be the only architectural correspondent in early Barbados to St. James, Goose Creek (FIG. 7.3). The connections of St. James to the Caribbean become more apparent, however, when considered in the context of the entire Greater Caribbean. Rather than thinking about South Carolina’s architecture as the descendent C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

255

F IGURE 7.3   South porch on St. James, Holetown, Barbados, ca. 1660 (Photo by author)

of Barbadian originals, it is more accurate to think of Anglican churches in both South Carolina and Barbados as components of an emerging British plantation culture that stretched from Barbados through the Leeward Islands and Jamaica to South Carolina and Virginia. The emergence of highly profitable agricultural economies, a regular source of enslaved labor, and a recognizable local elite transformed a region that had been fraught with economic, political, and social instability through the majority of the seventeenth century into eighteenth-century Britain’s prized colonial holdings.¹³ Appearing first in Barbados in the 1650s but in places throughout the region by the 1720s, this elite class enjoyed unprecedented wealth, sustained by large plantations that were passed from generation to generation through inheritance. These emerging elites fashioned themselves on the landed gentry of England. Of South Carolina’s planters, one observer wrote: “The planters have large incomes—live at their ease—enjoy much—suffer little—are high minded, and possess much of that dignity of character which constitutes an independent country gentleman.”¹⁴ But such observations were not unique to South Carolina. Summarizing a body of 1723 clergy reports from these colonies, the bishop of London, Edmund Wilson, found that “whether from the Southern mainland or the sugar islands, these replies were virtually interchangeable.”¹⁵ The various historical circumstances that shaped each colony’s history meant that this class of landed gentry surfaced in each colony at slightly different times. The Sugar Revolution of the 1650s transformed Barbados from a remote English outpost to a center of extraordinary wealth in only a few decades.¹⁶ Enjoying the greatest profits from sugar were those planters who owned large plantations, and it was these men who in the third quarter of the seventeenth century established the planter class on the island. Although 256

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

the Leeward Islands were settled contemporaneously with Barbados, more difficult terrain, frequent drought, greater political instability, and frequent military conflict meant that the planters in these four smaller islands were slower to realize the same profits from sugar.¹⁷ By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, after which the English enjoyed uncontested control over the Leeward Islands, a small number of planters had managed to amass large plantations, and the decades of stability that followed sustained an increasingly wealthy planter class.¹⁸ By the early eighteenth century, Antigua, together with the other Leeward Islands, had “a family-centered society where the great [planting] families were units of considerable permanence and power.”¹⁹ It was in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, almost a century after settlement, that planters in the Leewards began to see the profits from sugar culture that had been realized in Barbados decades earlier. The English capture of Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655 extended sugar culture to this much larger island. The first decades of English life on Jamaica, however, were characterized by significant internal conflict that did not support the establishment of a thriving plantation culture.²⁰ The departure of both buccaneers and small-scale planters by the end of the seventeenth century, however, freed wealthier planters to amass huge tracts of land, even larger than was possible in the smaller, older islands. Historians describe Jamaica’s plantation landscape as having a “self-conscious, articulate, cohesive class of proprietor-administrators” by the early eighteenth century.²¹ Unlike Barbados, a substantial percentage of these prosperous planters were of Scottish descent; one late eighteenth-century estimate reports that as much as one-third of the island’s white population was Scottish.²² While economic profits from sugar culture grew steadily in the early decades of the eighteenth century, an improving market in the 1740s allowed Jamaican planters to expand beyond their counterparts on Barbados and in the Leewards, helping Jamaica become the wealthiest of the sugar colonies. The two mainland colonies also developed agricultural systems that sustained a planter class by, or soon after, the turn of the eighteenth century. Unlike Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, where sugar culture could simply be borrowed from Barbados, South Carolina did not begin to develop its cash crop until the second decade of the eighteenth century. During the late seventeenth century, settlers of South Carolina’s rural parishes built a stable economy through the Indian trade, the production of naval stores, and cattle ranching. But in the early years of the eighteenth century, planters in the Lowcountry parishes began to realize profits from rice cultivation. The wealth derived from these cash crops by the 1710s provided a foundation for a wealthy planter class that retained control of the rural plantation parishes throughout the colonial period.²³ Although Virginia was in fact older than its Caribbean counterparts, economic success in tobacco production in the seventeenth century was complicated by fluctuations in the tobacco market. As a result, the colony did not have a stable planter class through much of its first century. The C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

257

development of elite social and political networks, including the establishment of the parish system of the Church of England, took place in the second half of the seventeenth century. By the 1690s, Virginia witnessed the emergence of a “recognizable, hereditary provincial elite,” and certain families began to consolidate very large plantations.²⁴ In these same years, enslaved Africans became the majority of the labor force, replacing a system of indentured servitude that had provided the majority of labor in the seventeenth century. Thus, highly profitable agricultural economies on large plantations owned by a wealthy hereditary elite and worked by an enslaved labor force coalesced in Barbados by the 1670s, in Jamaica and Virginia by the 1690s, and in the Leewards and South Carolina by the 1710s. The emergence of a strong plantation economy in each of the disparate colonies established across the Greater British Caribbean a cohesive planter class united by a shared political and social identity. The emergence of a planter class across the region was marked by a profound transformation in the architecture of Anglican churches. Prior to the rise of a conspicuous planter elite, Anglican churches in these colonies followed the longitudinal model that characterized seventeenthcentury church building in England. As discussed in chapter 2, these churches had a long, narrow rectilinear footprint. Newport Parish Church, built in the 1680s in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, is probably the best surviving example of this church-planning tradition in the region. Not including its western tower, the body of the church measures approximately thirty feet by sixty-six feet, a decidedly longitudinal form (FIG. 7.4). Archaeological evidence indicates that two Virginia contemporaries were built on the same plan—the second Bruton Parish Church (1681–83) and the James City Parish Church (ca. 1680). The same proportions characterize Vere Parish Church, a Jamaican church of approximately the same date.²⁵ Under construction by 1671 and completed by 1682, the footprint of Vere Church measured thirty-two feet wide and seventy-two feet long.²⁶ The footprint of the Valley Church on Antigua, as it was begun in 1689, takes on the same long, narrow plan. It is no surprise that the traditional longitudinal plan found throughout seventeenth-century England characterized contemporary church construction in the Greater British Caribbean through much of the seventeenth century. While a handful of buildings that survive from the 1670s and 1680s are brick or stone masonry, most of the early Anglican churches in the region were probably timber-frame buildings. A French traveler through the Caribbean wrote in the 1660s that “the churches are not comparable to those in France, they are fifteen or sixteen measures long, and three or four in height. About three or four feet above ground level, the walls are of stone either dressed or small ones; the rest of the walls including the roof are of timber construction; and all the siding is pierced to allow the air to pass.”²⁷ The late seventeenth-century timber-frame church in St. Thomas’s Parish on St. Kitts, for example, was described in 1706 as decidedly longitudinal, “about 258

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

50 foot long & 20 foot broad.” But it was also “Boarded and shingled, with good Iron wood Cratches with Pews and Desk.”²⁸ Iron wood is a West Indian timber that was used widely from a very early date for its resistance to both rot and insect infestation. But its density and strength made it more difficult to shape into traditional joinery, which might be one reason this church used cratches—naturally formed Y-joints used to support roof framing—rather than traditional box framing, which employed complex pegged, mortise, and tenon joinery. But simpler framing did not necessarily mean that the church was “rude” in the eighteenth-century sense of the term. St. Thomas’s was probably one of the “five very fair Churches, well furnish’d within with Pulpits, and Seats” that were described in 1666.²⁹ The instability that characterized the Greater British Caribbean throughout the seventeenth century resulted in largely timber-frame and often earthfast architecture. The vast majority of the region’s buildings were timber framed, including the churches.³⁰ In 1672, for example, George Ellwood described the buildings on Nevis as “poore much like to a Hogstie in England.”³¹ By the later seventeenth century, however, the increasing wealth generated by an emerging cash-crop culture was slowly beginning to have its effect. As early as the 1660s, Anglicans in Barbados began replacing their timber-frame churches with substantial masonry churches of brick or stone.³² The plantation parish of St. John’s, on the windward coast of Barbados, decided to replace their frame church with a new stone church in 1660. By 1665 Anglicans in Bridgetown had completed the substantial brick church of St. Michael’s. If the 1689 date on the stone baptismal font is any indication, the parish of St. John’s, Holetown, had also begun a substantial church-building campaign by the late seventeenth century (see FIG. 2.38). Brick churches began to appear in other colonies a few decades later. Newport Parish Church (1680s) in Virginia, Vere Parish Church (begun 1671) on Jamaica, and the Valley Church (ca. 1689) on Antigua are evidence of the shift to masonry construction in other colonies by the closing decades of the century (FIGS. 7.4 and 7.5). In the 1690s, Anglicans on Jamaica began the construction of St. Andrews Half-Way-Tree, followed soon thereafter by St. Thomas’s Parish Church in Kingston and St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown, begun in 1712 (FIG. 7.6). After 1700 Anglicans in Virginia began building brick churches in numbers that far outstripped the handful from the later decades of the seventeenth century.³³ The Leeward Islands and South Carolina—where a stable plantation economy and a planter class appeared latest—were also the last to see monumental masonry churches. As a seventeenth-century masonry church in the Leewards, the Valley Church was unique. By the opening decades of the eighteenth century, however, substantial churches appeared with some regularity. Large masonry churches appeared in a number of parishes on the island of Nevis, for example, in the early decades of the eighteenth century (FIG. 7.7). Although the first churches in South Carolina were frame, the Church Act of 1706 provided funds for the construction of masonry churches. Even so, most of the buildings that C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

259

F IGURE 7. 4  Newport Parish Church (St. Luke’s), Isle of Wight County, Va., 1680s (Photo by author)

F IGURE 7.5  Plan of St. Luke’s Parish Church, 1680s (Drawn by Dell Upton)

followed immediately thereafter were fairly small. It was not until the profits from rice began to flow in the 1710s and 1720s that Anglicans began building substantial masonry churches. Not completed until 1719, the church of St. James in Goose Creek was the largest of the churches initiated by the Church Act of 1706 and is probably the earliest of the churches erected in South Carolina by the emergent planter class (see FIG. 7.1). It is no surprise that the three wealthiest rural parishes—St. John’s, Berkeley; St. James, Goose Creek; and St. Andrew’s—also built the largest parish churches in the early decades of the century.³⁴ Appearing first in Barbados in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, masonry churches began to rise in Jamaica and Virginia in the last quarter of the century and in the Leeward Islands and South Carolina in the opening years of the eighteenth century. As discussed in an earlier chapter, a notable contingent of these new masonry churches was built on the cruciform plan. Although the parish 260

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.6 Plan of St. Catherine’s Parish Church, Spanishtown, Jamaica, 1712–14 (Drawn by author)

F IGURE 7.7 St. Thomas Parish Church, Nevis, begun mid-eighteenth century and expanded to a cruciform plan in the nineteenth century (Photo by author)

church of St. James, Goose Creek, was rectilinear, the very large chapel of ease begun in that same parish only a decade later followed a cruciform plan (FIG. 2.22). After its expansion in 1723, the parish church of St. Andrew’s in South Carolina was the same form (FIG. 2.1). Evidence survives for at least four cruciform churches in South Carolina in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a majority of churches erected in the Leeward Islands and almost one-third of the churches erected in Virginia were cruciform in shape. It is no surprise that the early eighteenth-century additions to the Valley Church on Antigua were northern and southern wings that transformed that longitudinal building into a cruciform shape (FIG. 2.24). All three of the monumental churches erected in Jamaica between the 1690s and the 1710s were cruciform in plan—St. Andrew’s, Half-Way Tree (1692–1705), Kingston Parish Church (1701–3), and St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown (1712–14). Following this precedent, five C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

261

out of every six churches built on the island in the eighteenth century were of the same form.³⁵ One early eighteenth-century visitor to Jamaica noted the frequency of such plans: “The Churches in the Towns are generally in the form of a cross.”³⁶ Together with monumental family seats, the appearance of substantial masonry—often cruciform—churches in the decades between 1670 and 1720 marked the rise of a stable, hereditary planter class in the colonies of the Greater Caribbean. Contingent with the rise of a planter class in each colony, these masonry churches began to adopt certain characteristics that reflect the formation of a collective identity among the region’s planter elite. The first characteristic is that many of these churches have explicit connections to elite families in the parish. Parish churches often highlighted the place of these families in the space of the church and its rituals through honorific entrances and seating patterns. They also became markers of status for certain families by recognizing their station through burial of their dead in places of honor. Finally, and most remarkable, is the prevalence among them of the cruciform plan, departing from the longitudinal plan that characterized church construction through the majority of the seventeenth century. The implications of each of these features will be addressed in turn. Even though no one church retains evidence of all of these practices, taken together they report on the appropriation of the architecture of the church by this new elite, hereditary, landed class for the purposes of reifying their social and political station. The earliest evidence of these changes appears in the seventeenth-century vestry records of St. John’s Parish on the island of Barbados. In March 1660 the parish vestry established a committee for the construction of a new stone church. Although the building was completed fairly quickly, the parish would not worship there for long. In 1675 a devastating hurricane so extensively damaged the structure that a committee recommended the parish build a new building on the old foundations. While the minutes offer no dimensions, they do indicate that the church had both a western porch and an eastern chancel.³⁷ A wooden screen separated the chancel from the nave.³⁸ Most significantly, the rebuilding in 1675–77 included two major additions to the 1660 building, “two Isles and Vaults, one at the North end and one at ye South.” Like the chancel, these northern and southern wings were separated from the body of the church by wooden screens. Each of these wings was funded entirely by the patriarch of a major local family—Henry Walton for the northern wing and Christopher Codrington for the southern. These spaces were privately owned by these men and their “heirs and assignees forever, for [their] sole use...for seates and burying place.”³⁹ These few lines of vestry minutes reporting on the erection of two private chambers appended to the parish church of St. John’s are the first evidence of leading families in the Greater British Caribbean appropriating the architecture of Anglican churches to give material form to their status within the parish. The Waldon and Codrington families both enjoyed a physical prominence in their parish church because they played a leading role in the financial 262

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.8 Christ Church, Lancaster County, Va., 1732–35 (Photo by author)

support of the church construction. Such support became a practice across the region by the early eighteenth century. One of the most well-known examples of such beneficence is the 1732–35 construction of Christ Church in Lancaster County, Virginia, by Robert “King” Carter (FIG. 7.8). While few other churches were funded entirely by a single individual, there were many that benefited in large part from the graces of a local family. The cost of building the church in St. James, Goose Creek, for example, had been “chiefly defray’d at the generous cost of Arthur Middleton, Esqr. and one or two of the wealthier Parishioners.”⁴⁰ Middleton was a Barbadian émigré. As a result of another private donation from parishioner and church commissioner Thomas Broughton, the interior of St. John’s Parish Church in Berkeley, South Carolina, was fitted with “a handsome pulpit, reading Desk, clerks Pew, Communion Table, and a Chancel Railed in.”⁴¹ In some instances, the relationship between a leading family and the local parish church was made explicit through proximity of the church to the family seat. An excellent South Carolina example is Charles Fraser’s early nineteenth-century view of William Bull’s Sheldon plantation, which shows Bull’s house nearly adjacent to the parish church in Prince William’s (also built by Bull) (FIG. 7.9). That same relationship could be found in Virginia, as can be seen in the plat of the Byrd family’s house at Westover and Westover Parish Church (FIG. 7.10). In this plat of the Byrd property, a straight road connects the family seat and the parish church, implying the preeminence of the Byrd family in the life of the parish. The architecture of Anglican churches in the Greater Caribbean further reinforced the distinction of certain families in the local community through differentiated access and seating. Although St. James, Goose Creek, has three exterior doors, all located in the center of their respective elevations and C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

263

F IGURE 7.9 Charles Fraser, View of Sheldon Plantation, ca. 1800 (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts)

F IGURE 7.10 A plan of Westover (Charles City County), probably after 1731. William Byrd title book (Virginia Historical Society)

all accessing the same space, they are not all equal. The far greater architectural elaboration of the west door clearly differentiates it from those on the north and south sides. The western door of St. James Church in Goose Creek boasts classical pilasters supporting a full pediment, complete with ornamental frieze and pedimental sculpture. Although the northern and southern elevations are crowned with a segmental arch, in comparison to 264

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.11 Side entrance of St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 7.12 Southern elevation of St. Thomas in the East, St. Thomas Parish, Jamaica, ca. 1750 (Photo by author)

the western door, they are clearly the lesser entrances (FIG. 7.11; compare to FIG. 7.1). Planters in the Greater Caribbean used the distinction between doors to reinforce status in the parish. The church of St. Andrew’s in South Carolina, for example, was described in 1718 as having both a “great” and a “little” door. By the little door, wrote an early minister, “both ministers and people do commonly go into the church,” while the great door, “through which ministers seldom go into the church,” was reserved for planters and their families (see FIG. 2.4).⁴² Evidence for similar patterns of differentiated access appear also on other Anglican churches in the Caribbean. Sometime in the middle years of the eighteenth century, the vestry of St. Thomas-in-the-East erected a highly articulated cruciform church in their rural plantation parish with a very clear hierarchy of elevations. The southern elevation, decidedly the most elaborated, has pilasters, cornice, raking hood, and window and door surrounds of bright white stone that contrast sharply with the dark red brick walls (FIG. 7.12). Pilasters trim the edges of the southern elevation and once supported a white stone cornice, although the majority of that particular detail does not survive. That cornice supported an attic that was itself capped with another cornice of white stone; a short run of modillions from this cornice remains intact. The western elevation is decidedly less ornamental than the southern, but the northern is remarkably plain. In light of the southern elevation, this was clearly the least significant of the building’s elevations and the least fashionable door into the church. The planning of St. Thomas’s interior reinforced the hierarchical arrangement of its exterior. Scars on the interior brickwork indicate that the C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

265

F IGURE 7.13 Plan of St. Thomas in the East, St. Thomas Parish, Jamaica, ca. 1750 (Drawn by author)

F IGURE 7.1 4 Plan of Christ Church, Lancaster County, Va., 1732–35 (Drawn by Dell Upton)

western and northern arms both contained galleries; no gallery hung over those pews accessed by the finest, southern elevation (FIG. 7.13). Significantly, the elevated pulpit stood on the northeastern corner of the crossing. This placement of galleries and pulpit provided the greatest visibility to those seated in the pews of the southern arm. Those same pews had the most convenient view of the pulpit. Both the interior and exterior of the parish church in St. Thomas-in-the-East were blatantly hierarchical and reinforce the mid-eighteenth-century observation by an English gentleman that “all [ Jamaican gentlemen] have something of a haughty disposition, and require Submission.”⁴³ Not only did the planning of the interior mean that the most comfortable view from the pews was in the southern arm, but it also reinforced the importance of being seen. It is possible that St. Thomas’s and other parish churches included a great pew like that erected for the royal governor in St. Catherine’s Church in Spanishtown, Jamaica. Writing in 1774, Edward Long indicated that “the governor’s pew is distinguished from the rest by being raised higher, and crowned with a canopy.”⁴⁴ Vestry minutes further note that the pew had cushioned chairs instead of the benches that filled most of the pews.⁴⁵ Neither was this practice unique to Jamaica. Claims to political authority in St. John’s Parish in Barbados meant that in addition to the wings added by Henry Walton and Christopher Codrington, the vestry added “two greate seates to be raised into their places answerable to the Highest seate now in 266

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

the chancell.”⁴⁶ Such seats surely had a material form that distinguished them from the more common seats in the church. Because of Arthur Middleton’s generous support of the construction of the church of St. James, Goose Creek, the vestry designated to him “one enclosed Pew or Seat, containing about 5 feet 6 inches by 7 feet of ground.” That pew became the private property of the designee; it was “hereby Ordained, Given and Appropriated Solely and only to the use of the said Arthur Middleton, Esq. and his heirs for Ever.”⁴⁷ Middleton’s pew probably approximated in relative size Robert Carter’s pew in the church he financed in Lancaster County, Virginia (FIG. 7.14). This emphasis on visibility was no accident. According to one mideighteenth-century observer in Jamaica, “The common Dress here is none of the most becoming: The Heat makes many cloaths intolerable, and therefore the Men generally wear only Thread stockings, Linen Drawers and Vest, a Handkerchief tied round their Head and a Hat above. Wigs are never used but on Sunday, or in Court-time; and then Gentlemen appear very gay in silk Coats, and Vests trimmed with Silver.”⁴⁸ Sunday services were one of the most important opportunities for self-presentation. The prominence of certain families in the space of the church continued after death. Burial of the local elite within the walls of the parish church was a centuries-old English practice that persisted in the Greater Caribbean into the eighteenth century.⁴⁹ A typical example—Ezekiel Gomessall’s ledger stone in St. Thomas’s Parish Church, Kingston, Jamaica—includes only the essential text surmounted by an elaborated family crest (FIG. 7.15). Similar markers appear in a number of early churches on the islands of Nevis and Barbados as well. The parish church of St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown, Jamaica, for example has a large collection of floor slabs that preserve the names of the parish’s most prominent families. In 1762 St. Catherine’s vestry noted, “The pavement of the church is in a most miserable order, owing to the graves being dug in the church, which it was the opinion of the vestry ought as much as possible to be discouraged.” To that end, they “determined that no body should be buried in the church without the previous payment of one hundred pounds.”⁵⁰ Such fees ensured that only the most prominent families would pursue burial within the church. The status of the local elite was also engraved in the memorials mounted on the walls of the church. The walls of numerous early Jamaican churches are ornamented with elaborate marble monuments from the early eighteenth century onward. The most extensive collection of such monuments survives in St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown. Usually dating from the 1720s through the eighteenth century, the earliest monuments are richly carved baroque forms with organic ornament, drapery, and cherubs framing a shield carrying the inscription and usually featuring the deceased’s family crest (FIG. 7.16). By midcentury, these wall memorials became more architectonic, with engaged columns and entablatures, but they were often still ornamented with cherubs (FIG. 7.17). By the end of the century, the scale expanded dramatically, as Anglican families commissioned leading English sculptors to execute sophisC ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

F IGURE 7.15 Ezekiel Gomessall ledger stone, St. Thomas Parish Church, Kingston, Jamaica, 1734 (Photo by author)

267

F IGURE 7.16 Thomas Rose wall marker, St. Catherine’s Parish Church, Spanishtown, Jamaica, ca. 1724 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 7.17 Memorial for John Hudson, St. Catherine’s Parish Church, Spanishtown, Jamaica, 1743 (Photo by author)

ticated and often life-size figural scenes in marble. The monument by John Bacon to Thomas Howard, Earl of Effingham and governor of Jamaica from 1790 to 1791, and his wife, Catherine, is only the most remarkable of a series by the English sculptor (FIG. 7.18). Usually beginning with the phrase “Near this place,” these markers memorialized those buried within the footprint of the church. John Morant’s 1723 wall memorial in Vere Parish Church on Jamaica begins, “Beneath this marble in this pew lieth interred,” making explicit the practice of burial of the elite within the family pew. Together with these memorials, Morant’s pew functioned in much the same way as Walden’s and Codrington’s screened chambers. All created spaces signifying the place of that family in the local social hierarchy, both as seats for the living and as places of rest for their recent ancestors. Whether a floor slab or a wall monument, these memorials were unified by one distinguishing feature: their persistent display of family heraldry. The remarkable collection of slab markers that survive from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on the island of Nevis illustrates the significance of family coats of arms by the early eighteenth century. In and around the island’s five early parish churches lie twenty-five slab grave markers, ranging in date from 1649 to the early 1760s. Notably, not a single 268

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.18   John Bacon, memorial for Thomas Howard, Earl of Effingham and governor of Jamaica, and his wife, Catherine, 1791 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 7.19 Thomas Pym grave slab, St. Thomas, Lowland, Parish Church, Nevis, ca. 1743 (Photo by author)

marker before the 1690s includes a family coat of arms. Of the markers that range in date from 1690 to the 1760s, however, thirteen include a substantial coat of arms. Thomas Pym’s white variegated marble slab is just one of the many examples from the island in these years (FIG. 7.19). The rise of the brick parish church corresponds with the rise of the heraldry on grave markers and wall memorials, and both correspond chronologically to the rise of great wealth derived from a plantation economy.⁵¹ This emphasis on elite memorials and family heraldry appears also in the mainland colonies. The walls of St. James, Goose Creek, carry monuments to John and Jane Gibbes of painted plaster on wood in emulation of the marble examples like those installed in St. Catherine’s (FIGS. 7.20 and 7.21). John’s carries his family crest in an obvious claim to status. One later Carolinian hoping to secure a copy of his family coat of arms expressed in a letter his wish that his children “have all the Rights to rank, a distinction, which is to be claimed from Ancestry.”⁵² The Gibbes family was not only an important planter family in the parish; they were also one of the few families allocated pews by the vestry before the remaining seats were sold.⁵³ After John Gibbes’s death, LeJau complained, “I must arm myself with Patience and for want of a potent friend must submit to see neither my church nor house finish’d.”⁵⁴ C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

269

F IGURE 7.2 0 John Gibbes monument, St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, 1711 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 7.21 Jane Gibbes monument, St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, 1717 (Photo by author)

Gibbes had been a major benefactor of the church, and at his death there was no leading man in the parish who would step into that position. Gibbes’s status was memorialized through the monument erected in the church in his memory. A handful of early eighteenth-century South Carolina and Virginia slabs also bear coats of arms. The slab covering Ann Nairn’s large 1720 chest tomb outside St. Andrew’s Parish Church in South Carolina boasts an elaborated family crest, as does William Rhett’s 1723 slab mounted on the large mausoleum at St. Philip’s Church in the same colony (see FIG. 2.48). The best Virginia examples are found in the churchyard of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg. The occasional presentation of family coats of arms on the exteriors of houses, such as the arms of the Baker family over the door of their seat at Archdale Hall (1706–10), would have made explicit the visual connections between powerful families, power houses, and the parish church. In ways common to the Caribbean examples, the John Gibbes monument carries in the center of its design his coat of arms, reinforcing not only his personal identity but also the status of the Gibbes family. The two early South Carolina monuments begin with “Under this lies” and “Near this place lies,” both implying, like their Caribbean counterparts, that their bodies were laid to rest within the walls of the church. But the practice of internal interment did not persist in South Carolina as it did in the Caribbean.⁵⁵ When asked about burial within St. Philip’s in Charleston in the 1740s, the vestry of that parish responded, “Burying in the church in this climate would not only be improper but might be attended with very 270

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.22 Design for William Wragg monument for Westminster Abbey, attributed to Richard Hayward (Historic Charleston Foundation)

bad consequences.”⁵⁶ Caribbean Anglicans seem not to have had the same reservations. The discontinuation of internal interment in South Carolina, however, did not mean that the practice of memorializing the elite with wall memorials disappeared. While later wall memorials in rural parish churches seem not to have survived, there was an extensive collection of wall memorials in St. Philip’s Church in Charleston before its demise by fire. A number of these were represented in White’s early nineteenth-century interior view of the church (see FIG. 1.5). The interior of the church had so many memorials of such high quality that it was compared to Westminster Cathedral. While none of those survive, one of similar age does survive in England. On par with the Bacon memorials in St. Catherine’s in Spanishtown is the memorial to South Carolina Loyalist William Wragg, erected in Westminster Abbey after his death in 1777 (FIG. 7.22). Not only is the monument of an enormous scale relative to earlier colonial memorials; it is the only monument to a colonial erected in the London church most closely associated with great men of England.⁵⁷ C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

271

F IGURE 7.23   Estridge Mausoleum, St. John’s Capesterre, St. Kitts, mid-eighteenth century (Photo by author)

F IGURE 7.24   Family mausoleum in the churchyard of St. Helena’s parish, Beaufort, South Carolina (Photo by author)

IN SOME INSTANCES, planter families asserted their place in the parish through the location of large monuments or family mausoleums in the churchyard. Eighteenth-century planters on St. Kitts, for example, made a habit of erecting a monumental family mausoleum immediately outside the principal entrances to their new parish churches (FIG. 7.23). The early elite in South Carolina and Virginia did much the same thing. Although they are less monumental, a number of South Carolina families erected a mausoleum in their parish churchyard (FIG. 7.24). Location also played a significant role for monumental chest tombs. The chest tomb of Elizabeth Nairn stands just beyond the original location of the great door into St. Andrew’s, explicitly associating her family with the best entrance into the church. So, too, William Rhett’s heraldic slab rests on a mausoleum situated immediately opposite the west entrance to St. Philip’s Church. In each case, not only the form but also the ornament and location of the memorial established the deceased among the leading families in the parish. 272

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.25 Carter family tombs at Christ Church, Lancaster, Va. (Photo by author)

These material expressions of elite families filled and surrounded Anglican churches, which by the early eighteenth century were frequently cruciform in shape—a planning tradition largely alien to contemporary building practices in England. As argued in chapter 2, one possible explanation for the appearance of cruciform church plans is the increasing attention paid by English colonists of the Caribbean to the structural stability of their architecture in an environment regularly battered by hurricanes and occasionally rocked by earthquakes. It is significant, however, that the cruciform plan also appears in colonies like Virginia, frequented only rarely by hurricanes. So while the motivations for building cruciform churches might in some respects be found in the violence of the Caribbean climate, the preference for the plan must also have had social or cultural motivations. Alan Gowans has suggested that the cruciform plan of Robert “King” Carter’s church in Virginia—Christ Church, Lancaster—might depend on centuries of tradition that conflate the functions of parish church and family mausoleum. Not only was Christ Church located very near the ancestral seat of the Carter family, but the 1728 deed from Robert Carter that helped to fund the church also specified that it was to stand on the site where his father was buried and that the chancel of the new church be “preserved as a burial place for my family.”⁵⁸ Robert Carter is buried in the chancel and other members of his family were buried immediately behind the chancel wall to the east of the church (FIG. 7.25). In his discussion of Christ Church, Gowans demonstrates that the cruciform church was in the late seventeenth century a church form used occasionally in Scotland and England to memorialize locally prominent families. In Scotland, the Lauder Church of 1673; the church in Glenclourse, Midlothian, built in 1699; and another in Canisbay, Caithness, of the same age were all cruciform churches built to memorialize prominent families. The density of Scottish émigrés to Jamaica might explain the prevalence of the cruciform plan on that island. A few similar examples also appear in England. Among the best is the church at Farley, in Wiltshire, C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

273

F IGURE 7.2 6   All Saints Church, Farley, Wiltshire, England, ca. 1690 (Photo by author)

erected in 1689–90 (FIG. 7.26). The northern wing of that cruciform church was a family seat and mausoleum for the Fox family, who rose from obscurity in the seventeenth century to high offices under Charles II. In its form, it probably compared very closely with the family wings added by the Waldon and Codrington families to the parish church of St. John’s on Barbados. The erection of a family wing, screened from the church proper and serving both as a seat and a burial place, was an acceptable post-Reformation emulation of the medieval chantry chapel in which prayers were said in perpetuity for the souls of deceased benefactors. While the theological practices of the chantry chapel were abandoned at the Reformation, the honorific functions of the form persisted. In this way, Christ Church in Virginia, St. John’s on Barbados, and Farley Church in Wiltshire used the cruciform planning of their churches to commemorate the establishment of locally prominent families in a way that depended on centuries of English practice. Once inscribed in the landscape, the cruciform plan, with its differentiated entrances, hierarchies of seating, and memorial functions, persisted in the Greater Caribbean as a sign of the social authority of prominent families. The exotic tropical context of the Greater Caribbean might also have played a role in the perpetuation of this plan. The cruciform Anglican church was a British landmark in an otherwise African landscape. Enslaved Africans were the majority population in Barbados by 1660 and in South Carolina by 1720.⁵⁹ While Virginians owned a large number of African slaves, their numbers were never greater than the colony’s white occupants.⁶⁰ By the early eighteenth century, Jamaica’s large plantations established the largest population of enslaved Africans and a greater disproportion of blacks to whites than any other British colony.⁶¹ The Caribbean slave-based agricultural economy had distinct implications for the physical nature of the plantation landscape. 274

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 7.27 Andie Le Breton, engraving of African maroon village, Jamaica

The heat and humidity, the dense and lush vegetation, and the exotic flowers, animals, and birds more closely approximated Africa than foggy England. One Englishman noted that the seemingly innumerable slaves in Jamaica were summoned to their labors not by European bells but “by the sound of a Conche-shell.” He also noted that thatched huts on this tropical island made “every Plantation look like a little African city” (FIG. 7.27).⁶² In South Carolina, the beat of African drums—thought by contemporaries and modern scholars to be one way of communicating conspiracy—resounded across open rice fields.⁶³ Until 1740 a majority of the slaves in South Carolina were African born. Archaeological evidence suggests that they built their houses in ways that approximated African architecture.⁶⁴ The sights, sounds, and smells were so densely African that in 1737 a Swiss observer suggested that South Carolina’s plantation landscape “looked more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.”⁶⁵ To greater or lesser degrees, the same could be said for each of the plantation parishes throughout the region. The racial imbalance had sharp implications for race relations. By the late seventeenth century, slave riots became increasingly common in the English Caribbean, sustaining among whites a latent anxiety fueled by racial tension. In the English Caribbean there were at least seven revolts of fifty or more slaves that resulted in the deaths of both whites and blacks between 1640 and 1713. While the earliest major uprising threatened Barbados in 1675, most uprisings took place on Jamaica.⁶⁶ Although South Carolina’s slaves attempted a revolt in 1730, the first successful slave uprising on the mainland—the Stono Rebellion—occurred in 1739.⁶⁷ In these locales, an increasingly wealthy and powerful class of English planters was fully aware of the African threat to their hegemony. The plantation landscape of the colonial South and the Caribbean was not only African, but it was dangerously so. C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

275

In the midst of these largely African landscapes stood hulking brick cruciform churches, buildings that asserted English planter authority over the land and its people.⁶⁸ In the same years that white Jamaicans realized their island now included an enslaved majority, the royal governor was instructed to “promote the Church of England...as far as it will consist with the peace and quietness of the island.”⁶⁹ Throughout the eighteenth century, slaves who threatened the established order were delivered severe corporal and often capital punishment. Physical reminders of that punishment marked the landscape; severed heads left on poles, often for years, is only the most gruesome example. The wife of Jamaica’s governor, Lady Maria Nugent, wrote that if she had not already promised her attendance in church, “I would not have gone, for we were obliged to pass close by the pole, on which was stick the head of a black man who was executed a few days ago.”⁷⁰ Roadways that passed by such gruesome visual reminders of Jamaica’s racial instability led to churches that reinforced established hierarchies. The vestry of St. John’s Parish on Barbados, for example, erected stocks immediately outside the churchyard walls. The minister to South Carolina’s Christ Church Parish in 1730 was dismayed that there were such “a great many negroe slaves who make Insurrection sometimes that the People are forced to come to Church with guns—loaded.”⁷¹ By the 1750s this practice had been written into law.⁷² In the most extreme demonstration of English cultural authority, the churchwardens of St. Anne’s Parish on Jamaica paid twenty shillings in 1779 to a slave named Quaw for the execution of Kent, a fellow slave convicted of practicing the creolized religion of Obeah.⁷³ For the disenfranchised, the Anglican Church offered no sanctuary. In building a majority of their churches on a cruciform plan, English planters re-created the English landscape but, significantly, not the landscape of contemporary England, where the cruciform plan was rarely employed. If seventeenth-century church builders in England shied away from the cruciform plan, their medieval counterparts had not. The cruciform plan had been a common planning option for small English parish churches since at least the thirteenth century, and centuries-old cruciform buildings were commonplace in the English landscape. With differentiated entrances, patterns of honorific burial, and the recognition of local gentry, these cruciform churches emulated their medieval predecessors in both form and function. The occasional use of crenellated parapets—“battlements” was the term used to describe the parapet of one church on Jamaica—was yet another material emulation of the medieval past (see FIG. 7.2).⁷⁴ Emulating the medieval parish church positioned the newly established planters as a hereditary, landed aristocracy governing a now-enslaved laboring class. The use of the cruciform church was for eighteenth-century planters a means of imposing a stable—if romanticized—past on a real and alien present fraught with instability. In building cruciform parish churches, Anglicans in the Caribbean sought to recreate in the plantation colonies markers of the agrarian landscape of rural England, an imagined landscape characterized by far greater social, political, 276

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

and racial stability than was true of their own circumstances in the Greater Caribbean. St. James, Goose Creek, was in many ways a church erected in “Carolina in ye West Indies.” Differentiated entrances, honorific seating, internal burials, elite wall memorials, and the cruciform plan of its chapel of ease all marked the parish’s participation in the elite Anglican culture of the Greater British Caribbean in the early eighteenth century. But at the same time, the building’s interest in a compact auditory space and its use of a classical architectural vocabulary marks its distinction from the churches across the Greater Caribbean. Such interest in classical forms—especially as disseminated from the English cosmopolitan center—ultimately differentiated Anglican churches in South Carolina from those in Barbados, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, or Virginia. As discussed in chapter 2, while the cruciform plan was common in South Carolina in the opening decades of the century, the auditory plan would quickly become more popular. In this way, South Carolina’s Anglicans conveyed their shifting allegiances, as their source of identity slowly transferred from the Greater Caribbean to London, the cultural and political center of the English world. Across most of the Greater English Caribbean, Anglicans constructed churches on the cruciform plan through the American Revolution and beyond. In Virginia, Anglicans built two monumental cruciform buildings in the 1750s and St. Paul’s Parish Church in King George County as late as 1766. The erection of large cruciform buildings in the cities of St. John’s on Antigua in 1789 and Montego Bay, Jamaica, in 1774 suggests that the cruciform plan remained in favor in the Caribbean throughout the century. But the same is not true of Anglicans in South Carolina, who began their last cruciform church in the 1730s. If the embrace of the cruciform plan in the first half of the eighteenth century suggests that Anglicans in South Carolina were influenced by the cultural factors of a regional identity, the architecture after midcentury tells a very different story. One significant factor that distinguished South Carolina from most of the other colonies of the Greater British Caribbean was Charleston, a major port city with a strong mercantile connection to London. By the 1740s, at least four London merchant houses specialized in trade with South Carolina.⁷⁵ As a result, the most recent London fashions were readily available in Charleston. As early as 1740, one Charleston resident articulated the increasing attention paid to the cultural practices of the cosmopolitan center: “Charles Town, the principle one in this province, is a polite, agreeable place. The people live very Gentile and very much in the English taste.”⁷⁶ The presence of an increasingly cosmopolitan port city also meant that by midcentury, the majority of the elite in South Carolina were rarely just planters, but planter-merchants or planter-lawyers. It is true that most elite families owned large plantations, but they also owned city residences and enjoyed a public presence in town as well as in the rural parish. Among the most prominent was Peter Manigault, son of Charleston merchant Gabriel Manigault. Trained as a lawyer C ARO LINA IN YE WEST IN D IES

277

in London’s Inner Temple, he returned to South Carolina in 1754, first to practice law and then to participate in politics and mercantile interests. All the while, Manigault managed his own rice and indigo plantations and those of his Goose Creek neighbor Ralph Izard. As a result of Charleston’s economic connections to London during the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the city and the colony turned its attention away from the Caribbean and toward the metropolis. This shift in focus meant that Anglicans in South Carolina selectively retained those features of their architecture that were consistent with elite practices in London, dispensing with those expressions that were decidedly provincial. In doing so, South Carolinians began setting themselves apart from the rest of the Greater Caribbean, preferring contemporary cosmopolitan expressions over provincial ones. As a provincial form, the cruciform plan was dropped almost immediately. So, too, was the practice of burying within the walls of the church, a practice critiqued in the early eighteenth century by London architects Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh. But at the same time, the practice of raising monuments on the interiors of churches persisted, as did the practice of honorific seating. These shifting practices demonstrate the importance of contextual analysis and changes over space and time in the interpretation of architectural forms and styles. The meanings of such referents are never stable but are closely linked to their social and political contexts. Shifting from the generalizations of the Greater Caribbean to the particularities of South Carolina, the next chapter explores in greater detail the ways Anglicans in South Carolina negotiated the material landscape of the church to their own political and economic advantage.

278

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

Chapter 8 A NGLICA N A RCH I T ECT U R E A N D CI V IC OR DE R

Against a field of deep black, the gilt and oversized Roman numerals of the steeple clock of St. Michael’s blaze forth in the bright light of the Carolina sun (FIG. 8.1). Easily visible from the street below, the numbers ring the six-foot dial cheek by jowl without any visible frame. Wound daily by the sexton, the clock rang the hour on the largest of the steeple bells and the quarter hours with a peal of four smaller bells “as the Royal Exchange in London.”¹ The clock of St. Michael’s was an improvement over that of St. Philip’s, which still rang the hours with only a single bell. The St. Philip’s bell was also notoriously dysfunctional through the early decades of the century and was replaced entirely in 1750.² The installation of a clock in an Anglican church steeple was a fairly common practice by the eighteenth century, when clocks replaced sundials. Tolling the bells on the hour expanded upon the seventeenth-century practice of marking dawn and dusk with the peal of church bells.³ While the bells were owned and tolled by churches, the role of the Church of England as the state church meant that bell ringing served not only sacred but also economic, social, and political functions. Whether by single or multiple bells, on the hour or on the quarter hour, by the middle of the eighteenth century Charleston’s residents could order their day by clock time, a new systematic structure regulating everyday life.⁴ Clock time was only one of the many ways that the Anglican Church provided—even imposed—order in early South Carolina. Order stood at the very center of Anglican theology and practice.⁵ In addition to calling together the faithful and marking the beginning of the service, bells were used to mark significant events in the calendar, such as Christmas and New Year, and important rites of passage, such as funerals.⁶ In the late seventeenth century, English church bells were often used to govern the natural progression of the day, chiming at the break of day and at dusk, for example.⁷ The setting apart of the divine service from the rest of the week echoed the Anglican adherence to the liturgical seasons. Like most colonial parishes, those in South Carolina did not abide by the complex schedule of festivals celebrated by their English counterparts.⁸ Most limited themselves to the four most important festival days: Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and St. Michaelmas. These days were often the four occasions for the celebration of Communion.⁹ But even in observing these festivals, Anglicans set

themselves apart from many Protestants, who denounced feast-day celebrations.¹⁰ Just as the liturgy ordered Anglican worship, a calendar ordered the Anglican year. Yet, order was inextricably linked to hierarchy. A system of priests, bishops, and archbishops was in the Anglican mind an earthly manifestation of similar hierarchies in heaven. “Almighty God hath created and appointed all things in heaven earth and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order,” read the Anglican Homily of Obedience. “In heaven he hath appointed distinct and several orders and states of archangels and angels.” Order extended also to God’s creation: “The sun, moon, stars, rainbows, thunder, lightning, clouds and all the birds of the air...the trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep their order.”¹¹ By extension, such order should also govern God’s church: “Every degree of people in their vocations, calling and office, hath appointed to them their duty and order. Some are in high degree; some in low, and every one have need of the other.” In this view, every social station was divinely ordained, a reflection of heavenly hierarchies. But in any context where church and state are intimately commingled, religious order has political implications as well. At the highest level of Anglican government, the archbishop of Canterbury was a personal adviser to the king. At the local level, any political figure had to be a member of the Church of England. The Homily of Obedience taught that kings, princes, and governors were appointed “in a good and necessary order.” While “high degree” in the Church of England always carried with it civic responsibilities, in South Carolina the absence of a county court system amplified the authority of the vestry. Justices of the peace performed only minor duties, leaving the weightiest decisions to the local vestry, the highest authority in the parish.¹² Hierarchical order was understood to preserve order in its second sense: peace. With the authority to direct a liturgy, the priest of a parish could ensure, in theory, that the performance of worship would be orderly, likened to the nature of God. One of South Carolina’s Anglican ministers argued that God was best worshipped “when men have a good form of sound words, and a decent orderly way of addressing themselves to Almighty God; where the worship is grave, solemn, and intelligible.”¹³ In the Anglican view, divine worship was not possible without a common liturgy directed by a recognized authority. It is important to recognize, however, that this theological ideal of ordered worship and ordered society was by no means a reality. Those implicated by these theologies subtly resisted the ordering of society by the Anglican Church. The South Carolina Gazette reported in 1733 that slaves meeting in the streets on Sunday create a “great Noise and Disturbance” with “prophane cursing and swearing and other Enormities to the great Scandal of Christianity.”¹⁴ In 1773 Josiah Quincy complained of “the great numbers playing pawpaw, huzzle cap, pinch penny and quarrelling around the doors of the Churches in service time.”¹⁵ The minutes of St. Michael’s report that “several young

F IGURE 8.1 St. Michael’s steeple, Charleston, 1752–61 (Photo by author)

280

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

Men made a practice of assembling under the Piazza at the West Door of the Church and disturbed the Congregation very much at that end of the Church with walking backwards and forwards, trailing sticks on the Flaggs and talking loud during Divine Service on Sunday Forenoons.”¹⁶ The early nineteenth-century vestry minutes of St. Philip’s Church records numerous complaints about children “running in and out during service.”¹⁷ Order was not easily achieved, and Anglicans enlisted many tools—architecture among them—to realize their theological and political ideal. South Carolina’s Anglicans enlisted the architecture of their churches to assert and preserve order in both city and plantation parishes. Civic order had political, social, temporal, and religious dimensions. As one of the first and most poignant acts manifesting the presence of Anglican political authority over the city, the construction of Charleston’s St. Philip’s Church confirmed the marriage between the colonial government and the Church of England. Anglicans found in the clocks and bells of their steeples useful tools in establishing and preserving order in the urban setting. Church bells tolled from city steeples during “great” funerals, a ritual that enlisted both the cityscape and the architecture of the church to reinforce the established social order by drawing clear lines of distinction between the empowered and the disenfranchised. Steeple clocks also enlisted church bells to chime the hours through the city, introducing clock time, a new system of temporal order enlisted by elites to differentiate, govern, and control. The Anglican drive to establish and preserve order was not limited to the city parishes. Although the Church of England remained the established church throughout the colonial period, by midcentury its authority was challenged by the rising tide of backcountry evangelicals. These new Carolinians introduced an emotionalism to religious worship that explicitly critiqued the orderly performance of the Anglican liturgy and threatened Anglican political hegemony. The classical design of St. Stephen’s was for Anglicans a visible sign of religious and political stability in a landscape increasingly characterized by disorder. From the political motivations of urban church-building campaigns to the order imposed by the clocks and bells of their steeples and the efforts to enlist architecture to preserve order in rural parishes near the backcountry, South Carolina’s Anglican church architecture was a powerful agent in the drive by elite Anglicans to establish and preserve civic order. IN 1739 BISHOP ROBERTS painted a waterfront view of the city of Charleston (FIG. 8.2). The painting represents the city from a thin slice of shore across the Cooper River. The wide expanse of river is littered with a rich variety of ships, from small rowboats to great ocean-worthy vessels. Having eliminated from his painting the wharves and waterfront warehouses that would have obstructed the view of the city from the water, Roberts presents the city as the range of buildings on Bay Street. Large residences stand together with tenements of mixed commercial and residential function. A large bastion stands at the southern end of the city and a guardhouse occupies a trianguARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

281

F IGURE 8.2 Bishop Roberts, View of Charles Town, 1739 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

F IGURE 8.3 Detail of Ichnography of Charles Town at High Water, 1739; St. Philip’s is building “A” in the plan (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts)

lar bastion projecting into the harbor. The most prominent building is St. Philip’s Church, with its monumental nave and tall cupola, rising above the rest of the city. The Ichnography, or city plan, intended to accompany his city view further reinforces the primacy of St. Philip’s over the cityscape (FIG. 8.3).¹⁸ Not only is St. Philip’s far larger than any of the city’s meetinghouses, but it is also the only building that does not conform to the grid plan that governs the rest of the city. Through its monumentality, architectural design, 282

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 8. 4   Redrawn copy of the Grand Model (South Carolina Historical Society)

and location in the city plan, St. Philip’s claimed prominence over Charleston’s public sphere. The design and construction of St. Philip’s asserted not merely an Anglican presence in South Carolina’s capital city, but Anglican authority over it.¹⁹ In an effort to draw a sustainable population, South Carolina was founded as a religiously tolerant colony. Drafted by John Locke, one of the most important political thinkers of the seventeenth century, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the colony’s Lords Proprietors, the Fundamental Constitutions of 1669 indicated a general preference for the Church of England but allowed any group of seven or more persons agreeing in a religion to constitute a legal church, Roman Catholics excepted.²⁰ The “Grand Modell,” drawn sometime after 1671, does not appear to have reserved town lots for any churches, but it divided the city into blocks with primary and secondary streets and indicated the location of the city’s central square (FIG. 8.4).²¹ By 1680 it was assumed that an Anglican church would enjoy a presence on that square. The city was described in that year as “regularly laid out into large and capacious streets, which to buildings is a great ornament and beauty. In it they have reserved convenient places for a church, town house and other public structures.”²² Sometime before 1680, Anglicans obtained the property facing the city square at the intersection of Broad and ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

283

F IGURE 8.5  Crisp Map, 1704. St. Philip’s is the building labeled “Q” standing adjacent to the land-side city gate (South Caroliniana Library; photo courtesy of Old Salem Museum and Gardens)

Meeting Streets (marked on the Grand Model as lot 109) and soon thereafter erected a framed church of black cypress on a brick foundation.²³ In selecting a site on what was to be the city’s central square, Anglicans intended to associate their building with the city’s public life.²⁴ Although little is known about this cypress church, it appears to have been square or slightly rectangular, sheltered by a gable or hipped roof and without a spire or tower. The only surviving representation of this structure appears on Edward Crisp’s 1704 map of the city (FIG. 8.5).²⁵ In the opening decades of the colony’s history, and without financial support from the Colonial Assembly, the erection of a substantial church edifice was neither economically feasible nor practical. As the Crisp map makes clear, the city had begun a series of fortifications that disrupted the original grid plan. By 1704 only two of the city blocks laid out in the Grand Model were completely developed, and subsidiary streets had been cut through these two to allow their interiors to be more densely developed. By the turn of the century, the city fortifications had bisected the Grand Model’s central square and the site of St. Philip’s Church was not as prominent as had been originally intended. 284

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

The first St. Philip’s differed very little in appearance from the Dissenters’ meetinghouses. By the first years of the eighteenth century, Presbyterians, Anabaptists, French Huguenots, and Quakers had each built their own meetinghouse, and all but the latter stood within the city walls. The Presbyterian meetinghouse on the Crisp map is clearly articulated as square, a building form preferred by dissenters throughout the colonial period. The Anabaptist and Huguenot meetinghouses stood on densely occupied side streets and the Quaker meetinghouse stood outside the city walls. While the Presbyterian meetinghouse occupied a very large, open lot in the northwest quadrant of the city, the Anglican church stood adjacent to the city gate on a cramped lot, subject to the noise, odors, and heavy traffic that accompanied such a location. Even though the Anglicans had attempted to distinguish themselves from dissenters by choosing a lot on the central intersection of the Grand Model, by the end of the seventeenth century, the erection of walled fortifications had undermined their efforts. The general uniformity of religious architecture reflected the political reality that in the earliest decades, Anglicans were simply one of a variety of denominational options in South Carolina’s diverse religious landscape. Religious identity did not play a significant role in the colony’s seventeenth-century politics. The Fundamental Constitutions of 1669 assumed the establishment of the Church of England even as they restricted its authority. Even though they established a system of taxation to support the Church of England, they simultaneously extended the promise of religious freedom to all Dissenters from that church. In a remarkably progressive clause, the Constitutions stated that any seven individuals who believed in God could form an officially recognized “church or profession” independent of the Anglican Church. The document went on to say that “no person whatsoever shall disturb, molest, or persecute another for his speculative opinions in religion, or his way of worship.”²⁶ The intended result was an extraordinary degree of religious toleration to all religious persuasions save Roman Catholicism. As a result, the early decades of the colony’s history were characterized by colonists exhibiting significant religious and cultural diversity, ranging from Jews to English Quakers, French Huguenots, Welsh Baptists, Scots and Irish Presbyterians, and German Lutherans, in addition to English Anglicans, the majority population. Although a number of issues divided the colonists along various lines, Governor Archdale, a Dissenter, was in the 1680s able to state that “religious differences did not peculiarly distinguish parties.”²⁷ The opening decade of the eighteenth century, however, introduced a fervent religiopolitical factionalism.²⁸ In 1700 the governor’s post became available, and the most logical candidates for governor were two of the surviving landgraves in the colony: Joseph Morton and Edmund Bellinger, neither of whom were Anglicans. After a lengthy dispute, the final election of Nathaniel Johnston, a fervent Anglican, as governor in 1703 secured the post for what would quickly become the “Church Party.” During Johnston’s term of office, his greatest ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

285

feat was orchestrating the “Church Act,” which established the Church of England as the official state church in the colony.²⁹ The year after his election, Johnston called an emergency session of the General Assembly and passed the act before enough Dissenters could arrive to vote against his bill. After vigorous opposition from Dissenters, a tempered version of the bill was finalized two years later. With money generated by a tax on the Indian trade, the 1706 act established the Anglican Church as the state church, partitioned the colony into parishes, and dedicated £333 of public funds per parish for the erection of parish churches and parsonages. This act opened the public coffers to the erection of Anglican churches and set the precedent for naming church commissioners for the erection of churches and chapels in the colony.³⁰ Summarizing the political climate just after church establishment, Commissary Gideon Johnston informed the church authorities in London that “the debates and contests, that are on foot here, are not between High and Low Churchmen; but between the Dissenters and the Church.” The fight for church establishment pitted churchmen against nonconformists, and the churchmen had won. In establishing the Church of England as a state church, Anglicans in South Carolina sought to capitalize on the political cachet enjoyed by the church in the motherland. Even in the context of the religious toleration characteristic of England after the Glorious Revolution—which was widely perceived as rendering churchgoing voluntary—the Church of England was still very much a state church. The archbishop of Canterbury, the highest office in the church and often a personal adviser to the king, was a position of significant political power. The Church of England still controlled the country’s universities. All of England’s bishops sat in Parliament’s House of Lords. Into the eighteenth century, ecclesiastical courts held the authority to judge marriage cases and other presentments related to church life.³¹ At the local level, full participation in civil life was limited to those individuals in communion with the Church of England. The Church of England was very much an extension of the state in a country where, in the early eighteenth century, only one out of every ten persons attended something other than the Church of England.³² But South Carolina’s political landscape was very different; estimates in 1710 suggested that 45 percent of the white population of South Carolina was Presbyterian and another 10 percent was Baptist, while only slightly more than 40 percent was Anglican.³³ These Dissenters fervently objected to the establishment of the church. Gideon Johnston complained in 1708 that Carolina’s Dissenters “are the most unreasonable in all the British Monarchy; they have Liberty of Property to the full and enjoy the free undisturbed exercise of their Religion in all respects...[yet] they would have their ministers provided for in all respects equally with us.”³⁴ Soon after his arrival as royal governor in 1721, Francis Nicholson complained that the colony’s Presbyterians embraced “factious and republican principles not worthy to be tolerated in his Majesty’s dominions.” A month later, Nicholson wrote again 286

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

that Presbyterians “infuse Ante Monarchical Principles into the people and are setting up for an Independt government both in Church and State.”³⁵ Even after the passing of the Church Act in 1706, the political authority of the Church of England was hotly contested. One of the most tangible means available to the Anglicans to secure their hegemony in the colony’s contested political landscape was the erection of the monumental St. Philip’s Church introduced in chapter 1.³⁶ Unlike the rest of the meetinghouses that conformed to early Charleston’s urban plan, the new St. Philip’s interrupted the city grid, asserting Anglican political authority over the civic order. The footprint of the large brick church measured approximately 110 feet by 62 feet, easily marking the church as the principal building in the city. Its three monumental Tuscan porticos soared over a street that was forced to wend its way around the church. The cupola of St. Philip’s—easily the tallest structure in the city—rose to a height of well over 100 feet. The church’s porticos enjoyed an advantageous situation at the upper end of the city’s principal street, and by reigning over the street, they asserted Anglican authority over the political landscape of the capital city. Situated at the terminus of the city’s longest vista on its highest elevation, the new church employed a well-understood urban Baroque vocabulary of authority.³⁷ The design and construction of St. Philip’s is one colonial example of the much broader practice of the Anglican Church in England of erecting churches in towns in the early eighteenth century as an attempt to preserve political authority.³⁸ As a result of political establishment, membership in the Church of England was a political as well as a religious identity. Positions of authority in the city church were often a stepping-stone for civil office. The average vestrymen served five or more one-year terms, allowing them the opportunity to demonstrate their mettle in local political affairs.³⁹ Approximately one-half of the men elected to the vestry of St. Philip’s, for example, later served as representatives in the colony’s Common House of Assembly.⁴⁰ After 1719, when the various parishes in the colony also became the geographic subdivisions for election to the Commons House of Assembly, the same was also true of the rural parishes. The churchwardens of each parish—two men selected from among the vestry—served as managers of the local election, which took place at the parish church, further integrating the power structures of church and state in the colony. In 1733, for example, Gabriel Manigault took out an advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette reminding the constituents of his parish that he was running for the Assembly and that the polling would take place “on Tuesday the 20th Inst. At 10 o’clock in the Forenoon in the Parish Church.”⁴¹ These responsibilities extended to the members of the vestry a political authority that distinguished them as important local power brokers. Not surprisingly, the political stature of the established church attracted former Dissenters into the Church of England.⁴² Writing in 1727, the minister to one of the rural parishes was pleased to report “the old inhabitants were many of them dissenters, but have since conformed ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

287

F IGURE 8.6   Detail of Edmund Petrie, Ichnography of Charleston, South Carolina (1788); St. Michael’s (“F”) and the statehouse (“G”) frame the William Pitt statue in the square to the upper left of this detail; St. Philip’s (“N”) stands at the right edge.

288

to the Church of England.”⁴³ As the new church of St. Philip’s rose in the city of Charleston, Anglicans began constructing a powerful church-state relationship that ensured the parish church would remain at the political nexus of the colonial landscape. By midcentury, Charleston’s cityscape had expanded significantly, and Anglicans sought once again to situate themselves at the political center of the city. By the early 1750s, large sections of the city walls that had circumscribed the city through much of the early decades of the century had come down. By these years, the city square imagined in the Grand Model but soon thereafter bisected by the city walls was finally being realized. What had been an undesirable location near the city gates in the 1710s was now at the center of the expanding city, a site still owned by the Anglican Church. On February 8, 1751, the parish of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina, petitioned the Governor’s Council to erect a second Anglican church in the city. The great increase in the number of inhabitants in Charleston and the inability of the parish church of St. Philip’s to contain the city’s Anglicans, MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 8.7   Charles Fraser, View of Meeting and Broad, ca. 1800; the statehouse is to the left, St. Michael’s is to the right, and the Pitt statue stands in the center of the intersection (Carolina Art Association).

F IGURE 8.8 Joseph Wilton, statue of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1770 (The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina)

they argued, necessitated dividing the city into two parishes and erecting a new church.⁴⁴ On June 14, 1751, Governor Glen signed the bill into law, charging nine church commissioners with the responsibility of erecting the new edifice. What Anglicans achieved in St. Philip’s by dominating the major urban axis they would again realize in St. Michael’s by situating themselves on the town square. It was no coincidence that Governor Glen signed a bill to erect the new church in Charleston on the same day he also signed a bill for a new statehouse. From the outset it was assumed these two buildings would occupy two of the four corners of this significant civic space. Since Benjamin Smith was a member of both building commissions, it is only reasonable to assume that the commissions of the two buildings conferred about their respective designs. The 1788 ichnography of the city of Charleston, and a slightly later sketch of the intersection by Charles Fraser, make plainly evident the significance of the site (FIGS. 8.6 and 8.7). The colonial statehouse (now “Court House” in these images) and St. Michael’s sat diagonally opposite one another. On the other two corners stood the beef market, the guard house, and the treasury. In the very center of the intersection stood Charleston’s most significant work of public art: the life-size statue of William Pitt, defender in Parliament of American objections to the Stamp Act (FIG. 8.8).⁴⁵ In 1766 the Commons House of Assembly ordered from London sculptor Joseph Wilton the statue of Pitt, “to be done in the most finished and elegant manner.”⁴⁶ By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, this intersection was clearly the political heart of the colonial city. ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

289

The church commissioners of St. Michael’s took great pride in the architectural sophistication of their design for the new city church (see FIG. 1.16). They took particular pains to note in their public announcement of the design that the steeple was “designed much larger than that of St. Philip’s, [and] will have a fine set of bells.”⁴⁷ Three octagonal tiers rise from a rusticated square tower. Reflecting ancient ideas on architectural order resuscitated during the Renaissance, the solid Tuscan columns of the portico support the Ionic pilasters of the lowest tier, which in turn support the Corinthian pilasters and the engaged Corinthian columns of the upper tiers. Drawing explicitly from steeple designs published earlier in the century by James Gibbs, the steeple of St. Michael’s was an extraordinary expression of architectural artistry. During his visit to Charleston in 1765, Pelatiah Webster commented on the church’s impressive steeple, which had “a good ring of bells.”⁴⁸ In fact, the steeple was so widely admired that drawings of the steeple, “richly framed,” were advertised for sale just a few decades after its completion.⁴⁹ But the significance of the steeple of St. Michael’s reached well past its visual prominence and architectural sophistication. THE STEEPLE BELLS of St. Michael’s played a central role in the mourning of public figures. At the news of George Washington’s death decades later, “A universal cloud sat upon the faces of the citizens of Charleston; the pulpits clothed in black—the bells muffled.”⁵⁰ Such acts of public mourning extended also to figures of local importance. Upon the death of the beloved minister Robert Smith, the vestry of St. Philip’s ordered “the pulpit, the reading desk, the communion table, and the organ gallery to be hung with black broad cloth. The bell of St. Philip’s Church shall strike from half past 8 to half past 9 this morning and be tolled muffled during the funeral procession.”⁵¹ The bell toll was only one of the most public aspects of the extensive rituals associated with “great” funerals.⁵² In many ways, the variation among funeral ritual and material culture reinforced the social and political hierarchies that were so central to an Anglican understanding of order. From the simplicity or sophistication of the material culture and ritual performances that surrounded death, participants and onlookers could immediately identify the station of the deceased. Funerals were events vested with enormous religious and social significance.⁵³ Anglicans took funeral practices seriously, for these rituals were first and foremost religious events. Although Protestants saw no relationship between the treatment of the deceased’s body and the salvation of his or her soul, the decent burial of the body remained an important ritual. In the absence of a parish minister, for example, one South Carolina congregation complained, “If any of us should die while our Parish is unprovided; tho’ we are Christians we must be buried like dogs.”⁵⁴ Without the series of Psalm readings, proclamations and sentences, and prayers for the deceased, the burial of the dead lacked the theological sanction that Anglicans had come to expect. But the presence of a minister to perform the funeral service was 290

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 8.9 Izard hatchment, St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, ca. 1743 (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts)

F IGURE 8.10 Interior of St. James, Goose Creek, showing hatchment (Photo by author)

only one of a long series of social and material acts that enlisted the funeral as a marker of the station of the deceased and his or her family. One of the most visible markers of death and mourning in an elite English family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the hanging of a hatchment on the outside of the house.⁵⁵ Derived from the officially sponsored heraldic funerals orchestrated by the College of Arms through the end of the seventeenth century, the hatchment was a family crest on a field of black painted on a large panel. By the late seventeenth century, however, such hatchments—both legitimate and spurious—were being produced by hatchment painters for most elite English families.⁵⁶ Although numerous advertisements by painters in South Carolina announce their ability to paint heraldry and coats of arms, the sole surviving example of a South Carolina hatchment hangs from the face of the gallery in St. James, Goose Creek, Parish Church (FIGS. 8.9 and 8.10).⁵⁷ Like the Roman numerals of the clock ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

291

F IGURE 8.11   Cypress coffin stool, Charleston, 1720–30 (Collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Old Salem Museum and Gardens)

F IGURE 8.12   Gold mourning ring marked “EP,” inscribed “ELIZA: MANIGAULT DYED 19 FEBRY AGED 36 YEARS,” South Carolina, 1773 (Private collection; photograph courtesy of Old Salem Museums and Gardens)

292

faces of St. Michael’s, the gilt and polychrome crest of the Izard family hovers in a field of black. An exuberantly Baroque cartouche contains diagonally organized quadrants, while symmetrical clusters of vegetation extend from behind a crowned and armored helm. In the church of St. James, the hatchment hangs directly opposite the royal arms of George I, centered above the reredos of the chancel. Probably painted after the death of Ralph Izard in 1743, the hatchment was an explicit claim to elite status and would have signaled the Izard family as a leading family in the parish. Following English mourning practices, this hatchment probably hung on the outside of the early house at the Elms, the Izard plantation seat, through the season of mourning, which was often up to a year. Afterward, the hatchment was moved to the church interior.⁵⁸ The hatchment was a visible sign of the preparations for burial and public mourning taking place inside. Very soon after death, a team of hired women prepared the body for burial by removing the clothes, shaving the face of men, and covering the body in a burial shift, a white garment usually of linen or wool. The estate of Elizabeth Sindrey (d.1705), one of the few complete accounts of an early South Carolina funeral, purchased “a winding sheet” and paid two women to prepare her body for burial.⁵⁹ Once prepared, the body lay in an open coffin in the best public room of the house for two to four days. Two stools elevated the coffin in the center of the room for comfortable visibility and easy access by mourners (FIG. 8.11). As one might imagine, the odors emitted by the body could be extraordinary, especially in the damp heat of a Carolina summer. One South Carolina minister was repulsed by the “ffilth & Nauseaus Smells & Ghastly Sights” of his sick visitations.⁶⁰ Visitation of the recently deceased cannot have been much more pleasant. One scent that might have helped to mask the odor of death was the copious amounts of hippocras, or mulled wine, traditionally prepared for mourners.⁶¹ The Sindrey estate accounts include expenditures for a quarter cask of wine, ten more gallons of wine, and eight bottles of claret. Some of these were to be mulled with sugar, cloves, or cinnamon.⁶² In the cases of poor funerals, the parish purchased only cinnamon for burning.⁶³ While one purpose was certainly odoriferous, the wine was surely enjoyed by the guests as well. “We found the people gathered and some of them pretty merry with grog,” wrote one eighteenth-century visitor, “and talking as if they had been at a Frolick rather than a Funeral!”⁶⁴ In addition to the mulling and drinking of wine, Sindrey’s mourners smoked tobacco and burned rosemary. Often mourners were provided with handkerchiefs for the practical purpose of covering the nose in the presence of the body. By the eighteenth century, the yearlong season of mourning was attended by an abundant material culture. After the death of Queen Caroline in 1738, South Carolina readers learned that gentlemen were to wear “black cloth, without buttons on the sleeves or pockets...crepe hatbands, black Swords, Buckles and Buttons,” while women donned “Crape Hoods, Shammy Shoes, and Gloves, and Crape Fans.”⁶⁵ But such elaborate material mourning was not MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 8.13 Cephas Thompson, James Miles and Children, 1805 (Private collection; photograph courtesy of Old Salem Museum and Gardens)

limited to honoring regents; they extended to local elites as well. Typically, the friends and family members closest to the deceased were provided with mourning rings by the estate. While references to such rings abound in wills, few survive. One, a richly ornamental scrolled ring with three precious stones fitted among the gold text on a black ground, memorializes planter Robert Mackewen, who died in 1764. The second, a more restrained black and gold band, bears the name of Elizabeth Manigault and remembers her death in 1773 (FIG. 8.12). But rings were not the full extent of such memorial attire. In 1760 one Charleston silversmith advertised that he had for sale “mourning swords, buckles, necklaces, rings with or without diamonds, and other such articles used on such occasions.”⁶⁶ In 1764 the husband of Elizabeth Snipes purchased for her funeral scarves, handkerchiefs, black fans, ribbon, shoes, buttons, stockings, and shoe buckles.⁶⁷ Cephas Thompson’s 1805 portrait of James Miles and his children illustrates mourning attire worn by the family by the opening years of the nineteenth century (FIG. 8.13). Father and son wear all black, complete with hats, and the daughter wears black jewelry. The memory of their mother is poignantly evident in the urn filling the void between the father and son. The gifting of mourning paraphernalia was not limited to just the family; Elizabeth Sindrey’s estate purchased 149 pairs of mourning gloves to be given to invited mourners.⁶⁸ ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

293

The greatest expense for a funeral, however, was often the coffin. Eighteenth-century coffins fell along a range of options geared to preserving the body and containing odor. Among common types, the simplest was a singleshell wooden coffin, a form most common to earth burials; and the most elaborated type was a triple-shell coffin—an outer and inner shell of wood separated by lead—which was usually reserved for elite burials in vaults.⁶⁹ Evidence for a wide range in South Carolina appears in the accounts of the cabinetmakers who were the principle manufacturer of coffins.⁷⁰ The most expensive coffin produced by Thomas Elfe was of cedar “full trimmed [and] black cov’d.” Relative to the £2 charge for a simple child’s coffin of the same wood, the £90 paid for this coffin—almost twice the cost of a mahogany bedstead by the same maker—easily distinguished it from its more common counterparts.⁷¹ Likely of more than a single shell, lined inside with flannel, and covered out with a black broad cloth secured by brass tacks, the coffin was probably ornamented with elegant gold or silver handles and corner squares.⁷² The corners of the best coffins were ornamented with tassels. The top face of the coffin might even have had the name of the deceased and their death date inscribed on a metal plate or spelled out in small brass letters and numbers.⁷³ Through the course of the eighteenth century, a wide range of coffin fittings and variations in both wood and finish generated a diverse range of prices. After the brief season of mourning, the minister, the coffin, the family dressed in mourning, and all the invited guests—149 in the case of Elizabeth Sindrey—proceeded in a great procession two by two through the city from the house to the church.⁷⁴ Derived from the pageantry of the heraldic funerals performed by the College of Arms, nonaristocratic funeral processions became an elaborate event by the eighteenth century.⁷⁵ In the early eighteenth century, the coffin was carried on the shoulders of men; by the later eighteenth century, carts and chariots became more fashionable.⁷⁶ Either way, a very large pall—a black cloth trimmed in white—covered the coffin. A position of great honor was to serve the deceased as a pallbearer, usually six individuals who supported the white trim of the pall during the procession. One eighteenth-century letter writer indicated that the estates of all individuals of “tolerable rank” provided scarves and gloves to at least the clergy, doctors, and coffin bearers.⁷⁷ While a long stream of mourners in Elizabeth Sindrey’s funeral procession wore black gloves, the estate also provided the minister and the six pallbearers with black scarves secured with black ribbon. These scarves might have served the same purpose as the rosemary often carried by the mourners: to mask the odor of the body.⁷⁸ In the cases where families mounted hatchments on their houses, they may also have affixed escutcheons, coats of arms painted on canvas, on the black pall (FIG. 8.1).⁷⁹ All the while, the funeral bell tolled. Richard Hudson noted in passing during the writing of some personal correspondence, “The bell has just rung for Col. Stephen Milner’s death.”⁸⁰ Vestry records throughout the century record the charge for tolling the funeral bell for great funerals, 294

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

at prices too high for the vast majority of the population.⁸¹ In eighteenthcentury South Carolina, as in the motherland, the elaborate funeral procession was an important signifier of social status. Once the procession arrived at the church, the minister spoke a series of proclamations at the church door, and the procession proceeded inside for the service. During the funeral service, the coffin rested again on two stools, usually before the gate into the chancel. Until 1742, when the vestry of St. Philip’s abolished the practice, great funerals were held late in the evening, drawing on obvious symbolism of the setting of the sun and the end of the day.⁸² The interior of the church was often illuminated with “a great number of candles on several pews.”⁸³ The organist was often hired by the estate to play a series of dirges and appropriate hymns.⁸⁴ In 1742, however, the vestry, out of fear of fire, ordered that evening funerals could be illuminated with no more than three candles, effectively abolishing the practice of night funerals. Even though they were now held before dusk, the preference for evening funerals persisted throughout the eighteenth century among both Anglicans and Dissenters.⁸⁵ In 1783 the times of great funerals were established by order of the vestry as being “from the 1st of April to that of October at 6 o’clock in the evening and from the 1st of October to that of April at the hour of four o’clock in the evening.”⁸⁶ Following the service, the body was transported to the grave, where the minister repeated a series of Psalms and the entire community recited the Lord’s Prayer. As the body was lowered into the grave or vault, each of the mourners cast in their sprig of rosemary.⁸⁷ With leaves that remained green through the dead months of winter, evergreens were associated with eternal life. Once the body was committed to rest, mourners returned to the house of the deceased to consume any remaining wine. The expenditures associated with elite mourning rituals and great funerals meant that only the wealthiest and most prominent individuals could be laid to rest in such a dignified manner. Obviously not every estate could afford to purchase a £90 coffin. The parish vestry usually provided for the very poorest of the parish. For £2, the vestry of St. Philip’s purchased wooden coffins from Edward Scull, coffin maker, and for the same amount paid a group of men to carry the coffin to the grave.⁸⁸ For those who wished to have some ritual but could not afford to pay the minister to deliver a funeral sermon or the organist to attend the event, there were less-expensive options. Most clergy charged as much as half the fee to deliver rites at the gravesite without a sermon in the church, a simpler option provided by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.⁸⁹ St. Philip’s also offered two palls for use during funerals. While the “good velvet” pall was reserved for those of a higher station, the “very old dragged” pall was intended for use during funerals for those of a middling or lower-class status.⁹⁰ The ceremony of poor funerals cannot have been helped in times of Charleston’s frequent epidemics. During one epidemic, Gideon Johnston reported, “Three Funeralls of a day, and sometimes four are now very usual.”⁹¹ During another, Alexander Garden noted, “The buryings are ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

295

from 5 to 10 and once 11 of a Day...employed all my time.”⁹² While many funerals for the poor might still have had processions, these would have had mourners without the mourning accoutrements worn for great funerals— only the “old dragged” pall, no tolling of the funeral bell, no service, sermon, or organ dirges in the church, and only brief rites offered at the gravesite. Funeral and burial practices among African slaves appear to have differed fairly dramatically. One remarkable burial account of a South Carolina slave’s infant son in about 1800 offers a rare window into typical practice among eighteenth-century Africans in the colony. The African-born father buried with his son a small bow and several arrows; a little bowl of parched meal; a miniature canoe, about a foot long, and a little paddle, (with which he said it would cross the ocean to his own country) a small stick with an iron nail, sharpened and fastened into one end of it; and a piece of white muslin, with several figures painted on it in blue and red, by which, he said, his relations and countrymen would know the infant to be his son, and would receive it accordingly on its arrival among them. The father then placed “a lock of hair from his head...upon the dead infant, and clos[ed] the grave with his own hands.”⁹³ Such rituals, which were intended to sustain and protect the deceased in the afterlife and allow passage back to Africa, were of profound religious significance. While no such graves have yet been excavated in South Carolina, a few examples have been reported from the Caribbean.⁹⁴ By contrast, those slaves buried by their masters appear to have had little or no ceremony. Although cabinetmakers’ accounts clearly indicate that many slave owners purchased coffins for their slaves, South Carolina’s Assembly minutes for 1724 record a recommendation from then-governor Francis Nicholson that “some place be appointed for the burial of Negroes,” because slaves were “promiscuously buryed in Lotts and some in the Streets.”⁹⁵ Such random dispensing of deceased slaves appears to have persisted throughout the century. In 1805 the city of Charleston passed an ordinance “to prevent the throwing of dead human bodies into the rivers, creeks, or marshes, within the limits of the harbour of Charleston.” Only two years later, the council noted that the ordinance was “shamefully violated, in a manner shocking to humanity, outrageous to common decency, and greatly endangering the health of the citizens.”⁹⁶ From the elaborated performance of mourning and great funeral processions with the tolling of the church bell, to simple processions of the urban poor and promiscuously burying slaves in the streets or discarding their bodies in the river, death rituals dramatically highlighted social, political, and racial hierarchies in early South Carolina. BEYOND THE OCCASIONAL responsibility of tolling for great funerals, steeple bells also chimed the hours. Prior to the installation of steeple clocks, a majority of Charleston’s residents ordered their lives by natural time.⁹⁷ 296

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

A 1719 statue prohibited foreign ships from unloading their goods “between sun rising and sun setting.”⁹⁸ In 1739 no persons were allowed to sell meats or other provisions “before the ringing of the Market Bell at Sun rising.”⁹⁹ Similarly, a 1741 statute prohibited Charleston tavern keepers from “play at the billiard table after the sun hath been set one hour.”¹⁰⁰ The daily courses of the sun and the tides, together with the weekly event of the Sabbath and the agricultural cycles of planting, tending, and harvesting, governed life for a majority of eighteenth-century colonials. This was largely true because through the first half of the eighteenth century, personal timepieces were owned by only the most wealthy, a very small minority of the city’s residents. Only one-quarter of Charleston inventories in the early decades of the century included a personal timepiece.¹⁰¹ In his study of clock time in the early South, Mark Smith argues that clock time was not practically applied to the management of the agricultural context until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.¹⁰² In an era when only a few owned case clocks or pocket watches and most governed their day by the position of the sun, the striking of the hours by Anglican steeple clocks introduced a systematic method of parsing the day into hours and minutes that had displaced natural time in Charleston by the end of the century. Emulating the gilt lettering of the sacred texts of the Decalogue and Apostle’s Creed painted on arched panels in the church interior, the aesthetics of the steeple clock implied that the systematic nature of clock time, an extension of natural law, was an extension of God’s divine order. As earlier discussions demonstrated, the disciplined regularity of the Anglican liturgy was integral to the reformation of the soul. But the religious functions of time discipline were few. In fact, time discipline appears to have had explicitly social functions. The elite quickly enlisted clock time as a tool for social exclusion. The Segoon-Pop Society, for example, announced in the South Carolina Gazette that they would call their meeting to order at seventeen minutes after seven o’clock. Such time discipline implied that all members of the society owned personal timepieces and had the capacity to synchronize in a very precise manner.¹⁰³ Over the course of the eighteenth century, clock time introduced a personal discipline that distinguished the elite from the rest of the city’s residents. As historians of time have demonstrated, the merchant class embraced time discipline most vigorously, and the same was true in Charleston.¹⁰⁴ The prominent placement of a clock in Allan Ramsey’s 1751 portrait of merchant/ planter Peter Manigault, for example, implied that the sitter’s wealth and stature was the result of his embrace of a disciplined and well-ordered day (FIG. 8.14).¹⁰⁵ In the late 1740s, Henry Laurens confessed in a letter to a client that he was “now extremely hurry’d to fetch up Lost time.”¹⁰⁶ Josiah Smith, another of Charleston’s merchants, worried that “loosing...Time [meant] paying a Heavy price.”¹⁰⁷ “You know as well as us,” wrote a later Charleston merchant, “that the most strict punctuality is necessary in money matters.”¹⁰⁸ As a system linked to economic efficiency, clock time was warmly embraced ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

297

F IGURE 8.1 4   Allan Ramsey, Peter Manigault, 1751 (© Image Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association)

by the merchants who dominated Charleston’s vestries; for most of these men, an orderly governance of the day meant higher profits.¹⁰⁹ In a slave society, however, time discipline had even greater implications for social and civic stability. Through the imposition of curfews, the clock and its artificial construction of time also assisted the state in asserting control over the city’s enslaved black majority.¹¹⁰ After 1740, when the clock of St. Philip’s announced the hours, a slave curfew used time discipline to regulate the movement of the city’s enslaved population.¹¹¹ By 1764 the clock and bells of St. Michael’s were consistently ringing the quarter hour as well.¹¹² Control over time was so important in the regulation of slaves, in fact, that those slave owners who lived beyond the tolling of a steeple clock preferred to own portable watches instead of house-bound tall case clocks.¹¹³ Charleston’s Anglican steeple clocks were a powerful means for the Charleston elite to impose discipline and order over the city. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Anglicans in Charleston successfully enlisted their architecture and material culture to impose and preserve their political hegemony over Dissenters, their social authority over inferiors, and their control of the rising enslaved majority. But in these same decades, a new threat would rise to confront the Anglican establishment, a threat that came not from within the city but from the backcountry. IN 1759 THE VESTRY of St. Stephen’s Parish—bordering on the backcountry— began collecting materials to build a new brick church to replace the simple wooden one that then occupied the site. Encased in engaged pilasters supporting a bold cornice, the new parish church in St. Stephen’s, built between 1764 298

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 8.15 St. Stephen’s Parish Church, Berkeley County (Photo by author)

and 1768, departed dramatically from those Anglican churches and chapels erected in the rural landscape over the first half of the century (FIG. 8.15). The surviving chapel erected in the town of Strawberry, begun in the late 1730s (compare FIG. I.4 with FIG. 2.6), is typical of Anglican churches built in South Carolina’s rural parishes during the first half century (see appendix 1). Built in brick on the plan of a compact rectangle, the exterior of the building was relatively unadorned. Save the occasional doorcase with columns or pilasters supporting a pediment, the majority of rural Anglican churches erected before 1740 shared Strawberry Chapel’s simple exterior.¹¹⁴ The vigorous display of classical orders on the exterior of St. Stephen’s is characteristic of other churches erected in the colony in these decades, but it is not a common design feature on Anglican churches of the same decades in other colonial contexts. Classical orders do not encase the exteriors of any Anglican church erected in these same decades in Virginia, for example. In their minutes, the vestry of St. Stephen’s never indicates their reason for erecting a new church. Only five years before they had paid a substantial sum to repair the older church, and after the new brick church stood ready for occupancy, the vestry paid to have the older church converted into a vestry house. The reuse of the building as a vestry house suggests that the older building was not failing structurally. If the older wooden church had been sufficient, why would the vestry spend an exorbitant amount of money to erect such an elaborate brick building? The prevailing interpretation of the more sophisticated ornament of midcentury buildings such as St. Stephen’s describes the architectural transformation in terms of Anglo-American refinement, and there is some evidence that this was the case.¹¹⁵ In this view, refined church architecture becomes the stage for the elite social rituals similar to those enacted in the dining room. Considered more carefully in its context, however, the building’s distinctive ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

299

architectural features are better understood as tools of Anglican self-assertion in an increasingly contested religious landscape. Between 1706 and 1740, Anglicans erected twenty-three churches outside of the colony’s capital—more places of worship outside the city than were built by all Dissenters combined. In the same years, the total combined building campaigns of the six dissenting denominations amounted only to twenty-four, a number of which stood in Charleston. Just as St. Philip’s rose above the urban landscape, large brick Anglican parish churches were easily recognizable as the centers of political authority in the rural parishes. As their buildings attested, Anglicans enjoyed a period of largely unchallenged social and political authority in the colony well into the second quarter of the century.¹¹⁶ Beginning in the late 1730s, however, Anglican moral and political authority faced a new challenge. In that decade, the beginning of a massive emigration from the northern colonies changed South Carolina’s cultural mix. In many cases, these new immigrants—relatively poor families originating from Britain, Wales, Ireland, France, and the German states—journeyed to the South down the Great Wagon Road, which ran from Pennsylvania through Maryland, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and North Carolina into South Carolina. Settling in the backcountry parishes in great numbers, these immigrants posed a new threat to Anglican social, political, and religious hegemony in both South Carolina and Virginia.¹¹⁷ Writing as early as 1727, one South Carolina parish minister complained that “the poor and illiterate...chiefly dwell in the out settlements and live straggl’d about.” As a result, “the Dissenting and other Teachers are always hunting after them to pick up these scattere’d sheep, for which reason it is there is scarce a Parish in this province yt has not a Meeting House or two in it, which have been set by these means.”¹¹⁸ This new wave of Dissenter immigration did not slow as the century unfolded. Unlike the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Dissenters in Charleston who resisted the establishment of the Church of England in the opening years of the century, these Dissenters were far more numerous, not of a comparable socioeconomic status as the Anglican elite, and of an evangelical persuasion. The undertone of crisis ushered in by the dramatic rise of evangelical “schismatics” can be heard in the words of the vestry of Prince Frederick’s Parish—like St. Stephen’s a parish bordering the backcountry—as they appealed to the bishop of London in 1757 for a new minister: Our parish church, parsonage, and Glebe, is daily falling into ruin by being unoccupied....[T]here are now 4 meetinghouses in this Parish, and two more talked of being built....[H]ad we a Godly minister, Chapels of Ease would probably be raised in their places, and less room for the sectaries to spread themselves....[T]he people of the lower part of the parish are a sober, sensible, and literate people—Those of the upper part, far otherwise, whose numbers daily increase by Refugees from ye other 300

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

Provinces. If a minister be not settled here soon, the defection from the church will be so great as to hardly leave enough Church members to form a congregation.¹¹⁹ The “sectaries” were on the rise and their swelling numbers were beginning to pose a threat to the Anglican establishment. One of the most common complaints about the evangelicalism of these new arrivals was their unregulated embrace of the passions. In the 1760s, for example, Charles Woodmason described the performance of the Lord’s Supper by a congregation of backcountry Dissenters. The congregation appeared to him to be “a Gang of frantic Lunatics broke out of Bedlam, rather than...a Society of religious Christians, met to celebrate the most sacred and Solemn Ordinance of their Religion.” During the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, Woodmason observed, “one Fellow mounted on a Bench with the Bread, and bawling, See the Body of Christ, and other with the Cup running around, and bellowing—Who cleanses his Soul with the Blood of Christ.” The lack of physical and emotional comportment that Woodmason described in these two church elders extended to the laity as well. He witnessed “a thousand other Extravagancies.” Some were singing, while others were howling, crying, ranting, dancing, skipping, laughing, and rejoicing. The lack of disciplined religious expression naturally (so goes the Anglican argument) manifested impropriety: “Here two or 3 Women falling on their Backs, kicking up their Heels, exposing their Nakedness to all bystanders.” Others were found in “indecent Postures and Actions,” while others sat “pensive, in deep Melancholy lost in Abstraction, like Statues, quite insensible.” When roused, these declared that “their souls had taken flight to Heav’n, and they knew nothing of what they said or did.” Drawing a sharp distinction between these evangelicals and the regular discipline of the Anglican liturgy, Woodmason asked, “Is there any thing like this in the Church of England to give Offence?”¹²⁰ Although the enthusiasm of this meeting was probably exaggerated by Woodmason’s sharpened quill, the contrast with the Anglican performance of the sacrament was evident to many. Both the architecture and liturgy of the Anglican Church were designed to bring regularity and order to a laity prone to irregularities. The refinement and order of Anglican church interiors served to convey the message that falling on one’s back, standing on a bench, or running around bawling were inappropriate (and simply more difficult) in the more carefully structured spaces of an Anglican church. What Woodmason and other Anglicans found particularly threatening about evangelicalism was the overriding sense of disorder that dominated the service, as members of the evangelical religious societies acted independently, rejecting the notion of a common liturgical form. The implications of dissent, however, were not simply theological or doctrinal. Emotional evangelicalism had the potential to upset the entire Anglican order—political, social, and even racial. In 1724 the clergy reported ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

301

to the bishop of London an early account of “enthusiasm.” They wrote of one family espousing “Enthusiastik notions that they were Divinely Inspired in all their Sentiments.” In a direct challenge to the spiritual and political authority of the Anglican government, their claim to divine revelation allowed the family to “refuse all obedience to Civil Government.” Eventually, the family became “insufferable,” and Civil Magistrates were ordered to arrest them for a series of crimes, including “Lawdness, incest, and murder.” The family sought to resist “publick Authority by force of arms” and violence ensued, resulting in the death of a justice of the peace and a woman from the family; “the rest of the Deluded Wretches were wounded and taken after an obstinate resistance.” The trial of the family resulted in a death sentence for five of the men in the family. “What is most dreadful after all their numerous and monstrous blasphemies and Impieties,” the clergy reported, is “they seem to Comfort themselves as Sufferers in a good cause and finally determined to die Impenitent.” In response to this state of affairs, the clergy pleaded with the bishop to inquire with the king how to stop “fanatick teachers being transplanted into the other Colonies of America from New England, or that part of Gt Britian call’d Scotland.” They hoped the king might be able “to restrain all future propagation of such pernicious Principles within the Governments.”¹²¹ To the consternation of the Anglican establishment, Dissenters were “independent in Matters of religion, as well as Republican in those of government.”¹²² Anglicans understood very clearly that such teachers were a direct threat not only to the spiritual but also to the political authority vested in the Church of England in South Carolina. Writing of this same conflict between Anglicans and evangelicals in Virginia, Rhys Isaac describes how “the beginnings of a cultural disjunction between gentry and sections of the lower orders where hitherto there had been a continuum, posed a serious threat to the traditional leaders of the community.”¹²³ Between 1738 and 1740, George Whitefield began to fan the flames of religious enthusiasm in the colony in a direct challenge to the Anglican establishment. The passionate, heartfelt religion espoused by Whitefield flew in the face of the South Carolina’s Anglicans. In his diatribe against Whitefield’s preaching, Anglican commissary Alexander Garden complained that “the ears and Passions, not the understandings, of the Lower sort, Specially Dissenters, were taken.”¹²⁴ Another commentator indicated that when he preached to large crowds in the open, Whitefield “departed from the rules of his church and performed divine service in the extempore mode usually practiced among [Dissenters].”¹²⁵ Whitefield’s impact was significant enough to elicit this comment by Eliza Pinckney soon after Whitefield’s final departure: “@’tis become so much the fashion to say everybody that is grave is religiously mad.”¹²⁶ The explosive clash between Whitefield and Garden, described by the former as one of the greatest challenges of his career, is well known.¹²⁷ Their personal conflict ultimately resulted in the commissary censuring Whitefield from Anglican pulpits in the colony; in response to the commissary’s action, the vast majority 302

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

of dissenting ministers opened their doors to Whitefield. That Garden found Whitefield threatening comes as no surprise; Whitefield often preached on damnation and the certainty of salvation, topics generally avoided by the Anglican clergy. A sympathetic sermon review by Josiah Smith, the minister of the Congregational Meeting in Charleston, described Whitefield as “cloathed in Flames, and adjudging a guilty World to penal Fire.”¹²⁸ Garden, together with the majority of Anglicans, was deeply offended by the thought that Whitefield assumed them to rank among the “guilty World.” They also saw Whitefield as a preacher aflame—not as Jesus Christ the great judge, but as a mad itinerant with the potential to burn to the ground the church structure they had constructed. Although Whitefield remained in the colony only a few months, his impact resounded for years. A decade after the itinerant’s departure, Garden complained of “several Phanatick young Men, who have taken upon themselves to go about preaching in this Province on the Whitefieldian plan, that is, according to Whitefield’s Manner and System of Doctrines.”¹²⁹ The most poignant example of the political dangers of religious enthusiasm was Hugh Bryan, a prosperous Anglican planter with plantations in a number of parishes south of Charleston who by 1739 had become a disciple of Whitefield.¹³⁰ Writing in 1742, Eliza Lucas Pinckney described the Hugh Bryan affair: Mr. H B. [Hugh Bryan] had been much deluded by his own fancys and imagined he was assisted by the divine spirrit to prophesey; Charles Town and the Country as farr as Ponpon Bridge should be destroyed by fire and sword, to be executed by the Negroes before the first day of next month. He came to town—60 mile—twice besides sending twice to acquaint the Governor with it. People in general were very uneasy tho’ convinced he was no prophet, but they dreaded the consiquence of such a thing being put in to the head of the slaves and the advantage they might take of us. From thence he went on (as it was natural to expect when he gave him self up intirely to his own whims) from one step to another till he came to working miracles and lived for several days in the woods barefooted and alone and with his pen and Ink to write down his prophecies till at length he went with a wan to divide the waters and predicted he should die that night.¹³¹ In another letter of the same year, Pinckney concluded her letter abruptly, having heard the news of Mrs. LeBrasseur’s suicide. As described by the South Carolina Gazette, LeBrasseur, a “Gentlewoman of considerable fortune” and one of Whitefield’s prime disciples, shot herself with a pistol, “professing her full Assurance of her Salvation, and that she longed to be in the blessed mansions which she knew were prepared for her.”¹³² Bryan and LeBrasseur were only the most acute examples of the pervasive fear that evangelical religion not only challenged Anglican religious practice; it also threatened to upset Anglican political authority and, even worse, the ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

303

racial order. Many Anglicans had resisted exposing their enslaved Africans and Indians to Christianity since the founding of the colony in the fear that they might interpret their new religious freedom too liberally. Whitefield, and his disciples like Bryan, threatened to upset the racial “harmony” when they insisted that Carolina planters evangelize their enslaved laborers. Rhys Isaac identifies the evangelism of slaves by Virginia Baptists and their incorporation into the church community as one of the most destabilizing factors of this conflict.¹³³ The memory of Hugh Bryan, widely known for his prophesies and his conversion as a disciple of Whitefield, was a persistent reminder to the Anglican elite that independent thought on issues religious could end in a disastrous disruption of the fragile order that governed life in South Carolina.¹³⁴ The frustrations of Anglicans in the backcountry were only exacerbated by the success of the evangelicals. By all accounts, the Dissenters spread like wildfire. In the four decades after 1740, Baptists and Presbyterians alone undertook the building of ninety-three meetinghouses in South Carolina, outpacing the Anglicans in church building by over five to one.¹³⁵ In Virginia, by comparison, the number of Baptist meetinghouses rose from seven to fifty-four between 1769 and 1774 alone.¹³⁶ By the 1750s, Anglicans in South Carolina were fully aware of the destabilizing possibilities inherent in religious enthusiasm and its threat to the Anglican establishment. As suggested by historian Walter Edgar, “The little world of the lowcountry elite was no longer all of South Carolina as it had been before 1750.”¹³⁷ The failure of the Anglican Church to establish thriving parishes in the backcountry eventually led the foremost inhabitants of those regions to abandon hopes that the Anglican establishment would successfully impose civil order. In the absence of a “regularizing” established church, the leading residents of the backcountry initiated in 1767 an organized movement of Regulators, approximately 1,000 residents who banded together in an attempt to impose civil order in the backcountry.¹³⁸ Because of South Carolina’s highly centralized government, the backcountry had few legal representatives in Charleston and few authority figures in their midst. South Carolina’s four counties had neither officials nor powers, and parish vestries took the responsibility only for caring for the poor and supervising elections. The only real representatives in the backcountry were justices of the peace, who were authorized to handle only petty criminal cases. These conditions, together with an expanding population, led to notable lawlessness in the backcountry by the 1760s. In the void rose the self-proclaimed “Regulators.” “Miscreants” writes the historian of the Regulators, “were rounded up, tied to trees, and mercilessly flogged,” initiating a loosely organized counterattack. The eventual response by the colonial government was the establishment of a circuit court, but through the latter years of the 1760s, the backcountry was a place of deep unrest.¹³⁹ This religious, social, political, and racial contest was one played out in architectural contexts. Isaac reports that in Virginia, the “main battleground” 304

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 8.16 Johns Island Presbyterian Church, Johns Island, South Carolina; begun 1740s, extensively reworked ca. 1800 (Photo by author)

of this religious battle was the small planter’s house and the slave quarter.¹⁴⁰ Yet he relates a 1771 account from Virginia, where an Anglican minister entered a Baptist service and “would keep Running the End of his Horsewhip in [the Baptist preacher’s] Mouth, Laying his Whip across the Hym Book, &c.” The preacher was then forcibly removed from his pulpit and lashed from the same whip.¹⁴¹ Writing in 1766, Woodmason reported offenses by Baptists against an Anglican chapel: “On Whitsunday following after Communion was ended, [Dissenters in St. Mark’s Parish] got into the Church and left their Excrements on the Communion Table, and at Lynchs Creek they oblig’d the People to desist from building a Chapel.”¹⁴² At another church, Woodmason reported that “a Sett of Wagoners got round the Church with their Whipps, and oblig’d the Minister to quit the Service.”¹⁴³ While much of the everyday work of evangelicalism took place in the domestic sphere and the workplace, much of the most explicit conflict appears to have centered in places of worship, buildings that played a critical role in shaping these conflicts. Unfortunately, none of those early evangelical meetinghouses in the backcountry still survive. The Presbyterian meetinghouse now standing on Johns Island is often purported to date from the 1740s, but a careful investigation of its formal design features—from details in the galleries and staircases to the (arched) window muntins and architraves—all point to a probable construction date in its present form around the turn of the nineteenth century (FIG. 8.16). This does not mean that the skeleton of the mid-eighteenth-century building is not buried within the walls of the later expansions and alteraARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

305

tions, but the form as we now see it is not from the period in question. But even in its later form, the building is instructive, since we can fairly assume that in its earlier iteration, it was probably even simpler than its restrained appearance now suggests. The best evidence for the visual appearance of the meetinghouses erected by rural evangelicals is the early nineteenth-century watercolor sketch of the 1740s Stoney Creek Presbyterian Meetinghouse by Charles Fraser (FIG. 4.5). Like those meetinghouses discussed in chapter 4, Stoney Creek Presbyterian employed flat-topped windows and doors; and like the few verbal descriptions of rural meetinghouses that do survive, the building was close to square in plan and sheltered by a pyramidal roof. The only major departure is that the Stoney Creek meetinghouse appears to have been masonry, while the vast majority of other early meetinghouses were, like Johns Island Presbyterian, timber framed. From this fragmentary visual evidence—and some documentary references, as well—it is safe to infer that the majority of these evangelical meetinghouses spreading throughout the rural parishes were small timber-framed buildings with square or otherwise very compact footprints. These increasingly familiar buildings became a mark of pride among evangelicals and a source of ire for Anglicans. Anxious that evangelical practices were beginning to hijack the liturgy and architecture of the rural Anglican church, Charles Woodmason launched a telling diatribe in the 1760s about a highly irregular chapel recently built by an Anglican congregation in the Carolina backcountry. Woodmason complained that the chapel, erected under the direction of his predecessor, was designed to appease the consciences of those who objected to liturgical worship. The minister’s “retrenching” of the service required less of their place of worship. Their new chapel had “no Pews, Font, Communion Table, or anything resembling a place of Worship saving this Pulpit.” Such a departure from traditional Anglican architecture meant that the chapel might function as a “Dancing Room, Hall of Justice, Barn or any Thing.” The stripping of ornament was thorough, extending even to the body of the minister, who “wore no surplice—Officiated in a coat—Put his Band in his pocket—[and] Wore a blue instead of a Black coat.” The absence of structure traditionally imposed by both Anglican architecture and liturgy liberated the congregation from “kneeling, and Bowing, and other Ceremonies enjoin’d by our Liturgy” and other physically manifested symbolism. These changes, Woodmason argued, eroded the deep structures of their faith. Their minister “never called for God Fathers or God Mothers” in the sacrament of baptism, nor did he require the recitation of “the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds”—the foundational statements of Christian belief. But even after the completion of this chapel, almost entirely devoid of fittings and ornaments, there were still those who clamored “that a New Barn must be built with 4 doors instead of two, and no Pulpit at All.” Such an entirely unarticulated space, where “every one may dance in and out ev’ry Minute like...Wasps in their Nest,” was a complete departure from Anglican tradition. For Woodmason, architecture and liturgy were inextricably linked. 306

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

The fittings of Anglican churches were wedded to liturgies that favored a congregational uniformity over individual expression. Box pews, the fixed pulpit, and the chancel restrained physical expression. In rejecting these fittings, Woodmason charged, his predecessor had “inverted the Nature of Things.”¹⁴⁴ By the 1750s, Anglicans bordering on the backcountry responded to the evangelical threat by building churches that sought to communicate one of two distinctive messages, and St. Stephen’s Parish Church is the only parish that chose to employ both (see FIG. 1.4). The first is the erection of curvilinear gables, a design motif that was by the middle of the eighteenth century so out of fashion that the choice almost has to be a conscious resurrection of an antique form. Such an architectural gesture would have the effect of manufacturing an antiquity in modern buildings that laid visual claim to Anglicanism’s long-standing authority over the newly contested landscape of faith.¹⁴⁵ A second and subtler strategy was the embrace of architectural classicism as a visual metaphor for the order—liturgical and theological but also social and political—they saw as essential to the stability of the colony. Architectural classicism was the Anglican response to the increasingly popular and highly personal—and therefore irregular and disorderly—message presented by evangelicals during the Great Awakening. The newly employed exterior classicism of rural Anglicanism of the 1750s and 1760s signified the Church of England not simply as elitist, but as a church of order, stability, and regularity in a religious landscape increasingly saturated with evangelicals. Although classicism informed the designs of a number of parish churches erected in the 1750s and 1760s, the metaphor was particularly acute at St. Stephen’s, the first substantial brick church erected on the borderlands to the backcountry. Just as cornices, capitals, and parades of pilasters depended on each other for stability and visual harmony within a classical system of architecture, so too the prescribed prayers and common creeds were components of an orderly liturgical tradition critical (in the minds of Anglicans) to the preservation of the civic order. FOR ANGLICANS in South Carolina facing the encroaching threat of irregularity and disorder, architectural classicism became a visual metaphor for disciplined order—in a word, regularity.¹⁴⁶ As Robert St. George has argued in his study of New England, “Symmetry, balance, and a conformity of parts were aesthetic principles that invoked divine order to sustain Christian communities on earth.”¹⁴⁷ In the words of one minister, it was his desire that “people resort to their proper Churches to hear the Word of God solemnly read, and their Duty explained to them in a sober, sensible and judicious Manner.”¹⁴⁸ Encased in pilasters supporting a classical entablature and organized on entirely regular principles, the church of St. Stephen’s was intended to exemplify one of those proper churches. In response to the rapid expansion of backcountry Dissenters and declining church attendance, Anglicans adopted in their architecture a new classical vocabulary as a metaphor for ARCH ITECTUR E AND CIVIC OR D ER

307

their practice of the Christian faith. St. Stephen’s was a visual manifestation of the “Solemn, Grave, and Serious Sett Forms” of the Anglican service, which differed dramatically from the “Wild Extempore Jargon” of the Dissenters, “nauseous to any Chaste or Refin’d ear.”¹⁴⁹ Anglicans responded to the threat of emotional evangelicalism by fashioning themselves—through architecture—as systematic, orderly, and regular. South Carolina’s Anglican churches claimed to order the colony’s increasingly complex religious and political landscape. Building St. Philip’s Church quickly became a monumental, material claim to the political conditions articulated in the Church Act of 1706, confirming for the rest of the colonial era the political authority of the Church of England over the colony. On the steeples of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, Anglicans installed clocks and bells, useful tools in establishing and preserving order in the urban setting. Church bells chimed the hours through the city, introducing clock time to the workday of the laboring classes—enslaved and free—and imposing a new system of temporal order. Church bells tolled for “great” funerals, but only those; the deaths of the middling and lower sorts went largely unannounced, and the bodies of slaves were often horrifically discarded. Funerals, or lack thereof, clearly reinforced the established social order by drawing strong lines of distinction between the empowered and the disenfranchised. In the rural parishes, imposing order on the political landscape was a very different process. The rising tide of backcountry evangelicals in the middle decades of the century introduced an entirely different challenge to Anglican political hegemony. The introduction of emotionalism and a direct critique of the liturgy elicited a heightened attention to architectural expressions of order among Anglicans. New churches, now encased in classical architectural structures, sought to confirm Anglican order in a landscape of increasing— and threatening—disorder. But the drive for order had implications within congregations as well. The leading members of any congregation enlisted the architecture of church interiors to construct and preserve their authority over the congregation and its minister.

308

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

Chapter 9 PU LPITS, PEWS, A N D POW E R

In the summer of 1744, the vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, included in the pages of their minutes a plan of their newly completed church (FIGS. 9.1 and 9.2). The nave of the church was organized around three aisles, two extending from the doors on the western elevation and terminating in a cross aisle that spans between doors on the northern and southern elevations. Filling the floor of the church in and around these aisles and the chancel aisle are twenty-seven pews, all of approximately the same size. The sense of uniformity among the pews was reinforced by the fact that the vestry paid carpenter Thomas Cheesman the same amount (£17) to build each of the twenty-seven pews. In 1759 the vestry of St. Helena’s Parish ordered the erection of three new pews in the western end of their parish church. Like most of their counterparts, the vestry of St. Helena’s insisted that the new pews “be built uniform to the others in Height and Model.”¹ This drive toward uniformity among pews in St. John’s, Colleton, and St. Helena’s was typical for South Carolina’s Anglican churches and, in fact, across the British Empire. The same could be said for pew plans and designs in Virginia, New England, and England. Even so, South Carolina is a particularly useful case study because such apparent equanimity is belied by the fact that throughout the eighteenth century, the plan of the Anglican parish church was among the most explicit representations of the sociopolitical hierarchies that governed life in the local parish.² Unlike Virginia, where seating was often divided by gender, seating in South Carolina’s Anglican churches was always by family. One of the primary purposes of recording the plan of the new church in the vestry minutes was not so much to report on its form but to record the legal owner of each pew. The vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, followed the common South Carolina practice of selling pews in an effort to raise funds for the construction of the church. Following a process of subscriptions, the highest subscriber would have the first choice of pews, followed by the second highest, and so on. It was no surprise, for example, that the pews located in the very heart of the church—numbers 4, 5, 9, and 10—were owned by the wealthiest and most powerful men of the parish: John Fenwick, Hugh Hext, John Gibbs, and John Stanyarne, respectively. Those incapable of purchasing an entire pew joined together with others of similar station to secure a seat in the church. Such jointly owned pews, however, were located at the west end of the church,

F IGURE 9 .1   Pew plan of St. John’s, Colleton, 1744 (South Carolina Historical Society)

F IGURE 9 .2   Redrawing of pew plan of St. John’s, Colleton, 1744 (Drawn by author)

some distance from the box pews at the crossing. Such wealth-dependent allocation, of course, meant that the rich quickly appropriated the space of the church as a vehicle for establishing and preserving their station.³ Pew subscriptions were the first stage in the process of building the social and political hierarchies of the parish into the very fabric of the church. The association of pews with social status had deep roots in English tradition. In the seventeenth century, seating within the space of the church 310

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 9.3 Great pew from Stokesay, Shropshire, late seventeenth century; notice also the ornamental panels of the pew behind (Photo by author)

was assigned explicitly by social rank. A seventeenth-century vestry of St. Michael’s Parish Church on Barbados, for example, directed the churchwardens to “take order for ye placing and seating of ye inhabitants according to their degree and quality.”⁴ Seventeenth-century English gentry would often embellish their pew with carved ornament, cover it with a canopy, and frequently hang curtains from the canopy under the pretense of warmth, such as was done at Stokesay in Shropshire (FIG. 9.3).⁵ In a pew designed by John Vanbrugh, the Duke of Newcastle sat elevated above the congregation with his own separate entrance and warmed by a fireplace faced with a marble chimneypiece.⁶ These so-called great pews were clear visual signs of the prominence of an individual or a family in the social and political hierarchy of the parish. But over the course of the seventeenth century, Protestants raised explicit objections to great pews. As early as 1623, Bishop Corbett of Norwich explained what he viewed as their moral offense: “Stately pews are now become tabernacles with rings and curtains to them. There wants nothing but beds to hear the word of God on; we have casements, locks, and keys, and cushions. I had almost said bolsters and pillows and for these we love the church. PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

311

I will not guess what is done in them, who sits, stands, or lies asleep at prayers, communion, etc., but this I dare say they are either to hide some vice, or to proclaim one; to hide disorder to proclaim pride.”⁷ As reflected in the 1712 resolutions of the London church commissioners, great pews had fallen out of favor by the early eighteenth century. These commissioners resolved that “the pews be single and of equal height, so low that every person in them may be seen either kneeling or sitting.”⁸ Seventeenth-century objections to great pews meant that by the eighteenth century, pews in both England and her colonies were expected to be low and uniform. The drive toward greater uniformity in pews corresponded in South Carolina with new funding schemes that depended less on singular benefactors and more on the contributions by a class of elites. With the dramatic rise in wealth generated in the 1720s by rice cultivation, church commissioners began to turn to a wider range of individuals. As a result, lists of subscribers replaced the singular benefactor. Through subscriptions, many more parishioners promised financial gifts for building or repairing. Although the church commissioners usually managed subscriptions, on rare occasions the minister took on this responsibility: “I set about...the Raising of Money by subscription, in order to finish the church and fit it for the decent performance of Divine Service, accordingly I set a Subscription on foot, but found the people very backward to subscribe, by reason of the management of former subscriptions. However, I pursued my design with success and have at length raised 1800 of this currency which is a sum sufficient to finish the Church.”⁹ Often, building projects required more than one subscription. In 1724 the minister in St. Paul’s Parish was pleased that “the Gentlemen of my parish have begun a Second subscription in order to compleat the sd building.” He estimated that the final construction costs would be “near £1200,” far more than had been allotted them by the Assembly.¹⁰ By the 1720s, church commissioners had begun to reward substantial subscriptions by giving the highest subscriber first priority in the selection of pews, a scheme that encouraged the wealthiest of the parishioners to compete for a place as a leading subscriber. In 1732, for example, the vestry of Prince Frederick’s Parish “resolved that the highest subscriber shall have the first choice of a place in the east end of the church for the building of a pew and that each choice shall be made in proportion to each person’s subscription.”¹¹ These pews were owned in perpetuity, and as legal recognition of property, vestries delivered certificates of title.¹² The list of pews and their assignees were also typically entered into the vestry minutes as a legal record. Of course, as individuals died or moved, or their financial status changed, pews and parts of pews could be and were sold to other individuals. As pews became commodities, these titles often limited the subdivision of the pew between no more than two parties in an effort to manage occupancy rates. In 1763 Robert Raper wrote to Berry Addison about his pew in St. Philip’s Church: “Pray tell me What I must give you for your half of our pew in St. Philip’s Church which cannot be sold to any other person whilst I am alive, 312

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

neither can I sell my half while you are alive.”¹³ Church commissioners recognized that linking gift sizes to ownership of a pew enlisted the expectations of social station to their advantage. In 1760 John Colleton’s estate manager informed Colleton that a new church was being built in his parish and that the commissioners “desired me to wish you to beg this favor you would give them something towards it as your estate has a pew always, I asked them what they Expected, and found out about £15 or £20, as every parishioner gives more or less I would advise you so to do. Sir John your neighbor gives them £20 or £25 pounds.”¹⁴ BY THE 1740S AND 1750S, Anglicans explicitly referred to church-building subscriptions as pew subscriptions; both commissioners and subscribers were fully aware that the size of their benefactions would determine their place in the political and social landscape of the church. South Carolina’s Anglicans employed rhetoric of architectural uniformity that suggested box pews were designed to avoid elevating certain members of the congregation above the rest. As previously cited, when the vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, hired Thomas Cheesman to erect pews in their church, they agreed to pay him £17 each for twenty-seven pews; no pew was to be distinguished from the others in size or ornament.¹⁵ When the vestry of St. Philip’s sold a pew in their new gallery to Philip Massey, a gunsmith, and Hugh Evans, a tailor, they included similar language in the indenture. The contract dictated that the new owners “shall not by any manner of ways or means alter the uniform of the said pew as it is...[by] raising or covering the same by taking down the partitions or by any other ways or means whatsoever.”¹⁶ According to the deed, the new proprietors of the pew would retain ownership of their property only as long as they did not attempt to draw attention to themselves by physically altering its form. Even though they rejected the material hierarchies of canopied great pews, eighteenth-century Anglicans vested their church interiors with similar if subtler mechanisms for differentiation. The size and location of a pew was still an important indication of the owner’s status in the parish community. In 1735, when an newly established parish of Prince Frederick’s inherited the old timber-frame parish church, it was filled with eighteen pews (FIG. 9.4). In order to distribute the pews, the vestry established a subscription charge for each. Instead of determining a best pew, the vestry recognized a set of eight—those numbered 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 18, each valued at £22, to be filled by individuals who were social equals. These were the largest pews east of the central cross aisle and the two easternmost pews of the western blocks. Pews to the west were valued at £20, while the two smallest pews at the far eastern end, numbers 3 and 4, were both valued at £16.¹⁷ The relationships between the occupants of the eight best pews reflect the kinship networks and peer relations that characterized the local elite of most South Carolina parishes. Not surprisingly, three of the four acting vestrymen PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

F IGURE 9. 4 Pew plan for Prince Frederick’s Parish Church, 1735 (South Carolina Historical Society)

313

who subscribed for pews secured east-end pews rated at £22 (numbers 1, 5, and 6). One of these, Anthony Atkinson in pew 6, served as the executor for the estate of Meredith Hughes, who occupied the pew just in front of him. Anthony and John White, sitting in pews 2 and 1, were father and son, respectively, and Anthony White’s son-in-law William Swinton sat across the aisle in pew 7. Thomas Morritt, the parish minister, subscribed £20 for pew 10, positioning his family just behind—both literally and socially—the leading families of the parish. A comparison of these pew subscriptions with contemporary tax lists of plantations owned by pew occupants further demonstrates the extent to which seating in the church was a visual record of social and economic status.¹⁸ By far the largest planter, William Swinton in pew 7, owned just shy of 6,000 acres. Five other planters, those sitting in pews 2, 4, 5, 8, and 9, owned between 1,500 and 2,500 acres. With one exception, all the pews to the west of the cross aisle were occupied by planters who owned 1,000 acres or less. In his study of Anglican churches in Virginia, Dell Upton found a gradual scale of importance that rose from the western to the eastern end of the church. The same was true for the rural parish churches in South Carolina; as a general rule, the best pews stood at the crossing and to the eastern end of the church. Even though no evidence for highly elaborated great pews appears in the South Carolina record, Anglicans used a number of subtle means to differentiate the best pews in church. Although Anglicans were not permitted to erect canopies over their pews, they often had them lined with cloth.¹⁹ Describing the damage done during the Yemassee War of 1715, the rector of St. Paul’s was relieved that the invading natives did little more than tear out “the lining from one of the best pews.”²⁰ In 1732 the vestry of St. Philip’s noted a “Large velvett pew” recently given to the parish to rent out for the support of the poor.²¹ Thomas Coleman advertised in the South Carolina Gazette in 1766 that he lined pews and did all sorts of church upholstery.²² In another example at St. Philip’s, Robert Raper wrote to his pew mate Berry Addison, then living in Durham, to inform the latter that he “lately had [their pew] lined with red cloth.”²³ In Charleston, St. Philip’s reserved pews for the governor, king’s officers, and shipmasters, and St. Michael’s reserved them for the governor, the Assembly, and the church vestry. Isaac Motte donated “a couple of Iron rods, with Gilt tops to be placed in the Church Wardens pew, as a mark of distinction from the rest” of the pews in St. Michael’s.²⁴ In 1768 the vestry of St. Philip’s paid almost £50 to have the governor’s pew lined with cloth.²⁵ These examples offer a tantalizing glimpse at what must have been a common practice, for it is clear that these lined pews were among the best in their respective churches. Most churches reserved one pew for “strangers” or visitors, but even these were not open to just anyone. In a 1750 letter from London to his mother in South Carolina, Peter Manigault expressed his frustration at the extent to which personal comportment was the gauge of social station. Responding 314

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

to his mother’s inquiry about the clothes he wore, Manigault indicated that he had been forced to purchase a laced coat so he could get a seat in church. On one occasion, “I was dressed quite plain, my friend had a Laced waistcoat and he, or rather his laced waistcoat, was introduced into a pew, while I, that is, my plain clothes, were forced to stand up, during the whole time of divine service, in the Isle.”²⁶ Away from home, South Carolina’s elite could not depend on personal recognition as they could at home. The same was true of visitors to South Carolina; they had to depend on the visual cues of dress as a sign of station.²⁷ The pews reserved by St. Philip’s for king’s officers and commanders of vessels were fitted with locks, and it was the charge of the church sexton to keep the key and reserve them for those individuals only. “If [the pews of the commanders of vessels or the officers of the king] are not filled at the time the voluntary is played,” by order of the vestry, “then the Doors [are] to be left open for any person to take a seat.”²⁸ But even here the vestry did not really mean “any” person. In another entry, the vestry limited access to these pews only to a few “decent” strangers, “so as not to crowd the seat.”²⁹ In the landscape of the church interior, boxed pews were reserved for the elite. Beginning in the 1720s, many parishes began to expand the seating capacity of their churches by constructing galleries. In 1726, for example, St. John’s, Berkeley, erected a gallery “for the persons who have no pews.”³⁰ The vestry of St. James, Goose Creek, also installed a gallery at the west end of their church sometime before 1727, when it was described in a letter of that year (see FIG. 8.11).³¹ The same was true for the large galleries installed in the 1730s in St. Philip’s and the early galleries installed in St. Andrew’s and St. John’s, Berkeley.³² In these cases, galleries were fitted with box pews and functioned as an extension of the floor space of the church. These box pews were sold or rented, just as were those on the floor, although generally at lower rates.³³ The pews in the gallery of St. Stephen’s, for example, were rented out at 5 shillings, while those on the floor earned three times as much.³⁴ As was the case in some Virginia churches, St. John’s, Berkeley, began a subscription in 1723 for a gallery to house students attending the parish school, which was described as handsome, well-endowed, and complete with a house for the schoolmaster.³⁵ But church worship was not limited only to those who could afford pews; most churches made allowances for those who could not afford pews by providing benches, usually at the west end or in the aisles and sometimes in galleries. In 1728, for example, the church in St. Thomas had “some Pews,” but “the rest of the floor is filled up with common seats.”³⁶ In 1728 the vestry of St. Helena’s Parish “ordered that the Churchwardens do Agree with Mr. Thos Burton to build as Many Seats as can Conveniently put in the middle Isle two foot Eight Inches to be payd for by the Parish.”³⁷ Again in 1759, the same parish ordered that the vacant western end of the church be filled with benches to be paid for by the parish.³⁸ These benches were free and open to those middling and lower sorts who wished to worship in the church but PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

315

F IGURE 9.5 Thomas Middleton, Interior of St. Philip’s, 1835 (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church)

could not afford a box pew. An early nineteenth-century painting of the interior of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston shows aisle seats in use (FIG. 9.5). In the painting, two women can be seen sitting in the aisle immediately below the pulpit. In some instances, churches erected galleries that were filled with benches instead of pews, expanding the seating capacity for the lower sort. Although the benches currently mounted against the west wall of St. James, Goose Creek, probably date from the nineteenth century, they approximate the seats installed in the same location in the previous century in many churches (FIG. 9.6). On occasion, the space within the chancel rails was reserved for those in need. In the eighteenth century, regular Sunday services would find the chancel of St. Philip’s filled with “the poor of the workhouse.”³⁹ Orphans of the parish sat on a bench fixed to the wainscoting within the chancel as well. By the early nineteenth century, the bench became a nuisance and was removed.⁴⁰ While the architecture of the church went a long way toward establishing the social and political hierarchy among the whites of the parish, blacks were not accommodated in the social landscape, even though they were occasionally communicants in the church.⁴¹ Ministers’ accounts indicate that some percentage of the congregation and as much as one-third of the parish communicants were either enslaved or free blacks, and blacks were 316

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 9.6 West end of St. James, Goose Creek, Berkeley County, begun 1714. The space under the gallery was not filled with box pews but rather by benches or forms simpler than the surviving nineteenthcentury forms; the seat against the wall can be seen at the base of the stairs (Photo by author)

frequently baptized and married in the church during services. Even so, very little accounts for where they sat in the space of the church. Ministers’ letters suggest that those enslaved blacks that were successfully integrated into the spiritual life of the congregation were often favorite house slaves. Since seating in the church was by household, it is possible that in most churches select blacks sat in the aisle immediately outside the family pew, as they did in St. Michael’s.⁴² Before the installation of the galleries in St. Philip’s, the aisles of the church were filled with poor whites, while blacks were relegated to the western vestibule, which had not yet been closed off from the nave by doors. After the addition of the galleries, however, “the aisles below were occupied exclusively by colored persons chiefly those who were attendants of their owners.”⁴³ In the smaller, rural parish churches where poor whites probably filled the aisles, slaves were relegated to the margins, where no seating was proscribed. In 1710 Francis LeJau reported that “slaves are sincerely desirous to do well, for they come constantly all of them near and about the windows of our Church, which cannot contain them when the parishoners are met, and behave themselves very devoutly.”⁴⁴ It was not until the early nineteenth century that specific references to seating for African Americans appeared in the vestry minutes of the rural parish churches. Typical is an 1824 notation that allowed “the free colored man, Wm Ellison...to place a bench under the Organ loft, for the use of himself and his family.”⁴⁵ Eighteenth-century South Carolina integrated slaves into their spatial order very slowly. Through much of the early eighteenth century, slaves were left to their own devices when it came to attending church, and the same can be said of the spaces they occupied on their owner’s property. Leland Fergusson has argued that archaeological evidence from plantation PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

317

sites suggests that enslaved Africans built their own quarters in technologies familiar to West Africa.⁴⁶ More recent archaeology in the city of Charleston suggests the same was true in urban contexts. Joe Joseph writes that the landscape of one early eighteenth-century urban lot, “with its earth-walled structure, borrow pit, and storage pits, would have been decidedly African in appearance.”⁴⁷ As Dell Upton has already demonstrated, eighteenthcentury whites did not incorporate slaves in the social order because they did not believe slaves were “susceptible to the same kinds of display” that elites used to order the social hierarchy.⁴⁸ Rather, as George Roupell’s drawing of eighteenth-century social engagement in South Carolina suggests, black slaves remained largely invisible to white eyes (see FIG. 5.28). In this drawing, a group of elite white men drink and converse while a young slave leans against the wall asleep. While the slave is uninterested in the merrymaking of the revelers, he—like the caged bird beside him—is a fixture of the room, largely invisible to them as well. By the early nineteenth century, however, South Carolinians—and southerners more generally—began to erect quarters according to Anglo-American technologies and aesthetics in neat rows that imposed a very clear racial order over both urban and rural spaces. In the same decades, churches began to dedicate galleries and other seating in their churches to black congregants.⁴⁹ THE REMARKABLE SURVIVAL of all the records from the two pew subscriptions at St. Michael’s Church in Charleston opens an important window into the social politics of one of the colony’s largest churches (FIGS. 9.7 and 9.8).⁵⁰ Before the pews were let out for subscription, the vestry reserved the two best pews for prominent public officials. The pew at the northeast of the center crossing was dedicated to the governor and his council, and the pew to the southeast of the crossing was reserved for members of the Colonial Assembly. In this one act, the vestry situated the power structure of colonial government in the very heart of their church. Reinforcing the primacy of these pews, the vestry numbered them pews 1 and 2. Subscriptions for St. Michael’s Church arrived in the hands of the vestry over the course of a few years. Appendixes 5 and 6 list each of the subscribers in order of their subscription amounts for 1758 and 1760, respectively. They also include their occupation, the date of their subscription, and the pew they selected. In large part, the subscribers were wealthy white planters, merchants, lawyers, or prominent public officials. Although a few prominent individuals subscribed very early in the process, the majority arrived in the last months of 1759. These came in response to an advertisement by the vestry that pews would be assigned to subscribers in the usual manner, according to the value of their subscription. Those individuals who had subscribed £350 or more occupied the best pews, which were all located near the crossing. In pew 60, immediately adjacent to the governor, sat Henry Middleton, a wealthy planter and former speaker of the House of Commons. Behind Henry and also adjacent to the governor sat his cousin Thomas Middleton. Miles Brewton, among the 318

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

F IGURE 9.7 St. Michael’s original pew plan, ca. 1760–62 (St. Michael’s Episcopal Church)

F IGURE 9.8 St. Michael’s pew plan coded by the cost of pews; darkest shading indicates payment over £350 and lightest less than £200 (Based on a drawing by Carl Lounsbury)

colony’s wealthiest merchants, sat in front of the governor in pew 17. George Austin, one of the foremost merchants and slave traders in the colony, occupied pew 33 adjacent to the Assembly. The family of the colonial governor, James Glen, sat in pew 34, just behind Austin. The “good friends” Ralph Izard and Benjamin Smith, subscribing £380 each, selected the adjacent pews 3 and 4, just west of the crossing.⁵¹ Izard was a planter and Smith was Miles Brewton’s business partner in the firm of Smith and Brewton; both were prominent public figures. Jacob Motte, the royal treasurer, and William Bull, PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

319

the lieutenant governor, owned pews 18 and 19 just behind the governor on the south side of the aisle. Like many of his peers, Lieutenant Governor William Bull offered £350 because that was “a sum subscribed by several gentlemen,” suggesting that he had conferred with his peers about an appropriate subscription. In doing so, they established the benchmark for their station. On any given Sunday, South Carolina’s most powerful men and their families could be found filling the best pews, those surrounding the crossing at the very center of the church. Following those pews at the very center of the church, pew assignments appear to radiate out from the crossing according to subscription value. Those individuals who subscribed between £300 and £350 selected pews adjacent to those already named. Three selected the pews 30, 31, and 32, in front of the Assembly and immediately under the pulpit. The lawyer James Parsons sat in pew 16 in front of the merchant Miles Brewton. This list also includes two women. Susanna Brunet owned pew 20 immediately behind the lieutenant governor, and Anne Mathews owned pew 59 adjacent to James Parsons.⁵² Only John McCall, the city treasurer, and Hector de Bauffain, the collector of customs, broke from this pattern. McCall chose pew 48, along the outside wall under the south gallery and adjacent to a window. De Bauffain chose pew 12 immediately opposite the pulpit and the first pew in front of the chancel. Subscriptions between £200 and £300 received fairly predictable pew assignments. Most of these individuals ended up in the remaining pews in the eastern half of the church or along the central aisle. George Appleby, merchant in the wealthy firm of Austin, Laurens, and Appleby, was the only individual subscribing over £200 to select a gallery pew. The side-aisle pews under the gallery at the westernmost end of the church were the least desirable of those on the floor, generally going to those who had subscribed less than £200. Although they subscribed the same amount as a handful of other planters (£150), William Henderson, a schoolmaster, and Morreau Sarrazin, an engraver, both occupied pews that would be among the least prominent on the floor—pews 54 and 55, respectively. Planters and merchants who subscribed that same amount, including Thomas Hutchinson, Samuel Prioleau, and Samuel Wainwright, all received more visible pews (57, 65, and 51), suggesting that they were allowed to choose before Henderson and Morreau. With subscriptions of £200 or under, Stephen Mazyck and William Hopton, both of prominent mercantile families, chose from among the best gallery pews instead of remote floor locations. In July 1760 the vestry solicited subscriptions for the remainder of the pews, the majority of which were located in the galleries. On the 26th of that month, they published the following ad: Whereas the pews in the church of St. Michael (agreeable to a plan in the hands of the subscriber) are now erected and a number of them still undisposed of: THIS IS TO GET NOTICE to all those who are desirous of subscribing for any of the said remaining pews, that they signify the 320

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

sum they subscribe in a letter sealed up, directed to the commissioners for building the said church of St. Michael, and delivered to the subscriber on or before Monday the first day of September next, on which day the commissioners will meet at the said church, at nine o’clock in the forenoon, when the subscribers are desired to attend in order to take their choice of the said pews, according to their subscriptions, and they, with the former subscribers, will receive titles to their pews on paying the sum subscribed.⁵³ Opening this second round of subscriptions changed the dynamics of pew ownership in two ways: it allowed new subscribers to overbid the firstround subscribers, and it drew an entirely different class of subscriber to pew ownership at St. Michael’s. Although a handful of planters, merchants, and public officials owned pews in the gallery—the Wando planter Robert Williams, the civil servant Thomas Lamboll, and the immensely wealthy merchant George Appleby are examples—the vast majority were mechanics. Seated in the galleries were John Ward and Darby Pendergrass (both Charleston tailors), John Stevenson (a glazier), John Favors (a carpenter), Robert Hardy (a chair maker), Jacob Boomer (a butcher), Jeremiah Theus (a painter), and Elizabeth Hunt (a midwife and one of the few working women to own a pew).⁵⁴ Seating in St. Michael’s Church made very evident the political and economic divide between Charleston’s professional and artisan classes.⁵⁵ As the pew selections of Ann Air and Thomas Lining make clear, social and economic class determined pew ownership every bit as much as the value of the subscription. With a subscription of only £105, Ann Air, the widow of planter William Air, selected pew 69 on the floor immediately adjacent to Rich Downes and Jo Nicholson, both merchants and wardens of the church at various times in their careers. The substantial subscription of £180 by chair maker Thomas Lining, however, could have placed him in any number of pews on the floor of the church, yet he chose a pew in the gallery. At least five other artisans offered subscriptions that could have given them floor pews, yet all five selected the gallery among other artisans. Lining’s and Air’s choices suggest that pew selections were driven as much by class identity as by subscription value. The majority of men who had subscribed for a pew in St. Michael’s during the first round were among the colony’s merchant-planter aristocracy. Of the fifty-five subscriptions, only five were not merchants, planters, lawyers, or prominent public officials. A characterization of those men who served the church as either a vestryman or a churchwarden during the formative years of the congregation, 1759 to 1764, highlights the clear socioeconomic distinction between the two classes of people who owned pews in St. Michael’s. Of the eighteen men who served during these years, not one was something other than a merchant, lawyer, planter, or prominent public official.⁵⁶ Of the forty-seven years of service represented by these eighteen men, merchants served thirty years, while lawyers or public officials served another eleven. PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

321

Planters served a total of only six years. Furthermore, no man who served in one of these positions subscribed less than £200 for their pew, and of the eighteen men serving, only one owned a gallery pew. Thus, Charleston’s political elite, those qualified for service on the vestry, were those merchants, planters, or lawyers who owned a floor pew for which they had subscribed over £200.⁵⁷ Conversely, artisans and other skilled laborers, who generally paid less than £200 and sat in the galleries, were not counted eligible for service as a vestryman or churchwarden. In light of this broad political distinction, the subscription and pew choice of Thomas Elfe, the prominent Charleston cabinetmaker who had worked firsthand on the construction of the church, is quite telling. Elfe was the only artisan to participate in the first round and his subscription of £200 was not insignificant. Together with his subscription, Elfe indicated that his first preference of pews was 14, a long pew at the easternmost end in the same block of pews as the governor.⁵⁸ If he had been given his choice, he would have found as his neighbors men such as William Gibbes, Othniel Beale, and Miles Brewton. Seated in the midst of a church that was an exemplar of his own handiwork, Elfe hoped to situate himself as Charleston’s premier cabinetmaker.⁵⁹ In the end, however, Elfe would occupy pew 37, still in the midst of the colony’s wealthiest planters and merchants but without the immediate proximity to the colony’s political aristocracy. There are, of course, a variety of other reasons that might have shaped an individual’s pew selection. In the middle decades of the century, Charleston’s elite families found in the social landscape of the church a vehicle for stabilizing kinship networks. Pew ownership in the newly constructed city church of St. Michael’s became a highly effective means for positioning oneself among the colony’s most elite circles. As the family of Jacob Motte demonstrates, many of these individuals were related to one another through a tight network of families. Motte, the colony’s treasurer, owned pew 18. In pew 62, immediately adjacent to 18, sat his son-in-law Thomas Shubrick. This family network was often sustained through generations by passing pews to descendants. If Isaac Mazyck’s eldest son, also named Isaac, were to die without a “male issue, of his Body lawfully begotten,” their family pew (21) was to revert to the male descendants of his second son, Paul.⁶⁰ Miles Brewton left pews in both city churches to his son Miles; he had himself inherited the pew in St. Philip’s from his father. Through a continuity of generations, the most prominent names of South Carolina would by virtue of pew ownership persist in one of the colony’s most clearly articulated landscapes of power, the city church. This observation of a pattern of pew inheritance to sons raises questions about the differences between pews and property in the minds of testators. In her study of early South Carolina women, Cara Anzilotti has demonstrated the power of women in early South Carolina as wealth holders through inheritance from their husbands, a practice that elevated women to positions of power at rates higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the British 322

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

mainland colonies.⁶¹ Anzilotti argues that in an effort to transmit traditional power structures from one generation to the next, planters “empower[ed] their wives to take their place, temporarily, as the patriarchs in their newly formed social order.”⁶² What might explain the frequent transmission of property from husband to wife but of pews from husband to son was the practical necessity of the former to sustain family wealth and the symbolic power of the latter to sustain family reputation. The symbolic power of pews to signal the status of the family was certainly a powerful factor in selection, but it was not the only concern. The subscription offered by James Reid, owner of the largest ropewalk at the docks, also suggests that physical comfort was a factor in pew preference. Reid began his unusually long subscription by complaining that he had never had the opportunity to own a pew in St. Philip’s. Even though he had faithfully attended for over twenty years, he had always had to rent a seat. He continued by informing the vestry: “My wife and I are both in years and consequently cannot hear at a distance so well as in youth, and that without hearing a preacher distinctly our coming to church is in vain, and our money laid out improfitably.”⁶³ He then laid out for the vestry a sequence of subscriptions he was willing to pay on the condition that the said subscription would allow him a place among the first selections of the remaining pews. Vastly underestimating the value of subscriptions, Reid indicated that he was willing to pay £206 if that amount gave him his first choice, which it did not. That failing, Reid stated that he would pay £150 for one of four other choices. That amount would have put him at about twenty-eighth in order of selection. Reid continued by stating, “After which as I may as well be without any as not to hear, and that I find I must fix upon some certain sum I subscribe only one hundred and twenty one pounds for my choice in course of subscription.” In the end, £120 purchased for Reid a gallery pew, and not necessarily a first-rate gallery pew at that, since almost everyone subscribing £140 and under received a pew in the galleries. The series of subscriptions that competed for pew 78 raises questions about the motivations behind pew selection. After the course of the first round of subscriptions, Humphrey Sommers had secured pew 78, immediately to the west of the north door. He had done so with a subscription of only £73.10, the lowest of the first-round subscriptions. Since the vestry’s advertisement for the second round of subscriptions indicated that pew selections would be made according to subscription value, only two—James Crockatt and John Giles—specified pews of choice. Interestingly, however, both were vying for Sommers pew. Crockatt, a Charleston-born merchant then serving as a buying agent in London, offered a subscription of £200, and Giles, serving as an executor empowered to buy a pew, offered £235. Sommers must have heard that his pew was being sought after, because in the second round, he more than doubled his subscription by adding £76.10, to make a total of £149.20. His attempts to secure his hold on pew 78 ultimately failed, although neither Crockatt nor the family represented by Giles owned the pew in the PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

323

end. The highest subscriber in the second round, Daniel Horry, a wealthy Santee River planter, outbid Sommers, Crockatt, and the anonymous family for the much-coveted pew 78. Why were so many individuals interested in pew 78? It is possible that the pew was desirable because of its proximity to the north door, which would have offered more light than a window and during the summer months may have been among the coolest spots in the church. But pew selections along the outside walls reveal a general preference for those pews along the south wall, suggesting that the clamor should be for pew 51 adjacent to the south side door. The significance of pew 78 was probably social in nature. Although the architecture of the exterior might imply otherwise, the northern door of St. Michael’s—with access directly into the north yard of the church and into the city square—was the most publicly visible and the principle door of the church. While the western end of the church was richly ornamented with a portico, those doors opened into the gallery stairs and the belfry, a space occupied by blacks, requiring one to navigate through a multitude of slaves to get into the nave. The white elite could more easily reach their pews in the center of the church through the northern door. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, South Carolinians were used to locating the best door in the center of a long elevation. As a result, the occupants of pew 78 would enjoy a place of extraordinary social and political access. Unlike the occupants of pew 77, who would have to turn around to do the same, the occupants of pew 78 could comfortably greet all those entering or departing the service through the northern door. As it did in all other churches, the pew subscription process marginalized the poor whites of the parish. With no access to the stranger’s pew, poor whites competed with slaves for seats in the aisles. In 1773 the churchwardens of St. Michael’s informed the vestry that “a number of poor White people had applied to the Clerk, to obtain Leave to carry Chairs &c. to the Church, to be plac’d in the Aisle for seats.” The applicants wished the vestry to remove the many benches owned by house slaves currently in those locations. In response, “The gentlemen of the vestry order’d...benches made, and fix’d in the Aile leading from the No. to the So. Door, and others near the Pulpit solely to be appropriated to the use of the Poor White People who may want seats.” The vestry determined that those benches owned by blacks should be moved to “the Gallerys, or under the bellfry and that no Negroes shall be permitted to sitt on the benches so ordered to be made.”⁶⁴ Thus, poor whites, who occupied a station above all blacks, were permitted to sit on benches in the aisles, while blacks—even favored house slaves—were relegated entirely to the back of the galleries or to the floor of the belfry. The complex systems of hierarchy and power that surrounded the Church of England were well understood by those forced to the margins of these landscapes of power, and they were often contested. Not owning a pew in the parish church—and by extension being forced to sit in the common benches—was tantamount to social, political, and economic alienation. In 324

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

1752 one wealthy Christ Church planter, disgruntled that he did not own a pew, “pulled down two of the public pews of his own Will and had them made into one, for the use of his family, without the leave or consent of the Vestry.” Naturally, this subversive action was swiftly addressed by the vestry, but “every other head of a Family” were also quite upset by the action because they “had paid a consideration for their seat in Church,” and this one planter thought it possible to attain the status without paying the price.⁶⁵ He was certainly mistaken; South Carolina’s church interiors, one of the most legible landscapes of local authority, could not be subverted so easily. On occasion, the hierarchies established by the architecture of the church were quietly subverted. The necessity for locks on St. Philip’s pews reserved for the governor or commanders of vessels suggests that these pews were often occupied by the uninvited. The same invasions occurred in private pews; Robert Raper, recently arrived in Charleston from London, wrote to his pew mate that “more persons come into the pew than John,” a situation that Raper “shall endeavor to prevent.”⁶⁶ Embedded within the Anglican pew plan was a legible system of public status and private ownership, but the preservation of that system required policing because the disenfranchised found ways to subvert the very system that defined them as the lower sort. Disruption of the established order came both from within and without. The Sunday services in the city’s churches were throughout the eighteenth century consistently disturbed by the city’s slave population. As early as 1712, the Assembly passed legislation against the slaves who came into the city “to drink, quarrel, fight, curse and swear, and profane the Sabbath.”⁶⁷ Again in 1734, the Gazette reported “a very great grievance the Negroes Meeting in such Numbers in the Streets of Charles Town on the Lords Day both in and after the Time of Divine Service.”⁶⁸ These complaints persisted through the century. Charleston’s slave community fully recognized the role played by the church, especially during the time of service, in buttressing the political structures of white authority.⁶⁹ In summary, seating in the Anglican churches was carefully delineated according to social, political, and economic station. The significance of the Anglican Church as a public institution in early South Carolina is also made evident in the support for church construction and repair that came from Anglicans in neighboring parishes. In 1728 a subscription for St. George’s received “some contributions from Gentlemen in other parishes.”⁷⁰ This was a political reality fully recognized by both Anglicans and Dissenters, who often owned pews for political rather than religious purposes. “The Dissenters come as usual to Church,” reported one clergyman, “and one of them William Hendricks, Esq. Gave sixteen Shillings towards repairing the Pews of the Church which had been newly glazed and painted.”⁷¹ Like many others, William Branford owned a pew both in St. Michael’s and in his plantation parish of St. Andrew’s. Miles Brewton even owned a pew in both the church and the Congregational meetinghouse in Charleston.⁷² At the end of the colonial period, one report suggests that pews in the city PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

325

churches were valued as much as £1,200 to £1,950.⁷³ At St. Michael’s, the governor and the Assembly were offered the most distinguished pews near the crossing, while city merchants and professionals established among themselves the price for the most elite pews and selected those immediately adjacent to the colony’s political authorities. The Charleston elite owned the vast majority of the pews on the floor, while artisans and the otherwise middling whites purchased pews in the galleries. Enslaved Africans, many present to attend to elite white families, occupied the aisles and the floor of the belfry through most of the century. Many others gathered outside to resist authority structures through disruption. The differences between St. Michael’s and Prince Frederick’s offer some insights into the contrasts between the use of church pews to reify status in urban and rural contexts. In both churches the seating structures differentiated the pew owners into two basic groups. At St. Michael’s the division lay between the gentry on the floor and the artisan class in the galleries, whereas at Prince Frederick’s the most prominent planter families sat to the east of the crossing aisle and smaller planters and other nonelites to the west. In both contexts, slaves occupied the margins of the buildings, taking only those spaces left over by the fixed seating. While the larger size of an urban church like St. Michael’s allowed pew owners to invest their seating patterns with a far more complex scale of social worth, the variations at Prince Frederick’s and others are certainly enough to recognize those same social and economic pressures at work among the laity. THE ONE PROMINENT FIGURE left out of the discussion thus far is the parish minister. The Church Act of 1706 established the Church of England as the state church, but it did so in ways that suited the local elites who were likely to serve on vestries. Although the act indicated that ministers were to be elected by the parish as the parish rector, a position that allowed them a salary of £50 per year, most parishes were reluctant to do so. The legal rights of the position of rector—and by right the president of the vestry—were such that dismissing a rector not to the liking of the vestry was not an easy task. As a result, most parishes opted not to elect Anglican missionaries as rectors but to pay their ministers themselves on an annual basis, to the great consternation of the clergy. As early as 1712, the whole body of the clergy in South Carolina collectively wrote to the bishop of London about their status in the colony. “Being President of a Vestry is thought too great an honour for the Ministers by the people of South Carolina,” they complained. Deprived of the legal protection of the rectorship, “the Clergy must be exceedingly cautious how they preach; for the declaiming against any sin, of which some of them may be guilty (tho’ unknown to the minister) presently exasperates them, as fancying they are industriously pointed out; And then a quarrel is commenced and a party made in order to call in question the validity of their election, and then ten to one, but out they go.”⁷⁴ The deference required by South Carolina elite of their clergy was not limited simply to political stature 326

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

but extended to social status as well. The clear social distinctions are palpable in Peter Manigault’s commentary on the pending marriage of a cousin to a member of the local Anglican clergy: “They tell me good Friend Cousin Betsy is to be married to Parson Keith. If she likes him I have no objection to the Match, but I would have her consider, that Gentlemen of his cloth wear their clothes longer than other Sort of People, & that there is no great Diversion in sewing a Horsehair Button on a greasy black Waistcoat.”⁷⁵ Using dress as a metaphor for social status, Manigault expressed his dissatisfaction that his well-established “horsehair button” family would be wed to one of common “greasy” standing. The political and social stature of Anglican clergy was lower in eighteenth-century South Carolina than it was in most other colonies.⁷⁶ In their own eyes, the stature of the vestry was so great that the clergy were very much their subjects. In some instances, conflict over the relative authority of the vestry and the clergy played out in the space of the parish church. The architecture of the parish church often became the stage where conflict unfolded between the colonial vestry interested in asserting their authority and the English clergy accustomed to greater control over parish affairs, as in a 1729 disagreement between the Reverend Winteley and the vestry of St. Paul’s Parish. The Sunday following the disagreement, Winteley “found the church doors and windows all nailed up barr’d and fasten’d so that there was no getting into the Church, and several of the vestry and the Church Wardens there present, I suppose to keep guard.” With some of the congregation supporting his cause, Winteley demanded that the doors be opened or give a reason why the congregation should not perform Divine Service. In response, “some of them cry’d out I was only a Hireling and they would have me no longer.” Undeterred, Winteley entered the vestry house with a portion of the congregation and began the prayers. As the service was begun, “the Vestry Men and Church Wardens and as many as they could persuade had taken their horses and rode away...as it were in Tryumph.”⁷⁷ On other occasions, disputes took on a threatening air and the architecture of the parish church saw physical violence. Writing from Chowan, North Carolina, in 1718, Rev. Ebeneezer Taylor described the events that led to his exile from St. Andrew’s Parish in South Carolina.⁷⁸ Since his arrival in that parish in 1712, the minister had actively resisted the self-governance of the vestry. On numerous occasions, Taylor preached against certain practices of the parish gentry, and particularly of one Mr. Skene “and his gang,” which were “very offensive to myself, and to many of my Parishoners.” The differences of opinion were to some degree doctrinal in nature. The vestry complained of Taylor’s “uncharitable railing during his sermons, not giving notice of the fasts or Feasts of the Church, not administering the Holy Sacrament on Christmas or reading proper Psalms and treating the character of the Blessed Virgin Mary in so scandalous a manner as chilled the very blood of his hearers.”⁷⁹ Conversely, Taylor felt that their behavior “made [most parishioners] unwilling to come to Church.” PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

327

By the summer of 1716, the conflict between cleric and vestry had come to a head. Taylor reported that Charles Brewer, a local carpenter who had recently finished constructing a new pew for Mr. Skene, “drew out all the nails of the bench of my desk but one, which he left just to keep it up, and took away the ledge and board that supported it.” As a result, the bench gave way as he sat down the following Sunday in the midst of the service and he fell on the floor of his desk, while Mr. Skene and the whole congregation, “set up a Laughter at it.” Taylor felt this “a very profane and wicked trick intended, and so I believe every one that hears of it will think it also.” Furthermore, someone broke “first one and then another Pin, which I used to hang my Hat upon, and to take away the Board on which I used to kneel, and made me kneel on the bare Bricks, when I was serving God at the Communion Table.” Taylor continued his lengthy complaint by indicating that his fear of the pulpit canopy being loosed with the intent of falling on his head during a sermon instilled in him a fear of mounting the pulpit and necessitated his bringing in a moveable desk from which to preach. The following Sunday, however, he arrived at the church to find that desk splintered and scattered throughout the churchyard. On the invitation of the vestry, a minister more to their liking arrived on a subsequent Sunday to deliver the sermon, at which Taylor “declared publicly that I would preach myself in St. Andrew’s Church while I stayed in St. Andrew’s Parish,...because it was my Church and parish.” The vestry did not agree. When Taylor went to church the next Sunday, he “found they had locked one of the Church doors with a new key and lock, and the other door made fast, nay and all the window shutters either hasp’d or nail’d fast that I might have no way to enter into my church.” Mr. Skene and his gang had won. Over the course of a few months, the parish church of St. Andrew’s had become a battleground between Taylor and the vestry. Both enlisted the fabric of the building to mediate their conflict. The minister introduced a new preaching station when he feared the first had been structurally compromised. The vestry destroyed the portable desk and scattered the remains as a visible sign of their objection. They enlisted the building first to slight the dignity of the cleric and eventually to strip him entirely of his authority in the community. Winteley and Taylor had both fought for a position of authority in the parish and had lost. Taylor’s eventual exile by the governor sent a clear message to Anglican missionaries in the colony that they were not to enjoy the same respect in the colony that they had at home; in South Carolina, final authority rested with the vestry.⁸⁰ It is important to recognize, however, that these instances of conflict are relegated largely to the early eighteenth century, decades when the balance of power between clergy and vestry was disputed. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the SPG sent fewer ministers to the colonies as vestries were expected to attract ministers to their parishes on their own. Early ministers’ letters are filled with complaints about the low standard of living they were forced to accept and the ruinous and occasionally uninhabitable condition 328

MATERIAL RELIGIO N AND S OCIAL PRACT ICE

of the parish parsonage. In 1714, for example, Francis LeJau wrote that “some of us have no house at all, and those that have must see them unrepaired.”⁸¹ By the middle of the century, however, vestries came to realize the potential of a well-kept parsonage to attract a desirable minister. In 1751 the parishioners of St. John’s Parish raised a subscription to repair their parsonage in the hopes of attracting a particularly desirable minister from another parish in South Carolina.⁸² By the middle of the century, those ministers who had learned to accommodate the consciences of their congregations came to live quite comfortably. Even so, the clergy remained at a station below that of the gentry throughout the colonial period.⁸³ If the gentry who comprised the vestry used the architecture of the church to subordinate the clergy that served in their churches, they also enlisted it as a means of preserving their station within the parish. But vestry/clergy relations were not always so contested. Parish vestries could also use the architecture of the church as a means of honoring ministers who had successfully negotiated the delicate balance between leadership and deference. Some parishes held their ministers in such high esteem that they gave them the honor of being buried inside the church. Francis LeJau reported in 1717 that the parishioners of St. John’s Parish buried their late rector, Timothy Maule, “at their own charge...near the South Door of their Church with all possible respect and decency, and Intend to erect a Tomb over his grave.”⁸⁴ Just a few months later, LeJau himself died, and his parishioners afforded him the honor of burial near the chancel of their parish church.⁸⁵ ELITE ANGLICANS in colonial South Carolina did not limit their claims to social and political status to their contests with Dissenters. Competition extended to the church interior as well, a space that could easily be read as a social and political map of the community. Instead of the great pews that characterized the seventeenth-century church, Anglicans in South Carolina opted to build pews that on the first glance would appear to be equal. But the significance of location, pew size, and occasionally the finish of the pew interior identified the leading families in any parish. In the galleries of St. Michael’s, the city’s leading artisans built for themselves an identity of place that mirrored that of the elites in box pews on the floor. The church was also a stage where contests between clergy and vestry were negotiated in the early decades of the century. All of this changed, however, with the onset of the Revolutionary War. The conflict between the colonies and the motherland upset the orderly nature of liturgical worship and undermined the established status of the Anglican Church. In refashioning themselves as the Protestant Episcopal Church, former Anglicans faced a variety of new challenges that threatened to strip them of the status they had enjoyed for a century.

PU LPIT S, PEWS, AND POWER

329

This page intentionally left blank

PA RT I V

Revolutionary Changes to Material Religion

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 10 BU I LDI NG T H E “HOLY C I T Y”

A few weeks before Easter in 1789, the vestry of St. John’s, Colleton County, convened at their parish church (FIG. 10.1). Upon inspection, they found the church “in a most deplorable situation, indeed not a door, window shutter, or pew to be seen, a large part of the floor missing, the pavement of the aisles in many places destroyed, and in short no one part but indicated the necessity of some repairs.”¹ The vestry of St. John’s was not alone. Although the Revolutionary War had left the two city churches with only minor damage, most of the rural parish churches had seen extensive damage. Most churches had been abandoned at the onset of the war, and many had housed soldiers or served as stables during the British occupation of South Carolina. Others saw their interior fittings burned as firewood. Five parish churches— Christ Church; St. John’s, Berkeley; St. Mark’s; Prince William’s; and Prince George’s—and a chapel of ease on James Island had been burned during or soon after the war. Another five—St. George’s, Dorchester; St. John’s, Colleton; St. Paul’s; the chapel at Edmundsbury; and the chapel of ease of St. James, Goose Creek—were described as in a ruinous condition in the years following the war due to vandalism and neglect.² The series of ruinous and burned-out churches that marked the rural South Carolina landscape were a

F IGURE 10.1 Charles Fraser, St. John’s, Colleton, ca. 1800 (© Image Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association)

F IGURE 10.2  St. Luke and St. Paul, Charleston, 1811–16 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

palpable reminder that the established church had been a casualty of war. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, Anglicanism in South Carolina seemed on the brink of collapse. YET BY 1811, ANGLICANS—now reconstituted as Episcopalians—began construction on the largest church to stand in the city of Charleston. Measuring more than 160 feet in length and seventy feet in width and fronted by an immense portico of four columns, St. Paul’s Church in the new suburb of Radcliffeboro was easily the largest church in Charleston (FIGS. 10.2 and 10.3). Sets of four pilasters frame understated doors centrally located along the side elevations, where engaged pilasters alternate with two tiers of windows. Rising behind the portico is a square tower that was intended to carry a steeple that would have surpassed those of older churches had it been completed. Pairs of superimposed columns on the interior carry the gallery and support the soaring roof (FIG. 10.4). The pulpit and reading desk originally stood in the midst of the middle aisle. Behind them opened a richly adorned semicircular chancel boasting Corinthian pilasters, with gilt capitals surrounding a large chancel window opening through the rear of its curved profile; an Italian marble baptismal font originally stood within the space of the chancel. Begun in 1811 and consecrated five years later, the design of 334

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.3 St. Luke and St. Paul, Charleston, 1811–16 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

St. Paul’s quotes that of St. Michael’s, its older sibling in the heart of the city, while its scale points to the larger and older St. Philip’s.³ The construction of St. Paul’s as the third city church was a monumental occasion for Anglicans; not only was it a sign to the city that the denomination had regained its religious footing, but it also made an aggressive claim on the social and political stature it had enjoyed in the colonial era. The dramatic differences between this new city church and the condition of parish churches in the rural parishes in these same years speak to the profound impact of political disestablishment on the architecture of Anglicanism. Vigorous challenges to the political establishment of the Church of England had come to the floor of the South Carolina Assembly as early as 1777. William Tennant, Presbyterian minister and grandson of the famous Gilbert Tennant, presented to the Carolina Assembly in January of that year a petition carrying thousands of signatures arguing against a “glaring impartiality”— the continued support of an established church, especially when that church was in the popular minority. “The established churches,” Tennant informed the Assembly, “are but twenty in number, many of them very small, while the number of dissenting congregations are seventy-nine, and much larger.” Central among Tennant’s complaints was the extent to which the public had supported the construction of churches: “The law builds superb churches BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

335

F IGURE 10. 4 Interior of St. Luke and St. Paul, Charleston, 1811–16 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

for the one—it leaves the others to build their own.” The Church of England “has for a century past been drawing more or less from the purses of all denominations—an estate of no less than three hundred and eighty thousand pounds.” Even so, he argued, Dissenters desired “no restitution”; Dissenters were content to let those “superb” churches “remain in her quiet possession and be fixed there.”⁴ Some Anglicans in the Assembly objected vehemently to disestablishment, defending the continued support of the church “on acct of the Provision for the Poor and the Management of Elections which were interwoven with the Law.”⁵ Tennant’s warm arguments for disestablishment eventually carried the day; when it was eventually ratified in 1790, South Carolina’s state constitution included no provisions for the support of an established church.⁶ After disestablishment, the first significant step in the reconstitution of the Church of England was the formal establishment of the Protestant 336

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

Episcopal Church in America in Philadelphia in 1784. The following year, the two city congregations, whose services resumed soon after the War, agreed that they “shall maintain the Doctrines of the Gospel as they are now held by the Church of England, and shall adhere to the Liturgy of the Said Church, as far as shall be consistent with the American Revolution, and the Constitution of the respective States.” The eighteenth-century prayer book of St. Philip’s reflects some of the necessary changes. Prayers for “thy servant George, our most gracious King and Governor,” were struck through and replaced in the margins by “the delegates of these our American states” (FIG. 10.5). When faced with the necessity to purchase new Communion silver, the vestry of St. Philip’s “resolved that the Large Chalice, marked G. R. be sent to England and formed into two small chalices with plates, for the convenience of administering private sacrament.”⁷ Although they retained a vast majority of their king’s silver, the sacrifice of this one chalice cannot have been without some political commentary. With the bulk of their material fabric still intact, the two city churches resumed regular worship with only minor alterations. The years between the legal reconstitution of the Church of England as the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1785 and 1820 saw former Anglicans in rural parishes struggle to reconstruct their churches as they renegotiated their place in South Carolina’s transformed religious and political landscape. Although the city churches were able to resume worship fairly easily, the reestablishment of regular worship in the rural parishes was a long, slow process.⁸ For the first time, Anglicans faced the responsibility of bearing the whole financial burden of constructing or reconstructing their churches. “The

F IGURE 10.5 Detail from the prayer book of St. Philip’s Church (St. Philip’s Episcopal Church; photo by author)

patronage which the Episcopalians enjoyed, under the royal government,” wrote South Carolina’s early chronicler David Ramsay in 1808, “made them less able to stand alone after that patronage had been withdrawn.” Unlike dissenters, for whom voluntary contributions were customary, Ramsay argued, Anglicans were less forthcoming with private funds for their churches.⁹ A few years later, Bishop Theodore Dehon expressed a similar sentiment. Dehon noted “the want of active cooperation on the part of the laity” to recover from “the decayed state of our church in many places.”¹⁰ Anglican planters were struggling to rebuild their plantations and reinvigorate their agricultural economies. By the end of the war, for example, rice production had fallen by almost one-third of its levels only a decade earlier.¹¹ For many, the reconstruction of their own plantations and the restoration of their economic means meant that building and rebuilding churches would have to wait. Attempts to reconstruct parish churches in the country were also frustrated by the habit of most planters of dividing time between city and country. As a result, they were less forthcoming with funds to support a parish where they only spent half the year. Even so, between 1785 and 1820 Episcopalians in South Carolina restored six of their prewar churches or chapels to regular services, and they built anew seventeen more, many of which fell in backcountry parishes formerly unoccupied by established Anglican congregations. By 1806 five parishes outside of Charleston had a serviceable church, and by 1810 five plantation parishes were having services on a regular enough basis to establish a body of communicants.¹² By 1819 Episcopalians in South Carolina had begun a vigorous campaign of consecrating new churches in Charleston, Columbia, Stateburg, and elsewhere throughout the Lowcountry and the backcountry, materially demonstrating that the years of slow reconstruction had come to an end. By 1820 the Episcopal Church in South Carolina was once again a thriving institution. THE MONUMENTAL CHURCH of St. Paul’s erected in Charleston was quite unlike the many chapels that rose in the plantation parishes over these same decades. Constructed usually of frame, most chapels were compact auditories measuring about forty feet by thirty feet, with a principle entrance located in the center of the longer southern side. The chapel erected in Pineville, St. Stephen’s Parish, in about 1809 is the only one of these frame chapels to survive, but it is fairly representative of the churches and chapels raised by Episcopalians in the plantation parishes between the Revolutionary War and 1820 (FIG. 10.6).¹³ Measuring forty-five feet by thirty feet, the primary southern elevation continues the fenestration patterns of its colonial predecessors, a central door flanked by pairs of evenly spaced windows. The western tower—unique to rural parish churches in both the colonial and postwar decades—rises three stories enclosed but terminates in an open gallery. The elegantly appointed interior originally separated two liturgical centers (FIG. 10.7). The pulpit, originally rising in the center of the northern elevation, 338

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.6 Pineville Chapel, Berkeley County, ca. 1809. The eastern vestry room is a later nineteenth-century addition (Photo by author)

F IGURE 10.7 Interior of Pineville Chapel, Berkeley County, ca. 1809 (Photo by author)

F IGURE 10.8  Plan for the construction of a chapel on the north side of the Santee (The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina)

together with its lower reading desk, has reeded ornament typical of the period. A venetian window at the east end—now obscured on the exterior by a later pentagonal vestry room—originally lighted the chancel. A fine gallery with a paneled front and supported by square piers capped by sunburst motifs stands over the western door. Access to the gallery, provided by an understated door accessing unfinished stairs rising within the tower, suggests that black members of the congregation occupied the gallery. Emulating the form popular in the late colonial era, a tray ceiling trimmed with a classical cornice soars above the interior. The only significant variation in the designs of these rural churches appears to have been related to the design and placement of the chancel. While the chancel in the Pineville chapel is consistent with colonial forms, two drawings produced for the reconstruction of Pon Pon Chapel after its destruction by fire in 1801 position the chancel in leftover space, behind the much more prominent pulpit. In July 1804, Isaac Mazyck and John Hume contracted for the construction of a forty-foot-by-thirty-foot chapel on the North Santee River in the parish of Prince George, Winyaw (FIG. 10.8). Together with an extensive description of the building included in the deed of contract, a plan produced pursuant to construction offers a fairly complete image of the building. In this, one of the earliest plans to survive from the post–Revolutionary War era, the chancel is little more than a rail built around the base of the pulpit. The Santee chapel probably differed little from a chapel erected in St. Paul’s Parish in 1812, which survives only in the form of an early twentieth-century line drawing (FIG. 10.9). Unlike the earlier Santee chapel, however, the chapel in St. Paul’s has an eastern 340

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.9 Drawing of St. Paul’s Chapel, ca. 1812 (South Carolina Historical Society)

F IGURE 10.10 St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish Church, Berkeley County, begun 1819. The original projecting chancel has been contained by a larger enclosure (Photo by author)

chancel lighted by a venetian window, much like the window that lighted the eastern chancel of the Pineville chapel. In 1816 the vestry of St. John’s Parish, Colleton, agreed with a carpenter to build a wooden church that included a projecting chancel in “a pentagon form six feet deep by fourteen feet wide, 11 feet wide.”¹⁴ Three years later, the vestry of St. Thomas and St. Denis began a church that differed from these others only in the fact that it was built of brick and included a projecting chancel (FIG. 10.10). Whereas the earliest chapels appeared to pay very little attention to chancels, by the BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

341

F IGURE 10.11  Plan for the reconstruction of Pon Pon Chapel, ca. 1801 (South Carolina Historical Society)

1810s chancels were visually distinguished by either venetian windows or structural projections. Evidence from various church-building campaigns demonstrates strong continuities between pre- and postwar building cultures. One of the two surviving drawings produced by different hands for the reconstruction of Pon Pon Chapel after its consumption by fire in 1801 shows a transverse section and a plan (FIG. 10.11).¹⁵ In each, parallel aisles run the length of the building, the interior of which is dominated by a pulpit rising from among the pews at the eastern end of the church. Behind the pulpit, a rail carves out a chancel against the east wall. The significant similarities between these two plans suggest that these were designs produced by competing hands to specifications generated by a client. If this is the case, these drawings illustrate the perpetuation of earlier building cultures into the postwar generation; building projects were completed by undertakers to the designs and specifications of a building committee. While the two designs demonstrate some subtle variations, the design program appears in these drawings to remain in the hands of the vestry or building committee. Another, very different, set of drawings from the same years, however, introduces an entirely different mode of design and construction. By the early nineteenth century, Anglicans in St. John’s Parish on Johns Island had decided to abandon their ruinous parish church and build anew. In 1803 the young architect Robert Mills produced a set of drawings for a new Episcopal church on Johns Island (FIGS. 10.12 and 10.13). The six drawings completed by Mills suggest an entirely different vision for rural parish-church architecture than Anglicans had historically embraced. The brick building was only forty-two by twenty-six feet, but the architectural elaboration was quite unlike anything else in the plantation parishes. A portico of four monumental columns fronted each end of the building. The side elevations were organized by arched bays 342

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.12 Robert Mills, Designs for a Church on Johns Island, 1803 (Charleston Library Society)

F IGURE 10.13 Robert Mills, Designs for a Church on Johns Island, 1803 (Charleston Library Society)

of alternating windows and blind panels, each supported by another panel in the form of a plinth block. A copper-sheathed dome on the roof contained a skylight, illuminating the interior. Unlike all previous parish churches in South Carolina, the building had only a single entrance—under the portico on the western elevation. Two rows of slip pews flanked a central aisle that terminated in a raised pulpit accessed by twin stairs elegantly rising to the stage from either side. Flanking the oval vestibule were circular staircases that gave access to the western gallery, reserved, according to Mills, for black members of the congregation. In so many ways, Mills’s designs are a brilliant look forward to the church buildings that would mark the nineteenth-century American landscape. Short-end entrances; single, central aisles; elevated speaking platforms; and sophisticated classical vocabulary are all features that would be typical of antebellum churches. Yet, even while the design was impressive, it was probably too expensive for the congregation to consider and was entirely out of step with Episcopal church design in South Carolina in the opening years of the century. Episcopalians in South Carolina were not yet prepared for such a dramatic departure from their own architectural tradition. The fact that Mills’s designs remained unrealized while design recommendations for a portico and a cupola made by Bishop Dehon for the same parish were embraced suggests that early nineteenth-century Anglicans were unwilling to relinquish control of the design process to a self-styled architect. But if Carolina Anglicans were unwilling to enlist the services of an architect—even a South Carolina-born architect—they were not averse to hiring undertakers beyond their borders if such an arrangement were to their advantage. The carpenter hired by Hume and Mazyck for the construction of their chapel on the North Santee was Abiel Waid of Taunton, Massachusetts. In their contract, Hume and Mazyck agreed that the carpenter would assemble in his shop in Massachusetts and deliver to South Carolina all the window sash and shutters, doors, wainscoting, and an interior cornice for the new church. Hume and Mazyck agreed to have ready for Waid upon his arrival all the necessary materials for the construction of the church beyond those components of the building being brought by Waid. By reaching out to carpenters beyond the region, Hume and Mazyck were able to contract for the construction of a chapel at less than half the price given by a reputable local builder.¹⁶ By hiring a Massachusetts carpenter but rejecting the designs of a South Carolina architect, Anglicans sent the message that they were willing to accommodate to the changing conditions of building culture in the new nation as long as they need not relinquish design authority to someone beyond their own circles. IF THE CULTURES surrounding the design and construction of churches remained largely unchanged, the postwar decades introduced new theologies that played an important role in reshaping church interiors. In the process of constructing or reconstructing their churches or in constructing anew, 344

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

Episcopalians demonstrated a remarkable degree of concern for the pulpit and its placement. The vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, for example, saw in the restoration of their colonial church building an opportunity to rethink the placement of the pulpit in their church. The former location of the pulpit, adjacent to the chancel opening, was “very improperly situated, not answering the end either of convenience, or elegance.” Rather, the vestry “agreed upon the propriety of removing the same, to the west end.” Standing in the center of the west wall opposite the eastern chancel, the vestry asserted, would best suit not only taste but convenience.¹⁷ In demonstrating great concern for their pulpit, the vestry of St. John’s was not alone. In the same years, the vestry of St. James, Goose Creek—one of the few churches largely untouched by the ravages of the war—abandoned their early colonial pulpit and desk and erected a new elegantly refined pulpit within the chancel (see FIG. 5.16).¹⁸ The two drawings produced by competing hands for the reconstruction of Pon Pon Chapel after it was destroyed by fire in 1801 present a similar arrangement. In these, the pulpit enjoys a clear prominence in the plan; the space of the chancel shrinks behind the prominent, central pulpit. The surviving expenditures for the North Santee chapel further highlight the central importance of the pulpit in that church. While the complete cost of the building shell was $750, an additional $200 was spent for the pulpit and canopy; by comparison, the vestry paid only $3 for the components used to assemble the chancel rail.¹⁹ Similarly, in 1806 Episcopalians in St. John’s, Berkeley, advertised for a builder to complete for them a chapel near Black Oak in their parish. The square chapel, twentyfive feet on a side, was to have three doors, one opening through each of three sides. Besides some accommodation for seating, the only other fitting mentioned in the advertisement is a paneled pulpit, which was probably intended to sit in the middle of the fourth wall. No mention at all was made of a chancel or chancel rail.²⁰ Church design among rural Episcopalians from the 1780s into the first decade of the nineteenth century appears to place great emphasis on the form and location of the pulpit, to the detriment or even the exclusion of a chancel. The pulpits newly erected in Episcopal churches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were often described as “convenient.” By the early nineteenth century, convenient no longer meant an acceptable material environment, usually spacious or commodious, as it had in the previous century; it now pointed more directly to physical comfort. In saying that the position of new pulpit was convenient, the vestry suggested that the pulpit accorded with a new, gentler form of body discipline: physical comfort.²¹ Convenient pulpits were lower, more centrally located in the space of the church, and visually accessible to as many seats as possible. In 1811 St. Philip’s began agitating for a new, lower, more convenient pulpit, a change that was made by the early 1820s.²² The new location of the pulpit made listening to the sermon a more physically comfortable activity. Physical comfort was important because, as one contemporary put it, “The soul and body are so BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

345

intimately connected that they mutually sympathize with each other, and whatever gives pleasure or pain to the one, gives likewise pleasure or pain to the other.”²³ Physical comfort facilitated spiritual grace. Early nineteenthcentury churches also began to accommodate physical comfort by slanting the seat backs of pews and providing wider benches. Church interiors also began to see carpeting and other domestic touches that extended the comfort of the home to the space of the church. The vestry of St. Philip’s, for example, carpeted the chancel and the minister’s pew in 1816.²⁴ In this way, more “convenient” church interiors worked toward the comforting of souls. Convenience and comfort were both aspects of the expanding importance of “sentiment” and “feeling” in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury culture, a phenomenon often described as the culture of sensibility.²⁵ Sentimentality, feeling, sympathy, and other emotional responses moved to the center of religious experience in these decades, replacing the doctrinal rigor and sacramental theology that had governed Protestantism since the Reformation.²⁶ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this emphasis on an emotional response to the sermon resulted in a change in preaching styles that was directed at moving the heart of the individual.²⁷ The warming of emotion could be seen in its most unbridled form—reaching below sentiment to the passions—in the preaching of Methodists and other evangelicals of the period. In the words of David Ramsay, South Carolina’s early nineteenth-century chronicler, “Their mode of performing divine service is calculated to keep up a high degree of fervor in the minds of their followers....[T]heir address is for the most part to the passions and excites more of feeling than of reason.” The goal of such preaching was the spread of “sympathetic feelings” among the congregation. “Frequently,” he continues, “whole congregations are melted into tears, or transported with extacy breaking out in loud exclamations.”²⁸ The height of religious emotionalism in the early nineteenth century were camp meetings, gatherings in remote locations of numbers into the thousands to hear emotional sermons by ministers of a variety of denominations. Such meetings were characterized by “violent agitations of the body, by clapping their hands, and beating their breasts— by shaking and trembling—by faintings and convulsions—[many] remained sobbing, weeping, and often crying aloud till the service was over.”²⁹ While Episcopalian ministers were not writing these kinds of emotionally centered sermons, and neither were their congregations responding in kind, sentimentality did encourage sympathy and feeling among the more refined segments of society.³⁰ Episcopalians embraced preaching that sought the warming of the heart while simultaneously rejecting the emotional expression associated with the passions demonstrated in evangelicalism. Robert Smith, eventually the bishop of South Carolina, expressed concern that he demonstrated “too warm a zeal or too great a forwardness” in his preaching.³¹ Smith hoped to strike a balance between an efficacious appeal to sympathy and overexuberant emotionalism. Similarly, Bishop Dehon was eulogized in 1818 as having “zeal happily tempered by discretion.”³² Episcopalian preach346

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.1 4 Robert Mills, designs for the expansion of St. Michael’s Church, 1804 (St. Michael’s Church)

ing was not without feeling, but it was feeling governed by comportment. Ensuring such comportment was the elegance, refinement, and taste of their church interiors more generally, but their pulpits in particular. Building on the common assumption about the interrelationships between feelings, morality, and aesthetics, Episcopalians erected stylish pulpits both to facilitate a sentimental response to the sermon from the congregation and to impose a restrained decorum on the minister’s delivery. It was important that the new pulpit in St. John’s, Colleton, be convenient, but it was equally important that it be elegant and tasteful, enlisting aesthetics to heighten sensibility. But traditional raised pulpits were also a conscious rejection of the modern, more open pulpits preferred by contemporary evangelicals. It was not accidental that Episcopalians continued to use the visual formula of eighteenth-century pulpits—a raised, freestanding pulpit—rather than the increasingly fashionable if unrealized stage pulpits proposed by Robert Mills both in his church for Johns Island and the new pulpit for St. Michael’s in 1804 (FIG. 10.14). In these new forms, the pulpit was a larger elevated platform with chairs often accessible by two flights of stairs. The more open stage of the modern pulpits allowed the minister far greater movement and physical expression associated with evangelical preaching. The modern pulpit installed in the Scots Presbyterian church was described soon after the completion of BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

347

F IGURE 10.15   Font in St. Luke’s and St. Paul’s, Charleston, ca. 1817 (Photo by author)

348

the building as “more in the northern style than is usual in this city, roomy and furnished with a hair bottomed and hair backed lolling chair.”³³ Such an allowance of space was largely rejected by South Carolina’s Episcopalians. As sentimentality became a central vehicle for the making of religious meaning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Episcopalians— together with most other denominations—moved their pulpits to center stage. But even as they embraced the culture of sensibility, Episcopalians used the architecture of their pulpits to ensure that ministers and their sermons were kept from the excesses of evangelical emotionalism. Soon after the turn of the nineteenth century, however, attendance at camp meetings was in sharp decline and the immediate threat of exuberant emotionalism had waned. “Much of the extraordinary fervor which produced camp meetings has abated,” wrote Ramsay in 1808, “and they are seldomer held, and when held they are attended by smaller numbers than formerly.”³⁴ As the immediate threat of evangelicalism waned, Episcopalians began to reestablish church order through the sacraments. Together with increasing financial stability and the election of the much-beloved and dynamic Theodore Dehon as bishop of South Carolina in 1812, the 1810s saw the recovering health of the church. In 1815 Bishop Dehon was pleased to report that there was “a growing attachment to church order.” He was especially pleased that “the ancient practice of administering baptism in public has, in many parishes, been happily restored.” Only two years later, St. Paul’s in Charleston saw its fine Italian marble font installed in the chancel (FIG. 10.15). He also reported the increasing practice of instructing children in the catechism. Given this increased interest in church order, it is not coincidental that the diocesan report of 1810 is the first to report the number of regular communicants in each of the parishes. The diocesan convention of 1813 was for the first time opened with the celebration of Communion among the delegates.³⁵ Bishop Dehon’s efforts to reinstate certain practices in church order had a measurable effect over the course of the 1810s. In the diocesan convention of 1810, Episcopal parishes reported a total of 637 communicants, 107 of which were from rural parishes. Only eight years later, that total had almost doubled to 1,249, with 267 communicants in rural parishes. In 1816 the number of communicants in the parish of St. Philip’s had increased so much that they were “usually assembled for four hours, and upwards.” In an effort to reduce the time necessary for Communion, the vestry asked the minister to abbreviate some of the collects and prayers said to each individual at the distribution of the elements. Although the decision to abbreviate the ceremony was made, the unusual length of discussion recorded in the vestry minutes reflects an intensity of debate and disagreement. By the 1810s, Episcopalians were deeply engaged with the practice and the theology of the sacrament. After the threat of religious emotionalism of the opening years of the nineteenth century had subsided, Episcopalians turned their attention to reinstating the sacraments of church order, resulting in a dramatic rise in baptisms and communicants over the course of the second decade of the century.³⁶ REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

Not surprisingly, the architecture of Episcopal churches responded accordingly. Churches and chapels of the late eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth century effectively merged the pulpit and the chancel into a single liturgical center. Often, as in the 1804 chapel on the North Santee and the 1801 reconstruction plans for Pon Pon, the chancel was little more than a rail at the foot of the more prominent pulpit. By the second decades of the century, however, the chapels in Pineville and St. Paul’s both installed a venetian window at the east end, clearly signifying the return of the chancel to its traditional liturgical location. By the end of the decade—just as the communicant numbers began to increase dramatically—Episcopalians began to install projecting chancels, providing even greater visual and liturgical emphasis on Communion in the life of the church. Chancels were added to St. Helena’s Parish Church in 1817, to a chapel on Edisto sometime before 1820, to the parish church of Prince George’s in Georgetown in 1825, and in the reconstruction of Prince William’s Parish Church in the same year. New churches constructed in these years were also designed with projecting chancels. St. John’s, Colleton, built in 1817, has a pentagonal projection, and the church completed in St. Thomas and St. Denis only two years later has an external chancel. By the late 1810s, Anglicans had returned to the traditional balance between the pulpit and the chancel as the two major liturgical centers in the practice of the faith. AS THE COURSE OF THIS BOOK has demonstrated, places of religious worship are simultaneously spaces of political power. In the early years of the new Republic, South Carolina’s Episcopalians were faced not only with political disestablishment but also with a popular drive toward egalitarianism. In these years, traditionally disenfranchised Americans increasingly challenged the system of social hierarchy inherited from the colonial era. In 1784, for example, William Thompson, a tavern keeper, insulted John Rutledge, a member of the Continental Congress and the U.S. Constitutional Convention and a recent governor of South Carolina. For his actions, Thompson faced a threat of banishment from the state by the legislature. Thompson responded by authoring a newspaper article tearing down the “self-exalted” man who “conceived me his inferior.”³⁷ The tavern keeper had put into words the driving sentiment of the day: Americans had just fought a war to overthrow a foreign aristocracy and they were not about to submit to a domestic one. Such sentiments worked their way into the culture of the church as well. In the midst of preparations for a large funeral in 1787, the sexton of St. Philip’s Church was instructed to ask for assistance in completing his responsibilities on time, to which “he declared he would not open the Church gates unless he had the whole management” of the affair. Hearing the resistance from the sexton, the individual orchestrating the funeral retorted that the “Clergyman would immediately order them to be opened.” In a response shocking enough to be recorded in the vestry minutes, the sexton responded that “the Clergyman was not his master—He had no Master” (emphasis in original).³⁸ BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

349

Such a statement from a sexton that both rejected clerical authority and asserted individual liberty was alien in a world where station was deeply entrenched in church life. In response, Episcopalians perpetuated and even expanded the power of architecture to order and control the social hierarchies of church culture. Arrangements for distributing the pews in St. Paul’s Parish Church reinforced in explicit ways the pre-Revolution hierarchies. Subscriptions for pews on the floor of that church ranged from $15 to $30. Slightly over half the pews drew a $30 subscription, while the other half drew $20 or less. Furthermore, the least valuable pews were contiguous: pews 1, 2, 37, and 38 were the only four pews valued at $15. Similarly, the best pews ran sequentially: 12 to 17, 22 to 27, and 32 to 35. In this way, the pew plan of the parish church continued to function in its colonial mode as a sociopolitical map of the parish. The new church erected by the vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, in the early nineteenth century had pews whose values were established by the vestry in order to make sure that revenues from the pews would meet the expected yearly expenses of the parish. The floor had large, square pews assessed at $15, other pews on the floor assessed at $10, and smaller pews under the western gallery assessed at $5. At the west end of the church stood a gallery filled with free “plain seats.” But long-standing social hierarchies remained nonetheless. The vestry “resolved that the descendants of the Pewholders in the Old church be allowed to choose a pew in the right of their ancestors and such other persons as want pews afterwards.”³⁹ In an effort to preserve the social authority enjoyed prior to the Revolution, certain families in the parish were allowed to select pews in a manner that perpetuated older social hierarchies in a way that restrained the potential disorder of the free market.⁴⁰ The changed landscape of social politics in South Carolina was nowhere more evident than in Charleston. On a visit to Charleston in 1810, J. B. Dunlop wrote an assessment of the city’s churches in his diary: “None but the Episcopalians have any pretensions to neatness of architecture.”⁴¹ In writing this, Dunlop highlighted the traditional distinction in eighteenth-century South Carolina between Anglicans and everyone else. As a result of their status as a state church, Anglicans had enlisted the deep financial resources of the public coffers as they erected their churches—churches that clearly communicated their political authority over that colonial landscape. Both of the Anglican churches in that city were monumental and architecturally distinguished edifices. Conversely, the Dissenters’ places of worship in the city were, in the words of one traveler, “neat, large, and convenient...[but] too plain to merit particular Descriptions.”⁴² The Baptist meetinghouse, completed in the 1740s, was a plain, square, brick building with a pyramidal roof and an upper tier of small windows lighting the gallery, which ran around three or maybe four sides of the interior. The Quaker meetinghouse was similarly square, with two tiers of windows and capped by a pyramidal roof. The meetinghouse of the independent church was brick, with two tiers of exterior windows and a tower standing on one of the short ends. 350

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.16   Second Congregational Church on Archdale Street, Charleston, begun 1772 (American Antiquarian Society)

The Second Congregational Church, built on Archdale Street in 1772, was probably among the most elaborated colonial buildings in the city erected by a dissenting congregation (FIG. 10.16). With a square tower in two tiers, corner quoins, and arched windows, the building was more articulated than most, but it still fell far short of the refinement of the Anglican churches, with their monumental scale, classical porticos and pilasters, and sophisticated towers and steeples. During the early nineteenth century, however, that would all change. Having recovered from the Revolution and its postwar recession, Charlestonians enjoyed a financial boom from the export of rice and long-staple cotton in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The latent opportunities made available by a healthy economy and religious disestablishment were not lost on Charleston’s formerly dissenting congregations. Between 1805 and 1820, six non-Episcopal congregations in the city—one Catholic, one Congregationalist, one Lutheran, two Presbyterian, and one Baptist—would erect monumental and architecturally distinguished places of worship.⁴³ In the fifteen years between 1805 and 1820, almost every formerly dissenting congregation in the city abandoned their eighteenth-century meetinghouse BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

351

F IGURE 10.17   Second Presbyterian Church, Charleston, 1809–16 (Photo by author)

and erected a grand new masonry church covered in scored stucco and fronted by a western portico and steeple. The new buildings erected for the Second Presbyterian Church, the First Scots Presbyterian Church, and the First Baptist Church are only three examples (FIGS. 10.17, 10.18, and 10.19). In fact, the only non-Episcopalian city congregations that did not rebuild their place of worship during these two decades were the Huguenots, the Quakers, and the Primitive Methodists—the last two of which were known specifically for consciously plain architecture. To greater or lesser degrees, each of these new buildings appropriated the architectural language formerly employed by Anglicans to renegotiate their place in the new landscape of religious equality. Most of them erected churches in the very form employed by colonial Anglicans: masonry churches covered in scored stucco, painted 352

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.18 First Scots Presbyterian Church, Charleston, ca. 1814 (Photo by author)

white with steeples at the western ends and fronted by monumental porticos. A close examination of one of these building programs, that of St. John’s German Lutheran Church (1816–19), demonstrates the importance placed on architecture as a tool for renegotiating social and political status after disestablishment. The erection of their building would communicate their desire to fully integrate themselves in the republican landscape of Early National Charleston. For a German congregation, of course, this meant abandoning visible signs of their ethnicity. German Lutherans were a part of South Carolina’s eclectic ethnic and denominational mix as early as the 1730s, but it was not until 1752 that a congregation of German Lutherans was formally established in the city. Seven years later, that congregation laid the cornerstone for their first permanent BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

353

F IGURE 10.19 Robert Mills, First Baptist Church, Charleston, 1819–22 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978)

place of worship, a building preserved only in a series of three paintings completed just prior to its demolition (FIGS. 10.20, 10.21, and 10.22). The large but simple frame building had its primary entrance in the center of the long, southern elevation. A tall-frame bell tower stood on the western elevation, while the small vestry house projected from the southern elevation. A coved ceiling spanned the interior, while the ranges of box pews accommodated a frame but marbleized altar standing under a raised pulpit mounted in the center of the eastern wall. Two small windows lighted the pulpit from either side. There were a number of things about the building that reinforced the congregation’s German heritage. In the eighteenth century, the church stood on “Dutch Church Alley,” following the English proclivity to condense “Deutsch” to “Dutch.” The building was sheltered by a gambrel roof, a type commonly called a “Dutch Roof ” in the eighteenth century. The subtle curvature of the roofing and the tower cap were also details associated with 354

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.2 0 Painting of St. John’s Lutheran Church, Charleston, ca. 1816 (Collection of St. John’s Lutheran Church)

F IGURE 10.21 Painting of St. John’s Lutheran, Charleston, ca. 1816 (Collection of St. John’s Lutheran Church)

F IGURE 10.22 Painting of interior of St. John’s Lutheran Church, Charleston, ca. 1816 (St. John’s Lutheran Church, Charleston)

F IGURE 10.23   Grained altar, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Pomaria (Photo by author)

Continental framing traditions. Material expressions of Germanic tradition also extended to the interior. Although the altar and the pulpit were occasionally arranged in this manner in English traditions, Germans made this a hallmark of their churches and meetinghouses, calling the unified center a prinzipalstuck.⁴⁴ The paneled form and the rich marbleized finish of the altar were also characteristically German. While English Communion tables were left in their natural state and more closely approximated domestic table forms, the Germans, who were more comfortable with the notion of an altar, represented theirs as a solid block, as in the slightly later example of a richly grained altar and pulpit from a German Lutheran church in Pomaria, South Carolina (FIG. 10.23). In a variety of ways, the building reinforced the Old World associations expressed by one nineteenth-century commentator, who described it as “an antiquated building of a peculiar construction, resembling some of the old churches in the rural districts of Germany.”⁴⁵ The graveyard surrounding the church was also filled with markers that differed from traditional English headstones. A few of the most distinctive are highly architectonic in design (FIG. 10.24). The one early stone that does approximate the materials and shape of an English headstone ornaments the tympanum with a skull and crossbones and uses a strong Germanic script on the tablet (FIG. 10.25). Throughout the colonial period, the Dutch Church, as English observers often called it, employed a visual culture that depended on a long tradition of Germanic Protestantism. Together with this visual context of Germanic ethnicity, the Sunday services would also have heralded this place as a German refuge in a predominantly English colony: all services throughout the colonial period were delivered in German. 356

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.24 Germanic marker in the churchyard of St. John’s Lutheran Church, Pomaria (Photo by author)

F IGURE 10.25 Headstone in churchyard of St. John’s Lutheran Church, Pomaria (Photo by author)

Charleston’s German Lutherans underwent a slow process of reconstitution following the Revolutionary War. For a number of reasons, Early National culture in America was not conducive to the persistence of German ethnicity, especially in a cosmopolitan port city. Contributing to this was the British employ of Hessian mercenaries and the prevailing assumption that Americans in these now united states were to participate in a cohesive Anglo-American culture. The first step toward acculturation after the Revolution was the introduction of English to the German Lutheran Sunday services. In 1780, immediately following the war, the minister Christian Streit delivered an occasional sermon in English, although the liturgy remained in German. By 1787 German was abandoned as the official tongue for record keeping, and by 1805 the Reverend Faber was delivering all his sermons in English and was occasionally offering the liturgy in English as well.⁴⁶ The gravestones found in the yard outside the church walls suggest that this slow process of English acculturation also had material implications. St. John’s German Lutheran graveyard suggests that between the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the congregation underwent a profound reordering of its German identity. Unlike the decisively Germanic form and text of the colonial-era stones, those postdating the American Revolution began to show signs of English acculturation. Even though the epitaph is inscribed in a rich Germanic text, the form and material of Sarah Bieller’s 1802 stone, for example, adopts the English formula for slate BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

357

headstones. Margaret Burkmeyer’s 1793 stone could easily be mistaken for a marker in any English graveyard if it were not for her profoundly German surname (FIG. 10.26). After about 1800, stones adopted almost exclusively the prevailing English model of a white marble headstone capped by a highly curvilinear profile. By the 1810s, St. John’s German Lutheran had come under the leadership of a new generation, one that had not known the pre-Revolutionary condition of the church in which the Germanic visual culture and the exclusive use of the German language had created a haven for German immigrants to Charleston. Most of these men had heard English spoken in church their entire lives. In 1814, as the vestry was searching for a new minister, they indicated that they hoped to find a minister “capable of performing the services of our church in the German and English languages.” They admitted, however, that if such a minister was not to be had, they would engage one who could perform service in English only. The abandonment of German was not considered lightly, however. There were those who did not approve of the “dereliction from that attachment which...we ought to possess to our Mother tongue.” The vestry defended their actions by responding that they were “desirous of retaining the religion of our fathers, although we cannot their language,” especially since the condition of the city has “for several years past precluded anything like German emigrants coming among us.”⁴⁷ The vestry, now men of German heritage largely acculturated into Charleston’s Anglo-American society, no longer considered spoken German essential to shaping congregational identity. The very same year, that vestry also decided to abandon the other principle marker that characterized them as German. In April 1814—with the new St. Paul’s and Second Presbyterian begun and plans for First Scots underway— the vestry appointed a committee to examine the expediency of erecting a new church. The report of the committee the next year indicates that the congregation understood their old church to characterize them in ways they no longer found appropriate. The committee found that here was an “almost unanimous desire of the congregation that a New Church should be built,” even if they argued that the most defensible reason for the construction of a new building was “the smallness of our church, and the impossibility of accommodating the present members.”⁴⁸ The committee’s report having been accepted, the vestry appointed a building committee and work was begun on the erection of a new brick church immediately to the west of the existing structure. By July 1815 a committee of nine members determined that a substantial brick building, complete with a “steeple as contemplated together with a portico,” could be erected on the site without disturbing the functioning of the old church. Besides the size of the building, the committee articulated three specific features they wished to have in their new church: they wanted it to be built in brick, and they wanted a portico and steeple. Any one of the three would have distinguished the church from its predecessor,

F IGURE 10.2 6 Margaret Burckmyer gravestone, St. John’s Lutheran churchyard, Charleston, ca. 1793 (Photo by author)

358

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

F IGURE 10.27 St. John’s Lutheran, Charleston, 1815–19 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

but all three indicated that the vestry hoped to appropriate the architectural language established by Charleston’s two colonial Anglican churches. The committee contracted with James and John Horlbeck for the brickwork and with Frederick Wesner to finish the building. All three contractors were members of the congregation. The church was to have four sufficient columns and recessed and revealed square pilasters, and the entire exterior was to be roughcast. That the new church erected by these men was clearly understood as an attempt to refashion themselves according to the prevailing Anglo-American model is indicated by the fact that although the old church was popularly known as the “Dutch Church” by outsiders and as St. John’s German Lutheran Church by the congregation, the new church was to be named simply St. John’s Church.⁴⁹ Four years later, in April 1819, the vestry dissolved the building committee and held services in their newly completed building (FIG. 10.27). The architectural similarities between St. John’s and St. Michael’s suggests that the colonial Anglican church was the model for the new Lutheran church building. The footprint of both buildings is about the same, and BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

359

F IGURE 10.2 8 Detail of pulpit and chancel in St. John’s Lutheran, Charleston, 1815– 19 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1977)

both have an elegant western portico and a western tower—although the steeple of St. John’s was not completed until the 1850s. The long elevation of each building even has double tiers of arch-topped windows alternating with engaged pilasters. The most direct quotation, however, is the “ogee” western gable end called for in the specifications of the new church and seen on St. Michael’s that allows the gable of the portico to step down from the roofline of the main building. Similarities continue into the interior of the church. The new pulpit and chancel of St. John’s, in fact, abandons entirely all Germanic character by embracing the cased pulpit on a stem standing before a semicircular chancel—forms familiar for so long among the colony’s Anglicans (FIG. 10.28). The German Lutherans of St. John’s underwent a profound transformation in the decades following the American Revolution, a transformation 360

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

that culminated in the erection of an entirely new and dramatically different place of worship. St. John’s Church building program allows a closer examination of how this congregation used its building to establish its place in Charleston’s cultural landscape and to communicate their fluency with the prevailing republican language of refinement. Not coincidentally, their decision to abandon their substantial frame meetinghouse with its decidedly continental features corresponded to the shift toward using the English language in services, in congregational records, and on gravestones. In the context of political disestablishment, the architecture of churches demonstrated the social and political virtues of the congregation, virtues that allow them to participate and compete within the city’s new republican culture. Associationism taught late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century observers that the material condition of the church reflected the spiritual condition of the congregation. In a landscape dotted with ruined churches and chapels, Episcopalians struggled to rebuild their places of worship in an effort to avoid the critique leveled at one such parish by Timothy Ford in 1786: “I remarked to Billy that I thought the spirit had not lately visited this parish; the Shattered & forlorn condition of the Church gave but too much room to question their zeal.”⁵⁰ In an effort to restore their church, Episcopalians built chapels in the rural parishes that asserted the refinement and comportment appropriate to an increasingly sentimental culture. In the city of Charleston, they began and struggled to complete St. Paul’s in the very years that many other congregations in the city were abandoning their colonial meetinghouses and erecting elegantly tasteful temples. The new church erected by the Congregationalists in 1804 led Francis Asbury to assume that “there must be a prodigious revival in the Independent Society.”⁵¹ Now on an even playing field with the Episcopal Church, former Dissenters erected buildings that demonstrated their republican virtues and explicitly appropriated the visual language of political entitlement in Charleston—large masonry buildings fronted by a large portico and bearing a tall steeple. The Lutherans of St. John’s were fully aware that they were not the only congregation seeking to use architecture to claim a place among the leaders of Charleston’s new social and political landscape. Referring indirectly to the other churches recently completed or still under construction, they boasted that “no building of its size and style of neatness has been more faithfully executed and at less expense.”⁵² The expedient nature by which the congregation raised the church reflected, in their own words, “good management, economy, and perseverance,” virtues integral to the language of American republicanism. They expected that Charlestonians would see their accomplishment as an “ornament to the city.”⁵³ By employing the language of economy and refinement to describe the building and the building process, they put forth their new building as material evidence that they were in command of the virtues necessary for participation in the new nation. For many former Dissenters, this drive to erect new churches participates in what Nathan Hatch has described as “the allure of respectability” in the BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

361

early nineteenth century.⁵⁴ Together with increasing institutionalism and the founding of denominational colleges, church-building programs were one significant means of those formerly on the margins to claim a respectable place at the new political table. In the Early National period, this congregation of Lutherans found themselves abandoning certain outward signs of their ethnicity at the same time that five other congregations were also reassessing the most important marks of their identity—the mark of architecture in the civic landscape. For these Lutherans and many others, Early National church architecture became an important way to shape congregational identity and to claim a prominent position in the city’s political landscape. In the Early National period, these buildings claimed for their congregations a place in Charleston’s new republican landscape and made visible Charleston’s slow migration toward religious pluralism after the American Revolution. This shift signaled the change among evangelicals from meetinghouse construction to church building. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the architectural vocabulary that had once signaled Anglican hegemony in the cosmopolitan capital—masonry construction, giant-order porticos, scored stucco exteriors and steeples—was now universally employed by former Dissenters.⁵⁵ But the promise of equality extended to Charleston’s Dissenters in the wake of the American Revolution promised little for the city’s majority population. In the years following the Revolution, the city’s Dissenters began to make specific accommodations for blacks in their congregations. As early as 1787, the Cumberland Street Methodist Church had built a gallery to provide seating for slaves.⁵⁶ The circular Congregational church begun in 1804 reserved one-half of the gallery for about 400 “decent, orderly and steady” black worshippers.⁵⁷ The Scots Presbyterian Church, begun in 1813, had reserved a gallery for the city’s black population. Abiel Abbott described the gallery in 1818: “A wide gallery is provided for blacks and is pretty well filled; some of the colored gentry were handsome in their manners and rather luxurious in their dress.”⁵⁸ Episcopalians, who had relegated blacks to the galleries in the later decades of the eighteenth century, began a campaign in the 1820s to remove them entirely from the space of the church. Erected in 1824, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Charleston was founded by an Episcopal women’s organization as a free church; it would be the first church in the state that did not require rents for the occupation of pews.⁵⁹ By establishing an independent church for the city’s disenfranchised, the Episcopal diocese effectively removed poor whites and free blacks from the aisles and galleries of the city churches to a space of their own. The disenfranchised status of the congregation was best represented by the fact that the masonry church was completed without a portico or steeple, the very forms that staked a claim to social and political entitlement by the city’s other congregations. The appearance of designated seating in the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries points to the increasingly complicated relationship between churches and slavery in the 362

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

decades following the Revolutionary War. While this attention to the place of slaves in the church did reflect an increasing awareness of the humanity of the slave—and by extension greater concern for the salvation of blacks—it was also an expression of increasing racial anxieties. The segregation of blacks out of the aisles of churches reflected the need to contain and control the increasing number of black Christians in the space of the church. IF HE HAD RETURNED at the end of the 1810s, J. B. Dunlop would scarcely have recognized the churches of Charleston. “Neatness of Architecture” was by 1820 a virtue demonstrated by almost every congregation in the city. As congregations employed the shared language of masonry architecture, porticos, and steeples in competition with one another, they simultaneously moved toward a visual uniformity that served to undermine denominational distinctions. As Ramsay noted as early as 1808, “Fashion no longer led exclusively to one church. The name of meetinghouse and the ridicule attached to those who frequented them were done away. The difference now is more in name than reality.”⁶⁰ After the wave of church building in the 1810s, this ideal would take on material form; indeed, so many of the buildings embraced a common architectural language that it was difficult to distinguish between churches and congregations. The churchmen-Dissenter conflict that had drawn such clear political divisions in the early years of the eighteenth century would a century later be largely dissolved. But more importantly, as multiple denominations made a claim in the city’s political landscape, the lines of division shifted from denominations to class and race. In 1815 Bishop Dehon proposed that “the state of their houses of worship will generally indicate the degree of attention which is paid by any people to their religious concerns.”⁶¹ As he spoke these words, Dehon knew that his church was struggling to reconstruct its own identity. Pleased by the initiative to construct a third building in the city but anxious about its incomplete state, he realized that the spiritual health of the Episcopal Church would be judged by its physical presence in the landscape. He also knew that churches were not just a mark of spiritual health but of social and political status as well. “It is mournful to witness the silence which pervades the unfinished walls,” Dehon continued, especially in light of the many “other temples, under the zeal of their builders, rising up in rapid succession around us.”⁶² The “Golden Age” of Anglican Carolina was over. The church had languished for decades after the Revolutionary War, visibly represented by burned-out and decaying churches, and now Dehon knew that if the Episcopal Church was to rebuild itself it must establish a visible presence in the landscape; it must rebuild. And rebuild it did. But the buildings raised by Episcopalians in the first decades of the nineteenth century were responsible for negotiating the very different social, political, and religious landscapes of the new nation. In the rural parishes, Episcopalians erected small chapels, often of wood, with refined details and prominent pulpits that became preaching stages for the restrained sentimentality central to religious culture of the early nineteenth BUILD IN G THE “ HOLY CITY ”

363

century. In the city, they began and struggled to complete the new church of St. Paul’s, asserting their continued presence in Charleston’s social politics just as numerous other congregations completed their own buildings that made their mark on the map of the new national city. By the nineteenth century, the reconstructed denomination found itself in entirely different circumstances, and its churches tell an entirely different story.

364

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

CONCLUSION

The Beauty of Holiness reads the architecture and decorative arts of Anglicanism in colonial South Carolina as a material record of the complexities of eighteenth-century religious practice and belief. Between the fervency of seventeenth-century doctrinal rhetoric and the rising tide of Enlightenment thought and sentimentality, eighteenth-century Anglicanism knew the tension between constancy and change. Theological contemplation, social engagement, and political conflict—South Carolina’s Anglicans negotiated these circumstances in material ways. Church ceilings and pew plans, gravestone iconography and mourning rings, and silver chalices and steeple clocks; Anglicans enlisted these objects and others to give form to belief and to shape relationships. Occasional convergence in the documentary and material evidence allowed the careful interrogation of specific acts in the everyday, while the expansive scope of source material illumines broad narratives of life on the colonial South Carolina stage. But these pages also examine the social and political dimensions of Anglican life, recognizing the fact that those in authority enlisted the material world to reify their position over the marginalized. As an examination of a specific historical context, the chapters of this book foreground the importance of the everyday and the degree to which the everyday, particularly in religious culture, fails to coincide with neat categories established by modern scholars. The everyday is and was messy and complex, and in this way, examining the everyday is far more real and revealing than the broad superficiality that too often passes for historical interpretation. The messiness of place and the everyday unseats our proclivity to embrace historical constructs like “colonial America” and to question binaries like architecture/building and sacred/secular. This conclusion considers the implications of a thick material and documentary description of a discrete place for writing about early American culture. This book questions the extent to which our concept of “colonial America” really played a role in shaping lived reality in early South Carolina. While a number of historians have explored the significant political and economic factors that bound the thirteen mainland colonies together as a confederation in the years preceding 1776, the anachronism of studying only thirteen colonies in the century and a half beforehand has become increasingly self-evident. The architecture of Anglicanism in early eighteenth-century

South Carolina suggests that the southern mainland colony had far greater connections with Barbados and Jamaica than it did with Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. Cruciform churches, scores of African slaves, and a brutal climate situated South Carolina at the mainland perimeter of the Greater British Caribbean. In so many ways, Carolina was West Indian. But while church architecture connected Carolina to the Caribbean, its grave markers came from New England, its silver from London, and its enslaved labor from the West African coast. South Carolina was also an active agent in the economic machine that crisscrossed the Atlantic. While it is my hope that this study demonstrates the value of an intensive examination of the local, studies of early America must begin taking more seriously the place of any single locale in the broader colonial project by dispensing with the “sacred thirteen” as an organizing framework and considering the connections of any place to the larger Atlantic Rim. The study of colonial America cannot be merely the study of thirteen colonies.¹ Similarly, the study of colonial architecture must also dispense with paradigms that define histories of post-Revolutionary architecture. In a culture devoid of self-conscious “architects,” the study of colonial architecture must embrace more vigorously the notion that buildings are best understood as the product of local building cultures. Designed by committee, overseen by a master builder, and realized by a coterie of skilled artisans, Anglican churches were the work of a community. Grounded in methods associated with vernacular architecture, the study stands on a foundation of exhaustive fieldwork; every colonial Anglican building or object surviving in South Carolina has been thoroughly examined and recorded in the field. Unlike the histories of early American architecture that focus entirely on production, this book covers that ground but then reaches also to the far more interesting histories that lie in the relationships framing the building process and in the ways buildings and associated objects shape cultural process.² A vernacular approach to colonial American architecture recognizes that cultures of building are far more valuable avenues of inquiry than are studies of single individuals. As a product of a community that continues to shape that space throughout the course of its life, a building is a valuable document of the lived experience. A vernacular approach also situates buildings as one aspect of a larger material world. By reaching past buildings and embracing gravestones and Communion silver as allied material culture, this study is object driven and not object centered, foregrounding the study of cultural processes that animated buildings. As a result, the preceding chapters also depend on a wide range of documentary sources: thousands of personal and clerical letters, a handful of surviving diaries and traveler’s accounts, builders’ records, and vestry minutes. Together with their associated material culture—in this case, grave markers and Communion silver—and their rich documentary record, early American churches are valuable documents for the writing of cultural history. 366

CONCLUSION

This book also explores the shared interpretive potential of vernacular architecture and lived religion. Called by some the “new architectural history,” vernacular architecture has over the last few decades dramatically transformed the questions asked of the built environment. Architectural historians have shifted their attention from academic and monumental architecture to the built environment of the everyday and have begun to ask questions of use and identity instead of production and stylistic trajectories. Material-culture studies have emerged from the intersection of art history and anthropology to consider the agency of objects in the everyday.³ Similarly, scholars of American religious history have broadened their scope from theological treatises, clerical biographies, and denominational histories to include studies of congregations, laity, and religious practice.⁴ In many ways, the study of the material dimensions of religion is the natural partner of what David Hall calls “lived religion.”⁵ Rooted in a cultural and ethnographic perspective on religion, lived religion is the study of practice, not only as it is officially instituted but also—and more importantly—as it is popularly appropriated. From lived religion, the study is driven by three convictions: religion cannot be separated from everyday life; the distinction between sacred and profane is a theological construct that has limited impact on practiced religion; and, most importantly, materiality does not profane religion. On this last point, this book demonstrates that the material world shapes the way religion is practiced and understood. Among the most explicit examples of the warm embrace of materiality among eighteenthcentury Protestants are the rituals and sacraments of Anglicanism. Baptismal basins; elevated pulpits; the silver, tables, and linens associated with Communion; and the coffins, mourning rings, gloves, and scarves of funerals all played an active role in shaping belief and practice. But it is also true that objects helped to establish and reinforce the hierarchies that are a reality of human communities, even—maybe especially—religious communities. The elaborated display of the Anglican “great” funeral was among the most explicit demonstration of social hierarchies among early Anglicans. This book demonstrates that Anglicans were fully capable of embracing the piety and prayer associated with the contemplative life and the social and political hierarchies that were an everyday reality. Unfortunately, the shared drive toward the everyday and the lived experience has not resulted in a body of literature drawing together vernacular architecture, material culture, and lived religion; scholars interested in vernacular architecture have focused largely on domestic space, material culture studies largely ignore religion, and most scholars of American religious history still fail to enlist material culture and the built environment as evidence in their arguments. This has been especially true of scholarship on colonial America; religious historians have difficulty finding meaning in Protestant objects or buildings not burdened with specifically theological iconography, and most historians of vernacular architecture and material CO N CLUS ION

367

culture still accept the now-refuted belief that religion was in decline in eighteenth-century America. With this book I hope to offer new strategies for scholars in these fields. These chapters also abandon any assumption that “real” sacred spaces successfully promote wholeness of the individual or the complete harmony of a community. They do, but never completely. The same Anglicans who prepared themselves spiritually for participation in Communion are also those Anglicans who purchased pews to reinforce social, economic, and racial hierarchies. The lesson here is to resist the pervasive if unspoken assumption among academics that political hierarchies and sincere religion are antithetical; to assume as much is poor historical method. As a thick description of a specific place and time, readers might be tempted to limit the arguments of this book only to eighteenth-century South Carolina. It is hoped that this study of one locale initiates others that question, challenge, or confirm the interpretations presented in the preceding pages. How did other colonial Protestants vest architecture, gravestones, and Communion silver with material theologies? How did they enlist the material world to negotiate these theologies in the real context of social relationships? The scholarship on early Protestantism has for too long accepted the antimaterialist claims of theologians. But early modern Protestants realized their faith in a material world densely vested with meaning. Examined independently, documentary and material sources provide only limited access to the cultural work they perform. Considered together and in light of other less-institutional sources such as gravestones and diaries, the investigation of both words and things opens doors to new ways of knowing and understanding early modern Protestantism. Scholars must reach through both sources to better understand the beliefs and practices of the people that generated them. In 1876 a group of Victorian Episcopalians converged on St. James, Goose Creek, to rededicate the ancient relic of South Carolina’s early colonial past. They did so celebrating a “temple shadowy with remembrances of the majestic past.” The turbulence of the present veiled their view of the past. The preceding chapters have likewise engaged this and other buildings, but in a manner that seeks to engage the artifacts of the past on their own terms and in light of their own context. The result is ambiguous and often contradictory, but in this way it more closely approximates the reality of religion in everyday life.

368

CONCLUSION

A PPE N DI X ES

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix 1 CATA LOG OF A NGLICA N CH U RCH ES E R ECT E D I N SOU T H CA ROL I NA, 168 0 –1820

Building

Building Dates

Building Material

Footprint (in Feet)

Notes

St. Andrew’s

Begun 1706

Brick

40 by 25, with western tower of wood and southern vestry of wood

No external ornamentation

St. Paul’s Parish Church

1706–7

Brick

35 by 25

St. Thomas Parish Church

1706–8, burned 1815

Brick

38 by 28

Christ Church

Begun 1707, roughcast 1723, burned 1725

Frame

40 by 24

St. John’s, Berkeley

1710–13, burned 1755

Brick

47 by 34

St. Philip’s Church

1711–13, destroyed incomplete

Brick

100 by 45

St. James, Goose Creek

1714–19

Brick, covered in roughcast

43 by 35

Pilasters and pediments frame each door, corner quoins

St. Philip’s Church

1715–23, burned 1835

Brick

80 by 60

Pilasters around body, three western porticos and a cupola over a vestibule

St. George’s Parish Church

1719–21, rebuilt in 1734

Brick

50 by 30 with 15 by 5 external chancel

St. Paul’s Parish Church Expansion

1722/23

Brick

Cruciform, approximately 60 by 35

St. Andrew’s

1723 reconstruction of 1706 church, burned in 1766

Brick, covered in roughcast

Cruciform, 76 by 24

St. Helena’s Parish Church

Ca. 1724, complete with tower by 1737, extensively reconstructed 1817

Brick, covered in roughcast

40 by 30 with external chancel 10 by 10

Prince Frederick

1726–33

Frame

45 by 25

Portico on north and south sides

Corner quoins

Building

Building Dates

Building Material

Footprint (in Feet)

Notes

Christ Church

1727–32, burned in both Revolutionary and Civil Wars

Brick

38 by 25 with external chancel

No external ornamentation

St. George’s Parish Church

1734–38, tower added in 1751

Brick

Cruciform, 70 feet long and 30 feet wide

Classical pilasters on tower

St. John’s, Colleton

1734–44

Brick

Square with an external chancel

Prince George’s Parish church in Georgetown

1745–55, tower added in 1824

Brick

80 by 50

Exterior pilasters, curvilinear gables

St. Michael’s Parish Church

1751–62

Brick, covered in roughcast

Dimensions unknown

Engaged pilasters on body, western portico, steeple

Prince William’s Parish Church

1751–53, burned 1779

Brick

50 by 35

West-end portico

Chapel/parish church at Pon Pon, St. Bartholomew’s

1753–55, burned 1801

Brick

52 by 36

Curvilinear gables

Chapel/parish church at Edmundsbury in St. Bartholomew’s

1753–61, ruinous by 1806

Brick

52 by 36

Curvilinear gables?

St. Stephen’s Parish Church

1762–67

Brick

Dimensions unknown

Body encased in pilasters, curvilinear gables

St. Mark’s Parish Church

Before 1766

Stone rubble

St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish Church

Ca. 1767

Brick

60 by 40

Corner and fenestration quoins

St. James, Santee Parish Church

Ca. 1768

Brick

Dimensions unknown

Porticos sheltering north and south doors

St. Matthew’s Parish Church

Ca. 1768

Frame

40 by 30

St. David’s Parish Church

1770–73, western bay, tower, and steeple added in 1827

Frame

53 by 30

St. Luke’s Parish Church

After 1786

Frame

40 by 36

St. Paul’s Parish Church

1812

Frame

St. Matthew’s Parish Church

1815

Frame

30 feet square

St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish Church

Ca. 1815

Brick

34 by 24

All Saints Parish Church

1820

372

APPENDIXES

Appendix 2 CATA LOG OF A NGLICA N CH A PE L S E R ECT E D I N SOU T H CA ROL I NA, 168 0 –1820

Building

Building Dates

Building Material

Footprint

St. Philip’s Church

Ca. 1680

Frame

Square or slightly rectangular

French chapel at Santee

Before 1700

Frame on brick foundation

Chapel at Pompion Hill in St. Thomas

Ca. 1703

Frame

St. James, Goose Creek

Before 1704, abandoned by 1715

Frame?

Chapel at Eschaw Creek, St. James, Santee

After 1714

Frame

James Island chapel in St. Andrew’s Parish

Begun 1722, destroyed in 1730 hurricane but quickly rebuilt, burned in 1781

Frame

Chapel in St. James, Goose Creek, Parish

1724–27

Brick

Chapel at Pon Pon, St. Bartholomew’s

1725–27

Frame

Chapel at Strawberry Ferry, St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish

Before 1728, ruinous by 1739

Frame

Chapel at Wolf Trap in St. James, Santee

1731–53

Wacamaw Chapel in Prince Georges Parish (All Saints after 1767)

1732–35

30 feet square

Cruciform, 60 by 40

Frame?

Chapel at Chihaw in Ca. 1736 St. Bartholomew’s Parish Chapel at Combahee in St. Helena’s Parish

1736–38

Frame?

Chapel in St. Paul’s at Beach Hill

1736–39, ruinous by 1775

Brick

Northern and southern porticos

Notes

Building

Building Dates

Building Material

Footprint

Chapel at Strawberry Ferry, St. John’s, Berkeley

Begun 1740

Brick

Chapel at Eschaw Creek, St. James, Santee

1742–48

Brick

Peedee River chapel in Prince George’s Parish

1745

Frame?

Chapel on St. Helena’s Island in St. Helena’s Parish

Ca. 1750, extended to east by 1820

Tabby

40 by 30

St. Mark’s Parish Church Completed by 1808

Frame

51 by 37

Pineville Chapel in St. Stephen’s Parish

Ca. 1809

Frame

45 by 30, with western vestibule

St. Mark’s lower chapel

Ca. 1809

Frame

30 feet square

Chapel on Pompion Hill, 1763–66 St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish

Brick

43 by 28, with a shallow, external chancel

Chapel in upper parish, St. John’s, Berkeley

Before 1764

Log

30 by 20

Orangeburg Chapel, St. Matthew’s Parish

Ca. 1769

Frame?

Notes No ornamentation

Cupola over vestibule

Venetian window over altar

Chapel on Edisto Island, Ca. 1774, St. John’s, Colleton external chancel Parish added ca. 1820

Frame (intended to be tabby)

Santee River chapel in Prince George’s Parish

1804–05

Frame

50 by 36

Chapel at Black Oak, St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish

After 1806

Frame

25 feet square

Chapel on John’s Island, St. John’s, Colleton Parish

1816–20

Frame

45 by 32, with 6 by 14 external chancel

West front porch with brick roughcast columns and cupola above

Chapel on St. Helena’s Island in St. Helena’s Parish

Ca. 1820 expansion of 1750 chapel

Tabby, covered in roughcast

50 by 30 with external chancel of 17 by 7

Columned porch

374

APPENDIXES

Fabricated by Abiel Ward of Taunton, Mass., and shipped to S.C.

Appendix 3 CATA LOG OF GR AV E M A R K E RS E R ECT E D I N A NGLICA N CH U RCH YA R DS, 168 0 –18 0 0

Name

Date of Death

Parish

Form

Robart Seabrook ? Benjamin Seabrook Sarah Seabrook Thomas Nairn Elizabeth Nairn William Rhett William Crooke Benjamin D’Hariette John Lambert Ann Ramsey John King Thomas Baker Ann Prioleau Ann Scott Edward Bullard Adam Beauchamp Ann Austin James Parker John Hext Martha Logan Maria Quincy

1710 1712 1714 1715 1718 1720 1722 1723 1726 1729 1730 1733 1737 1739 1740 1740 1741 1741 1742 1742 1742 1742

St. Paul’s St. Thomas and St. Denis St. Paul’s St. Paul’s St. Andrew’s St. Andrew’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s

Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Slab Slab Chest tomb Chest tomb Slab Headstone Chest tomb Chest tomb Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Chest tomb Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone

Charlotta Drayton Joseph Ellicott Thomas Lloydd Gabriel Banbury Thomas Prue Daniel Dwight Catherine Warden John Ellicott Elizabeth Fowler Amerenthia Lowndes Amerenthia Elliott Francis Barrow Mary Dart Martha Price

1743 1744 1744 1745 1747 1748 1749 1749 1750 1750 1750 1750 1752 1754

St. Andrew’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. John’s, Berkeley, chapel St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Paul’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s

Chest tomb Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Chest tomb

Decorative Motif Columns down the sides Soul’s head Death’s head Heraldic shield Heraldic shield Heraldic shield Death’s head

Death’s head Hourglass, skull and crossbones Cherubs Death’s head

Hourglass, skeleton, and figure of hope Death’s head Soul’s head Soul’s head

Death’s head Death’s head Cherub Angel aloft Heraldic shield Portrait

Name Thomas Pool Ann D’Hariette William Shepard Robert Broun Henrietta Lloydd Hasell Thomas Mary Middleton William Lloydd Mary Elliott Robert Brewton Job Milner Jane Banbury Alexander McGillivray Jeremiah van Rensselear Ann Crouch Martha Grimke John Rogers Martha Chalmers Francis LeJau Thomas Bromley Robert Stedman Ebenezer Simmons James Legare Elizabeth Banbury John Champneys Ann Drayton ? John Roffe Edward Bullard Mary Motte John Bull Amerenthia Waring Joseph Williams Suzannah Pinckney Thomas Nightingale Richard Baker Francis Prue Elizabeth Ann Smith John Snelling John Chapman Mary Ann Luyten William Baker John Cleator Hannah Baronet Benjamin Smith Charles Crouch Richard Corbett Isaac Waldrow John Moore

Date of Death 1754 1754 1756 1757 1758 1759 1760 1760 1760 1761 1761 1761 1763 1764 1764 1764 1765 1765 1765 1765 1766 1766 1766 1766 1766 1766 1766 1767 1767 1767 1767 1768 1768 1768 1769 1769 1769 1769 1769 1769 1770 1770 1770 1770 1770 1771 1772 1772 1772

376

Parish

Form

Decorative Motif

St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. James, Goose Creek St. Philip’s St. Philip’s Prince William’s St. Philip’s St. Andrew’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. James, Goose Creek St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s Prince William’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s Prince William’s St. Philip’s St. Andrew’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. James, Goose Creek St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s

Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab on base Chest tomb Headstone Headstone Chest tomb Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Slab on base Headstone Slab Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Chest tomb Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Chest tomb Headstone Slab Slab on base Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Slab Grave board Headstone Headstone Slab on base Slab on base Headstone Slab Headstone Slab

Skeleton with hourglass Portrait

APPENDIXES

Soul’s head

Soul’s head

Soul’s head

Angels Death’s head Reveals for brass inlay now missing

Scull and crossbones Heraldic shield Cherubs

Soul’s head Portrait

Soul’s head

Soul’s head Soul’s head

Name John Baker Jane Righton Elizabeth Crouch George Logan John Prue William Augustus James Postelle Francis LeBaron Robert Cripps Elizabeth Butler Sarah Creighton John Mackenzie Charles Cosslett William Green James Parsons Elizabeth Shubrick Esther Wayne Jonathan Lawrence George Cobham John and Martha McCall Ann Mazyck Thomas Legare Charles Pinckney Mary Smith William and Mary Sutton Jacob Bommer Thomas Savage Jacob Solzar William Green John Garden Jane Postell Elias Ball Stephen Brown James Green Peter Bacot Elizabeth Cogdell Andrew Stewart Samuel Harvey Charlotte Massey Thomas Markland Thomas Bower Frip Hester Brown John Moor John Markland Benjamin Simons Daniel Lesesne John Watson Elizabeth Harleston Susanna Hall

Date of Death 1772 1772 1772 1773 1773 1773 1773 1773 1774 1775 1775 1775 1776 1778 1779 1779 1780 1782 1784 1784 1785 1785 1785 1785 1785 1786 1786 1786 1786 1786 1786 1786 1787 1787 1787 1787 1787 1787 1787 1787 1787 1788 1788 1788 1789 1789 1789 1790 1790

Parish

Form

St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. George’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s Prince Frederick’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Thomas and St. Denis St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. James, Goose Creek St. Philip’s Christ Church Prince George’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s Prince Frederick’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. John’s, Berkeley, chapel St. Michael’s Prince Frederick’s St. Philip’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s Prince Frederick’s St. Thomas and St. Denis St. Philip’s St. Thomas and St. Denis chapel St. Thomas and St. Denis St. Philip’s St. Thomas and St. Denis chapel St. Philip’s

Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Headstone Slab Slab Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Slab Headstone

APPENDIXES

Decorative Motif

Soul’s head Soul’s head Soul’s head Portrait

Soul’s head

Soul’s head Inscribed urn Soul’s head

Soul’s head

Soul’s head Soul’s head Soul’s head

Soul’s head

Soul’s head

377

Name Sarah Garden Mary Grimke Mary Lesesne Ann Glover J. P. G. Peter Sinkler Jeremiah Roche Elizabeth Hall Foster Mordecai Gist George Cogdell Hannah Prior Elizabeth Pearce Harriett Murray John Graham Eleanor Gaillard Harriet Prior Thomas Moore John Parker Elizabeth Chalmers Richard Wilkinson F. Wells Michael Carroll Maria Mayer Thomas Holland Edith Mathews James Wyatt Margaret McBride Lydia Jane Green George Bampfield Walter Hall Mary DuPre William Moultrie John Hollard Jane Green John Mayer James Sinkler John Hazlehurst Samuel Heron Maria Turnbull Thomas Taylor John Lewis Gervais Mary Pratt Anna Lord Peter Ryan Peter Smith’s Family Mary Gaillard Mary Gibbes Ripley Singleton

Date of Death 1791 1791 1791 1791 1791 1791 1792 1792 1792 1792 1793 1793 1793 1793 1793 1793 1794 1794 1794 1794 1794 1795 1795 1795 1795 1796 1796 1796 1796 1796 1796 1796 1796 1797 1797 1797 1798 1798 1798 1798 1798 1798 1798 1798 1798 1799 1799 1799

378

Parish

Form

St. Thomas and St. Denis St. Michael’s St. Thomas and St. Denis St. James, Goose Creek St. Michael’s St. Stephen’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s Prince George’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s St. Stephen’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. James, Goose Creek Prince Frederick’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s Prince George’s St. James, Goose Creek St. Philip’s Prince Frederick’s St. Philip’s St. Stephen’s St. Michael’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s Prince George’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Philip’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s St. Stephen’s St. Philip’s St. Michael’s

Slab Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab on base Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Slab Slab Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone Headstone Slab Headstone

APPENDIXES

Decorative Motif

Soul’s head Bronze wreath Portrait Soul’s head Soul’s head Crossed vines Mourning figure Soul’s head Urn

Urn Soul’s head Soul’s head

Heraldic shield Urn and willow

Cross, urn, and cherubs

Appendix 4 CATA LOG OF A NGLICA N CH U RCH SI LV E R, 1680 –1820

Parish

Form

Date

Maker

St. John’s, Berkeley

Silver and gilt beaker

Before 1685?

French

Presented to the parish in 1742 as cup “used by the Protestants in France before the Persecution” [1685]

St. Philip’s

Heart-shaped salver

1690–1700

Spanish

Possibly plunder from 1702 attack on St. Augustine

St. Philip’s

Salver

1702

Christ Church

Chalice

1705

St. James, Goose Chalice, Creek tankard, and plate

1706

St. Paul’s

Chalice

1707

St. Philip’s

St. Thomas and St. Denis

Inscription

Notes

Gift of Francis Fidling; no longer extant John Edwards, Boston Probably bequest of Ralph Izard, June 4, 1706; no longer extant Miles Brewton, Charleston

S. P.

Chalice, paten, 1710–11 flagon, and alms basin

Robert Peake, London

The Gift of Coll: Wm. Rhett to ye church of St. Philip, Charles-Town, South Carolina

Chalice

1711

Miles Brewton, Charleston

Belonging to St. Thomas’ Parish in SC A.D. 1711

Prince George’s, Paten Winyaw

Ca. 1715

Henry Hurst, Boston

Prince George’s, Chalice, flagon, Winyaw alms basin

Before 1717 Samuel Hough, Boston

St. John’s, Berkeley

Chalice and paten

1725

Miles Brewton, Charleston

St. John’s Parish, South Carolina, in America

St. Johns, Berkeley

Flagon

1724–25

English

St. John’s Parish, South Carolina, in America

St. Andrew’s

Chalice, paten, and alms basin

1727

Given by Rev. Thomas Morritt in 1734; no longer extant. Given by Rev. Thomas Morritt in 1734; only the chalice survives

Vestry minutes note the gift from William Fuller; no longer extant

Parish

Form

Date

Maker

Inscription

Notes

St. Philip’s

Chalice, paten, 2 flagons, and alms basin

1729–30

Joseph Allen, London

Royal Arms of George II

St. George’s

Chalice and paten

1729–30

London

Trigram in a glory and inscription “St. George’s Dorchester, So. Ca.”

St. Helena’s

Chalice, paten, and alms plate

1735–36

John White, London

The gift of Capt. John Bull to Alms plate now lost the Parish of St. Helena’s 1734

Prince Frederick’s

Chalice and tankard

Ca. 1745

Now in possession of St. Paul’s Summerville

Prince Frederick

Prince George’s, Chalice with Winyaw paten

1747

Attributed to Henry Herbert, London

St. Thomas and St. Denis

Chalice

1750

English

Belonging to the Parish of St. Thomas in SC 1753z

Prince Williams

2 chalices

Ca. 1750

English

The Gift of Mr. Evans Palmer for the use of the Church in Prince William’s Parish, 1753

St. James, Santee

Chalice

1750

London

The gift of Ralph Jerman, 1750

St. Helena’s

Chalice and paten

1753–54

London

St. Helena’s Parish, St. Helena Island

Prince William’s

Chalice, paten, flagon, and alms basin

1753–54

William Grundy, London

Eucharistiae Celebrandae sacrum, dicabat Gulielmus Bull Provinciae Carolinae Australis Proprator Consilium Patris optimi Vita functi exsequitur Gulielmus Bull MDCCLVI. Prince William’s Parish.

St. James, Santee

Paten

1754–55

London

Pro Sta Jacobi, Jacob Nicola Schwartzkoff, Feb 11, 1756

St. George’s

Plate

1755

American

The gift of Henry Middleton, Now in possession of Esq., to St. George’s Church St. Michael’s Parish in Dorchester, 1755

St. Michael’s

2 flagons, chalice, paten, and alms plate

1757–58

Mordecai Fox, London

The Gift of His Excellency Thomas Boone, Esqr. Governor of this Province to the Church of St. Michael Charles Town So. Carolina 1762

Only flagon and paten survive

St. Stephen’s

Chalice, paten, 1759 and 2 alms plates

English

For St. Stephen’s Parish, A.D. 1759

Ordered from England and engraved by John Paul Grimke

St. James, Santee

Paten

London

Pro Sancta Jacobi, Santee; The Gift of George Simmonet, July 13, Anno Domini 1764

1759–60

380

APPENDIXES

Possibly Continental with a Victorian patent

Parish

Form

Date

Maker

Inscription

Notes

St. Michael’s

2 alms plates

1762

The Gift of George Somers, Esq, to St. Michael’s Church, Charles-town, 1764

Christ Church

Paten

1763

The gift of Jacob Motte, Esq., to Christ Church 1763

St. Stephen’s

Tankard

1763–64

St. Paul’s

Paten and alms plate

1766

St. Matthew’s

Chalice

1773–74

London

This was given by Tacitus Gaillard, Esq., to the parish of St. Matthew, Feb 1777, for the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church

St. Philip’s

2 small chalices

1791–92

London

Trigram in a glory with “St. Philip’s Church, Charleston”

St. Michael’s

Christening basin

?

St. Michael’s

Chalice

1816

St. Matthew’s

Chalice, paten, 1819 flagon, alms plate, and christening basin

No longer extant

William Shaw II, London The Gift of George Sommers, Esq., to St. Paul’s Church, Stono, An 1766

Intended for private communion Gift of Miss Ann McPherson

The Gift of Elias Horry, Esq., Intendant of this City to the Church of St. Michaels, Charleston, S.C. 1816 P. Chitty, New York

Presented to the Episcopal Church of St. Matthew’s by Mrs. Ann Lovell, 1819

APPENDIXES

381

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix 5 PEW SU BSCR I P T IONS AT ST. M ICH A E L’S CH U RCH I N CH A R LE STON, 1758

Amount

Name

Occupation

£400 400 380 380 367 360 350 350 350 350 350 350 320 305 (75) 305 300 300 300 300 300 280 280 270 260 260 260 250.1 250 250 250 250 225 225 225 220 220 220 220

George Appleby Children George Austin Ralph Izard Benjamin Smith James Glen Miles Brewton Henry Middleton William Bull Jacob Motte William Branford John Savage Anne Mathews John McCall Thomas Middleton James Parsons Hector de Bauffain Susanna Brunet Luke Stoutenburgh David Deas George Inglis Thomas Lynch Edward Fenwick Thomas Shubrick Isaac Mazyck William Gibbs William Moultrie William Middleton Robert Pringle Ann Waller Othniel Beale Henry Laurens William Stone George Appleby Benjamin Mazyck William Burrows Thomas Drayton Thomas Farr, Jr. Daniel Ravenel, Jr.

Merchant, Austin/Laurens/Appleby Merchant, Austin/Laurens/Appleby Planter and public official Merchant, Smith and Brewton Governor Merchant, Smith and Brewton Planter and public official Lieutenant governor Royal Treasurer Planter, St. Andrew’s Parish Merchant Merchant/planter City treasurer/churchwarden (CW) Planter, St. Andrew’s Parish Lawyer Collector of the customs Planter, Goose Creek Merchant Merchant Planter, Santee, and public official Planter, Johns Island Merchant Gentleman/planter Merchant and planter Military general, governor Planter, public official Merchant and judge Merchant Merchant, wharf mogul Merchant, Austin/Laurens/Appleby Merchant Merchant, Austin/Laurens/Appleby Lawyer, justice of the colony Planter, St. Andrew’s Parish Planter, Stono Planter, St. John’s Parish

Church Office Vestry (V) Commissioner (C)

C V

C V

V/CW

C V C V/CW

V/CW/C C

V

Pew Gallery #33 #3 #4 #34 #17 #60 #19 #18 #35 #36 #59 #48 #61 #16 #12 #20 #32 #31 #30 #63 #5 #62 #21 #58 #37 #49 #29 #22 #15 #7 #13 Gallery #75 #8 #50 #23 #64

Amount

Name

Occupation

Church Office

Pew

200 200 200 200 200 200 200 175 150 150 150 150 150 110 (40) 100 (50) 100 (50) 73.1 (76) ? ? ? ?

Frederick Grimke Elizabeth Akin William Hopton Thomas Elfe Job Milner Thomas Farr Sarah Baker Stephen Mazyck William Henderson Moreau Sarrazin Thomas Hutchinson Samuel Prioleau Samuel Wainwright Thomas Rose Charles Pinckney John P. Grimke Humphrey Sommers William Bampfield John Gibbes Edward Lightsons Lionel Chalmers

Merchant, Planter at Stono Planter, Goose Creek Merchant Cabinetmaker Merchant Planter in Stono

V

#76 #47 Gallery #37 #38 #53 #52 Gallery #54 #55 #57 #65 #51 #80 #73 #74 #77 #25 #79 #82 #83

384

Schoolmaster Engraver Planter in Ashepoo Merchant, wharf mogul Planter Planter, Ashley River Lawyer, public official Jeweler and merchant Carpenter and planter Merchant Planter Doctor

APPENDIXES

V

V/C

Appendix 6 PEW SU BSCR I P T IONS AT ST. M ICH A E L’S CH U RCH I N CH A R LE STON, 176 0

Amount

Name

Occupation

£275 250 235 235 230 230

Dan Horry William Blake John Hume John Giles for “a family” Robert Williams, Esq. William Roper, Esq.

Planter, Santee Planter, St. Bartholomew Parish Merchant

225 210

Will Storrs George Austin for 2 Miss Golightlys Rich Downes Eben Simmons, Esq. Jo Nicholson John McQueen James Reid Thomas Saw William Bassnell James McQueen James Crockatt Alexander Garden William Scott Thomas Lining Henry Perronneau Thomas Lamboll John Ward Paul Douxaint John Snelling Richard Park Stobo Sarah Johnston Bernard Beekman Peter Leger Peter Manigault Sarah Hollybush John Pendriau John Favors Frederick Strubel William Hall Robert Hardy

203 211 210 210 206 200 200 200 200 200 180 180 175 175 165 160 160 157 156 155 153 150 150 140 140 130 120 110

Planter, Wando, Assembly member Common House Assembly, St. Helena’s, merchant

Church Office

Vestry (V)

V

Pew #78 #45 #72 Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony #44

Merchant, Dorchester Planter, Johns Island and Kiawah Merchant, Charleston Planter, slave auctioneer Ropewalk, manufacturer

Churchwarden (CW) V CW V

Indian trader London merchant Botanist, clergy Merchant, Commons House Cabinetmaker Lawyer Taylor Tax collector Clerk Merchant, Charleston and Jacksonburg Attorney, Tax assessor Merchant Speaker of the Assembly Planter, Wando Carpenter, joiner Shipmaster Chair maker

V

#27 #71 #26 #46 Balcony Balcony Balcony #43 #70 #24 #81 Balcony #9 Balcony Balcony Balcony #42 Balcony #39 #56 #40 #41 #66 Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony

Amount

Name

Occupation

100 100 105 70 65 60 50 50 50 50 30

Darby Pendergrass Thomas Jusker Ann Air Jacob Boomer Elizabeth Hunt Mary Esther Hodgson Robert Johnston Jer Theus George Gardiner Thomas Nightingale Robert Harney

Tailor

386

Liquor license Butcher Midwife

Painter Owner, Newmarket Race Course, cattleman

APPENDIXES

Church Office

Pew Balcony Balcony #69 Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony Balcony

NOT E S

Abbreviations BSC

Bishop Smith Collection of Sermons, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church Archives, Charleston

FPC

Fulham Palace Correspondence, Records of the Bishop of London, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

LCMD SCG SCHGM SCHS SCL

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. South Carolina Gazette, Charleston South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

SPG SPGLB

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Letter Books, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

SPVM

St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, Vestry Minutes, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church Archives, Charleston

Introduction 1 “Rededication of St. James, Goose Creek,” SCHS. 2 Only months after this service, President Grant sent federal troops to South Carolina to suppress riots and arrests surrounding the introduction of the black vote in the 1876 presidential election. 3 McInnis, “Conflating the Past and Present,” 39–53. 4 On the politics of memory in early twentieth-century Charleston, see Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory. 5 Samuel G. Stoney wrote both Plantations of the Carolina Lowcountry and This Is Charleston: An Architectural Survey of a Unique American City. Albert Simons— coeditor, with Samuel Lapham, of The Early Architecture of Charleston—was a prominent preservation architect who was a proponent of recording early Charleston buildings. Simons was active in the preservation community into the 1970s. 6 If the 1876 congregation vested this building with their mythologies of a past rich in “refinement and piety” as a balm for their present woes, so too might be the recent restorations not only of St. James and Goose Creek but also of Christ Church, St. Andrew’s, and Pompion Hill Chapel. The efforts to preserve these colonial churches over the last decade might be a search for solace as the Episcopal Church stands on the brink of schism, with South Carolina once again at the center of the conflict. 7 The most articulate and recent expression of this view can be found in Glassie, Vernacular Architecture, 118–19, 124–31. See also Bushman, The Refinement of America; and Leone, “The Georgian Order as the Order of Merchant Capitalism,” 235–61. For a critique, see Pogue, “The Transformation of America.” 8 For a more thorough discussion of the problems of imposing a style on the artistic expressions of the eighteenth century, see the introduction to Craske, Art in Europe. 9 The final demise of interpretations of Georgian architecture in early America might be signaled by the absence of any discussion of Georgian architecture in Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America. 10 Besides the Charleston parish of St. Philips, the colony’s three counties were subdivided into nine other parishes. The act divided Berkeley County into Christ Church, St. Thomas, St. John’s (later known as St. John’s, Berkeley), St. James (always known as St. James, Goose Creek), St. Andrew’s, and St. Denis. The parish of St. Denis was originally intended to serve the French residents of that region but was in 1708 combined with an adjacent English parish to form the single parish of St. Thomas and St. Denis. The act also established two parishes in Colleton County—St. Paul’s and St. Bartholomew’s—and one parish in Craven County by the name of St. James, Santee (as distinguished from the Berkeley County parish of St. James, Goose Creek). The historical circumstances surrounding this event are discussed in greater detail in chapter 8. 11 On the SPG, see O’Connor, Three Centuries of Mission. 12 See Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 143–47. 13 St. Philip’s Church Warden’s Account Books, 1725–52, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. 14 SCG, August 3, 1738. 15 Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1, April 15, 1744. 16 That same vestry would some years later hear testimony surrounding the death of Mary Bonnell, a servant woman. See Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, 388

NOTES TO PAGES 1– 5

17 18 19

20

21

vol. 2, December 6, 1770, 202–5. For more on the political role of the vestry, see Boucher, “Vestrymen and Churchwardens.” Christ Church, St. Andrew’s, St. James (Goose Creek), St. John’s (Berkeley), St. Paul’s, and St. Thomas Parishes. St. Helena’s and St. George’s in 1712, Prince George’s in 1721, and St. John’s, Colleton. See Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History, 3, app. 4. Many of these new building projects were the by-product of acts of the Assembly that either subdivided older parishes or established new parishes in what had been the backcountry only decades earlier. Three new parishes were carved out of St. Helena’s: Prince William’s, St. Peter’s, and St. Luke’s in 1745, 1746, and 1767, respectively, circumscribing the older parish to the town of Beaufort and its surrounding Sea Islands. In 1754 St. Stephen’s parish was carved out of St. James, Santee. In the same year, Prince Frederick’s was subdivided from Prince George’s. And finally, All Saints Parish was established in the coastal regions north of Georgetown in 1767. The Assembly also established three very large parishes in the backcountry—St. Mark’s in 1757 and St. Matthew’s and St. David’s in 1768. On the implications of postcolonial theory on the writing of colonial American history, see the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 64, no. 2 (April 2007), which is dedicated entirely to that theme. Prown, “Mind in Matter,” 69–95.

Chapter One 1 Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1753, 337–38. 2 An estimation taken in 1774 mentioned the “Ionic Capitals of Wood to Pilasters in the Steeple.” SPVM, 1756–74, August 31, 1772. 3 The image was probably sent to the Gentleman’s Magazine by Charles Woodmason, who published a poem describing Carolina in the next month’s issue. See Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1753. 4 Although the image was not published until 1753, it was probably the same image offered for sale in 1737. “To be sold by the printer hereof, the west prospect of St. Philip’s Church in Charles Town,” SCG, March 26, 1737. 5 Clergy of the Province to SPG, July 12, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 118, SPGLB. 6 Peter Wood, Black Majority, 152. 7 On the remarkable number of urban churches built in England in the very late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 201–3. See also Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 110–11. 8 On the rising cosmopolitanism of English towns, see Borsay, English Urban Renaissance. 9 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 26. 10 Reprinted in Ibid., 454. 11 “A True Copy of the Clergy of South Carolina’s Instructions to Mr. Johnston,” Charles Town, March 4, 1712/3. 12 Ibid. 13 Johnston to SPG, “Mr. Johnston’s reasons for staying so long from his Cure at Charles Town,” June 1714, series A, vol. 9, no. 72, SPGLB. 14 Clergy of the Province to SPG, July 12, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 118, SPGLB. 15 Quoted in Waddell, Charleston Architecture, 41. 16 Johnston to SPG, November 19, 1714, series A, vol. 9, no. 27, SPGLB. 17 Johnston to SPG, “Mr. Johnston’s reasons for staying so long from his Cure at Charles Town, June 1714,” series A, vol. 9, no. 72, SPGLB. After his return in NOTES TO PAGES 5–17

389

18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

390

December 1715, he reported that he had raised “530 Cur of this Country Money in London” toward rebuilding the church. Johnson to SPG, December 19, 1715, series B, vol. 4, no. 37, SPGLB. Johnson to SPG, December 19, 1715, series B, vol. 4, no. 37, SPGLB. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 458. Ibid.; Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 36. Rev. Johnson’s drowning in 1716 precluded him from continuing on as a commissioner. He also sold property to the church for use as a cemetery. In addition to his efforts at St. Philip’s, Parris played a role in erecting the frame church in Christ Church Parish in 1712, and he donated all the window glass for the erection of a church in St. Helena’s Parish in Port Royal. SCG, March 13, 1736; Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, July 28, 1712, SCHS; Jones to SPG, January 26, 1728, series A, vol. 20, no. 116, SPGLB. For a biographical sketch of Parris, see Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, 505–7. Clergy to SPG, July 12, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 118, SPGLB. Kornwolf, “Doing Good to Posterity,” 333–74. See also Hernandez, “Williamsburg,” 26–35. Nicholson to SPG, January 11, 1722, series A, vol. 16, no. 97, SPGLB. Garden to SPG, September 26, 1729, series A, vol. 22, no. 266, SPGLB. Whiffen, Public Buildings of Williamsburg, 48. Unfortunately, given the absence of any building records for this church or any vestry minutes before 1732, the exact condition of the church at his arrival in the colony is uncertain. Robert Mills was involved in renovations to the building in the early 1820s; his drawings of St. Philip’s probably date from that project. SPVM, 1823–31, July 20, 1823. Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of the Arts ( January 1836): 364–66. Although these pilasters do not appear in the Mills drawing, they are mentioned in descriptions, and repairs to the pilasters are also mentioned in the vestry minutes. The balustrade remained in place until at least 1752, when it was damaged in a hurricane of that year. SPVM, 1735–55, September 19, 1752. In 1736 an estimation of the repairs necessary to bring the church to completion included “Bricklayers Work for finishing all ye Bases round the Church and making good all the Plaistering without side the Body of the Church and Porticos.” The same report also mentions the “Parapet of wood all along each front, and a large Cornish under ye eves and round ye porticoes.” SPVM, 1735–55, January 25, 1736. An estimation taken in 1774 mentioned the “Outside of church to be painted (stone colour).” SPVM, 1756–74, August 31 1772. Webster, “A Journal of a Voyage,” Monday, May 27. “Charleston, S.C., in 1774 as Described by an English Traveller,” reprinted in Colonial South Carolina Scene, 282. SPVM, 1735–55, June 28, 1741. SPVM, 1735–55, February 25, 1739, and January 28, 1740. SPVM, 1735–55, June 1750, December 12, 1738, and August 6, 1753. Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of the Arts ( January 1836), 364–66. The author also mentions heavy Tuscan porticos in front and at the sides forming a huge cross, so that the Doric columns he notes must be on the interior of the vestibule. Those columns are probably the fourteen columns that received new bases and plinths of plaster in 1772, since no other set of columns on the

NOTES TO PAGES 18 – 20

40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

50

51 52 53 54

55 56

57

church totaled fourteen. This repair to the fourteen columns is the first interior repair on the list. The repair list also mentions repairs to pilasters, so the author clearly meant columns. The only other set of columns were the eight columns that supported the exterior porticos. SPVM, 1756–74, August 31, 1772. SPVM, November 9, 1806, and July 28, 1822. The artist and the painting are both discussed in Mary Ellen Turner, “John Blake White.” Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 121–27. The first pulpit was lowered in 1756 and replaced entirely in the early nineteenth century. SPVM, 1756–74, April 15, 1756. Arthur Middleton and James Moore to Archbishop Wake, November 9, 1721, Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury (Wake), 1716–37, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. SPVM, 1735–55, September 1, 1746. The 1804 assessment indicated that the north aisle had twenty-seven pews, the middle aisle had thirty-five, and the southern aisle had twenty-six. SPVM, 1804–12, May 13, 1804. SPVM, 1756–74, November 2, 1763; SPVM, 1761–95, January 9, 1786. SPVM, 1756–74, June 7, 1756. The best source for Wren’s city churches is Downes, Architecture of Wren. See also the section on Wren’s 1714 letter to the London church commissioners in Soo, Wren’s “Tracts” on Architecture. For other churches erected in seventeenthcentury London and its suburbs, see Guillery, “Suburban Models,” 69–106. On the fifty new churches, see Colvin, “Fifty New Churches”; and Downes, Hawksmoor, 156–70; For a discussion of the composition of the commission, see Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 49–54. My use of the term “fashion” here draws from Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 228–29. Cruickshank and Wyld, London: The Art of Georgian Building, 3–9. Ibid., 21. See Wren, Parentalia, 318–21. For a full discussion and transcription of the letter, see Soo, Wren’s “Tracts on Architecture,” 107–18. The letter is also reprinted as appendix 2 in Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 133–37; “Mr. VanBrugg’s Proposals about Building ye new Churches,” Rawl. B. 376, appears as appendix E in Downes, Vanbrugh. Guillery, “Suburban Models,” 69–106. Hicks’s recommendations appear as appendix 3 in Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 139–42. Du Prey also discusses Hicks’s recommendations in some detail (56–59). On Hicks, see Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 56–57. The Rules of the Commissioners are reprinted as appendix 4 in Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 143–44. The other five churches include: St. Paul’s, Depford (1712–30); St. George’s, Hanover Square (1712–24); St. Anne’s, Limehouse (1712–24); St. John’s, Westminster (1714–28); and St. Mary le Strand (1714–17). The most prolific architect during this campaign was Nicholas Hawksmoor, erecting six churches: St. Alphege, Greenwich (1712– 14); St. Mary’s, Woolnoth (1716–27); St. George’s, Bloomsbury (1720–30); St. Anne’s, Limehouse (1712–24); Christchurch, Spitalfields (1723–29); and St. George in the East (1715–23). Thomas Archer provided the designs for two: St. John’s, Westminster (1714–28); and St. Paul’s, Depford (1712–30). James Gibbs designed St. Mary le Strand (1714–17), and John James designed St. George Hanover Square (1712–24). The architects of the other two are unknown: NOTES TO PAGES 20 – 25

391

58 59

60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80 81

392

St. John’s, Horsleydown (1728–33), and St. Luke, Old Street (1727–33). Together with other churches erected soon thereafter but not associated with the Church Building Act—including James Gibbs’s designs for St. Martin’s in the Fields (1722–26) and St. Marylebone Chapel (1721–24), Henry Aldrich’s design for All Saints in Oxford (1706–10), and Thomas Archer’s St. Philip’s in Birmingham (1708–15)—the two decades following the 1711 act proved to be a prolific period of church construction in the English cities. The guidelines of the commissioners have been recently reprinted as appendix 4 in Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 143–44. The relationships between these churches and models to that of St. Michael’s are addressed later in this chapter. As early as June 1713, James Gibbs had been paid for four models, and at least some of the four models of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. Alphege’s Church in Greenwich must also predate the publication of his final designs in the early months of 1714. The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, quoted in Colvin, “Fifty New Churches,” 189–96. A 1733 list of the models survives in the records of the commissioners. “Receipts for Models for 50 New Churches.” Reprinted in Colvin, “Fifty New Churches,” 194. The other five churches include: St. Paul’s, Depford (1712–30); St. George’s, Hanover Square (1712–24); St. Anne’s, Limehouse (1712–24); St. John’s, Westminster (1714–28); and St. Mary le Strand (1714–17). The commissioner’s rules are published as appendix 4 of Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches. One earlier instance is Dean Aldrich’s All Saints Church in Oxford, begun in 1706. The formal similarities between Archer’s elevation and the Gentleman’s Magazine view of St. Philip’s suggest the possibility that the former served as the model for the latter. “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” LCMD. See White, Peter Paul Rubens, 148. Rubens praises the building in the preface to his Palazzi di Genova. Vrancx’s painting is Figure 175 in White, Peter Paul Rubens. Although Roberts failed to include the building’s southern portico, which was surely standing by that date, he did include the cupola. Du Prey, “Hawksmoor’s ‘Basilica,’@” 38–52. See Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 47–80. Edgar, “Some Popular Books,” 178; see also “Catalogue of Books in the Library of St. James, Goose Creek, 1723,” series B, vol. 4, no. 142, SPGLB. Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 25. Quoted in Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 17. SPVM, 1823–31, August 24, 1828. Gillies, Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, 47. See “An Act dividing the Parish of St. Philip, Charlestown, and for establishing another Parish in the said town by the Name of the Parish of St. Michael,” reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 459–60. Much of this information appeared first in Williams, St. Michael’s Church. Discussions of St. Michael’s also appear in Ravenel, Architects of Charleston, 29–40; Lane, Architecture of the Old South, 54–55; and McKee, “St. Michael’s,” 39–42. SCG, June 17, 1751. Emphasis in the original. Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, July 19, 1764.

NOTES TO PAGES 25– 3 8

82 Saunders, “@‘As regular and fformidable as any such woorke in America,’@“ 198–214. 83 SCG, October 22, 1751. Smith was an officer of the Freemasons, vice president of the Charleston Library Society, and building commissioner for both the state House and St. Michael’s in the 1750s. In the 1760s he served as a commissioner for the Exchange, Customs House, and Watch House. His extensive participation in architectural programs in the city and his leadership in Freemasonry suggests that Smith played a major role in the design process. 84 Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 14. 85 Reprinted in Ibid., 14. 86 The first nine commissioners were William Bull II (1710–91), Edward Fenwick (1720–75), James Irving (?–1762), Isaac Mazyck (1700–1770), Charles Pinckney (1699–1758), Jordan Roche (?–1752), Andrew Rutledge (?–1755), Benjamin Smith (1717–70), and Alexander Vanderdussen (?–1759). The six men who joined the commission after 1751 because of the deaths of Pinckney, Roche, and Rutledge and the resignations of others were Othniel Beale (1688–1773), James Graeme (?–1752), Gabriel Manigault (1704–81), Thomas Middleton (1719–66), Robert Pringle (1702–76), and George Saxby (?–1786). Biographies of all these men appear in Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory. 87 For a comparative analysis of the great wealth of Charleston residents over all the rest of the mainland colonies, see Jones, Wealth of a Nation. 88 That both Othniel Beale and Charles Pinckney also owned pews in Charleston’s congregational church, and that both Isaac Mazyck and Gabriel Manigault regularly worshipped in the Huguenot church, further reinforces this argument. 89 For information on the Charleston Library Society, see Davis, Intellectual Life; Gregorie, “First Decade,” 3–10; and Edgar, “Notable Libraries” and “Some Popular Books.” Over the course of the eighteenth century, the vestries of both city churches would remain predominantly merchants and attorneys, while, not surprisingly, planters dominated those of the rural parish churches. See Waterhouse, “Responsible Gentry,” 160–85. 90 For a complete list of all architectural treatises available in colonial Charleston, see Dixon, “List of Architectural Furniture Books.” 91 A survey of the collections indicates an interest far deeper than simply collections of “modern” designs. The society’s collection also included documentaries of historic and archaeological sites, including Inigo Jones on Stonehenge, Leroy and Potter on Ancient Greece, and Robert Wood on Balbec and Palmyra. No architectural library would be complete without Palladio. The society owned both Leoni’s and Ware’s editions on Palladio. As a testimony to their interest in architectural theory, they even owned a 1649 publication of Vitruvius. That some of these men held more than just a cursory interest in modern architectural design is indicated by church commissioner and Charleston Library Society founder Thomas Middleton’s 1784 inventory, which included six volumes of architectural designs. See Dixon, “List of Architectural Furniture Books,” 65–86. Middleton was not alone in his collection. Other Charlestonians with sizeable collections of architectural treatises included Thomas Blythe, who owned thirteen in 1762; Ezra Waite, the famous carver of the Miles Brewton House, who owned nine in 1769; and Joseph Wragg, who owned eight as early as 1751. See Dixon, “List of Architectural Furniture Books,” 57. 92 The relationships between these churches and models to that of St. Michael’s are addressed later in this chapter.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 3 8 – 41

393

93 SCG, February 22, 1752. 94 See Ravenel, Architects of Charleston, 29; and Waddell, Charleston Architecture. Williams also discounts Gibson as the designer of St. Michael’s. 95 This copy is now in the collections of the SCHS. 96 The twelve-foot depth of the portico is derived from a later entry describing the contest between the vestry and the city commissioners over the boundary of the church property. See Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, September 11, 1764. 97 Ibid., May 27, 1764. 98 Reprinted in Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 152. 99 See Lipscombe, Journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, 144. Special thanks to Katherine Saunders for bringing this to my attention. 100 Substantial deliveries of bricks had been arriving on the site of the new church for over two months. Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 135. 101 Hasell to SPG, June 4, 1728, series A, vol. 21., no. 108, SPGLB. 102 Drawings in the collections of the Lambeth Palace Library. 103 The use of the other London churches as source material opens the door to another possible identity of the Gibson noted in the newspaper account. By the time of the Gazette’s announcement, the London city churches and their corresponding models were associated with the recently deceased bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, who had served as the ecclesiastical head of both the commission, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and the SPG, since 1723. As bishop of London, Gibson had overseen the completion of many of the churches, suggesting the possibility that St. Martin’s in the Fields, St. Alphege’s, and other early eighteenth-century city churches might have been known as “Mr. Gibson’s Designs.” 104 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” LCMD. 105 “1752, The Committee for Michael’s Church to Mort. Sarrazin,” Building Commissioner’s Records, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 106 Quoted in Burton and Ripley, South Carolina Silversmiths, 105. 107 Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 131. 108 Ibid., 139. 109 Ibid., 135; “The Commissioners of St. Michael’s Church to Zach. Villepontoux, 1752,” St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 110 Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 14. 111 Ibid., 149. 112 SCG, January 31, 1774. 113 Carl Bridenbaugh made the argument that since Peter Harrison was the only early architect in early America, he must have been the architect of St. Michael’s. See Bridenbaugh, Peter Harrison, 63–66. 114 Todd and Hutson, Prince William’s Parish. 115 “It has been the generally accepted belief that the land upon which the church was built was given by William Bull, at that time of Sheldon. However, we find an affidavit to a memorial filed by the widow of the second Landgrave Edmund Bellinger, in 1747, in which she states that in the division of Tomotley Barony, she gave fifty acres to the commissioners, in accordance with directions in the will of her husband for the building of a church. Tomotley Barony, which contained 13,000 acres, was bounded on the east by Sheldon Plantation, then the property of Colonel William Bull. It is, therefore, reasonable to believe that this fifty acres was that upon which the church was afterwards built.” Todd and Hutson, Prince William’s Parish, 75.

394

NOTES TO PAGES 41– 48

116 Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, History of Beaufort County, 117. 117 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 382. See also Todd and Hutson, Prince William’s Parish, 75. 118 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. 119 See Kinloch Bull Jr., The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston. 120 Langhorne to SPG, December 5, 1751, series B, vol. 19, no. 136, SPGLB. 121 “The Lieutenant Governor [Bull] informed me that this Spring the parishioners [of Prince William parish] will build a church and a parsonage House both of bricks, and that they intend to request a missionary from the society.” Boschi to SPG, October 30, 1745, series B, vol. 12, no. 112, SPGLB. 122 In addition to hosting services and contributing substantially to the church in his own parish, William Bull I made a number of financial contributions to other parishes. Sometime before 1727, he gave sixty acres for the glebe of St. Andrew’s Parish, and in 1736 he subscribed £40 for the erection of the new church in Georgetown. William I’s brothers also actively supported the church. Captain John Bull donated £1,000 for the purchase of a Communion plate in the Bulls’ home parish of St. Helena’s in 1734, and Burnaby Bull was listed among the church commissioners for the chapel at Edmundsbury in St. Bartholomew’s Parish in 1745. 123 For a biography of William Bull II, see Kinloch Bull Jr., The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston. 124 The physical remains do not bear any evidence that the church had a projecting chancel in the eighteenth century, even though the writer of the Report of the Committee on the Destruction of Churches in the Diocese of South Carolina, during the Late War indicated that he could “remember how an oak tree which grew in the center of the venerable pile filled the interior, and threw its ample branches over the lofty wall, while a cedar sprang from the chancel recess” before the church was rebuilt in the 1830s. This exterior chancel was probably added in the 1825 reconstruction of the building. See Report of the Committee on the Destruction of Churches in the Diocese of South Carolina, during the Late War, n.p. 125 “Receipts for Models of 50 New Churches.” 126 The Bull brothers, William Wragg—another Carolinian and great friend of the Bulls—and two students from Jamaica were probably the only students at the school from the colonies. Westminster was celebrated for its emphasis on manners, deportment, and religious education. The next record of the younger Bull appears in the graduate rolls of the University of Leyden, where in 1734 he became the first native-born American to receive the degree of doctor of medicine. Soon after his graduation, William Bull returned to the increasingly wealthy colony to practice medicine but quickly entered local politics. For this and other information on William Bull’s education, see Kinloch Bull Jr., Oligarchs in Charleston, 11–13. 127 Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, History of Beaufort County, 19. 128 Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, 2. 129 Dixon, “List of Architectural Furniture Books”; see also A Catalogue of Books in the Charlestown Library Society (London, 1750). 130 The first scholar to note the importance of Prince William’s church in American architectural history was John Fitzhugh Millar. See Millar, Architects of the American Colonies. 131 A small collection of garden buildings, or follies, predate Prince William’s as temple-form buildings in English architecture. William Kent’s Temple of

NOTES TO PAGES 48 – 52

395

Venus at Stowe from before 1732 and Henry Flintcroft’s Temple of Flora at Stourhead from 1745 are prominent among them. Neither depends directly on an antique model. The one obvious exception is the church designed as a Tuscan barn by Inigo Jones at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, in London in 1630–31. 132 Upton, “Pattern Books,” 107–124. 133 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 111.

Chapter Two 1 See Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 716. 2 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 295. 3 Commissary Bull’s 1723 description of the Province, reprinted in Short History of the Diocese, 20–21. 4 LeJau to SPG, September 23, 1707, vol. 16, no. 179, FPC. 5 Hasell to SPG, June 4, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 108, SPGLB. 6 Ibid. 7 On the history of the church, see Tompkins, “The Ashes of Our Fathers.” 8 Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, nos. 107–15, SPGLB. 9 Taylor to SPG, March 24, 1718, series A, vol. 13, no. 157, SPGLB. This was recently confirmed through an investigation of the physical evidence. See Richard Marks Restorations, “Old St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church: Archaeological and Architectural Findings.” 10 Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, nos. 107–15, SPGLB. 11 Ibid., nos. 110–15, SPGLB; the Charles Fraser painting of St. John’s, Colleton, indicates that the western elevation of that church was illuminated by two flat-topped and one arched window. The windows on the southern elevation are all arched. 12 Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, February 11, 1711, SCHS. 13 Holcomb, Saint David’s Parish, South Carolina, Minutes of the Vestry 1768–1832, Parish Register 1819–1924, April 30, 1770. 14 Barrel-vaulted ceilings appeared in St. Andrew’s (1723); Strawberry Chapel (1723–25); St. John’s, Colleton (1734?–44); and Prince George’s, Winyaw (1741–53). The ceiling now in the church of St. James, Goose Creek, is flat, but recent archaeological excavations under the church floor indicate that the interior posts that supported the ceiling have been displaced and were not originally located where they are now. This suggests that the ceiling in St. James carried by the four internal posts is not original. 15 Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, nos. 107–15, SPGLB. Although Dalcho suggests that this tower was never constructed, vertical scars on the western elevation of the church suggest the possibility that sometime during the eighteenth century, a wooden tower marked the western end of the church. See Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 339. 16 Leslie to SPG, October 30, 1731, series A, vol. 23, no. 300, SPGLB. 17 Graham and Lounsbury, “Precedents for Brick Construction,” 2-2, 2-4, and 2-10 to 2-12. 18 Ibid., 2-12. 19 The recent restoration of St. Andrew’s Parish Church by Richard Marks Restoration demonstrated that the original 1706 building was not ornamented with quoins. Special thanks to Richard Marks for sharing their 2005 restoration report. 20 Ludlam to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, SPGLB. 21 Morritt to SPG, September 1, 1729, series B, vol. 4, no. 234, SPGLB. 396

NOTES TO PAGES 53 – 69

22 “Plan for a new church of St. Paul’s in Augusta Ga., 1749,” series B, vol. 18, no. 194, SPGLB. 23 Bernheim, History of the German Settlements, 124. 24 St. Bartholomew’s; St. James, Santee; St. John’s, Berkeley; St. Helena’s; and St. Paul’s. 25 Hunt to SPG, May 6, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 97, SPGLB. 26 Dwight to SPG, 12 April 1739, series B, vol. 7, no. 237, SPGLB. 27 Durand to SPG, 1 October 1764, series B, vol. 5, no. 249, SPGLB. 28 See Lounsbury, Illustrated Glossary, 366. 29 South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, September 11, 1770. 30 Two South Carolina churches were covered with roughcast in the nineteenth century. It was not until 1810 that the vestry of St. James, Goose Creek, first advertised that they would receive proposals to roughcast their church. (Charleston Courier, September 26, 1810). Whether the chapel of ease in St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish, now known as Strawberry Chapel, was covered in stucco throughout the eighteenth century or not is also not known. That the brickwork underneath the current stucco is finely pointed might imply that like St. James, Goose Creek, it was not covered until the early nineteenth century. 31 “Charleston, S.C., in 1774 as Described by an English Traveler,” reprinted in Merrens, Colonial South Carolina Scene, 282. 32 Webster, “A Journal of a Voyage,” Monday, May 27, SCHS. Emphasis in original. 33 Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, June 20, 1723, SCHS. 34 “Plan for a new church of St. Paul’s in Augusta, Ga., 1749,” series B, vol. 18, no. 194, SPGLB. 35 John Gwynne in London and Westminster Improved (1766), quoted in Cruickshank and Wyld, London: The Art of Georgian Building, 192. 36 Those late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Anglicans erecting churches with elongated proportions may have thought that shape analogous to a ship. Ephraim Chambers made the connection in his widely popular Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, first published in London in 1728 but enjoying many later editions. Chambers published as his definition of the term “CHURCH, with regard to architecture...a long oblong edifice, in form of a ship.” Furthermore, he defined “NAVE, in architecture...[as denoting] the body of a church; or the place where the people are placed,” which, of course, would in Protestant terms be the simple auditory church erected by many Anglicans after the Reformation. Chambers goes on to explain that the word “nave” was derived “from the Greek naos, temple; which [was itself derived] from naus, ship; by reason the vault or roof of a church bears resemblance to a ship.” There is little evidence that Anglicans actually erected their auditory churches to resemble a ship, but that does not rule out the possibility of this association as one of the factors for the persistence of elongated proportions well after more compact auditory plans became normative. 37 Nigel Yates offers the most comprehensive discussion of the evolution of Anglican Church planning in the seventeenth century. See Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 30–36, 68–76. For a parallel discussion of these proportions as medieval in origin and persisting among the more remote and conservative congregations well into the eighteenth century in Scotland, see Hay, The Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, 77–86. 38 While the church in Christ Church Parish shared dimensions with St. Andrews—forty feet by twenty-five feet—the church in St. Paul’s was the same NOTES TO PAGES 69 – 72

397

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47

48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56

398

width but five feet shorter. The church in St. Thomas’s was slightly wider, measuring thirty-seven by twenty-seven. Morritt to SPG, September 1, 1729, series B, vol. 4, no. 234, SPGLB. Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, May 22, 1732, SCHS. Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, no. 98, SPGLB. “St. Michael’s Commissioners’ Daybook, November 7, 1753,” St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. Yeomans discusses the employ of various pattern books in “The Dissemination of New Forms,” chapter 6 of Trussed Roof, 95–116. That a similar separation between the joints of the king post tie beam and the queen posts appears on a drawing by Thomas Archer for St. John’s Smith Square, Westminster (1714–28), indicates that this practice of separating these joints was not uncommon in practice. This drawing is published in Yeomans, Trussed Roof, plate 5.1. The similarity of this system to those published by Langley and Gibbs suggests that this system was a common answer to the problem of roofing an English basilican church. In an addendum to his 1750 book, Langley published fourteen plates dedicated to roofing systems. On the final plate was a truss very similar to that in Prince George’s labeled “For a Church.” James Gibbs published a very similar system in his section for St. Martin’s in the Fields, plate 4 in his 1728 A Book of Architecture. Hoppus, Gentleman’s and Builder’s Repository, and Langley, The Builder’s Jewel, both contain designs for trusses, although neither has designs that approximate the South Carolina trusses more closely than those published by Langley in 1750. Lounsbury, “Anglican Church Design.” For a discussion of Wren’s churches, see Jeffrey, City Churches of Wren. See also Downes, Architecture of Wren. Peter Guillery has demonstrated that Wren’s city churches were the popularization of a cosmopolitan model present in London church building reaching back decades before the Great Fire. The Broadway or New Chapel, begun in the 1630s, and the related Church of St. Matthias, originally called the Popular Chapel (1642–54), both offered to Londoners a distinctively Protestant church interior that was neither longitudinal nor preserved the external chancel. See Guillery, “Suburban Models.” Wren, Parentalia, 320. Wren’s letter was first printed in Wren, Parentalia, 318, and has been reprinted in appendix 2 in Addleshaw and Etchells, Anglican Worship, 247–50. For a discussion of the letter and its context, see “Letter on Building Churches,” chapter 4 of Soo, Wren’s “Tracts” on Architecture, 107–18. For the most complete discussions of Wren’s churches, see Downes, Architecture of Wren. A particularly early example is Silsden in West Yorkshire, built in 1712. Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 90. The determination of the shape of the new addition to St. Paul’s derives from a physical inspection of the site. The building mound remaining on site is clearly of a cruciform plan, measuring about sixty feet in length and thirty feet in width. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 352. “Up the Ashley and Cooper,” 12. Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 2, no. 98, SPGLB. All that remains on the site today are a few markers; all evidence of the church is gone.

NOTES TO PAGES 72 – 7 6

57 Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 100–102. For comprehensive discussions of eighteenth-century Anglican Churches in other British colonies, see Upton, Holy Things and Profane; and Friary, “Anglican Church in Colonies.” 58 Of the thirty-eight extant colonial Anglican churches in Virginia, nine are cruciform. They are Bruton Church, Williamsburg, built between 1711 and 1715; Elizabeth City Parish Church, Hampton, begun in 1728; Lower Church in St. Stephen’s Parish in King and Queen County, built between 1730 and 1734; Christ Church, Lancaster, built between 1732 and 1735; North Farnham Parish, Richmond County, begun in 1734; Elizabeth River Parish Church, Norfolk, begun in 1739; Abingdon Church, built between 1751 and 1755; Aquia Church, built between 1754 and 1757; and St. Paul’s Parish Church, King George County, begun in 1766. 59 Bruton (1711–15); Elizabeth City (begun 1728); Lower Church in St. Stephen’s (1730–34); Christ Church, Lancaster (1732–35); North Farnham (begun 1734); Abingdon (1751–55); Aquia (1754–57); and St. Paul’s (begun 1766). See Upton, Holy Things and Profane. 60 In his study of the cultural impact of hurricanes in the English Caribbean, Matthew Mulcahy argues that English colonists had begun to realize the importance of architectural accommodations to their environment by the later seventeenth century. For other interpretations of the cruciform plan, see chapter 4, “Sensing the Sacred,” and chapter 7, “Carolina in Ye West Indies.” 61 Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, chaps. 5 and 18. 62 Hurricanes struck English islands in 1624, 1638, 1667, 1675, 1707, 1712, 1722, 1726, 1733, and 1751. 63 Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, 120–21; original in Knight, “The Natural, Morall, and Political History of Jamaica,” 1:198. 64 LeJau to SPG, January 22, 1714, series A, vol. 9, no. 257, SPGLB. 65 Clergy of the province to SPG, July 12, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 118, SPGLB; Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 340. 66 See Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, chap. 5. 67 Rochefort, History of the Caribby-Islands, 177. 68 “Answers to the Inquiries sent to Colonel Stapleton, Governor of the Leeward Islands,” November 2, 1676, CSPC, 499; quoted in Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, 123. 69 Philip Gibbes to Lord Penrhyn, 1788, FitzHerbert Papers, M/E 20555 and 20777; quoted in Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, chap. 5. 70 Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 30. 71 In 1712 Anglicans in Charlestown, Nevis, began the construction of a cruciform, masonry church. Many other eighteenth-century churches in the Leeward Island have a similar plan. In 1723 Anglicans in St. Andrew’s Parish in South Carolina completed a large addition, which transformed their small, rectilinear building into a much larger cruciform structure. Soon thereafter, other Anglican churches in that colony followed suit. Between 1711 and 1715, Anglicans in Williamsburg, Virginia, erected Bruton Parish Church, the first of many cruciform churches that would eventually be built in that colony. 72 See Nelson, “Anglican Church Building and Local Context.” 73 This statistic is taken from the churches for which some information about the plan survives. Cruciform churches erected in eighteenth-century Jamaica include: St. Andrew’s Parish Church (1692–1705); Kingston Parish Church (1701–3); St. Catherine’s Parish Church (1712–14); Clarendon Parish Church (1722–40); Westmoreland Parish Church (before 1722); Port Royal Parish

N OT E S TO PAG E S 7 6 – 81

399

74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

400

Church (1725); St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish Church (ca. 1750); St. Anne’s Parish Church (1765); St. James Parish Church (1774); St. George’s Parish Church (before 1802); and Portland Parish Church (before 1804). Those that were not include Hanover Parish Church (before 1774) and Trelawney Parish Church in Falmouth (1796). Vestry of St. Andrew’s to SPG concerning the removal of Taylor as Rector, 1716, series A, vol. 11, no. 213, SPGLB. 1717 letter cited in Bicentennial Facts from St. Andrew’s Parish Episcopal Church. See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 110–13. For discussions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglican church planning, see Addleshaw and Etchells, Anglican Worship; Davies, Worship and Theology; Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church; Upton, Holy Things and Profane; Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship; Birch, London Churches; and Friary, “Anglican Church in Colonies.” Brief essays on church architecture of the eighteenth century also appear in Cruickshank, Guide, 104–26; and Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 278–88. The bibliographies on contemporary churches in Scotland and Ireland are limited. A comprehensive discussion of churches in Scotland is Hay, Scottish Post-Reformation Churches. A few churches of the period in Ireland are included in O’Reilly, Irish Churches and Monasteries. See Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 33–35. For other examples of eighteenth-century chancel screens, see Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 33. The middle church (begun 1712), the upper chapel (ca. 1710), and the lower chapel (begun 1714), although none survive. Varnod to SPG, April 3, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 77, SPGLB. Jones to SPG, January 26, 1728, series A, vol. 20, no. 116, SPGLB. Special thanks to Robert Leath for bringing this table and its interpretation as a Communion table to my attention. See Leath, “Many Hands, Many Voices,” 150–59. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 265. Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, February 11, 1711, SCHS. Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. Hasell to SPG, June 4, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 108, SPGLB. Jones to SPG, June 8, 1731, series B, vol. 4, no. 246, SPGLB. On the reappearance of the altar rail, see Fincham, “Ancient Custom.” On variation in the late seventeenth century, see Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 209–10. See Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 210. Taylor to SPG, March 24, 1718, series A, vol. 13, no. 155, SPGLB. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 57. Quoted in Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 33. Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 34. Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, May 22, 1732, SCHS. Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, 34–35. Jones to SPG, February 3, 1742, series B, vol. 10, no. 153, SPGLB. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 366–67. Durand to SPG, October 1, 1764, series B, vol. 5, no. 249, SPGLB. Bull, All Saints’ Church Waccamaw, 4.

NOTES TO PAGES 82 – 93

102 Bull, October 10, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 124, SPGLB; Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 352. 103 Leslie, October 30, 1731, series A, vol. 23, no. 300, SPGLB. 104 St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873, November 13, 1767; September 14, 1768; and April 17, 1769, SCHS; Durand, November 28, 1763, series B, vol. 5, SPGLB. 105 Smith, Dwelling Houses of Charleston, app. 106 Ravenel, Architects of Charleston, 42. 107 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 329. 108 Schellekens, “Scrolled Gables,” 430–35; Schless, “The Province House,” 115–23. 109 Although other options for upright headstones were available by the 1750s, New England carved slate stones remained the favorite among South Carolina’s Anglicans until the 1790s, when marble stones of local manufacture— many by Thomas Walker, the first long-term resident stone carver—quickly overtook the imported slates in popularity. On Thomas Walker, see Combs, Early Gravestone Art, 71–77. 110 Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, 97. See also Deetz and Dethlefsen, “Death’s Head.” The interpretation of the winged head as a soul effigy and not an angel is discussed more fully in chapter 6. That the winged head represents the soul of the deceased has been convincingly argued by a number of authors. See Ludwig, Graven Images, 67–69, 223; Watters, With Bodilie Eyes, 35–68; and Brooke, “For Honour and Civil Worship,” 463–86. A discussion of the various meanings of the forms on gravestones appears in Hijiya, “American Gravestones.” Congregationalists adopted the winged soul’s head much more quickly than did Anglicans, with a ratio of almost one to one by 1750. 111 In her book on early gravestones in Georgia and South Carolina, Diana Combs implies that the choice of motifs lay largely with the carver, not the patron. Even if this is so, patrons certainly had the agency of choice between carvers and by default selected motifs by selecting the carver. See Combs, Early Gravestone Art, 15–18. 112 Charleston Morning Post, April 26, 1787, quoted in Combs, Early Gravestone Art, 103. 113 SCG, December 11, 1736. 114 South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, January 26, 1773, quoted in Combs, Early Gravestone Art, 6. 115 Combs, Early Gravestone Art, 6–80. 116 Ibid., 131–33. 117 Ibid., 167–78. 118 Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, 70. 119 This is not true of Virginia, where Dell Upton found that the majority of vestries turned to London makers; Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 157. 120 Lounsbury, “Anglican Church Design.” 121 Ibid., 30.

Chapter Three 1 Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church, 7. 2 SPVM, 1735–55, January 9, 1737. 3 The 1710 Act of Assembly for erecting a new brick church in Charlestown, the parish church of St. Philip’s, listed the Reverend Dr. Gideon Johnson first

NOTES TO PAGES 93 –115

401

4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

402

among the six church commissioners—the only time a clergyman was listed as a commissioner. Johnson’s role in the new church was great enough to necessitate a trip to London sometime before 1715 specifically to raise funds for the new building. See Johnson to SPG, December 19, 1715, series B, vol. 4, no. 37, SPGLB. Francis LeJau, the most prominent Anglican clergyman in early South Carolina, indicated that during the construction of St. James, Goose Creek, he went to great lengths to see the building completed, even if the laity were ultimately responsible. He wrote: “I have been forced to pass my own word for the payment of things necessary for the finishing of my church and house, else we were like never to see the end of that tedious work. I hope the parishoners will not suffer me to loose [sic] too much.” See LeJau to SPG, February 20, 1712, series A, vol. 7, no. 398, SPGLB. SCG, January 1735, quoted in Lane, Architecture of the Old South, 31. The twenty-four commissioners were the Right Honorable Sir Nathaniel Johnson, Knt.; the Honorable Thomas Broughton, Esq.; Nicholas Trott, Esq.; Colonel Robert Gibbs; Henry Noble, Esq.; Ralph Izard, Esq.; Colonel James Risbee; Lieutenant Colonel William Rhett; Lieutenant Colonel George Logan; Mr. Arthur Middleton; Captain David Davis; Mr. Thomas Barton; Mr. John Abraham Motte; Captain Robert Seabrook; Mr. Hugh Hext; Mr. John Woodward; Mr. Joseph Page; John Ashby, Esq.; Richard Beresford, Esq.; Mr. Thomas Wilkinson; Captain Jonathan Fitch; Mr. William Bull; Mr. Rene Ravenel; and Mr. Philip Gendron. The supervisors for the construction of the 1706 church in St. Andrew’s Parish, for example, were Jonathan Fitch and Thomas Rose. Fitch was a commissioner named in the Church Act; Rose was not. The same is also true in St. Paul’s Parish. The supervisors for the construction of St. Paul’s church were Hugh Hext, Robert Seabrook, and Thomas Foxer. Hext and Seabrook were church commissioners named in the Church Act; Foxer was not. “An account of the erecting and building St. Paul’s Church in South Carolina,” 26 May 1715, series B, vol. 10, nos. 123–25, SPGLB. May to SPG, May 26, 1715, series B, vol. 10, nos. 123–25, SPGLB. In 1717, for example, when the Assembly created the parish of St. George’s, Dorchester, the act directing the construction of the parish church specifically named seven church commissioners, none of whom had been listed among the original twenty-four of the Church Act. A surviving account book for the 1706 church commissioners indicates that by the late 1710s, the commissioners were involved only with the regular financial support of the ministers. “The Church Commissioners Book, 1717–1742,” South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Varnod, April 3, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 77, SPGLB; Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 354. Fordyce to SPG, July 1, 1740, series B, vol. 7, no. 247, SPGLB. Durand, November 28, 1763, series B, vol. 5, SPGLB. Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 14, 149. See “Raising Money: Rates,” in Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church, 90–96. Commissary Bull’s 1723 description of the Province, reprinted in typescript of Short History of the Diocese, 20–21. St. John’s, Colleton, Parish Vestry, January 30, 1741, series B, vol. 9, no. 121, SPGLB. Gertrude C. Bull, “Prince Winyah Parish, Georgetown, S.C., 1721–1976,” n.p.

NOTES TO PAGES 115–17

17 18 19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church, 208. Guy, January 24, 1721, series A, vol. 14, no. 79, SPGLB. Clergy of the Province to SPG, July 12, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 118, SPGLB. Jones to SPG, January 26, 1728, series A, vol. 20, no. 116, SPGLB; Vestry of Christ Church to Nicholson and SPG, June 3, 1723, series A, vol. 17, no. 153, SPGLB; Commissary Bull’s 1723 description of the Province, reprinted in Short History of the Diocese, 20–21. Vestry of Christ Church Parish to SPG, June 3, 1723, series A, vol. 17, no. 153, SPGLB. Hunt, May 18, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 153, SPGLB. Using the substantial contribution of a single donor followed by lesser gifts by other individuals was a common manner of raising money for the construction of a church in England. Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 196–98. Journals of the Vestry, July 14, 1719, quoted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 249–50. Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. Varnod, April 3, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 77, SPGLB. On the architectural competency of eighteenth-century planters in North Carolina, see Bishir, Architects and Builders, 60–64. Contract reprinted in Godfrey, Old St. David’s Church, 14–15. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 329. Upton, “Pattern Books and Professionalism,” 107–24. Upton finds evidence for similar designs in Virginia by 1700. See Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 33. This practice was not limited to Anglicans; dissenters also produced architectural plans that articulated scale, materials, fenestration, and the location of pews. See Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church, 554. Guy to SPG, January 7, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 133, SPGLB. Similar models of such buildings have survived in the archives of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for churches in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Chowan County, North Carolina. They have been published by Friary, “Anglican Church in Colonies,” and Lounsbury, “Anglican Church Design,” respectively. SCG, October 23, 1752. South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, Charleston, March 29, 1768. The greater frequency in the documentary record of references to plans or models in the second half of the century suggests that this practice became increasingly common as the eighteenth century progressed. South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, September 11, 1770; Saint David’s Parish, South Carolina, Minutes of the Vestry, April 30, 1770. Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, May 30, 1771. Ibid., December 24, 1771. Peter Manigault to Ralph Izard in Philadelphia, July 1765, “Peter Manigault Letter Book, 1763–1773,” SCHS. “Plan for a new church of St. Paul’s in Augusta, Ga., 1749,” series B, vol. 18, no. 194, SPGLB. St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven Co., Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873, April 8th, 1765, SCHS. Ibid., April 14, 1766. St. Michael’s Building Commissioner’s Records, SCHS. Hasell to SPG, June 4, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 108, SPGLB. Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1, June 13, 1745. St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, March 22, 1731–April 14, 1813, July 5, 1753, SCHS. NOTES TO PAGES 117 – 21

403

45 Ibid., December 4, 1751, SCHS. For more information on early eighteenthcentury slave houses, see Ferguson, Uncommon Ground. 46 Guy to SPG, August 1, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 120, SPGLB. 47 SCG, April 24, 1755. 48 Leslie to SPG, October 30, 1731, series A, vol. 23, no. 300, SPGLB. 49 South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, March 8, 1768. 50 Holcomb, Saint David’s Parish, South Carolina, April 30, 1770. 51 St. Mark Protestant Episcopal Church Vestry Minutes, 1770–1924, September 17, 1788, SCL. 52 For a more extensive discussion of the financial implications, see Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 15–19. See also Bishir, Architects and Builders. 53 Holcomb, Saint David’s Parish, South Carolina, April 30, 1770. 54 Bishir, Architects and Builders, 86. 55 Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1, February 22, 1734. 56 Varnod to SPG, September 17, 1734, series A, vol. 25, no. 110, SPGLB. 57 Varnod to SPG, April 3, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 77, SPGLB. 58 For a discussion of the role of skilled slaves in eighteenth-century South Carolina, see Edelson, “Terms of Affiliation.” A great discussion of skilled slaves in early North Carolina appears in Bishir, Architects and Builders, 99–102. 59 SCG, October 11, 1735. 60 Charleston County, S.C., South Carolina Mortgages, No. F. F., 1748–1750, 336, June 12, 1750, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. 61 These names are those of the first three slaves in his inventory. 62 “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785–86,” SCHGM 13 ( July 1912): 142 (Thursday, October 13). 63 The extensive collection of drawings in the Guildhall Library for the various fittings for St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, indicates that in that very famous Wren church, the design for the fittings were left to the master craftsmen. That collection includes designs by the carpenter Thomas Creecher for an altar piece and the western end screen, and Creecher and carver William Newman’s designs for the pulpit and font. The collection also includes three other designs for the pulpit and one alternative for the altar piece, all by other hands. The multiple designs for the altar piece and the pulpit, for example, indicate that master craftsmen produced designs on paper and then submitted them to the vestry—and probably to Wren himself—for the final selection. 64 Wills, etc., vol. 75-A, 1746–49, September 1, 1737, 165–89, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 65 Wills, etc., vol. 7, 1752–56, August 26, 1751, 250, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 66 SCG, June 12, 1736; see also SCG, March 29, 1738–39. 67 For more on apprentices of early South Carolina’s artisans, see Rauschenberg, “Apprenticeship System,” 1–68. 68 SCG, November 9, 1734; SCG, March 12, 1740–41; SCG, September 5, 1741. 69 SCG, June 27, 1744. 70 Book Z, 1 May 1744, 512–16, Miscellaneous Land Records, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. 71 SCG, August 21, 1736. Anne Dharriette pays Watson for a coffin for her husband. Wills, etc., vol. 61-B, 1726–27, May 11, 1727, 439, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 72 Wills, etc., book LL, July 10, 1735, 644, Charleston County Probate Record Office; SCG, May 10, 1735. 404

NOTES TO PAGES 122 – 26

73 Wills, etc., vol. 75-A, 1746–49, February 20, 1745/6, 296, Charleston County Probate Record Office; SCG, 10 May 1735. 74 Huger and Salley, Register of St. Philip’s Parish, 65, 66, 68, 71, 78, 114, 115, 120, and 156. 75 Ibid., 283; Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Register of St. Andrew’s Parish,” SCHGM 13 ( July 1912): 220. 76 Huger and Salley, Register of St. Philip’s Parish. 77 Ibid., 150; Pt. 18, book S, 1737–39, October 25, 1737, 42–43, Miscellaneous Land Records, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. 78 Mabel L. Webber, “Register of the Independent Congregational Church, 1732–38,” SCHGM 12, no. 3 ( July 1911): 135–40. 79 SCG, June 19, 1736. 80 SCG, May 15, 1736. See Ravenel, “Pioneer Timepiece Makers,” 129; SCG, June 19, 1736. 81 Garden to SPG, May 10, 1763, series B, vol. 5, no. 217, SPGLB. 82 While the records never name the nephew Francis, he seems the more likely since by 1767 Zachariah was sixty-nine years old and Francis’s name appears prominently on the building. This particular reference is probably to Francis Villepontoux, whose name is carved in a brick. “Pontoux” might also have been meant to include Zachariah and his brother Paul, who was also involved in the building trades. In 1770 the vestry hired Paul Villepontoux to repair the Glebe house of the parish. 83 Gazette of the State of South Carolina, April 28, 1777. 84 SCG, February 12, 1763; SCG, September 1765; SCG, April 25, 1768. 85 Inventories, vol. D, 1800–1810, 4, Charleston County Probate Record Office; Wills, no. 28, book D, 1800–1807, September 2, 1800, 59, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 86 The register of St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish Church indicate that a William Axson married Elizabeth Susannah Mouzon on October 8, 1761, and that their three children were baptized on February 27, 1763, and April 14, 1765. See Clute, Annals and Parish Register, 26, 48. Brad Rauschenberg has suggested the possibility that there were two William Axsons, a carpenter in St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish and a cabinetmaker in Charles Town. The evidence for this is inconclusive. See Bivins, “Charleston Rococo Interiors,” 35. 87 For information on the Villepontoux family, see Peck, “The Villepontoux Family” (1949), 29–45; and Peck, “The Villepontoux Family” (1947), 35–38. Before his involvement with these two churches, Villepontoux had provided the vast majority of St. Michael’s bricks from his Back River plantation. But since the undertaker fashioned all the molds necessary for the shaped bricks of the columns and capitals of that building, Villepontoux’s role at St. Michael’s was only as brick maker. 88 SCG, January 1, 1756. 89 Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. On builders and building economies, see Rilling, Building Houses, Crafting Capitalism. 90 For a discussion of fashion, see Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 228–29. 91 St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1738–1817, August 9, 1742, SCL. 92 Garden to SPG, May 6, 1765, series B, vol. 5, no. 220, SPGLB. 93 Gazette of the State of South Carolina, April 28, 1777. 94 Colin Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus; Gibbs, Book of Architecture; Halfpenny, Sound Building; Langley, Treasury; Morris, Select Architecture; and Pain, Builder’s Companion. John Aheron included the plan and elevation of a church in his A General Treatise on Architecture. NOTES TO PAGES 126 – 28

405

95 Langley, Treasury, plates 108–11; Morris, Select Architecture, plate 46; Pain, Builder’s Companion, plate 61. 96 Anthony Forehand, 19 June 1762, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 97 Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, book 2, 1. 98 Cruickshank and Wyld, London: The Art of Georgian Building, 82–89. 99 Ibid., 160. 100 For a summary of Cardy’s life in Ireland immediately before his emigration, see Severens, “Emigration and Provincialism,” 21–36. For more on Cardy, see Ravenel, Architects of Charleston, 29–35. 101 He and his skilled labor produced thirty-two sash and frames (£1,120), four great doors and cases (£122), and the Venetian and Egyptian windows at the east end (£50 and £20, respectively). The “Egyptian window” is probably the Diocletian window in the eastern gable of the chancel, visible from only the exterior. He prepared the walls of the exterior to receive the cornice, made the curved brick molds necessary to create the columns, pilasters, and other ornaments, and prepared all the centers for the arched masonry openings. Also related to the masonry, he was paid £50 for designing and erecting a “machine for raising the materials for the steeple.” The necessary “timber, pullies, morticing, and handles” for the machine were delivered to the site in January 1754. He was also hired to complete some of the structural elements of the building, such as framing the floors of the steeple (£130). Cardy’s charges to the vestry indicate that the church commissioners paid the carpenter £25 per month starting in May 1752, just as the walls of the church begin to rise. See “The Honorable Board of Commissioners for Building the New Church Called St. Michael’s to Samuel Cardy, May 1752 to 1757,” St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 102 This may not have been so unusual in English practice; the records for the Church Commissioners for the Act for Building Fifty New Churches indicate that the commissioners for each of those churches signed individual contracts with each tradesman, even though most of the churches were designed by prominent architects. For more, see Yeomans, Trussed Roof, 79. 103 Samuel Cardy, November 28, 1757, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 104 I. A. 6, August 3, 1759, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 105 Burton, Charleston Furniture, 84–89, 97–98. 106 See Bivins, “Early Carving in the South Carolina Low Country”; SCG, April 16, 1750. 107 Samuel Cardy, November 28, 1757, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 108 There are a number of individuals who might have executed the drawing. It is very possible that the design was produced by a member of the vestry, but it is equally possible that it was generated either by the undertaker Samuel Cardy or Henry Burnett, the carver who played a leading role in the fabrication of the pulpit. 109 Other eighteenth-century books by William Pain and Robert Morris included such designs for fonts, pulpits, and altarpieces, but it was Langley’s that had the greatest impact. 110 Scholars of early American decorative arts have developed an extensive body of scholarship on the role of the artisan in early America. For discussions of the various factors that informed the making of an object, see Lovell, “Such Furniture,” 27–62; Puig and Conforti, American Craftsman; and Zea, “Rural 406

NOTES TO PAGES 128 – 34

111

112 113 114 115

116

117 118

119 120 121 122

Craftsmanship and Design,” 47–72. Luke Beckerdite has made the argument that Philadelphia carvers worked on both furniture and architecture. See Beckerdite, “Philadelphia Carving Shops,” 1044–63. John Bivins has made the same argument for Charleston carvers in the third quarter of the eighteenth century; see Bivins, “Charleston Rococo Interiors,” 1–122. John Bivins, through his extensive investigation of the carved work in St. Michael’s, has determined that the pulpit survives largely intact save the torus, the pineapple finial, and the denticulated crown above the pulpit box. Burnett’s account for the church indicated that the pulpit had a torus pierced through, similar to the one that survives on the pulpit at Pompion Hill Chapel, which, according to Bivins, is by another hand. See “St. Michael’s Church,” in Lounsbury, Nelson, and Poston, “Field Guide,” 97. Books WW–XX, 1760–62, 587–89, Miscellaneous Land Records 30, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. Ravenel, Architects of Charleston. See Bullock, “American Freemasonry,” 347–69. Although no lodges of Freemasons in South Carolina used the term “ancient” until after the Revolution, such a lodge was established in Philadelphia as early as 1757. On ancient Freemasonry, see Bullock, “American Freemasonry,” 10– 15, 85–108. The only history of Freemasonry in South Carolina is Mackey, History of Freemasonry. Charles Pinckney is listed as a provincial grand steward in 1754. See Mackey, History of Freemasonry, 31; William Bull is listed as a member in SCG, December 31, 1764. Samuel Prioleau was elected as junior warden of Solomon’s Lodge in 1741; see SCG, January 1, 1741. Unfortunately, all of the membership lists of the Freemasons were destroyed in the nineteenth century, so the few references of elections published in the SCG are the only names that can be firmly associated with the organization. SCG, December 31, 1739. See also Mackey, History of Freemasonry, 1–59. Mackey, History of Freemasonry, 45. The Anglican Church and Freemasons enjoyed great parallels in early America. Both were intended to cultivate proper behavior—that of the elite—and both promised certain degrees of universal membership. Where the Anglican Church sought to be latitudinarian enough to encompass Christians of diverse doctrinal persuasions, the masons likewise considered their meeting universal—“like Heaven”—in the fact that they claimed membership from “all Religions, Sects, perswasions and denominations.” See Bullock, “American Freemasonry,” 57, 63. Yet they, too, denied membership to “improper” persons—the lower sort. Another parallel that links the erection of St. Michael’s with Masonry is the similarity between the Mason’s famous public processions and entertainments and the processions and entertainments held at the foundation of the church’s cornerstone. For the former, see SCG, January 2, 1741, and January 3, 1742; for the latter, see SCG, February 22, 1752. Two later eighteenth-century sermons addressed to masons survive in the collection from Bishop Smith in the archives at St. Philip’s Church: “A workman, that needeth not to be ashamed,” 2 Tim. 2:15 for the Free Masons, no. 266, 1764, 1785, BSC; and “Charity Sermon to the Masons,” box 5, no. 2, 1756, 1771, BSC. SCG, December 28, 1738. Box 4-22, index to sermons, BSC. SCG, February 20, 1762. Account reprinted in Mackey, History of Freemasonry, 54. NOTES TO PAGES 134 – 3 7

407

123 Quoted in Sachse, Benjamin Franklin. 124 SCG, December 31, 1739. See Mackey, History of Freemasonry, 1–59. 125 In addition to these, he served the colony as a commissioner for an Ashley River Bridge in 1754 and a commissioner for new fortifications between 1756 and 1763. 126 SCG, February 20, 1762. For an extensive discussion of Smith’s status among the masons, see Mackey, History of Freemasonry, 39. 127 See Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 299; I-C, Pew Subscriptions, 1759–60, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 128 For an excellent discussion of the role of the “Augustan Style” of architecture in the lives of early American masons, see Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 25–40.

Chapter Four 1 On New England gravestones in South Carolina, see Combs, Early Gravestone Art. 2 The association of the number 4 with things material dates at least to Saint Augustine. See Male, The Gothic Image, 11. The four elements, the four humors, and other doctrines of Renaissance science were still being taught at Yale in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. They persisted in the popular imagination throughout the century. See Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 6, 192–205. By means of the acre, the square serves to order the landscape. See Stilgoe, Common Landscape, 99–100. For the construction of the temporal world as a square, see Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 45–46. 3 For more on the theocentric view of heaven in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 177–80. An extraordinary discussion of the power of shapes in Puritan linguistics is “Iconoclastic Materialism,” in Kibbey, Material Shapes in Puritanism, 42–65. If such power was given to forms by Puritans, then Anglicans would be even more likely to do so since they were more moderate on the interpretation of the Second Commandment. 4 In her study of the memorials in the Orckney Islands, Sarah Tarlow found that the metaphor of journey/ascent was prominent in the visual content of seventeenth-century memorials. See Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration, 103–5. 5 Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; “On Death,” 1772, box 3, no. 7, 322, BSC. 6 The Book of Common Prayer and the Administration of Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England and Ireland, n.p. 7 On the New England gravestone as the portal between earth and heaven, see Ludwig, Graven Images, 139–42. See also Watters, With Bodilie Eyes, 90–91; and LeJau to SPG, June 13, 1710, series A, vol. 5, no. 343, SPGLB. 8 For a theoretical frame for the architecture of death as gate between places, see Jones, Hermeneutics, 169–71. 9 The shared embrace of this shape and its underlying theological implications by both New England Calvinists and southern Anglicans demonstrates the embrace of certain basic beliefs by two religious groups who differed fundamentally on issues of church government and less on issues of theology. The vast majority of Protestant denominations active in the southern colonies were still firmly rooted in the Calvinistic tradition into the early eighteenth 408

NOTES TO PAGES 13 7 – 42

10 11

12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28

century and were therefore deeply invested in the doctrines of original sin and the depravity of humankind. See Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic”; Levy, “Early Puritanism”; and Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians. Maurice Ashley has argued that by the opening decades of the eighteenth century, the daily religious life of Englishmen was Calvinist in theology if not in government. See Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century, 238. Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor have an excellent discussion of the theology of eighteenth-century Anglicanism in their introduction to Church of England. The most comprehensive discussion of late seventeenth-century popular piety and practice within Anglicanism and the seventeenth-century Anglican belief in predestination is chapter 6, “The Whole Duty of Man,” in Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 279–330. This St. Philip’s burned in 1835. In his theoretical treatise on the hermeneutics of sacred architecture, Lindsay Jones argues that one of the significant means of understanding places of worship is through homology, or the capacity of a place to orient believers to the cosmos. In this way, the early eighteenth-century churches of South Carolina seem to correspond well with this frame of reference. See “Homology: Microcosmic Images of the Universe,” especially the discussion of the priority of allurement, in Jones, Hermeneutics, 33–46. The barrel vault is a simplification of the dome. Discussions of the theological connections between the dome and the heavens in Christian tradition are abundant. See Lehmann, “The Dome of Heaven”; and Smith, Dome. See also McVey, “The Domed Church as Microcosm,” 95. For more general discussions of architectural associationism in the eighteenth century, see Archer, “Associationism.” Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, vol. 1, ch. 4, 10. Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 6. Ephraim Chambers’s immensely popular Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, first published in London in 1728, describes heaven as “an azure, transparent orb.” This association of heaven with a sphere would be dropped in similar dictionaries by midcentury. Anthony Sparrow, Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England; reprinted in Keickhefer, Theology in Stone, 140. Eccles. 43:11; Addison, The Spectator, vol. 6, no. 415, 76–81. Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, nos. 107–15, SPGLB. Ibid., nos. 110–15, SPGLB. Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, February 11, 1711, SCHS. Holcomb, Saint David’s Parish, April 30, 1770. Price, British Carpenter, 21. The first and very early appearance of the arched window on a dissenting meetinghouse is the Willtown Presbyterian Meeting, built in 1765. See Simmons, “Records of the Willtown Presbyterian Church, 1738–1941.” Carl Lounsbury has made this same observation in his extensive fieldwork on colonial churches and meetinghouses. See Lounsbury, “God Is in the Details.” Reprinted in Davies, Worship and Theology, 25. See Buggeln, “New England Orthodoxy and the Language of the Sacred”; and Sweeny, “Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches.” See also Donnelley, New England Meeting Houses, 35, 61, 107–8. David Hall’s chapter on the meetinghouse in Worlds of Wonder. On the national versus the gathered models of the church, see Davies, “Two Ecclesiologies,” 24–30. NOTES TO PAGES 14 2 – 48

409

29 Vestry of St. Paul’s and their minister Bull to Nicholson, 1722, series A, vol. 16, no. 84, SPGLB. 30 LeJau to SPG, September 23, 1707, 1702–10, vol. 16, no. 179, FPC. 31 Reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 249. 32 Vestry to SPG, May 26, 1715, series B, vol. 10, no. 125, SPGLB. 33 Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. 34 Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-A, 377, 1794, BSC. 35 On the emphasis of such continuity in the “new Anglicanism” of the late seventeenth century, see Ahlstrom, Religious History, 96. The idea of God’s special presence in the church has early seventeenth-century Laudian origins. For the theology of the church as the House of God in the early seventeenth century, see Lake, “The Laudian Style,” 161–86. 36 Alexander Keith Commonplace Book, 1730–40, SCL. 37 Gerardus van der Leeuw summarizes the standard line of argument regarding the secularization of Protestant church architecture: that the church is a “House of Prayer” not a “House of God.” Although this line of argument follows Anglican theology, the material and documentary evidence indicates that this did not hold true on the popular level. See van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 199–201. 38 “A prayer before Divine Service Begins,” Edward Brailsford Devotions, 1710– 44, SCL. 39 “A Teacher’s Journal, 1740,” August 9, 1740, in Merrens, The Colonial South Carolina Scene, 136,. 40 “Keep thy foot, when thou goest into the House of God,” Eccles. 5:1, box 4-22, Index to Sermons, 123, 1759, 1774, 1797, BSC. 41 “On Correct Behaviour in Church,” in Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 88–89. 42 Davies, Worship and Theology, 11–22. 43 Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, 209. See also Lake, “The Laudian Style,” 165. 44 Cruickshank and Wyld, London: The Art of Georgian Building, 161. The country houses of John Vanbrugh, with a consistent use of arched windows, are a notable exception to this rule. 45 Noted anthropologist and theorist of religion Arnold van Gennep argues, “Sacredness as an attribute is not absolute: it is brought into play by the nature of particular situations.” Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 12. See also Smith, Map Is Not Territory. 46 See Smith, “The Cross,” 70. 47 The Book of Common Prayer (London, 1760). For a lengthy discussion of the disputes over this topic, see “Crosses in Baptism” in Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 124–48. 48 Thomas, Decline of Magic, 31. For evidence of this usage in the early South, see Hand, North Carolina Folklore, 164. 49 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 105. 50 Johnston to SPG, September 20, 1708, series A, vol. 4, no. 311, SPGLB. 51 SPVM, 1735–55, April 14, 1743. 52 A chapel of ease in St. James, Goose Creek, Parish (begun 1721); St. Paul’s (begun 1721); St. Andrew’s (begun 1723); and St. George’s, Dorchester (begun 1734). 53 Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, no. 98, SPGLB; Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, nos. 107–15, SPGLB. 54 Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 293. 55 While I have argued that Anglican churches in Jamaica often take the form of a cross as a structural insurance against hurricanes and earthquakes, the 410

NOTES TO PAGES 148 – 53

56

57

58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

78 79

80 81

reduced frequency of cruciform churches in South Carolina and its relatively subdued climatic conditions suggest that reasons for the form might lie elsewhere. See Nelson, “Local Context in Early Jamaica.” Eliade describes the temple as “an opening in the upward direction.” He goes on to describe the temple as the axis mundi, the space connecting earth and heaven. See Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26, 38. For numerous references to angels on the ceilings of eighteenth-century Anglican churches in England, see Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church, 162–87, esp. 170–71. For other examples of painted ceilings, see ibid., 170–71. For examples in England, see the 1671 ceiling at Bromfield in Shropshire and the ceiling of Staunton Harold, erected in Leistershire between 1652 and 1665. For other examples of painted ceilings, see Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church, 170–71. For examples in the American colonies, see Norton, “Anglican Embellishments.” Norton, “Anglican Embellishments.” Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 119. Ibid., 119. For a discussion of the historic applications of Article IX through the nineteenth century, see Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 357–78. On New England, see St. George, Conversing by Signs, 6. The most comprehensive discussion of Eliza Lucas Pinckney is the introduction to her letterbook by Bellows in “Eliza Lucas Pinckney,” 147–65; quote from Pinckney, Letterbook, 70. Cara Anzilotti’s discussion of women in early South Carolina suggests that Pinckney was indicative of a simultaneously strong and submissive class of elite women in the colony. Anzilotti’s study, unfortunately, says very little about the religious lives of women. See Anzilotti, Affairs of the World. “Broughton Letters,” SCHGM 15 (1914): 175–76. Durand to SPG, April 23, 1747, series B, vol. 15, no. 171, SPGLB. Bradford J. Wood, “A Constant Attendance.” Benes, Masks of Orthodoxy, 52. Watters, With Bodilie Eyes, 35–68. Peter Benes argues that Puritans struggled with exactly this same issue. See Benes, Masks of Orthodoxy, 52–54. “Easter and at any Time, Easter Sunday A.M., 1765,” Sermons by Number, box 1, 110–213, and box 1-15, no. 171, BSC. “Funeral Sermon, 1767,” box 7-4, BSC. 1 Pet. 5:8. On the Early Modern conception of Satan, see Thomas, Decline of Magic, 469–77. On the presence of Satan in the eighteenth-century South, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 52–76. Thomas, Decline of Magic, 472. Quoted in Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 120. On the “black man” in the early South, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 29, 52. On the relationship between (African) blackness and evil in the early South, see Jordan, White over Black. Quoted in Heyrman, Southern Cross, 71. Cited in Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 85. See also Hogue, “Nicholas Trott,” 133–63. For a history of witches, see Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations. Davis, Intellectual Life, 575–76. LeJau to SPG, April 15, 1707, series A, vol. 3, no. 332, SPGLB. N OT ES TO PAGES 153 – 57

411

82 See Thomas Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (1682–1712), 2:509– 10, 739; cited in Edgar, South Carolina: A History. 83 See Butler, Sea of Faith, 83–86. 84 The arguments made by Thomas in Decline of Magic still characterize the scholarly perception even though much new research suggests that folk magic, conjuration, and the presence of the palpable supernatural was alive and well in the eighteenth century. See Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment; Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 117–20; Benes, Wonders of the Invisible World. Don Yoder has recently argued the same for German Americans; see Yoder, Discovering American Folklife, 95. 85 See Olson, “Spirits, Witches, and Science.” 86 Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 117–20. See also “Witchcraft: Decline” in Thomas, Decline of Magic, 570–86. 87 See “Witchcraft,” in Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 66–125. 88 Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 141–71. Frey and Wood concur that the African belief in witches and evil spirits survived the middle passage. See Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 56, 59. For an extraordinary description of haunts and hags in early nineteenth-century Jamaica, see Lewis, Journal, 97; See also Patten’s article on slave beliefs in Invisible World. 89 Frey and Wood, Coming Shouting to Zion, 46–48; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 223; Hand, North Carolina Folklore, 106–7, 164–65. See also Fennel, “Conjuring Boundaries.” 90 Leone and Fry, “Conjuring”; Stine, “Blue Beads.” 91 See Frey, Water from the Rock, 40–41. 92 Fennel, “Conjuring Boundaries,” 282. 93 See Raboteau, Slave Religion, 85. 94 Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 147. 95 Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 48, 116. 96 For a discussion of apotropaic symbols in traditional architecture in England, see Meeson, “Ritual Marks and Graffiti.” 97 St. George, Conversing by Signs, 115–204. 98 Ibid., 192. On witch bottles in England, see Merrifield, Ritual and Magic, 163–75. 99 Fennel, “Conjuring Boundaries,” 287. 100 St. George, Conversing by Signs, 190. 101 This cherub was noted by Emma Drayton-Grimke in her 1924 “Chronicles of Archdale Hall,” reprinted in Zierdon, “Archdale Hall.” 102 Stoney, Plantations, 79. 103 Angels over windows was also not original to St. James but is in evidence in late seventeenth-century parish churches in England as well. Minsterly in Shropshire, ca. 1689, for example, has similar cherubs over the windows. On the cherub as apotropaic sign, see St. George, Conversing by Signs, 181–95. 104 For a complete discussion of the complexity of “the Word” in the Christian tradition, see “The Spoken Word as Christian Holy Writ,” in Graham, Beyond the Written Word, 119–25 (quote from page 63). 105 See Morgan, “For Christ and the Republic,” 49–50. 106 Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, 208–9. 107 Quoted in Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church, 170. 108 Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 158. 109 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 300; Hasell to SPG, September 6, 1707, series A, vol. 3, no. 362, SPGLB. 110 Gutjahr, An American Bible. 412

NOTES TO PAGES 15 7 – 64

111 Davis, Southern Colonial Bookshelf, 73. 112 Cited in Davis, Intellectual Life, 2:516. 113 “Catalogue of Books in the Library of St. James, Goose Creek,” series B, vol. 4, no. 142, SPGLB; Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, 1751, SCHS. 114 “Items from the estate inventory of Mr. Ludham, rector of St. James, Goose Creek,” series B, vol. 4, no. 287, SPGLB. A full list of the value of libraries owned by South Carolina clergymen appears in Edgar, “Notable Libraries.” 115 St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven Co., Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873, August 26, 1754, SCHS. 116 St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. 117 Newspaper advertisements suggest that personal Bibles, Books of Common Prayer, and catechisms were widely available in South Carolina in the early eighteenth century, “To be sold by the printer hereof, Common Prayers, Testaments, Psalters...Church Catechisms.” SCG, January 13, 1733. 118 Johnson to SPG, December 19, 1715, series B, vol. 4, no. 37, SPGLB. 119 Davis, Intellectual Life, 2:528. See also “Religion” in Davis, Southern Colonial Bookshelf, 65–90; and Edgar, “Some Popular Books,” 174–78. 120 Isaac, “Ideology of the Revolution.” 121 Morgan, Protestants and Pictures, 6. 122 Leigh Schmidt argues that in the Early Modern context, “words became printed objects more than breathed speech, things to be seen rather than voices to be heard.” Schmidt, Hearing Things, 16. 123 Ibid., 7. 124 Graham, Beyond the Written Word, 39. See also Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, 31. 125 “Silent, private reading appears to have become dominant only with the advent of widespread literacy in much of Western Europe, which was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon.” Graham, Beyond the Written Word, 41. See also Rath, How Early America Sounded, x. 126 Graham, “Of Written and Spoken Words,” in Beyond the Written Word, 9–44. Reinhard Wittman describes the most pervasive forms of reading in the eighteenth century as “naïve, non-reflexive, and undisciplined, and for the most part performed aloud. It constituted the sole form of reading among the rural population and a large section of the urban lower classes too.” Wittman, “Reading Revolution,” 290. See also Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, x. 127 Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. 128 Jones to SPG, January 26, 1728, series A, vol. 20, no. 116, SPGLB. 129 Hasell to SPG, June 4, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 108, SPGLB. 130 See Burton, Charleston Furniture, 31–32. 131 On the “poetics of implication,” see St. George, Conversing by Signs. 132 Quoted in Burton, Charleston Furniture, 29. 133 Quoted in Ibid., 32. 134 Pinckney, Letterbook, 36. 135 Dwight to SPG, April 12, 1739, series B, vol. 7, no. 237, SPGLB. 136 1 Kings 6:18–20. 137 The theological implications of the use of cedar in churches was first made by the late John Bivins, who wrote on St. Michael’s pulpit in Hudgins and others, Vernacular Architecture of Charleston. For two of many descriptions of the cedars of Lebanon, see Ezek. 17:23 and 31:3. 138 See Lev. 14. 139 Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–39, BSC; box 3, no. 18-A, 377, 1794. NOTES TO PAGES 164 – 67

413

140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162

163

164 165

166

414

Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1, November 24, 1740. Durand to SPG, April 19, 1744, series B, vol. 12, no. 106, SPGLB. John Bivins on St. Michael’s pulpit, Vernacular Architecture Forum guidebook. See Jer. 22:14; Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, February 24, 1772. For an extensive discussion of the power of scent in early Christianity, see Harvey, Scenting Salvation. SPVM, 1735–55, June 1750. “A True Copy of the Clergy of South Carolina’s Instructions to Mr. Johnston, Charles Town, March 4, 1712/3,” SCG, February 27, 1762. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 305, 350; Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, Easter Monday, 1737. Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, nos. 107–15, SPGLB. Moore, “The Abiel Abbot Journals,” 53 (May 19, 1819). See “Taming Time’s Pinions, Weaving Time’s Web: Of Times Natural, Sacred, and Secular, 1700–1900,” in Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 39–68. SCG, December 15, 1739; cited in Durecki, “Changing Times.” White and White, Sounds of Slavery, 1–7. Repeatable, audible markers such as chimes and bells are the threshold of sacred time; see Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 68–113 (quote from page 69). On the power of bells to shape culture, see Corbin, Village Bells. On the role of time in the making of Protestant sacred space, see Morgan, Visual Piety, 182. Cited in Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 71. See “Ringing to drive away evil,” in Price, Bells and Man, 122–29. See Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 422–23. Quoted in Price, Bells and Man, 133. Rath, How Early America Sounded, 46; see also Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 70. “A Teacher’s Journal, 1740,” in Merrens, The Colonial South Carolina Scene, 134–35. See chapter 1, “@‘Those Thunders, Those Roarings’: The Natural Soundscape,” in Rath, How Early America Sounded, 10–42. “Elizabeth Sindrey Account Book,” SCHS. On the persistence of the passing bell after the Reformation, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 70; see also Price, Bells and Man, 130. “Inventories, Charleston County,” 94A–B, 1771–74, p. 296, Charleston County Probate Record Office. An alternative reason for the coffin bell might have been the emerging fear in the later eighteenth century of being buried alive. An external bell allowed the buried individual a means of alerting the living of his or her status. Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 48. Arnold van Gennep argues that symbols are commonly placed at portals since they serve as significant points of passage between realms: “Sacred objects are hung or nailed onto [portals] as on the architrave.” See Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 17–20. Eliade describes the church door as “the threshold...the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where two worlds communicate, where passage from the profane and the sacred world becomes possible.” See Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 25. Edward Brailsford’s devotional book (1710–44), in the collections of the South Caroliniana Library, survives as a rare manuscript book type that was very common among Anglicans in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For a discussion of printed devotional books, see Spurr, Restoration Church of

NOTES TO PAGES 167 – 70

167

168 169 170 171

172

173 174 175 176

England, 341–53. For a discussion of devotionals among early Anglicans in Virginia, see Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 97–102. Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, November 29, 1757; SPVM, 1735–55, August 6, 1753. The cock on the Huguenot church is visible in the 1739 Roberts’s view of Charleston. The reference to the Scotch Presbyterians appears in Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church, 201. See also Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 14. Mal. 4: 2. See Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 45. Norton, “Ornamentation.” Poplar Spring Church in Virginia similarly had a painted curtain; see Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 119. Cited in Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 119. On the interest in the Temple of Jerusalem among Freemasons, see Hamilton, Material Culture, 15; and chapter 4, “The Great Prototype,” in Curl, The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry. The image of the Temple of Jerusalem also occupied the imagination of prominent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglican church architects. See “Wren, Hawksmoor, and the Wonders of the World,” in Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches, 3–46. “Whitsunday: Georgetown, 1763, St. Philip’s, 1766,” Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; and box 3, no. 5, 295, BSC. On the power of the senses to shape Early American culture, see Hoffer, Sensory Worlds. St. George, Conversing by Signs, 3. See Shiam, “God and the Enlightenment.”

Chapter Five 1 On Miles Brewton, see Horton, “Miles Brewton, Goldsmith.” 2 See Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 58–70; Upton, Holy Things and Profane, xx; Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 74. For a scholarly discussion of Anglican piety in the English context, see the introduction in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor, Church of England, 1–3. 3 Johnston to SPG, September 20, 1708, series A, vol. 4, no. 311, SPGLB. 4 Boschi to SPG, April 7, 1748, series B, vol. 12, no. 111, SPGLB. 5 St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, September 25, 1754, SCHS. 6 In her study of religious practice in the American colonies before 1750, scholar Patricia Bonomi argues that church attendance among white colonials on the mainland hovered at 75 percent, refuting the traditional assumption that, besides the Puritans, Americans were only nominally religious until the evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century. See Bonomi and Eisanstadt, “Church Adherence.” More recently, W. M. Jacob has made a similar argument in his book-length study of Anglicanism in eighteenth-century England. Jacobs found “a deep attachment to Christian faith among a broad crosssection of people, as illustrated by their expectations of the clergy, their active involvement in...worship...[and] personal devotional practices, their concern for...Christian morality and peace between neighbors, their Christianly motivated philanthropy,...and their substantial investment in...building and beautifying churches.” See Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, 3. 7 In the same year, the minister in rural St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish had for some time offered both morning and evening prayers on Sundays, but he “perceived ye Inhabitants (some coming 16 miles to church) to grow weary of it.” Hunt to Bishop of London, May 18, 1724, 1703–69, vol. 9, no. 166, FPC. NOTES TO PAGES 17 1– 78

415

8 Garden to Bishop of London, April 15, 1724, 1703–69, vol. 9, no. 160, FPC. 9 Lewis Jones at St. Helena’s in Beaufort wrote in 1731 that he had “attempted on several times to keep up publick prayers on Festivals and on Wednesdays and Fridays”; Jones to SPG, June 8, 1731, series B, vol. 4, no. 246, SPGLB. Richard St. John was offering morning prayer in the same parish on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, in addition to regular Sunday services; St. John to SPG, June 15, 1748, series B, vol. 15, no. 185, SPGLB. After the death of their rector in 1737, the vestry of Christ Church Parish appointed Stephen Hartley “to Read on every Sunday or other Holydays the Morning and Evening Prayer as they are set forth in the Book of Common Prayer with a Sermon after morning Service”; Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, October 7, 1737, SCHS. 10 Commissary Bull’s 1723 description of the Province, reprinted in typescript of Short History of the Diocese, 20–21. 11 Bull to Bishop of London, August 12, 1720, vol. 9, no. 99, FPC; Annual Fast Days were observed in St. Stephen’s Parish as late as the 1790s; St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven Co., Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873, April 11, 1790, SCHS; Ann Ashby Manigault recorded in her journal that in 1756, 1758, and 1761 she observed a Fast Day in late April or early Mayl; Manigault Papers, Extracts from the Journal of Mrs. Gabriel Manigault (Ann Ashby Manigault), 1754–1781, SCHS. 12 Smith, “Henry Laurens.” 13 “Prayer when in Church,” Edward Brailsford Devotions, 1710–44, SCL. 14 “The Ellerton Journal,” reprinted in Merrens, Colonial South Carolina Scene. 15 Varnod to Bishop of London, March 30, 1724, vol. 9, no. 171, FPC. 16 Reprinted in Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 89. 17 The most recent scholarship on Anglicans and enslaved Africans is chapter 3, “The Anglicans: Early Attempts at Conversion,” in Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 63–79. Chapter 2 of that volume discusses the persistence of African religious traditions in the eighteenth-century South and Caribbean. See also chapter 6, “Red, Black, and Anglican,” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 102–20; and Wood, Black Majority, 133–42. 18 “A True Copy of the Clergy of South Carolina’s Instructions to Mr. Johnston,” Rawlinson Manuscripts, Bodleian Library. 19 Ludlam to SPG, July 2, 1724, series B, vol. 4, no. 181, SPGLB. The same was true of Anglicans in Virginia. See Nelson, A Blessed Company, 261. 20 LeJau to SPG, September 23, 1707, vol. 16, no. 179, FPC. 21 Olwell indicates that the highest percentage of baptized slaves in a parish was 12 percent and that approximately half the baptized slaves were baptized as adults. See Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 117–19. 22 Quoted in ibid., 122. 23 Hasell to SPG, February 16, 1729, series A, vol. 22, no. 272, SPGLB. 24 The five letters that divide communicants by race are: LeJau, “Statistics of St. James Parish,” September 23, 1707, vol. 16, no. 181, FPC; Varnod, January 13, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 132, SPGLB; Harrison, April 14, 1760, series B, vol. 5, no. 230, SPGLB; Varnod, March 30, 1724, vol. 9, no. 171, FPC; and Roe, July 17, 1739, series B, vol. 7, no. 255, SPGLB. Olwell also estimates that about one-third of the Communion population was black. See Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 133. In his otherwise positive report of Anglicanism in Virginia, Nelson offers very low accounts of slaves at Communion. See Nelson, A Blessed Company, 268–69. 25 “Diary of Timothy Ford,” SCHGM 13 ( July 1912): 145. 416

NOTES TO PAGES 178 – 79

26 See “Architecture as Ritual Context” in Jones, Hermeneutics, 183–294, for a lengthy discussion of the complex relationships between sacred architecture and ritual. 27 Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, 1708, SCHS. 28 Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, 18-D, no. 352, 1794, BSC. 29 “1 Cor. 10:16, 1766,” box 5, no. 1, BSC. 30 Many scholars have discussed the implications of social order in Anglicanism. See Noll, Religion and American Politics, 27–28; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 108–15; and Isaac, Transformation of Virginia. 31 “A prayer of a Youth against Lust,” in Alexander Keith Commonplace Book, 1730–40, 122, SCL. 32 “A Prayer before coming to the Holy Communion,” Alexander Keith Commonplace Book, 1730–40, 126, SCL. 33 SCG, March 1, 1735. 34 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 111. 35 “Diary of Timothy Ford,” SCHGM 13 ( July 1912): 145. 36 On architecture as surrogate, see St. George, “Attacking Houses,” in Conversing by Signs, 205–96. 37 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 742. 38 The body/building metaphor in seventeenth-century New England is explored at great length in St. George, Conversing by Signs. 39 Guy to SPG, January 22, 1727, series A, vol. 20, SPGLB. 40 Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, December 24, 1771. 41 St. Andrew’s, St. Michael’s, and St. Stephens. 42 SPVM, 1812–22, August 8, 1819. 43 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 140–48. 44 For an excellent discussion of the theology of Baptism, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 106–13. 45 Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 620. This basic theology remained in place even after the Acts of Toleration were passed as a result of the Glorious Revolution. 46 Sidney Ahlstrom argues that in an important period of Anglican redefinition, 1660–90, the “new Anglicanism” abandoned the idea of a comprehensive church—thus legitimating the notion of denominations in the eyes of Anglicans—but never adopted any dogmatic restrictions on membership common to other, more firmly Calvinistic Protestant denominations. See Ahlstrom, “The New Anglicanism,” in Religious History, 95–98. 47 Maule to Society, June 3, 1710, SPGLB; quoted in Wood, “A Constant Attendance,” 213. 48 Dunn to SPG, April 21, 1707, series A, vol. 3, no. 258, SPGLB. 49 LeJau to Secretary, September 23, 1707, vol. 16, no. 179, SPG Correspondence, 1702–10, Lambeth Palace Library. 50 Minister in St. George’s to SPG, January 13, 1723, series B, 1701–86, vol. 4, no. 132, SPGLB. 51 “Statistics of St. James Parish, September 23, 1707,” vol. 16, no. 181, SPG Correspondence, 1702–10, Lambeth Palace Library. 52 The preference for home baptisms appears to have been true across eighteenth-century England as well. See Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 73. 53 Garden to Bishop of London, May 24, 1725, vol. 9, no. 176, FPC. 54 Orr to SPG, September 30, 1744, series B, vol. 12, no. 97, SPGLB; Lady Nugent’s journal indicates that home baptisms were also the practice in Jamaica. See Nugent, Journal, 89, 126, and 181. NOTES TO PAGES 180 – 86

417

55 There was also incentive for ministers to celebrate private baptisms, since “the fees for Christenings in Private Houses depend on the Benevolence of the People,” whose generosity, the author writes, was often great on these occasions. Letter to Bishop of London, April 3, 1762, vol. 10, no. 153, FPC. 56 John K. Nelson questions the prevalence of home baptisms in eighteenthcentury Virginia, suggesting that this was limited largely to the elite. See John K. Nelson, Blessed Company, 214–15. 57 May 24, 1725, vol. 9, no. 176, FPC. 58 See Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 188–94. See also Pollock, “Stage of the World.” 59 A lengthy argument for the vibrant nature of home devotional life among eighteenth-century Anglicans in England can be found in “Personal and Family Piety,” in Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 93–123. Walsh and Taylor concur, arguing that household, family, and individual worship was far from uncommon. See Walsh and Taylor, Church of England, 25. In his study of eighteenthcentury Virginia, by contrast, Isaac found little evidence for family prayers; see Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 68. 60 Samuel Thomas, “Account of the Church in South Carolina,” 1706, reprinted in SCHGM 5 ( January 1904): 32. 61 Series C, vol. 7, no. 25, SPGLB. 62 Thomas to SPG, March 10, 1704, series A, vol. 1, no. 180, SPGLB. 63 Samuel Thomas, “Account of the Church in South Carolina,” 1706, reprinted in SCHGM 5 ( January 1904): 46. 64 Quoted in Wood, “Death and Dying,” 219. 65 Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, 102. 66 Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:46. 67 Edgar, “Some Popular Books.” See also Davis, Colonial Southern Bookshelf, 114–15. 68 Edward Chandler, A Sermon Preached at St. Mary-le-Bow (1725), 13; quoted in Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, 102. 69 “Last Will and Testament of Mr. Edward Brailsford (1729),” vols. 62-A, 481, Wills and Miscellaneous Records, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 70 Extracts from “The Journal of Mrs. Gabriel Manigault (Ann Ashby Manigault), 1754–81,” Manigault Family Papers, SCHS. The same is also true in England. See Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 73. 71 A brief discussion of the use of chrism cloths and christening sheets in earlier centuries appears in Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 163–64. 72 In addition to the Christening robe and blanket, the Charleston Museum has in its collections an 1801 Charleston-made bowl with a provenance as a private christening basin for the Pinckney family. 73 Nugent, Journal, 181. 74 Pinckney, Letterbook, xxi. 75 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 88–89. 76 See Lake, “The Laudian Style,” 169. 77 Viviane Barrie-Curien, “The Clergy in the Diocese of London in the Eighteenth-Century” and “The Reception of Richard Podmore: Anglicanism in Saddleworth, 1700–1830,” in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor, Church of England, 86–109 and 110–26. See also Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 52. 78 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 181. 79 Maule to SPG, March 6, 1709, series A, vol. 4, no. 471, SPGLB. 80 Hunt to SPG, May 18, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 153, SPGLB.

418

NOTES TO PAGES 186 – 91

81 Extracts from “The Journal of Mrs. Gabriel Manigault (Ann Ashby Manigault), 1754–81,” Manigault Family Papers, SCHS. 82 “Letter to Miss Bartlett, March 1742,” in Pinckney, Letterbook, 32. 83 “Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Charles Pinckney, 1744,” in Pinckney, Letterbook, xii; Phoebe Caroline Pinckney Seabrook Copybook, SCHS. 84 October 1, 1764, series B, vol. 5, no. 249, SPGLB. 85 Edgar, “Some Popular Books,” 174–75. 86 Pilmore, Journal, 178. 87 On the plain style of preaching, see Smyth, The Art of Preaching, 90–166. Anglican parish preaching also depended heavily on previously published sermons, from which they often lifted material in part or, on occasion, in whole. See Nelson, Blessed Company, 203–4. 88 SCG, January 5, 1740. 89 It was for this very reason that Alexander Garden denied George Whitefield admittance to the pulpit of St. Philip’s; Garden believed Whitefield to be inaccurately interpreting God’s Word. 90 Pouderous to Bishop of London, April 25, 1724, vol. 9, no. 169, FPC. 91 For an excellent summary of divine worship, see John Kendall Nelson, Blessed Company, 191–92. 92 “On Correct Behaviour in Church,” in Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 88–89. 93 Taylor to SPG, March 24, 1718, series A, vol. 13, no. 155, SPGLB. 94 Crowley, Invention of Comfort. 95 On the importance of vows made before Communion, see Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 122. 96 The Book of Common Prayer (London, 1760). 97 Gibson, Thirty-Nine Articles, 660–61. 98 1684 devotional book reprinted in Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 294. 99 “Bicentennial Facts from St. Andrew’s Parish Episcopal Church,” photostat in St. Andrew’s Parish Church files. 100 Varnod to SPG, January 13, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 132, SPGLB. 101 “Thursday 28, 1772,” Anonymous, 10 MSS, February 20, 1772–October 13, 1855, SCL; for more on the Communion practices of Carolina Presbyterians, see Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church, 508. 102 Rector, St. John’s, Berkeley, to SPG, October 2, 1761, series B, vol. 5, no. 244, SPGLB. 103 Hunt to SPG, May 18, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 153, SPGLB. 104 LeJau to SPG, April 15, 1707, series A, vol. 3, no. 256, SPGLB. 105 Minister to Bishop of London, June 15, 1724, vol. 9, no. 163, FPC. 106 Walsh and Taylor, Church of England, 23. 107 Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-F, 386, 1798, BSC. 108 Walsh and Taylor, Church of England, 23. 109 See Spaeth, “Common Prayer? Popular Observance of the Anglican Liturgy in Restoration Wiltshire,” in Wright, Parish, Church, and People, 135. 110 For a lengthy discussion of the complex implications of enslaved blacks in the church community, see “Communion and Community” in Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects. 111 Varnod to Bishop of London, March 30, 1724, vol. 9, no. 171, FPC. 112 LeJau to SPG, December 11, 1712, series A, vol. 7, no. 440, SPGLB. 113 Olwell, Masters, Slaves, Subjects, 103–38 (quote from page 107); Nelson, Blessed Company, 263–71.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 9 1– 9 9

419

114 Turner, The Ritual Process, 95. 115 LeJau to the Secretary, August 18, 1711, quoted in Classified Digest of the Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–1892, 15. 116 Olwell articulates nicely the ambiguous social position of slave communicants. Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 126–38. 117 “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785–86,” SCHGM 13 ( July 1912): 142–43 (Thursday, October 13). 118 Morritt to SPG, April 7, 1732, series A, vol. 24, no. 316, SPGLB. 119 St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, March 22, 1731–April 14, 1813, July 25, 1753, SCHS. 120 Williams, St. Michael’s Church. 121 Foulke Robarts, God’s Holy House and Service, 41; quoted in Lake, “The Laudian Style,” 177. 122 “Sacrament,” Sermon no. 193, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, July 27, 1766, box 1, no. 24, BSC. 123 Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, no. 98, SPGLB. 124 It should be noted that the text at St. James, Goose Creek, is an extremely rare survival for South Carolina, but late seventeenth and early eighteenth century examples in England were not uncommon. 125 “Sacrament,” Sermon no. 193, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, July 27, 1766, box 1, no. 24, BSC. 126 These texts were all uncovered through paint analysis during a recent restoration and stabilization project. Paint analysis confirmed that these texts dated to the earliest building period. 127 The Communion rail reappeared after the Glorious Revolution and remained a fixture of Anglican church interiors from the 1660s on. See Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 162–65. See also Fincham, Altars Restored. 128 See Fincham, Altars Restored. 129 This was a rare but not unique liturgical arrangement. See Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 151. 130 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 346. 131 Jones to SPG, January 26, 1728, series A, vol. 20, no. 116, SPGLB. 132 The addition to St. Andrew’s, begun in 1723, provided that church with a substantial chancel (twenty-four feet by twelve feet), and the chapel in St. James, Goose Creek, had a chancel twenty-two feet wide by ten feet deep. 133 It is now generally accepted that noncommunicants departed the church before the Communion. Walsh and Taylor, Church of England, 11. For a discussion of noncommunicants departing from the service at the time of the offertory in Virginia, see Nelson, Blessed Company, 194. Writing from Jamaica, Lady Maria Nugent indicated that the vast majority of hearers departed before the Communion service. Even though the church was full on Easter Sunday, “at the communion, there were only one old white man and woman and one brown lady, besides ourselves, for the clergyman’s two daughters, who came with us, left the church with the rest of the congregation.” Nugent, Journal, 93. See also Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 179. 134 Addleshaw and Etchels discuss the persistence of this practice at length in Anglican Worship, 174–79. 135 “Bill to Isaac Mazyck, 1752,” Building Commissioner’s Records, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS; Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, March 7, 1763. 136 Dunn to Secretary, November 24, 1707, SPG Correspondence, 1702–10, vol. 16, no. 182, Lambeth Palace Library. 420

N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 9 9 – 2 0 5

137 138 139 140 141 142

143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151

152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

167 168

Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, August 1, 1757. Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 167. SPVM, 1735–55, February 7, 1737. SPVM, 1735–55, April 10, 1738. Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 168. In the 1724 reports, the ministers of both St. Andrew’s and St. James, Goose Creek, complained of not having the appropriate cloths and linens for the Communion table. The first evidence of such ornamentation in the records of St. Philip’s, for example, does not appear until May 31, 1807; SPVM, 1804–12. Reprinted in Porcher and Rutledge, Silver of St. Philip’s, 10. Ibid., 10. See Ward, “Communion Silver.” St. Philip’s Church Warden’s Account Books, 1725–52, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. For a lengthy discussion of the charity of South Carolina vestries, see chapter 3 of Boucher, “Vestrymen and Churchwardens.” Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1, April 15, 1744. Garden to SPG, May 10, 1763, series B, vol. 5, no. 217, SPGLB. Ps. 34:8. Other examples are Prince Frederick’s Parish and St. Stephen’s Parish, April 14, 1745. Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1; September 19, 1759; St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven Co., Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873, SCHS. Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, March 4, 1717, SCHS. Ibid., November 25, 1751, SCHS. Anne Allston Porcher, “Minutes of the Vestry of St. Stephen’s Parish, South Carolina, 1754–1873,” 160. Ward, “Communion Silver.” The Book of Common Prayer and the Administration of Sacraments and Other Rites, n.p. “Edward Brailsford’s devotional book,” Edward Brailsford Devotions, 1710– 1744, SCL. Grigsby, “From Punch Bowls to Puzzle Jugs,” 10–11. Mark Peterson has made a similar argument for the Communion silver of New England. See Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement,” nn. 32–38. “Sacrament,” Sermon No. 193, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, July 27, 1766, box 1, no. 24, 110–213, BSC; box 1, no. 24, BSC. Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-F, 386, 1798, BSC. St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, March 22, 1731–April 14, 1813, July 7, 1742, SCHS. Gretchen Buggeln finds a similar memorial function in some Connecticut Congregational silver as well. See Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 220. For three other examples from New England, see Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement,” pages with nn. 75–87. Bugglen finds the same meanings in Communion silver of eighteenth-century Connecticut. See Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 220. The same may also be true in England, where the donation of Communion silver declines markedly after 1750, so that by those years, most parishes are partaking from chalices reflecting seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century forms. See Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, table 1, 212. Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 171. St. George, “Artifacts of Regional Consciousness,” 35. NOTES TO PAGES 205–11

421

169 Buggeln makes the same observation in Temples of Grace, 220. 170 St. Michael’s Church of Charleston, February 18, 1762. 171 “Will of Ralph Izard,” vols. 58–59, 1722–1726, Wills and Miscellaneous Records, Charleston County Probate Record Office; vol. 58, 335, Wills and Miscellaneous Records, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 172 SPVM, 1735–55, April 19, 1754. 173 For other examples, see Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement,” 338. 174 “A Prayer before coming to the Holy Communion,” Alexander Keith Commonplace Book, 1730–40, 126, SCL. 175 “Sacrament,” Sermon No. 193, St. Philip’s, July 27, 1766, BSC, Box 1, #24. 176 Clark, Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 1:507 ( January 23, 1786); Pilmore, Journal, 178 ( January 19, 1773). 177 Box 4-22, index to sermons, BSC. 178 Davis, Intellectual Life, 2:570–72. 179 SPVM, 1756–74, June 7, 1756. 180 Reverend Jenkins Memorandum Book, SCHS. 181 Dalcho notes that St. Matthew’s Parish received a silver christening basin in 1819. See Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 334. Paul Trapier, the rector of St. Michael’s from 1840 to 1846, wrote that “another of the usages of the congregation was that Baptism was always administered at the Chancel from a silver bowl placed on the Communion Table, while an antique font of large dimensions, co-eval with the Church and dating back a hundred years, had been at the main door of the Church, unused for generations. My predecessor, in hopes of inducing a more seemly practice, had removed the Font into the Chancel, but the vestry had ordered it back to the door. I issued a pastoral to show that administration of baptism at the back door was the custom of the early church, was significant of the design of that sacrament, and had manifestly been the intention of those who arranged the interior of this particular building.” Trapier, Incidents in my life, 23. Special thanks to Maurie McInnis for bringing this reference to my attention. In his dissertation, Donald Friary indicates that the conditions in South Carolina were common throughout the mainland colonies. He notes that only a few of the city churches had stone fonts, but that some had wood. He suggests that the christening basin was the most common form throughout the colonies. See Friary, “Anglican Church in Colonies,” 129–45. 182 Dalcho records in 1820 the recent gifts of silver christening basins to both St. Mark’s and St. Matthew’s parishes. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church. 183 Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 181–82. William Jacob argues that together with the religious identity of the family, the corporate identity of the parish community also saw a significant decline beginning in the early eighteenth century. See Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 13–18. Jacob suggests that the later eighteenth-century decline in household piety is true in England as well. See Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 102. 184 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 75.

Chapter Six 1 Building Commissioner’s Daybook, 1752–17?6, June 17, 1760, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. The descending dove, a reference to the descent of God in the form of the Holy Spirit, was the usual crown to an Anglican pulpit. Making explicit reference to the descent of the Holy Spirit

422

NOTES TO PAGES 21 1– 17

2

3

4 5

6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15

on Christ at his baptism by John, the dove symbolized the indwelling of God. In 1759, when the pulpit carver was paid for his work, the words “pine apple” might have meant one of two different things. “Pine apple” commonly referred in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century to the seedpod of a pine tree—a pine cone—a common feature in English decorative arts from the early eighteenth century. The separation of the words “pine” and “apple” in the payment accounts supports this particular recording of the words. But the appearance of what is clearly a pineapple—the fruit—on a slightly later South Carolina pulpit suggests that the pulpit finial of St. Michael’s was not the seedpod of the pine tree but the tropical fruit. See Roenker, “The Fruits of Change.” See also Lounsbury, Illustrated Glossary, 275. “Letter from Charleston to sister, June 1, 1799,” Charles Caleb Cotton, letters 1794–1804. Import records list only seventeen dozen pineapples arriving in the port of Charleston in 1738, but by 1760—the date of St. Michael’s pulpit—the number had risen tenfold to 182 dozen. Just over a decade later, that number would skyrocket to 1,040 dozen. Clowse, Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 40. St. James, Santee (ca. 1768), St. Stephen’s (1762–67), Pompion Hill Chapel in St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish (1763–66), and Pon Pon Chapel in St. Bartholomew’s Parish (ca. 1761). Only St. David’s Parish Church, Cheraw (1770–73), in the very remote parts of the upcountry, was erected with a coved ceiling after 1750. See, for example, Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2:863. As Patricia Bonomi argues, eighteenth-century Anglicanism “had shifted the emphasis from an interventionist God to one whose greatest gift to humankind was natural reason.” Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 98. Almond, Heaven and Hell, 145. I say here popular Anglicanism, because rationalism had been an increasingly popular theological perspective among the English clergy since the late seventeenth century. Church leaders had been debating the appropriate theological situation of the church since the Restoration, resulting in the numerous camps within the church—the High Churchman and the Latitudinarians being two of the most prominent. An excellent discussion of these distinctions is Spellman, Latitudinarians. Spurr also addresses it in Restoration Church of England. On Anglicanism and the Enlightenment, see also Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 219. Walsh and Taylor discuss this shift in great detail in their introduction to Church of England, esp. 29–45. On Latitudinarian Anglicanism, see Fitzpatrick, “Latitudinarianism at the Parting of the Ways: A Suggestion,” in Walsh and Taylor, Church of England, 209–27. Joe Allard argues that Enlightenment thinkers believed that “in its most perfect form,” music “could lead the listener to God.” See Allard, “Music in the Enlightenment,” 47–65. Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment. The findings of the English Royal Society were first made publicly available in Chambers’s 1728 edition of the Cyclopedia. See Bronowski and Mazlish, Western Intellectual Tradition, 191. A Society of Gentlemen, A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. SCG, July 19, 1739. South Carolina and American General Gazette, March 30, 1772. Barth, Protestant Thought, 15–16. William Chambers’s 1728 Cyclopedia, for example, is the first public dissemination of the findings of the English Royal Society. See Bronowski and

NOTES TO PAGES 217 – 21

423

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

424

Mazlish, Western Intellectual Tradition, 191. In his critical study of eighteenthcentury thought and theology, Karl Barth argues that “eighteenth-century man...could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of the fact that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that this vast and rich earth...was not the center of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others....[As a result] the geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthropocentric.” Barth, Protestant Thought, 15–16. Durand to SPG, June 3, 1743, series B, vol. 11, no. 231, SPGLB. “Easter and at any Time, Easter Sunday A.M., 1765,” Sermons by Number, box 1, 110–213, and box 1-15, no. 171, BSC. SPVM, 1761–95, October 22, 1790. Building Commissioner’s Daybook, 1752–17?6, June 17, 1760, St. Michael’s Church Building Records, SCHS. See, for example, “Sermon on death,” ca. 1780s, Rev. Paul Turquand Sermons, Misc. Manuscripts, SCHS. Jacob has argued that Cartesian empiricism “assisted to lessen the power of the Devil in the minds of the orthodox.” See Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 119. Horton Davies has argued that “the categories of the supernatural, the revelational, the mysterious, and the miraculous were at a discount” among most Anglicans by the middle of the century. See Davies, Worship and Theology, 69. Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 4. “Letter to father, March 11th 1741/42,” Pinckney, Letterbook, 30. Pinckney, Letterbook, 29. One minister wrote in 1730, “A great many negroe slaves who make Insurrection sometimes that the People are forced to come to Church with gunsloaded.” Fulton to SPG, December 4, 1730, series A, vol. 23, no. 222, SPGLB. Alexander Keith Commonplace Book, SCL. The clergy in South Carolina to SPG, July 12, 1722, series B, vol. 4, no. 118, SPGLB. Commissary Bull’s 1723 description of the province, reprinted in Short History of the Diocese, 20–21. Basil Clarke also notes the proclivity to use “neat” and “regular” to describe churches, but he does not venture possible interpretations of these uses. See Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church, 174–76. Oxford English Dictionary. St. Helena’s, Beaufort Misc. Info file. 1912 pamphlet quotes SPG records, SCHS. Durand to SPG, November 28, 1763, series B, vol. 5, no. 248, SPGLB. Morritt to SPG, April 7, 1732, series A, vol. 24, no. 316, SPGLB. SPVM, 1756–77, March 22, 1756. Pinckney, Letterbook, 19. For a concise summary of Early Modern faculty psychology, see the introduction to Howe, Making the American Self, 5–10. For a discussion of the importance of moderation, order, and balance in late seventeenth-century New England, see Corrigan, Prism of Piety. The writers of Scottish moral philosophy, the popularizers of faculty psychology, were widely read by the American elite by the second half of the eighteenth century. See chapter 2, “The American Founders and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Howe, Making the American Self, 48–78. On the importance of faculty psychology in early American culture, see “The Balanced Character” in Howe, Making the American Self, 5–10. On the relationship between faculty psychology and early modern theology, see Fulcher, “Puritans and the Passions.” Jacquelyn Miller has discussed

NOTES TO PAGES 221– 22

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55

56 57 58

59

the virtue of regularity in very different terms. See Miller, “An Uncommon Tranquility.” Elisa Lucas Pinckney to George Lucas, summer 1742, in Pinckney, Letterbook, 51–53. Garden to Bishop of London, April 24, 1740, vol. 10, no. 54, FPC. Pinckney, Letterbook, 140. On the importance of Prayer Book liturgies in Anglicanism, see Maltby, “By This Book,” 115–38. Bishop Beveridge, “Sermon on the Excellency and Usefulness of the Book of Common Prayer,” 1681, quoted in Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 64. Lake, “The Laudian Style,” 166. “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-A, 377, 1794, BSC. For an excellent discussion of the role of proportion in English art and literature, see Heninger, Subtext of Form. Bacon, Two Books, 152. Quoted in Kivy, Seventh Sense, 15. Sir Henry Wooten, The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), 12; cited in Heninger, Subtext of Form, 52. Palladio, Four Books, 79. Ibid., 79. Morris, Lectures on Architecture. Downes, Hawksmoor, 6. See Neale, “Building of Bath,” 272–77. John Wood the Elder’s use of the Vitruvian Man in his work at Bath might suggest that this was a popular theoretical source in early eighteenth-century English architecture. On the origins of good proportion in the human body, see Panovsky, “Human Proportions.” The author highlights the pre-Lapsarian context of the origins of geometry by describing a few sentences later the origins of the three orders—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Each was generated from various body types designed “to fit all the various Purposes of Life.” The “robust and strong” (Doric) were destined for a life of labor, while the “slender and genteel” (Corinthian) for “Activity and Address.” Between those extremes is found the “Man of Business.” The variation of these bodies from the singularly perfect body of Adam and their association with work—required after the expulsion from the Garden—situates them in the mind of the author and his readers as products of the Fall. “Archaeologus,” a South Carolina Mason, published his description of the Virtruvian Man—although he never identifies it as such—in the SCG, March 30, 1752. Minister to SPG, October 1, 1764, series B, vol. 5, no. 249, SPGLB. Calvert, “Function of Fashion,” 274. E. H. Gombrich has written about the metaphoric qualities of the visual. He argues that in addition to “fixed code-symbols of value, such as they exist in religious ritual,...[we should investigate] visual qualities that lend themselves to symbolic use.” Thus the cultural context that surround those symbols offer their greatest meaning. Gombrich argues that “a visual quality may be experienced as the equivalent of a moral value.” See Gombrich, “Visual Metaphors.” Allard, “Music in the Enlightenment,” 54. NOTES TO PAGES 222 – 26

425

60 In lining out the Psalms, seventeenth-century Anglicans were no different from the Puritans of New England who engaged in the same practice. For examples of this music, see “New England Puritanism, 1620–1720,” in Stevenson, Protestant Church Music, 13–21. 61 Marini, Sacred Song in America, 75. 62 SCG, January 14, 1773. 63 Hunt to SPG, August 11, 1726, series B, vol. 4, no. 205, SPGLB. 64 Stevenson, Protestant Church Music, 18–19. A complete discussion of English church music from this period appears in Wilson, Anglican Chant. See also Temperley, “The Old Way of Singing.” 65 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 89. 66 Williams, Jacob Eckhard’s, xiv, 12–13. 67 Stevenson, Protestant Church Music, 22. 68 Mazzio, “The Three-Dimensional Self,” 42. 69 Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-D, 352, 1794, BSC. 70 The best discussion of the transformation of parish music in the eighteenth century is “Chants and Chanting in Parish Churches, c. 1710–1820,” in Wilson, Anglican Chant, 163–91. See also “Regular Singing, 1720–1775,” in Stevenson, Protestant Church Music, 21–31. 71 William Vincent, Considerations on Parochial Music (London, 1787); quoted in Wilson, Anglican Chant, 165. Wilson suggests that Vincent’s late eighteenthcentury sentiment reflects a division between Cathedral and Parochial music recurrent in the eighteenth century, “despite a growing challenge to their complete separation.” 72 The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–12, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1941), 276; quoted in Stevenson, Protestant Church Music, 54. 73 Marini, Sacred Song in America, 75. 74 John Chetham, A Book of Psalmody (London, 1718), preface; quoted in Wilson, Anglican Chant, 164. 75 Hunt to SPG, August 11, 1726, series B, vol. 4, no. 205, SPGLB. 76 SCG, May 21, 1750. 77 “Letter to Mrs. H, 1742,” Pinckney, Letterbook, 48–49. 78 Schmidt, Hearing Things, 63–64. 79 Thanks to David Morgan for this observation. 80 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 180. 81 Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, no. 98, SPGLB; Millechamp to SPG, April 12, 1743, series B, vol. 11, no. 228, SPGLB. 82 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. 83 “Plan for a new church of St. Paul’s in Augusta, Ga., 1749,” series B, vol. 18, no. 194, SPGLB. 84 Johnston’s description is reprinted in Milling, Colonial South Carolina, 144. 85 Characteristicks, 1:399, quoted in Kivy, Seventh Sense, 6; Edgar, “Some Popular Books,” 174. 86 Characteristicks, 2:427, quoted in Kivy, Seventh Sense, 14. 87 Kivy, Seventh Sense, 18. 88 See “God and Aesthetics,” in Kivy, Seventh Sense, 111–23. 89 Plato, Dialogues, 1:250–57. Thanks to David Morgan for this reference. 90 Thomas Bisse, The Beauty of Holiness in the Common Prayer: As Set Forth in Four Sermons Preach’d at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1716, 1721). On the popularity of Bisse’s work in England, see Temperley, Music, 1:97–105. 426

NOTES TO PAGES 226 – 31

91 The organ arrives in 1728, but the first evidence of its being played in the service is not until 1731. SPVM, 1735–55. On February 7, 1737, the vestry “paid Mrs. Baker the late Sexton’s Wife for her negroe, Herreford, for the blowing of the Organ for Six years past.” 92 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. 93 St. Andrew’s had an organ by 1755, St. George’s had one by 1766, and St. Michael’s had one by 1768. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 340; “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD; SCG, August 22, 1768. 94 Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America, 55. 95 “Vestry of St. Paul’s Augusta, Ga., to SPG,” March 20, 1763, series C, vol. 8, no. 24, SPGLB. 96 Anglican music written for the organ does not appear until the later seventeenth century. See Temperley, Music, 1:7. 97 Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, January 6, 1762. 99 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. 99 Webster, “A Journal of a Voyage from Philadelphia to Charlestown in South Carolina begun May 15, 1765,” Monday, May 27. 100 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD; Williams, “Change Ringing in the Carolina Lowcountry,” 11. 101 SPVM, 1735–55, June 25, 1739; “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. 102 Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, October 26, 1763. On change ringing, see Sanderson, Change Ringing. 103 Williams, “Change Ringing in the Carolina Lowcountry,” 11. 104 Change ringing, David Cressy tells us, was, “a suitable accompaniment to the beauty of holiness.” Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 70. 105 See Williams, “Eighteenth-Century Organists at St. Michael’s,” 83–87; and Williams, “Charleston Church Music.” 106 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 181. 107 “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. 108 Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helen’s Parish. 109 SPVM, 1804–12, January 1, 1809. 110 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 97. 111 Garden to SPG, April 23, 1745, series B, vol. 12, no. 80, SPGLB. 112 Taylor to SPG, March 24, 1718, series A, vol. 13, no. 155, SPGLB; Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, February 11, 1711, SCHS. Dell Upton argues that the canopy served to reinforce the authority of the speaker. As Rath argues, these are not mutually exclusive functions. See Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 134–35; and Rath, How Early America Sounded, 208, n. 6. 113 Mace, Musick’s Monument, 238. 114 Ibid., 240. 115 Forsyth, Buildings for Music, 21–43. 116 Ibid., 28. 117 Rath, How Early America Sounded, 114. 118 In addition to St. Michael’s, a semicircular chancel appears in the 1760s Pompion Hill Chapel, but similar chancels were also added in the later eighteenth century to Christ Church Parish and Prince George’s, Winyaw, in Georgetown. NOTES TO PAGES 231– 3 6

427

119 120 121 122

123 124

125 126 127 128 129 130 131

132 133

134 135 136 137 138

139 140 141 142 143

144

428

Addleshaw and Etchels, Anglican Worship, 56. Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, November 11, 1765. SPVM, 1756–74, February 1, 1774. As Jeanne Kilde has shown, this becomes more explicitly exaggerated in the nineteenth century among evangelicals. See Kilde, When Church Became Theatre. On the theatre in Charleston, see Davis, Intellectual Life, 3:1294–95. Buggeln’s essay “American Sanctuary” suggests that New England Congregationalists would begin to flirt with the power of aesthetics and the sanctity of space by the closing years of the century. 1813 quote reprinted in Garber, Methodist Meetinghouse, 34. “Letter from Penuel Bowen in Chas. to Gen. Lincoln, July 9, 1786,” BowenCooke Papers, SCHS. On the conflation of the “black man” with African and cultural others, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 28–32; and Norton, Devil’s Snare, 58–59. See “Mounting Anxiety among Whites,” in Wood, Black Majority, 218–38. Varnod to SPG, January 13, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 132, SPGLB. Cited in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 112. See Bolton, “Red, Black, and Anglican,” in Southern Anglicanism, 102–20; and Olwell, “Communion and Community: Slavery and the Established Church,” in Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 103–40. On the increasing segregation of the domestic lot, see Joseph, “From Colonist to Charlestonian.” In the one remarkable exception, James Harrison of St. James, Goose Creek, reported in 1760 that he had thirty-two white and twenty-eight black communicants. Harrison to SPG, April 14, 1760, series B, vol. 5, no. 230, SPGLB. In the introduction to Masters and Slaves, Boles asserts that slave attendance in church rose in the later eighteenth century. Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, April 27, 1773. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 338. Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 116–18. Minutes of the 23rd Convention of the Pro. Epis. Church in the State of So. Ca. held in Charleston, Feb. 20 and 21, 1810; reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 509–12. Lorena Walsh hypothesizes that the increasing percentages of slaves involved in church life in the later decades of the eighteenth century in Virginia signaled the establishment of a creolized African American culture that accepted the Anglican faith and ritual. See Lorena Walsh, Calabar to Carter’s Grove, 155–58. SPVM, 1774–1831, July 9, 1815. Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 164. Durand, June 3, 1743, series B, vol. 11, no. 231, SPGLB. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 98. Diana Combs also found that after about 1740, “great importance is given to the individual life as an ornament to the greater glory of God.” See Combs, Gravestone Art, 172. David Watters makes the argument that the shift from a skull to a head is a theological shift grounded in the principle of representing the beauty of the soul in Puritan theology. While this may have been so in the theologically educated circles of New England, the Anglican laity of South Carolina probably applied little meaning to these images beyond the representation of the soul. See Watters, “Edward Taylor and the Metaphors of Perfection,” in With Bodilie Eyes, 135–57.

NOTES TO PAGES 23 6 – 42

145 A bibliographic discussion of these questions appears in Hijiya, “American Gravestones.” See also Ludwig, Graven Images, 223–25. 146 See 2 Tim. 4:8; 1 Pet. 5:4; and James 1:12. 147 Watters, With Bodilie Eyes, chap. 2. 148 The reading of the winged head as a soul effigy rather than a cherub further clarifies James Deetz’s insightful examination of the relationship of these images to theological conservatism or liberality in the greater Boston region. See Deetz and Dethlefsen, “Death’s Head.” This shift in representation corresponds also with the change in spire ornament on St. Michael’s. Instead of a cock, the historic symbol of the temporal location of the faithful between Creation and Judgment in the unfolding of God’s sacred drama, St. Michael’s steeple held high the dragon, a self-referential portrait of the congregation. Williams, St. Michael’s Church, 143. 149 Sally Promey has discussed the notion of framing the self on gravestones as a mode of self-examination among seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Puritans in ways that are a far more theologically reflective act than is likely among South Carolina’s Anglicans. See Promey, “Seeing the Self.” 150 This discussion of framing derives from Heninger, Subtext of Form, 170–73. 151 For a general discussion of the impact of Enlightenment literature on eighteenth-century religious thought, see chapter 1, “The Beauties of Balance,” in May, Enlightenment, 3–25. 152 Locke disseminated the doctrine of empiricism—realized in visualizing the past and the present, not the future, in gravestones. See Bronowski and Mazlish, Western Intellectual Tradition, 201. 153 See Tennant, “The Anglican Response.” 154 Pinckney, Letterbook, 19. See Edgar, “Some Popular Books,” 175. 155 Pinckney, Letterbook, 134. 156 St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, March 22, 1731–April 14, 1813, October 20, 1748, SCHS. 157 SPVM, 1756–74, March 28, 1757. 158 SPVM, 1756–74, October 14, 1767; SPVM, 1804–12, August 21, 1808; SPVM, 1812–22, February 11, 1816. 159 On the generally unkempt condition of seventeenth-century churchyards, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 465–69. 160 SPVM, 1756–74, March 4, 1773. 161 Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, April 27, 1773. 162 “Easter and at any Time, Easter Sunday A.M., 1765,” Sermons by Number, box 1, 110–213, and box 1-15, no. 171, BSC. 163 SPVM, 1823–31, September 29, 1825. 164 “Funeral Sermon, 1767,” box 7, no. 4, BSC. 165 Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration, 131–32. 166 Ibid., 125. 167 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 252. 168 The adoption of the affective power of Anglican architecture among Latitudinarian Anglicans presents a great irony. The Platonic notion that the church building should visually manifest the beauty of holiness finds its roots within Anglicanism in the theology of a small contingent of early seventeenthcentury Laudian theologians who most Anglicans would have held in fairly low esteem. In using the term “Laudian,” I am depending on Peter Lake’s extensive discussion of the theology of those early Anglicans who emphasize the divine presence in the world and the appropriateness of ritual, not a rigid embrace of Archbishop Laud’s specific theology. See Lake, “The Laudian Style,” NOTES TO PAGES 24 2 – 48

429

161–85. For a fascinating defense of the life-giving capacity of beauty, see Scarry, On Beauty, 28–33. 169 “Sermon before Sacrament,” 1763, box 3, no. 28, BSC. 170 In theoretical terms outlined by Lindsey Jones, this eighteenth-century transformation is a shift between modes of commemoration, from “architecture as the abode of the god” to “architecture conceived as the abstract representation of the god’s attributes.” See Jones, Hermeneutics, 92–108. 171 For more on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of grace, see Buggeln, Temples of Grace, esp. chapter 4, “The Sacred and the Sentimental.” Eighteenth-century Anglicans had not yet embraced the faculty of taste as espoused by Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, and Kant. The first use of the word “taste” in the documentary record examined for this project appears in 1789. St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1738–1817, April 13, 1789, SCL.

Chapter Seven 1 A recent restoration of the building by Richard Marks has preserved many of the earliest elements of this church, and much has been learned in the process. Soon after the foundation of the colony, Goose Creek was settled by former Barbadians and became a political stronghold of Anglicanism in the colony; by 1706 all of the property on Goose Creek and its tributaries was granted to, and occupied almost exclusively by, members of the Church of England. In 1705 the Reverend Thomas, the first missionary from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts commissioned to South Carolina, reported that there resided in Goose Creek “about 120 families. Most of the inhabitants are of the profession of the Church of England, excepting about five families of French Protestants,...three families of Presbyterians and two Anabaptists.” Quoted in Waring, St. James Church Goose Creek, South Carolina, 6. See also Heitzler, Historic Goose Creek, 6. In 1714 Francis LeJau indicated that this church had been started six years prior (1708) but that it was “not yet in a condition to be made use of.” LeJau to SPG, April 20, 1714, series A, vol. 9, no. 265, SPGLB. 2 Fraser, Charleston Sketchbook, 10. 3 Locally produced histories of early South Carolina abound with this mythology. For discussions of the church, see Lounsbury, “The Dynamics of Architectural Design”; Stoney, Plantations, 50–51; and chapter 11, “St. James’ Church, Goose Creek,” in Heitzler, Historic Goose Creek, 177–201. 4 Historians of early American architecture are fond of demonstrating logical patterns of cultural diffusion by locating the architectural predecessors of New World forms in the immigrants’ place of origin. In a now classic study of early framed houses from the Massachusetts Bay, Abbot Lowell Cummings offered a compelling argument that the certain features of the seventeenth-century Massachusetts house derived from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century framing and house-planning traditions in southeastern England, reflecting the regional origins of immigrants to the bay. Similar arguments have been made that the single-chamber stone-enders of early Rhode Island derive from western England. Studies of the Pennsylvania farm demonstrate specific inheritances from their German predecessors, especially in the forms of their barns. See Shoemaker, Pennsylvania Barn; Glassie, “Delaware Valley Folk Building”; Bucher, “The Continental Log House”; Pendleton, Oley Valley Heritage; and Chappell, “Acculturation.”

430

NOTES TO PAGES 248 – 53

5 Quoted in Wood, Black Majority, 33. 6 This conceptual region was first suggested by Wallerstein in The Modern World System, 103. By grouping together those British colonies that were a source of tropical produce such as sugar, rice, and tobacco, and by distinguishing these from colonies that provided a market for manufactures and reexport, Immanuel Wallerstein was among the first to group the colonies of the “extended Caribbean.” Not only were these colonies ecologically suited for the production of staple crops, but they also depended on a coerced or enslaved labor source to reduce production costs. See also Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 4–5; and Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, a study of the cultural impact of Hurricanes. 7 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves; Thomas, “Barbadians in Early South Carolina”; Helwig, “Early History of Barbados”; Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 19–100; Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands”; Waterhouse, “England, the Caribbean, and the Settlement of Carolina”; Alleyne and Fraser, Barbados-Carolina Connection; Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities, 87–112; and Greene, “Caribbean Connection,” 197. 8 Edward McCrady, A Sketch of St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, 13. Two authors have argued that the origin of the pervasive Charleston “single house” can be found in early Barbados. See chapter 10, “The Charleston Single House and the Barbadian Connection,” in Alleyne and Fraser, Barbados-Carolina Connection, 47–63, for the argument that the wellspring of the single house lies in Barbados. See also Waddell, “The Charleston Single House.” Severens, in Southern Architecture, makes the argument that the form is indigenous to South Carolina. These authors generally fail to realize that, as Bernard Herman’s work demonstrates, this basic housing model appears all over the Atlantic rim. For his work on later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century single houses, see Herman, “Embedded Landscapes.” 9 Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. 10 Greene, “Caribbean Connection,” 200–201. 11 Surviving from 1655 to the end of the eighteenth-century almost completely intact, the vestry minutes of St. Michael’s were published in the Journal of the Barbados Historical Society 14 (May 1947) and in successive volumes through November 1959. Since I have been unable to obtain copies of the original vestry minutes, the reconstruction in this paragraph depends solely on Barbara Hill’s assessment of the minutes published in Historic Churches of Barbados. Although she does not provide exact references to the minutes, her assessment appears to be otherwise quite thorough. 12 In 1664 the vestry minutes refer to the selection of timber for the construction of “ye tower.” See Hill, Historic Churches of Barbados, 25. The minutes indicate that Her Majesty’s Engineer Colonel Christian Lilley provided a model for this tower. 13 Although he limits his discussion to the Caribbean proper, Richard Dunn has discussed the planter class in careful detail. See Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. 14 Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:413. 15 Quoted in Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 68. 16 Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, Beyond the Line, 195–266. 17 Frequent military raids undermined the economic viability of smaller planters who had sold out to larger planters by the end of the seventeenth century. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 177–87. 18 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 157.

NOTES TO PAGES 253 – 57

431

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27

28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

432

Quoted in ibid., 158–59. See Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 161–62. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:224. See Waterhouse, A New World Gentry, for the rise of the planter class in South Carolina. The top third of the households in one Lowcountry parish in 1745, for example, all owned more than 1,000 acres, and more than 60 percent of the households owned 500 acres. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 145. On the perpetuation of that elite class through Charleston’s history, see Jaher, The Urban Establishment. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 85. On February 1, 1671, a new church in the parish of Vere was described as being built, and by 1682 a church was standing in the parish. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 161; Lynch to Compton, October 23, 1682, Calendar of State Papers (1681), 5, 6–7. The extant walls of the church reveal the extensive repairs and reconstructions of the building after the earthquake of 1692 and the hurricanes of 1712 and 1722, but the early southern tower remains largely intact. A 1724 rector’s report described the building as “one third broken down by the story [the 1722 hurricane].” The bricks of the seventeenth-century tower are smaller and of a much darker color than those found in eighteenth-century masonry on the island. Contrasting boldly with the dark red brick, the tower had a low and heavy water table, corner quoins, belt courses, window surrounds, crenellations, and a massive, rusticated door surround in stucco. The oldest portions of the nave walls stand tallest at those points where the tower served as a buttress, suggesting an early if not original date for the tower. Jean Baptiste de l’Ordre des FF. Precheurs du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitee par les Francois, 2,423–24; translated and cited in Hobson, “Domestic Architecture.” Fol. 439, Church of St. Thomas, PRO CO 243/2, Colonial Office of the Public Record Office Archives. Special thanks to Roger Leech for bringing this account to my attention. Rochefort, History, 24. Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 35; Hill, Historic Churches of Barbados, 22. See also Ligon, True and Exact History, 59. Ellwood quoted in Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society. Also quoted in Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 229. Crain offers the only survey, however incomplete, of Anglican Church architecture in the Caribbean in Historic Architecture. Hill, Historic Churches of Barbados, is the only discussion of early Anglican churches on the island. An extensive annotated list of all church records appears in Chandler, Records in Barbados. Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 39. See chart in Wood, Black Majority, 149. See Nelson, “Building Cross-Wise.” Vernon, A New History of Jamaica, 28. St. John’s Parish, Barbados, Vestry Minutes, 1649–1682/3, March 26, 1660, Barbados Archives. Ibid., April 9, 1660, Barbados Archives. Ibid., July 23, 1677, Barbados Archives. Journals of the Vestry, July 14, 1719; republished in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 249–50.

NOTES TO PAGES 257 – 63

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Maule to SPG, January 23, 1714, series A, vol. 10, no. 77, SPGLB. Taylor to SPG, March 24, 1718, series A, vol. 13, no. 157, SPGLB. Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 303. Long, History of Jamaica, 5. St. Catherine’s Vestry Minutes, October 15, 1768. St. John’s Parish, Barbados, Vestry Minutes, 1649–1682/3, February 18, 1677, Barbados Archives. Journals of the Vestry, July 14, 1719; reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 249–50. Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 34. For essays with an excellent discussion of elite self-presentation, see Marcus, Elites. See Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 460–65. St. Catherine’s Vestry Minutes, November 6, 1762. In her study of graveyards in the Orckney Islands, Sarah Tarlow finds that heraldic shields appear most frequently on memorials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, seasons when these memorials served to legitimate a new social order. See Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration, 96–102. Quoted in Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 75. Heitzler, Historic Goose Creek, 185. Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 124. Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 202. SPVM, 1735–55, January 31, 1749. On the monument, see Jonathan Poston’s entry in McInnis, In Pursuit of Refinement, 175–77. Gowans, King Carter’s Church, 28. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 226; Wood, Black Majority, 131. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 12. By the 1710s, blacks outnumbered whites on the island of Jamaica by eight to one. The number of Africans on the island more than doubled between 1700 and 1750 and increased by a factor of five by the end of the century. Burnard and Morgan state decisively that “Jamaica had the largest demand for slaves of any British colony in the Americas.” Burnard and Morgan, “Slave Market,” 205. See also Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 164–65. On increasing absenteeism, see Hall, “Absentee-Proprietorship.” Oldmixon, British Empire, 120. The typical eighteenth-century slave quarter— earthfast, thatched, and plastered inside—is described in detail in Stewart, Jamaica and Its Inhabitants, 231. See Rath, How Early America Sounded, 85–89. On the birthplace of slaves, see Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 70. On slave architecture, see Ferguson, Uncommon Ground. Wood, Black Majority, 132. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 256. On the 1730 revolt, see Wood, Black Majority, 237. Olwell makes this same observation in Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 105. Jamaica Papers, Colonial Office 138.4, September 8, 1681; reprinted in Minter, Episcopacy without Episcopate, 24. Wright, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 165. Fulton to SPG, December 4, 1730, series A, vol. 23, no. 222, SPGLB. SCG, March 17, 1756. St. Anne’s Vestry Minutes, 1767–90, March 29, 1779. Long, History of Jamaica, 6.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 63 – 7 6

433

75 Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 13–14. 76 Pinckney, Letterbook, 2 May 1740.

Chapter Eight 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24

434

Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, October 26, 1763. SPVM, 1735–55, December 23, 1735; August 8, 1737; June 1750. Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 187–88. Marc Leone has argued that those who owned clocks “understood natural law through direct observation, which justified both hierarchy and individualism.” See Leone, “Georgian Order,” 235–61. In this chapter, I offer a theological and practical frame for order that in most studies of the eighteenth-century is understood entirely in social, political, and economic terms. See, for example, the work of Leone, “Georgian Order.” Yet, in so doing, I do not suggest that the pursuit of religious order did not have social, economic, or political implications. See Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 16, 46, 69, 70. Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 187–88. For the English practices, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 16. The celebration of these four festivals is a dramatic reduction from the observance of many saints’ days and other festival days common in the British Isles in the same century. See Jacob, Lay People and Religion. On sacred time in Anglican Virginia, see Nelson, Blessed Company, 230–32. On the rejection of Christmas by Protestants in New England, see Barnett, American Christmas, 2–6. Quoted in Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 398. Waterhouse, “The Responsible Gentry,” 161. Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-A, 377, BSC. SCG, March 30, 1733. Quoted in White and White, Sounds of Slavery, 147. Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, May 28, 1770. SPVM, 1823–31, August 24, 1828. On September 20, 1740, the estate of Bishop Roberts announced that there were still “Plans & Prospects of Charlestown which remain yet unsold.” SCG, September 20, 1740. Peter Guillery has offered a similar reading of the newly built early eighteenth-century churches in London. See Guillery, “Suburban Models,” 95. The Fundamental Constitutions were reprinted in full in Parker, North Carolina Charters, 128–240. Those portions of the Constitutions addressing religion appear in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 4–7. The most extensive discussion of the Lords Proprietors appears in Powell, Proprietors of Carolina; and Haley, First Earl of Shaftsbury. See also Fagg, “Carolina, 1663–1683.” The 1670s Grand Model survives only in a 1725 copy now in the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society. See Smith, “Charleston: The Original Plan.” Even though it was assumed from the outset that the city would have an Anglican church, the documentary record is not clear as to whether the first Anglicans in Charleston were given a lot in the city or had to purchase one. Reprinted in McCrady, A Sketch of St. Philip’s Church, 7. St. Michael’s Church in Charleston would many years later be erected on this same site. Anglicans did the same thing in Dorchester, a town about twenty-five miles up the Ashley River from Charleston. On the first of February, 1699–1700,

NOTES TO PAGES 277 – 84

25

26 27

28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49

John Stevens, Congregationalist, received the titles to over 4,000 acres for the use of a Congregational Church recently arrived from Massachusetts. Soon thereafter, they laid out the town. Sometime after 1719, a group of local Anglicans secured four lots in the town facing the public square for a new church. Note that this choice of locale comes as no surprise since the vast majority of Anglican churches in England appeared in similar locations. Great care should be taken when discussing the Crisp Map because a number of nineteenth-century lithographs of the map were produced that changed the forms of various buildings. The South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia has an original copy. Quoted in Edgar, South Carolina: A History. Reprinted in Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History, 66. On church-state relations during the colonies’ opening decades, see chapter 2, “Establishment and Settlement,” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 16–36; and chapter 4, “Peace and Prosperity,” in Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 55–74. See “The Renascence of Factions, 1700–1712,” in Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 75–102; and “Establishment and Settlement,” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 16–36. Virginia and England’s Caribbean colonies never needed such acts since these colonies were peopled largely by Anglicans from the outset, and the Church of England enjoyed a privileged status in each since their foundation. For more information on the Church Act, see Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 22–28. For a copy of the Church Act, see Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 437–52. See the introduction to Walsh and Taylor, Church of England. Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 378. Clark, Our Southern Zion, 43. Johnston, September 20, 1708, series A, vol. 4, no. 311, SPGLB. Clark, Our Southern Zion, 47. The fact that their first building was not demolished until 1727 indicates that their intentions were not driven entirely by some desperate need to replace a decaying building. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 27. For an excellent discussion of this planning technique in sixteenth-century Rome, see Burroughs, “Absolutism.” For other examples of this type of urban planning, see Reps’s discussion of Francis Nicholson’s plans for Annapolis and Williamsburg. Reps, Tidewater Towns, 117–70. See Corfield, Impact of English Towns, 139–40. Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 151. See “The Authority of the Laity” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, esp. 151. For a broader view, see Painter, “The Anglican Vestry.” SCG, March 17, 1733. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:46. Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, no. 98, SPGLB. See “An Act dividing the Parish of St. Philip, Charlestown, and for establishing another Parish in the said town by the Name of the Parish of St. Michael,” reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 459–60. See Jonathan Poston, “Statue of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1770,” in McInnis, In Pursuit of Refinement, 219–21. Quoted in Poesch, Art of the Old South, 86. SCG, February 22, 1752. Webster, “A Journal of a Voyage,” Monday, May 27. City Gazette, Charleston, April 12, 1805. NOTES TO PAGES 284 – 90

435

50 Asbury, Journal and Letters, 2:221 ( January 4, 1800). 51 SPVM, 1804–12, July 18, 1804. 52 On death and dying in South Carolina Anglicanism, see Wood, “A Constant Attendance.” 53 On the social significance of funerals, see Whaley, Mirrors of Mortality. 54 Wood, “A Constant Attendance,” 215. 55 See Litten, English Way of Death, 25, 189–90. 56 See ibid., 131–32, 161–64, 194. 57 See Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making,” 58. 58 Summers, Hatchments. See also Chapin, “Colonial Hatchments,” 302. 59 A full transcription of Sindrey’s funeral expenses appears in Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making.” For a great description of early eighteenth-century burial clothes and practices, see the Misson account cited in Litten, English Way of Death, 143–46. 60 Cited in Wood, “A Constant Attendance,” 214. 61 Litten, English Way of Death, 144, 152. 62 “Estate of Mr. Maule, 1716–17,” series A, vol. 13, no. 252, SPGLB. 63 See St. Philip’s Church Warden’s Account Books, 1725–52, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. 64 Pilmore, Journal. 65 SCG, January 12, 1738. For a discussion of mourning black, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 438–43. 66 Cited in Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making,” 33. 67 Cited in ibid., 28. 68 Ibid. 69 Litten, English Way of Death, 100. 70 See Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making”; and Litten, English Way of Death, 19. 71 Cited in Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making,” 35. 72 See Litten, English Way of Death, 107. 73 Late nineteenth-century repairs to the foundations of St. Michael’s Church uncovered a cedar coffin with the initials “J O B” and the date “1678” spelled out in brass tacks on the top. Cited in Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making,” 35. 74 On processions, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 435–38, 449–55. 75 Litten, English Way of Death, 132. 76 Ibid., 130. 77 Cited in Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making,” 28. 78 Litten, English Way of Death, 129, 144. 79 Ibid., 25. 80 “Richard Hutson Letterbook, 1765–1777,” May 27, 1776, SCHS. 81 For an extended discussion of the ringing of bells for civic events in England, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 50–92. See also “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” in Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 421–25. 82 Nocturnal funerals were popular from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. See Litten, English Way of Death, 161–63. 83 SPVM, 1735–55, December 3, 1742. 84 The organist of St. Philip’s was required to play “at great Funerals at the desire of the relations of the deceased, who pay the organist themselves for that service.” SPVM, 1756–74, March 6, 1758. 85 On Sunday, June 9, 1765, Pelatiah Webster attended an evening funeral at the Scotch Presbyterian church. Webster, “A Journal of a Voyage from Philadelphia to Charlestown in South Carolina begun May 15, 1765.”

436

NOTES TO PAGES 290 – 95

86 SPVM, 1761–95, June 30, 1783. 87 In the description of an early nineteenth-century funeral, sprigs of evergreen were thrown into the grave after the coffin had been laid to rest. Moore, “Abiel Abbot Journals” (November 10, 1827), 236. For English examples, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 454. 88 St. Philip’s Church Warden’s Account Books, 1725–52, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. 89 SPVM, 1761–95, June 30, 1783; Litten, English Way of Death, 161. 90 SPVM, 1735–55, May 2, 1753. For a discussion of the use of palls in earlier centuries, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 432–435. 91 Johnston, Carolina Chronicle, 99. 92 Cited in Wood, “A Constant Attendance,” 215. 93 A report given by ex-slave Charles Ball as reprinted in Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 52. 94 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 52. 95 Francis Nicholson to the Assembly, June 6, 1724. Cited in Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, 14–15. There is very little evidence for the rituals associated with slave funerals in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, they were often accompanied by long processions, preaching, and elaborate mourning rituals. See White and White, Sounds of Slavery, 11–17. 96 Cited in Rauschenberg, “Coffin Making,” 41. 97 See Smith, “Old South Time” and “Taming Time’s Pinions, Weaving Time’s Web: Of Times Natural, Sacred, and Secular, 1700–1900,” in Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 39–68. See also Landes, Revolution in Time. 98 Thomas Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (1682–1712), 3:61; cited in Edgar, South Carolina: A History. 99 SCG, December 15, 1739; cited in Durecki, “Changing Times.” 100 Quoted in Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 48. 101 See Figure 1 in ibid., 31. For a comparable assessment of rising clock ownership in Maryland in these same decades, see Shackel, Personal Discipline, 96. In light of the fact that the taking of a probate inventory was often limited only to the middling and elite, overlooking the vast majority of the “lower sort,” even these proportions are overstated. 102 See Smith, Mastered by the Clock. 103 Cited in Durecki, “Changing Times.” 104 See Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 63–67. See also Leone, “The Georgian Order.” 105 Special thanks to Jan Durecki for this observation. 106 Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 65. 107 Ibid., 66. 108 Quoted in ibid., 65. 109 Ibid., 22. 110 Woods, Black Majority, 273. 111 Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 48. 112 Williams, “Sweetness Itself.” 113 Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 35. 114 St. James, Goose Creek, has a classical doorcase around the western door, and the documentary record indicates that small porches with two columns each sheltered the northern and southern doors into St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish Church. These are the only two examples of classical details in the rural

N OT ES TO PAGES 295– 99

437

115

116

117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 438

South Carolina setting before the 1740s. Sheldon Church, erected by the Bull family in the early 1750s, is the first example of the overt use of classicism on Anglican architecture in the rural context in South Carolina. See Bushman, Refinement of America. The vast majority of scholarship addressing mid-eighteenth-century classicism in the colonies suggests that the increased use of these forms was a direct result of the publication of English pattern books. While I do not deny there is a relationship, this chapter seeks to examine the immediate context in order to find more meaningful interpretations of these forms. For the former interpretation, consider the standard survey of American architecture, Whiffen and Koeper, American Architecture, 66–75. In addition to its established status, the Church of England enjoyed the support of two very powerful figures in its early history. The staunch Anglican Francis Nicholson arrived in 1721 as governor and immediately set to the task of establishing Anglican churches in each of the parishes. During his brief five-year tenure as governor, he initiated the building of five parish churches. In addition, the Reverend Alexander Garden arrived in 1720 to serve as rector of St. Philip’s Church in Charleston. By 1728 this highly educated Scotsman was selected by the Bishop of London to serve as South Carolina’s first and only commissary. In the absence of any colonial bishop, the commissary served as the episcopal head of the church. Garden’s lengthy and stable term in office provided the established church with a well-respected figurehead during his thirty-year tenure. Nicholson’s patronage and Garden’s leadership guided the Church of England through the reasonably calm waters of the 1720s and 1730s. Numerous accounts from these years describe the Church of England as “flourishing.” The clergy described the church as flourishing in 1722 (reprinted in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 38). For a lengthy discussion, see chapter 3, “The Church of Alexander Garden,” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 37–62. Richard Hooker offers a concise summary of backcountry life in his introduction to Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry. A more expansive discussion appears in chapter 2, “The Back Country in the 1760s,” of Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 13–37. For a discussion of the arrival of evangelicals in Virginia, see Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 161–79. Morritt to SPG, February 3, 1727, series A, vol. 19, no. 346, SPGLB. Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, June 26, 1757. Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 101. Clergy to Bishop of London, October 1, 1724, vol. 9, no. 154, FPC. Quoted in Clark, Our Southern Zion, 85. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 173. Clergy to Bishop of London, April 24, 1740, vol. 10, no. 54, FPC. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:11. “Summer of 1741 to Mrs. Pinckney,” in Pinckney, Letterbook, 19. See Kenny, “Revivalism in South Carolina”; and Morgan, “The Great Awakening.” See also Clark, Our Southern Zion. SCG, January 12, 1740. Garden, April 4, 1751, series B, vol. 19, no. 132, SPGLB. See Gallay, “Planters and Slaves.” “Elisa Lucas Pinckney to Mr. Lucas, March 11th, 1742,” in Pinckney, Letterbook, 30. SCG, June 14, 1742. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 171.

NOTES TO PAGES 299 – 3 04

134 For a summary of Hugh Bryan and his story, see Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm, 200–201. 135 See Little, “Adding to the Church.” 136 Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 173. 137 Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 263. 138 On the Regulators, see Brown, South Carolina Regulators. 139 For more on the Regulators, see ibid.; quote on pages 38–39. 140 Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 172. 141 Ibid., 162. 142 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 742. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 105. 145 For more on this, see McCraken, Culture and Consumption. 146 E. H. Gombrich has written about the metaphoric qualities of the visual. He argues that in addition to “fixed code-symbols of value, such as they exist in religious ritual,...[we should investigate] visual qualities that lend themselves to symbolic use.” Thus the cultural context (and historic assumptions) that surround that symbol offer its greatest meaning. Gombrich argues that “a visual quality may be experienced as the equivalent of a moral value.” In the same way, I argue that the classical armatures that encased Anglican churches became a visual metaphor for order and regularity because it successfully communicated those values/qualities in a specific historic moment that desperately needed to do so. See Gombrich, “Visual Metaphors.” 147 St. George, Conversing by Signs, 145. 148 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 96. 149 Ibid., 101.

Chapter Nine 1 Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, July 16, 1759. 2 The infiltration or integration of political hierarchies are part and parcel of religious life. Interpretations that diminish the perceived sincerity of religious practice by those who allow or invite political expression into corporate worship inappropriately impose a modern, progressive value on the past. See “Politics: The Legitimation of Authority” in Lindsay Jones, Hermeneutics, 129–52. 3 On Anglican architecture as a mark of social prestige, see Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 186–88; and Davies, Worship and Theology, 22–27. For a discussion of the seating in Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, see Lounsbury, “Take a Seat.” For other essays on seating, see Dinkin, “Seating the Meetinghouse.” For some perspective on the continued importance of seating and status, see Sarna, “Seating and the American Synagogue.” For pew plan as social map of a village, see Armstrong, The Church of England, 13. For the church as a reflection of social order, see Barry, “The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 104. 4 Cited in Hill, Historic Churches of Barbados, 27. 5 For the English tradition, see Hardy, “Remarks.” 6 Described in Jacobs, Lay People and Religion, 215. 7 Reprinted in Davies, Secular Use, 138. 8 As cited in appendix 4 of Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches. 9 Leslie to SPG, October 30, 1731, series A, vol. 23, no. 300, SPGLB. 10 Guy to SPG, July 13, 1724, series A, vol. 18, no. 83, SPGLB. NOTES TO PAGES 3 04 – 12

439

11 Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, vol. 1, May 20th, 1732. 12 Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, December 28, 1726. 13 To Berry Addison in Durham, February 9, 1763, Robert Raper Letter Book, 1759–70, SCHS. 14 To John Colleton in London from Robert Raper in Chas, May 22, 1760, Robert Raper Letter Book, 1759–70, SCHS. 15 St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1734–1817, August 9, 1742. 16 “Reverend Alexander Garden, Hon. John Fenwick and Alexander Parris to Eleazer Allen, Esqr. to Hugh Evans and Philip Massey, 4 April, 1742,” M4 290, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. 17 Pews 17 and 10 were valued at £20, 16 and 11 at £18, 15 and 12 at £16, 14 at £14, and 13 at £12. 18 The information in this paragraph is derived from Draine and Skinner, South Carolina Tax List. 19 A 1785 vestry record in St. Andrew’s Church in Jamaica indicated that some of the pews there were lined in green cloth. “St. Andrew’s Vestry Minutes,” April 9, 1785. 20 Bull to SPG, 1715, series A, vol. 10, no. 59, SPGLB. 21 SPVM, 1735–55, July 17, 1732. 22 South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, March 18, 1766. 23 To Berry Addison in Durham, February 9, 1763, Robert Raper Letter Book, 1759–70, SCHS. Special thanks to Max Eddleston for bringing this reference to my attention. Congregationalists also lined their best pews, at least after the Revolution. On July 20, 1788, William Axson was paid for “fixing cloth on brass nails lining the Governor’s pew.” See Records, Independent Congregational Church, construction, Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. 24 Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, April 8, 1771. 25 SPVM, 1756–74, September 19, 1768. 26 Letter dated 2/20/1750 from Peter Manigault in London to Mrs. Manigault in S.C., Manigault Family Papers, SCHS. 27 Calvert, “Function of Fashion.” 28 SPVM, 1756–74, November 9, 1756. 29 Ibid., October 13, 1766. 30 Hunt to SPG, October 3, 1726, series B, vol. 4, no. 210, SPGLB. 31 Ludham to SPG, December 12, 1727, series A, vol. 20, no. 98, SPGLB. 32 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 338; St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, March 22, 1731–April 14, 1813, March 22, 1731, SCHS. 33 Jacob argues that in England, gallery pews went for more than those on the floor. Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 215–18. 34 St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven Co., Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873, December 14, 1789, SCHS. 35 Hunt to SPG, October 30, 1723, series B, vol. 4, no. 167, SPGLB; “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766,” box 316, no. 300, LCMD. On galleries for students in Virginia, see Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 180. 36 Hasell to SPG, June 4, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 108, SPGLB. 37 Salley, Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, April 22, 1728. 38 Ibid., July 16, 1759. 39 SPVM, 1756–74, October 13, 1766. 40 SPVM, 1804–12, June 1, 1806. 41 Dell Upton first made this argument in his examination of the place of slaves in Virginia society. See Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 218.

440

NOTES TO PAGES 312 –16

42 This was the case in the city churches and is also the pattern in Virginia churches. See ibid., 181. 43 SPVM, 1823–31, August 24, 1828. 44 LeJau to SPG, July 14 1710, series A, vol. 5, no. 401, SPGLB. 45 “Protestant Episcopal Church, Sumter County, The Holy Cross, Claremont Parish, Statesburg, 1770–1924,” August 6, 1824, SCL. 46 See “Ground Houses,” in Fergusson, Uncommon Ground, 63–81. 47 Joseph, “From Colonist to Charlestonian,” 228. 48 Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 218. See also Upton, “Black and White Landscapes.” 49 See “Ordering the Backlot,” in McInnis, The Politics of Taste, 160–94; John Michael Vlatch, “@‘Snug Li’l House.’@” 50 The St. Michael’s Building Records Collection in the South Carolina Historical Society contains all of the subscriptions for pews in the church, each complete with name, date, and the amount subscribed for the pew. The majority of this discussion depends on my analysis of that collection of subscriptions and the comparison of the documents with the final pew assignments written into the surviving pew plan. 51 The relationship between Izard and Smith was described in Izard’s will: Last Will and Testament of Ralph Izard, Charleston Co. Wills, 1760–67, no. 45, South Carolina Wills and Testaments, 1740–71, Winterthur Museum Library. 52 For more on the relatively powerful role played by women in early South Carolina as property holders, see chapter 5, “@‘By Order of Madame’: Women and Property in the Low Country,” in Anzilotti, Affairs of the World, 135–62. 53 SCG, 26 July, 1760. 54 These occupations were drawn from Wilson, “ESCN Database Reports”; South Carolina Wills and Testaments, 1740–71, Winterthur Museum Library; and Richard Walsh, Sons of Liberty. 55 Richard Walsh discusses the political divide between the merchant-planter class, who were abundantly represented in the Assembly, and the mechanics, who had no representation at all, in chapter 1, “Mechanics of Colonial Charleston,” in Sons of Liberty, 3–25. 56 Walsh makes clear that the same held true for the local government, where although public offices were legally open to mechanics, those offices were held exclusively by planters and merchants. See Walsh, Sons of Liberty, 26–29. 57 Richard Waterhouse has completed an extensive study of the contours of vestry membership in colonial South Carolina. He found that a handful of planters dominated the vestries of rural parishes and that the merchants dominated those of the two city churches. See Waterhouse, “The Responsible Gentry,” 160–85. 58 Rauschenberg, Furniture of Charleston; Burton, Charleston Furniture, 84–89, 97– 98. The first evidence of Thomas Elfe in the colony is a 1747 advertisement, but he was already by then a very prosperous cabinetmaker in the colony. At St. Michael’s under the direction of Samuel Cardy, Elfe and Hutchinson were responsible for the turned work and a small amount of case work. They turned everything from the sixty-one dozen “drops” (guttae) necessary for the Doric order around the church exterior and another ninety-six dozen for the portico to the interior columns supporting the gallery and lining the chancel. They also turned all the newels and banisters for the stairs to the pulpit, those to the desk, and the very large staircases at the west end.

NOTES TO PAGES 317 – 22

441

59 Richard Walsh describes Thomas Elfe as one of Charleston’s most opulent mechanics in Sons of Liberty, 16. 60 Last Will and Testament of Ralph Izard, Charleston Co. Wills, 1760–67, no. 45, South Carolina Wills and Testaments, 1740–71, Winterthur Museum Library. 61 Anzilotti, Affairs of the World, 143. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 “James Reid to the church commissioners, 20 August 1760,” St. Michael’s Church Building Records, I-C, Pew Subscriptions, 1759–60, SCHS. 64 Minutes of St. Michael’s Church, April 27, 1773. 65 Durand, April 15, 1752, series B, vol. 20, no. 141, SPGLB. 66 Raper to Benj. Addison, May 10, 1765, From Charleston, Robert Raper Letter Book, 1759–70, SCHS. 67 Statutes, 7:371, quoted in Wood, Black Majority, 272. 68 SCG, March 30, 1734; quoted in Wood, Black Majority, 272. 69 On black recognition of the church as a power structure, see Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 115–16. 70 Varnod to SPG, April 3, 1728, series A, vol. 21, no. 77, SPGLB. 71 Durand to SPG, April 19, 1744, series B, vol. 12, no. 106, SPGLB. 72 Wills and Miscellaneous Records, vol. 72-B (1740–1747), 561–65, Charleston County Probate Record Office. 73 Jones, “Writings of the Reverend William B. Tennant, 1740–1777.” 74 “A True Copy of the Clergy of South Carolina’s Instructions to Mr. Johnston Charles Town, March 4, 1712/3,” Rawlinson Manuscripts, Bodleian Library. 75 Cited in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 125. 76 See chapter 8, “Authority of the Laity,” in Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 140–53. 77 Winteley to SPG, June 14, 1729, series A, vol. 22, no. 248, SPGLB. 78 Taylor to SPG, March 24, 1718, series A, vol. 13, no. 157, SPGLB; Vestry of St. Andrew’s to SPG, July 22, 1717, series A, vol. 12, no. 116, SPGLB. The role of the Anglican minister in and over the life of the parish was an issue that caused great consternation over the opening decades of the eighteenth century in South Carolina. On March 4, 1712, all the Anglican clergy of the colony gathered to convey their grievances to the bishop of London. The central issue of their very lengthy letter of complaint was the role of Episcopal authority at the parish level. The ministers wrote that “being President of a Vestry is thought too great an honour for the Ministers by the people of South Carolina.” A complete copy of the minister’s complaints, entitled “A True Copy of the Clergy of South Carolina’s Instructions to Mr. Johnston, Charles Town, March 4, 1712/3,” is in the Rawlinson Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. The conflict between Taylor and Skene was particularly acute, as Taylor served as a Presbyterian minister prior to his Anglican ordination and Skene was among the most High Church of the Anglicans in the colony at the time. 79 Reprinted in “Bicentennial Facts from St. Andrew’s Parish Episcopal Church”; photostat in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church Archives. 80 The conflict between clergy and vestry parallels that between gentry planters in Virginia and the tobacco inspector at the dinner table. Just as the vestry banned together to alienate a minister they found threatening, so too did the Virginia planters employ social mores to embarrass the inspector, a man from lower social circles who wielded some authority over them. See Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 77–79. 81 LeJau to SPG, April 20, 1714, series A, vol. 9, no. 265, SPGLB.

442

NOTES TO PAGES 322 – 29

82 Vestry of St. John’s Parish to the Rev. Mr. Durand, November 4, 1751, recorded in St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, March 22, 1731–April 14, 1813, SCHS. 83 See Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 121–39. 84 LeJau to SPG, January 3, 1717, series A, vol. 11, no. 69, SPGLB. 85 LeJau’s marker survives in the floor of the church. He died on September 15, 1717. On internal burial as honorific act, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 460–65.

Chapter Ten 1 St. John’s, Colleton County, Vestry Minutes, 1734–1817, April 13, 1789. 2 Minutes of the Nineteenth Convention of the Pro. Epis. Church in the State of So. Ca. held in Charleston, from February 17 to February 20, 1806, reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 493–98. 3 Mills, Statistics, 415–16. If this language actually means that the pulpit stood in the space of the aisle itself—as opposed to standing adjacent to the aisle—this might point to the involvement of Bishop Dehon in the design. Such a placement recalls identical placement of the pulpit in Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island, where Dehon ministered prior to moving to South Carolina. 4 Tennant’s petition reprinted in part in Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church, 370. 5 Letter To Mr. Wm Hazzard Wigg, January 18, 1777, Richard Hutson Letterbook, 1765–1777, SCHS. 6 Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 84. 7 SPVM, 1761–95, October 9, 1791. 8 The restoration of the church was slow throughout the new nation. Mark Noll has described the Episcopal Church in these years as in a languished state. Noll, America’s God, 120–22. 9 Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:23. 10 Address of Bishop Theodore Dehon to the 28th Convention of the Pro. Epis. Church in So. Ca., held in Columbia, on the 7th and 8thm Feb. 1815; reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 548–53. 11 Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 156–57. 12 Minutes of the 23rd Convention of the Pro. Epis. Church in the State of So. Ca. held in Charleston, February 20 and 21, 1810; reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 509–12. As late as 1806, only St. James, Goose Creek, St. Andrew’s, the chapel of ease at Childsbury, and the churches in Georgetown and Beaufort were described as serviceable. Minutes of the Nineteenth Convention of the Pro. Epis. Church in the State of So. Ca. held in Charleston, from February 17 to February 20, 1806, reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 493–98. 13 The handful of other new buildings—a chapel on the Santee (1804), two new churches in St. Mark’s Parish (before 1808 and 1809), a parish church in St. Luke’s (after 1789), and a new church in St. Paul’s Parish (1812)—were all of similar scale, and all were frame. 14 St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1734–1817, January 11, 1816, SCL. 15 City Gazette, February 3, 1801. Although these drawings are undated, one bears a watermark of 1794. The distinctive curvilinear gable identifies the buildings as the chapel in Pon Pon, the only chapel known to have had this

NOTES TO PAGES 329 – 42

443

16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 444

detail besides the church in St. Stephens, which also had exterior pilasters absent from the drawings. Thomas Bennett quoted a price of $1,602.33 for a chapel measuring thirtysix feet by fifty feet. The subscribers paid Abiel Waid only $750 for a slightly smaller chapel measuring forty by thirty. Stoney, “Building a Church on the Santee,” 5, 10–11. St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1734–1817, April 13th, 1789, SCL. The vestry of St. James had their pulpit painted in 1790, suggesting that the unpainted mahogany pulpit now in the church postdates 1790. See Alexander Crawford Daybook, 1788–1795, 1790, June 2, 54, SCHS. Stoney, “Building a Church on the Santee, 14–15.” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, July 1, 1806. Crowley, Invention of Comfort, 151, 206. See also Buggeln, Temples of Grace, 209. SPVM, 1804–12, January 13, 1811, and April 8, 1821. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:35. SPVM, 1812–22, January 21, 1816. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility. See also Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic. See Hatch, Democratization. For a discussion of the origins of this change in preaching styles in the middle of the eighteenth century, see Stout, The Divine Dramatist. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:32. Ibid., 2:34. Gretchen Bugglen has demonstrated, for example, that among early nineteenth-century Congregationalists in Connecticut, “the value placed on highly charged sentiment was by no means confined to [evangelicals].” Bugglen, Temples of Grace, 129. Sermons by Number, box 3, 292–391, BSC; box 3, no. 18-F, 386, 1798, BSC. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 230. Moore, “Abiel Abbot Journals,” 70 (November 22, 1818). Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:36. Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 516. Ibid., 508–573. Quoted in Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 23. SPVM, 1761–95, January 6, 1787. St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1734–1817, April 10, 1817, SCL. The pews assessed in the 1812 church in St. Paul’s Parish indicate the same pattern. Of the thirty-eight pews on the floor of that church, pew rents ranged from $30 to $15 in a pattern that emulates that of Prince Frederick’s pew plan from almost a century earlier. St. Paul’s, Stono, Vestry Minutes, 1786–1864, 1812. J. B. Dunlop Diary, 1810, New York Historical Society. George Milligan Johnston, untitled 1763 description of the city, reprinted in Milling, Colonial South Carolina, 144. They are: St. Mary’s Catholic Church, a brick church with “four handsome columns” (1801); the Circular Congregational Church (1804–6); the Second Presbyterian Church (1809–11); First Scots Presbyterian Church (1814); St. John’s Lutheran Church (1816–19); and First Baptist Church (1819–22). White, Protestant Worship, 86. Bernheim, German Settlements, 207. These dates are all taken from the vestry minutes.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 3 4 4 – 5 7

47 St. John’s Lutheran Church Vestry Minutes, September 10, 1814, South Carolina Room, Charleston County Public Library. 48 Ibid., April 17, 1815. 49 Ibid., August 26, 1815. 50 “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785–86,” SCHGM 13 ( July 1912): 145. 51 Asbury, Journal and Letters, 2:487 (December 28, 1805). 52 St. John’s Lutheran Church Vestry Minutes, April 12, 1819. 53 Ibid., November 3, 1819. 54 Hatch, Democratization, 201–6. 55 The simple fact that the vestry of St. John’s rejected Mills’s plans and erected a church years later by advertising for an undertaker to erect a church according to their own specifications suggests that South Carolinians were not ready to hand over the design of their buildings to professional architects. Even in the massive urban building campaigns that produced six enormous churches with porticos in fifteen years, only two were erected by an individual who operated in the manner of a nineteenth-century architect and not an eighteenthcentury master builder. But it would not be long until things changed; following the lead of Robert Mills, “professional” architects would soon play the leading role in the design of most churches in the state. 56 Burgess, Chronicles of St. Mark’s Parish, 27. 57 Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:29. 58 Moore, “Abiel Abbot Journals,” 70 (November 22, 1818). 59 Charleston Courier, December 16, 1823. 60 Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:46. 61 Address of Bishop Theodore Dehon to the 28th Convention of the Pro. Epis. Church in So. Ca., held in Columbia, on the 7th and 8thm Feb. 1815; reprinted in Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 548–53. 62 Dalcho, Protestant Episcopal Church, 542.

Conclusion 1 See Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem.” For a discussion of the uncomfortable position of the Caribbean in early American history, see Hulme, “Postcolonial Theory and Early America.” 2 See Carter and Herman, “Introduction: Toward a New Architectural History,” 1–8. 3 Prown, “Style as Evidence,” 52–68. 4 Patricia Bonomi’s Under the Cope of Heaven and Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith were pivotal texts in dispelling as myth the declension model of religion in the eighteenth century. Butler and Bonomi also broadened the discussion of early American religion by emphasizing the powerful force of popular religion. 5 See introduction to David Hall, Lived Religion in America, vii–xiii.

NOTES TO PAGES 358 – 67

445

This page intentionally left blank

B IBL I OG RAPHY

Manuscript Sources BR I DGE TOW N, BA R BA DOS Barbados Archives C H A R L E STON, SOU T H C A ROL I NA Charleston County Probate Record Office Will Books Charleston County Public Library, South Carolina Room Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance Miscellaneous Land Records McCrady Plat Collection Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina Archives Recordbook of Episcopal Transactions, 1798–1856 St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church Archives Letter from William Izard Bull to Miss E. McP. Ravenel, June 10, 1889 Bicentennial Facts from St. Andrew’s Parish Episcopal Church St. Philip’s Episcopal Church Archives St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, Vestry Minutes, 1735–55, 1756–74, 1774–1831 Bishop Smith Collection of Sermons South Carolina Historical Society Bowen-Cooke Papers Christ Church Parish Minutes of the Vestry, 1708–59, 1797–1847 Johnston Scrapbook Manigault Family Papers, 1685, 1727–1873 “Peter Manigault Letter Book, 1763–73” “The Journal of Mrs. Gabriel Manigault (Ann Ashby Manigault), 1754–81” Phoebe Caroline Pinckney Seabrook Copybook Prince Frederick’s Episcopal Church, Georgetown, S.C. Register and Journal, 1713–78 “Rededication of St. James, Goose Creek,” St. James, Goose Creek, Miscellaneous Information File Reverend Jenkins Memorandum Book Robert Raper Letter Book, 1759–70 St. John’s Parish, Berkeley Co., Vestry Minutes, 1731–1813 St. Michael’s Church Building Records Building Commissioner’s Records Building Commissioners’ Daybook Pew Subscriptions, 1759–60 St. Paul’s, Stono, Vestry Minutes, 1786–1864 St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven Co., Vestry Minutes, 1754–1873

“Elizabeth Sindrey Account Book, 1705–20” Rev. Paul Turquand Sermons, Misc. Manuscripts Pelatiah Webster, “A Journal of a Voyage from Philadelphia to Charlestown in South Carolina begun May 15, 1765” COLUM BI A, SOU T H CA ROL I NA South Carolina Department of Archives and History The Church Commissioners Book, 1717–42 Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury (Wake), 1716–37 The Green Transcripts, 1702–6 The Holy Cross, Claremont Parish, Statesburg, Vestry Minutes, 1770–1924 Records of the Public Treasurers of South Carolina, 1725–76 Ledger A, Accounts of the Public Treasurer, 1725–30 St. Philip’s Church Warden’s Account Books, 1725–52 South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina Edward Brailsford Devotions, 1710–44 Alexander Keith Commonplace Book, 1730–40 St. John’s, Colleton, Vestry Minutes, 1738–1817 St. Mark Protestant Episcopal Church Vestry Minutes, 1770–1924 St. Matthew’s Parish Vestry Minutes, 1767–1838 St. Philip’s Church Vestry Minutes, 1732–55 and 1761– 95 Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina Fulham Palace Correspondence, Bishop of London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Letter Books, Series A (1702–37), Series B (1701–86), Series C (1635–1812) K E W, E NGL A N D National Archives of the United Kingdom Colonial Office of the Public Record Office Archives K I NGSTON, JA M A IC A Institute of Jamaica Royal Gazette St. Jago Gazette The Taylor Manuscript LON DON, E NGL A N D British Museum, Additional Manuscripts Ms. 12418. James Knight, “The Natural, Morall, and Political History of Jamaica” Lambeth Palace Library, Records of the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches Ms. 2724. “Receipts for Models of 50 New Churches” Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Correspondence, 1702–10 N E W YOR K, N E W YOR K New York Historical Society J. B. Dunlop Diary, 1810

448

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OX F OR D, E NGL A N D Bodleian Library Gentleman’s Magazine Rawlinson Manuscripts “A True Copy of the Clergy of South Carolina’s Instructions to Mr. Johnston, Charles Town, March 4, 1712/3” SPA N I SH TOW N, JA M A IC A Jamaica Archives Kingston Parish Account Book, 1722–59 Kingston Parish Vestry Minutes, 1744–49, 1750–54, 1763–67, 1769–70, 1795–1805 Manchester Parish Vestry Minutes, 1816–24 Port Royal Parish Vestry Minutes, 1735–41, 1777–1807, 1819–23 St. Andrew’s Scot Kirk Records, 1814–26 St. Andrew’s Vestry Minutes, 1781–87 St. Anne’s Vestry Minutes, 1767–69, 1791–1809 St. Catherine’s Vestry Minutes, 1761–69 St. David’s Vestry Minutes, 1785–1823 St. George’s Parish Vestry Minutes, 1801–16 St. Thomas in the Vale Vestry Minutes, 1789–1802 Westmoreland Vestry Minutes, 1780–81 WA SH I NGTON, D.C. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division Fulham Palace Correspondence, 1703–69, Records of the Bishop of London “Mr. Woodmason’s Account of South Carolina in 1766” W I L L I A M SBU RG, V I RGI N I A Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Manuscript Collections Blathwayt Manuscripts W I NSTON-SA L E M, NORT H CA ROL I NA Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Charleston Courier Gazette and Daily Advertiser Gazette of the State of South Carolina Georgetown Gazette, and Mercantile Advertiser South Carolina and American General Gazette South Carolina Gazette (1732–76) South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of the Arts W I N T E RT H U R, DE L AWA R E Winterthur Museum Library Abstracts of Jamaica Wills in the British Museum, 1625–1792 South Carolina Wills and Testaments, 1740–71

BIB LIOGRAPHY

449

Printed Sources Adams, Annmarie, and Sally McMurry. “Exploring Everyday Landscapes: An Introduction.” In Exploring Everyday Landscapes, edited by Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, xvii–xxix. Vol. 7 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. 8 vols. London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1749. Addison, William. The English Country Parson. London: Dent, 1948. Addleshaw, G. W. O., and Frederick Etchells. The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship. London: Faber and Faber, 1948. Aheron, John. A General Treatise on Architecture. Dublin, 1759. Ahlstrom, Sidney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972. Aldridge, A. Owen. “Natural Religion and Deism in America before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 54 (October 1997): 835–48. Allard, Joseph. “Music in the Enlightenment.” In The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, edited by Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova, 47–65. London: Routledge, 1990. Alleyne, Warren, and Henry Fraser. The Barbados-Carolina Connection. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1988. Almond, Philip C. Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Anzilotti, Cara. In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002. Archer, John. “The Beginnings of Associationism in British Architectural Esthetics.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (Spring 1983): 241–61. Armstrong, Anthony. The Church of England, the Methodists and Society, 1700–1850. Totawa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973. Asbury, Francis. Journal of Francis Asbury, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, from August 7, 1771 to December 7, 1815. Vols. 1–3. New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1821. Ashley, Maurice. England in the Seventeenth Century, 1603–1714. London: Penguin Books, 1958. Augustine of Hippo. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D. W. Robertson Jr. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Bacon, Francis. The Two Books of Sr. Francis Bacon of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane. Oxford, 1633. Baithwaite, Kamau. Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica. London: New Beacon, 1970. Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Barnett, James H. The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Barry, Jonathan. “The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Unity and Variety: A History of the Church in Devon and Cornwall, by Nicholas Orme. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1991. Barth, Karl. Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl. Translated by Brian Cozens. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969. Beckerdite, Luke. “Philadelphia Carving Shops: Part 3, Hercules Courtenay and His School.” Antiques 131, no. 5 (May 1987): 1044–63. 450

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bellows, Barbara L. “Eliza Lucas Pinckney: The Evolution of an Icon.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 106, nos. 2 and 3 (April/July 2005): 147–65. Benes, Peter. Masks of Orthodoxy: An Ecclesiological Interpretation of Puritan Spirit Carvings in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. ‰. “Sky Colors and Scattered Clouds: The Decorative and Architectural Painting of New England Meeting Houses, 1738–1834.” In New England Meetinghouse and Church: 1630–1850, edited by Peter Benes, 51–69. Boston: Boston University, 1979. ‰. Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600–1900. Boston: Dublin Seminar, 1995. Bernheim, Gotthardt Dellman. History of the German Settlements and of the Lutheran Church in North and South Carolina. Philadelphia: Lutheran Book Store, 1872. ‰. A History of the Lutheran Church in North and South Carolina. Philadelphia: Lutheran Book Store, 1872. Bernstein, Basil. Class, Codes, and Control. Vol. 1, Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Bill, E. G. W, comp. The Queen Anne Churches: A Catalogue of the Papers in Lambeth Palace Library of the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in London and Westminster, 1711–1759. London: Mansell, 1979. Birch, G. H. London Churches of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London, 1896. Bishir, Catherine. Architects and Builders in North Carolina: A History of the Practice of Building. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. ‰. “Good and Sufficient Language for Building.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 4. Edited by Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman, 44–52. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Bisse, Thomas. The Beauty of Holiness in the Common Prayer: As Set Forth in Four Sermons Preach’d at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1716, 1721). Bivins, John, Jr. “Charleston Rococo Interiors, 1765–1775: The “Sommers Carver.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 12, no. 2 (November 1986): 1–122. ‰. “Early Carving in the South Carolina Low Country: The Career and Work of Henry Burnett.” American Furniture (2003). Black, Clinton V. Spanish Town: The Old Capital. Spanish Town: The Parish Council of St. Catherine’s, 1974. Boles, John B., ed. Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870. University of Kentucky Press, 1988. Bolton, S. Charles. “The Anglican Church of Colonial South Carolina, 1704– 1754.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973. ‰. Southern Anglicanism: The Church of England in Colonial South Carolina. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood, 1982. Bonomi, Patricia. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Bonomi, Patricia, and Peter R. Eisanstadt. “Church Adherence in the EighteenthCentury British American Colonies.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 39, no. 3 (April 1982): 245–86. The Book of Common Prayer. London, 1760. The Book of Common Prayer and the Administration of Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England and Ireland. Dublin, 1668. Borsay, Peter. The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Bostridge, Ian. Witchcraft and Its Transformations, 1650–1750. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1997. BIB LIOGRAPHY

451

Boucher, Edward Joseph. “Vestrymen and Churchwardens in South Carolina, 1706–1778.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1948. Bowes, Frederick. The Culture of Early Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942. Bridenbaugh, Carl. Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742. New York: Ronald Press, 1938. ‰. Mitre and Scepter: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689– 1775. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. ‰. Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952. ‰. Peter Harrison: First American Architect. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949. Bridenbaugh, Carl, and Roberta Bridenbaugh. No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1629–1690. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Brinsfield, John Wesley. Religion and Politics in Colonial South Carolina. Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1983. Bronowski, Jacob, and Bruce Mazlish. Western Intellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. Brooke, John L. “For Honour and Civil Worship to Any Worthy Person: Burial, Baptism, and Community on the Massachusetts Near Frontier, 1730–1790.” In Material Life in America, 1600–1860, edited by Robert Blair St. George. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. “Broughton Letters.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 15 (1914): 171–96. Brown, Richard. Church and State in Modern Britain, 1700–1850. London: Rutledge, 1991. Brown, Richard Maxwell. The South Carolina Regulators. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1963. Bucher, Robert C. “The Continental Log House.” Pennsylvania Folklife 12 (1962): 14–19. Buggeln, Gretchen Townsend. “New England Orthodoxy and the Language of the Sacred.” In American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces, edited by Louis P. Nelson, 17–36. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006. ‰. “Protestant Material Culture and Community in Connecticut, 1785– 1840.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1995. ‰. Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut’s Churches, 1790–1840. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003. Buisseret, D. J. Port Royal. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ‰. “Port Royal, 1655–1725.” Jamaican Historical Review 6 (1966): 21–28. Bull, Gertrude C. “Prince George, Winyah Parish, Georgetown, S.C., 1721–1976.” Charleston, S.C.: Privately published pamphlet, 1976. Bull, Henry DeSaussure. All Saints Church, Waccamaw, 1739–1968. Spartanburg: The Reprint Company, 1994. Bull, Kinloch, Jr. The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston: Lieutenant Governor William Bull II and His Family. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Bullock, Steven C. Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasons and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. ‰. “The Revolutionary Transformation of American Freemasonry, 1752– 1792.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 47, no. 3 ( July 1990): 347–69.

452

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burgess, James M. Chronicles of St. Mark’s Parish, Santee Circuit and Williamsburg Township, South Carolina, 1731–1885. Columbia, S.C.: Charles A. Calvo Jr., 1888. Burnard, Trevor. “European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 53, no. 4 (October 1996): 769–96. Burnard, Trevor, and Kenneth Morgan. “The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 58, no. 1 ( January 2001): 205–28. Burroughs, Charles. “Absolutism and the Rhetoric of Topography: Streets in the Rome of Sixtus V.” In Streets: Critical Perspective on Public Space, edited by Zeynep Celik, Diane Favro, and Richard Ingersoll, 177–88. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994. Burton, E. Milby. Charleston Furniture, 1700–1825. Charleston, S.C.: Charleston Museum, 1955. Burton, E. Milby, and Warren Ripley. South Carolina Silversmiths, 1690–1860. Charleston: C. Tuttle, 1968. Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Butler, Alfloyd. The Africanization of American Christianity. New York: Carlton Press, 1980. Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. ‰. “Religion in Early America.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 54, no. 4 (October 1997): 693–94. Calam, John. Parsons and Pedagogues: The SPG Adventure in American Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: American and West Indies. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1994. Calhoun, Robert M. Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. ‰. “Religion Confronts the Social Order.” In Religion in South Carolina, edited by Charles H. Lippy, 168–81. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Calvert, Karin. “The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America.” In Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, 252–83. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Campbell, Colen. Vitruvius Britannicus; or, The British Architect. London, 1717. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Campbell, Peter F. Chapters in Barbados History. Bridgetown, Barbados: Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 1986. Carll, Mary Allison. “The Role of the Black Artisan in the Building Trades and the Decorative Arts in South Carolina’s Charleston District.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1982. Carter, Thomas, and Bernard L. Herman. “Introduction.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 3. Edited by Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman, 1–6. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. ‰. “Introduction: Toward a New Architectural History.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 4. Edited by Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman, 1–6. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991. A Catalogue of Books in the Charlestown Library Society. London, 1750.

BIB LIOGRAPHY

453

Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. London, 1728. Chandler, M. J. A Guide to Records in Barbados. Oxford: University of the West Indies, 1965. Chapin, Howard M. “Colonial Hatchments.” Magazine Antiques 14, no. 4 (October 1929): 300–302. Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Chappell, Edward C. “Acculturation in the Shenandoah Valley: Rhenish Houses of the Massanutten Settlement.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 55–89. Clark, Elmer T., ed. The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury. 3 vols. London: Epworth Press; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958. Clark, Erskine. Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Clarke, Basil. The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church. London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1963. Classified Digest of the Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–1892. London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1893. Clowse, Converse D. Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 1717–1767. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981. Clute, Robert F. The Annals and Parish Register of St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish in South Carolina. Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans, and Cogswell, 1884. Cohen, Charles L. “The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 54, no. 4 (October 1997): 695–722. Colvin, Howard. Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840. London: John Murray, 1954. ‰. “Fifty New Churches.” Architectural Review 107 (1950): 189–96. Combs, Diana Williams. Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Concannon, T. A. L. Falmouth, 1791–1970. Kingston: The Georgian Society of Jamaica, 1990. Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. Translated by Martin Thom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Corfield, Penelope. The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Corrigan, John. The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy and the Beginning of the Enlightenment. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Crain, Edward E. Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Craske, Matthew. Art in Europe, 1700 to 1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ‰. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Cromley, Elizabeth Collins, and Carter Hudgins. “Preface.” In Gender, Class, and Shelter, edited by Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter Hudgins, xi–xiv. Vol. 5 454

BIBLIOGRAPHY

of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Cross, Arthur Lyon. The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies. New York: Longmans, 1902. Crowley, John. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Cruickshank, Dan. A Guide to the Georgian Buildings of Britian and Ireland. New York: Rizzoli, 1986. Cruickshank, Dan, and Peter Wyld. London: The Art of Georgian Building. London: The Architectural Press, 1986. Cundall, Frank. A Brief History of the Parish Church of St. Andrew, Jamaica. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1931. ‰. Historic Jamaica. London: West India Committee, 1915. Curl, James Stevens. The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry: An Introductory Study. London: B. T. Batsford, 2002. Curtin, Marguerite. “The Kingston Parish Church.” Jamaican Journal 17, no. 4 (November 1984–January 1985): 3–4. Dalcho, Frederick. An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina from the First Settlement of the Province to the War of the Revolution. Charleston, S.C.: E. Thayer, 1820; reprint, Diocese of South Carolina, 1970. Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England: From Watts and Wesley to Maurice, 1690–1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Davies, J. G. The Secular Use of Church Buildings. New York: Seabury Press, 1968. Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South. 3 vols. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. ‰. The Southern Colonial Bookshelf: Reading in the Eighteenth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979. Dayfoot, Arthur Charles. The Shaping of the West Indian Church, 1492–1962. Barbados: The Press University of the West Indies, 1999. Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Deetz, James, and Edwin Dethlefsen. “The Doppler Effect and Archaeology: A Consideration of the Spatial Aspects of Seriation.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21 (1965): 196–206. Dehon, Theodore. Sermons on the Public Means of Grace. New York: Thomas N. Stanford, 1856. De Rochefort, Cesar. The History of Barbados, St. Christophers, Nevis, St. Vincents, Antego, Martinico, Monserrat, and the Rest of the Carubby-Islands. London, 1666. Dinkin, Robert J. “Seating the Meetinghouse in Early Massachusetts.” In Material Life in America, 1600–1800, edited by Robert Blair St. George, 407–18. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Dixon, Caroline Wyche. “A List of Architectural Furniture Books Available in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1750 through 1821.” Unpublished master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1979. Donnelley, Marian Card. The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. Downes, Kerry. The Architecture of Wren. New York: Universe Books, 1982. ‰. Hawksmoor. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980. ‰. Vanbrugh. London: Zwemmer, 1977. ‰. Wren. London: Allen Lane, 1971. Draine, Tony, and John Skinner. South Carolina Tax List, 1733–1742. Columbia, S.C.: Congaree Publications, 1986. BIB LIOGRAPHY

455

Dunn, Richard. “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 72 (April 1971): 81–93. ‰. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Du Prey, Pierre de la Ruffiniere. Hawksmoor’s London Churches: Architecture and Theology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ‰. “Hawksmoor’s ‘Basilica after the primitive Christians’: Architecture and Theology.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (1989): 38–52. Durecki, Jan. “Changing Times in Charleston.” Unpublished paper, MESDA, Summer 2002. Dyrness, William A. Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Edelson, S. Max. “The Terms of Affiliation: Skilled Slaves in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina.” Paper presented to the College of Charleston Program for the Study of the Lowcountry and the Atlantic World, Charleston, S.C., May 1995. Edgar, Walter B. “Notable Libraries of Colonial South Carolina.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 72 (April 1971): 105–10. ‰. “Some Popular Books in Colonial South Carolina.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 72 ( July 1971): 174–78. ‰. South Carolina: A History. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Edgar, Walter B., and N. Louise Bailey, eds. Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives. Vol. 2, The Commons House of Assembly, 1692– 1775. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1959. Ellis, Clifton. “Dissenting Faith and Domestic Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” In Exploring Everyday Landscapes, edited by Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, 23–40. Vol. 7 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Evans, E. L. A History of the Diocese of Jamaica. Kingston: Anglican Diocese of Jamaica, 1975. Fagg, Daniel W. “Carolina, 1663–1683: The Founding of a Proprietary.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1970. Fennel, Christopher. “Conjuring Boundaries: Inferring Past Identities from Religious Artifacts.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 4, no. 4 (2000): 281–313. Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. Ferguson, Leland. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Fincham, Kenneth. “@‘According to the Ancient Custom’: The Return of Alters in the Restoration Church of England.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 29–54. “The First Masonic Discourse Delivered in America.” Freemasons’ Monthly Magazine 8 (August 1848): 289–93. Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Forsyth, Michael. Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. 456

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fraser, Charles. A Charleston Sketchbook, 1796–1806. Charleston, S.C.: Carolina Art Association, 1940. Fraser, Henry. Historic Houses of Barbados. Barbados National Trust, 1982. ‰. Treasures of Barbados. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1990. Frey, Sylvia. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Frey, Sylvia, and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and the Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Friary, Donald. “The Architecture of the Anglican Church in the Northern American Colonies: A Study of Religious, Social, and Cultural Expression.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1971. Friedlander, Amy Ellen. “Carolina Huguenots: A Study in Cultural Pluralism in the Lowcountry, 1679–1768.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1979. Fulcher, Rodney. “Puritans and the Passions: Faculty Psychology in American Puritanism.” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 9, no. 2 (1973): 123–39. Gallay, Allan. “Planters and Slaves in the Great Awakening.” In Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870, edited by John B. Boles, 19–36. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988. Garber, Paul Neff. The Methodist Meetinghouse. New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension, Methodist Church, 1941. Garden, Alexander. “Regeneration, and the Testimony of the Spirit.” In The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, edited by Alan Heimert and Perry Miller. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1967. Garfinkel, Susan. “Letting in ‘The World’: (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House.” In Gender, Class, and Shelter, edited by Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter Hudgins, 78–94. Vol. 5 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Gibbs, James. A Book of Architecture. London, 1728. Gibson, Edgar C. S. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. London: Methuen and Co., 1896. Gillies, John. Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield. New York: Hodge and Shober, 1774. Glassie, Henry. “Eighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk Building.” Winterthur Portfolio (1972): 29–57. ‰. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. ‰. Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. ‰. Vernacular Architecture. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000. Godfrey, W. R. An Historical Sketch of Old St. David’s Church, Cheraw, South Carolina, 1768–1916. Cheraw, 1916. Godwyn, Morgan. Negro’s and Indians Advocate. London, 1680. Gombrich, E. H. “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art.” Chapter in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, 12–29. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968. Gowans, Alan. King Carter’s Church. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Maltwood Museum, 1969. Graham, William A. Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1987. BIB LIOGRAPHY

457

Graham, Willie, and Carl Lounsbury. “Seventeenth-Century Precedents for Brick Construction in England and Virginia.” Unpublished report, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002. Greene, Jack. “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 64 (April 2007): 235–50. ‰. “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection.” South Carolina Historical Magazine (October 1987): 192–210. ‰. Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992. ‰. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Gregorie, Anne King. Christ Church, 1706–1959: A Plantation Parish of the South Carolina Establishment. Charleston: The Dalcho Historical Society, 1961. ‰. “The First Decade of the Charleston Library Society.” In Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association. Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 1935. Grigsby, Leslie B. “From Punch Bowls to Puzzle Mugs: Drinking Vessels and Traditions in England and America.” Winterthur Magazine (Winter 2004): 10–11. Guillery, Peter. “Suburban Models, or Calvinism and Continuity in London’s Seventeenth-Century Church Architecture.” Architectural History: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 48 (2005): 69–106. Gutjahr, Paul. An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999. Haley, K. H. D. The First Earl of Shaftsbury. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Halfpenny, William. The Art of Sound Building. London: Samuel Aris, 1725. Hall, David. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. ‰. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hall, Douglas. “Absentee-Proprietorship in the British West Indies to about 1850.” Jamaican Historical Review 4 (1964): 15–35. Hamilton, John D. Material Culture of the American Freemasons. Lexington, Mass.: Museum of Our National Heritage; Distributed by University Press of New England, Hanover, N.H., 1994. Hand, W. D., ed. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Vol. 7. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1964. Hardy, W. J. “Remarks on the History of Seat Reservation in Churches.” Archaeologia 53 (1893): 95–106. Hart, Oliver. “Dancing Exploded.” In The Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution, 1766–1783, edited by Frank Moore. New York, 1860. Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Hatch, Nathan. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. Hawkins, Harriett Claire. “Icons in the Wilderness: The Anglican Churches of Rural South Carolina.” M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1983. Hay, George. The Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, 1560–1843. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. 458

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heitzler, Michael J. Historic Goose Creek, South Carolina, 1670–1980. Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1983. Helwig, Adeline. “The Early History of Barbados and Her Influence upon the Development of South Carolina.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1931. Heninger, S. K., Jr. The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994. Herman, Bernard L. “The Embedded Landscapes of the Charleston Single House, 1780–1820.” In Exploring Everyday Landscapes, edited by Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, 41–57. Vol. 7 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Hernandez, Jorge L. “Williamsburg: The Genesis of a Republican Civic Order from under the Shadow of the Catalpas.” New City, no. 2 (Winter 1993–94): 26–35. Hewat, Alexander. An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. 2 vols. London, 1779. Reprinted in Historical Collections of South Carolina, compiled by R. B. Carroll. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836. Heyrman, Christine. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997. Hijiya, David. “American Gravestones and Attitudes towards Death: A Brief History.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 127, no. 5 (October 1983): 339–63. Hill, Barbara. Historic Churches of Barbados. Barbados: Art Heritage Publications, 1984. Hirsch, Arthur Henry. The Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1928. The History of the Parish Church of St. Helena, Beaufort, South Carolina. Columbia: R. L. Bryan, 1990. Hobson, Daphne. “The Domestic Architecture of the Earliest British Colonies in the American Tropics: A Study of the Houses of the Caribbean Leeward Islands of St. Christopher’s, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat, 1624–1726.” Unpublished Ph.D. diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007. Hoffer, Peter Charles. Sensory Worlds in Early America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Hogue, L. Lynne. “An Edition of ‘Eight Charges Delivered at So Many General Sessions [1703–1707] by Nicholas Trott.’” Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 1972. Holcomb, Brent H., ed. Saint David’s Parish, South Carolina, Minutes of the Vestry, 1768–1832, Parish Register 1819–1924. Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1979. Holifield, Brooks. Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860. Durham: Duke University Press, 1978. Hoppus, Edward. The Gentleman’s and Builder’s Repository. London, 1737. Horton, Frank. “Miles Brewton, Goldsmith.” Journal of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts 7 (November 1981): 1–13. Howe, Daniel Walker. Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Howe, George. History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. 2 vols. Columbia, S.C.: Duffie and Chapman, 1870. Howell, John. The Common Prayer Book: The Best Companion in the House and Closet as Well as in the Temple. Oxford, 1689. Hudgins, Carter L., Carl R. Lounsbury, Louis P. Nelson, and Jonathan H. Poston, eds. The Vernacular Architecture of Charleston and the Lowcountry, 1670–1990: A Field Guide. Charleston, S.C.: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 1994. BIB LIOGRAPHY

459

Hudgins, Carter L., and Elizabeth Collins Cromley. “Preface.” In Shaping Communities, edited by Carter L. Hudgins and Elizabeth Collins Cromley, xv–xviii. Vol. 6 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methueun, 1986. ‰. “Postcolonial Theory and Early America: An Approach from the Caribbean.” In Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, edited by Robert Blair St. George, 33–48. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Hunte, George. Jamaica. London: B. T. Batsford, 1976. Isaac, Rhys. “Dramatizing the Ideology of the Revolution: Popular Mobilization in Virginia, 1774 to 1776.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 33, no. 3 ( July 1976): 357–85. ‰. “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765–1775.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 31 (1974): 345–68. ‰. “Religion and Authority: Problems of the Anglican Establishment in Virginia in the Era of the Great Awakening and the Parsons’ Cause.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 30 (1973): 3–36. ‰. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Jacob, W. M. Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jaher, Frederick Cople. The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982. James, Fleming H. “Richard Marsden, Wayward Clergyman.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 11 (1954): 578–91. Jeffrey, Paul. The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren. London: Hambleton Press, 1996. Jenkins, Sophia Seabrook. Commemorative History of St. John’s Parish, John’s Island and Wadmalaw Island, 1734–1934. Charleston: Tricentennial Edition, 1970. Johnston, Gideon. Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707–1716. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Frank J. Klingberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946. Jones, Alice Hanson. Wealth of a Nation to Be. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Jones, Lindsay. The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Jones, Newton B., ed. “Writings of the Reverend William B. Tennant, 1740–1777.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 53 (1952): 212–16. Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1968; reprint Baltimore, 1969. Joseph, J. W. “From Colonist to Charlestonian: The Crafting of Identity in a Colonial Southern City.” In Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interaction in the Southern Colonies, edited by J. W. Joseph and Martha Zierden, 215–34. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Journal of the Assembly of Jamaica. 14 vols. Kingston: Aikman, 1826. Joyner, Charles. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

460

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Keickhefer, Richard. Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kenny, William Howland. “Alexander Garden and George Whitfield: The Significance of Revivalism in South Carolina, 1738–1755.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 71 (1970): 1–16. Kershaw, John. History of the Parish and Church of St. Michael, Charleston. Charleston: Privately published, 1915. Kibbey, Ann. The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kimball, Fiske. American Architecture. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merril Company, 1928. Kivy, Peter. The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. New York: Burt Franklin, 1976; 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Kniffen, Fred B. “Folk Housing: Key to Definition.” In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlatch, 3–26. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Kornwolf, James. Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America. 3 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ‰. “@‘Doing Good to Posterity’: Francis Nicholson, First Patron of Architecture, Landscape Design, and Town Planning in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1689–1716.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101 ( July 1993): 333–74. Krysmanski, Bernd. “We See a Ghost: Hogarth’s Satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs.” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 ( June 1998): 292–310. Lake, Peter. “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity, and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s.” In The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, edited by Kenneth Fincham, 161–85. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Landes, David. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Lane, Mills. Architecture of the Old South: South Carolina. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984. Langley, Batty. The Builder’s Jewel. London, 1746. ‰. The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury. London: R. Ware, 1741. Lawson, John. A History of Carolina: Containing a Description and Natural History of That Country. London, 1718. LeJau, Francis. Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706–1717. Edited by Frank Klingberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. Leone, Mark P. “The Georgian Order as the Order of Merchant Capitalism in Annapolis Maryland.” In The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, edited by Mark P. Leone and Parker Potter, 235–61. Leone, Mark P., and G. Fry. “Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen: An Interpretation of African American Belief Systems Based on the Uses of Archaeology and Folklore Sources.” Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999): 372–403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Leslie, Charles. A New History of Jamaica from the Earliest Accounts to the Taking of Porto Bello: Thirteen Letters from a Gentleman to His Friend. London, 1740.

BIB LIOGRAPHY

461

Leventhal, Herbert. In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 1976. Levy, Babbette. “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 70, pt. 1 (April–October 1960): 69–348. Lewis, Leslie. “English Commemorative Sculpture in Jamaica.” Jamaican Historical Review 9 (1972): 7–140. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. A Journal of a West Indian Proprietor. London: John Murray, 1834; republished, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Ligon, Richard. True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London, 1657; reprinted, Barbados National Trust, 2000. Lippy, Charles H. Religion in South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Lipscombe, Terry, ed. Journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986. Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor. The Church Architecture of Robert Mills. Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1985. Litten, Julian. The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450. London: R. Hale, 1991. Little, Thomas J. “Adding to the Church Such as Shall Be Saved: The Rise of Evangelical Churches in Colonial South Carolina, 1740–1772.” Paper presented to the College of Charleston, May 1995. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London, 1690. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica; or, A General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of That Island with Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government. 3 vols. London: T. Lowndes, 1774. Lounsbury, Carl R. “Anglican Church Design in the Southern Colonies: English Inheritance and Regional Interpretations.” In Constructing Image, Identity, and Place, edited by Alison K. Hoagland and Kenneth A. Breisch, 22–38. Vol. 9 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. ‰. “The Dynamics of Architectural Design in Eighteenth-Century Charleston and the Lowcountry.” In Exploring Everyday Landscapes, edited by Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, 58–74. Vol. 7 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. ‰. “God Is in the Details: The Transformation of Ecclesiastical Architecture in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 13 (2006): 1–21. ‰. “Take a Seat, But Not Just Any Seat.” Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter (1991): 4–10. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Lounsbury, Carl R., and Vanessa E. Patrick. An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Lovejoy, David S. Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Lovell, Margaretta. “@‘Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable’: The Business of Cabinetmaking in Eighteenth-Century Newport.” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 27–62. Ludwig, Allan. Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650–1815. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966. Lumpkin, Sarah Parker. Heritage Passed On: History of Prince George, Winyah, Parish. Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1992. Mace, Thomas. Musick’s Monument; or, A remembrancer of the best practical musick, both divine and civil, that has ever been known to have been in the world divided into three parts. London: T. Ratcliffe, 1676. 462

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mackey, Albert G. The History of Freemasonry in South Carolina from Its Origins to the Present Time. Columbia: South Carolina Steam Power Press, 1861. Male, Emile. The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. New York: Harper, 1958. Maltby, Judith. “@‘By This Book’: Parishioners, the Prayer Book and the Established Church.” In The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, edited by Kenneth Fincham, 115–37. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Manross, William. The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library: American Colonial Section Calendar and Indexes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Marcus, George, ed. Elites: Ethnographic Issues. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983. Marini, Stephen. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music and Public Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Martin, L. Emile. Jamaica’s Churches: Part of Our Heritage. Montego Bay: Unlimited Exposures, 1995. ‰. The St. James Parish Church and Its Missions, 1775–1994. Montego Bay: Unlimited Exposures, 1994. Mather, Increase. Cases of Conscience. Boston, 1693. May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Mazzio, Carla. “The Three-Dimensional Self: Geometry, Melancholy, Drama.” In Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Glimp and Michelle Warren. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. McCrady, Edward. A Sketch of St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, S.C. From the Establishment of the Church of England under the Royal Charter of 1665 to July 1897. Charleston: Walker, Evans, Cogswell, 1901. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. McInnis, Maurie D. “Conflating the Past and Present in the Reconstruction of Charleston’s St. Philip’s.” In Constructing Image, Identity, and Place, edited by Alison K. Hoagland and Kenneth A. Breisch, 39–53. Vol. 9 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. ‰. The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. McInnis, Maurie D., in collaboration with Angela D. Mack. In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740–1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. McKee, Harley J. “St. Michael’s Church Charleston, 1752–1762.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 23 (March 1964): 39–42. McMurry, Sally, and Annmarie Adams. “People, Power, and Places: An Introduction.” In People, Power, Places, edited by Sally McMurry and Annmarie Adams, xix–xxvii. Vol. 8 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. McVey, Kathleen. “The Domed Church as Microcosm: Literary Roots of an Architectural Symbol.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983): 91–121. Meeson, Bob. “Ritual Marks and Graffiti: Curiosities or Meaningful Symbols.” Vernacular Architecture 36 (2005): 41–48. BIB LIOGRAPHY

463

Merrens, H. Roy, ed. The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697–1774. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977. Merrifield, Ralph. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1987. Millar, John Fitzhugh. The Architects of the American Colonies. Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers, 1968. Miller, Jacquelyn. “An Uncommon Tranquility of Mind: Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity.” Journal of Social History 30, no. 1 (1996): 129–48. Milling, Chapman J. Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951. Mills, Frederick V. Bishops by Ballot: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Mills, Robert. Statistics of South Carolina. Charleston: Hurlbut and Lloyd, 1826. Minter, R. A. Episcopacy without Episcopate: The Church of England in Jamaica before 1824. Worcester: Self-Publishing Association, 1990. The Minutes of St. Michael’s Church of Charleston, S.C. from 1758–1797. Charleston: The Historical Activities Committee of the South Carolina Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Mitchell, Richard D. “The Presbyterian Church as an Indicator of Westward Expansion in 18th-Century America.” Professional Geographer 18 (1966): 293–99. Moogk, Peter M. Building a House in New France: An Account of the Perplexities of Client and Craftsmen in Early Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. Moore, John Hammond. “The Abiel Abbot Journals: A Yankee Preacher in Charleston Society, 1818–1827.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 68 (1967): 53. Morais, Herbert M. Deism in Eighteenth-Century America. New York: Russell and Russell, 1960. Morgan, David. “For Christ and the Republic: Protestant Illustration and the History of Literacy in Nineteenth-Century America.” In The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally Promey, 49–50. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ‰. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ‰. Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Morgan, David, and Salley Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Morgan, David T. “The Great Awakening in South Carolina, 1740–1755.” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 595–606. Morgan, Edmund. “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 24 ( January 1967): 3–43. Morris, Robert. Lectures on Architecture: Consisting of Rules Founded upon Harmonick and Arithmetical Proportions in Building. London: J Brindley, 1734. ‰. Select Architecture: Being Regular Designs of Plans and Elevations Well Suited to Both Town and Country. London, 1757. Mulcahy, Matthew. Hurricanes and Society in the Greater British Caribbean, 1624–1783. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Nadelhaft, Jerome J. Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina. Orono: University of Maine Press, 1981. Neale, Ron. “Society, Belief, and the Building of Bath, 1700–1793.” In Rural Change and Urban Growth, 1500–1800: Essays in English History in Honor of W. G.

464

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hoskins, edited by C. W. Chalklin and M. A. Havinden, 272–77. London and New York: Longman, 1974. Nelson, John Kendall. “Anglican Missions in America, 1701–1725: A Study of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1962. ‰. A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Colonial Virginia, 1690–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Nelson, Louis. “Anglican Church Building and Local Context in Early Jamaica.” In Building Environments, edited by Kenneth A. Breisch and Alison K. Hoagland, 63–80. Vol. 10 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. University of Tennessee Press, 2005. ‰. “‘Building Cross-Wise’: Reconstructing Jamaica’s Eighteenth-Century Anglican Churches.” Jamaica Historical Review (Spring 2003): 11–39. A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 6 vols. London, 1754. Newman, John. “Laudian Literature and the Interpretation of Caroline Churches in London.” In Art and Patronage in the Carolina Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, edited by David Howarth, 168–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Norton, Bettina. “Anglican Embellishments: The Contributions of John Gibbs, Junior, and William Price to the Church of England in Eighteenth-Century Boston.” In New England Meetinghouse and Church: 1630–1850, edited by Peter Benes, 70–85. Boston: Boston University Press, 1979. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002. Nugent, Lady Maria. Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. Edited by Philip Wright. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1966. O’Connor, Daniel, and others. Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Oldmixon, John. The British Empire in America. London, 1708. Olson, Richard. “Spirits, Witches, and Science: Why the Rise of Science Encouraged Belief in the Supernatural in Seventeenth-Century England.” Skeptic 1, no. 4 (1992): 34–43. Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. O’Reilly, Sean D. Irish Churches and Monasteries: An Historical and Architectural Guide. Cork: The Collins Press, 1997. Pain, William. The Builder’s Companion, Demonstrating all the Principal Rules of Architecture. London: Printed for Robert Sayer, 1769. Painter, Borden W., Jr. “The Anglican Vestry in Colonial America.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1965. Panovsky, Erwin. “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles.” In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers In and On Art History, by Erwin Panovsky, 55–107. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/ Anchor, 1955. Parker, George. North Carolina Charters and Constitutions, 1578–1698. Raleigh, N.C.: Carolina Charter Tercentenary Commission, 1963. Pascoe, C. F. Classified Digest of the Records of the Society of Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1892. London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1895. ‰. Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G.: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1900. 2 vols. London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1901.

BIB LIOGRAPHY

465

Patten, M. Drake. “African-American Spiritual Beliefs: An Archaeological Testimony from the Slave Quarter.” In Wonders of the Invisible World, 1600–1900, edited by Peter Benes and Jane Montague Benes, 44–52. Boston: Dublin Seminar for New England Life, 1995. Peck, Heyward. “The Villepontoux Family of South Carolina.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 48 (1947): 35–38. ‰. “The Villepontoux Family of South Carolina: An Outline Genealogy and History of the First Five Generations.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 50 (1949): 29–45. Pendleton, Philip. Oley Valley Heritage: The Colonial Years, 1700–1775. Birdsboro: Pennsylvania German Society, 1994. Perkins, William. Discourses on the Damned Art of Witchcraft. Cambridge, 1608. Peterson, Mark A. “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 58, no. 2 (April 2001): 307–46. Pierson, William. American Buildings and their Architects: The Colonial and Neoclassical Styles. Vol. 1. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Pilmore, Joseph. The Journal of Joseph Pilmore. Philadelphia: Message Publishing, 1969. Pinckney, Elisa Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Luca Pinckney, 1739–1762. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1972. Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. 2 vols. Translated by B. Jowett. New York: Random House, 1937. Poesch, Jessie. The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560–1860. New York: Harrison House, 1983. Pogue, Dennis. “The Transformation of America: Georgian Sensibility, Capitalist Conspiracy, or Consumer Revolution?” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 2 (2001): 41–57. Pollock, Linda A. “Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy among the Elite of Early Modern England.” In Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its Interpretations, edited by Adrian Wilson, 78–96. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Pool, Robert, and John Cash. Views of the Most Remarkable Public Buildings, Monuments and Other Edifices in the City of Dublin. Dublin: The Dublin Society, 1780. Porcher, Anne Alston, ed. “Minutes of the Vestry of St. Stephen’s Parish, 1754–1783.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 45 (1944): 56–70, 157–71, 217–21; and South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 46 (1945): 40–48. Porcher, Jennie Rose, and Anna Wells Rutledge. The Silver of St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, 1670–1970. Charleston, S.C.: St. Philip’s Church, 1970. Port, Michael H. The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711–27; A Calendar. London: London Record Society, 1986. Port Royal Project Staff. “The Port Royal Project.” Jamaica Journal 4, no. 2 ( June 1970): 2–12. Powell, William S. The Proprietors of Carolina. Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1963. Price, Francis. The British Carpenter: or, A Treatise on Carpentry, Containing the Most Concise and Authentick Rules of That Art. London, 1733. Price, Percival. Bells and Man. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Promey, Sally M. “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’: Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety.” Material Religion 1 (2005): 10–47. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” In Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 466

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Š. “Style as Evidence.” In Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Puig, Frances J., and Michael Conforti, eds. The American Craftsman and the European Tradition, 1620–1820. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Quattlebaum, Alberta L., George Rowe Townsend, and Katherine Wells. All Saints Church Waccamaw, 1739–1968. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1994. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Ragatz, L. J. The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833. New York and London: The Century Co., 1928. Ramsay, David. History of South Carolina from Its First Settlements in 1670 to the Year 1808. 2 vols. Charleston, S.C.: Walker, 1809. Rath, Richard Cullen. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Rauschenberg, Bradford L. “Coffin Making and Undertaking in Charleston and Its Environs, 1705–1820.” Journal of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts 16, no. 1 (May 1990): 18–59. Rauschenberg, Bradford L., and John Bivins Jr. The Furniture of Charleston, 1680– 1820. Winston-Salem: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 2003. Ravenel, Beatrice St. Julien. Architects of Charleston. Charleston: Carolina Art Association, 1945. ‰. “Pioneer Timepiece Makers.” Magazine Antiques 37 (March 1940): 129. The Register Book for the Parish Prince Frederick Winyaw. Baltimore: The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1916. Reid, Melanie Sovine. “@‘Neither Adding nor Taking Away’: The Care and Keeping of Primitive Baptists Church Houses.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 1. Edited by Camille Wells. Annapolis, Md.: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 1982. Report of the Committee on the Destruction of Churches in the Diocese of South Carolina, during the Late War. Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans, and Cogswell, 1868. Reps, John W. Tidewater Towns: City Planning in Colonial Virginia and Maryland. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1972. Richard Marks Restorations. “Old St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church: Archaeological and Architectural Findings.” Unpublished report, 2005. Rilling, Donna J. Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Roberts, K., and A. M. Roberts, trans. and eds. Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1947. Roenker, Katherine. “The Fruits of Change: The Evolution of the Pineapple as a Design Motif.” Unpublished paper, MESDA Summer Institute, 2002. Rogers, George C., Jr. Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1969. ‰. “Evidence for the Apprenticeship System in Charleston, South Carolina.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts XXIX, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 1–68. Rowland, Lawrence, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers Jr. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina. Vol. 1, 1514–1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. An Inventory of Nonconformist Chapels and Meeting Houses in Central England. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1986. Sachse, Julius F. Benjamin Franklin as a Freemason: Address to the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1906. BIB LIOGRAPHY

467

St. George, Robert Blair. “Artifacts of Regional Consciousness in the Connecticut River Valley, 1700–1800.” In The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut River Valley, 1635–1820. Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985. ‰. Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. ‰. “@‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England.” In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlatch, 336–66. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Salley, A. S., Jr. The History of Orangeburg County, South Carolina. Orangeburg, S.C.: R. Lewis Berry, 1898. ‰, ed. Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, June 2, 1724, to June 16, 1724. General Assembly of South Carolina, 1944. ‰, ed. Minutes of the Vestry of St. Helena’s Parish, South Carolina, 1726–1812. Columbia: The State Company, 1919. Sanderson, J. Change Ringing: The History of an English Art. Guilford, England: Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, 1997. Sarna, Jonathan D. “Seating and the American Synagogue.” In Religion in American History: A Reader, edited by Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, 397–410. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Saunders, Katherine. “@‘As regular and fformidable as any such woorke in America’: The Walled City of Charles Town.” In Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies, edited by J. W. Joseph and Martha Zierden, 198–214. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Schellekens, Jona. “Scrolled Gables of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in the Low Countries.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51, no. 4 (December 1992): 430–35. Schless, Nancy. “The Province House: English and Netherlandish Forms in Gables and Chimneys.” Old Time New England 62, no. 2 (April–June 1972): 115–23. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Sellers, Leila. Charleston Business on the Eve of the Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934. Severens, Kenneth. “Emigration and Provincialism: Samuel Cardy’s Architectural Career in the Atlantic World.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 5 (1990): 21–36. ‰. Southern Architecture. New York: R. P. Dulton, 1981. Shackel, Paul. Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Sheehan, Jonathan. “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay.” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1061–80. Shoemaker, A. L., ed. The Pennsylvania Barn. Kutstown: Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 1959. A Short History of the Diocese of South Carolina. Charleston, S.C.: The Dalcho Historical Society, 1953. Simmons, L. C., ed. “Records of the Willtown Presbyterian Church, 1738–1941.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 62 (December 12, 1965). Simons, Albert, and Samuel Lapham Jr., eds. The Early Architecture of Charleston. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970. Simpson, Pamela H. “Linoleum and Lincrusta: The Democratic Coverings for Floors and Walls.” In Exploring Everyday Landscapes, edited by Annmarie Adams 468

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and Sally McMurry, 281–92. Vol. 7 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Sinnott, Edmund. Meetinghouse and Church in Early New England. New York: McGraw Hill, 1963. Sirmans, M. Eugene. Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Smith, D. E. Huger, and A. S. Salley Jr., eds. The Register of St. Philip’s Parish, 1754–1810, Charleston, S.C., vol. 2. Charleston, S.C.: Walter Evans and Cogswell, 1927. Smith, E. Baldwin. The Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. Smith, Henry A. M. “Beaufort: The Original Plan and the Earliest Settlers.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9 ( July 1908): 141–51. ‰. “Charleston: The Original Plan and the Earliest Settlers.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9 (1908): 12–27. ‰. “Childsbury.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 15 (April 1914): 107–12. ‰. “Georgetown—the Original Plan and the Earliest Settlers.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9, no. 2 (April 1908): 85–95. ‰. “Radnor, Edmundsbury, and Jacksonborough.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 11, no. 1 ( January 1910): 40–49. Smith, Jonathan Z. Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden: Brill, 1978. Smith, Mark M. Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ‰. “Old South Time in Comparative Perspective.” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1432–69. Smith, Ryan. “The Cross: Church Symbol and Contest in Nineteenth-Century America.” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 70, no. 4 (December 2001): 705–34. Smith, Samuel. “Henry Laurens: Christian Pietist.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 100 (April 1999): 143–70. Smyth, Charles Hugh Egerton. The Art of Preaching. New York: Macmillan Co., 1940. A Society of Gentlemen. A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Comprehending All the Branches of Useful Knowledge. 6 vols. London: W. Owen, 1754. Soo, Linda M. Wren’s “Tracts” on Architecture and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Spellman, W. M. The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Spurr, John. The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Stearns, Raymond. Science in the British Colonies of America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Stevenson, Robert. Protestant Church Music in America: A Short Survey of Men and Movements from 1564 to the Present. New York: Norton, 1966. Stewart, J. A View of the Present and Past State of the Island of Jamaica; With Remarks on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Slaves, and on the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies. New York, 1823. Stewart, John. An Account of Jamaica and Its Inhabitants. London, 1808. Stilgoe, John R. Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982. BIB LIOGRAPHY

469

Stine, L. F., and others. “Blue Beads as African-American Cultural Symbols.” Historical Archaeology 30, no. 3 (1996): 49–75. Stoney, Samuel Gaillard. “Building a Church on the Santee, 1804–1807.” Charleston Museum Leaflet No. 21. Charleston: The Charleston Museum, 1945. ‰. Plantations of the Carolina Lowcountry. Charleston, S.C.: Carolina Art Association, 1938. ‰. This Is Charleston: An Architectural Survey of a Unique American City. Charleston: Carolina Art Association, 1944. Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991. Summers, Peter, ed. Hatchments in Britain, vol. 2. London: Phillimore, 1976. Summerson, John. Architecture in Britian, 1530 to 1830. 9th ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Sweeny, Kevin M. “Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches: Changing Perceptions of Sacred and Secular Space in Southern New England, 1720–1850.” Winterthur Portfolio 28, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 59–61. Sykes, Norman. Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934. ‰. Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669–1748: A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 1926. Tarlow, Sarah. Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Temperley, Nicholas. The Music of the English Parish Church. 2 vols. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ‰. “The Old Way of Singing: Its Origins and Development.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 (1981): 511–44. Tennant, R. C. “The Anglican Response to Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity.” In Philosophy, Religion, and Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by John W. Tolton, 188–205. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1990. Thomas, Dalby. Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West Indies. London, 1690. Thomas, John P. “The Barbadians in Early South Carolina.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 31 (1930): 75–92. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Thomas, Samuel. “Letters of the Rev. Samuel Thomas.” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 4 (1903): 221–30, 278–85. Thomas, Sidney. A Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina, 1820–1957. Columbia: R. L. Bryan, 1957. Thompson, H. P. Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1950. London: S.P.C.K., 1951. Todd, John R., and Francis M. Hutson. Prince William’s Parish and Plantations. Richmond, Va.: Garrett and Massie, 1935. Tompkins, George Johnson. “The Ashes of Our Fathers, the Temples of Our God: An Architectural History of St. Andrew’s Parish Church, Charleston County, South Carolina, with Proposals for Restoration and a Columbarium.” Ph.D. diss., University of the South, 1990. Trapier, Rev. Paul. Incidents in My life: The Autobiography of the Rev. Paul Trapier, S.T.D., with Some of His Letters. Edited by George W. Williams. Charleston: Publications of the Dalcho Historical Society of the Diocese of South Carolina, 1954. Turner, Mary Ellen. “John Blake White: An Introduction.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 16 (May 1990): 1–17. 470

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. ‰. “Variations on a Theme of Liminality.” In Secular Ritual, edited by Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, 36–52. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977. “Up the Ashley and Cooper.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1875. Upton, Dell. “Anglican Parish Churches in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 2. Edited by Camille Wells, 90–101. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. ‰. Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1986. ‰. “Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Domestic Architecture in America, 1800–1860.” Winterthur Portfolio 19 (1984): 107–124. ‰. “Toward a Performance Theory of Vernacular Architecture: Early Tidewater Virginia as a Case Study.” Folklore Forum 12 (1979): 173–96. ‰. “White and Black Landscapes of Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” Places 2 (1985): 59–72. Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Van Horne, John C. Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717–1777. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Vernon, Vice-Admiral. A New History of Jamaica from the Earliest Accounts to the Taking of Porto Bello; Thirteen Letters from a Gentleman to His Friend. London, 1740. Vlatch, John Michael. “@‘Snug Li’l House with Flue and Oven’: NineteenthCentury Reforms in Plantation Slave Housing.” In Gender, Class, and Shelter, edited by Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter Hudgins, 118–32. Vol. 5 of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Waddell, Gene. Charleston Architecture, 1670–1860. Charleston: Wyrick, 2003. ‰. “The Charleston Single House: An Architectural Survey.” Preservation Progress 22 (March 1977): 4–8. Wallace, David D. South Carolina: A Short History, 1520–1948. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. Vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Walsh, John, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor. The Church of England, 1689–1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Walsh, Richard. Charleston’s Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763–1789. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1959. Walsh, Lorena S. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: A History of a Slave Community. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Ward, Barbara Mclean. “In a Feasting Posture: Communion Vessels and Community Values in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century New England.” Winterthur Portfolio 23 (Spring 1988): 1–24. Ward, Edward. A Trip to Jamaica: With a True Character of the People and the Island. London, 1700. Waring, Joseph Ioor. St. James Church Goose Creek, South Carolina: A Sketch of the Parish 1707–1909. Charleston, S.C.: The Daggett Printing Co., 1909. BIB LIOGRAPHY

471

Waterhouse, Richard. “England, the Caribbean, and the Settlement of Carolina.” Journal of American Studies 9 (December 1975): 259–81. ‰. A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670–1770. New York and London: Garland, 1989. ‰. “The Responsible Gentry of Colonial South Carolina: A Study in Local Government, 1670–1770.” In Town and Country: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies, edited by Bruce C. Daniels, 160–85. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. Watters, David H. “A Priest to the Temple.” In Puritan Gravestone Art II, edited by Peter Benes for the Dublin Seminar in New England Folklife, 25–36. Boston: Boston University Press, 1978. ‰. “With Bodilie Eyes”: Eschatological Themes in Puritan Literature and Gravestone Art. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981. Weir, Robert M. Colonial South Carolina: A History. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1983. Weis, Frederick Lewis. The Colonial Clergy of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Boston: Genealogical Publications Committee, 1955. Welch, Edwin. Two Calvinist Methodist Chapels, 1743–1811. London: London Record Society, 1975. Wells, Camille. “Introduction.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 1. Edited by Camille Wells, 5–6. Annapolis, Md.: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 1982. ‰. “Old Claims and New Demands: Vernacular Architecture Studies Today.” In Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. Vol. 2. Edited by Camille Wells, 1–10. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Whaley, Joachim, ed. Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Whiffen, Marcus. The Public Buildings of Williamsburg. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1958. ‰. Stuart and Georgian Churches. London: B. T. Batsford, 1947. Whiffen, Marcus, and Frederick Koeper. American Architecture, 1607–1976. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. Whistler, Laurence. The Imagination of Vanbrugh and His Fellow Artists. London: Art and Technics, 1954. ‰. Sir John Vanbrugh, Architect and Dramatist, 1664–1726. New York: Macmillan, 1939. White, Christopher. Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. White, Shane, and Graham White. Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Song, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon, 2005. White, James F. Protestant Worship and Church Architecture: Theological and Historical Considerations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Wilkinson, C. P. Seabrook. “A Declaration of Dependence: Robert Smith’s 1775 Humiliation Sermon.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 100 ( July 1999): 221–40. Williams, George. “Change Ringing in the Carolina Lowcountry: A Record of Full-Circle Ringing from 1751 to 2000.” Charleston: Privately published pamphlet, 1999. ‰. “Charleston Church Music, 1562–1833.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 7 (Spring 1954): 35–40. ‰. “Eighteenth-Century Organists at St. Michael’s.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 53 (1952): 212–22. ‰. Jacob Eckhard’s Choirmaster’s Book of 1809. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971.

472

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‰. St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, 1751–1951. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951. ‰. “@‘Sweetness Itself ’: The Quarter Chime of St. Michael’s, Charleston.” Carologue: A Publication of the South Carolina Historical Society (Spring 1997): 14–17. Williams, Wilma. “Early Kingston.” Jamaica Journal 5, nos. 2–3 ( June 1971): 3–8. Williamson, Tom. “The Nonconformist Chapels Survey, Preliminary Results.” In Religious Dissent in East Anglia. East Anglia: Center for East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia, 1993. Wilson, John H. “ESCN Database Reports: A Reference Guide to Local News and Advertisements Found in the Early South Carolina Newspapers, 1733–1760.” Winterthur Museum: unpublished manuscript, 1997. Wilson, Ruth M. Anglican Chant and Chanting in England, Scotland, and America, 1660 to 1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Winiarski, Douglas L. “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. 61, no. 1 ( January 2004): 3–36. Wittman, Reinhard. “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 284–312. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Wood, Bradford J. “@‘A Constant Attendance on God’s Alter’: Death, Disease, and the Anglican Church in Colonial South Carolina, 1706–1750.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 100, no. 3 ( July 1999): 204–20. Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf, 1974. ‰. “Jesus Christ Has Got Thee at Last: Afro-American Conversion as a Forgotten Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Southern Intellectual History.” Bulletin for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Religion 3, no. 3 (November 1979): 2–7. Woodmason, Charles. The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant. Edited by Richard J. Hooker. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953. Woolverton, John Frederick. Colonial Anglicanism in North America. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1984. Wren, Christopher. Parentalia; or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens. London, 1750. Wright, Philip. Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1966. Wright, Susan, ed. Parish, Church, and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–1750. London: Hutchinson, 1988. Yates, Nigel. Buildings, Faith, and Worship. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Yeomans, David T. The Trussed Roof: Its History and Development. Aldershot, England: Scolar, 1992. Yoder, Donald. Discovering American Folklife: Studies in Ethnic, Religious, and Regional Culture. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990. Yuhl, Stephanie. A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Zea, Philip. “Rural Craftsmanship and Design.” In New England Furniture: The Colonial Era, edited by Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, 47–72. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Zierdon, Martha, Jeanne Calhoun, and Debi Hacker-Norton. “Archdale Hall: Investigations of a Lowcountry Plantation.” Charleston Museum Archaeological Contributions 10 (1985).

BIB LIOGRAPHY

473

This page intentionally left blank

I NDE X

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Acculturation, 357 Act of Toleration of 1689, 89 Act to Build Fifty New Churches in London, 15, 22 Addison, Joseph, 144, 212 All Saints (Derby, England), 56 All Saints Parish, 93, 119, 372 Allston, Josiah, 119 Alms basin, 108, 108, 206–7, 210, 379–81 Altar. See Communion table Altarpiece, 21, 64, 91, 118, 127–29, 128–29, 134 Altar rail, 88–89 Anabaptists, 285 Antigua, 77, 80, 97, 98, 103, 238, 257, 277 Apostles’ Creed, 91, 128–29, 162, 185, 193, 196, 221, 297 Apotropaic devices, 159, 161 Archdale Hall, 66, 160, 160–61, 270 Arched windows, 68, 71, 91, 144; types of, 62–63, 131; rejection by Dissenters, 145–47; as signifier of the sacred, 150–52, 161, 163, 167, 173 Archer, Thomas, 28, 40, 45, 56, 391 (n. 57) Architects, 24, 47, 53, 115, 136, 344, 366, 445 (n. 55) Architectural models, 25–27, 41 Architectural pattern books, 40, 73, 94, 110, 113, 118, 127, 138, 145, 393 (n. 91); as design sources, 28, 32, 51–52, 128–29, 134 Architectural plans, 39, 113, 115, 119, 120, 123 Auditory plan, 49, 59, 72–77, 93–94, 111 Augustine of Hippo, 143 Aura, 165

Axson, William, 113, 124–29, 128, 134, 137, 175, 177, 405 (n. 86) Bacon, Francis, 224 Baptism, 152–53, 179, 182–90, 198; bowl, 183, 185, 215; theology of, 184; service, 184–85; private, 185–86, 214–15, 188–89; gown, 188, 188 Baptists, 8, 145–46, 304, 350–51 Barbados, 76, 79–80, 103, 253–59, 262, 274–75, 277, 311 Barrel-vaulted ceilings, 20, 21, 57, 62–64, 142, 142, 171, 354, 396 (n. 14); supplanted by tray ceilings, 91, 95, 217; theological significance of, 142–45, 150, 163, 173–74, 409 (n. 12); and Ptolomaic universe, 220; and musical performance, 235 Beach Hill Chapel (St. Paul’s Parish), 49, 373 Beacon fund, 47 Beaker, 108 Beale, Othniel, 40, 322, 383, 393 (nn. 86, 88) Beauty, 219–20, 230–34 Bee, John, 17 Bee family, 187 Belfry, 324 Bellinger, Edmund, 48 Bells, 20, 39, 63, 290; and sacred time, 167–68, 174; warding off evil spirits, 169; and music, 231–32; and natural time, 279; and funerals, 281, 294; and clock time, 296–97 Benches, 73, 195–96, 315–16, 317, 324 Bethel Methodist Church, 146 Beveridge, William, 191 Bibles, 153, 161, 163–65

Black Oak Chapel (St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish), 374 Body, theology of, 141, 180–81 Body/building metaphor, 181–82 Book of Common Prayer, 164–65 Books, sacred and religious, 163–65 Boone, Thomas, 210 Boschi, Charles, 177 Boston, 155 Brailsford, Edward, 149, 170, 187–88, 208 Brewton, Miles, I (silversmith), 108, 175, 177 Brewton, Miles, II (merchant), 318, 320, 322, 325, 383 Brick construction, 64–65, 259 Brick House, 66, 67 Brick masonry, 66–68 Broughton, Thomas, 88, 118, 263; wife (Mrs. Thomas Broughton), 155 Bryan, Hugh, 221, 303–4 Building commissioners, 113–15, 118, 121–23, 133 Bull, Commissary, 222 Bull, John, 99, 104 Bull, Mary, 99 Bull, Stephen, 50 Bull, William, I, 47–49, 53, 319–20, 395 (n. 122) Bull, William, II, 40, 49–50, 136, 383, 393 (n. 86), 395 (n. 123), 407 (n. 116) Bull family, 187 Bull family tombs, 97, 98–99 Bull’s-eye window, 91 Burnett, Henry, 133–35 Campbell, Colin, 51–52, 130 Canns, 107 Canopy (over pulpit), 82, 89, 90, 91, 134, 175, 190, 190, 328, 345; as sign of authority, 192; as sounding board, 234 Cantey, Charles, 121 Cardy, Samuel, 46, 47, 73, 124, 132–33, 135–36, 406 (nn. 100, 101) Caribbean, Anglican churches in, 76–82 Carolina-Caribbean connection, 253–58 Cartesian view of the world, 220 Catholics, 351 Cedar, 166–67, 172, 174 Chalice, 107–8, 108, 173, 175, 177, 206– 10, 207, 214, 379–81; and memory, 208–10

476

INDEX

Chambers, William, 40 Chancel, 24, 50, 57, 59, 91, 162, 175, 348–49, 360; internal chancel, 20, 203, 236, 263; as site of honorific burial, 49; chamber chancel, 62, 77, 86–88, 94, 204; screen, 63, 82–83, 86, 86, 89, 262; distinction from nave, 83, 205; absence of, 84–85, 204; chamber chancel, 86–87, 87, 88, 95; minister’s space, 114; window, 161; as site for Holy Communion, 182, 196–97, 200–205; niche chancel, 217; as sound shell, 236 Change ringing, 231–32 Chapels of ease, 91–93, 117 Charleston Library Society, 40, 393 (n. 89) Cheesman, Thomas, 127 Cherubs, 153, 155, 159, 159–61, 167, 171, 173–74, 217, 221 Chest tomb, 49, 58, 59, 97, 98–99, 109, 375–78 Chihaw Chapel (St. Bartholomew’s Parish), 373 Childsbury. See Strawberry Chapel Christ Church (Philadelphia), 31, 33, 56 Christ Church (Spitalfields, London), 45 Christ Church Parish, 164, 180, 207; parish silver of, 108, 109, 379, 381 Christ Church Parish Church (1707), 71, 116–17, 144, 371 Christ Church Parish Church (1727– 32), 72, 90, 95, 333, 372 Church Act of 1706, 4, 60, 115–16, 259, 286, 402 (n. 5) Church buildings: financing of, 40, 46–47, 115–18; cost of, 93–94; Anglican meaning of term, 147–48; as sacred space, 147–50; consecration of, 148–49 Church Militant, 173, 180–81, 184, 208–10, 213–14 Church of England, disestablishment of, 335–36 Church Triumphant, 173, 180–82, 184, 208–10, 213 Churchyard, 246–47 Cinnamon, 292 City churches, 56 Clark, Richard, 191, 233 Classical vocabulary, 130–32 Clerk’s desk, 133, 194

Clocks, 20, 279, 281, 296, 298 Cock, symbol of, 13, 20, 173, 296 Coffin, 294 Colleton, John, 313 Combahee River, chapel at (St. Helena’s Parish), 49, 373 Communion. See Holy Communion Communion silver, 21, 107, 175, 179, 182, 206–8, 213; inscriptions, 210; gifting of, 211 Communion table, 60, 85, 87–89, 88, 118, 123, 125, 166, 193, 215, 263, 306, 356; placement of, 82, 84–85, 89, 203– 4; linen, 60; theological significance, 84; as site for Holy Communion, 179, 196–200, 206, 212; as object of contest, 182 Congregationalists, 8, 145, 351 Construction: stone, 64; brick, 64–65, 259; timber-frame, 258; earthfast, 259 Convenience, 345–47 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 224, 230, 283 Copernicus, 144, 220 Cornices, 66, 91, 94 Creed. See Apostles’ Creed Cross, 152; sign of, 152 Cruciform plan, 59–61, 93, 153, 260–62, 273–76, 399 (nn. 71, 73) Cupola, 28, 30 Curfew, 298 Curtain, 171, 173 Curvilinear gables, 91, 96–97, 111 Cushion, 60, 195 Customs house. See Exchange and Customs House Death, theology of, 141 Death’s head, 104–5, 109, 155–56, 242, 245, 247, 401 (n. 110) Decalogue, 128–29, 162, 165, 196, 297 Dehon, Theodore, 338, 344, 346, 348, 363 Demons, 157, 169, 174 Descartes, René, 168, 220 Design process, 53, 118–21, 125–36 Deveaux, James, 48 Dissemination model, 255 Dissenters, 182, 187, 300 Dogs in church, 84, 149 Dorchester meetinghouse, 145, 145 Douxsaint, Paul, 137 Doves, as symbol, 175, 182, 190, 192, 217, 422 (n. 1)

Drayton, Reverend, 1 Dunn, William, 185 Dupre, Joseph, 121 Durand, Levi, 92, 221–22, 225, 240 Durand, Reverend, 167 Durand, William, 178 Earthfast construction, 259 Edict of Nantes, 60 Edisto Island, chapel on (St. John’s, Colleton, Parish), 349, 374 Edmundsbury, chapel at (St. Bartholomew’s Parish) 93, 96, 333, 372 Egalitarianism, 349 Elfe, Thomas, 133, 135, 294, 322 441 (n. 58) Ellerton, James, 149, 178 Elliott family, 187 Elms, The, 160 English bond, 65, 65, 67, 71 Enlightenment, 4 Episcopal Church (Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States), establishment, 337 Epitaphs, 241 Eschaw Chapel (St. James, Santee, Parish), 373 Escutcheons, 294 Ethnicity, 356–57 Evangelicalism, 8; rise of 300–307 Evil: spirits, 152, 169; supernatural, 157–60, 169, 174 Exchange and Customs House, 96 Exeter, 66 Faculty psychology, 222, 424 (n. 35) Family: crest, 58, 160; identity, 187; mausoleum, 272, 272 Fashion, 96, 111, 118, 138, 150, 277, 307, 391 (n. 51); rise in mid-eighteenth century, 71, 113, 127 Fasting, 178 Fenwick, Edward, 40 Fenwick family, 187 Fieldwork, importance of, 8 Fire engine, 22 First Baptist Church, 352, 354 First Scots Presbyterian Church, 352, 353, 358, 362 Flagon, 107, 108, 206, 210, 379–81 Flaming hearts, 170 Flat-topped window, 146 IN D EX

477

Flemish bond, 65, 65, 67–68, 71, 109 Fonts, 57, 91, 119, 162, 175, 183, 190, 214, 348, 422 (n. 181); near western entrance, 25, 182; rarity in South Carolina, 91, 183, 306; moved to chancels, 334, 348; Ford, Timothy, 179, 182 Fordyce, John, 93 Forehand, Anthony, 129 Fowler, Elizabeth, 155, 156 Frame construction, 68–69 Free churches, 362 Freemasonry, 113, 136–37, 172, 225, 393 (n. 83), 407 (nn. 116, 118) French Chapel on Santee (St. James, Santee, Parish), 60, 373 French Huguenots, 60 Fundamental Constitutions, 4, 283, 285 Funerals, 290, 292–96; preparations, 292; procession, 295; liturgy, 295; great, 295 Galileo, 220 Galleries, 22, 73, 123, 125, 132, 217, 237, 266, 291, 291, 320, 350; intended for poor whites, 239, 313, 315, 317; for slaves, 239, 324, 340, 362 Gambrel roof, 355 Garden, Alexander, 114, 127, 186, 212, 234, 239, 295, 438 (n. 116); conflict with Whitefield, 222, 302–3 Georgia, 146 Georgian architecture, 3–4, 110, 217, 249, 388 (n. 9) Germans, 69 Ghosts, 157, 174 Giant orders, 13, 24 Gibbes, John and Jane, 269, 270 Gibbes, William, 322, 383 Gibbon, William, 17, 18 Gibbs, James, 19, 40–41, 45–46, 50, 52, 56, 391 (n. 57), 392 (n. 59) Glanville, Joseph, 157, 158 Glazed headers, 48, 65–66 Glen, James, 38, 43, 319 God: special presence of, 149; character of, 155 Goose Creek Men, 253 Graeme, James, 136 Grand Model, 283–85, 288 Grave board, wooden, 106, 106 Grave markers. See Headstones

478

INDEX

Gravestones. See Headstones Greater Caribbean, 8, 79, 82, 97, 101, 253–54, 258–59, 277, 366, 431 (n. 6); and planter class, 256–58, 262–78 Greene, John, 48 Guy, William, 62–63, 90, 117, 119, 122, 179, 182 Hags, 159–60 Harris, John, 40 Hartford Plantation, 64, 65 Hasell, Thomas, 179 Hassell, Reverend, 166 Hatchments, 291, 291, 294 Haunts, 159–60 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 23, 35, 40, 45–46, 52, 224, 391 (n. 57), 392 (n. 59) Headstones, 97–107, 103, 105, 109, 141, 156, 241, 242, 243, 245, 357–58, 357, 358, 375–78, 401 (n. 109); religious meanings of, 141–42, 146, 155–56, 240–45 Heaven, 141 Hepworth, Thomas, 18 Heraldic shields, 58, 97, 97, 160, 267–70, 272, 291, 294, 433 (n. 51) Hicks, George, 24–25; principles for church planning, 25 Hippocras, 292 Holy Communion, 83, 84, 180, 196–213, 301, 348, 420 (n. 133); preparation for, 198; frequency of, 198–99; slaves’ participation in, 199–200, 428 (n. 138); linens, 205–6 Hoopsa Neck Chapel. See Combahee River, chapel at Huguenot, 108, 127, 285, 352 Hunt, Bryan, 191, 198, 226, 229 Hurricane, damage by, 17, 18, 77–79, 117, 273, 399 (nn. 60, 62) Hutcheson, Francis, 230 Hutchinson, Francis, 157 Hutchinson, Thomas, 133 Il Gesu, Rome, 30, 32 Izard, Ralph, 18, 119, 212, 278, 292, 319, 383 Jamaica, 76–77, 80, 80–81, 99, 99–100, 103, 103, 253, 257–59, 261, 266–68, 274–77

James Island Chapel (St. Andrew’s Parish), 334, 373 Jefferson, Thomas, 52 Jenkins, Reverend Dr., 214 Johns Island, church on (St. John’s, Colleton, Parish), 342–44, 343, 347, 374 Johnson, George Milligen, 230 Johnson, Nathaniel, 178, 187, 285 Johnston, Gideon, 17, 22, 24–25, 27–28, 165, 177, 179, 206, 286, 295 Jones, Inigo, 53 Jones, Lewis, 92 Keith, Alexander, 149, 181, 213, 221 King’s Chapel, Boston, 56 Kneeling, 195–96 Knight, Nathaniel Johnson, 60 Langhorne, William, 48 Langley, Batty, 40, 46, 128, 129–30, 134, 138, 224 Langley Chapel (England), 71, 72, 85, 85 Latitudinarianism, 220, 241, 248 Laud, William, 84, 89, 203, 429 (n. 168) Laurens, Henry, 178, 297, 383 Ledger stone, 100–101, 101, 102, 109, 375–78 Leeward Islands, 76, 79–80, 253, 258, 277 LeJau, Francis, 148, 157, 159, 179, 185, 191, 199–200, 269, 317, 329 Le Pierre, Reverend, 199 Lessou, Reverend, 209 Lining out the Psalms, 226–28 Liturgical fittings, 82–91, 119, 175 Liturgy, 192–93, 227, 236 Lived religion, 367 Locke, John, 245, 283 Log construction, 69, 92 Longitudinal plan, 59, 71–72, 74, 76–77, 93, 110, 258 Lord’s Prayer, 91, 128–29, 162, 185, 192, 196, 295 Ludham, Richard, 66, 179 Lutherans, 351, 353–61 Lynche family, 187 Manigault, Ann Ashby, 188, 191 Manigault, Elizabeth, 293 Manigault, Gabriel, 40, 277, 287, 393 (nn. 86, 88)

Manigault, Peter, 119, 277, 297, 314, 327 Manigault family, 187 Marston, Reverend, 187 Massey, Joseph, 126 Material culture, 8, 366–67 Material religion, 3–4, 179–80 Mathematical proportions, 130–31, 224–25 Maule, Timothy, 89, 166, 254, 329 Mazyck, Isaac, 39–40, 322, 383, 393 (nn. 86, 88) Meade, Joseph, 35 Meetinghouses (Dissenter), 146–47, 305–6, 350–51 Memento mori, 104, 155, 242 Memorials, 267 Memory, 208–10, 212 Methodists, 352 Middleton, Arthur, 20, 118, 263, 267 Middleton, Henry, 318, 383 Middleton, Mary, 99 Middleton, Thomas, 40, 318, 383, 393 (n. 86) Millichamp, Timothy, 149, 230 Mills, Robert, 342, 344, 347 Models for London churches, 25–27 Moore, James, 20 Morris, Robert, 128, 224 Morritt, Thomas, 200 Motte, Isaac, 314 Motte, Jacob, 237, 319, 322, 383 Mourning: practices, 290–96, 292; rings, 293; gloves, 293–94; scarves, 293–94 Music, 225–29, 231–35 Neoclassicism, 52 Nevis, 79, 259, 268 New England, 207 Nicholson, Francis, 18, 116–17, 286, 296, 438 (n. 116) Norris, John, 187 Orangeburg Chapel (St. Matthew’s Parish), 374 Order, 279–81, 348–50, 434 (n. 5); lack of, 301, 306 Organ, 231, 232, 233 Orr, William, 186 Osborn, Reverend, 92 Oxford Movement, 76 INDEX

479

Pain, William, 40, 128 Palladio, Andrea, 32, 224 Palls, 294–96 Palmer, Joseph, 121 Parishes, 4, 5, 5, 388 (n. 10), 389 (n. 19) Parish minister, 326–29 Parris, Alexander, 17, 18 Parsons, James, 32 Paten, 107, 108, 206–7, 210, 379–81 Peedee River Chapel (Prince George’s Parish), 374 Pews: governor’s pew, 21; box pews, 21, 25, 57, 59, 73, 91, 132, 142, 167, 194, 194–96, 217, 354; subscriptions, 118, 309, 312, 313, 318–25, 441 (n. 50); lack of, 306; as seating, 309; uniformity of, 309, 313; great, 311–12; and wealth, 313–14, 318–25, 350; lining, 314; reserved for governor, 314; reserved for strangers, 314; women as owners, 321–22; for poor whites, 324; slip pews, 344 Physical comfort, 323, 345–46 Piano nobile, 24 Piety, 175, 178, 189, 212, 214 Pilmore, Joseph, 192, 214 Pinckney, Charles, 40, 96, 136, 230, 393 (n. 88), 407 (n. 116) Pinckney, Eliza Lucas, 155, 166, 178, 189, 191, 221–22, 229, 245–46, 303, 411 (n. 65) Pinckney, Thomas, 188 Pinckney family, 187 Pineapple, 134, 217, 423 (nn. 1, 2) Pineville Chapel (St. Stephen’s Parish), 338, 339, 341, 374 Pitt, William, statue of, 289, 289 Plat-eyes, 159, 161 Pompion Hill chapel (1706, in St. Thomas Parish), 60, 373 Pompion Hill Chapel (1763–66, in St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish), 93–95, 94, 130–31, 131, 175, 176, 177, 190, 190, 193, 193–94, 197, 374; chancel in, 94–95, 175, 196; construction of, 126–27; liturgical fittings in, 167, 175, 190, 193–94 Pon Pon Chapel (St. Bartholomew’s Parish), 93, 96, 342, 342, 345, 349, 372–73 Porticos, 24–25, 28, 32, 37, 43, 45, 50, 52, 56, 70, 94, 132, 287, 334, 342, 352, 358,

480

INDEX

361, 363 Portrait: roundel, 245; headstone, 247 Pouderous, Reverend, 192 Preaching, 84, 346; plain style, 192 Presbyterians, 8, 145, 285, 304–5, 351 Price, Francis, 73, 145 Prince Frederick Parish, 116, 207, 300; parish silver of, 380 Prince Frederick Parish Church, 72, 124, 313–14, 326, 371 Prince George, Winyah, Parish, 74, 93, 95–96, 117–18, 167–68, 200; parish silver of, 379–80. See also Peedee River Chapel; Santee Chapel; Wacamaw Chapel Prince George’s Parish Church, 69, 73, 122, 333, 349, 372 Prince William Parish, 94; parish silver of, 108, 380; meeting house in, 146 Prince William Parish Church, 15, 47–52, 48–49, 93, 230, 333, 349, 372; churchyard, 97 Prinzipalstuck, 356 Prioleau, Samuel, 132, 320, 407 (n. 116) Provincial Grand Lodge, 136 Ptolomaic view of universe, 144, 220 Pulpit, 20, 50, 57, 60, 64, 89, 91, 125, 132, 134, 162, 165–67, 175, 177, 180, 182, 190, 214, 217, 237, 263, 360; placement of, 59, 345, 334, 338, 347–49, 354; cloth, 60; as site of contest, 82, 328; history of 84, 89; triple-decker, 89, 90, 133; design of, 118, 134–35, 134, 135, 190; as site for sermon, 190; as liturgical center, 193; absence of, 306; stage pulpit, 347 Quakers, 285, 350, 352 Quincy, Josiah, 280 Quoins, 64, 66–67 Reading desk, 60, 82, 89, 118, 133, 166, 193, 193–94, 263, 334 Regularity, 222–30, 307 Regular singing. See Singing, regular Regulators, 304 Republican virtues, 361 Reredos. See Alterpiece Revolutionary War, 333 Rhett, William, 17, 240, 270; grave slab of, 100; Colonel and Madame Rhett, 206

Rice culture, 257, 275 Roman temple, 50 Rood screen, 83, 83, 86, 89 Rosemary, 295 Roughcast, 19–20, 62, 70–71, 397 (n. 30) Sacred geometry, 141–52 Sacred texts, 161–65, 171; read and spoken, 161–62 St. Alphege’s Church (Greenwich, England), 22, 23, 28, 45–46 St. Andrew’s Parish, 122, 198, 315; parish silver of, 380. See also James Island Chapel St. Andrew’s Parish Church: after 1723 addition, 57–58, 57, 58, 62, 66, 70–71, 144, 153, 168, 183, 260, 270, 371; before 1723 addition, 60, 61, 72, 86, 89–90, 121, 265, 327–28, 371; plan of, 61, 75–76, 87, 95, 261; funding for, 116–17; as sacred space, 153; chancel of, 200; organ in, 231 St. Bartholomew’s Parish, 92, 117, 177, 187. See also Chihaw Chapel; Edmundsbury Chapel; Pon Pon Chapel St. Carolus Borromeus Church (Antwerp), 30, 31 St. David’s Parish, 118, 123 St. David’s Parish Church, 63, 69, 69, 144, 372 St. George’s (Bloomsbury, London), 45 St. George’s, Dorchester, Parish Church, 87, 121, 121, 124, 168, 171, 231, 333, 371–72; tower of, 63, 64; cost of, 116, 118; plan of, 153, 204; St. George’s Parish, 76, 117, 178, 185; parish silver of, 380 St. Helena’s Island chapel (St. Helena’s Parish), 69, 70, 70, 374 St. Helena’s Parish, 47, 49, 92, 117; parish silver of, 380. See also Combahee River, chapel at St. Helena’s Parish Church, 168, 171, 205, 309, 315, 349, 371; tower of, 63; size of, 87, 204; chancel in, 88 St. James, Goose Creek, Parish, 60, 127, 164; parish silver of, 379; first chapel in, 373 St. James, Goose Creek, Parish Church, 1, 2, 2, 64–68, 66, 71, 90, 130–32, 131, 144, 253, 254, 260, 265, 371;

rededication in 1876, 1–2; plan of, 6, 62, 72, 72, 75; connection to Caribbean, 8, 255; funding for, 118, 263; dedication of, 148; as sacred space, 153, 159, 159, 170, 170; chancel in, 161–62, 162, 165, 201–3, 202; churchyard of, 248; monuments in, 269; hatchment in, 291, 291; gallery in, 315; benches in, 316, 317; pulpit in, 345 St. James, Santee, Parish, 117, 192; parish silver of, 380–81. See also Eschaw Chapel; French Chapel on Santee; Wolf Trap Chapel St. James, Santee, Parish Church, 60, 68, 68, 94, 132, 137, 194, 194–95, 372 St. James chapel of ease (St. James, Goose Creek, Parish), 76, 76, 153, 261, 333, 373 St. John’s (Westminster, England), 45 St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish, 66, 67, 73, 75, 88, 89, 92, 116, 121, 127, 178, 198, 209; parish silver of, 109, 379–80; chapel in upper parish, 374. See also Black Oak Chapel; Strawberry Chapel St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish Church, 118, 166, 260, 329, 333, 371–72; size of, 93, 130; cost of, 94; dedication of, 149; liturgical fittings in, 194, 263; chancel of, 200; organ in, 231; churchyard of, 246; gallery in, 315 St. John’s, Colleton, 73, 116, 119, 194, 204–5, 309, 310, 313, 333, 333, 345, 347, 349–50, 372. See also Edisto Island Chapel; John’s Island Chapel St. John’s Lutheran Church, 353–61, 355, 359, 360 St. Kitts, 79, 79, 258 St. Luke’s Parish, 122, 372 St. Mark’s Parish, 123, 333, 372, 374 St. Martin-in-the-Fields (London), 19, 41, 42, 43, 46, 217 St. Mary-le-Strand (London), 50 St. Mary’s (Avington, Hampshire), 71 St. Matthew’s Parish, 372; parish silver of, 381. See also Orangeburg Chapel St. Michael’s Parish Church, 15, 39, 44, 48, 70, 165, 168, 182, 217, 218, 219, 288–89, 372; design of, 38–47, 49, 73, 74, 129, 132–36, 134; cost of, 46–47, 116; chancel of, 94, 200, 201, 205, INDEX

481

236, 347, 347; ceiling in, 96, 118, 235; construction of, 124, 127; liturgical fittings, 167, 182, 183, 190, 193; organ in, 231; bells of, 231–32, 290; galleries in, 237; clock on steeple, 279; location of, 288–90; steeple of, 289; pew subscriptions for, 318–26; parish silver of, 380–81 St. Paul’s, Covent Gardens (London), 56 St. Paul’s Cathedral (London), 22, 28, 56 St. Paul’s Church, Charleston (now St. Luke’s and St. Paul’s), 334–35, 335, 336, 337, 358, 363 St. Paul’s Parish, 49, 75, 117–18, 141–42, 148, 327 St. Paul’s Parish chapel, 340, 341 St. Paul’s Parish Church (Augusta, Georgia), 69, 71, 119, 120, 203–4, 230 St. Paul’s Parish Church, 93–94, 115, 153, 207, 333, 350, 371–72; parish churchyard of, 141; parish silver of, 379, 381. See also Beach Hill Chapel St. Peter’s Cathedral (Rome), 28 St. Philip’s, Birmingham (England), 28, 29, 30, 56 St. Philip’s Parish, 5, 178–79, 189, 199, 207; parish silver of, 206, 206–8, 207, 210, 379–81 St. Philip’s Parish Church, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 33, 44, 46, 48, 70, 73, 142, 172, 316, 371; construction of, 17–18; design of, 18–22, 28–38; chancel of, 114, 173, 201, 203, 206; as sacred space, 153; churchyard, 155, 189, 246, 270; bells of, 167–68, 279, 290; cupola of, 171; liturgical fittings in, 183, 193–94; interior, 232; and music, 235; monuments in, 237; location of, 281–84, 287; location of, 282–88; gallery in, 313, 315; benches in aisles, 316; first St. Philip’s Church, 373 St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Charleston, 362 St. Stephen’s Parish, 121, 300; parish silver of, 108, 108, 381. See also Pineville Chapel St. Stephen’s Parish Church, 6, 7, 91, 92, 93–94, 95, 96, 110, 126, 128, 130, 165, 298–99, 299, 307, 372; cost of, 93–94; construction of, 113, 115, 127; Freemasonry and, 113, 136; design of, 118, 128, 134; liturgical fittings in 167,

482

INDEX

182–83; gallery in, 315 St. Thomas and St. Denis Parish, 60, 126, 179, 199, 207; parish silver of, 175, 177, 379–80 St. Thomas’s Parish Church, 121, 166, 175, 177, 207, 315, 341, 341, 349, 371–72. See also Pompion Hill Chapel St. Thomas’s Parish Church (1706–8), 45, 62, 88 Santee Chapel (Prince George’s Parish), 340, 340, 344, 345, 349, 374 Satan, 157, 161; as “black man,” 157, 238 Satur, Jacob, 17 Saxby, George, 40 Scent, 166–67 Seabrook, Benjamin, 141, 155 Seating, 314, 318 Second Congregational Church, 351, 351 Second Presbyterian Church, 352, 352, 358 Segmental arches, 62, 66, 131 Sentimentalism, 247, 346, 347–48, 361, 363 Serlio, Sebastiano, 52, 54–55 Sermons, 191–92 Sheldon plantation, 48, 264 Signature bricks, 113, 121, 121, 126 Simons, Albert, 2 Sindrey, Elizabeth, 169 Singing, regular, 228–29 Salver. See Paten Slavery, 238–39, 298, 303–4 Slaves, 38, 178–79, 199–200, 274–76; as artisans, 118, 124–25; conversion of, 179; marriage of, 179; at Communion, 179, 239; baptism of, 185; revolts, 275; subtle resistance, 280, 325; burial practices of, 296; in church, 316–18, 324, 344, 362 Smith, Benjamin, 39–40, 45, 101, 136–37, 289, 319, 383, 393 (nn. 83, 86); ledger, 102 Smith, Josiah, 192, 297, 300 Smith, Robert, 149, 156, 167, 192, 209, 214, 223, 246, 290, 346 Smith family, 187 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 26–27 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 4–5, 17, 28, 49, 114, 117, 119, 179, 206

Soloman’s Lodge, 136–37 Sommers, Humphrey, 323 Soul, 141 Soul’s head, 104, 105, 109, 141, 155, 242, 245, 247, 401 (n. 110) Sound, power of, 167–69 Square windows, 144 Standing cup, 107 State house, 43, 44, 45 Steeples, 24–25, 39, 40, 45, 47, 70, 279, 289, 296, 334, 352, 358, 361, 363 Stone construction, 64 Stono Rebellion, 6, 238–39, 275 Strawberry Chapel (St. John’s, Berkeley, Parish), 62, 63, 69, 71, 73, 131, 166, 299, 373–74 Stringcourses, 66 Stucco, 57, 65, 68 Sugar Revolution, 256 Supernatural, 152–61, 169, 218, 221, 412 (n. 84) Tabby construction, 69–70 Tankard, 107–8, 108, 127 Taylor, Ebenezer, 82, 196, 327–28 Temple of Jerusalem, 35–38, 36–37, 166–67, 172, 415 (nn. 171, 172) Ten Commandments, 185 Tennant, William, 335–36 Tester. See Canopy Theus, Jeremiah, 321 Thirty-Nine Articles, 59, 184, 197–98 Thomas, Samuel, 187 Thorpe, Robert, 48 Tillotson, John, 191 Timber-frame construction, 258 Time: clocks, 168, 170, 279, 297–98; natural, 168, 170, 296–97; sacred, 168, 170–71, 174 Tower, 63, 64, 71, 121 Townsend, Stephen, 126 Transubstantiation, 180, 197 Tray ceiling, 91, 95, 95–96, 174, 217, 340 Treaty of Utrecht, 257 Trott, Nicholas, 157, 159 Trusses, 46, 73, 74, 75, 145, 398 (n. 45)

Undertaker, 113–14, 122, 123, 132–33, 138 Vanbrugh, John, 25, 28, 56, 311; principles for church design, 24 Varnod, Francis, 118, 178, 199 Venetian windows, 49, 91, 129, 132, 150, 196, 200, 217, 237, 340, 341 Vernacular architecture, 367 Vestry house, 121, 122 Vestry room, 61 Villalpando, Juan Bautista, 35 Villepontoux, Francis, 121, 126, 126, 405 (n. 82) Villepontoux, Zachariah, 121, 126–27 Virginia, 80, 97, 103, 107, 110, 155, 157, 160, 173, 175, 187, 253, 257–59, 261, 263, 270, 272–74, 277, 299, 309; parish churches in, 86 Virtues, 240, 247 Vitruvius, 52, 225 Wacamaw Chapel (Prince George’s Parish), 373 Water tables, 66–68 Wesley, Charles, 233 Wesley, John, 178 Whitefield, George, 6, 192, 221, 239, 302–4 Winteley, Reverend, 327 Witches, 157–58, 161, 174 Wolf Trap Chapel (St. James, Santee, Parish), 373 Wood, John (the elder), 224 Woodmason, Charles, 13, 30, 46, 48, 56, 149, 152, 181, 215, 223, 233, 301, 305–6 Words, the power of, 161, 201 Worship services: frequency, 178; in home, 187 Wragg, William, 271 Wren, Christopher, 22–25, 28, 35, 37, 40, 46, 56, 110, 204; principles for church planning, 24, 74 Yarnold, Benjamin, 137 Yemassee Indian War, 18, 314

IN D EX

483