Early in 1740, actor-turned-revivalist George Whitefield journeyed to Savannah after a preaching tour that had taken him to Philadelphia and New York before heading south to Charleston, where he arrived in January that year. At the time, Charleston was experiencing communal angst. A few months before, in September 1739, an uprising occurred in this colony where African slaves were a majority—perhaps even two-thirds of the population. Around two dozen whites lost their lives, and several plantations were burned.Footnote ¹ Popular belief held that a Catholic priest inspired the revolt since apparently many involved in the uprising were Catholic Kongo people who hoped to escape to St. Augustine where Spanish Catholic authorities had promised them freedom. The assault came on a Sunday early in September. Later that month new colonial legislation that required white men to be armed at all times—even while attending Sunday worship—would become law. Whites assumed that the timing was intended to assure that the revolt occurred before that provision took effect, since most did not ordinarily carry firearms to church on Sunday.

The Stono Rebellion was only one of many problems plaguing South Carolinians when Whitefield passed through, although the conditions of slavery and the lack of sustained efforts to evangelize among slaves troubled him deeply. Charleston, for example, had recently endured another malaria outbreak, an ongoing challenge of the colonial era.Footnote ² Even Whitefield's presence proved unsettling. St. Philip's, the bastion of the Church of England, refused to let him preach, though Whitefield was a Church of England priest. Only the Independent Meeting House, with New England Puritan antecedents, and the Huguenot Church granted him access.Footnote ³

Back in Savannah, Whitefield penned a “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” reflecting on his experiences, particularly his encounter with slavery. After commenting on the harshness of the slave system throughout the South, alluding to the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina and recent malaria and smallpox epidemics there, and no doubt bristling from his cold reception in the colony's largest settlement, Whitefield claimed that the hand of God was at work in these events to stir recalcitrant South Carolinians to improve their treatment of slaves and to submit to authentic religion. “God first generally corrects us with Whips;” he wrote, “if that will not do, he must chastize us with Scorpions.”Footnote ⁴ In his journals, Whitefield dismissed the religious timbre of the colony, alluding to Ezekiel's eschatological vision when he expressed dismay over so little stirring among the dry bones of Carolina in response to his cry to examine one's soul for signs of election and conversion.Footnote ⁵

That literally stinging response reveals much about both what Whitefield saw and what in retrospect he—and countless others—have overlooked about the religious life of Carolina. Scorpions are common even today in the Palmetto State and probably inhabited a mythic valley of dry bones in the colonial religious desert of Whitefield's imagination. Yet Whitefield's appraisal stands at odds with the later perception of South Carolina as a bastion of evangelical Christianity and one of the last states to jettison “blue laws” that regulated and restricted certain business activity on Sunday. I contend, though, that it was not an innate religious indifference that made Whitefield's sojourn less than ideal in his mind, but a complex religious and ethnic diversity that had brought many peoples and many faiths together in one colony—and a southern one at that. Neither Whitefield nor most later historians have recognized the richness of religious life in early Carolina or celebrated its diversity.Footnote ⁶

Historians have lifted up the middle colonies as providing the roots of the later diversity that became a hallmark of American religious life. In particular, Pennsylvania and its founder's “holy experiment” have become the favored templates for evolving patterns. After all, Penn welcomed to Philadelphia many religious and ethnic clusters, thanks to aggressive recruiting in Europe, particularly in Germany. With Scandinavian settlers in what became New Jersey and the Dutch Calvinist Reformed tradition undergirding New York life, the middle colonies became the prototype for this nation with the soul of a church. When religiously pluralistic Philadelphia hosted both the Continental Congress that declared independence from the British Crown and then the Constitutional Convention that produced a document whose first amendment forbade a national religious establishment and guaranteed free exercise of religion, the centrality of the mid-Atlantic region to foreshadowing American religious diversity became fixed. After all, as one moved south before the age of independence, one found legal establishment of the Church of England everywhere—in Maryland (1692), Virginia (1624), Carolina (1706), North Carolina after the formal division of Carolina into two in 1729,Footnote ⁷ and Georgia (1758). Virginia's establishment was perhaps the strongest and the most persistent in efforts to quash dissenters, who were always present. Indeed, the Virginia establishment has buttressed the image of the colonial South as more monolithically Anglican—at least in the coastal areas—than anywhere else, not as a bulwark of diversity.

What gets overlooked is the extent to which establishment varied from place to place, in terms of what it meant in legal terms and how it actually operated. Also overlooked is the extent to which a vibrant religious diversity took hold in South Carolina, where pundits joke that even today there are “more Baptists than people.” Pennsylvania had an extraordinary pluralism during the colonial epoch, but Carolina—what is now South Carolina—and to a lesser extent Maryland nurtured what one historian has called a “robust” religious pluralism.Footnote ⁸ My argument is that this southern pluralism exemplified by South Carolina—a pluralism amidst establishment—is as vital as Penn's holy experiment in paving the way for the diversity that cascades across American religious history. Developments in Carolina were a harbinger of what was to come, though its pluralism and liberty may not always have denoted a generous toleration and some felt the pain of exclusion from both civil and religious acceptance. Yet as one recent essay claimed, “In many ways, South Carolina became early America's incubator for religious freedom and expression.”Footnote ⁹

What made pluralism possible in colonial South Carolina was a document known as the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Four or five documents bear that name, the first dated in 1669 and the last in 1698, a version that the colonial assembly was still discussing eight years later and tabled without action. Myth and mystery surround the Fundamental Constitutions, although copies are extant. Authorship, especially of the 1669 rendition that informed how the Lords Proprietors would set up their colonial settlement, remains elusive. For generations, John Locke was the presumed author, for there is a copy with a few paragraphs in his hand—though now that is disputed—and several editions of Locke's works include the Fundamental Constitutions. Most historians believe that Anthony Ashley Cooper crafted the document. Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, was the chief Lord Proprietor at the time settlement was proposed. John Locke, Ashley Cooper's secretary, simply transcribed it.Footnote ¹⁰

Sections describing the structure of colonial government, though echoing Whig political philosophy of the day, called for an extraordinarily complex feudal order—counties, seigniories, baronies, precincts—based on large numbers of settlers from designated social classes, along with an unusually convoluted system of courts. The vision bore no resemblance to the reality of setting up a colonial enterprise; virtually none of those provisions ever went into effect. A somewhat condensed version that appeared in 1670 served as a promotional piece to recruit settlers. No version received endorsement from the colonial assembly. Technically, none had the force of law. But the Fundamental Constitutions carried enormous symbolic significance.

The sections of the earliest versions pertaining to religion became hallowed icons that paved the way for robust pluralism to emerge in Carolina. Articles 96 through 110 of the 1669 draft reveal the posture that informed all later versions. Article 96 referred to the Church of England as “the only true and orthodox and the national religion of all the King's Dominions” and reserved any potential public financial support for religion solely for that body. One part of Article 97 trumped that passing reference to Anglicanism as the only true religion:

Additional provisions talked about what constituted a legitimate religion, with Article 100 noting that affirmation that “there is a God” and that “God is to be worshipped” was adequate. Subsequent articles forbade interrupting any religious assembly, or even disturbing, molesting, or persecuting anyone for “speculative opinions in religion, or his way of worship.”Footnote ¹² Looking back, the most negative provision granted freemen control over their slaves' religion, regardless what it was. Later versions had minor rephrasing. The 1682 version, for example, added affirmation of some future life to the beliefs making a religion legitimate. It also contained a clause urging Scottish Covenanter Presbyterians to come to Carolina, a clause that provoked local dissent. For the most part, principles articulated in 1669 remained in place.

Later commentators who cite the document lift up the phrase that extended a modest welcome to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters” but fail to note that all these are contrasted with the purity of genuine Christians. As well, the statement implies Christians who refused to identify with the Church of England were not Christian at all. In other words, there was little question that the Lords Proprietors were Anglicans through and through. Nonetheless, the wording suggested that Carolina settlement was open to just about anybody who did not disrupt the commonweal.

The contrast with Pennsylvania and Maryland, the other colonies celebrated for their diversity, is instructive. In Maryland, the 1649 Act of Toleration, often extolled as one of the legal precursors for the kind of religious freedom fixed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was far more restrictive. The second paragraph captures the spirit of the act:

The next paragraph, a nod to Maryland's being a refuge for English Catholics, prescribed fines for saying anything reproachful about the Blessed Virgin Mary. For Maryland, toleration extended only to fairly orthodox, Trinitarian-believing Christians. No Jews or heathens were welcome, and only dissenters who were Trinitarians.

On paper, Pennsylvania, whose earliest frame of government came in 1682 or just over a decade after the Fundamental Constitutions, is more generous than Maryland, but not as open to diversity as Carolina. Article XXXV noted:

Penn's approach opened the door to non-Trinitarians and even non-Christians, though it required theistic belief among colonists. There was some flexibility, and the province accepted those whom postmoderns might call “spiritual, but not religious” since it did not require having organized practices or institutions to sustain that belief.

On the surface, Carolina's approach seems extraordinarily inclusive, more so than Maryland's and Pennsylvania's. Little wonder that the French philosopher Voltaire, writing a tract in 1673 extolling toleration and presuming Locke's authorship of the Fundamental Constitutions, could say, “Jetez les yeux sur l'autre hémisphère, voyez le Caroline, dont le sage Locke fut le législateur” (“Cast your eyes on the other hemisphere, look at Carolina, for which the wise Locke was the lawmaker.”).Footnote ¹⁵ The record is more nuanced and the story not one of rampant religious liberty but of contention, compromise, and adaptation.

I. Early Religious Diversity in Carolina

An understanding of the variety of groups that found a home in the colony will show how South Carolina paved the way for later pluralism. Then, an examination of some of the contention that diversity generated will reveal that Carolinians struggled with the pluralistic culture taking hold. Looking at the Church Act of 1706 that legally established the Church of England will demonstrate that in Carolina establishment did not necessarily create the same challenges for other religious communities as it did elsewhere. Nonetheless, some retained reservations about diversity and sought to marginalize others on the basis of religion. Finally, what the Carolina experience tells us about Christianity and culture in America will provide a concluding appraisal.

Although scores of heathens did not jump at the chance to come to Carolina, between 1670 and 1740, persons aligned with an array of religious groups made their way to this province and lived in relative harmony. Anglicans, among the earliest arrivals, took just over a decade before constructing St. Philip's in Charleston, the first Church of England building, in 1681. Throughout the colonial period, Charleston remained the hub of the colony's Anglican population, who dominated political and economic life. St. Philip's remained the sole parish serving Charleston until 1751 when the assembly authorized a second, which became St. Michael's Church.Footnote ¹⁶ It is rather remarkable that it took more than ten years before Carolinians could boast of a Church of England structure, given the endorsement for Anglicanism the Lords Proprietors provided in the Fundamental Constitutions.

Equally remarkable, in that same year—1681—a Dissenter's Society organized. The name itself is suggestive, for the composition of this alternative body was somewhat eclectic. It included a very few English migrants inclined to Baptist ways, some who came from New England and believed Congregationalism best captured the Christian ethos, a smattering of Huguenots whose numbers grew quickly, and some Scots whose Calvinistic Presbyterian doctrine was closest to the beliefs of the Huguenots. They pooled resources to erect what became known as the “White Meeting House” and worshiped together for a time, demonstrating an ecumenicity within diversity. Other New England migrants clustered in Congregational churches near Dorchester (ca. 1696), also called the White Meeting House, and today's McClellanville (then the Wappetaw Independent Congregational Church, ca. 1700).

The Huguenots were the first to go their own way. With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the pace of the Huguenot diaspora picked up considerably. By 1687, numbers in Charleston warranted formation of a separate congregation, today an independent Calvinist church using an early eighteenth-century English translation of the French liturgy.Footnote ¹⁷ Although these French refugees clustered in half a dozen low country communities, Charleston remained the symbolic center. With stability came change. Churches catering to Huguenots in smaller communities succumbed to the spell of Anglicanism, perhaps because many Huguenots spent time in England after leaving France before embarking for Carolina. By 1706, only the French congregation in Charleston remained, though persons of Huguenot descent remained engaged in public life.

A half century after becoming part of the Dissenter's Society, many of Scots extraction in Charleston formed a congregation, still known affectionately as First (Scots) Presbyterian.Footnote ¹⁸ In some areas, churches with roots in New England Puritan Congregational migration drifted into the Presbyterian orbit. The aforementioned Dorchester White Meeting House and the Wappetaw Independent Church are two such congregations. Throughout the eighteenth century, Scots and Scots-Irish immigration to Carolina mushroomed, as it did throughout the English colonies. Scores made their way southward from Pennsylvania through Maryland and Virginia into Carolina. In time, the Scots-Irish presence buttressed the increased acceptance of an evangelical style of Christianity that in turn pushed toleration in yet other directions.Footnote ¹⁹ The first national census after independence indicated some 15 percent of South Carolina's whites were of Scots descent, although several thousand left during the war. Historian Erskine Clarke has reminded us that this influx allowed Independent Meeting House pastor William Tennent, when the American Revolution erupted, to observe that Reformed Calvinist dissenters comprised the largest single religious community in South Carolina, likely more than half the free population.Footnote ²⁰

Adding another dimension to this array of Christian groups were Quakers who were hardly welcome in most English colonies other than Pennsylvania. Quakers were present in small numbers in the 1670s, with some receiving direct encouragement from Ashley Cooper, by then Lord Shaftesbury, to relocate to Carolina. Shaftesbury asked Carolina governor Andrew Percivall to be “very kind” to a group of Quakers migrating in 1675, and to “give them all the assistance you can in the choice of a Place. . . . For they are people I have a great Regard to. . . .”Footnote ²¹ Friends had garnered sufficient numerical strength to organize a meeting in Charleston in 1682, the year after the formation of first Church of England parish and the Dissenter's Society. Mary Fisher, exiled from Boston in 1656, wound up settling in Charleston; she and her descendants became anchors of the Quaker community.Footnote ²²

Many early Carolina Quakers emigrated not from England but from Barbados, where they had exposure to slave culture.Footnote ²³ Some were slave owners, though most recoiled at the severity of the Barbadian slave system. Migration to Carolina increased when, based on a perception that Quakers were fomenting slave rebellions in Barbados, local authorities in 1680 outlawed Quaker meetings. The Quaker cause appeared to flourish when the proprietors in 1695 designated as governor John Archdale, one of their own who was a member of the Society of Friends. Archdale served barely a year, and soon Quaker ambivalence about militia service and the emerging cultural ethos of Carolina brought unfavorable attention. Nonetheless, a handful of other Quaker enclaves away from the Atlantic coast flourished well into the eighteenth century, with some of the stronger found in the Bush River area of the midlands.Footnote ²⁴

During the first third of the eighteenth century, German and German-speaking immigration increased slowly but steadily, in time planting a Lutheran presence in Carolina.Footnote ²⁵ Among the earliest were those with Swiss roots who settled along the Savannah River in the early 1730s at a place soon called Purrysburg, The area also attracted numbers of French settlers; it became a stopping point for those journeying between Charleston and Savannah. The following decade brought larger numbers of Germans, including some migrating from other colonies. While some remained in Charleston, scores moved inland as far as, and in some cases beyond, present-day Columbia; the area dubbed Dutch Fork echoes that, for as with the Pennsylvania Dutch, the word was originally Deutsch. For many years, Lutherans lacked formal organization or pastoral leadership. In 1742, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, renowned for his labors among Lutherans in Pennsylvania, spent a few weeks in Charleston on two occasions; his catechizing and preaching spurred organization of the first Lutheran church in the colony, St. John's in Charleston, but the congregation had no pastor until 1755 when Johannes Georg Friedrichs came to Charleston. One long-term result of the Lutheran settlement is a swath of communities and a county or two in the midlands around Newberry and Laurens, where Lutherans constitute the largest religious body.

No telling of the story of diversity dare neglect African American religious life. Less than half a century after the proprietors opened Carolina for settlement, those forced to migrate from Africa as slaves made up a majority of the population.Footnote ²⁶ Although the Fundamental Constitutions had granted slave owners the right to control the religious activity of those they held in bondage, that caveat was impossible to enforce. The sheer number of slaves meant that in Carolina there was a far greater likelihood that those in bondage would have ongoing association with others from their own native tribes or at least kindred tribes. In turn, they transplanted and adapted aspects of tribal culture, even under the harshness of the slave system. For African Americans, to extract the religious from the cultural was impossible. African spirituality, richly expressed in song and dance, struck whites as activity that was not religious at all; it lacked the sermon and sacrament by which they defined religion. Some masters, though, left references in diaries and papers that provide evidence of the Muslim identity of a minority of slaves.Footnote ²⁷ Islamic practice proved less amenable to survival in a slave setting than aspects of tribal religiosity and seems ultimately to have disappeared.

White Protestants in Carolina, regardless of label, demonstrated little interest in proselytizing among slaves until the middle of the eighteenth century. That failure had aroused Whitefield to castigate Carolinians in his 1740 letter. The Stono Rebellion spurred some to think anew about slave conversion, perhaps hoping that conversion would render slaves less restless. So, too, did the evangelical awakening associated with Whitefield and others. Yet from the white perspective, issues of control took precedence. The South Carolina slave code of 1740, enacted in response to Stono, forbade more than seven adult male slaves from traveling together or assembling (presumably for other than labor) without a white person present.Footnote ²⁸ That code became a model of other southern colonies. Slave religious gatherings, apart from those sanctioned by whites, became covert—hardly a sign of inclusivity—and the “invisible institution” took shape.

One other feature of early diversity as well-known as the Huguenot presence is the arrival of Jews in the first waves of colonial settlement. The Fundamental Constitutions singled out Jews as among those who were welcome in Carolina. Figures are sketchy. Most Jewish immigrants shared a Sephardic identity and traced their immediate roots to Spain and Portugal, though like the Huguenots, they too had experienced a diaspora, one that took some to Netherlands, some to South America, and some elsewhere. Unlike some other minorities, Carolina's Jews did not quickly form institutions to assure survival, but survive and flourish they did.Footnote ²⁹ Finally around 1749—historians remain uncertain of the date—Charleston's Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim received a charter, making the congregation one of the first five in the English colonies and likely the only one with an uninterrupted history into the twenty-first century.

II. The Problems of Pluralism

By the 1740s when Whitefield scorned Carolina's religious life, Anglicans and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Lutherans, a few Baptists and Jews, Huguenots and an occasional Muslim, Quakers and the African American slaves whose condition of servitude they deplored,all found a home in Carolina. The diversity promised by the Fundamental Constitutions seemed to have produced much fruit. Yet a closer look suggests that this extraordinary diversity also bred controversy. As William Hutchison has reminded us in the subtitle of his history of pluralism, the saga is one where contention is never far beneath the surface.Footnote ³⁰

Much of the story centers around efforts to establish the Church of England, culminating in the Church Act of 1706. This tale has many twists and turns. It involves moves on the part of Huguenots to look after their own interests, even at the expense of other dissenters. It includes attempts to marginalize the Jewish population of the colony and at some points the Quakers in Carolina. It reflects the hostility of most Carolinians toward Roman Catholicism. And it embraces the ongoing ambivalence regarding the religious life of African slaves and Native Americans. Contention marks each of these components that are so intertwined it is difficult to appraise one without assuming the others.

Politics made strange bed fellows in Carolina even before the assembly considered legislation to establish the Church of England.Footnote ³¹ During the 1680s, political life coalesced around two parties, one favoring proprietary government and the other opposing it. Anglicans tended to oppose proprietary rule, largely because of the policy of allowing non-Anglicans rights of citizenship. Dissenters, on the other hand, generally—but not always—supported proprietary government. One might assume that Huguenots would identify with the pro-proprietor party since they were dissenters as well as of an alien ethnic background. However, by the early 1680s, particularly in outlying areas, the reverse held true. Huguenots joined with Anglicans, for example, in thwarting ratification of the 1682 version of the Fundamental Constitutions. When power shifted in the early 1690s, Huguenots saw their rights stripped away, though they were quickly restored. Then John Archdale, the Quaker governor who usually supported fellow dissenters, also denied Huguenots the vote and right to serve in the assembly, leaving a political deadlock. Again, the setback was temporary.

A move in 1697 to limit basic rights only to Protestants who took an oath of loyalty to the king—note the failure to mention Jews and heathens here—rekindled the Anglican-Huguenot alliance.Footnote ³² Many dissenters, especially Quakers, resisted such oaths. Until the idea was abandoned, another stalemate in the assembly resulted since the two parties had equal strength. The next effort in the attempt to tilt political power in favor of the Anglicans and their allies and to curtail that of dissenters came in 1704, two years before the Church Act. This initiative would have restricted membership in the assembly to those who regularly attended Church of England worship—a move that would have included most Huguenots since by then all of the Huguenot congregations save Charleston's identified with the Church of England, but it was struck down by the Queen in Council.Footnote ³³ Alliances stoked by provincial politics thus sometimes undermined the spirit of the Fundamental Constitutions. It was one thing to allow “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters” to settle in Carolina; it was another to extend full rights of citizenship to all who came.

Quakers in Carolina encountered additional challenges, though not to the extent as in Massachusetts Bay. Since some Quakers had become wealthy slave owners, the earliest contention was not over the well-known Quaker aversion to slavery.Footnote ³⁴ It had to do with oath taking and serving in the militia. Quaker reticence over swearing oaths, since one's word was always truthful, and Quaker pacifism brought controversy by the early 1690s in outlying areas where colonists lived in fear of Indian attacks and relied on an armed militia for defense. Governor Archdale secured passage of legislation that provided exemption from militia service for Quakers refusing to bear arms because of religious convictions. A law replacing this one in 1703 made no mention of Quakers, but was sufficiently vague to let Quakers presume that such exemption remained.Footnote ³⁵ In addition, a 1692 ordinance requiring assembly members to take off their hats while addressing the house speaker rankled Quaker sensibilities; it violated Quaker egalitarian principles and was intended to target only Quaker legislators.Footnote ³⁶ Yet Quakers continued to enjoy positions of prominence in the assembly, and they exercised influence in economic circles. Much of that eroded when Quakers retreated from public life after Anglican establishment.

More challenging to Quakers was what Friends founder George Fox lamented as the degree of “your liberty in that province.” It was easy to assimilate and to abandon the plain style associated with quietly awaiting guidance from an inner light. Intermarriage also slowly undermined commitment to Quaker ideals. Yet in reality, a deeper dissonance between the Quaker ethos and the larger culture contributed profoundly to the dilemma of the Quakers. Even Quakers ambivalent about slavery had reservations about the hierarchical and inegalitarian deference promoted by traditional English ways and cemented more firmly in an economy dominated by slavery. Quakers simply did not observe what one analyst has called the “etiquette of power” or the way it operated in what another characterized as a “culture of power.”Footnote ³⁷ For Friends, spiritual equality carried over into the public square. After the Church Act drove Quakers from political life, this revulsion toward deference further marginalized them. As more endorsed nascent abolitionism, they turned ever inward, exhibiting the signs of what a later age might call an invisible religion. The number of meetings declined, and Quaker identity became a matter of the private sphere. By the later eighteenth century, many migrated westward to places like Ohio, where slavery was illegal.

Many religious minorities experienced exclusion because of the Church Act of 1706, although none was actively suppressed and pluralism percolated beneath the surface. Of course, that legislation had a history. The assembly took the first steps in 1704 by approving an extraordinarily convoluted act.Footnote ³⁸ That law restricted service in the assembly to men who received the sacraments according to Church of England rites or who could demonstrate regular attendance at Church of England worship or otherwise prove that they subscribed to Anglican belief. It also created commissioners to determine when and where new churches would be built, possibly drawing on public funds if contributions did not cover construction costs or, as a last resort, on a tax on property owners that might be levied as well by vestries. Opposition was immediate and strong, more over the requirements for eligibility to serve in the Commons than over the use of public funds to create parishes and build churches.Footnote ³⁹ The religious diversity promoted by the Fundamental Constitutions meant that persons from a variety of religious backgrounds had served with Anglicans in the assembly. Across the Atlantic, Daniel Defoe became involved in protesting the law, which was disallowed by British authorities.Footnote ⁴⁰ Had the law stood, thirty years of religious liberty would have unraveled.

But the “Act for the Establishment of Religious Worship in this Province, according to the Church of England, and for the Erecting of Churches for the public Worship of God; and for the Maintenance of Ministers, and the building convenient Houses for them”—the Church Act—in 1706 gave Anglicanism legal establishment in Carolina.Footnote ⁴¹ The long title indicates the length of the law itself. It set up ten parishes throughout the province, earmarking plots of land in each for churches, cemeteries, parsonages, and glebes. Vestries took on both religious oversight and local political power in each parish, many of which were sparsely settled. Earlier protests aside, office holders now had to affirm their faith as it was set forth by the Church of England and to swear oaths of loyalty to the Crown. Non-Anglicans were effectively removed from public office.

The law did not snuff out dissent. Provisions specifically granted freedom of religious practice and even assured that most dissenters had the right to vote. But only Anglican churches could receive public financial support, and marriages and other public rites and records were the sole domain of the established church. Interestingly, the ways public funds supported establishment represented something of a concession to non-Anglicans and a token affirmation of the religious diversity in Carolina. James Hutson has observed:

Establishment as set up by the Church Act remained after South Carolina became a royal colony in 1729, to be dismantled only after the Revolution in the state constitution of 1778. Yet by 1706, all Huguenot congregations outside Charleston already identified with the Church of England, Quakers were already accepting a politically marginal status and wrestling with issues of deference and power, dissenters of Presbyterian and Congregationalist persuasion were still concentrated in the low country where they noticed little change in religious or public life with establishment, and African slaves were still ignored or scorned in matters of faith. For the small Jewish population and for Catholics, however, establishment brought particular challenges.

Traditional English and Anglican animosity toward Roman Catholics had deep roots. Political and economic rivalries between England and both Catholic France and Catholic Spain had colored popular feeling since the reign of Elizabeth I. France and Spain were England's major competitors for control of North America and the only two European powers to establish permanent colonial settlements there. Complicating matters was the location of the major areas of English settlement. Nestled from New England to Georgia, English territories found French-controlled lands to the north and west and Spanish outposts in Florida to the south. Extending a welcome to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the Christian religion” did not mean expecting Catholics would come. Recruitment efforts intentionally ignored Catholics, and in the years before Georgia became a buffer between Carolina and Florida, the Spanish Catholic presence in Florida remained a source of anxiety. Popular perception held that Florida's Spanish Catholics could attack Carolina at any time as the contest for empire became more aggressive. The colonial assembly, however, in 1702 approved an act that granted the franchise to Catholics in the province, although procedural irregularities meant that the law never went into effect. At the time, some thought the proposal reflected political expediency more than an affirmation of pluralism.Footnote ⁴³

Finally in 1716 the assembly enacted provisions that specifically excluded Catholic immigrants; one section of the law prohibited Irish immigrants from coming to Carolina, a clause that reflected not only hostilities across the Atlantic between English and Irish, but also awareness that the Irish aligned themselves with dreaded popery.Footnote ⁴⁴ Those wary of Spanish Catholic intentions felt their fears confirmed when a 1733 Spanish royal edict promised freedom to fugitive slaves from the English colonies able to reach St. Augustine. This move may have prompted rumblings about Catholic meddling in the Stono uprising since some of the leaders came from areas of Africa controlled by Catholic Portugal and some ringleaders were labeled “Portuguese slaves” and were possibly Catholic.Footnote ⁴⁵ A decade later in 1749, rumors that Jesuits were inciting French colonists in Mobile to invade South Carolina stoked the fires of anti-Catholicism.Footnote ⁴⁶ The political and religious climate of colonial Carolina always pushed Catholic life underground.

Clearly, Carolina diversity had its limits. To be sure, a handful of Catholics wound up in Charleston and other areas. If they remained faithful, the details of their struggle to do so are unknown. Analysts assume that most gradually abandoned Catholic ways or at least kept practice strictly out of the public eye. There was no Catholic church in Carolina until a priest arrived in Charleston in 1788 and the following year prodded local Catholics to buy a ramshackle building to use for worship. The 1778 state constitution did not grant Catholics (or Jews) all the rights of citizenship; equal rights for Catholics did not become law until 1790.

Carolina's Jewish community experienced some of the same marginalization, though again the story is complex and too many details lack historical consensus. Early colonial Carolina Jews encountered much more oppression in Europe and elsewhere, and endured far greater political disabilities there than was ever the case in Carolina. Given that history of forced exclusion from common life, Carolina's Jewish population—which remained steady but small until the 1730s—adapted to local conditions without much visible protest. As early as 1697, four Jewish merchants successfully petitioned the assembly for citizenship. The 1704 legislation that proposed to establish the Church of England might have stripped Jewish Carolinians of citizenship, but that law was disallowed. The Church Act of 1706 excluded Jews from public office and the franchise, but accepted them as citizens and guaranteed them freedom of worship.

In Carolina, exclusion was sometimes more a matter of legal principle than enforced procedure. One careful study of colonial Charleston Jews argues that the economic standing of many Jews trumped the law in practice, insisting that even if Jews did not serve in the assembly, as the eighteenth century progressed, prominent Jewish merchants and businessmen were likely to vote, regardless of the law.Footnote ⁴⁷ The inconsistencies in the Carolina approach became increasingly apparent by mid-century, and surely Carolinians who in 1774 elected Francis Salvador to the First Provincial Congress (and re-elected him the following year) knew full well that he was a Jew and that the law required elected officials to be Protestant Christians. More to the point, Jewish settlers voted “with their feet” since more came to Carolina than to any other colony in North America; obviously those who realized that Carolina was a promising place in which to live and work.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Jews, as for Catholics, only the 1790 state constitution granted full equality and rights. Even then, African Americans, most of them slaves, were excluded, as were Native Americans.

III. Conclusion

Did colonial Carolina foster religious liberty? Was it a haven for religious diversity even though there eventually was a religious establishment? From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the record of colonial Carolina through 1740 seems modest at best and limited at worst in matters of liberty and diversity. But that perspective presumes more than two centuries of an evolving, sometimes tortuous history of the notion of free exercise and a ban on a national religious establishment embedded in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Looking forward from the 1669 draft of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina to 1740, a different appraisal emerges. During the late seventeenth century, the promise of Carolina in terms of religious liberty was extraordinary. The diversity that marked the first three-quarters of a century of provincial life buttresses the conviction that Carolina offered in theory and practice “tremendous tolerance and acceptance” of a range of religious options, with the exception of those associated with African slaves, Native Americans, and most Catholics.Footnote ⁴⁹ By 1740, such a degree of pluralism flourished amid Anglican establishment that George Whitefield summoned God to use whips to turn Carolinians from their religious tolerance that he mistook as indifference and from their harsh treatment of African slaves. If that discipline failed, Whitefield urged God to chastize them with scorpions. Yet it may well be that historians who are so besotted by the holy experiment in religious diversity of colonial Pennsylvania and the relatively generous toleration extended to Trinitarian Christians in colonial Maryland that they fail to see the richness of colonial South Carolina pluralism are those who should be chastized by scorpions.