In August of 1831, Nat Turner's revolt, one of the most extensive slave rebellions in the pre–Civil War United States, cut a swath of destruction across Southampton County, Virginia. While the revolt did not ultimately overturn slavery in the Old Dominion, it nevertheless, in the words of Randolph Ferguson Scully, “exposed the racial and gendered fictions on which antebellum Virginia's social order rested” and “shattered the comforting white illusions of reciprocity, respect, and affection between slave and master” (1–2). The rebellion similarly highlighted tensions that underpinned Virginia's evangelical communities, which “became central to the battle to understand, define, and control the Nat Turner revolt” (3). Turner's jailhouse “confession,” which was subsequently published and widely distributed, reinforced local belief that evangelical religion had, in some way, inspired and facilitated the revolt, putting both black and white Baptists under intense scrutiny and suspicion while straining their relationships to one another within congregations.
The Turner rebellion is not the subject so much as the inspiration for Scully's masterful study of Revolutionary and antebellum Virginia Baptists. This book seeks to reconstruct the variegated religious world out of which Nat Turner and his enemies emerged. Emphasizing the agency of all converts in constructing that world, Scully expertly pieces together the interwoven histories of black and white Baptists to illustrate the range of potential meanings that evangelical communities could produce.
The book begins with two carefully researched chapters that succinctly sketch the religious contours of the Old Dominion in the colonial period. The Church of England, according to Scully, was not just legally established in Virginia but vital and thriving in spite of numerous minor challenges from religious dissenters. However, in the awakening that rooted Presbyterianism in the Virginia Piedmont in the 1740s, evangelicals posed a rather more significant threat to the dominant church by making converts in a wide geographical area, by attracting slaves to fellowship, and by building alternative religious societies based on distinctive values. The ensuing religious contest deepened considerably beginning in the 1750s with an influx of Baptists, who were even less careful to conform to the dictates of traditional authority. The Baptists built local communities of faith (“little societies,” Scully calls them) that grew out of the individual experiences of conversion, and brought a broad spectrum of people together to aid one another in their walk with Christ. Along the way, they shed some of the social conventions of the dominant order and took up distinctive beliefs and practices that sometimes put them at odds with the wider society. Baptist fellowship may not have overturned social hierarchy, but, in Scully's words, it was a “vital site of interaction and negotiation—power laden and unequal but no less important for that—between members of a changing southern society,” white and black (90).
At the heart of this book are two chapters on the Revolution and its aftermath. Baptists, Scully explains, were able to stabilize their institutions and lay claims to legitimacy in their support for the Revolution. They embraced the republicanism that swept the state, but also sometimes advanced limited alternative strains of it that emphasized antislavery and a modified household order. Slaves joined the Baptist Church in increasing numbers, developing “their own distinctive interpretations of evangelicalism's message outside the bounds of white oversight, sometimes in ways very directly related to the political and social turmoil of the post-Revolutionary era” (126). In the postwar years, Baptists extended their reach even further, becoming a denomination of considerable import in the state. While white male leadership and conservative forms of republicanism were hallmarks of this now mainstream faith, “the operation of race and gender did not always or automatically mean exclusion” for women and African Americans (136). What ensued was the entrenchment of a church government, a disciplinary system, a ministerial leadership structure, an interpretation of doctrine, and a political stance vis-à-vis crucial secular debates of the day that was primarily shaped by white male authority with a view to subordinating women, children, and slaves. Yet, by the very nature of Baptist fellowship, this entrenchment was also left open to contestation. “Evangelical principles offered,” Scully explains, “a standard of justice and divine meaning to which members could appeal and through which their voices carried authority in their communities,” even members excluded from equal privilege in the secular order.
In the Turner Revolt, Scully posits, the social potentials of the Baptist faith dramatically, if somewhat indirectly, broke loose, came under wide scrutiny, and were to a significant degree squelched in the backlash. But even while evangelical congregations “increasingly asserted a white, paternalist orthodoxy,” the faith continued to expand, in part because it also offered “a powerful system of meaning and authority to those in positions of subordination or dissent, providing a perspective from which they could evaluate and criticize the conditions of their own subordination and the righteousness of their own society, in both spiritual and social terms” (239, 240).
This book will be of considerable value to American religious historians, southern specialists, and interested general readers. Scully weaves together a fine argumentative synthesis that, to my mind, pushes the discussion well beyond old debates about the extent to which early Southern evangelicals offered a countercultural challenge to the dominant order. He achieves this by balancing recognition of the power relations operating in Baptist churches with an account of the agency and perspective of the disempowered. This balance allows us to see how the development of proslavery Christianity and the prophetic visions of Nat Turner could, and necessarily did, spring from a common source.
