Frontier Mission

A History of Religion West of the Southern Appalachians to 1861

Walter Brownlow Posey

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186436
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Religion is viewed here as the great cultural force which introduced and preserved civilization in the era of westward expansion from 1776 to the eve of the Civil War. In this first major study of religion in the South, Mr. Posey surveys the work of the seven chief denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, Cumberland Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Episcopal—as they developed in the frontier region that now comprises the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri.

The great challenges faced by the churches, Mr. Posey believes, were, first, the barbarism continually threatening a people isolated in a savage wilderness and, second, the materialism likely to engross minds preoccupied with the hard necessities of frontier survival. Many frontiersmen who had wandered across the mountains to escape the trammels and restrictions of an established society were distrustful of traditional religion, and some forgot their inherited beliefs entirely. To overcome these attitudes demanded new approaches.

As organizations the churches faced great obstacles in attempting to minister to the folk on the moving frontier. One early answer was the camp meeting, and many of its features—an emphasis upon fervid emotion and individualism and the active participation and use of untrained people in religious services—continued as dominant elements in frontier religion. Indeed, those churches flexible enough to make use of these appeals were the most successful in spreading their beliefs. But inherent in the emotion and individualism was the danger of fragmentation, a danger most tragically evident when the slavery controversy split most southern denominations from their northern brethren. In education the churches fared better; even those that were at first skeptical of its benefits were by the time of the Civil War actively engaged in its support. But overall, the southern churches were hampered by too little money for the support of priests and preachers, too little communication between isolated congregations, and too little regard for service to the community.

At the center of the churches' work—the care of congregations, the missions to the Indians and the Negroes, and the founding of educational institutions—were the frontier ministers. Mr. Posey pictures these men—stern and hard but full of zeal—as performing a stupendous task in their efforts to build and maintain spiritual life on the southern frontier.

1

INTO THE VALLEY

THE VAST REGION beyond the Appalachian Mountains served as a beacon to restless folk who saw there the bright new day of economic betterment. Fertile land nestling in river bottoms like those of the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi was abundant and beckoned to the white man. For many thousands this region was to become the home where they would find greater social and financial equality than in the East. Daring and self-reliant, these frontier people hunted, explored, surveyed, cleared land, built cabins, organized communities, and established local and state governments. This territory contributed by 1845 eight states to the Union. By then, in Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, the Catholic and Protestant churches were giving moral stability to the region they had helped to develop. The Protestant churches had had little influence in the West before the American Revolution; the colonists were too preoccupied with wresting a living from a new land. Representatives of the Roman Catholic Church had come early with explorers into the area; unhampered by domestic concerns, their purposeful missionary endeavors carried them up the St. Lawrence River and across the Great Lakes to secure a tenuous foothold in the Mississippi Valley.

Near the middle of the sixteenth century Catholic priests accompanied the De Soto expedition of nearly a thousand men which traveled through much of the southern part of North America. Sailing into Tampa Bay, the expedition touched land in May 1539 and claimed it for the Spanish king. For nearly a century and a half thereafter, Dominican, Capuchin, and Jesuit priests moved from post to post in the region bordering the Gulf of Mexico.¹

After La Salle had descended the Mississippi River in 1682 and claimed the entire area as French territory, the Seminary of Quebec was permitted to send three missionaries to establish missions in the lower part of the region. The men reached the mouth of the Arkansas River in 1699 and began work among the Tensaw and Natchez Indians. In 1727 an effort to establish a mission at the mouth of the Yazoo River incited the Indians to massacre more than a third of the seven hundred settlers. The retribution taken in 1729 by a French military force was so terrible that the Natchez disappeared as a nation.²

In August 1727 twelve Ursuline nuns, traveling at the expense of the Western (later called the Indies) Company, arrived in New Orleans to begin a work which has continued to the present. Governor Jean Baptiste le Moyne Bienville, foreseeing the need for a school for girls, had appealed to Father Nicholas I. Beaubois, the superior of the Jesuits in Louisiana, who in turn sought aid from the Ursulines in Rouen. For forty years during the French period and for another forty years under Spanish rule, these nuns were the “Guardian Angels” of the young girls in New Orleans. They taught the children, the Negroes, and the Indians, nursed the sick, and took care of the children who had been made orphans by the Indian massacre at Natchez.³

By agreement between the Bishop of Quebec and the Western Company’s council the Mississippi Valley was divided in 1722 into three jurisdictions. The region to the north of the Ohio River, including the Illinois settlements and territory along the Missouri River, was given to the Jesuits. The district from the Perdido River along the coast and up the Alabama and Mobile rivers, with headquarters in Mobile, was assigned to the Discalced Carmelites. The third territory, comprising the French and Indian settlements in the area from the mouth of the Mississippi to that of the Ohio River, was Capuchin territory. Later, because of the small number of Capuchin priests, the company was forced in 1726 to place all the Indian tribes under the Jesuits also who could perform no ecclesiastical functions, however, without the consent of the Capuchins.⁴

During the whole of the French rule in Louisiana, no bishop was sent to that vast region. In 1783 Father Cirillo de Barcelona, a Spanish Capuchin, became Louisiana’s first resident auxiliary bishop. Ten years later he was relieved of his office, having been charged unjustly with permitting a deplorable lack of religious and ecclesiastical discipline. In December 1793 Luis Peñalver y Cardenas, a native of Havana, was appointed bishop of the newly created diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas. During eight years of valiant struggling against disorder, he was unable to make any apparent progress.⁵

As early as 1756 some Acadians, ruthlessly expelled from Canada by the British, made their way to Louisiana, where they were given immediate aid by French officials and the inhabitants of New Orleans and in time granted lands. Other Acadians came in the succeeding years, with the largest influx in 1763. In 1765 a commission was granted to the Acadian settlement at Attakapas which became known as New Acadia. A frame church was built at St. Martinville, the most celebrated haven for the exiles.⁶

The Mobile and the Alabama missions among the Indians had been little disturbed by controversy among the Carmelite, Capuchin, and Jesuit orders. From 1723 to 1769 there were, as a rule, two Capuchin priests who attended to the churches at Mobile and on Dauphin Island and to the Indian missions among the Apalachees and Tensaws. At various times Catholic missionaries were dispatched to Fort Jackson, near Montgomery, to the Choctaws in the southwest, and to the Chickasaws on the upper part of the Tombigbee River.⁷

Dating from about 1734, Ste. Genevieve, to which priests were sent from Cahokia in Illinois, was the first Catholic settlement in Missouri. When St. Louis was founded in 1764, the entire area had only two Catholic priests. Soon after Father Pierre Gibault reached St. Louis in 1768, he erected a small church of upright logs—the first church building in the immediate territory. A Capuchin was resident priest in St. Louis from 1772 until 1789. No existing records reveal a resident priest for the next several years, and by 1800 St. Louis and the territory west of the Mississippi River had been under five church jurisdictions, all of which apparently had accomplished very little.⁸

The first Roman Catholics to settle in Kentucky were members of the Coomes family who came from Charles County, Maryland, to Harrodsburg in the spring of 1775. Mrs. Coomes opened a school which was probably the first elementary school in Kentucky. The Coomes family later moved near Bardstown, secured several tracts of land, and in 1804 gave a farm of more than one hundred acres to the church. Unsatisfactory conditions in the East and news of attractive opportunities in the West led to the formation in Maryland of a Catholic colonization league which influenced a group of Catholics to leave Maryland in 1785 and to settle in the Pottinger’s Creek region a few miles from Bardstown. This band had traveled to Pittsburgh and then had come down the Ohio River to Kentucky. Other Catholic groups came to Kentucky overland by the way of the Cumberland Gap.⁹

French-born priests Stephen T. Badin and Michael Barriere, selected by John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore, to go to Kentucky, arrived there in November 1793. After a few months Barriere departed, leaving Badin alone to serve the vast area. The twenty-five-year old priest, the first to be ordained in the United States, was handicapped by a meager knowledge of the English language and less acquainted with the customs of Kentuckians. Between 1797 and 1799 three more priests arrived in Kentucky, two to find an early grave and one to withdraw because of temperament. By 1803 Badin again was alone. Within ten years the increase in the number of Catholic families made almost unbearable demands on the lone priest. The arrival of Father Charles Nerinckx in 1805 relieved Badin of some labors among his scattered flock.¹⁰

Catholic families did not migrate early to the region that became Tennessee. In 1790 a small party came from North Carolina, and in this group was Father Rohan who stayed only part of a year. Nearly ten years later the number of Catholics in the new state did not exceed one hundred. In 1799 Governor John Sevier of Tennessee, in an effort to increase the state’s population, sought to interest Badin in the possibility of settling one hundred families there and offered to sell parcels of land as inducements. Sevier defeated his purpose, however, by setting so dear a price on the land that the Catholic families were uninterested in the offer.¹¹

Only in Kentucky did the Catholics secure a foothold, and this was accomplished amidst the Protestants’ overwhelming advantages—lay workers and local preachers. Into the transmontane area adjacent to the Atlantic colonies members of the Protestant denominations moved rapidly, established churches, and installed preachers of their own beliefs. The Methodist and Baptist congregations rarely had a preacher who had been ordained before he came to the West, but the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches used only regularly ordained ministers, a practice which greatly limited their expansion into the new lands.

The Baptists in America had arisen as a denomination after the expulsion of Roger Williams from the Massachusetts Colony and the subsequent organization of a congregation at Providence, Rhode Island, in 1639. The Great Awakening of a century later stirred many controversies among the Congregational churches of New England and contributed a great deal to Baptist growth. The local Baptist congregations, scattered along the length of the Atlantic seaboard as far south as Georgia, were completely autonomous; no administrative office supervised the action of any congregation or dictated a program. The democratic form of Baptist church government matched the nature of its membership and appealed especially to a people of little property or culture. If a Baptist congregation needed a preacher, a man was chosen from its members and ordained. Baptists were generally regarded with disfavor by other denominations, particularly in Virginia, where they suffered severe treatment from the members of the Episcopal Church who deeply resented their inroads. Originally identified with the excesses of the Reformation and opposing themselves to long established usages, the Baptists were not always comfortable companions. Their churches frequently were a member’s only opportunity for self expression, and to him his voice sounded sweet and strong.

During the American Revolution the Baptists, like the Methodists and Presbyterians, sacrificed greatly in behalf of freedom from England. Their demands for non-interference from the state and equality for all religions before the law led them to support the Constitution strongly; indeed, any objections against the new government usually arose from the fear that it would not provide sufficient religious liberty.¹²

Despite wartime loss of church buildings, Baptists had gained in membership. Hard times and persecution, however, encouraged many of them to turn westward to lands across the mountains. A Baptist preacher, Thomas Tinsley, had preached in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, as early as 1776, but it was five years later under the shade of a maple tree at Severns Valley that eighteen people organized the first Baptist church west of the mountains. John Garrard served as pastor of this church until he was captured and murdered by the Indians. The Baptist ranks increased rapidly: by 1785 in Kentucky there were eighteen churches, nineteen preachers, and the Elkhorn and Salem associations. A third association was formed in 1787, at which time Baptists, both Regular and Separate, numbered more than three thousand in a total population of about seventy thousand. So great had been the Baptist migration westward that one-fourth of the Baptists in Virginia moved to Kentucky between 1791 and 1810.¹³

The Baptist migration into Tennessee paralleled the Kentucky movement. A permanent church was formed in 1780 at Buffalo Ridge on Boone’s Creek by a group which had moved in a body from a congregation at Sandy Creek in North Carolina. Within six years there were enough congregations in east Tennessee to form the Holston Association. A church was organized in 1786 in middle Tennessee, on a branch of the Red River, and within ten years the Mero Association was formed from the many churches in that section.¹⁴

From the coastal settlements, the Baptists moved farther west and south than the pleasant places of Tennessee and Kentucky. In 1780 a band of emigrants, among them many Baptists, left South Carolina for the Natchez region. After a perilous trip down the Holston, Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, the group made a permanent landing at the mouth of Cole’s Creek about twenty miles north of Natchez. Richard Curtis, a licensed preacher, having obtained the consent of a church in South Carolina to preach, to exercise discipline, and to baptize, gathered the Baptists often for religious meetings in the homes of interested persons. Although Spanish officials permitted only the Roman Catholic form of worship, they did not molest the Baptists for several years. As Curtis’s work spread to other settlements, the Spanish authorities issued warnings which went unheeded. In April 1795 Curtis was brought before Governor Gayoso who confronted him with his persistent violations and abuses of the privilege of occasional meetings. Facing arrest, Curtis fled to South Carolina where he stayed until the Natchez country fell to the United States. Returning in midsummer of 1798, Curtis organized the Salem Church, the first of several churches erected about the same time.

A group of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, twice expatriated, had made a settlement on the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 1649. Influenced in some degree by the attractive offer of Lord Baltimore, they had turned to America as the land of hope and had found so many of their kin already there that in a relatively short time a native organization of large scope was easy to achieve. At the opening of the eighteenth century immig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Into the Valley
• 2 The Early Camp Meeting Era
• 3 Some Denominational Splinters
• 4 Two New Denominations
• 5 Practices of Local Churches
• 6 Government of the Churches
• 7 The Indians
• 8 The Negroes
• 9 Catholic Expansion
• 10 Media of Education
• 11 Reform and Discipline
• 12 The Slavery Problem Before the 1840s
• 13 Crises and Divisions
• 14 On the Eve of the Civil War
• 15 The Balance Sheet
• Appendix
• Index