Abstract
This chapter documents how the Great Awakening supported the Revolutionary cause in the Southern Backcountry. Special emphasis is on how the pro-independence colonials of the Southern Backcountry felt that God supported their efforts at waging a holy war against their English oppressors.
A modified version of this chapter was presented at the “Rethinking Warfare Conference” on November 9–10, 2012 held in Fernando Pessoa University, Porto, Portugal.
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- 1.
Royal governors were generally members of the nobility who showed little interest in running their colonies and seldom bothered to visit them from England. Lieutenant governors were the de facto heads of state, particularly in the Carolinas, and largely responsible for the success or failure of colonial rule.
- 2.
The pastor at the Waxhaw Meeting House was the Reverend William Richardson, who married one of the daughters of Rev. Alexander Craighead. “Watts’ Psalms” is a reference to the works of Rev. Dr. Isaac Watts, an Anglican minister and hymnist who published a psalter for the Church of England and wrote many well-known hymns, including “Joy to the World.” The Scottish Presbyterians preferred their own Scottish psalter, which was written in the lowland Scots dialect.
- 3.
Charles Shinner was chief justice of South Carolina from 1761 until his death in 1768. A native of Ireland and a friend of Woodmason, he was himself the victim of English prejudice because of his Irish birth. A British newspaper article, reprinted in South Carolina, called him “‘an Irishman of the lowest Class’ and the son of a tradesman, who had risen ‘through a Series of those various Shifts and Changes which chequer the Lives of NEEDY ADVENTURERS’” (cited in Woodmason 1953, p. 292n).
- 4.
In spite of what Woodmason would have us believe, the Presbyterians, Baptists and other Protestant sects in the Southern Backcountry also celebrated communion, although perhaps not as frequently as Woodmason would have liked.
- 5.
Author Michael C. Scoggins can trace his paternal ancestry back to the Giffords of Scotland, a Norman French family who were granted lands in East Lothian during the reign of King David I of Scotland (d. 1153). The family became Presbyterian during the Scottish Reformation.
- 6.
Witherspoon’s influence on the Declaration of Independence was profound. After the Declaration was signed, Horace Walpole of the British Parliament remarked, “There is no use crying about it. Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it” (Walpole cited in Leyburn 1962).
- 7.
Aaron Burr came by his Presbyterian credentials naturally. He was the son of the Reverend Aaron Burr Sr., a Presbyterian minister and the second President of the College of New Jersey. His mother, Esther Edwards, was the daughter of the Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards, a founder of the Great Awakening (Boatner 1994; Purcell 1993).
- 8.
The depth of Scotch-Irish support for the Revolution in Pennsylvania was apparent even to foreign military officers. A German Hessian officer serving in the British army, Captain Johann Heinrichs, wrote to a friend in January 1778, “Call this war, dearest friend, by whatever name you may, only call it not an American Rebellion, it is nothing more nor less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion” (Heinrichs 1898, p. 137).
- 9.
Examples of Old Testament ‘bad rulers’ include Jabin the king of Canaan in Judges 4:23–24 (“So God subdued on that day Jabin the king of Canaan before the children of Israel. And the hand of the children of Israel prospered, and prevailed against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin king of Canaan”); Jehoshaphat the king of Judah in II Chronicles 19:2 (“And Jehu the son of Hanani the seer went out to meet him, and said to king Jehoshaphat, Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? Therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord”), the anonymous kings of Proverbs 16:12 (“It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness, p. for the throne is established by righteousness”), and the unnamed king of Israel addressed in Hosea 10:15 (“So shall Bethel do unto you because of your great wickedness, p. in a morning shall the king of Israel utterly be cut off”).
- 10.
The story of David and Goliath is found in I Samuel, Chap. 17.
- 11.
Dagon also appears in Joshua 15:41, Joshua 19:27, I Samuel 5:2–7, and I Chronicles 10:8–10 (Old Testament) and I Maccabees 10:83 and 11:4 (Biblical Apocrypha).
- 12.
According to Draper, the primary sources for this oft-quoted threat are Col. Isaac Shelby’s “King’s Mountain Narrative,” 1823; John Haywood’s Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee (1823); Shelby’s statement in the American Whig Review, December 1846; and Gen. Joseph Graham’s account in the Southern Literary Messenger, September 1845.
- 13.
Rev. Charles Cummins was probably a relative of the aforementioned Rev. Francis Cummins, who preached in Mecklenburg County, NC from 1780 to 1782 and at Bethel Presbyterian Church in York County, SC, during 1782 and 1783.
- 14.
Draper’s later version (1881, pp. 203–204) differs slightly from Wheeler’s, and substitutes the word “degraded” for Wheeler’s lightly edited “pissed upon.” Ferguson’s reference to the alleged murder of an “unarmed son” by Whig militia bears a striking resemblance to the story that the Whigs told about the Tory murder of the “unarmed boy” William Strong at Fishing Creek Meeting House in June.
- 15.
By “good soldiers,” Ferguson meant trained British regulars, not the Tory militia that made up the bulk of his army.
- 16.
The Biblical quotations by Craig and McJunkin are from Ecclesiastes 9:11 (KJV): “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
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Chacon, R.J., Scoggins, M.C. (2014). Awakened Rebels and Holy War in the Southern Backcountry. In: The Great Awakening and Southern Backcountry Revolutionaries. SpringerBriefs in Anthropology(), vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04597-9_5
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