The Past is Never Dead . . . Religious Leaders in Virginia on Local Tribes

Randall Stephens

I was just thinking about a new idea for the blog. Maybe a series of posts? "The Past is Never Dead . . ." It could entail news items or books that deal with contemporaries who are wrestling with history. To paraphrase Carl Becker "everyman/woman his/her own religious historian." Many Americans come to grips with the nation's religious identity be resorting to the past. (Isn't this Glenn Beck's big campaign?) Perhaps history has a greater resonance right now. Some questions: How do believers and non-believers use history to describe what America is or has been? Who owns American religious history? Why is it so important for citizens to put religious history, or just American history in general, to use for the present?

Robert Dilday, "Baptist executives urge federal recognition of Virginia tribes," Associated Baptist Press, 19 August 2010.

RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) -- The top executives of two Virginia Baptist groups have joined other religious leaders in calling for federal recognition of six Native American tribes in the state.

In an open letter released Aug. 17, about 30 Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders asked Virginia’s Republican governor and two Democratic senators to support congressional legislation giving to Virginia’s tribes the same status held by more than 560 other Native American tribes across the United States.

Among the signers were John Upton, executive director of the predominantly white Baptist General Association of Virginia, who also was recently elected president of the Baptist World Alliance, and Cessar Scott, executive minister of the historically black Baptist General Convention of Virginia. . . .

History erased by racist official

Walter Plecker, registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, replaced “Indian” with “black” on every birth and death certificate in his office. Plecker, a white supremacist, said Native Americans had become a “mongrel” mixture. >>>

Religion and the Founding of Virginia

Randall Stephens

Rebecca Goetz and Lauren Winner have convinced me that historians have long had some ahistorical assumptions about the role of religion in colonial Virginia. (And, when many are teaching on a subject that is well out of their field--me included--they tend to dust off the old fables and retell them as fact.)

Of course, there are glaring differences between the Mass Bay Colony and Virginia. When you look at the number of churches per colonist in the 17th-century North and South, things take on a different cast. What about devotional reading? Baptismal records? The training of ministers? Reading from a range of institutional evidence, historians have tended to downplay religion in 17th and early 18th-century Virginia. Virginians were not all that interested in God or piety, so it goes. They left pious fancies to Puritans and Pilgrims, Yankees in the making, up north. Virginians cared about making a profit and maintaining their aristocratic order. That echoes Louis Philippe's famous 1835 letter to Charles Gayarre:

I do not wish to be a prophet of evil, but you, as a people, have conflicting interests and ambitions and unappeasable jealousies. You have the Puritans in the north and the Cavaliers in the south, Democracy with its leveling rod, and Aristocracy with slavery raising its haughty head in the other section and creating a social elegance, a superiority of breeding, and race, which must incite the intense hatred of your antagonists. Hence deadly conflicts, political convulsions and social transformations.

The June issue of Historically Speaking, now up at Project Muse, features an essay by Lorri Glover on "Faith and the Founding of Virginia." It's instructive on the matter and has helped me rethink religion in the Old Dominion. (I especially like that one of the questions behind all this is "what counts as religious?") The first migrants to the Virginia Colony, says Glover "were not as pious as their New England neighbors (although they were far more religious than scholars typically acknowledge)," writes Glover. A couple of interesting, longer passages well illustrate Glover's argument:

But certainty about God’s omnipotence imbued the early modern English worldview. Most 17th-century English men and women believed that God and the devil operated in the world. To these early moderns, a place perceived as dangerous—like Bermuda—was logically diabolical. Likewise, safety and bounty were gifts from God. For the castaways, it only made sense to see their situation in that providential context. Moreover, Protestant faith—and its corollary, virulent anti-Catholicism—had suffused the fundraising campaigns of the Virginia Company from its inception. Promotional writers in the employ of the company and ministers who saw Virginia as the main chance to beat back Catholics in the New World sounded the same note. They promised “adventurers”—the term designating both those who wagered their lives and those who staked their fortunes—that their efforts would bring true religion to the Native Americans and glory to their God and nation. . . .

Most historians have either ignored the role of faith in England’s earliest westward forays or dis- missed it as cynical campaigning for investors and migrants. But the language of religious conviction in the sources, particularly after word of the survival of the Sea Venture voyagers reached London, is simply too widespread and too forceful to dismiss. And this religious discourse inspired people to risk their lives and fortunes. Hence the religious dimension says a great deal about English values.

To discount the role of providential thinking and of religious faith in these choices is to miss a vital part of the story. Few today would believe that God orchestrated the hurricane, the wreck on Bermuda, or the meeting of De La Warr and Gates. But the evidence from the era—the private writings of Virginia Company leaders, the reminiscences of castaways, colonists’ letters, sermons, broadsides, and promotional tracts—is convincing on one count. A significant proportion of men and women engaged in Atlantic colonizing saw the hand of God in their endeavors. To substitute our perceptions for theirs is flawed on a myriad of levels and ignores what we all know as historians: that it does not matter what is so, it only matters what people believe is so. read on>>>

I'm looking forward to reading Jon Sensbach's forthcoming book on religion in the colonial South. Now, how can I make all this seem coherent enough to students?

Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Part VI: "Our Indians having no notion of the Sabbath . . ."

Randall Stephens

I've been reading a used copy I picked up of The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian, edited by Louis B. Wright. Byrd's compulsive scribbling might seem tedious to some. I like his rambling style and I'm intrigued--maybe esp. because I'm no colonialist--by what it tells of us of the Virginia gentry in the early part of the 18th century. "A Journey to the Land of Eden, 1733," his account of a meandering survey trip through the Old Dominion offers a glimpse into his privileged world.

Not knowing too much about Byrd, I've been struck by some of his personal ticks. He was a creature of his many habits. Byrd often pointed out the laziness of others--subordinates, Indians, slaves--while relying on their muscle to, for instance, paddle him up a river here or there. Improvident fellows are controlled by their appetites, indolent, toad-like, he sniffs.

Byrd makes passing mention of Sabbath observance in "Land of Eden." Curious stuff. A couple of selections here:

Near the camp grew several large chestnut trees very full of chestnuts. Our men were too lazy to climb the trees for the sake of the fruit, but, like the Indians, chose rather to cut them down, regardless of those that were to come after. Nor did they esteem such kind of work any breach of the sabbath, so long as it helped to fill their bellies. One of the Indians shot a bear, which he lugged about half a mile for the good of the company. These gentiles have no distinction of days, but make every day a sabbath, except when they go out to war or a hunting, and then they will undergo incredible fatigues. . . .

Our Indians having no notion of the sabbath, went out to hunt for something for dinner, and brought a young doe back along with them. They laughed at the English for losing one day in seven; though the joke may be turned upon them for losing the whole seven, if idleness and doing nothing to the purpose may be called loss of time. . . .

The sabbath was now come round again, and although our horses would have been glad to take the benefit of it, yet we determined to make a Sunday's journey to Brunswick church, which lay about eight miles off. Though our landlord could do little for us, nevertheless, we did him all the good we were able, by bleeding his sick negro, and giving him a dose of Indian physic. We got to church in decent time, and Mr. Betty, the parson of the parish, entertained us with a good honest sermon, but whether he bought it, or borrowed it, would have been uncivil in us to inquire. Be that / as it will, he is a decent man, with a double chin that sits gracefully over his' band, and his parish, especially the female part of it, like him well. We were not crowded at church, though it was a new thing in that remote part of the country. What women happened to be there, were very grim and tidy in the work of their own hands, which made them look tempting in the eyes of us foresters. When church was done, we refreshed our teacher with a glass of wine, and then receiving his blessing, took horse and directed our course to major Embry's. . . .