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1 “I Had Rather Rely on God’s Plan Than Man’s” Marshall Keeble and the Missionary Society Controversy Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men. —Acts 5:29 The 1870s cast a series of extraordinary challenges before African Americans . While emancipation from slavery and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments signaled the arrival of better days for newly freed blacks, the physical assaults of the Ku Klux Klan, the Hamburg Massacre in South Carolina on July 4, 1876, and the westward migration of blacks from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee portended the erosion of African Americans’ civil rights in the New South. As one former slave testified poignantly before a Senate Committee: “In 1877 we lost all hopes . . . we found ourselves in such condition that we looked around and seed [sic] that there was no way on earth, it seemed, that we could better our condition” in southern states.1 W. E. B. Du Bois assessed Reconstruction more succinctly: “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then turned again toward slavery.”2 The era of Reconstruction, initially replete with joy and promise for ex-slaves, ended abruptly with crushed hopes and aborted dreams. In this dismal and turbulent milieu emerged Marshall Keeble. Born on December 7, 1878, in Rutherford County, Tennessee, Marshall Keeble Jr. was the son of Robert and Mettie Keeble. Details of Keeble’s ancestry remain obscure, but the 1850 national census for free inhabitants of Rutherford County listed Edwin A. Keeble, a lawyer, with a net worth of $800. Attorney Keeble, originally from Virginia, had relocated to Tennessee where he met and married Mary, with whom he fathered five children: 12 / chapter 1 James, Lallie (?), Edwin Jr.,Thomas, and Walter. Edwin A. Keeble Sr., probably a relative of Horace P. Keeble, also an attorney in Rutherford County, owned real estate valued at $4,000. Horace and his wife, Cassandra, by 1860 had amassed a property value of $27,000 and a personal net worth of $14,000. The family holdings included five male and five female slaves, and likely both Marshall Keeble’s grandfather and father numbered among these bondsmen.3 AfteremancipationtheKeeblehouseholdconsistedof MarshallandMary Keeble, the paternal grandparents of young Marshall. The elder Keeble worked as a farmer while his wife served as a housekeeper in Murfreesboro , Tennessee. In 1870 the Keeble offspring consisted of eight children: D. Marshall (age twenty), Robert (sixteen), Nancy (fourteen), Milton (eleven), James (eight), Eliza (four), George (two), and Mar (one).The four older children hired out as farm laborers and the younger four stayed at home. A decade later, D. Marshall and Robert Keeble had families of their own. Twenty-seven-year-old D. Marshall, the husband of twenty-fouryear -old Hattie, fathered two-year-old Lizza, while twenty-three-year-old Robert married twenty-two-year-old Mettie, who gave birth to Marshall Keeble Jr.4 The Keeble clan, slave and free, nourished a strong commitment to one of the nineteenth century’s most dynamic religious developments, the Restoration Movement. Barton W. Stone, Thomas Campbell, and Alexander Campbell had joined with other reformers in the early nineteenth century to launch this work, variously referred to as Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ, and Christian Churches. Seeking to return Christianity to its roots, their efforts emerged as one of the largest Protestant bodies of the era, and the Keeble family’s connection to this movement predated the Civil War. Marshall Keeble Jr. later noted that his grandfather subscribed to the Gospel Advocate, a prominent journal of the movement, which doubtlessly played a role in leading the younger Keeble into Churches of Christ.5 The pages of another of the movement’s papers, the Christian Standard, show that both his grandfather, Marshall Keeble Sr., and his uncle, D. Marshall Keeble, actively participated in the Christian Church in the early 1880s. Proceedings of a church convention in Rutherford County,Tennessee, listed Marshall Sr. and D. Marshall as elders and delegates of the congregation in Murfreesboro .6 Even though the younger Marshall Jr.’s spiritual linkage to the Stone- “i had rather rely on god’s plan . . .” / 13 Campbell Movement preceded the Civil War, he also grew up under the influence of a devout Baptist mother.7 In the early 1880s Robert Keeble relocated his family to Nashville, Tennessee , where he worked for John B. Ransom and Company, a wholesale lumber and planing mill business...

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