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2 Democratic Religion Revisited Early Bap­ tists in the Ameri­ can South Jewel L. Spangler Virginia Bap­ tist minister James Ireland would never forget the winter of 1769–1770. He spent most of it incarcerated in Culpepper County for preaching without a license. There, dreadful living conditions and worries about his impending court appearance turned out to be the least of his troubles. The Culpepper jailor had it in for the preacher and appeared willing to commit murder, if that was what it would take to silence him. He tried to suffocate the minister with smoke, set off a homemade bomb in his cell, and even resorted to poisoning his food. Ireland responded to every act of persecution by recommitting himself to his ministry to the commonfolk of Culpepper. He bravely carried on preaching to crowds (large ones) that gathered around his cell window to hear him, no matter what might come next. Opposition to his work soon spread beyond the walls of the jail itself. Gangs of well-­ placed local men took to galloping their horses through his congregation to break up these meetings and grabbed the slaves in his audience to be whipped. A few of them even pulled benches over to the windows of the jail, jumped up on them, and urinated on the minister through the bars to shut him up.1 Ireland’s story of persecution, endurance, and ultimate triumph (after being released in 1770, he went on to establish and lead several congregations in the Shenandoah Valley and become a beloved pillar of the church in the South in the founding generation) is well-known to Bap­ tist historians in the United States.It has been told many times over,as have dozens of other stories about the hardships faced by the first Bap­tist ministers and converts in the Ameri­ can South. The tale primarily has its basis in Ireland ’s memoir, The Life of the Rev. James Ireland, dictated from the preacher ’s deathbed in 1806 and posthumously published in 1819. The story also Democratic Religion Revisited 31 secured a safe place in the historical record because of early published retellings by other ministers of Ireland’s cohort, most notably Robert Baylor Semple and James B. Taylor.2 It is interesting to note, however, that stories such as this one have remained familiar even while other incidents in Ireland’s life have been almost completely passed over and forgotten by Bap­ tist historians over time, even tales that were just as dramatic and well-­ documented. A glaring example is an attempted murder in 1792, which is detailed in the final chapters of the autobiography, but did not make it into Semple and Taylor ’s writings and has rarely been mentioned since. Ireland’s two house­ servants—one a free, white girl in her teens, the other a young adult slave mother—laced the family’s evening tea with arsenic after a previous attempt to poison Ireland alone had failed. Ireland’s whole household was desperatelysickenedintheattack,andhisyoungestsondiedafterhesneaked some sips of poisoned tea from his mother’s unattended saucer. The incident was reported in the local newspaper, and court records confirm that the women were barely acquitted of murder in the child’s death and that considerable evidence of their involvement in a poisoning plot had been compiled.3 What can one make of the fact that this narrative of rebellion in the Ireland household has been largely passed over by those whose business it is to remember and tell Bap­ tist stories, when other parts of Ireland’s life are so well-known and often repeated? This sort of forgetting can certainly be understood as part of the “normal” process of selectivity in storytelling . In fact, most of the past is forgotten as a matter of course, and a wide range of influences come into play to help a few stories to get retold and remembered over time. It can be argued, though, that the poisoning story, in particular, was ripe for omission because it fits a bit awkwardly with the narrative framework storytellers have typically imposed on Ireland ’s life. Descriptions of Ireland as a heroic Bap­ tist founder are streamlined and easier to tell without the poisoning episode to contend with, as the incident has the potential to raise some awkward questions in readers ’ minds. It hints that all was not quite well in the Ireland household at some point. Though no motive for the poisoning is explained in either Ireland...

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