The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina

10. Building the “Holy City”

Chapter 10 BUILDING THE “HOLY CITY” A few weeks before Easter in 1789, the vestry of St. John’s, Colleton County, convened at their parish church (FIG. 10.1). Upon inspection, they found the church “in a most deplorable situation, indeed not a door, window shutter, or pew to be seen, a large part of the floor missing, the pavement of the aisles in many places destroyed, and in short no one part but indicated the necessity of some repairs.”¹ The vestry of St. John’s was not alone. Although the Revolutionary War had left the two city churches with only minor damage, most of the rural parish churches had seen extensive damage. Most churches had been abandoned at the onset of the war, and many had housed soldiers or served as stables during the British occupation of South Carolina. Others saw their interior fittings burned as firewood. Five parish churches— Christ Church; St. John’s, Berkeley; St. Mark’s; Prince William’s; and Prince George’s—and a chapel of ease on James Island had been burned during or soon after the war. Another five—St. George’s, Dorchester; St. John’s, Colleton ; St. Paul’s; the chapel at Edmundsbury; and the chapel of ease of St. James, Goose Creek—were described as in a ruinous condition in the years following the war due to vandalism and neglect.² The series of ruinous and burned-out churches that marked the rural South Carolina landscape were a FIGURE 10.1 Charles Fraser, St. John’s, Colleton, ca. 1800 (© Image Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association) REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES 334 palpable reminder that the established church had been a casualty of war. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, Anglicanism in South Carolina seemed on the brink of collapse. YET BY 1811, ANGLICANS—now reconstituted as Episcopalians—began construction on the largest church to stand in the city of Charleston. Measuring more than 160 feet in length and seventy feet in width and fronted by an immense portico of four columns, St. Paul’s Church in the new suburb of Radcliffeboro was easily the largest church in Charleston (FIGS. 10.2 and 10.3). Sets of four pilasters frame understated doors centrally located along the side elevations, where engaged pilasters alternate with two tiers of windows. Rising behind the portico is a square tower that was intended to carry a steeple that would have surpassed those of older churches had it been completed. Pairs of superimposed columns on the interior carry the gallery and support the soaring roof (FIG. 10.4). The pulpit and reading desk originally stood in the midst of the middle aisle. Behind them opened a richly adorned semicircular chancel boasting Corinthian pilasters, with gilt capitals surrounding a large chancel window opening through the rear of its curved profile; an Italian marble baptismal font originally stood within the space of the chancel. Begun in 1811 and consecrated five years later, the design of FIGURE 10.2 St. Luke and St. Paul, Charleston, 1811–16 (Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo by Charles N. Bayless, 1978) BUILDING THE “HOLY CITY” 335 St. Paul’s quotes that of St. Michael’s, its older sibling in the heart of the city, while its scale points to the larger and older St. Philip’s.³ The construction of St. Paul’s as the third city church was a monumental occasion for Anglicans ; not only was it a sign to the city that the denomination had regained its religious footing, but it also made an aggressive claim on the social and political stature it had enjoyed in the colonial era. The dramatic differences between this new city church and the condition of parish churches in the rural parishes in these same years speak to the profound impact of political disestablishment on the architecture of Anglicanism. Vigorous challenges to the political establishment of the Church of England had come to the floor of the South Carolina Assembly as early as 1777. William Tennant, Presbyterian minister and grandson of the famous Gilbert Tennant, presented to the Carolina Assembly in January of that year a petition carrying thousands of signatures arguing against a “glaring impartiality”— the continued support of an established church, especially when that church was in the popular minority. “The established churches,” Tennant informed the Assembly, “are but twenty in number, many of them very small, while...