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Introduction
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INTRODUCTION “Long may it remain, a monument to the refinement and piety of an age and a generation that have long passed away.”¹ With these words, the Reverend Drayton concluded his sermon for the 165th anniversary and rededication of the remote parish church of St. James, Goose Creek (FIG. I.1). He stood amidst the monuments surrounding the early colonial church, preaching to a congregation of a thousand or more. Mounted over the door behind him, a rustic arch read, “A temple shadowy with remembrances of the majestic past”; and over the pulpit inside was written, “Gently, without grief, the old shall pass into the new.” In 1876—among the final and most difficult years of Reconstruction—Drayton and his congregation were clinging to the glory of their colonial past in the midst of a tumultuous present.² Their choice to do so in the yard of a colonial church was not accidental; as early as the antebellum years, South Carolina’s colonial churches had become icons of the state’s golden age.³ Because it had served one of South Carolina’s wealthiest colonial plantation parishes and had remained largely unchanged since the early eighteenth century, St. James, Goose Creek, was a place dense with evocative power, a favorite of Victorian romantics. FIGURE I.1 Early twentieth-century postcard entitled “St. James, Goose Creek Church” (Printed by A. F. Doscher and Sons, Charleston; author’s collection) In a city and a region steeped in the memory of its colonial past, the power of this church to evoke a gentler and more refined age persisted into the twentieth century.⁴ In the 1930s the Colonial Dames erected a perimeter wall preserving the building and its site. Both Robert N. S. and Patti Foos Whitelaw (d.1974 and 1998, respectively), Samuel Gaillard Stoney (d.1968), and Albert Simons—some of the most ardent defenders of Charleston’s early architecture and culture—selected this remote churchyard as their final resting places (FIG. I.2).⁵ Even more recently, the Society of Colonial Wars donated funds for the church’s preservation, and, supplemented by other generous gifts, the building has undergone an extensive restoration program and stands today in an extraordinary state of preservation.⁶ Together with other colonial churches in South Carolina, St. James, Goose Creek, has a remarkable power to evoke in her visitors images of “refinement and piety” of the past. But, as is always the case, much of that power depends on assumptions and perceptions that visitors bring to such places rather than on historic realities. The Beauty of Holiness reaches past the romantic mythologies of the present and the recent past to engage the realities and complexities of South Carolina’s colonial history. In response to Enlightenment ideas about order and beauty, the threats of evangelical fervor and slave rebellion, and the broader cultural and political currents in the British Atlantic world, South Carolina’s Anglicans fashioned a beautiful and rational spirituality, underscored by a complex and subtle vitality often overlooked by historians. An essential window into this time and place is the extensive body of material things that survive, every FIGURE I.2 View of churchyard, St. James Church, Goose Creek (Photo by author) [3.147.62.92] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:16 GMT) INTRODUCTION 3 bit as much documents as the letters and sermons that shared their cultural space. This book begins by examining carefully the material production of early Anglican culture; buildings, grave markers, communion silver, and other objects of early Anglican practice stand at the center of this study. But it is not content to tell the stories of these objects as disconnected artifacts, as nothing more than beautiful and evocative antiques; this book locates the meaning of these things in the cultures of their production and use. The beauty of these objects is not valorized on its own merit but as an extension of the “beauty of holiness” that shaped early Anglican belief. Simultaneous changes in grave markers and church architecture signaled a shift of popular belief and practice, which often differs from official theology in significant ways. If this book locates Anglican material religion in the context of local religious culture, it also positions South Carolina in the broader context of the Greater British Caribbean. The history of early South Carolina is often discussed in relation to the Caribbean, but few studies follow through on that claim by placing South Carolina at the northern edge of this broader region. In short, by examining the early...