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

1. The City Churches

Chapter 1 THE CITY CHURCHES In June 1753 the Gentleman’s Magazine published an engraving of the west prospect of “St. Philip’s Church in Charles Town, South Carolina” (FIG. 1.1).¹ Shade and shadow exaggerate the monumentality of the building’s three giant-order Tuscan porticos, while engaged pilasters carrying a continuous cornice extend the classical order to the body of the church. Rising from behind the porticos, a tall cupola of two octagonal stages supports a dome, a square lantern, and a cock weathervane.² St. Philip’s was far superior in finish and scale to the tenements, small shops, and houses that lined the streets of the colonial city (FIG. 1.2). A description accompanying the image praised the building as “one of the most regular and complete structures of the kind in America. The design was sent to us from Charles Town, where it has a very advantageous situation, at the upper end of a broad and extensive street.”³ The engraving, completed sometime before 1737, was probably sent to London by Charles Woodmason, a prominent South Carolina Anglican minister who in the subsequent edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine published a poem extolling Carolina as a “Second Carthage” where “Domes, temples, bridges, rise in distant views/And sumptuous palaces the sight amuse.”⁴ When recounting domes and temples, the poet-priest certainly had in mind the soaring cupola and triple porticos of St. Philip’s. Woodmason was not alone in his praise for the building. Writing just prior to the completion of the new church in 1722, South Carolina’s Anglican clergy celebrated the church as “not paralleled in his Majesty’s Dominions in America.”⁵ Published in a London monthly, the west prospect of St. Philip’s asserted an architectural sophistication at the fringe of empire that must have surprised the magazine’s cosmopolitan readership. Standing on the highest point within the city walls, St. Philip’s cupola reigned over Charleston, and its southern portico dominated the city’s principal north-south street (FIG. 1.3). As evident in the 1739 Ichnography of Charles-Town, the church of St. Philip’s was easily the principal building in this colonial town, the capital of a colony with an estimated 20,000 white and almost 40,000 enslaved black inhabitants by 1740.⁶ The church stood at the northern end of the city in blocks that were in the early eighteenth century still fairly open; just to the northwest stood the colony’s powder magazine. The blocks immediately to the south were densely constructed with merchants’ FIGURE 1.1 Engraving titled “St. Philip’s Church in Charles Town, South Carolina” (Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1753) THE CITY CHURCHES 15 houses, shops, tenements, and warehouses nearest the wharfs. While some of the wealthiest might leave a multistoried private house like the few evident in the 1739 Bishop Roberts’s view of Charleston, most Anglicans who came to the church for regular worship departed domestic settings of only a few very plain chambers, often shared with a number of other people. Three- and four-story brick tenements with multiple, irregularly located doors and often unstable wood balconies projecting overhead lined the street and stood cheek by jowl with warehouses and unassuming frame shops less than ten feet wide. Rising from the midst of this landscape, St. Philip’s seemed wholly other. More than sixty feet wide and seventy feet long, the church occupied a more prominent place than any other space in the real or imaginary landscape of the majority of Carolina Anglicans. Begun in 1711, St. Philip’s was the first of three Anglican churches erected in colonial South Carolina that demonstrated the remarkable cosmopolitan fluency of this remote outpost of the British Empire. Together with St. Michael’s, also in Charleston (1751–62), and Prince William’s Parish Church (1751–53), in a remote plantation parish, St. Philip’s was one colonial example of a revolution in elite Anglican church design. In 1711 Parliament passed an act for building fifty new churches in London and her immediate environs, initiating a flurry of discussion and debate among English architects and clergy about appropriate design for Anglican churches. While only fourteen new churches were built in London as a direct result of this act, the process of formulating the urban Anglican church informed an extraordinary FIGURE 1.2 Thomas You, St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, ca. 1760 (South Carolina Historical Society...