The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism: Religious Revivalism in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1760 by Thomas J. Little (review)

Why should Virginia get all the attention? That is the question Thomas J. Little asks in his study of revivalism in colonial South Carolina, The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism. True, a smattering of Presbyterians, Separate Baptists, and Methodists in turn established footholds in the Anglican colony along the Chesapeake in the second half of the eighteenth century, and yes, late colonial Virginians ultimately embraced evangelical religion. But in framing the religious developments of the Chesapeake region as a proxy for the entire colonial South, Little contends, historians have overlooked the distinctive, pluralistic religious culture of early South Carolina and have accordingly misconstrued the roots of southern evangelicalism. His monograph, an analysis of the religious and political dynamics that birthed revivalism in the Lower South, ensures that colonial South Carolinians get their due.

Little sets out to rewrite the timeline of southern evangelicalism, placing its emergence in the Lower South in the early eighteenth century, decades before it first flowered in Virginia. Reflecting recent priorities in early American historiography, he also seeks to situate South Carolina's religious story in a transatlantic context and to connect local developments with trends elsewhere in the North American colonies. This is a book about a colonial South Carolina nestled within an imperial context, welcoming settlers from a range of European nations and English colonies and swirling with religious texts penned from London to Boston to Charleston.

Little's central concern is the significance of the Great Awakening in South Carolina: the local and transatlantic circumstances that presaged its emergence, its unfolding in Charleston and throughout the Lowcountry, and its legacies. Countering S. Charles Bolton's claim that the fire kindled by George Whitefield fizzled out with little trace in the colony prior to the American Revolution, Little asserts that revivalism smoldered and blazed from the 1720s forward, a perpetual flame in southern society.¹ Even members of the Anglican establishment burned with evangelical fervor, some of them siding with Whitefield in his increasingly contentious debates with clergy he considered unregenerate.

After a concise preface laying out the stakes of the project, a lengthy opening chapter traces the roots of religious revivalism to the permissive settlement policies of the Carolina proprietors, who encouraged dissenting Protestant groups to people the colony alongside the Anglicans in the late seventeenth century. The eight proprietors to whom Charles II granted the colony of Carolina in 1663 adhered to the Church of England, but they offered freedom of conscience and religious toleration as bait to lure seasoned colonists from New England and other English settlements. From the proprietors' earliest promotional materials through their novel Fundamental Constitutions (first drafted in 1669), they ensured that Quakers, Anabaptists, and even Jews could constitute their own religious bodies in the colony. By the early 1670s the project of recruiting nonconformists had taken on new significance. The proprietors sought a demographic counterweight to the group of Anglican Barbadians who had grasped local power and persisted in challenging the proprietors' authority. A religiously eclectic mix of settlers drawn by the promise of toleration streamed into Carolina in the next few decades—Scottish Covenanters, English Puritans, Barbadian Quakers, Maine Baptists, New England Congregationalists, and French Huguenots—many of them fleeing religious persecution. Little asserts that these Atlantic migrations transformed the colony by tipping the religious balance. In the late 1690s dissenters, who constituted a majority of the white population, dominated local politics. By 1700 South Carolina had ten dissenting churches and one Anglican church.

Readers may be surprised by the dominance of vital dissenting congregations in seventeenth-century Carolina but probably not by the weak showing of the Church of England. Scholars have long stressed the fragility of the Anglican establishment in the southern colonies. As Donald G. Mathews observed, "the South Carolina [Anglican] church was merely the low country planter aristocracy at prayer; the backcountry was left to dissenters...