Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina: The Life of the Reverend Alexander Garden, 1685–1756 by Fred E. Witzig (review)

Anglican rector and commissary of Charles Town, South Carolina, Alexander Garden is best known for his acrimonious public dispute with the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield. Yet Fred E. Witzig demonstrates Garden’s pivotal role in promoting polite society, building the local Anglican establishment into a major cultural force, and defending slavery and social hierarchy. Claiming to be a “dual biography” of Garden and South Carolina, Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina: The Life of the Reverend Alexander Garden, 1685–1756 traces the relationship between the man and the colony (p. xi). Witzig claims, “Garden and his friends built the Old South—the slave plantation economy, social politeness and hierarchy, and conformity to racial norms—that came to represent something of a founding myth comparable to New England’s ‘City on a Hill’” (p. xii).

Previously depicted as angry and imperious, Garden emerges as a full character in this biography: “economically perceptive, politically aware, religiously informed, and socially astute” (p. 19). He made friends with the local elite and joined the ranks of prominent slaveholding families by marrying Martha Guerard. As commissary, he defended the vestry in disputes with ministers and “turned the Church of England into a symbol and instrument of white authority” (p. 53). According to Witzig, South Carolina needed Garden to “paint a veneer of godliness over the decidedly carnal business of slave exploitation” (p. 54). Witzig aptly considers the connections between gentility, rising Anglican influence, and the stifling of criticism against the elite, the social hierarchy, and slavery. Witzig shows that clergy in Charles Town were often charged with immorality, but political opposition to the vestry, Garden, and their elite allies was the actual offense. That the elite benefited from the rising cultural value of Anglicanism is well argued here. Yet readers learn more about the local ministers whom Garden opposed than the elites in the front pews of St. Philip’s Church, whom Witzig calls the “key white culture makers of the colony” (p. 79). More on Garden’s interactions with his prominent friends would help readers estimate how much to credit Garden, as opposed to prominent lay leaders and lawmakers, with building the Old South. Garden’s impact on slaves, or their opinions about him, is even more uncertain. Readers may also wonder if, instead of a comparison with New England’s founding myths and Congregationalism, a comparison with the Anglican establishment in Virginia would have been more fruitful in revealing how South Carolina’s patterns of Anglican gentrification, which were connected to slavery, replicated or diverged from Virginia’s model.

Concerning evangelicalism, Garden’s impact is clearer. Garden’s opposition to George Whitefield was neither immediate nor theological, since the commissary claimed his own views were generally compatible with revivalism and thought small theological differences should not be polarizing. Yet Whitefield criticized the luxury of wealthy Charles Town residents and the laxity of the clergy, who did not censure their wealthy congregants for their dress, entertainments, or poor treatment of slaves. Therefore, Garden charged Whitefield in ecclesiastical court with sedition against the Church of England and believed he was attempting to incite slave rebellion and social annihilation. Witzig asserts that “[t]he threat of social upheaval never occurred to antirevivalists” elsewhere because South Carolina’s enslaved majority posed a more serious risk of rebellion (p. 123). Garden thus responded to Whitefield’s open letter about slavery in the most surprising way: setting aside his decades-long practice of neglecting African education and creating a slave school in Charles Town. In so doing, he imagined a school “more socially responsible” than Whitefield’s Bethesda orphanage, “and he sanctified polite slaveholding by publicly tending to slave education and Christianization” (pp. 138, 176). In his response to evangelicalism, as in his earlier career, Garden promoted the cultural authority of the...