Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

Poison Stories: A Rereading of Revolutionary Virginia’s Baptist “Revolt”

105 Poison Stories A Rereading of Revolutionary Virginia’s Baptist “Revolt” jewel l. spangler The 1792 poisoning of Virginia Baptist minister James Ireland had all the makings of a good story. There was a mystery: everyone from the victims to the district court judges was anxious to determine who put arsenic in the Ireland family’s evening tea. The story had high drama. A roomful of people were sickened and a crowd of friends, neighbors, county officials, and medical specialists rushed to the scene to give aid and act as a posse to investigate the crime. The story had twists. While it initially seemed as if the Irelands had sweetened their tea with sugar from the Caribbean that slaves had tampered with, gradually people started to believe that the poison was local in origin—two of Ireland’s house servants were suspected of trying very intentionally, if not very precisely, to kill the Baptist leader. There was tragedy. The only death in the incident was a three-year-old child who had sipped tea surreptitiously from an unattended saucer during the hubbub. The tale perhaps even had a hint of comedy. The diners all but rolled their eyes when Ireland, the first to feel ill, reacted to the poison’s effects by leaping to his feet to run from the room, as he was known to be “addicted” to health complaints and had interrupted a few meals before. But then the whole group took sick all at once and “scattered off from the table, some hanging to the different door cheeks, and some in other postures, crying out, ‘Hold my head, I shall die, give me drink, I am poisoned, etc!’”1 106 jewel l. spangler Two chapters of the preacher’s published autobiography, The Life of the Rev. James Ireland (1819), sketch out this tale of attempted murder gone wrong. It is also relayed more briefly in the local Winchester newspaper , Bowen’s Virginia Centinel and Gazette, and various Frederick County and district court proceedings.2 Yet this story, like so many other personal dramas of the past, has largely been ignored by both professional historians and Baptists interested in their heritage. Their lack of interest in the poisoning is, of course, completely ordinary, as we remember and repeat over time only a tiny fraction of that which has been described in written source material. It is odd, however, that the poisoning is barely remembered when Ireland’s autobiography is still read and used quite extensively by southern religious historians and American Baptist writers alike. For generations Ireland’s memoir, the majority of which details the minister’s high-spirited youth, his religious conversion, and the path he took to the pulpit in Revolutionary Virginia, has been an important primary source for those researching the origins of the Bible Belt and the founding of the Baptist faith in the southern United States.3 Popular versions of the Baptist founding story, largely written by Baptists themselves, tend to underscore the hardships the sect endured and overcame to spread the word of God. This literature draws from Ireland’s autobiography mostly to recount a series of confrontations the minister had with colonial officials, culminating in his 1769–70 imprisonment in Culpepper County, Virginia, for preaching without a license (the Anglican Church was legally established in Virginia, and dissenting faiths could only practice at the pleasure of the colonial government). Descriptions in Ireland’s memoir of his ongoing effort to preach from his jail cell window, even after the prison guard tried to silence him by suffocating him with smoke, exploding a homemade bomb in his cell, and poisoning his food, have facilitated the building of a narrative of the Baptists’ rise in the United States as a product of hardship and brave perseverance. Ireland ’s confrontations, incarceration, and persecution are sometimes, and not inaccurately, linked by Baptist writers to the broader struggle for separation of church and state and religious freedom in the Revolutionary age, a linkage that underscores the fact that Baptists such as Ireland were important contributors to the American, and not just the Baptist, founding.4 Academics have focused on some similar features of Ireland’s autobi- A Rereading of Revolutionary Virginia’s Baptist “Revolt” 107 ography as they have formulated a “master narrative” of the rise of evangelical religion in the American South. That master narrative has cast early evangelicals as social and cultural outsiders...