The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832

EIGHT: The Accommodation of Cultures

The forces of economic and demographic growth that gave most Lunenburg households an increased level of agricultural output and a slightly enhanced standard of physical comfort appear to have cut across the religious and ethnic lines that had worked to divide the white citizens of the county during the prerevolution­ ary period. While growing similarities in economic circumstance did not eliminate the cultural differences that separated evangeli­ cals, Episcopalians, and unbelievers, they did, in combination with a revised institutional structure that removed the privileges and powers of sanction from the Episcopal church, greatly reduce the conflicts those differences had previously generated. • TOWARD RELIGIOUS PLURALISM The unequal distribution of economic and political power which gave disproportionate advantage to the members of the Anglican gentry elite in the prerevolutionary period did not disappear com­ pletely after the war, but there was a marked trend toward an evening of those imbalances. The formal power of the Protestant E I G H T The Accommodation of Cultures The Accommodation of Cultures 187 Episcopal Church had declined markedly; most obvious, it no longer possessed the legal power to command attendance at its weekly services, and it could not command the taxpayers to sup­ port either its doctrines or its ministers. And in a display not so much of militant repudiation as of unconcern and apathy, many of Lunenburg's citizens—both well­to­do and middling—simply ceased to take an interest in the affairs of the church once com­ pulsory support had been eliminated. The members of the church vestry, who in the decade before the Revolution constituted a group nearly synonymouswith wealth and political power in the county, were by the end of the eighteenth century steadily losing their claim to preeminence. By 1795 fewer than half the members of the county court had also served the Episcopal church as vestrymen, and only five of the twenty wealth­ iest men in the county had held that post. By 1815 the separation of secular authority and the old church was even more marked. Only three of the eighteen justices and only five of the twenty wealthiest men in the county had served as vestrymen.1 As might be expected, certain prominent family names closely associated with positions of leadership in the economic, political, and reli­ gious life of the county in earlier years (Chambers, Billups, Stokes, and Taylor) continued to appear on the lists of court justices and of the affluent, but in many cases those sons and relations of the pillars of the prerevolutionary Anglican church did not choose to follow the example of their elders and devote their time to serving the Episcopal church.2 Disestablishment facilitated the move­ ment of at least a few prominent Lunenburg citizens out of the ranks of the Episcopal church altogether and into the ranks of what previously had been defined as "dissenting" religions. The most prominent example of this trend was the Rev. Clement Read, the •grandson of the great patriarch of Lunenburg and one of the pillars of the Anglican church during the formative years of the county. The younger Read, after completing a course of study at the newly established Presbyterian college of Hampden­Sydney in neighbor­ ing Prince Edward County, was received as a candidate in the Presbyterian ministry in 1788. Ultimately Read spurned Presby­ terianism, becoming instead one of the leaders in the emergent Republican Methodist Church.3 The growth of the Republican 188 The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry Methodists, just one of the variants of Methodism that was making its influence felt in the Southside by the turn of the century, was itself another sign of the growing acceptance within the county of a pluralistic cultural­religious standard. The Republican Method­ ists, like the Presbyterians, constituted a thoroughly "respectable" group within Lunenburg, and while Episcopalians continued to enjoy a slight preponderance among the economic and political elite of the county, members of other denominations increasingly appeared in the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. Even the Sep­ arate Baptists, who in Lunenburg continued to represent the most radical and numerically significant alternative to the values of traditional religion, had by 1815 managed to place four of their members on the county court; one, Joseph Yarborough, could be counted among the fifteen wealthiest men in the county, and sev­ eral other members could boast of landholdings and slaveholdings that placed them in the upper 10 percent of the...