(Daily Signal)—On Aug. 14, 1774, the Rev. John Bullman climbed into the towering pulpit of Charleston’s St. Michael’s Church and told his South Carolina congregation that they needed to know their place.
As tensions with Great Britain mounted, Bullman, St. Michael’s assistant rector, preached “The Christian Duty of Peaceableness.”
He ridiculed the “silly Clown” and “illiterate Mechanic” who presumed to “censure the conduct of his Prince or Governor.” There was, Bullman declared, “no greater Instrument or Ornament of Peace” than for every man to keep “his own Rank” and perform the duties of his station. The congregation erupted.
The next day, the vestry—the parish’s lay governing body—considered a sermon that had caused “great offence and exasperated many of the inhabitants.” Some parishioners threatened to leave the church; the controversy grew so heated that violence was feared.
The vestry moved against Bullman almost immediately. By the following morning, he had been relieved of his position. He remained in Charleston for several months, hoping for reinstatement, before returning to England.
Completed in 1761 at Charleston’s famous Four Corners, St. Michael’s was among colonial America’s grandest churches. Its 186-foot steeple dominated the skyline. Its pews held men who would help lead a revolution their ministers struggled to accept. Thomas Heyward Jr. and Thomas Lynch Jr. would sign the Declaration of Independence; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Rutledge, and Pierce Butler would sign the Constitution.
At nearby St. Philip’s, the Rev. Robert Smith reached a different conclusion about Christian duty and political resistance. In February 1775, he preached to South Carolina’s political leaders on a day of fasting and prayer amid the dispute with Britain. Smith defended the colonists’ cause as the “sole Defence of undoubted rights,” while urging them to examine their own conduct and acknowledge their dependence on God. He rejected the claim that resistance necessarily sprang from an “unreasonable thirst of power, or factious discontent.”
Smith called his listeners to repentance and placed their cause under divine judgment, but he made clear that defending their rights could be consistent with Christian duty. Sixteen months later, he enlisted as a private to defend Charleston.
The Church of England was intertwined with the British establishment, and its clergy had sworn allegiance to the Crown. Anglican worship included prayers for the king, a practice that became politically explosive as resistance turned toward revolution.
Yet Anglicanism did not dictate one political position. Smith showed that a clergyman could defend the colonists’ rights while remaining a priest of the Church of England. For Bullman and other loyalist clergy, obedience to established authority was a religious obligation. As resistance hardened, Anglican priests faced a question of conscience: What did a clergyman owe the king when his congregation turned against him?
Bullman chose loyalty to the Crown. Many parishioners did not.
St. Michael’s rector, the Rev. Robert Cooper, also remained loyal. He refused to sign the Patriot association, join the militia, or take an oath of allegiance to South Carolina.
By the summer of 1776, the dispute over allegiance was no longer confined to sermons and vestry meetings. It was about to be tested by cannon fire.
The British Royal Navy opened fire on the unfinished palmetto-log fort on Sullivan’s Island. Among Col. William Moultrie’s defenders were Rev. Smith, my fifth-great-grandfather James Baggett, Catawba warriors, Francis Marion, William Jasper, Danger Thomson, and more than 1,200 other soldiers.
Outnumbered by a British force of nearly 3,000 men and facing nine armed warships, Moultrie’s defenders endured hours of cannon fire and lost 12 men, but they ultimately repelled the Royal Navy’s assault. Charleston rejoiced!
Christopher Gadsden, commanding at Fort Johnson across the harbor, sent Moultrie a message: “I congratulate you on the drubbing you gave those fellows.”
Susannah Elliott sailed to Sullivan’s Island to congratulate the defenders, including her husband, Maj. Barnard Elliott, who had fought in the battle. She presented the Second South Carolina Regiment with two silk banners she had embroidered herself, praising their gallant defense of “Liberty & your country.”
The victory at Sullivan’s Island made heroes of Charleston’s defenders. It also made neutrality increasingly impossible.
As Moultrie’s men fought the British fleet on June 28, Cooper publicly prayed at St. Michael’s that God would strengthen George III to triumph over his enemies.
Smith, however, returned to the pulpit at St. Philip’s on June 30 and hailed Charleston’s defenders. The contrast between the two clergymen could hardly have been clearer. One prayed for the king’s victory; the other thanked God for a Patriot triumph he had helped secure.
This was too much for St. Michael’s vestry. On July 2, they dismissed Cooper for persisting in his allegiance to the Crown.
That same day in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress declared that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Two days later, Congress adopted the Declaration explaining that decision.
Bullman and Cooper may sincerely have believed that Christian duty required obedience to the Crown. But the question was not settled by sincerity alone. Political authority is not absolute, and resistance to earthly authority is not necessarily rebellion against God.
Smith’s example offered another understanding of Christian responsibility. He defended the colonists’ rights while placing their cause under moral scrutiny. The Patriot conviction that government existed to secure liberties endowed by the Creator, rather than exercise unlimited authority over the people, gave many colonists a powerful moral argument for resistance.
The dividing line in Charleston did not always run between denominations, or even between churches. Sometimes it ran straight down the aisle.
In August 1774, Bullman climbed into one of colonial America’s grandest pulpits and told his congregation that peace required every man to keep his proper place. The people listening were about to help create a new country.
They had no intention of staying in their place.
This article is part of a series on the American Revolution in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal
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