Becoming Baptists: Conversion in Colonial and Early National Virginia.

BETWEEN 1755 AND 1790 VIRGINIANS PARTICIPATED IN A SERIES OF religious revivals that were crucial in rooting the Baptist Church in the South. Historians have long sought to explain the appeal of Baptist practice and faith to those who first embraced them in this staunchly Anglican region, as becoming a Baptist at that moment was difficult and sometimes even dangerous work. It was difficult because converts had to act and think in profoundly new ways. When Virginians joined Baptist churches they eschewed the predictable cycle of the Book of Common Prayer and the quiet, private worship that characterized Anglicanism to embrace a far more spontaneous and emotional practice that demanded a great deal from converts. Baptists also had to accept the far stricter discipline of their new church, which demanded a detailed, public airing of personal sin and required that congregants take an active part in disciplining one another for those sins. In the end, Baptists were also relinquishing the comforts of Anglican Arminianism for the harsher Calvinism of their new faith. At the same time, those who responded to revival preaching subjected themselves to danger by joining Baptist churches, because they took up a faith that violated the legal establishment of the Church of England, making converts into potential lawbreakers and exposing them to extralegal mob violence.

A number of historians have interpreted the rise of the Baptist Church as an event centered around class interests in some way. While acknowledging that the occasional planter family found their way into fellowship, some of these historians have claimed that Baptist worship attracted mostly the smallest farmers and slaves, while others maintain that solid yeomen filled the first meetinghouses.(1) Some have gone a step further to argue that early Baptists were attracted to the faith precisely by a sense of discontentment with their place in the social order, so that their class background may be understood as directly related to their conversions. Others have suggested that Baptists stood apart from their fellow southerners in more profound cultural ways. Dissenting congregations, populated by those who rejected the dominant culture or felt unable to fit well into it, represented a sort of alternative community in which values of emotion, piety, and self-discipline were ranked above those of wealth, honor, and display.(2) Some historians have conceived of Baptist conversion as the commencement of a spiritual journey that, in fact, led initiates away from conformity to southern norms. In this view, new converts to the Baptist faith were required to absent themselves from many of the venues and occasions that had traditionally allowed rural people to build a sense of community, to observe their betters in the act of leadership, and to defer to them as leaders.(3)

The historiographical trend, therefore, has been to describe the rise of the Baptists in Virginia as an expression of more or less bitter divisions within communities, centered upon the fundamental question of the proper nature of the social order. Early Virginia Baptists, according to a number of scholars, were more egalitarian in their beliefs and practice than most Virginians, even though they were not social levelers by any means. As such, they found Baptist practice, which promoted lay participation and an uneducated clergy, appealing. At times, some have argued, the Baptist emphasis upon equality placed them in pointed conflict with the hierarchical, patriarchal social order dominated by Virginia's leading planters.(4) A few have suggested that among the most socially disruptive of Baptist practices was their open-armed welcoming of slaves as members and their brief, tentative questioning of the morality of slavery in the immediate post-Revolutionary years--practices that threatened to undermine the most fundamental social ordering principle in the region.(5) Historians have also linked the relatively egalitarian and inclusive nature of Baptist worship to the more radical democratic tendencies of the American Revolution, which the ruling class ultimately sought to curb during the early years of the republic.(6) Most agree that Baptists were only able to win the trust of Virginia's leading families and convert a significant portion of the population by jettisoning some forms of equality and inclusiveness within the church after 1790 and accommodating themselves to planter rule and slavery.(7) However, historians have yet to fully elucidate how that accommodation took place or what explains its timing.

This article reconsiders the nature of early Baptist dissent in Virginia on the premise that none of these standard interpretations can fully explain Baptist conversion in the early years of fellowship. The first Baptist churches drew their membership largely from the middling sort, but significant social diversity also marked these congregations. Ties between Baptists and their unbelieving neighbors appear to have been fairly strong before conversion and continued after saving grace set Baptists apart spiritually. While Baptists separated themselves from their unconverted neighbors when it came to certain matters of personal conduct, they were not outsiders to the community at large, in search of a remedy to their sense of social rejection. Rather, some were themselves community leaders, while others enjoyed backing from the leading men of the county. Nor did Baptist practice significantly challenge notions of hierarchy and patriarchy so fundamental to the Virginian social order. Instead, Baptist spiritual egalitarianism was limited enough to leave basic household inequalities intact, while Baptist religious practice supported patriarchal relations and involuntary servitude, thereby shoring up rather than eroding the authority of planters and household heads. While slaveholding members were probably instrumental in shaping the socially conservative nature of these churches, Baptist religious practice may have contributed to the formation of a patriarchal, proslavery ideology even among nonslaveholders, people who had little intimate contact with either slaveholders or slaves outside of their participation in Baptist fellowship.

Yet the first Baptist converts appear to have received some social and emotional benefits from their church that were not otherwise readily available in rural Virginia. It is the argument of this article that converts were particularly drawn to the faith by its promise to provide social order through a heightened self-discipline and its ability to elicit intimate interpersonal contact and intense emotional release.(8) These elements were appealing to rural Virginians particularly in more newly settled regions of the state, where other institutions were least able to provide these services. This article further suggests that there was a particular set of social conditions that governed the rise of the Baptist Church in Virginia. The first Baptist converts were social innovators, people willing to embrace something new. As such, they are probably difficult to generalize about as a group, but religious mavericks seem to have been those who were particularly lacking in certain types of social ties, and who, once they had a positive contact with the new faith, developed intense bonds to others in the new group. Baptist conversion appears to have been a two-stage process. The very first converts, through their existing social networks, were then able to bring in the critical mass of secondary converts needed to start and sustain the first Baptist churches. Baptist expansion depended upon the pre-existing relationships of family, neighborhood, and friendship. In the end, Baptist success in the South can be understood as a gradual process owing to the power of social networks, southerners' growing familiarity with Baptist ways over time, and the ability of this faith to meet the emotional needs of rural people, rather than as a function of a concerted effort to transform the faith to accommodate to southern ways.

Two Virginia Baptist churches founded in the 1770s south of the James River will serve as test cases for this article: Black Creek Baptist Church in Southampton County and Meherrin Baptist Church in Lunenburg County. The minute books of Black Creek, a Regular Baptist congregation formed in 1774, are rich in detail, and the church is particularly interesting because of its antislavery record. The church's minister, the Reverend David Barrow, manumitted all of his slaves in 1784, wrote an antislavery tract, and ultimately migrated to Kentucky in 1798 in part to escape slavery. Black Creek was the only congregation in revolutionary Virginia to challenge slavery directly by declaring slaveholding a sin, and a few congregants followed Barrow's lead by manumitting slaves. If any Baptist church in Virginia might conform to historiographical expectations by creating a separate community that operated largely outside of and in opposition to the slaveholders' regime, it should be Black Creek.(9) Meherrin, in contrast, was a Separate Baptist church further inland, formed in 1771 from Nottoway Church in neighboring Amelia County.(10) Meherrin was virtually the only Separate Baptist congregation in Virginia that was both situated in a county with good surviving local records and kept extensive church minutes from its founding. The church minutes in this case are exceptionally rich, and Meherrin's minister, the Reverend John Williams, also kept a diary describing the period just before the church was constituted. Meherrin Church has long served for historians as an example of the egalitarian tendencies of the early Baptists, so it is also particularly worthy of reexamination.(11)

Few residents of Southampton County, situated on the edges of Virginia tobacco production, could match the sort of wealth associated with Tidewater planters on the peninsulas, regardless of religious persuasion, but the congregants of Black Creek Church were particularly notable for their modest material circumstances. Southampton Baptists in the 1770s and 1780s were predominantly drawn from the population of free small farmers, possessing enough property to maintain a competency but not enough to live in luxury--in fact, they owned significantly less property on average than Southampton residents at large. In 1782 about 40 percent of Baptist household heads for whom data is available were slaveholders, paying levies on less than five slaves each, a figure well below county averages.(12) In that same year Black Creek taxpayers averaged less than 200 acres of land, far below the norm for the county (see Table 1). The modest nature of Baptist wealth in Southampton was probably due, at least in part, to the fact that the meetinghouse was situated in the poorer, upper section of the county, where relatively few residents were significant slaveholders.(13) About 40 percent of the Baptist male household heads were not listed in the personal property tax records at all, raising the possibility that they were entirely propertyless.(14) While the free householders of Black Creek appear to have been marginal farmers in the main, no congregants in 1782 came from the slave quarters. The first slave convert did not enter the church until 1785, and less than 9 percent of all Black Creek members through 1804 were slaves, in spite of the fact that slaves comprised 45 percent of Southampton's population in 1776 and 46 percent in 1790.(15)

                                TABLE 1
            WEALTH IN SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 1782

                                          Baptist      Taxpaying
                                        Households    Households

Percentage of slaveholders among
 taxpayers                                    40            64
Average number of slaves per
 slaveholding household                       4.6           7.2
Average number of slaves
 per taxpaying household                      1.8           4.6
Average acreage owned per taxpayer            200           332

SOURCES: Southampton County Personal Property Tax Book,
1782, manuscript, Library of Virtinia; Southampton County
Land Tax Book, 1782, manuscript, Library of Virginia.

The dearth of slave members in the Black Creek congregation deviates sharply from the standard description of early Baptists, but it would be simple enough to conclude that in other ways Black Creek conformed to expectations, being comprised of a single class of struggling farmers. To be sure, such families dominated the membership numerically, but it is important to note that social diversity also characterized this congregation. The richest convert, Elias Herring, owned twenty-two slaves and a plantation of 440 acres in 1782, which he expanded to over 1,000 acres by 1787. His wealth may have been modest by Tidewater standards, but he was one of the richest and most powerful men in Southampton County. Herring held virtually every office of any importance in local government in the 1770s and 1780s, including those of sheriff, militia colonel, and justice of the peace. (16) A handful of other Black Creek congregants were substantial yeomen who owned enough property to live in security, sometimes dabbling in county government.(17)

Among the Separate Baptists of Lunenburg County, men of property were more numerous, while the congregation as a whole was more socially diverse. In Lunenburg, almost 50 percent of Baptist householders listed in surviving tithable records were slaveholders in 1772, just after Meherrin Baptist Church was formed, averaging 3.7 slaves each. By 1782 over 70 percent of Meherrin Baptists found on the personal property tax lists were slaveholders, averaging 6.5 slaves per household, almost exactly in line with county averages.(18) In terms of land ownership, the Separate Baptist taxpayers in Lunenburg were similarly well fixed, if not as comfortable as some of their neighbors, owning an average of 258 acres per taxpayer (see Table 2). Only 40 percent of Meherrin Baptists appeared on tithable lists for 1772-1775, and even fewer on the personal property tax lists for 1782; however, one cannot assume that all those Baptists not found on the tax lists were propertyless. Meherrin Baptist Church drew a significant portion of its membership from other counties for which tithable records have not survived. By 1782 a number of Meherrin congregants had relocated outside of Lunenburg County, which also makes it difficult to trace them in local records.

                                 TABLE 2
         WEALTH IN LUNENBURG COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 1772 AND 1782

                                      1772

                             Baptist       Taxpaying
                             Households    Households

Percentage of
 slaveholders among
 taxpayers                      50             61
Average number of
 slaves per slave-
 holding household             3.7            3.7
Average number of
 slaves per taxpaying
 household                     1.7            2.2
Average acreage
 owned per taxpayer             --             --

                                     1782

                           Baptist         Taxpaying
                           Households      Households

Percentage of
 slaveholders among
 taxpayers                   74             68
Average number of
 slaves per slave-
 holding household           6.5            6.6
Average number of
 slaves per taxpaying
 household                   4.5            4.5
Average acreage
 owned per taxpayer          258            337

SOURCES: Landon C. Bell, Sunlight on the Southside: Lists
of Tithes, Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1748-1783
(Philadelphia, 1931; repr., Baltimore, 1974), 287-309;
Lunenburg County Personal Property Tax Book, 1782,
manuscript, Library of Virginia; Lunenburg County Land Tax
Book, 1782, manuscript, Library of Virginia.

Compared to Black Creek Church, more of Meherrin's members might be considered comfortable by 1782. Tscharner Degraffenreid was probably the wealthiest Meherrin Baptist, with twenty-eight slaves and 435 acres of Lunenburg land, while three other converts owned more than ten slaves and plantations of between 650 and 900 acres. Henry Blagrave Jr. was one of three converts who hailed from wealthy and powerful families, although he was too young to have taken over the family fortune at the time of his conversion.(19) At the same time, however, the church was attracting more members from the ranks of the dispossessed as well. In addition to the possible landlessness of a significant number of free householding converts, 15 percent of Meherrin's membership to 1780 were enslaved, a figure that dropped in the 1780s but then rose dramatically in the 1790s. It is difficult to imagine that the first generation of Baptists in Lunenburg County were driven to conversion by a commonly held worldview predicated on their lack of power in that locality. Surely Tscharner Degraffenreid, as a substantial planter, would have had a fundamentally different understanding of his social place in Lunenburg than his fellow Baptist Anthony Fullerlove, a nonslaveholder whose family worked a modest farm of 100 acres--not to mention his obvious differences with enslaved Meherrin congregants Sharper and Esther. In the end, it seems clear that the social origins of Southside Baptists were not the primary source of motivation for conversion.(20)

The farmers of Black Creek and Meherrin Baptist Churches cannot be described as a unified, dispossessed underclass. At the same time, it is difficult to characterize them as rejected outsiders to the secular community who were searching for an alternative means of achieving a sense of belonging. Court records chart the persistent public activities of some converts in the secular world both before and after conversion. For Revolutionary-era Virginians, court day operated much like town meetings did for New Englanders. The court punished those who violated community norms, settled conflicts among inhabitants, and generated the infrastructure of the county. Most decisions the community needed to make were administered through the courts, such as surveying for new roads and maintaining old ones, building and maintaining bridges, collecting taxes, keeping prisoners, supporting orphans and the poor, placing apprentices, and issuing licenses. Baptists in Southampton and Lunenburg Counties were as involved in this system as were their unconverted neighbors. When Baptists bought and sold land, a trip to court was required to register the transaction. Estates were processed through the court, so Baptists gave testimony about their value, served as executors at the court's discretion, and submitted their wills for examination. Baptists served the county in many court-appointed offices, ranging from law enforcement positions to the grand jury. They sued and were sued by non-Baptists, so they were required to present their cases, hire and pay witnesses, and honor the rulings of the justices.(21) Baptist participation in county affairs leaves little doubt that a significant number of early converts were well attached to the secular community and commanded at least a modicum of respect therein, both before and after becoming Baptists.

County justices frequently appointed Baptists (and others soon to be converted) to a host of local offices where they served important civic functions, which suggests that the early Baptists were hardly outcasts in their neighborhoods. Probably the clearest example of such appointments was in the maintenance of the local transportation network. Some Black Creek and Meherrin Baptists were appointed overseers of the roads, which involved keeping paths clear of debris and passable during the winter. To carry out such appointments, overseers were expected to use the household labor of other farmsteads in the area. Southampton and Lunenburg Counties paid some Baptists for repairing bridges as well, while several were assigned to survey the placement of new roads.(22) Since the path of a road could enhance the value of some property holdings and deflate the value of others, surveying road placement was a task of particular significance. When Baptists performed such tasks, they assumed the citizenship responsibilities required by the non-Baptist community. Of course their participation was not entirely voluntary--overseers of the roads performed their jobs on pain of presentment before the grand jury, should the roads fall into disrepair. However, such appointments do indicate that the most powerful men in the county, the magistrates, thought some Baptists to be capable and reliable members of the community who would be likely to carry out these burdensome tasks. More importantly, by placing Baptists in a position to supervise the labor of others, justices expressed their opinion that Baptists could be community leaders.

While the role of Baptists in building and maintaining the transportation network of the Southside may not, in itself, persuade anyone that some converts possessed important ties to and held the respect of the unconverted community, the diverse nature of their public service cannot be denied. Baptists in both Southampton and Lunenburg Counties, for example, also served on grand juries with some frequency.(23) That Baptists served when called is not terribly surprising, since once named by a sheriff, jurors could only decline to serve under threat of a fine. That a sheriff would select Baptists for such service, however, speaks clearly to the position of early Baptists in their communities. Southampton County Court spelled out in 1773 what was assumed in Southside Virginia at large: jury members were to be "the most capable persons of this county not being ordinary keepers, constables, surveyors of highways or owners of mills." When Baptists were called to serve on grand juries, the summonses constituted assessments that they were "capable persons."(24) Once impaneled, Baptists were again expected to act as leaders, given their new positions of authority within their communities. Jurors, after all, reprimanded county dwellers for failing to perform public services assigned to them, for violating moral codes of conduct, and for creating public nuisances. Grand jury members also disciplined inhabitants of the county at large for inappropriate social conduct, much as the Baptist Church corrected errant members. True outsiders to the community would probably not have found themselves called to serve in such a capacity.

Similarly, Baptists were at times called upon to act as surrogate patriarchs in charge of individuals whose own households had failed them, another measure of how they were esteemed in the community. Particularly in Southampton County, justices nominated Baptists to be guardians for orphans, both Baptist and non-Baptist, and to provide support for indigent individuals.(25) Perhaps justices chose Baptists for these tasks partly because converts had experience in taking care of those in need. Baptist churches expected their members to support the widows and orphans among them, to help one another in hard times, and to support the minister voluntarily. In a sense, their county involvement mirrored and duplicated their efforts within the church. The congregation was a world within a world, and Baptists were active participants in both.

Justices also appointed some Baptists to posts in which they wielded power, expected deference, and commanded respect. In Southampton County, Elias Herring served as sheriff from 1779 to 1782, while in Lunenburg, Joseph Williams was sheriff when he joined Meherrin Baptist Church in 1771, and his son, the Reverend John Williams, was his deputy.(26) In Southampton, two Baptists held the highest local office as justices of the peace--Elias Herring and the Reverend David Barrow. In Lunenburg, Joseph Williams served as justice of the peace in the 1770s.(27) County justices, far from being outsiders to the community, were the heart of it. They made most of the decisions that would affect the operation of the county, the inhabitants of the area submitted themselves to their judgment, and the community opened up all of its business to them. The office of justice was a springboard for most statewide political careers. No one lacking community esteem could have sat on the bench for long. At the same time, some Baptist heads of household assumed leadership roles in the community by serving as officers in the militia as well. During the Revolutionary War, Shadrack Lewis and John O'Berry, Southampton Baptists, joined Elias Herring as militia officers, and after the war fellow congregants John Bowers, Arthur Bowing, and John Joyner also served the county in that capacity. In Lunenburg, John Pamplin was commissioned as an ensign in 1777, while Craddock Vaughan was recommended for the office of captain and commissioned as a second lieutenant at the same session of the court. Both were already church members at the time of their appointments.(28) There can be no greater test of citizenship than the willingness to go to battle to defend the community. Southside Baptists were not just willing, they were ready to lead the way--and Southampton and Lunenburg magistrates thought they could handle the job.

The extensive evidence of Baptist community service undermines the notion that converts sought Baptist fellowship from a sense of utter alienation from their neighbors or a lack of respect in their communities. Furthermore, conversion clearly did not preclude continued civic involvement. To the contrary, Black Creek Baptist Church went so far as to directly require its membership to participate in county business and to submit to local authorities as the law required. In 1778 the church defined community participation as an essential part of a godly life when it brought one of its members, Peter Butler, under censure for the sin of "Rejecting Civil Authority."(29) In the end, the community relations of the first Virginia Baptists, as revealed in court records, provide little evidence to distinguish them from their non-Baptist neighbors and explain their choice of distinctive religious views and practice. The appointment of some Baptists to positions of authority and leadership in the county indicates that a few of them were more than mere participants in county business--they were insiders, caught up in the network of relationships that supported planter power in both Southampton and Lunenburg Counties. Those Baptists who served on the bench, in law enforcement positions, and in the militia were charged with responsibility for protecting the status quo as defined by the elite coterie of slaveholders who dominated local politics. Most of these Baptists were themselves slaveholders or former slaveholders. In Southampton, Elias Herring, Shadrack Lewis, John Bowers, and David Barrow might at some point have fit this description. In Lunenburg, Tscharner Degraffenreid, Elijah Baker, and Joseph Williams may be counted in this category. These were men who knew the taste of power as both slaveholders and officeholders. They reasonably could have pictured themselves as citizens of significant community esteem, who both enjoyed the support of the leading planters who had placed them in office and shared much in common with those planters. While Black Creek's minister, David Barrow, self-consciously retreated from the planter elite by manumitting his slaves and finally by quitting Southampton itself, he left behind a significant number of Baptist household heads on the Southside who did not follow his example.

Magistrates who appointed nonslaveholding Baptists to lesser positions of community service demonstrated the fact that there was also a relationship between the planting elite of the county and those who had little personal stake in the slave system, whether Baptists or not. That the actions of the court and the interests of the planter class were significantly connected cannot be doubted, as magistrates were usually among the largest slaveholders in the county. When these men selected nonslaveholding Baptists to serve as overseers and surveyors of roads, as guardians, and as lesser militia officers, they demonstrated their basic respect for them. At the same time, magistrates sometimes placed nonslaveholding Baptists into paid service for the county, which suggests something of a patronage relationship between planters and nonslaveholding Baptists, mediated through the court system. Those Baptists compensated for repairing bridges, taking care of orphans, and the like probably did not consider themselves outsiders in the community, nor would they be likely to object to or challenge the premises of planter rule from which they so directly benefited.(30)

If Baptists in Southside Virginia did not convert to this outsider faith because of their class status or position in the secular community, were potential converts attracted to the church because it challenged norms about how society should best be arranged? Did the Baptist Church offer its converts the appeal of an alternative community arranged along different--even countercultural--principles? An avalanche of work in recent years has explained that slavery and patriarchy were the fundamental ordering principles of southern society, serving as complementary foundations of white male authority. Women, children, unpropertied men, and slaves were for the most part dependent members of households and therefore virtually barred from the public life of the community. Propertied white men were able to come together in the public sphere as relative equals precisely because of the dependent and unequal status of most household members, whether these were kinfolk or hired laborers. The centrality of the patriarchal household to the southern social structure thus provided a fundamental basis for white male political equality, even as it ensured that the overall extent of social equality was powerfully circumscribed. Slavery was fundamental to the continuation of this form of social organization in the aftermath of the War for Independence. On the one hand, Virginia's dependence upon the institution inhibited the emergence of a free labor market east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, meaning that the patriarchal order survived there longer than it did in increasingly market-oriented, non-slave states in the postwar period. On the other hand, slavery served as an extension of familial patriarchy, and its continuation reinforced those values.(31) If the earliest Virginia Baptists were fundamentally (if not perfectly) "egalitarian" in outlook, as the prevailing literature has at times hinted, one might expect them to have undermined the patriarchal household structure to some measurable degree, and most particularly to have brought slavery into question as the most obvious violation of the notion of equality before God. At Black Creek and Meherrin Baptist Churches, however, slavery and other traditional relations of dependence were upheld far more than they were challenged.

Historians have described both Black Creek and Meherrin as congregations where slaves, in particular, found a favorable environment, and there is some basis in fact for this interpretation. At Black Creek, not only did the minister and several congregants manumit their slaves, but the church went further still in a November 1786 meeting, ruling slavery to be "unrighteous." This statement was not a well-defined emancipationist policy, but it was the clearest position any Virginia congregation would take in opposition to slavery during the Revolutionary era.(32) At Meherrin, no such antislavery sentiment was in evidence, but three hotly debated discipline cases have been cited by historians as evidence of the ability of slave members of Meherrin congregation to employ the church to protect their rights. In 1772 two slave members complained to the white male membership that Rebeckah Johnson, a church member, had committed "the sin of anger and unchristian language, also offering something like parting of a black bro and sister (man and wife)." The church actively investigated these charges and worked to bring mistress and slaves back into a state of harmony, actions that might be interpreted as intervention to protect slaves' rights. The following year the church declared it "unlawful" to bum a slave and expelled Charles Cook for that offense, another example of the Meherrin congregation's willingness to protect slaves' human fights. Finally, in 1775 Sherwood Walton came under investigation for fathering a child with one of his slaves--a charge that originated with the pregnant slave herself, even though she was not a Baptist. Once again, the church took notice, an action that some historians have taken as a sign that Meherrin congregants were willing to step in to protect slaves from abuse.(33) Yet, in spite of these examples, the overwhelming body of evidence from these two congregations suggests a weak record of antislavery, a faltering commitment to advancing the civil rights of slaves, and an inability to challenge the patriarchal order that governed members' lives to a significant extent.

A few slaves embraced Baptist fellowship in the first decades, probably in part from the hope that the practice might open up new possibilities for them to achieve a measure of social equality and self-determination that would ameliorate the worst excesses of the slave system. However, a dearth of slave members in these churches before 1790 speaks at least indirectly to the limited ability of these congregations to satisfy these hopes. As previously mentioned, it was not until 1785 that the first slave member appeared in the records of Black Creek Church, and slaves constituted a tiny minority of members through the 1790s. At Meherrin Church, more slaves were active members from the beginning, but they were still vastly underrepresented in the congregation.(34) Like everyone else in Virginia, slaves were unfamiliar with Baptist belief and practice when they first encountered it in these years. Preaching strangers demanded that they act in odd ways and adopt new ideas, many of which were often hard to embrace. Would-be slave converts also had to act autonomously to renegotiate their relationship with their masters so that they would be allowed to become Baptists--a difficult prospect at best. They needed to obtain permission to attend church, to act to protect their chastity and sobriety, and to choose a non-violent course of action for themselves, among other things. If Baptist fellowship had offered the promise of a significant loosening of bondage's chains, slaves might have quickly overcome these obstacles to stampede to the meetinghouses. The relative absence of slaves among converts before 1790, however, indicates that slaves, like free people, came to the Baptist faith slowly and cautiously, and their conversions can probably be explained in similar terms to those of their free counterparts.

The proslavery leanings of Black Creek and Meherrin Churches are further revealed in the actions of their congregations. Black Creek Church's members owned few slaves, and the church was situated in a part of the county where nonslaveholding households were prevalent. Still, given the preponderance of political power held by the slaveholding elite of Virginia, it was difficult for Baptists to denounce slavery, even when they were not themselves heavily committed to the institution economically. In spite of their church's ruling against slaveholding, most Black Creek members failed to manumit the few slaves they did own. In point of fact, over 35 percent of the membership continued to own at least one slave throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Only a handful of congregants persisted in their commitment to rid the membership of slaveholders by refusing to take communion until the matter had been addressed, but the church worked on these diehards until all but one made their peace with their fellow Baptist slaveholders.(35) Only three members freed all of their slaves by deed of manumission. These members were clearly the antislavery fringe of the congregation who defined slavery as a violation of the "Golden Rule" and freedom as "the Natural and Unalienable fight of all Mankind."(36) That any slaves at all found their way out of bondage through the Baptist Church must have made a deep impression on potential slave converts, but these few manumissions represent the greatest collective achievement of Virginia Baptist churches on this subject, a sobering thought at best. The more salient point is that the small number of benevolent Baptists at Black Creek, in the end, did not fundamentally challenge the institution of slavery regardless of revolutionary or Christian principles.

The fragmentary evidence of antislavery sentiment at Black Creek is offset by the way church members continued their involvement in the slave system even as nonslaveholders. Following their ruling against slave ownership, the congregation grappled with the question of whether hiring slaves should be considered slaveholding. The church could not agree on a course of action and finally withdrew the question unanswered. This seems significant in light of the large number of nonslaveholders in Black Creek Church. Slave hiring was a means by which nonslaveholders who were unable to gather the capital to purchase slaves of their own could acquire access to slave labor. That Baptists in Southampton even raised the question of slave hiring suggests that some of them, though not financially secure enough to own slaves, assumed the role of slavemaster by hiring.(37) That the church failed to rule against slave hiring meant that Baptists at Black Creek were free to participate in the slave system by the means most available to them--the yearly contract.

At Meherrin Baptist Church the story was similar. Church intervention on behalf of slave members (or non-members, in the case of Sherwood Walton's pregnant slave) was a message of hope--in fact, news of these cases undoubtedly helped some unconverted slaves to find their way to Baptist fellowship, at least partly from a desire to participate in a faith that held out even the barest promise of justice. Slaves may have been further encouraged by the church's May 1772 ruling that it was sinful for church members to whip Baptist servants and children unless verbal persuasion had failed to bring a change in behavior.(38) The actual results of discipline cases related to slaves, on the other hand, must have been cause for some disappointment. Rebeckah Johnson and her slave Esther, whom Johnson had regaled with curses and threats of separation from her spouse, came to an understanding that allowed them to give one another the right hand of fellowship. However, there is no evidence that Esther's marriage survived this crisis. The vagueness of the church record leaves open the possibility that Esther was forced to accept the sale of her husband as part of a bargain to remain in fellowship. The case of Charles Cook, who burned a slave as a means of correction, is equally ambiguous. While slaves must have been elated by the church's decision to expel Cook from the church for his cruelty, and by the promise of expulsion to any who followed Cook's example, they were probably disheartened that the church was comfortable enough with Cook's behavior to restore him to fellowship within a month and to put him in the pulpit by the year's end. Finally, the prospect that Sherwood Walton might have fathered a slave child indeed horrified Meherrin congregation, but the church aggressively rallied to Walton's support. The slave was beaten several times in an effort to force her to retract her accusations, and at the time of her delivery her midwives even told her that her painful labor was a judgment from God for her lies. When the child proved to be dark in color in their estimation, the church was satisfied that the slave had been lying and Walton continued in fellowship. That slaves in Lunenburg County hoped that Meherrin Baptists would act on their behalf in these cases is evident--but so too were the distinct limits of that hope.

In spite of the various rulings and discipline cases that might indicate otherwise, slaves were clearly second-class members in both churches from the moment they joined these congregations. To put it bluntly, slaves had virtually no official function in the church. Most of the business meetings at which discipline cases were decided occurred on Friday or Saturday, when slaves were unlikely to be able to obtain permission from their masters to attend.(39) When slaves missed business meetings they were excluded from the discussion of questions of practice, from voting for deacons and representatives to be sent to higher levels of Baptist government, from the process of disciplining other members, and from helping to settle disputes among church members. Slaves were rarely appointed to notify other members, even other slaves, to come to business meetings to receive discipline. Outside of the Meherrin case of Rebeckah Johnson and Esther, there is no record of slaves giving testimony in discipline cases involving free members in either church. In the main, slaves were confined to attending Sunday services and receiving discipline when their behavior was reported to the church fathers.

Interestingly, both churches treated free women in a similar fashion--all female members, regardless of race or status, were effectively barred from any sort of public role in the church. Women appear not to have had voting fights in either church, though they were sometimes expected to attend business meetings. They held no official posts in the church, such as deacon, elder, or preacher, with the singular exception of their appointment as housekeepers for the meetinghouse itself. Women were not expected to contribute to the funds of the church directly but supported the church through the contributions of the men governing their households. Black Creek Church explicitly ruled that women could not speak publicly in meetings at all except through a male church member. Women in both churches almost never participated in the disciplining of male church members, while the men who led the church were fully responsible for providing Baptist women with religious guidance and correction, much as women were subject to the guiding hand of their husbands and fathers within their families.(40)

The discipline cases involving women in both churches make it clear that female members were expected to conduct themselves within the narrow confines of dominant southern gender conventions. Women and men were both disciplined by the congregation for a host of sins like excessive drinking and merriment, fornication, and adultery. However, both churches sent female members a clear message that they would be held to sex-specific standards of behavior as well. Women who joined these churches were expected to maintain a submissive demeanor, communicating with circumspection and presenting themselves with a certain reserve. A number of women were disciplined for expressing anger and particularly for using language in an aggressive or vivid way. While men were also subject to such charges, women were held to a different standard, being reprimanded not only for expressing hostility but also for more subtle forms of verbal aggression such as scolding, gossiping, and lying. At the same time, women were the exclusive subjects of discipline for excessive adornment, which suggests that they were held to standards of public behavior that differed from their male counterparts. By the same token, free male heads of household within the congregation were expected to conform to standards that applied only to them. They were to act as patriarchs, leading their families in religious practice. Meherrin Church ruled it the responsibility of men to insure that their families engaged in religious worship and to correct their children and servants who fell into sin.(41) Baptist men were expected to treat their charges with basic human respect, however. One Meherrin congregant was condemned for "misconduct" to his mother, while another was expelled for whipping his wife.(42) In the end, worship in Baptist churches, while it probably provided women with a means of expressing themselves in ways far more overt than they were allowed in other areas of their lives, did not liberate them from the confines of their established roles. Perhaps it is naive to expect the churches to have done so, any more than these tiny congregations could have taken on the formidable and well-entrenched system that governed the behavior of slaves.(43)

By the same token, the discipline cases of slaves reveal that they were held to a special code of conduct commensurate with their subordinate role in the household. For example, slaves could be called before the congregation for the sin of treating free people with disrespect.(44) The free male membership implicitly acknowledged that a slave's master was the highest earthly authority to whom a slave should and must answer. For example, when a slave named Humphrey was charged by Black Creek congregation with the sin of shooting his master's dog in 1793, the church not only required public contrition among the brethren, but also ordered Humphrey to go with a white church member to confess' his sin to his master and ask forgiveness.(45) Baptists understood that masters had previous claim on the time and movements of slaves. Masters were usually consulted when slaves were requested to attend business meetings. Both the Black Creek and Meherrin congregations were accustomed to arranging their disciplinary activities around the masters' schedules. For example, at Meherrin Church, in the process of investigating the charges against Rebeckah Johnson, the congregation discovered that the master and husband of that household, Joseph Johnson, intended to use his authority to prevent both women from appearing at a business meeting to settle the matter. The church bowed to the master's authority and sent a committee onto his plantation to adjudicate the case under his watch and care.(46) Finally, slaves could be excommunicated from a congregation for simply disobeying their masters (even if their masters were not Baptists).(47)

While these churches were developing a second-class membership status for slaves, as well as free women, the free men of these congregations also actively upheld the institution of slavery in the community at large. In Southampton County, for example, the county court often assigned Baptists the task of assessing the value of slaves and determining how slaves would be divided upon the death of a master.(48) Southampton Baptists did not own many slaves themselves, but justices probably saw them as fairminded, knowledgeable, and perhaps even more objective about slaves' market value. By dividing estates, Baptists routinely participated in one of the most morally problematic aspects of slavery. They decided who would stay in the neighborhood and who would be sent away, which slave families would remain intact and which would be broken up. Naturally, Black Creek Baptist Church, regardless of its antislavery pronouncements, completely ignored the participation of its members in this sort of activity. On the contrary, even the Reverend David Barrow divided an estate in 1789, while serving as a magistrate.(49)

In sum, the household heads who ran Black Creek and Meherrin Baptist Churches did so largely in ways that reflected, rather than challenged, the patriarchal order that privileged them and subordinated slaves and other dependents. The development of a second-class membership status for slaves certainly expresses the proslavery views of some church members. Those men who owned slaves themselves were probably primarily responsible for shaping church policy with regard to slaves, as it was husbands and fathers who were undoubtedly responsible for defining the subordinate place of women in the congregation. One important lesson to be gleaned from these churches, then, is that some Baptists came into the church, even in the earliest years, already well versed in proslavery and patriarchy, ideas that undergirded planter power in Virginia until the Civil War.

That slaveholders would actively seek to create a subordinate status for slaves who joined Baptist churches is not surprising, but the role of nonslaveholders in this process requires some consideration. To be sure, the relations of inequality within the families of nonslaveholders could be comfortably extended to slaves in the right context. However, if ideology is (to quote Barbara J. Fields), "the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day," it could be argued that Baptist practice in Southampton and Lunenburg Counties provided a means by which nonslaveholders could develop the necessary, direct experience to form their own version of proslavery ideology.(50) In these Baptist churches, nonslaveholding men enjoyed relatively equal status with wealthier free congregants and experienced slaves as unequal, dependent, and powerless. In the same way as when they served as slave patrollers or divided estates for the county court, nonslaveholding Baptists found themselves in positions of authority over slaves in the course of ordinary church business. To participate in church discipline, nonslaveholders were required to serve as surrogate slave owners and to uphold the power of masters, experiences that may have been difficult for them to obtain in other circumstances. For example, it was a nonslaveholding Baptist, Francis Vaughan, who was ordered by the church to convey the slave Humphrey to his master to apologize for having shot his master's dog. In his performance of a church-assigned duty, Vaughan witnessed Humphrey's subordination to and dependence upon his master, and was thereby afforded the opportunity to experience himself as an authority figure over a slave. Vaughan reported back to the congregation that the slave had mentioned "some of the affair to his Master," but, in his assessment, Humphrey had failed to show satisfactory contrition.(51) At Meherrin, nonslaveholders Henry Haley and William Sammons found themselves in a similar position as part of the team that investigated Rebeckah Johnson' s threats to break up the marriage of her slave Esther. It should be noted that at Black Creek a few nonslaveholding members apparently reacted negatively to such experiences, since they persistently called upon their brethren to give up slave property. Their voices were overwhelmed, however, by those in the congregation who clearly understood proper social relations to rest upon the subordination of slaves. At Meherrin, there was no internal controversy on the subject at all. By charging nonslaveholders with enforcing slave discipline, by acknowledging the primacy of the relations of slavery, and by reinforcing the power of all free men over slaves, as well as women, Black Creek and Meherrin Baptist Churches took the lead in shaping nonslaveholding residents on the Southside into supporters of, rather than detractors from, the slaveholding regime in those rocky years of revolutionary fervor.

If class background, community participation, and social ideology fail as direct explanations for conversion, an alternative interpretation is in order. The reasons for conversion are undoubtedly complex and varied, impossible to fully explain in a confined space such as this, and possibly beyond our reach altogether as historians. The dearth of narrative sources that might shed light upon the conversion process only makes this effort that much harder. Some preliminary observations can be made, however, that may open up this issue for further discussion.

It should be kept in mind that most Virginians did not become Baptists during the first wave of revivals that took place in the three decades after 1760. Probably well less than 10 percent of the adult population was brought into the inner circle of faith by 1790.(52) John Williams reported in his journal that he and his colleagues were preaching to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of people at a time in 1771, yet the official membership in the church he formed from these efforts was little more than 100 people.(53) The Baptist Church, then, was not initially for everyone--in fact, most people avoided it. Those who did convert may be roughly divided into two groups--those few innovative risk-takers who were the first to respond to Baptist preaching by embracing the faith when it was brand-new and least well known, and subsequent converts who became Baptists after an initial core of locals had begun to worship together.(54)

For the religious mavericks who first became Baptists, there are probably no clear, unifying factors to explain conversion--their enthusiasm for the Baptist faith must have been idiosyncratic in some measure. Yet it is possible to point out likely factors that contributed to some of their conversions. One line of sociological inquiry suggests that an important precondition for conversion to a new, "outsider" faith is "availability." Potential converts, generally speaking, are those not deeply involved in activities similar to those of the new faith, which would have made involvement in the new practice redundant and therefore less appealing.(55) In other words, those Virginians who were deeply and passionately involved in a religious practice when Baptist churches began to seek members would have been less available for conversion than "unchurched" Virginians, who may have had religious training but were not fully committed to a congregation at the moment when they were first proselytized. Such was the case with the Reverend James Ireland, whose memoir is among the few narratives of conversion to survive from the earliest period of Baptist activity in Virginia. Ireland's conversion occurred on Virginia's Northern Neck in the 1760s, and he then settled west of the Blue Ridge, where he made a name for himself as a minister. Though raised as a Presbyterian, Ireland was not closely affiliated with a church during the months preceding his Baptist conversion, when he was plagued by a deep conviction for his sins. At that time he was not receiving regular spiritual guidance from a minister, not participating in church rituals, and not forming satisfying relationships with fellow churchgoers.(56) While we cannot assume that Ireland's story is representative, we can note that in areas where Baptist churches were most entrenched before 1790, other forms of worship were less accessible to the population, making it likely that a significant portion of the population was "unchurched" and therefore more available for conversion. Of the 229 Baptist churches established in Virginia through 1790, 64 percent were situated in the Piedmont, the region that, although in the process of replicating the institutions of the Tidewater, was more newly settled and less closely governed by Anglicanism. Only 26 percent were in the Tidewater, the longest-settled and most densely populated part of the state, and the region where the Anglican Church was most entrenched. And l0 percent were west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where population was sparse and competing Presbyterian and Lutheran churches provided alternative sources for worship.(57)

In both Southampton and Lunenburg Counties many residents were available for conversion by this definition. Black Creek Baptist Church was founded in the upper Southampton parish of Nottoway, where the established church had been all but defunct for some time, leaving most residents in that neighborhood sufficiently unchurched that alternative sources of spiritual guidance may have especially appealed to them. Meantime, the lower parish of St. Luke's enjoyed the continuous religious leadership of a very effective Anglican minister, and Baptists did not establish a presence in that area.(58) By the same token, Meherrin Baptist Church blossomed as Anglicanism floundered in Lunenburg County as well. The Anglican minister of Lunenburg's Cumberland Parish, James Craig, reported in 1759 that many people "by Reason of their Distance from my Place of Divine Worship, had never, or seldom, been at Church since they were baptized." In addition to the prohibitive distances Lunenburg residents would have to travel to worship, Craig blamed the sorry state of the established church on the fact that the parish had often been without a minister and, when supplied, had suffered at the hands of immoral and negligent ones.(59) In these places, and presumably in others, plenty of residents were able to become Baptists in part because the legally sanctioned faith was not supplying them with spiritual guidance or any other of the benefits of worship.

Those who have recently been physically uprooted were probably among the most available to become the first converts to a new faith. One aspect of availability for conversion is the absence of the sorts of social ties that might work to prevent adoption of a new and potentially socially unacceptable faith. By relocating, newcomers weaken the social and institutional ties that could make them unavailable for conversion.(60) James Ireland's life may stand as an extreme example. Ireland began the process of conversion very shortly after immigrating to Virginia from Scotland. At that point in his life, he was separated from most of the people and practices that had provided him with security and direction in earlier times. While he clung to any compatriots he happened to meet, his immigrant status left him looking for a community to join and a way of bringing order and stability to his life. Conversion, at long last, gave him the peace he was seeking.(61) The biographies of the first Baptist ministers in Virginia confirm that geographic relocation was a recurring theme, if not a direct cause, of conversion. Of a sample of forty-three early Virginia Baptist ministers for whom biographical information is known, thirteen of them, or 30 percent, had relocated during the decade prior to their baptisms into the faith, most of them shortly beforehand.(62)

The pattern of Baptist expansion in general also suggests that geographic mobility may have been a factor in conversion. It was in Piedmont and Southside Virginia that Baptists had the most success in founding new churches before 1790, and historians have noted the high turnover of population in these regions relative to the Tidewater.(63) In Lunenburg County, Meherrin Baptist Church's minute book reveals constant movement into and out of the church by relocating members. This is not to say that Baptists were people without any ties to their communities, but relocating may have left newcomers with space in their lives previously filled with other activities, which could now be used for a rigorous religious practice. It also could have weakened some of the most intensive ties with old friends and family who were opposed to conversion, thus helping to create an emotional vacuum that could be filled by Baptist practice.

In addition to availability, favorable contact with the new faith would be an obvious precondition for conversion. Across Virginia, as a host of early Baptist histories have made clear, effective ministers began to make an appearance just before Baptist churches started to form in significant numbers.(64) In 1771, when Meherrin Baptist Church was founded, Lunenburg County abutted North Carolina, in close proximity to the headquarters of the Separate Baptists across the border in Guilford County. There, many preachers were converted, trained, and then dispatched northward on preaching tours. Among them was the Reverend Jeremiah Walker, who founded Nottoway Church in Amelia County, Virginia, which produced a significant number of the converts who ultimately formed Meherrin Baptist Church in Lunenburg County. Walker was widely known for his ability to engage an audience and provoke deep religious conviction among them. In the words of early Baptist historian Robert Semple, Walker "was equalled by few of any denomination. His voice was melodious: his looks were affectionate: his manner was impressive and winning: his reasoning was close and conclusive: his figures were elegant, well chosen, and strictly applicable."(65)

Southampton County Baptists were similarly influenced by their neighbors to the south. General Baptists in North Carolina had been converted to Regular doctrine by missionaries from the Philadelphia Association in the 1760s and then served as a source of ministers to work the Virginia Southside. For Southampton, the Reverend David Barrow was the central figure. He was converted by the Regular Baptists in North Carolina and then moved to Southampton County in 1774, becoming the minister of Mill Swamp Baptist Church in Isle of Wight County, from which Black Creek Church was formed that same year. Barrow was well known among his peers as an exceptional speaker. One early historian doubted that Burrow's preaching "has ever been excelled by any Baptist minister of Virginia or Kentucky" and claimed that "[h]is talents were of a high order."(66) Encountering preachers like Barrow and Walker would obviously be an important step toward conversion. The charisma of the first Baptist preachers, while difficult to assess or quantify, must be understood as a major lure to potential Baptists.

In addition to these social factors, the context in which the first converts were brought to faith was a probable factor in their conversions. They encountered Baptist ideas and practice in settings outside of the normal structures of everyday life, where it was possible to experience intense bonding with other participants. Sociologists have argued that intense, isolated contact with previous converts, potential converts, and religious leaders is of tremendous importance in persuading people to convert to outsider faiths, because such contacts replace prohibitive ties outside of the group with affective bonds within it, making newcomers more likely to reach the point where they can commit to the practice.(67) James Ireland's conversion illustrates this process. While he was not converted in a revival setting, an intense relationship with a morally upright Baptist played a vital role in bringing him to conviction for his sins. This convert (who Ireland called "N.F.") shamed Ireland by the example of his sterling ethical conduct, while also inspiring him to think and write about issues like brotherly love, which helped to lead Ireland to faith. At the same time, Ireland recounts at least two episodes in which he was the conduit of conversion for others, who became attached to him and looked to him for guidance.(68) In Lunenburg County the development of such bonding was quite evident in the months preceding the founding of Meherrin Church. In May 1771 John Williams began an intensive round of preaching in his neighborhood in conjunction with a handful of other ministers. They drew huge crowds, meeting day and night in private homes and arbors. Though Williams was most interested in keeping track of the effectiveness of his preaching, he did take note in his diary of the warm feeling developing among some members of the audience. Particularly when the crowd engaged in foot-washing or took communion, Williams recorded an intense love that swept through the worshipers. The bonds generated by participating in these meetings, day after day, effectively separated potential converts in Lunenburg from the routine of their regular lives, leaving them open to forming new relationships with other participants. These relationships were, in essence, the basis of a new church.(69)

Those who embraced the Baptist faith soon after the initial round of preaching had converted a few locals undoubtedly experienced a similar context of conversion in many respects--they were available to join the Baptist Church, had contact with effective ministers, and developed a strong relationship with earlier converts who helped them to find faith. However, their exposure to Baptist ideas and practice was likely to have been in more routinized weekly meetings rather than in the highly charged atmosphere produced by new or itinerant preachers. This group of secondary converts, unlike the religious innovators who preceded them into the Baptist inner circle, had more opportunity for personal and sustained contact with Baptists prior to conversion. Sociologists have pointed out that social networks are extremely important in church building--that social contact with existing members is instrumental in bringing people to take up a new faith.(70) This model seems to hold for the early Virginia Baptists. While there is very little information about the pattern of conversion before churches were actually founded, church records suggest that conversion essentially proceeded along the paths of previously existing social networks. The vast majority of members were in some way related to other members, either by kinship or other social ties.

Family networks seemed to work best to recruit new members. At Black Creek Church, over 80 percent of free members had family names that appeared more than once on membership lists through 1790. Among the free founding members of Meherrin Baptist Church in Lunenburg County, more than 70 percent shared a family name with other founders. The founding members at Meherrin appear to have been a conduit through which other family members found their way into the church. For example, William Hammond was the only Hammond among the founders of Meherrin Church in 1771, but by the end of 1773 three more converts shared that last name, one of whom was probably his wife, and the others, a married couple, were likely his brother and sister-in-law.(n71)

Family connections were no doubt the most powerful force bringing new converts into Baptist churches, but they were not the only relevant social ties. Friends and neighbors also seem to have been able to influence one another. James Ireland described his influence over at least two friends who had known him before he himself became a Baptist. Both ultimately converted to the Baptist faith in spite of their earlier efforts to try to "redeem" Ireland from the clutches of this new sect.(72) By the same token, Baptist minister John Taylor explained that the first Baptist meeting he attended "solemnly affected" him because "some of my companions were in the number."(73) In Southampton and Lunenburg Counties the importance of neighborhood was particularly apparent. Baptists in these locales lived in very close proximity to one another. Rarely did they hail from neighborhoods where there were few other Baptists--in fact, Baptists appeared on tithable lists and personal property tax records as immediate neighbors surprisingly often.(74) Interestingly, the Reverend Devereux Jarratt noted the same pattern at work among converts to a similarly marginal sect, the Methodists, during this period. In his words, those who attended services returned "home all alive to God, spread the flame through their respective neighborhoods, which ran from family to family."(75)

Other forms of social contact also served as conduits for Baptist conversion. For example, Joseph Williams, a Baptist whose son was Meherrin Church's minister, served as a magistrate in the 1760s with Henry Blagrave Sr., whose son, Henry Jr., was a convert. Perhaps the younger Blagrave found Baptist principles through his father's friends, though he might also have encountered them through his immediate neighbor John Pamplin, who was also a founding member of Meherrin Church. This sort of social connection was undoubtedly a factor as well for Elijah Baker and William Thornton, both founding members of Meherrin Baptist Church, who were servants in the household of Lodowick Farmer in 1769. It is likely that one helped to convert the other, perhaps as they labored side by side in the fields.(76) Finally, James Ireland provides us with yet another example of the power of social networks. In his memoir he described how his own conversion inspired that of a man to whom he was bound primarily by their shared expatriate status as Scots.(77)

It is more difficult to trace the social connections that brought slave members to the faith, but the power of social networks is still clear, even if they did operate more slowly among slaves, helping to delay the entry of significant numbers of them into Baptist churches until the 1790s and later.(78) The power of social networks in the case of slaves is most obvious at Meherrin Church. Among the ten founding members who were slaves in 1771, only one did not have a clear connection to other members. Six were working on the same plantation with another slave convert. All but one had masters or mistresses who were also founding church members. The relationship of Black Creek's slave membership to the church's white congregants is somewhat less evident. Of the twenty-one slaves who were members between the founding of the church and 1799, nine were owned by church members, two of whom worked on the same farm. Three other slave members of Black Creek were owned by the same non-Baptist and probably worked on the same plantation. Although the social connections of eight others cannot be accounted for by the surviving evidence, some of them may well have been the relatives and neighbors of other slave converts. In all likelihood, as masters converted, they exposed their slaves to the faith and made it possible for them to take up an active practice. As a few slaves convened, they exposed others on their farms and neighboring quarters to the faith through their examples. They also established a precedent with masters for the right to Baptist worship--a right that could then be enjoyed by later slave converts.(79)

The existence of social networks helps to explain how Baptist churches formed after the first wave of revivals had passed. Once the innovative few had found the courage to try a new faith, their participation both helped to spread contact with the faith to others and also lent it the legitimacy of their participation. While this pattern was certainly in operation among neighbors, friends, and family, it could also function at a greater social distance. In both Lunenburg and Southampton Counties, a handful of the first Baptists were men of significant standing in the community; they were wealthier than their neighbors and held public offices of some esteem.(80) When magistrates, militia officers, and sheriffs--men who were powerful and presumably respected in their neighborhoods--became founding converts, they were in a position to legitimize the faith for those onlookers who observed their religious commitment, even if there was not close, personal contact.(81)

Such factors as availability for conversion, contact with effective preachers, bonds to other converts, and the existence of social networks of faith help to give shape to the process by which Southside Baptist churches formed, but they cannot fully explain Baptist membership. After all, many people who were unchurched, recently relocated, and even related to Baptists chose not to join the faith before 1790. For those who cleaved to Baptist fellowship, the faith must have had something to offer that they desired. In his exceptional work on early Virginia Baptists, Rhys Isaac suggested that Baptist practice offered a strong sense of community and emotional support that were welcome alternatives to the harsh realities of life in eighteenth-century Virginia. Baptist practice brought order and self-discipline for converts living in a dispersed, rural society where excess of all kinds was rife.(82) Isaac's work has served as the basis for the argument that Virginia Baptists were outsiders, looking for a sense of belonging. However, converts need not have rejected or developed a nascent class-based critique of the fundamental principles of the dominant order, nor must they have been excluded from participation in that order entirely, to find Baptist practice inviting. Before 1790 rural Virginians in the more newly and sparsely settled Southside struggled to form functional communities that could meet the needs of inhabitants in a way that was probably not so evident by this time in the longest-settled Virginia counties. The Baptist Church provided one alternative for Southsiders seeking an orderly life and deep connections to their neighbors, friends, and family. Early Baptist practice required that converts participate in rigorous self-discipline, maintain intimate contact with fellow converts, and express their emotions openly. It could be argued that converts seeking these elements were, in a sense, the most "available" for membership.(83)

The first Baptists in Southside Virginia sustained relationships with their unbelieving neighbors by a variety of means, but they did avoid certain types of contact with outsiders and understood themselves to be a people apart in some measure, creating a profound sense of community among members. In the covenant of Black Creek Church, adopted on May 27, 1786, congregants described it as their duty to "keep our own appointed meetings, & our own secrets, being Taught by God's word, That the Church of Christ, is a Garden enclos'd, a Spring Seald, a fountain shut up." Inside this carefully cultivated garden of Baptist fellowship, members were invested with important obligations to one another that extended beyond their duties to the community at large. In their covenant, the members of Meherrin Church promised to "keep the unity of the spirit in the Bond of peace & that we will bear one anothers burdens, weaknesses & impurities, with much tenderness." Black Creek Church members, on the other hand, promised to "admonish, Encourage & Reprove one another if need be, according to the Gospel Rule in Love," and to themselves submit to the watchful care of their brethren. These were pacts that bound Baptists together--and shut out those not in fellowship.(84)

Converts may have been wooed to the Baptist Church, in part, by the sort of community interaction it offered. The discipline required by the Baptist faith meant that converts became involved in the lives of other members and shared their own lives with them in a way that would have been unusual outside of the church, where privacy was well respected. The church records are riddled with evidence that joining a Baptist congregation provided converts with a special sense of belonging difficult to find elsewhere in Southside Virginia. One need not have been shunned by one's neighbors or disempowered by poverty to react favorably to the welcoming nature of this nascent group. Converts in Southside Virginia who had previously looked mostly to their own families for intimacy could now turn to fellow congregants as figurative "brethren" and "sisters." The Reverend John Williams of Meherrin Church left a record of the emotional ties of his converts. He described how, on one occasion, a visiting minister washed the congregation's feet after his sermon. In Williams's view, "truly the love of God seem'd to be among us" on this occasion. He also twice reported how he and fellow ministers sang, exhorted, and prayed over a woman who had been bedridden for four years. For her, surely the Baptists were an important link to the rest of humanity--and perhaps, at that moment, she did not feel like a second-class member either.(85) For slaves, the message of brotherly love, while particularly limited in its impact, was not entirely without meaning. They, perhaps more than other converts, craved even an imperfect experience of Christian love and community.

The Baptist Church, in a sense, made it possible for members to become involved with one another in professional and personal ways while maintaining relative certainty that these relationships would remain "safe," because the whole church was willing to help to make them so. Baptist churches required that converts deal with one another in a loving, familial way and avoid public quarrels with one another. Congregants were required to handle disputes with fellow Baptists in the relative privacy of the church meeting and in a spirit of brotherly love, not under the public gaze of the magistrates as common quarrelers. Minute books recount a number of disputes over contracts broken or improperly carried out and the churches' efforts to find compromises that would placate all parties and bring them back into fellowship.(86) It was extremely important that all members be "in fellowship" with one another, by which they meant that every member must bear no malice and harbor no ill will toward one another.

The style of worship among the Baptists was also probably a powerful lure to some Southsiders--those members in need of a means of publicly experiencing and expressing profound emotion. Early Baptist preaching in Virginia was, at times, intensely emotional, meant to move the audience toward a sense of conviction for their sins or joy in their faith. Emotional outbursts among congregants had a contagious effect. Meherrin's minister, John Williams, described the scene of a baptism he witnessed in 1771 this way: "The Christians [fell] to shouting, sinners trembling & falling down convulsed, the Devil a raging & blaspheming, which kindled the flame of the Christians, & the Lord, we hope and trust, plucked a soul in that time out of the jaws of death, hell & eternal destruction."(87) As this passage makes clear, congregants could actually be inspired to emotional heights by one another's enthusiasm as well as directly by preaching. While Black Creek's congregation may have kept their emotions more in check, consonant with Regular practice, compared to other churches in Southampton the Baptist meetinghouse was nevertheless a place where emotion flowed freely. In a rural society in which people gathered together only occasionally, and in which people were encouraged to hide their spiritual ardor and present a calm public face, it must have been a blessed release for some to find fellowship among the Baptist community, where their pent-up feelings could surface and be set free. For slaves, who risked the most direct sort of punishment if they acted upon their emotions in their daily lives, Baptist practice was undoubtedly appealing for its ability to provide emotional release.

At the same time, Baptist practice provided converts with a heightened sense of social order, which may have been appealing to those residing in the more newly settled counties, such as those in Southside Virginia, where institutions that could provide social control were sparse and weak. Baptist discipline regulated the lives of converts in rigorous ways. For example, converts were restricted in how and where they could intermingle with unbelievers to insure that they demonstrated the expected level of self-control. Converts were required to avoid drinking heavily with the unconverted in local taverns. Baptist congregations not only reprimanded members (mostly males) for drinking to excess in inappropriate company, they demanded contrition of them and excommunicated those who failed to control themselves in such matters.(88) Congregants expected one another to eschew certain forms of merriment and the type of company that would encourage excessive behavior. Sister Mary Nelms of Black Creek congregation, for example, was brought under investigation when a report came to light that she had been "at Vall Jenkins's at a Race & Black Water at a Shooting match."(89) As a result of such investigations, both churches not only expelled members who violated acceptable codes of social conduct, but in the case of Black Creek, the congregation ruled it their duty to restrain their children "from vices such as night Dances, night Cotton pickings, cockfights and such like."(90) In fact, some members of that congregation were brought before the church merely for the act of keeping "ungodly company."(91)

Self-control was a fundamental issue for Baptists in Southside Virginia in all their activities, not just those involving public displays with unbelievers. Of course, Baptists risked excommunication from the church for obvious sins of excess like fornication and adultery, but the church expected its members to control themselves in more subtle ways as well. For example, converts were supposed to carefully measure their words to avoid a surplus of heated emotion and to strictly observe the boundaries of truthfulness. The Meherrin congregation went so far as to excommunicate Susanna Rogers in 1774 for the girlish sin of "repeated falcities" and "forging a letter of love from Mr. R. Mcullock's name to her."(92) Congregants were also to avoid excess in their daily behavior. These churches excommunicated a number of members over the years for such transgressions as repeated drunkenness, excessive revelry, fighting, and the vague act of "disorderly conduct."

Clearly, it required a serious commitment and personal discipline for converts to maintain their fellowship in good standing among the Baptists. However, the moral compass that guided Baptist practice was in some respects used as well by the wider community, although civil authorities were not as rigorous about enforcing proper conduct as was the Baptist Church. Like the Baptists, civil authorities expected residents to keep their language clean, to turn only to their spouses for sexual gratification, to conduct themselves with reserve in public, to observe the Sabbath, and to restrain their passions. For example, in November 1772 the Southampton County grand jury presented five men for swearing, four for gaming, and two for "riotous behavour." Lunenburg County court records recorded a similar effort to control an epidemic of gaming, drinking, and sweating in 1777. In May 1777 Southampton's grand jury presented a man for "fishing with a Seine on the sabbath," and two years later it presented one man for "geting drunk and breaking the Sabbath." In 1770 the Lunenburg grand jury presented four women for "being delivered of a bastard Child and two men for "being in Adultery."(93)

County officials watched over their charges less intently and punished far more sparingly than the Baptists, pursuing only a handful of cases for the entire county in any given year. Southside Baptists may have turned to the faith in part to join a community in which order and self-discipline would be better assured. For those who craved order and discipline, not only was local government ineffective, but so too was the established church, the only other institution that might have brought order to the Southside. As previously mentioned, in neither county did Anglicanism exercise an influence over a majority of residents on a regular basis, as distance, empty pulpits, and ineffective ministers had considerably weakened its influence among many. At the same time, the Anglican Church was not terribly rigorous about encouraging self-control among its congregants. The Baptist Church proved a far more effective institution for bringing people together who placed a premium on order and self-discipline. Even slaves, whose lives were already well regulated in many respects, would have found that Baptist practice ordered their lives according to a more rigorous standard. In essence, it gave bondspeople a measure of self-governance, even as their masters continued to govern over them.

The Baptist Church was, by definition, strict. Self-control was not merely expected of converts, it was rigorously forced upon them. Church members took their covenants very much to heart, watching one another's actions and reporting transgressions at monthly meetings. Of the 134 members who joined Black Creek Church between its founding and 1790, 18 percent were excommunicated in this same period, a figure considered by historians to be at the high end of exclusivity. While only 17 of the 268 people who joined Meherrin congregation between 1771 and 1784 were expelled, considering the fact that the majority of these converts were only members of Meherrin for a year or two before being dismissed to spin-off churches where records of their conduct have been lost, this figure actually seems quite high.(94) The rigorous examination of congregants' behavior and the frequent expulsion of unrepentant sinners is indicative of the tenacious efforts to erect firm boundaries between the church and the community in terms of social behavior, to allow only the purest of souls beyond those barriers, and to promote rigorous, long-term self-control among those souls.

Recent sociological research suggests that strict faiths such as the early Baptist Church attract converts precisely because their doctrine and practice are stringent.(95) By reducing the number of members who were unwilling to participate fully--in the case of the Baptists, by expelling from membership those unwilling to discipline and be disciplined, to be intimately involved with fellow congregants, and to have an intense emotional reaction to worship--all remaining members were able to have a more concentrated experience of all of these benefits. It follows, then, that those who embraced Baptist fellowship must have been seeking precisely the experience that Baptist strictness preserved.

At the same time, the Baptist Church struck a balance, avoiding the problem of being too strict and driving all potential converts away. To be sure, most people viewed the church as excessively strict in the early years, and a majority of the population continued to be disinterested in fellowship even when the Baptist Church reached its peak in popularity.(96) However, the church was able to gain a significant enough number of converts to put down permanent roots in the region and gain respectability, if not favor, in most people's eyes, because its strictness had limits. The Baptists required that members separate themselves from the world by controlling their passions, curbing personal excess, and distinguishing themselves in their speech and even their dress. But it was not so demanding that it required that converts cut themselves off completely from the non-Baptist world. The church did not, for example, demand that converts cease to have contact with the unconverted, reform the political system to conform to Baptist principles, dress in an austere manner, abstain entirely from alcohol or tasty food, give up their worldly possessions, or rearrange their marital lives. The importance of reaching a proper balance of strictness cannot be overestimated. On the rare occasions when Baptist churches upset the balance, the costs were immediately apparent. For example, when the Black Creek congregation broke social convention by ruling slavery to be "unrighteous," they quickly found themselves on dangerous ground. It was the only Virginia church to take this step, and its members quickly retreated from this position upon seeing that it was a requirement that the majority of congregants--not to mention potential converts--viewed as unreasonable.(97) This congregation, like others in Virginia, usually sought to be at least minimally acceptable to the dominant order, even while maintaining boundaries that separated them from the secular world.

In the end, it is not that difficult to imagine how Black Creek and Meherrin Churches were formed. Itinerant preachers reached a few people, those most available and ripe for conversion, who then exposed others to the faith and also lent the faith legitimacy by their very participation. Those who desired the specific qualities of Baptist worship, among them the emphasis upon self-discipline, access to deep personal ties to fellow converts, and opportunities for intense emotionality, were soon shouldering up alongside the first converts to sign church covenants. The process of church-building continued at a brisk pace until the outbreak of the Revolution, which effectively ended itinerant preaching and distracted Virginians enough to seriously hinder expansion; indeed, all churches in Virginia appear to have suffered from apathy and decline during the Revolutionary era. In the postwar period church membership continued to dwindle (with a brief resurgence around 1785). However, the disestablishment of the Anglican Church and its concomitant decline generally made far more Virginians available for conversion. Conditions were ripe for the Baptist Church to prosper, if only a spark could ignite Baptist preachers and potential converts. That spark came with the religious revivals that swept the state during the opening years of the nineteenth century.(98) By that time Baptists had made their practices and beliefs well known in Virginia as news of the faith wound its way down the paths of existing social networks. The Baptist Church had gained a certain legitimacy though its earlier converts and was now transformed from an outsider sect to something far less radical and befuddling--but without necessarily abandoning its deeply held principles. The strict boundaries between the Baptists and the secular world remained intact, but the interpretation of the young faith's practice as cultism had waned. It was this change that made the eventual rise of the so-called Bible Belt possible.

(1) In Rhys Isaac's words, "[o]nly isolated converts were made among the gentry, but many among the slaves." Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 166. Mechal Sobel has described the evangelical revivals in pre-Revolutionary Virginia as a "response to the needs of the lower class"; see Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, 1987), 180. In a similar vein, Gregory A. Wills argued that "Baptists had few educated preachers or wealthy members--most members were humble folk"; see Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (New York and Oxford, 1997), 50. Donald G. Mathews concurred in the view that evangelical faiths attracted people of a certain class, but he has maintained that it was the sturdy yeomanry that filled the pews of Baptist congregations. He described the first converts as "neither wealthy nor desperately poor," but "independent folk who had been successful enough to resent the invidiousness of the distinction between them and the aristocracy, but humble enough to take certain stubborn pride in the inadequacy of traditional social distinctions to define them." Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago and London, 1977), 36 and 37. J. Stephen Kroll-Smith's quantitative analysis confirmed Mathews's position. In Kroll-Smith's view, "it was the yeoman planter situated between the lower class and the gentry that was most receptive to Baptist ideas"; Kroll-Smith, "Tobacco and Belief: Baptist Ideology and the Yeoman Planter in 18th Century Virginia," Southern Studies, XXI (Winter 1982), 354. Richard Beeman's calculations of the wealth of Baptists in Lunenburg County seems to agree with Kroll-Smith's. He found that Lunenburg Baptists were significantly poorer than neighboring Anglicans; see Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832 (Philadelphia, 1984), 114.

The author would like to thank Rachel Klein, Steven Hahn, Heather Coleman, and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Southern History for their comments. Portions of this article were presented at meetings of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Shenandoah Valley Regional Studies Seminar, the Society of Early Americanists, and the American Studies Association. The author is grateful to the panel participants and the audiences at those sessions for their questions and suggestions.

(2) In the words of Donald Mathews, "Evangelicalism attracted people who were dissatisfied with conventional society" and "was a means through which a rising 'new' class sought authentication outside the archaic social hierarchy." Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 35-38 (quotations on 37 and 38). For the "counterculture" of the Baptists and their rejection of the dominant culture see Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 163-72.

(3) Historians have noted, for example, that the Baptist Church required personal disputes between members to be settled by the church rather than the courts, cutting converts off from the sociability associated with court days and the experience of submitting to their betters. The same could be said of Anglican practice, from which Baptists absented themselves as dissenters. It has also been noted that when pious Baptists rejected "the glittering world" to live in a godly way, they eschewed many social moments that had served to knit the non-Baptist community together, such as parties, dances, gaming events, and sporting contests. See James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770-1808 (Philadelphia, 1982), 26-72 (quotation on 53); Rhys Isaac, "Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., XXXI (July 1974), 345-68; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 163-72; and Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), 16-22.

(4) For example, Gregory A. Wills has described how southern Baptist practice was shaped by the egalitarianism of the American Revolution, though he acknowledges that Baptist egalitarianism was confined to church practice and did not necessarily translate into a critique of social inequality based upon household dependence; see Wills, Democratic Religion, esp. 50-66. Rhys Isaac explained that "[a] concomitant of fellowship in deep emotions was comparative equality.... They conducted their affairs on a footing of equality so different from the explicit preoccupation with rank and precedence that characterized the world from which they had been called." Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 165.

(5) See Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 171-72; Sobel, World They Made Together, 188-98; Essig, Bonds of Wickedness, 73-96; W. Harrison Daniel, "Virginia Baptists and the Negro in the Early Republic," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXX (January 1972), 60-69; and Albert J. Raboteau, "The Slave Church in the Era of the American Revolution," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1983), 196-202.

(6) See, for example, Wesley M. Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-1790 (Durham, N.C., 1930; repr., Gloucester, Mass., 1965), 187-218; and Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven and London, 1989).

(7) See Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 39-80; and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca and London, 1975), 203-12. Christine Leigh Heyrman offered a compelling revision of this argument centered upon evangelical challenges to the patriarchal household in Southern Cross, 117-60.

(8) Rhys Isaac, in particular, has suggested that order and disorder, community-building, and emotionality were central to the rise of the Baptist Church in Virginia. In his view, the disorder and social separation introduced by gentry culture, undiluted by social institutions available in more urban settings, most disturbed potential Baptists; see Isaac, "Evangelical Revolt."

(9) For Black Creek's antislavery record see Daniel W. Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (Charlottesville and London, 1992), 92-95; Essig, Bonds of Wickedness, 74-78; Sobel, World They Made Together, 196-97, 226; Ernest A. Freeburg III, "Why David Barrow Moved to Kentucky," Virginia Baptist Register, XXXII (1993), 1617-27; and Vivien Sandlund, "'A Devilish and Unnatural Usurpation': Baptist Evangelical Ministers and Antislavery in the Early Nineteenth Century, A Study of the Ideas and Activism of David Barrow," American Baptist Quarterly, XIII (September 1994), 262-77.

(10) Much of the recent literature cited in this essay observes an important distinction between Regular and Separate Baptists. It is widely believed that the Separates were the more socially radical group, more often targeted for persecution. The main distinction between these two branches of the Baptist faith concerns style, as both groups shared a single theology and practice. Separates in Virginia were historically linked to the revivals of the 1740s in New England that produced Baptist congregations that were profoundly emotional in their worship and demanded that preachers seek to evoke an emotional response. Virginia's Regular Baptists also trace their roots northward to congregations unaffected by revivals. Separates sought a "visible sainthood" more rigorously than Regulars and were more prone to expelling ministers and congregants for sin. In my view, the distinction between Regular and Separate Baptists in Virginia has been overemphasized. Both groups at times acknowledged that there was little difference between them, and both groups sought union at various times. For example, see Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, 1774-1818, photostat, Library of Virginia (hereinafter LVA), December 1774. For more on Regulars and Separates see Garnett Ryland, The Baptists of Virginia, 1699-1926 (Richmond, 1955), 1-59.

(11) For Meherrin Baptist Church see Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry, chaps. 4 and 8, esp. 108-9; Beeman and Rhys Isaac, "Cultural Conflict and Social Change in the Revolutionary South: Lunenburg County, Virginia," Journal of Southern History, XLVI (November 1980), 525-50: and Virginia George Redd, "The Meherrin Baptist Church, Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1771-1842," Virginia Baptist Register, XV (1976), 706-18. Meherrin Church has also often been used as an example of the favorable situation of slaves within Baptist churches; see esp. Sobel, World They Made Together, 194-96.

(12) These calculations are based on a sample of twenty-nine male and four female householders who were probable active members of Black Creek in 1782 and who could be identified from the Southampton County Personal Property Tax Book for that year. (Unless otherwise noted, all county records cited in this article are available on microfilm at the Library of Virginia.) If the largest Baptist slaveholder, Elias Herring, is excluded from the sample, the average slaveholding Baptist household would have contained 2.1 slaves. Unfortunately, there is little available data on the wealth of Southamptonites in the 1770s, when Black Creek was in its formative stage, since few tithable lists have survived for this county from the colonial period. By 1782, when the first personal property tax records were kept, many converts had been dismissed from Black Creek to join other churches or had been excommunicated and therefore were excluded from the sample.

(13) For distinctions between the upper and lower portions of Southampton County see Crofts, Old Southampton, 3-6. Crofts suggests that soil differences may account, at least in part, for economic variation within the county.

(14) Daniel Crofts has estimated that in 1850 about a third of white Southampton families were propertyless; see Crofts, Old Southampton, 14. Unfortunately, it is impossible to provide a similar estimate for 1782, since census records were not yet kept at that time and only the taxpaying (and therefore propertyholding) population can be traced. Assuming that some Southampton Baptists moved out of the county after their conversion but before 1782, Black Creek members could well have been no more propertyless than the county average calculated by Crofts for the later period.

(15) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, 1776-1818, photostat, LVA; H. R. McIlwaine, ed., "Proceedings of the Committees of Safety of Caroline and Southampton Counties, Virginia, 1774-1776," Bulletin of the Virginia State Library, XVII (November 1929), 155; Heads of Families at the First Census ... (Washington, D.C., 1908), 9. Of the 192 Black Creek members whose names were recorded in the church book as having joined the congregation from its inception through 1804, 161 were probably white, 5 were free blacks, and 26 were slaves. The percentage of slave members in Baptist churches varied widely across the state, but in most cases slaves did not seek out Baptist fellowship in significant numbers until after the close of the American Revolution. See Jewel L. Spangler, "Salvation Was Not Liberty: Baptists and Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia," American Baptist Quarterly, XIII (September 1994), 221-36; and Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill and London, 1998), 99-104 and 118.

(16) For Herring's holdings see Southampton County Personal Property Tax Book, 1782; Southampton County Land Tax Book, 1782; Southampton County Land Book, Alterations 17841787. His activities in local government are evident throughout the Southampton County Court Order Books 2-5 for the period between 1772 and 1787, when he was expelled from Black Creek congregation.

(17) Among the comfortable yeomen of Black Creek was Shadrack Lewis, who was certainly not considered wealthy with his holdings of 130 acres of land and two slaves, but who also served his community as a militia captain and, late in the century, as a magistrate. Conversely, Tynes West, while never finding his way into county offices, did own four slaves and 345 acres of land in 1782, which put him beyond a mere competency.

(18) If the wealthiest Baptist, Tscharner Degraffenreid, is dropped from the sample, the average slaveholding Meherrin Baptist owned 2.2 slaves in 1772. Lunenburg County residents were in the process of solving their transportation difficulties and beginning to produce tobacco in earnest when the Revolutionary War broke out. Tobacco production was disrupted during the war, but the crop rebounded after the peace, and it was cultivated in Lunenburg long after most other counties had given it up. Lunenburg's commitment to slavery was on the rise during the Revolutionary period, and the slave population would continue to grow there long after the war. In both tobacco production and the commitment to slave labor, Lunenburg was different from the more economically stagnant Southampton County, which may account for the greater property holdings of some Lunenburg Separate Baptists. See Beeman, Evolution of the Backcountry, 160-85; and Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 16801800 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), 141-57.

(19) Numerous secondary sources have claimed that Blagrave Sr. was a Baptist, but it was undoubtedly his son of the same name who joined Meherrin Church. In May 1772 Henry Blagrave asked Meherrin congregation if he should submit to pressure from his father to allow his infant child to be baptized. Blagrave Jr. had recently left the household of Blagrave Sr., a longtime Anglican vestryman, and thus was far more likely to have been starting a young family under the watchful eye of his disapproving father. Blagrave Sr. was truly among the elite of Lunenburg, having not only served as vestryman and magistrate but also as the county representative to the Virginia House of Burgesses on more than one occasion. See Landon C. Bell, Cumberland Parish, Lunenburg County Virginia, 1746-1816, Vestry Book 1746-1816 (Richmond, Va., 1930), 183-84. In addition, converts Henry and Bryan Lester were the sons of Bryan Lester Sr., a modest planter and vestryman of Cumberland Parish: see Redd, "Meherrin Baptist Church," 709.

(20) These findings form an interesting parallel with the early Virginia Presbyterians. See Rodger M. Payne, "New Light in Hanover County: Evangelical Dissent in Piedmont Virginia, 1740-1755," Journal of Southern History, LXI (November 1995), 665-94.

(21) Information given in the pages that follow is derived from a search of the Southampton County Court Order Books 2, 3, 4, and 5, for the years 1772-1786; Southampton County Court Minute Books for the years 1786-1787; Lunenburg County Court Order Book 13, 1769-1777; and Lunenburg County Court Order Book 14, 1777-1784. Unfortunately, the court records provide only an abbreviated account of local business, giving few details of suits, testimony, and judgments. Selected examples rather than citations for every relevant case are given below.

(22) A number of Baptists helped to develop Southampton County's transportation network before their conversions, including Simon Johnson, Elias Herring, Richard Sharp, and Mathew Vick. Many Baptists participated in the maintenance of the transportation network after conversion as well, including Shadrack Lewis, John Bowers, Benjamin Beale, David Barrow, Henry Jones, John Pledger, and John Crumpler. See Southampton County Court Order Book 2, March 12, 1772, p. 503; Southampton Court Order Book 3, August 13, 1772, May 13, 1773, July 15, 1775, pp. 30, 171, 417; Southampton Court Order Book 4, September 14, 1780, p. 132; Southampton Court Minute Book, 1786-1790, September 11, 1788, October 8, 1789, February 13, 1787; and Southampton Court Minute Book, 1793-1799, September l0 and Il, 1795. In Lunenburg County, Craddock Vaughan was appointed to survey roads before becoming a Baptist, while Henry Blagrave Jr. and John Sammons served at that post after joining Meherrin Baptist Church. See Lunenburg Court Order Book 13, February 13, 1772, October 8, 1772, November 12, 1772, November 11, 1773, June 12, 1777, pp. 172-173, 245, 249, 376, 497.

(23) Among the Black Creek members who served on grand juries in the 1770s and 1780s were John Bowers, Benjamin Beale, and John Luter; see Southampton Court Order Book 4, November 10, 1778, p. 39; Southampton Court Order Book 5, May 12, 1785, p. 64; and Southampton Court Minute Book, 1786-1790, November 13, 1788. Shadrack Lewis served on the Southampton grand jury many times and was also the foreman on a number of occasions. Thomas Garrett, Matthew Williams, John Hawkins, and Charles Cook were among the Meherrin Baptists who served on the grand jury in Lunenburg County; see Lunenburg Court Order Book 13, May 9, 1771, November 14, 1771, May 8, 1777, pp. 5, 81, 117, 161,493. For the role of grand juries see A. G. Roeber, "Authority, Law, and Custom: The Rituals of Court Day in Tidewater Virginia, 1720-1750," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., XXXLVII (January 1980), 43-47.

(24) Southampton Court Order Book 3, March 11, 1773, p. 124.

(25) In 1777 William Vick of Black Creek Church was appointed by the court as a guardian. In the 1780s a significant number of Baptists found themselves serving their community by supporting indigent or orphaned individuals, among them Henry Jones, David Barrow, and John Luter, while in 1787 Black Creek Baptist John Bowers was appointed an overseer to the poor; see Southampton Court Minute Books, 1786-1790, December 31, 1786, March 10, 1787, August 1787. In Lunenburg County, John Hawkins was appointed as a guardian in the 1770s; see Lunenburg Court Order Book 13, January 1776, p. 466.

(26) Southampton Court Order Book 4, 1778-1784, September 9, 1779, February 14, 1782, pp. 92, 178; Lunenburg Court Order Book 13, December 13, 1771, p. 170.

(27) Herring served as magistrate from at least 1772 to 1787, and Barrow joined him on the bench in 1782; Southampton Court Order Book 3, July 9, 1772, February 11, 1773, pp. 26, 99; Southampton Court Order Book 4, May 9, 1782, p. 191. For Williams's service see Lunenburg Court Order Book 13, October 12, 1769, February 8, 1770, July 10, 1771, pp. 1, 24, 148.

(28) McIlwaine, ed., "Proceedings of the Committees of Safety," 152; Southampton Court Order Book 4, September 10, 1778, May 13, 1779, pp. 36, 67, 68; Southampton Court Minute Book, 1786-1790, December 12, 1787; Southampton Court Order Book 4, October 8, 1778, May 13, 1779, July 13, 1780, pp. 36, 69, 122; Southampton Court Minute Book, 1786-1790, September 14, 1786, April 12, 1787, December 13, 1787; Southampton Court Minute Book, 1793-1799, June 14, 1793; Lunenburg Court Order Book 13, May 8, 1777, p. 493; Lunenburg Court Order Book 14, August 14, 1777, pp. 2-3.

(29) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, February 20, 1778, LVA.

(30) For the relationship between planters and nonslaveholders in the South see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, "Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders' Democracy," in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York and Oxford, 1983), 249-71; and Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990), 269-302.

(31) For discussions of the primacy of the southern patriarchal household see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 319-66; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York and Oxford, 1995), 171-207; and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill and London, 1988), 37-99. For the family in Revolutionary Virginia see Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca and London, 1980); and Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1983).

(32) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, November 24, 1786, LVA.

(33) Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, February 22, 1772, June 1772, September 1775, LVA. For interpretations of these episodes see Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry, 108-9; and Sobel, World They Made Together, 194-96.

(34) Recent work has begun to challenge and reject the view that slaves rushed to membership because they identified Baptist churches as places where relative social equality could be achieved. See, for example, James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 (New York, 1997), 35-39; and Spangler, "Salvation Was Not Liberty." Slaves were clearly more attracted to Separate than to Regular Baptist practice in the early years. For the importance of the Separate style of worship to the African American community see Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 99-104.

(35) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, November 24, 1786, February 23, 1787, July 28, 1787, June 21, 1791, August 26, 1791, February 1794, March 26, 1802, LVA.

(36) Black Creek members Toomer Joyner, Henry Jones, and Giles Johnson submitted deeds of manumission to the county court in the winter of 1787-1788, freeing five slaves between them; Southampton Court Minute Book, 1786-1790, December 13, 1787, February 14, 1788. For their stated reasons for manumission see Southampton County Deed Book 6, 1782-1787, p. 208; and Southampton County Deed Book 7, 1787-1793, pp. 41, 65.

(37) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, February 23, 1787, July 28, 1787, LVA. When five members later refused to continue in fellowship until slaveholders had been expelled from the church, their ranks included those who hired slaves as well; Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, Jane 21, 1791, LVA. Daniel Crofts has pointed out that for the period after 1830, in any case, slave hiring in Southampton was common and "redistributed slave labor from larger units to smaller ones," though it is his opinion that it was the households of small slaveholders that were most likely to be hiring; Crofts, Old Southampton, 20. For the importance of slave hiring in communities with few slaveowners see Nancy Sorrells, "Francis McFarland and the Black Community: A Case Study of the Slave-Hiring System in Augusta County, Virginia," unpublished paper presented at "After the Backcountry: Rural Life and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Valley of Virginia," a conference held at Lexington, Virginia, March 23-26, 1995 (copy in author's possession). See also Sara S. Hughes, "Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782-1810," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d set., XXXV (April 1978), 260-86.

(38) Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, May 30-31, 1772, LVA. For a discussion of slaves' motives for joining dissenting churches in the South in this period see Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 80-117. Frey and Wood point out that in addition to the hope of finding justice or even freedom through worship, the nature of evangelical belief and style of worship were also particularly appealing to slaves. See also Raboteau, "Slave Church in the Era of the American Revolution," 202-9.

(39) Meherrin Baptist Church held business meetings on both Saturdays and Sundays, so slaves could conceivably at least have been present for some official church activities.

(40) On February 23, 1776, Black Creek Church ruled that both men and women should attend business meetings. On February 22, 1793, Black Creek spelled out who could vote, who should attend business meetings, and who should speak at those meetings. At that time both slaves and women were barred from voting, and women were expressly barred from speaking. On February 25, 1785, the church expressly barred women from preaching and exhortation, and on June 22, 1792, the church explained how funds would be raised. Women participated in church discipline only once in the entire early history of Black Creek Church, on January 24, 1789. Meherrin's minute book is largely silent about the role of women in official business, except for a notation on October 1, 1776, that the male congregants were called to gather to consider church business, implying that women were not participating in or voting at such meetings. For a thorough study of women's participation in Baptist church life see Janet Moore Lindman, "A World of Baptists: Gender, Race, and Religious Community in Pennsylvania and Virginia, 1689-1825" (Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1994). See also Susan M. Juster, "Patriarchy Reborn: The Gendering of Authority in the Evangelical Church in Revolutionary New England," Gender and History, VI (April 1994), 58-81; and Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 293-96.

(41) On January 4, 1772, Meherrin members ruled it "a matter of dealing for a member to suffer any of his domesticks (children or servants) in open sin uncorrected," while in June 1773 they determined that it was unlawful to "neglect calling any part of our family to [religious] duty night and morning." Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, LVA.

(42) Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, October 1, 1776, February 14, 1777, LVA.

(43) For an excellent discussion of women's participation in evangelical churches in spite of their anti-feminist nature see Blair A. Pogue, "'I Cannot Believe the Gospel That Is So Much Preached': Gender, Belief and Discipline in Baptist Religious Culture," in Craig Thompson Friend, ed, The Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (Lexington, Ky., 1999), 217-41.

(44) For example, at Black Creek Church, Lawrence's slave, Will, was charged with "rude Behavior among Women," which undoubtedly had to do with his treatment of white women; Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, May 21, 1791, LVA. At Meherrin, Sharper, a slave belonging to Mr. Wood, was censured for "unchristian behaviour to some of the Brethren," a vague condemnation that may well have been a way of expressing Sharper's violation of the proper code of conduct for slaves; Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, January 12, 1772, LVA.

(45) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, June 21, 1793, August 23, 1793, LVA.

(46) Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, May 30 and 31, 1772, LVA. See also Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, August 23, 1793, December 7, 1792, LVA.

(47) For example, the Black Creek Church minute book noted on May 21, 1790, that William Barnes's slave Moses was excommunicated because, among other things, he committed the sin of "disobeying his Master."

(48) Jesse Council of Black Creek Church, for example, was assigned the task of appraising the slaves and personal estate of Ann Drake in 1775; see Southampton Court Order Book 3, August 10, 1775, p. 417. Often, however, there was no will to guide the process of administering an estate, as was the case when Shadrack Lewis of Black Creek Church was placed on a committee to divide the slaves of a Mr. Williams "equally" among his orphans; see Southampton Court Minute Book, 1793-1799, September 18, 1797.

(49) Southampton Court Minute Book, 1786-1790, May 14, 1789.

(50) Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, CLXXXI (May/June 1990), 110.

(51) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, June 21, 1793, August 23, 1793, LVA.

(52) Robert Gardner has estimated that only about 3 percent of Virginia's population were Baptists by 1790, while Christine Heyrman calculated that less than 20 percent of all adult southerners had joined Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian churches by 1810. See Robert G. Gardner, "Virginia Baptist Statistics, 1699-1790," Virginia Baptist Register, XXI (1982), 1024; and Heyrman, Southern Cross, 5.

(53) John S. Moore, ed., "John Williams' Journal," Virginia Baptist Register, XVII (1978), 795-813.

(54) For a discussion of similar divisions among religious converts in general, see Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven and London, 1993), 95-97.

(55) See ibid., 60-63; David A. Snow, Louis A. Zurcher Jr., and Sheldon Ekland-Olson, "Social Networks and Social Movements: A Microstructural Approach to Differential Recruitment," American Sociological Review, XLV (October 1980), 794.

(56) James Ireland, The Life of James Ireland ... (Winchester, Va., 1819), 42-122.

(57) Edwin Scott Gaustad has Sown that the highest concentration of functioning Anglican churches were clustered in the Tidewater in 1750; see his Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York, 1962), 7. For religious competition in the Valley see Joseph W. A. Whitehorne, "'Baptists and Yams Did Not Grow Well in the Shenandoah Valley': Regional Differences in the Baptist Movement in Colonial Virginia," a paper presented to the Shenandoah Valley Regional Studies Seminar, May 15, 1998 (copy in author's possession). It should be noted that ethnicity also played an important role in religious affiliation in the Shenandoah Valley. The Scotch-Irish and German immigrants who made up most of the population in that region at this time were likely to make religious choices that helped to maintain their ethnic identities; as a result, the Baptist Church was less appealing to them. On the development of the Virginia Piedmont see Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry, 23-24, 56, and 99; and Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 92-99, 141-61.

(58) The Reverend Henry John Burges temporarily revived Anglican practice in Nottoway Parish in the 1770s but was captured early in the Revolutionary War and appears not to have returned to Christian service afterward. Another Nottoway minister, William Andrews, was incapable of developing a positive relationship with the community he served due to his passionate Tory sentiments. Rogers Dey Whichard, The History of Lower Tidewater Virginia [2 vols.; New York, 1959], II, 288; Thomas C. Parramore, Southampton County Virginia (Charlottesville, 1978), 31-32. An October 13, 1778, petition to the General Assembly from Nottoway Parish requested the dispersal of the vestry because it had not met for several years, which is also an indication of the weakness of Anglicanism there; Legislative Petitions, Southampton County, Virginia, manuscript, LVA.

(59) James Craig to William Dawson, September 8, 1759, Dawson Papers, Library of Congress.

(60) See, for example, Snow et al., "Social Networks," 792-94.

(61) Ireland, Life of Ireland, 42-122.

(62) William S. Simpson Jr., Virginia Baptist Ministers, 1760-1790: A Biographical Survey (3 vols.; Richmond, Va., 1990-), I, passim.

(63) See Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry, 67; and Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 141-48.

(64) Among the best of the early Baptist histories are Robert Baylor Semple, History of the Baptists in Virginia, rev. by G. W. Beale (Richmond, Va., 1894; repr., Lafayette, Tenn., 1976); William Fristoe, A Concise History of the Ketocton Baptist Association (Staunton, Va., 1808); and Lemuel Burkitt and Jesse Read, A Concise History of the Kehukee Baptist Association from its Original Rise to the Present Time (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1803; repr., Philadelphia, 1985), all of which treat the activities of early ministers as an important pan of the expansion of the Baptist Church in Virginia.

(65) Robert B. Scruple, History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia (Richmond, 1810), 386.

(66) Simpson, Virginia Baptist Ministers, I, 6 (quotations). For the early history of Southside Regulars see Semple, History of the Rise of the Baptists, 447-54. For the importance of preachers to the formation of Baptist churches in the South see Sandra Rennie, "The Role of the Preacher: Index to the Consolidation of the Baptist Movement in Virginia from 1760 to 1790," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXVIII (October 1980), 430-41.

(67) See, for example, John Lofland and Rodney Stark, "Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective," American Sociological Review, XXX (December 1965), 871-72; David A. Snow and Cynthia L. Phillips, "The Lofland-Stark Conversion Model: A Critical Reassessment," Social Problems, XXVII (April 1980), 440-43; and Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 103-8. Victor Turner's concept of communitas is certainly relevant here. Turner explained that in rites of passage (such as religious conversion), participants enter a liminal phase where previous social status is stripped away. In that moment of freedom from social structure, liminal persons can experience an intense bonding with others in the same state. Turner labels that moment of "anti-structure" and coming together communitas, a camaraderie in the breach. Particularly in revival settings, where potential converts are removed from their normal routines for prolonged periods, driven to unusual emotional heights, and told by ministers that they must let go of their past, communitas can develop, taking those in its path over to conversion. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, 1966; repr., Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), 94-97 and 125-30. For an excellent description of this process with respect to the Great Revivals of 1801-1805 see Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville, Tenn., 1999), 218-35.

(68) Ireland, Life of James Ireland, 46-56, 82-88, and 114-19.

(69) Moore, ed., "John Williams' Journal," 798-99, 803, and 805-6.

(70) There is an enormous literature on this point. See, for example, Snow et al., "Social Networks," 787-801; David A. Snow, Louis A. Zurcher Jr., and Sheldon Ekland-Olson, "Further Thoughts on Social Networks and Movement Recruitment," Sociology, I (February 1983), 11220; and Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, "Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects," American Journal of Sociology, LXXXV (May 1980), 1376-95.

(71) Figures derived from the Minute Books of Meherrin Baptist Church and Black Creek Baptist Church, LVA.

(72) Ireland, Life of James Ireland, 82-88 and 114-19.

(73) John Taylor, A History of Ten Baptist Churches ... (Frankfort, Ky., 1823), 7.

(74) Southampton County Personal Property Tax Books, 1782, manuscript, LVA; Landon C. Bell, Sunlight on the Southside: Lists of Tithes, Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1748-1783 (Philadelphia, 1931; repr., Baltimore, 1974).

(75) Devereux Jarratt, A Brief Narrative of the Revival of Religion in Virginia. In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1778), 10.

(76) Bell, Sunlight on the Southside, 269-70, 284, and 351.

(77) Ireland, Life of James Ireland, 82-86.

(78) For a discussion of the late entry of African Americans into Virginia Baptist churches see Spangler, "Salvation was Not Liberty."

(79) Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, November 27, 1771; Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, both in LVA.

(80) In Southampton County, Elias Herring converted and became a founding member of Black Creek Church in 1774, while he was serving as a justice of the peace for the county. He subsequently became sheriff and held a series of high-ranking militia posts before his ouster from the congregation in 1787. In Lunenburg County, the most prominent early Baptist was Joseph Williams, who had served on the bench for over a decade before his conversion and was the sheriff of the county when the spirit overtook him.

(81) It should be noted that there were solitary members of both congregations-men and women who were not related to other members and for whom it is impossible to trace a social connection. Understanding the way that such members came to fellowship is a difficult but worthy task--particularly as a majority of these converts in both churches were women.

(82) Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 163-77.

(83) Ellen Eslinger has similarly argued that community formation was related to conversion with respect to African Americans in Kentucky during this period. See Eslinger, "The Beginnings of Afro-American Christianity Among Kentucky Baptists," in Friend, ed., Buzzel About Kentuck, 197-215.

(84) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, May 27, 1786, LVA; Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, June 1779, LVA.

(85) Moore, ed., "John Williams' Journal," 805-6, 808, and 809.

(86) For Black Creek Church see particularly the dispute between brothers Henry Jones and Shadrack Lewis in 1783, and the cases of Henry Jones and John Joyner in 1790; Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, October 10, 1783, November 26, 1790, LVA. For Meherrin Church see the disputes between Thomas Shelburne and Thomas Wood, and between John Marshall and Edward Walton, both in 1772; Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, May 1772 and August 1772, LVA.

(87) Moore, ed., "John Williams' Journal," 803-4.

(88) See, among many examples, the case of Elias Herring, who was excommunicated from Black Creek Church in 1788 for, among other things, "Drinking to excess and Swearing, and Joining in a Club with the ungodly"; Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, May 23, 1788, August 22, 1788, LVA; at Meherrin, see the case of Thomas Haley, who was censured for "unchristian behavior, evil conversation, & getting too far in liquor at Isaac Johnsons"; Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, September 11, 1772, LVA.

(89) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, November 26, 1786, LVA.

(90) Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, February 1794, LVA.

(91) See, for example, the case of Elias Herring recorded in the Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, May 22, 1788, LVA.

(92) Minute Book of Meherrin Baptist Church, April 19, 1774, LVA.

(93) Southampton County Court Order Book 3, October 8, 1772, May 8, 1777, pp. 65, 479; Southampton County Court Order Book 4, May 13, 1779, p. 68; Lunenburg County Court Order Book 13, November 1770, May 1777, pp. 81,494.

(94) For the importance of church discipline to the development of a sense of "separateness" see especially Curtis D. Johnson, Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 17901860 (Ithaca and London, 1989), 89-93. Southampton Baptists averaged 1.47 excommunications per year, which is almost exactly the number that Johnson cited for the most exclusionary denomination--Baptist--of the four congregations that he studied (see his Table C.3, p. 190).

(95) The classic expression of this view is Laurence R. Iannaccone, "Why Strict Churches Are Strong," American Journal of Sociology, XCIX (March 1994), 1180-211. See also Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, "How the Upstart Sects Won America: 1776-1850," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, XXVIII (March 1987), 27-44.

(96) Even in its most successful season, when the Baptist Church had become mainstream in the South, the church was unable to attract more than about 30 percent of southern churchgoers, even though the social conception of church membership had changed significantly by the twentieth century. See Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), 147.

(97) See Minute Book of Black Creek Baptist Church, November 1786, LVA.

(98) John B. Boles has pointed out that a truly transformative religious revival must be preceded by the development of "a network of churches and ministers ... [and] a shared community of belief about how God works in history...." Clearly the first Virginia Baptist converts, as he argued, were building a base for the far more transformative revivals at the turn of the nineteenth century. See Boles, "Evangelical Protestantism in the Old South: From Religious Dissent to Cultural Dominance," in Charles Reagan Wilson, ed., Religion in the South (Jackson, Miss., 1985), 13-34 (quotation on p. 15).

MS. SPANGLER is an assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary.