“Seals of my ministry”

Before Oliver Hart’s arrival in Charleston, the Southern colonies had produced none of their own indigenous ministers, having always looked to the Northern colonies or to Great Britain to supply their pulpits. One of Hart’s most significant contributions was to address this need. He personally trained in his home many young Baptist men called to gospel ministry and led the Charleston Association to found the minister’s education fund, the first cooperative education effort by Baptists in America. Hart actively recruited young ministers from other regions to fill the empty pulpits of the South and counseled other novice pastors on a variety of issues in his extensive correspondence. This chapter uncovers the greatest crisis of Hart’s pastoral career, the near-usurpation of the Charleston Baptist pulpit by one of his own trainees, Nicholas Bedgegood. It also recounts the story of the conversion and ministerial call of one of Hart’s most significant protégés, Edmund Botsford.

Cherokee and Creek Victual Warfare in the Revolutionary South

This chapter focuses on the victual warfare that prevailed in the southern colonies and then states. Three periods of bad food diplomacy, victual warfare, or a combination of the two methods of communication—during 1775–1778, 1779, and 1780–1782—illustrate how confused policy, hunger, and violence became intertwined. The first time span reveals inadequate food diplomacy and changes in victual warfare. Indians'—Cherokees and Creeks—behavior shifted from killing and maiming animals to stealing, butchering, and eating them. During the second period, previous changes, in combination with the death of John Stuart—the southern agent for British Indian Affairs and a key official among the Creeks—disrupted Anglo-Indian alliances. This was characterized by extreme confusion caused by shoddy British food diplomacy, and by increased American attempts to create Native hunger, which they did by intensifying their victual warfare and circumscribing food-aid distributions. From 1780 to 1782 power relations were hard to predict. As British military leaders deprioritized Indian diplomacy, American states grew more likely to use the threat of victual warfare to try to create hunger and control people. At the same time, the states' Indian policies became inconsistent. Ultimately, unsuccessful food diplomacy had three results: it created confusion, it made white Americans reluctant to distribute food aid, and it forced people to associate victual warfare with famine creation, famine prevention, and violence.

The Nature of the South

Plantation agriculture in the western hemisphere extended from Brazil northward through the Caribbean to the northern boundary of Maryland. This geography created a line in North America noted by seventeenth-century imperial economists. The southern colonies produced crops needed in the home land making the South far more valuable to the empire than the North. Plantation agriculture stopped at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border because the climate made slavery impractical north of that line. Only farmers who produced valuable exports could afford the price of slaves. Tobacco, though it could be grown in the North, was not commercially feasible there. The growing season had to be long enough to get a crop in the ground while also planting corn for subsistence, allow the tobacco to mature, and harvest it before the first frost. Tobacco was practical within the zone of the 180-day growing season whose isotherm outlines the areas where slavery flourished. Within this zone, the ground could be worked all but a month or two in winter, giving slaves plenty to do. Cattle could also forage for themselves, reducing the need for hay. Southern farmers could devote themselves to provisions and market crops, increasing their wealth substantially compared to the North where haying occupied much of the summer. Differing agro-systems developed along a temperature gradient running from North to South with contrasting crops and labor systems attached to each.

The Old World Meets the New

This chapter stretches from the early eighteenth century to the end of the French and Indian War. With a focus on how European ideals permeated early American society, Chapter 1 traces Washington and Franklin’s individual definitions of honor and virtue and how they changed over time. It discusses how their mindsets were largely the result of self-education and personal experience, allowing for a comparison between the northern and southern colonies. It also illustrates the extremely early emergence of an American concept of honor, highlighted by Franklin’s 1723 original concept of merit-based “ascending honor”. The chapter shows Americans as first moving closer to Europe ideologically, before a transformation in ethical ideals saw a greater divergence from the mother country. It also frames the Revolution as being sparked by these preexisting ethical changes.