A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists by Keith Harper

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists by Keith Harper Nicholas Patrick Cox A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists. By Keith Harper. America's Baptists. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xxii, 197. $49.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-642-1.) Thousands of Americans moved into the trans-Appalachian West during and immediately after the American Revolution, settling in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Many of those who established frontier communities in Kentucky, understandably, relocated from neighboring Virginia. There established Anglicanism had provoked the emergence of a wide range of dissenting Protestant political movements that culminated in the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. Baptists were often at the forefront of challenging the established church in Virginia, and many left for Kentucky and points westward. Kentucky offered migrants plenty of economic incentives in the form of inexpensive land, drawing a diverse mix of transplants, including Baptists who had fought in the Revolution, as well as those ministers who had challenged Anglican hegemony in Virginia. These churchmen formed the ranks of Kentucky Baptist leadership. Keith Harper examines these Baptist ministers who led the early churches in the Bluegrass State as it transformed into an affluent middle-class member of the Union. Historians of early Kentucky and religion in the early republic may recognize these prominent ministers, such as John Gano, James Garrard (who served as Kentucky's second governor), William Hickman, the Craig brothers, and John Taylor. One wishes there was more space in this volume to discuss the views of congregation members in addition to their clergy, or perhaps that there were more records that captured the perspectives of ordinary Kentucky Baptists. Although the ministers of frontier Kentucky Baptist churches may not quite meet anyone's definition of hegemonic elites in the early republic, it sure appears that they played that role locally. These fractious ministers left behind a large volume of manuscripts, pamphlets, and memoirs about their efforts to establish Baptist churches, to form the Elkhorn Association in 1785, and to maintain three essential but occasionally irreconcilable commitments: Baptist "doctrinal fidelity," Jeffersonian republicanism, and the widely observed but infinitely varied southern honor culture (p. xix). The Elkhorn Association is "widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Appalachian Mountains" (p. xiii). Its members largely replicated Virginia's Regular Baptist conformity to the Philadelphia Association's endorsement of the Second London Confession of 1689. Those in Virginia who dissented from this doctrinal imposition from London often founded rival Separate Baptist churches. Both Regular and Separate Baptists established congregations in Kentucky. Divisions over doctrine, authority and autonomy, revivalism, slavery, missionary efforts, and simple personality conflicts between ministers and landed elites reverberated through early republic Kentucky's Baptist communities, providing fruitful opportunities for Harper's close analysis of Baptist belief, practice, and behavior from the 1780s to the 1820s. Generally, the majority of Elkhorn Association ministers (and presumably the congregants who employed them) remained faithful to the Philadelphia [End Page 757] Association's doctrine, sought to avoid disruptions and to quash divisions in favor of order, and desired union with Virginia's Regular Baptists and other Kentucky Baptist associations. This emerging southern Baptist unification movement often found itself anxious about the emerging role of New England clergy, ecumenical benevolent reform, and the centralizing and authoritarian tendencies associated with Federalism. As mission work aimed at Native Americans and foreign nations increased in the early nineteenth century, Kentucky Baptists generally embraced mission societies in pursuit of a nondoctrinal common purpose that would paper over local Baptist divisions, achieve national recognition alongside the mainline Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches, and simply support the goals of missionizing. Dissenters among Kentucky Baptists––particularly John Taylor––worried that the Kentucky churches would lose local autonomy over doctrine and practice as the mission societies sought to bypass churches via direct appeals to Christian donors, formed national associations with non-church-based local branches, and paternalistically targeted white frontier communities deemed insufficiently redeemed for mission work. Missionary enthusiasm, however, subsumed local division. By the mid-1810s, Harper argues, missionary work became the foundation of a...