Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire

Abstract

EARLY 1704: QUEEN ANNE'S WAR RAGES ON THE FRONTIERS OF EASTERN North America. Indian and European allies advance southward through forest on unsuspecting enemy villages. A surprise raid--defenders are quickly overpowered. Homes and churches are torched, captives are burned at stake while reciting religious verse, hundreds more file northward into slavery, and those who cannot keep up are butchered on trail. A fellowship of godly is decimated. This scene might well describe famous raids by French and Iroquois attackers on Deerfield and other towns in colonial Massachusetts, immortalized in contemporary survivors' accounts and revisited in dramatic detail by modern scholars. But, in fact, it more accurately depicts attacks eleven hundred miles to south by Carolina colonists and their Creek allies on Spanish mission villages of northern Florida. By August 1704 more than one thousand Apalachee and Timucuan Catholics had been killed or enslaved, many to be sold to West Indies. Thousands more fled to Louisiana or, disgusted by mission system and by Spaniards' inability to protect them, left voluntarily to relocate in Carolina. Slaughter, captivity, and flight hastened their virtual extinction as peoples; mission system, linchpin of Spanish colonialism in American Southeast since 1560s, was essentially destroyed. By any measure assault was far more destructive than its New England counterpart, forever changing face of Southeast with eradication of great majority of region's Catholics. But because of enduring grip of Puritans on public and scholarly imagination, Deerfield raid lives on in working vernacular of historians of early America, while annihilation of Florida missions is mostly known to a few specialists, remaining a largely obscure episode in southern geopolitical history and in growing literature on Indian slave trade. In fact, it was a turning point in both early American history and in religious history of South. (1) In a rare gaze southward, Perry Miller reminded us long ago that founding of Virginia was as much a religious enterprise as a commercial one and that English religion was present in earlier than in New England. (2) Still, in this four-hundredth anniversary year of Jamestown, we do well to remember that Catholicism was dominant form of Christianity in American long before Virginia Company's New World gambit. In 1570 Spanish Jesuits had begun a mission on a Chesapeake peninsula they called Ajacan, between two rivers English later named James and York. A year later, Indians destroyed mission and killed friars, but by early seventeenth century Spanish chain of missions stretched from coast of Georgia as far west as present-day Tallahassee, claiming many thousands of native converts. Just outside Gainesville, Florida, archaeologists recently uncovered remains of San Francisco de Potano, largest Timucuan mission, founded in 1606 and abandoned under duress a century later. Potano's four-hundredth anniversary passed in 2006 with little notice. Just as Spanish borderlands history has remained on margins of southern history, historians still have not widely assimilated Spanish missions or a strong sense of Protestant-Catholic antagonism into a general understanding of early southern religious history. While historians as venerable as Verner W. Crane and as recent as Alan Gallay, Kathleen DuVal, and Juliana Barr have depicted early South--particularly region south of Virginia--as a vast zone of demographic complexity and territorial dispute between Britain, France, Spain, and multiple Indian peoples, scholars have seldom applied this approach to study of religion. That study has been shaped by an assumption that the South equated to Britain's southern colonies and that very often Virginia was representative of those colonies. …