Tyler’s Early Church Endorsed White Supremacy
“Baptist and Methodist churches had opposed slaveholding members in the early years of the Republic. These denominations’ rapid expansion in the South, however, meant abandoning this position ‘in recognition that upwardly mobile members increasingly included slaveholders. Justification for slavery came with this growth and found its parallels in the biblical subordination of women.” Matthew Wills
The Uprising Of The People
How did religion fit into the local history of Native American genocide and the immoral economic engine of Afro-American human chattel enslavement used by migrants of European heritage in East Texas? It helps to understand that the Christianity imported to the “New World” had a history of justifying and endorsing the dehumanization of people of color, allowing for their wholesale murder and use as slaves due to the Roman Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery dating back to 1452.
But that did not mean the Church in the U.S. started out endorsing slavery.
According to Matthew Wills, “Baptist and Methodist churches had opposed slaveholding members in the early years of the Republic. These denominations’ rapid expansion in the South, however, meant abandoning this position ‘in recognition that upwardly mobile members increasingly included slaveholders. Justification for slavery came with this growth and found its parallels in the biblical subordination of women.”[1] Regardless of outliers, many professed Christians regarded Native Americans and Afro-Americans as savage non-humans or less than human. This belief system allowed most any treatment imaginable of non-whites. Many Southerners believed it was their Christian duty to convert or eradicate Native Americans or manage the sinful African/Afro-American for their good and the Christian’s good pleasure.
MARVIN UNITED METHODIST CHURCH
Tyler’s Marvin United Methodist Church As Pictured In 1911.
In the early 1800s, Christians and governments around the world began to debate the morality of the slave trade and slavery in earnest. Those debates made their way to the United States, where they raged within varied denominations setting Church against Church. One such debate took place in 1844 at the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), held in Louisville, Kentucky. Northern abolitionists were outraged, and tensions escalated over the refusal of James O. Andrew, a Georgia Bishop, to release the slaves he acquired through marriage. In turn, Southerners at the conference mounted a fiery “Biblical” defense of slavery, eventually leading to the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Many other denominational schisms would develop over the issue of slavery.
In 1848, a few years after southern Methodists affirmed the institution of human trafficking (slavery), a “revival” occurred in Tyler. Christians in the newly established Smith Co. joined new converts to form the first church. Church members decided to be affiliated with and named after the newly established slavery-defending institution, The Methodist Episcopal Church, South at Tyler.
At least two of its first four preachers/leaders, Joshua Starr and Joshua Ginn were human traffickers. Who has Rev. Joshua Starr? Starr, a minister from Alabama, is famously known as the founder of Starrville, TX, once the largest city in Smith Co. Starr, a principled man, was known for his opposition to alcohol sales - he was a prohibitionist because of his faith. He was so committed he insisted others join the cause. Lots Starr sold from his 640-acre tract contained a clause in the deed that reverted land back should alcohol be sold by the new owner. But he was also known as a successful farmer, something made possible only due to the use of forced slave labor, which he justified with the Bible.
According to an abstract found in the book No Land Only Slaves Volume 9 (referencing a deed found in the Smith Co., TX
Book of Deeds F, Page 365. Dated - 8 Mar 1854, & 14 Mar 1854), Joshua Starr gave his wife, Martha Starr, a gift of slaves. Details about their slaves are scant but we know their names and ages: 1) Tony, male, 30; 2) Dick, male, 18; 3) Sally, female, 25 and her 2 children, 4) Montgomery, male, 5 and 5) Allis, female, 2; 6) Sopha, female, 23, and her 1 child, 7) Sam, male, 8; 8) Harriet, female, 18; 9) Mariah, female, 19. The slaves were recorded as a gift from Joshua Starr to his wife by the Clerk of Smith County, Texas: E.T. Broughton. Six years later, the 1860 slave schedule details almost all of the slaves were mulatto or products of enslaver & enslaved sexual relations or rape.
Why did Starr gift humans to his wife? This was likely a way for Starr to hide assets with real monetary value from debtors. His wife's property could not be taken to settle debts Joshua Starr owed.
The new Tyler church would later be renamed after Confederate army chaplain Enoch Mather Marvin, D.D. L.L., Marvin Methodist Church.
Before the Civil War began, Rev. Marvin had a chance to choose which side he would serve, North or South. Owner of at least two household slaves, “faithful old servants, Uncle Reuben and Aunt Sukey,” Rev. Marvin sided with the anti-abolitionists. According to Thos. C. Reynolds, Bishop Marvin became a “prominent figure in the Confederacy, on account of the great esteem in which he was universally held, and the wholesome moral and religious influence he exercised over the Missouri troops.”[2] Marvin, known for his “power of thought, the energy of style, and profound reasoning,” chose to give himself to the defense of the cause of white supremacy for the Confederacy.
Joshua & Martha Starr
Founders of Starrville, TX & Marvin Methodist Church
Former slaves, hostages, who attended the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) left soon after the Civil War ended. They joined either the independent black denominations of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church founded in Philadelphia (1816) or the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church based in New York (1821).
Others joined the (Northern) Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), which planted new congregations in the South. The MECS maintained polity for almost 100 years after which in 1939 it reunited with the elder Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Protestant Church (earlier separated from Methodist Episcopals in 1828). Later, it helped form the current United Methodist Church.
TYLER’S FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
First Baptist Church Tyler As Pictured In 1906.
Southern Methodists weren’t alone in their support of the brutal institution of chattel slavery. One year after the Methodist Episcopal schism over Bishop Andrew’s slaves, the American Baptist Church also experienced a split over slavery. For decades, American Baptists did their best to ignore the issue of slavery, with all its suffering and cruelty, in favor of tenuous peace, as new states and territories of the U.S. were committing to the use of a slave economy.
Conversely, abolitionist societies arose in passionate moral opposition to the institution of slavery. It didn’t take a prophet to foresee the coming split. In April 1840, the American Baptists held an Anti-Slavery Convention in New York, and then the issue came into the light.
The question at hand was, “Can slaveholders be missionaries?” The answer was a resounding, “No!” The Baptist Foreign Mission Board then denied a request by the Alabama Convention that slave owners be eligible to become missionaries. This led to the formation of an independent mission society financed by wealthy southern plantation owners, slave capitalists, and other apologists. Dr. Richard Furman, President of the Baptist State Convention of South Carolina, and slave capitalism defender believed, “the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example” and that was part of the “Christian genius.”[3]
Like-minded Southerners, largely, withdrew to form the new Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. It was this context that a few short years later, in 1848, Tyler Baptists (now known as First Baptist Church of Tyler) became the 53rd Baptist church to organize in what was now the new State of Texas. Unsurprisingly, slave owners were among the charter members, Stephen and Georgia Reaves and W. S. and Amy Walker. The church, first known as The Baptist Church of Tyler, would become the mother church of countless other congregations in the area including Second Baptist Church (est. 1890 renamed North Tyler Church, then Calvary Baptist Church), Friendly Baptist Church (est. 1949), Green Acres Baptist Church (est 1955), and South Spring Baptist Church (est. 2016 formerly FBC South Campus). All these churches are direct heirs to Tyler’s legacy of white supremacy and human trafficking, to one degree or another.
TYLER’S FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH
First Christian Church Tyler As Pictured In 1906.
Methodists and Baptists would soon have another Christian movement join the national debate. 19th-century restorationists, known as the Stone-Campbell movement, which birthed the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, were also caught up in the debate over the practice of chattel slavery. In 1845, Alexander Campbell, a founder of the movement, said, “There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting it but many verses which regulate its practice. It is not, then, we conclude, immoral.” Ultimately, the peculiar institution of slavery was not viewed as immoral among the restorationists.
Wes Crawford, the former pastor of Glenwood Church of Christ in Tyler, and author of a book on Church of Christ history revealed that Southern slaveholders were encouraged to evangelize the enslaved as a means of creating a more compliant slave.[4] Crawford went on to argue that the sentiment, as mentioned earlier, transcends the institution of slavery and “is alive throughout the history of Churches of Christ, even now.”[5]
In 1859 Tyler’s Christian Church, a Restoration Movement church (specific to the Campbell camp), was founded. Among the charter members were S. H. Boren, owner of 12 slaves, and Dr. J. W. Davenport, owner of two slaves. During the Reconstruction period, an incredibly difficult economic time in Smith County, the Church folded, only to reopen in 1886 under the direction of evangelist Reverend J. J. Lockhart. Charter members of the reopened Church included secessionists and slave owners Oliver Loftin (a delegate to Texas’ Secession Convention and one of largest slave-owning planters in Smith Co; 79 souls) and J.O. Seastrunk.
TYLER’S FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
First Presbyterian Church Tyler As Pictured In 1883
Most denominations made deliberate choices for one side or the other on the issue of slavery. The Presbyterians were no exception. The same year the Civil War began, a schism in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America led to the foundation of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America.[6]
Theologians in Southern states mounted a vigorous defense of both slavery and secession using the scriptures. Their arguments for secession hung on an analogy of the Hebrew Republic. Slavery was justified using the Bible, and those who fought for the freedom and equality of Black peoples were considered “radical abolitionist infidels” by Southern Presbyterians.
Robert Lewis Dabney provided the most thorough defense of the institution of slavery in his 1867 book, “A Defense of Virginia, and Through Her of the South.” His arguments included the following;
Abraham was a slaveholder. When Abraham came into covenant with God, he was commanded not to free his slaves but to circumcise them.
The Laws of Moses did not abolish slavery but rather regulated it.
Christ commended slaveholders and received them as believers.
Paul’s letters admonished Christian slaves to obey their masters.
Paul exhorted Christian slaves to be content in their lot and not to seek to change their situation.
Runaway slaves, Hagar in the Old Testament, and Onesimus in the New, are commanded to return and submit to their masters.
After the Confederates lost the war, the racist denomination changed its name again to the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). Five years later, Tyler’s First Presbyterian Church was founded by William Nathaniel Dickey, joining the denomination which affirmed the causes of separation from its northern abolitionist brothers.
Who was William Nathaniel Dickey? Before the Civil War, from 1860 to 1861, Dickey acted as a locum tenens at his alma mater, Davidson College, now known as a “Little Ivy” private Presbyterian college in North Carolina.[7] He acted as a Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy. While on staff a Confederate military company was organized at nearby Creswell Springs. There, on May 16th, 1861, Dickey volunteered for the 7th Infantry and was commissioned an officer. On June 30th, 1862, Lieutenant Dickey was wounded in the right thigh at a battle near Frayser’s Farm, Virginia. After mustering out on February 23rd, 1863, Dickey eventually enrolled in seminary.[8] He graduated from Columbia Theological Seminary in 1869,[9] devoted to a life of ministry.
Did Lt Dickey receive an education committed to the equality of all humankind? Doubtful. At that time Columbia Theological was fully supportive of the slave trade. Here are a few of the countless examples cited in the work A Window into the Breach: Theology and the Economy of Slavery at Columbia Theological Seminary, 1824-1899. You decide.
Columbia Theological’s first professor, Thomas Goulding was a planter and owned field slaves.
The seminary’s first scholarships were provided by funds from the sale of 166 people.
George Howe, professor of Biblical Literature, held 26 souls hostage while teaching.
The Seabrook Endowment was provided by profits made possible from the sale of 150+ people on a labor camp owned by William Seabrook.
When planter Andrew Maybank passed away, Columbia Theological received all the proceeds from the sale of his 700-acre planation including slaves.
Charles Colcock Jones, Professor of Ecclesiastical Polity and Church History, owned 100 slaves.
In 1863 Columbia Theological Seminary transferred to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America.
According to Rev Dickey’s own notes, in 1870 while traveling through East Texas on horseback he arrived in Tyler. Upon hearing that no presbyterian church existed in the area, he committed to establishing one in the area.
In summary, religion played a significant part in the formation of the culture of the City of Tyler and Smith County. While abolitionism in northern states forced a national discussion on slavery, Southern ministers, said historian Elizabeth L. Jemison, willingly shifted from “acceptance of slavery as a necessary evil to defending it as a positive good.” This theological justification by pro-slavery men of God created an unChristlike belief that “not only did God sanction slavery, but slavery’s supporters were better Christians and more faithful interpreters of Biblical text than were their opponents.”[10]
It was a matter of Southern theological pride to be among the slave-owning class, and it was supported by “the overwhelming majority of churches and ministers” in the South, especially in Tyler, Texas. Southerners engaged in “the white man’s burden” or the “Lord’s work” would soon be stunned by the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of their way of life. “And so after the Civil War Blacks and whites simply went their separate ways,” Texas College professor of history and religion Edward J. Robinson says. “It’s called de facto segregation.”[11] People in Tyler, like elsewhere around the South, would hold tightly to their antebellum worldview and recommit to it after Reconstruction to build the institutions needed to uphold their reign of white supremacy. All of Tyler’s churches would remain segregated for the next 100+ years.
FOOTNOTES:
Finney, T. M. (1880, Pg 407). The Life and Labors of Enoch Mather Marvin, Late Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. J.H. Chambers https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=6GIghuDhVpIC&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1.
Northern - Southern Baptist Split Over Slavery - American Baptist Historical Society. (2019, April 29). American Baptist Historical Society. http://abhsarchives.org/northern-southern-split-slavery/.
Young, J. R. (2006). Proslavery and Sectional Thought in The Early South, 1740-1829: An Anthology. University of South Carolina Press.
Crawford, W. (2013). Shattering the Illusion: How African American Churches of Christ Moved From Segregation to Independence. Abilene Christian University Press.
Bryce, T. S. (2014, January 7). Review: Race and Churches of Christ: New Book Dispels Myths | The Christian Chronicle. The Christian Chronicle. https://christianchronicle.org/race-and-churches-of-christ-new-book-dispels-myths/.
First Presbyterian Church Tyler. Established 5 years after the Civil War ended. It was a P.C.U.S. Church, originally known as the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America which was founded 1861. In 1983 the denomination joined other Presbyterians to form the Presbyterian Church (USA) of which the Tyler Church it is now a member.
Davidson College: Intimate Facts. (1923). United States: Fleming Revell Press.
Historical Data Systems, Inc.; Duxbury, MA 02331; American Civil War Research Database
The Semi-Centennial Catalogue of Davidson College, Davidson, NC, 1837-1887, published in Raleigh, NC, 1891
Jemison, E. J. (n.d.). Proslavery Christianity After The Emancipation. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43825502.
Bacon, C. M. (2020, February 4). Delving into The History of Black Churches. The Christian Chronicle. https://christianchronicle.org/delving-into-the-history-of-black-churches/.
