The gentlemen Sabbatarians : the Sabbath Movement in the upper south, 1826-1836

The Christian Sabbath constituted a pillar of American society from the colonial era through 1865. Yet its importance as an institution and its place in the context of the moral reform movements of the Jacksonian era have been neglected, especially in the South. Consequently, the perceived fundamental importance of the Sabbath to Christianity on the part of most evangelicals, and to the maintaining of peaceful, prosperous, and orderly communities on the part of both evangelicals and some non-evangelicals in the region, has been but dimly understood.

This study examines the Sabbath movement in the Upper South during the period 1826 to 1836. Chapter One examines the initial controversy resulting from the Postal Law of 1810 requiring Sabbath day labor by postal workers. This phase served as a precursor to the late 1820s and illustrates that greater continuity existed among Sabbatarian leaders than has been perceived. Chapter Two examines the late 1820s phase of the same controversy, focusing on the "Sabbath mails" reports of Richard M. Johnson. Johnson has been treated favorably by historians, in part because many of them have accepted the views of Anti-sabbatarians regarding Sabbatarians' intentions, assuming Sabbatarians to have been "coercive" or desirous of a "union between church and state." Chapter Three focuses on the Sabbath's role in the controversy between Calvinists and Campbellites in Kentucky. Whereas mainly Presbyterians and Calvinist Baptists petitioned Congress to halt Sabbath mails, the followers of Alexander Campbell were responsible for most of the state's Anti-sabbatarian sentiment. Chapters Four and Five examine the Sabbath in Virginia, where Presbyterian influence on behalf of the Sabbath was relatively strong and where the best example of a Southern Sabbath society existed during the period. Although Sabbath observance by whites was primarily a moral-religious concern, its observance was also a social-economic issue, especially as whites viewed its observance by blacks. Chapter Six concludes that the Sabbath movement in the Upper South was moderate, even conservative, in nature, and that it witnessed the coinciding of moral-religious and social-economic priorities for a number of evangelicals, county justices of the peace ("gentlemen justices"), and some merchants and bankers.