Up Close with the my Southern parts

Early Methodist Circuit Rider

Timing is everything. I arrived in Chapel Hill on the anniversary of the tumbling of the University’s Confederate statue, aka Silent Sam. On August 18^th, the New York Times published its 1619 Project. The Wall Street Journal followed with its three page Legacies of Slavery essays in its Saturday/Sunday Review Section. So here I am, wondering what I’m doing in this place, if not getting up close with the South and my Southern parts. 

A month ago, I was invited me to attend church at First Baptist of Chapel Hill, founded in 1865 as the Colored Baptist Church. To be in that historic and sacred place is a privilege. I love being there with my friend from water aerobics, for the warmth of the welcome, the immersive music, and Word. The minister, Dr. Rodney Coleman, is known as “The Pitbull of the Pulpit.” He can truly teach and preach.

His preaching reminded me of the stories of my sixth-great grandfather, the Rev. James Jenkins, born in South Carolina in 1764. He became a Methodist, and one of the first Methodist circuit riders. Known to his audiences as “Thundering Jimmy” or “Bawling Jenkins,” he was said to be a minister of rebuke and reproof, and not afraid to shout. Among other things, James Jenkins thought there was too little religion and too much pound cake at revival meetings.

Dr. Coleman tells me these days you can’t scare people into heaven. I’m glad I’m here in 2019, but I am forcing myself to wrap my mind around seven generations of my father’s family being Southerners. I do this to educate myself to the reality of the depth of their complicity in slavery. James Jenkins gives me a window into the mind of Southern ancestor. He self-published his memoirs, Experience, Labors and Sufferings, of which I have an original copy.

Rev. Jenkins spent decades preaching the circuits of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Each of these required him to ride on horseback to reach the inhabitants of the back-country, some 300 miles round trip. In his 1790 worlds, settler were strung sparsely along the rivers, the Oconee, the Savannah, the Saluda, Big PeeDee, Little PeeDee and the rightly named Cape Fear River. He rode up one river to its headwaters, then through the mountains and down another. Vast sections of the interior were labeled Indian Territory. James Jenkins preached to back country settlers, to the enslaved, and to the people known as Cherokee.

What were his thoughts about the non-white people he encountered? He wrote that the upcountry white folk were primitive and superstitious. He disapproved of their funeral custom of offering cakes and wine, or supper, to the mourners.
He also condemned the funerals of colored people. A feast was offered, and then a play for the deceased, that he called a frolic, which lasted all night. He observed that a bottle was broken on the headboard and libation poured, or water and meal sprinkled on the grave. Jenkins condemned the superstitions of a man digging an alligator out of its den to turn it over, as an offering for rain in a season of drought.

Rev. James Jenkins, like most early Methodist ministers, began life on a small farm between the two Pee Dee rivers. At age twenty, he superintended the plantation of a cousin. He wrote “having some refractory negroes to govern, my temper became often excited, and I increased in vice daily.” A few years later he experienced his conversion to Methodism.

Although the early Methodist leader, Francis Asbury, condemned slave-holding,  members were not forced to manumit their slaves, as proposed. I wanted to believe that James Jenkins’ conversion was an attempt to repent. Evidently, he did not. According the the Census, in 1840, he held 8 slaves. Census Slave Schedules are columns of names, letters and numbers. Under the name of slave holder, the enslaved are listed by age and sex. These lists are the exhumed bones of slavery. Are they less horrifying because of the anonymity of the enslaved? The absence of names is part of the crime.

James Jenkins, 1840, Census Enumeration

 My great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s will makes the cruelty clear.  He gives his slaves, by name, to his sons and sons-in-law. They are valued as property, like cash, land, a gold watch, and the future children of the women. They were the capital with which the Rev. Jenkins' descendants made their way in the world.

James Jenkins' Will, including funds to purchase two young boys for son-in-law,
William Jefferson Croswell.

William Jefferson Croswell, 1850 Slave Schedule, showing the two boys.

           No doubt, the Reverend James Jenkins justified his Christianity with 18^th Century notions of race.  His descendants, down to my generation, benefited from his estate. My father was named for, William Jefferson Croswell, his great grandfather. But now, in 2019, we have 200 years of science, and the mapping of the human genome to teach us Jenkins' mistaken belief. 

Give us the strength that this generation will be the last to persist in ignorance of our shared humanity.