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“Courts of Conscience”: Local Law, the Baptists, and Church Schism in Kentucky, 1780–1840

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

Jeffrey Thomas Perry
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Abstract

This article examines how religious controversy affected antebellum Kentucky's legal culture and helped construct the relationship between church and state. It incorporates legal theory to broaden conceptions of law and argues that Baptist churches served as important legal sites for their communities. More than simply punishing moral transgressions, churches litigated disputes that under common law and within county courts would be considered criminal or civil law. By acknowledging that individuals produced law outside of state institutions, the article illuminates a more complex and fluid trans-Appalachian legal culture, one in which church members and non-members alike possessed a capacious vision of law. During the late 1820s and 1830s, Kentucky Baptists faced years of discord emanating from Alexander Campbell's “Reformation.” Amidst a religious backdrop of doctrinal controversy and schism, afflicted churches witnessed a decline of disciplinary activities as individuals' ceased to envision their churches as sites for neutral dispute resolution. The failure of church courts to contain internal dissension and curtail schism led to contentious court battles over rights to local meetinghouses. As judges reviewed church disciplinary records and litigants debated religious doctrine at the courthouse, these church property disputes highlight the process of redefining church-state relations in the post-establishment era.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 124 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2015 

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References

1 Minute Books of Eminence, Kentucky Baptist Church (formerly Fox Run), April/May 1831, Archives and Special Collections, James P. Boyce Centennial Library, The Southern Baptist Theological Library, Louisville, Kentucky (hereafter SBTL).

2 For the marriage of Elizabeth Drane and Jeptha Brite, see Ancestry.com, accessed March 18, 2013, http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?ti=0&indiv=try&db=eamky&h=63158. It cites Jordan Dodd, Kentucky Marriages, 1802–1850 (Provo, Utah). In the June 1831 records of Fox Run Church, a letter from the Dranes and Brites mentions that a “Creath” preached in the Brite home. Jacob Creath, Jr., “was the most active and turbulent advocate of Campbellism in the state,” while his uncle, Jacob Creath Sr. “was among the first converts to Campbellism.” See, Spencer, John H., A History of Kentucky Baptists From 1769 to 1885, including more than 1800 biographical Sketches, vol. 1 (Cincinnati, Ohio: J.R. Baumes, 1886), 204Google Scholar, 312.

3 McGarvie, Mark D. notes in One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 9, that early-National Americans were especially concerned with the degree of societal leadership that churches would assume in the new republic. Indeed, he concludes, this matter “was at the heart of successful efforts to separate church and state in the early republic.”

4 Use of the term “tribunal” here is merely descriptive of the church gathered and addressing disciplinary matters. It should not be misconstrued as a sitting or appointed body that dispensed discipline. All attending full members—which as discussed below, were increasingly defined as white male members—voted on disciplinary matters at Saturday business gatherings.

5 And, as Porterfield, Amanda notes in Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 113Google Scholar, “religious communities had governments of their own that supplemented—and in important respects superseded—local, state, and federal authority.”

6 See Eslinger, Ellen's discussion on the importance of ritual in creating community in Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), xixGoogle Scholar.

7 Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 46Google Scholar. Suggestions concerning the decline of church discipline vary in scope and detail. Najar, Monica, in Evangelizing the South A Social History of Church and State in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, does not specifically address the fluctuations in church disciplinary proceedings across space or time. Najar, Unlike, Sparks, Randy, in On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994)Google Scholar, does note a marked decline in church disciplinary procedures after the 1820s in Mississippi. He largely attributes this to disputes between “Modernists”—who wanted disciplinary power to reside with synods, conferences, or associations—and “Traditionalists” who charged their opponents as too concerned with worldly status, prestige, and membership numbers” (see 151); Scully, Randolph Ferguson, in Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 4, addresses disciplinary patterns related to the defendants' race and sex, but not to the recurring patterns that Mathews notes; Wills, Gregory A., in Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, points to a steady decline of discipline in Georgia Baptist churches after 1850, connecting it to a number of factors, including generational change, the growth of urban churches, and a greater concern among evangelicals with reforming all of society (see 9–10). In his The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 282–283Google Scholar, Randolph Roth claims that why “discipline perished” in evangelical churches “is difficult to explain.” Yet, “by 1860 evangelical churches made virtually” no use of disciplinary mechanisms. Waldrep, Christopher, in “The Making of a Border State Society: James McGready, the Great Revival, and the Prosecution of Profanity in Kentucky,” The American Historical Review, 99 no. 3 (June 1994): 781–782Google Scholar, argues that the religious fervor emanating from Campbell's movement led to an upswing in the number of prosecutions for profane swearing in the county courts, but does not mention how the “revival” altered patterns of discipline within church tribunals. Likewise, in his article, “‘So Much Sin’: The Decline of Religious Discipline and the ‘Tidal Wave of Crime,’” Journal of Social History 23, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 535–536Google Scholar, Waldrep argues that the “southern church discipline declined because southern communities lost their cohesiveness” on more general grounds than simply the “growth of sentimentalism and industrialism.” Focusing on Trigg County, Kentucky, Waldrep's primary goal is to show how a decline in church discipline led to a rise in vigilantism during the decades following the Civil War.

8 Lindman, Janet Moore, Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 93Google Scholar.

9 On community see the introduction in Mann, Bruce, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

10 Ross, Richard J., in “The Legal Past of Early New England: Notes for the Study of Law, Legal Culture, and Intellectual History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (Jan., 1993): 32–39Google Scholar, insists that each legal subculture, whether based on religion, race, class, gender, or something else, such as occupation, is “interrelated and changing over time” (33). Although Ross's essay is directed toward historians of colonial North America, his discussion of legal culture and its relationship to the broader society is relevant for any legal historian. He also notes the importance of dispute resolution studies, but does admit that different questions need to be asked and pursued. “While we have fine studies of why colonists chose this or that dispute-settling institution and how they acted within those institutions,” he writes, “we need to go back a step and figure out how legal culture helped place labels—for instance, the label of ‘legal dispute’—on the ambiguous words and deeds of daily life” (39). Since disputes brought to Baptist churches were bound up with the social and familial relations of the congregation, studying the particulars of disputes which spilled out of church walls and into local courtrooms holds the potential of illuminating individuals' larger conceptualizations of the legal world.

11 See in general, Wills, Democratic Religion.

12 This understanding of “legal culture” derives from Friedman, Lawrence M., “Legal Culture and Social Development,” Law & Society Review 4 no. 1 (August 1969): 34Google Scholar. For persistence of localized law see, Edwards, Laura F., The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Edwards, Laura F., “The Peace: The Meaning and Production of Law in the Post-Revolutionary South,” UC-Irvine Law Review 1, no. 3 (February 2011)Google Scholar. Edwards, though reacting to formalist and instrumentalist tendencies of legal historiography, is also building on the work of William Novak and others who have charted the extensive reach of local governments in subverting the individual to the needs of the community. See, Novak, William, The People's Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar. For various “legalities,” of British North America, see in general, The Many Legalities of Early America, eds. Tomlins, Christopher and Mann, Bruce H. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

13 Mann, Neighbors and Strangers; Nelson, William E., Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725–1825 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Konig, David Thomas, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, & Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Legal scholar Christopher Tomlins has argued that during the early-nineteenth century, law became the “modality of rule” for Americans. See, Tomlins, , Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Historian Mark McGarvie, in his investigation of the process of disestablishment, agrees with Tomlins's assertion, arguing that law, as a modality of rule, led to the triumph of common-law contract doctrine over Christian ethics, and the judge and court replaced the minister and church tribunal as social arbiter. See McGarvie, One Nation Under Law, 69.

14 Edwards, “The Peace,” 565.

15 In, The People and Their Peace, 83–84, Edwards does briefly examine disciplinary mechanisms of the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, but her examination is geared toward transformations of local law as practiced in courthouses, not church meetinghouses.

16 Strict disciplinary practices persisted in the South and West “long after New England Congregationalists abandoned the practice in the mid-eighteenth century.” See Sparks, On Jordan's Stormy Banks, 146–147. Scholars disagree as to whether church tribunals were sites for social control. See, for example, Najar, Evangelizing the South. Najar looks at church disciplinary proceedings in the Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee—focusing especially on how church bodies exerted their authority within individual households (thus challenging the authority of the household head) but also how church discipline “eased the progress of the market economy” for members and provided a “version of ‘citizenship’” for women and free and enslaved blacks (90). Janet Moore Lindman, in Bodies of Belief, examines Baptist churches in the mid-Atlantic region, noting that “as a means of social control, the church courts set standards of conduct for all members” (91). Lindman focuses less on the opportunities church tribunals presented to subordinate groups, and more on the top-down imposition of church rules, insisting that church elders decided upon and enforced church regulations. In Religion and the Making Of Nat Turner's Virginia, 169, Randolph Scully contends that among southeastern Virginia Baptists during the early-nineteenth century, “despite white male control over the institution of church discipline, the process never became a straightforward application of social control,” as all members fell under the church's jurisdiction; Similarly, Randy Sparks, in On Jordan's Stormy Banks, 164-168, devotes a full chapter to the disciplinary practices of evangelical churches in Mississippi and argues that no member, black or white, free or enslaved, was exempt from church disciplinary proceedings, although blacks were “disciplined at a rate higher than their percentage of membership in some churches.” Instead of solely a matter of social control, Sparks concludes, church discipline was “an effort to foster self-control, a crucial attribute in a republican society” (148). Wills, in Democratic Religion, 9–10, argues that church discipline was less about social control and more about ecclesiastical control.

17 Lindman, Bodies of Belief, 94.

18 See, for example, Pospisil, Leopold, “Legal Levels and Multiplicity of Legal Systems in Human Societies,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 11, no. 1, (March 1967): 2–26Google Scholar; See also, Pospisil, Leopold, Anthropology of Law: A Comparative Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 98–99Google Scholar. Legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry notes that some institutions, such as corporations, factories, civil associations, and universities “include written codes, tribunals, and security forces” which replicate “the structure and symbolic form of state law.” Furthermore, in any society, various “informal systems”—from the family, labor group, or collective—establish rules and seek to gain compliance with them. A variety of legal systems are found in almost all societies—not only in the colonized—and central to the investigation of law is the relationship between official state legal regimes and all other forms of social ordering which are separate yet still dependent upon state authority. Merry, , “Legal Pluralism,” Law & Society Review 22, no. 5 (1988): 870–874Google Scholar.

19 For instance, the critical legal pluralists decry “social-scientific conceptions” of legal pluralism, such as the one advanced by Merry above, and their continued “appeal to the primacy of the institutionalized State legal order.” Instead, critical legal pluralists attribute more agency to the legal subject, endowing him or her “with a responsibility to participate in the multiple normative communities by which they recognize and create their own legal subjectivity.” See, Kleinhans, Martha-Marie and Macdonald, Roderick A., “What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?” Canadian Journal of Law & Society 25 (1997): 35Google Scholar, 37–38. On the pitfalls of classifying all normative ordering systems as “law,” see in general Tamanaha, Brian Z., “A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism,” Journal of Law and Society 27, no. 2 (June, 2000): 296–321Google Scholar; For a recent review on the state of legal pluralism within the field of history, albeit directed at empires and not religious groups, see the introduction to Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

20 This position is put forth by Brian Tamanaha in “A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism,” 313. Italics in original. “Thus, what law is,” Tamanaha continues, “is determined by the people in the social arena through their own common usages, not in advance by the social scientist or theorist” (314).

21 Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Records, December 1840, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky (hereafter FHS).

22 Moore, Sally Falk, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study,” Law & Society Review 7, no. 4 (Summer 1973): 721Google Scholar.

23 For the lessening influence of women and blacks, free and enslaved, in post-Revolutionary Kentucky Baptist churches, see, Pogue, Blair A., “‘I Cannot Believe the Gospel That Is So Much Preached’: Gender, Belief, and Discipline in Baptist Religious Culture,” in The Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, ed. Friend, Craig Thompson (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999)Google Scholar.

24 Najar, Evangelizing the South, 9.

25 Crowley, John G., “‘Written that Ye May Believe’: Primitive Baptist Historiography” in Through A Glass Darkly: Contested Notions of Baptist Identity, ed. Harper, Keith (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 212Google Scholar. Campbell's “Disciples” were particularly detrimental to Baptist church membership in Kentucky; see Sweet, William Warren, Religion on the American Frontier: The Baptists, 1783–1830 (New York: Cooper Square, 1964), 26Google Scholar. For information on the growth of the “Primitive” Baptist movement, see Taylor, Jeffrey Wayne, The Formation of the Primitive Baptist Movement (Ontario: Pandora Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

26 In his study on profanity prosecutions within local courts in antebellum Kentucky, “The Making of a Border State Society,” 779, Christopher Waldrep argues that “grand juries in some jurisdictions responded closely to upswings and downturns in religious enthusiasm.” Increases in profane swearing prosecutions in these areas were “closely connected to outbursts of evangelicalism such as the Campbellite crusade,” yet this “did not occur elsewhere in the nineteenth century.”

27 Friend, Craig Thompson, Kentucke's Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 234Google Scholar.

28 Rohrbough, Malcolm J., Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 31–32Google Scholar.

29 still, Even, as Conklin, Carli N. argues in “Transformed, Not Transcended: The Role of Extrajudicial Dispute Resolution in Antebellum Kentucky and New Jersey,” The American Journal of Legal History 48, no. 1 (January 2006)Google Scholar, that despite what legal scholars such as Morton Horwitz, who focuses largely on eastern regions, contend about the triumph of formalized law over the particularities of extra-judicial arbitration during the antebellum period, such practices continued throughout the early-republic and antebellum periods in Kentucky. Though Conklin does not examine churches' role in settling land disputes, her work demonstrates the need to place legal systems within their local context instead of relying upon historiographical contentions arising from different locations.

30 Friend, Kentucke's Frontiers, 185.

31 Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 96.

32 Ireland, Robert M., The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 4–5Google Scholar, 18.

33 Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 57, 6. In contrast to Rohrbough's contention that the federal government was relatively weak during the early decades of settlement, Bergmann, William H., in his recent work, The American National State and the Early West (Cambridge, Mass.: University of Cambridge Press, 2012), 2Google Scholar, posits the federal government as an important actor in the region, “cultivating partnerships with state governments and local businesses, thereby fostering a commercial economy.” Christopher Waldrep, in “The Making of a Border State Society,” notes that during the early nineteenth century, “Kentucky courts had established themselves as forums for neighborhood dispute resolution.” He has also demonstrated that before 1850, circuit court cases began in front of grand juries, which “often operated with little supervision” and paved the way for “ordinary citizens” to play “a large role in shaping the traffic through the court,” allowing “grand jurors to control access to its criminal justice system more often than legal professionals” (773–774).

34 Najar, Evangelizing the South, 97.

35 Bryan's Station Church Record Book, July 1786, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky (hereafter KHS); Monica Najar, Evangelizing the South, 3–4; Donald G. Mathews Religion in the Old South, 3–4; Ayers, Edward A., Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 120–121Google Scholar.

36 At times, however, associations refused to take up such queries or referred them back to the individual churches to consider.

37 Wardin, Albert W. Jr., Tennessee Baptists: A Comprehensive History, 1779–1999 (Brentwood: Tennessee Baptist Convention, 1999), 97–100Google Scholar; See also, Nation, Richard F., At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 69–70Google Scholar, which notes that, although one of associations' ‘primary functions was to help resolve doctrinal disputes within the local church,” they instead “often served to fan the flames of dissent.”

38 Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier: The Baptists, 24–26; For the state's population see, Ramage, James A. and Watkins, Andrea S., Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from the Early Republic to the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 238Google Scholar.

39 Heyrman, Christine Leigh, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 265Google Scholar. By 1835, Heyrman notes, 65.8% of whites and 28% of blacks were “adherents” of southern evangelical churches. “According to contemporary accounts,” she continues, “Baptist adult adherents outnumbered members by about three to one.” For Heyrman, the South includes “Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri, as well as the western country settled principally by southerners—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.”

40 Edwards, The People and Their Peace, 67.

41 This should not mislead us to think that local courts did not exert influence in their communities. As Robert Ireland argues, “So essential were these local tribunals to Kentuckians that any group of citizens who experienced the slightest inconvenience in reaching the county seat inevitably petitioned the state legislature for the creation of a new county.” See The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky, 4.

42 On Kentucky's economic transformation see in general, Aron, Stephen, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

43 Church Records of Long Run Baptist Church, Jefferson County, Kentucky, November-December 1806, SBTL. Chimmith was admonished and restored to fellowship in December 1806.

44 David Fork's Baptist Church Minutes, Lexington, Kentucky, May-June 1823, accessed June 11, 2014, http://davidsfork.org/images/David_s_Fork_minutes_1802-1850_PDF.pdf..

45 Mount Pleasant Baptist Church Records, Folder 1, July-September 1799, KHS. My emphasis.

46 Fitzgerald, Jeffrey and Dickens, Richard, “Disputing in Legal and Nonlegal Contexts: Some Questions for Sociologists of Law,” Law & Society Review 15, no. 3/4 (1980–1981): 687Google Scholar.

47 Christopher Waldrep, in his discussion of declining church discipline in post-bellum Kentucky has noted that the very professionalism of southern lawyers “may have made courts appear to be inefficient and ineffective to those familiar with church courts.” See Waldrep, “‘So Much Sin,’” 541.

48 Some churches did allow women a vote in matters of church government and discipline. Yet increasingly after the Revolution, although white women and African Americans were considered members, church “member” was defined as white male. See Pogue, “‘I Cannot Believe the Gospel That is so Much Preached’,” 217; Randolph Scully argues that in southeastern Virginia “formal institutional authority in the churches rested on masculinity and freedom.” Not until the 1813 did any church in the region explicitly tie participation in church governance to white males, with most following suit in the 1830s. See Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia, 148–149.

49 Buffalo Lick Baptist Church Minutes, July–November 1809, FHS.

50 Edwards, “The Peace,” 585. For examples of subordinate groups participating in church disciplinary procedures, as well as the workings of the disciplinary system itself see, Najar, Evangelizing the South, chapter 4.

51 Elk Lick Primitive Baptist Church, vol. 1, August 1815, KHS.

52 And as Janet Moore Lindman reminds us, “white men served as arbitrators of the social, sexual, and religious behavior of other members.” See Bodies of Belief, 104.

53 Fitzgerald and Dickins, “Disputing in Legal and Nonlegal Contexts,” 687–688, 691. Especially in rural communities, excommunication from the church body could lead to social ostracism. See Waldrep, “‘So Much Sin,’” 541.

54 Bryan's Station Baptist Church, Fayette County, Kentucky, September 1803, KHS. For the court records, see Pickett v. Mitchell (1803), Fayette County Circuit Court Records, box 6, drawers 51–53, case no. 746, Kentucky Department of Library and Archives, Frankfort, Kentucky (hereafter KDLA).

55 Fitzgerald and Dickins, “Disputing in Legal and Nonlegal Contexts,” 687–691.

56 For all quotes see, Minute Books of Eminence, Kentucky Baptist Church (formerly Fox Run), vol. 1, March 1807, June/July 1807, March 1808, May 1808, July/August 1808, October 1809, July 1810, SBTL.

57 “Deposition of Roadham Rout,” Bennett et al Trustees of the Mt. Vernon Church vs. Curd et al (1836), folder 1, case 7914, box 69, Court of Justice, Woodford Circuit Case files, 1833–1837, (hereafter CJWCC), KDLA.

58 Robert B. McAfee journals, 1796–1807, folder 1, p. 61, KHS. It does not appear, in 1803 at least, that McAfee was a member of any church. McAfee consistently noted happenings at local churches (especially inter-faith gatherings), including sermons preached by ministers of various Protestant faiths.

59 David's Fork Baptist Church Minutes, Lexington, Kentucky, June 1826, accessed June 11, 2014, http://davidsfork.org/images/David_s_Fork_minutes_1802-1850_PDF.pdf.

60 Quoted in Wills, Democratic Religion, 14.

61 Bryan's Station Church Records, December 1793, KHS.

62 Numbers from Basil Manly Jr.'s Sketches of the History of the Elkhorn Association, Kentucky (1876), Baptist History Homepage, accessed July 23, 2014, http://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/elkhorn.assoc.his1.manly.html.

63 Ibid.

64 For an average, see Records of the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, 1826–1840, SBTL. On the history of the association in general, see Birdwhistell, Ira, The Baptists of the Bluegrass: A History of the Elkhorn Baptist Association, 1785–1985 (Berea, KY: Berea College Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

65 Birdwhistell, Ira V., Gathered at the River: A Narrative History of the Long Run Baptist Association (Louisville, Ky.: Long Run Baptist Association, 1978), 9–11Google Scholar; Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists, vol. 1, 566. For averages see, Book of the Records of Long Run Association, vol. 1, SBTL.

66 Book of Records of the Long Run Association, September 1825, p. 145, SBTL.

67 The exclusionary rate is based upon Long Run's affiliated churches' membership totals and their reported exclusions for the previous year. In 1805 the exclusionary rate was 4.68%. To place the 1826 percentage in closer context, from 1814 to 1825, it never reached 2% and averaged only 1.47%. The query to the churches, then, ignited dissension and led to a drastic increase in excommunications.

68 Records of the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, 1827, SBTL. Though the Elkhorn Association did not mention Campbell in 1827, the “Church of Christ” appellation is rooted in the “Restoration” movement headed by Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell. The leader of the dissenting faction was Dr. James Fishback, who, as discussed below, was throughout his life central to many church schisms. His denominational loyalties, if any, are difficult to pin down. During the controversy over the Mt. Vernon meetinghouse in the mid-1830s he stridently insisted that he remained a Baptist preacher. In 1841, however, he attended a meeting for the union of churches of Disciples of Christ. Alonzo Willard Fortune, a historian of Kentucky's Disciples, notes that Fishback at this time “was wavering between the Baptists and Disciples.” See Fortune, , The Disciples in Kentucky (Kentucky: Convention of Christian Churches, 1932), 152Google Scholar. John Spencer notes in his second volume of History of Kentucky Baptists, 29–30, that Fishback, though a “fine scholar” and “excellent speaker,” “was unstable in all his ways, ever learning, and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

69 Records of the Elkhorn Association, 1827–1828, SBTL.

70 Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists, vol. 1, 599.

71 Ibid., 598–599.

72 Records of the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, 1829, SBTL.

73 Records of the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, 1830, SBTL.

74 Book of Records of the Long Run Association, September 1830, p. 176–177, SBTL.

75 For numbers see, Records of the Long Run and Elkhorn Associations, 1829–1831, SBTL.

76 Birdwhistell, Gathered at the River, 29–31.

77 Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists, vol. 1, 646.

78 Today the church, now the Pleasant Grove Church, is in the greater-Louisville metropolitan area.

79 For quotes from church letter, see Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Records (formerly Flat Rock), August 1831, FHS. My emphasis. For range of charges over the decade, see ibid., 1821–1831.

80 This does not necessarily mean that the church charged 5.5% of the membership with a transgression, as one individual could have multiple charges leveled against them.

81 For all charges see, Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Records, 1815–1836, FHS; I want to thank Michael Benedict for putting together both Figures 1 and 2 for this article.

82 Membership numbers taken from Records of the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, 1824, 1826–1840, SBTL.

83 For all charges, see David Fork's Baptist Church Minutes, 1802–1860, accessed June 11, 2014, http://davidsfork.org/history.html. The church charged ten whites for non-attendance at meetings, and eight for joining or interacting with another religious sect or denomination.

84 Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, 63.

85 Willis, Geo. L. Sr., History of Shelby County, Kentucky (Shelby County Genealogical-Historical Society's Committee on Printing, 1929), 59–60Google Scholar.

86 Taylor, John, History of Clear Creek Church; and Campbellism Exposed (Frankfort, Ky.: A. G. Hodges Commentator Office, 2nd ed., 1830), 35Google Scholar.

87 See Records of the Elkhorn Association, 1830, STBL.

88 For instance, the Harrod's Creek Church divided over Campbell's doctrine in 1831. From 1819 through 1824, the church recorded one charge every 3.8% of the membership body. In contrast, from 1825 through 1830, the same average was only 2.3%. Unfortunately, in 1831, after most of the church party joined the Campbellites, the church book becomes very sloppy, and jumps over most of 1832 before picking back up in 1837. Yet even from that point, with a complete record book, the church documented no charges for three years until recording one in May 1840. See, The Harrod's Creek Baptist Church, Crestwood, Ky., 1819–1840, vol. 1, SBTL. For information on the schism see, Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists, vol. 1, 348–349.

89 For all charges and those against Bro. Thomas, see Minute Books of Eminence, Kentucky Baptist Church (formerly Fox Run), August 1829, SBTL. Membership totals taken from Book of Records of the Long Run Association, 1820–1830, SBTL.

90 Minute Books of Eminence, April/May 1831, SBTL.

91 Minute Books of Eminence, June 1831, SBTL.

92 Ibid.

93 Willis, History of Shelby County, 79. This is not to be confused with the Clear Creek Baptist Church of Woodford County.

94 Taylor, History of Clear Creek Church, 5–6, 36.

95 “Deposition of James Fishback,” pp. 23–26, in Bennett et al v. Curd et al (1836), folder 1, case 7914, box 69, CJWCC, KDLA.

96 “Remonstrance,” in ibid..

97 “Deposition of James Fishback,” pp. 23, 30–32, in ibid. On the new church, see, the complainants' declaration to the Court (9).

98 Similar disputes over rights or ownership of church meetinghouses had erupted in the late eighteenth century. In the Connecticut River Valley of the Revolutionary era, Congregationalists and Baptists fought over the use of meetinghouses, while, according to historian Randolph Roth, “at times violent conflicts” also arose between Congregationalists and non-Calvinist groups such as Methodists and Universalists. Much like Baptist groups in the trans-Appalachian West during the 1830s, Congregationalists sought to bar these latter groups entirely from town meetinghouses in an effort “to prevent them from wooing away nominal adherents,” see, Roth, The Democratic Dilemma, 72–73.

99 “Bennett &c v. Curd &c,” Bennett et al v. Curd et al, CJWCC, KDLA. “Curd, Steele, & Redd, ‘Answers,’” p. 1, in ibid. For Court of Appeals decision see, Curd v. Wallace, 37 Ky. 190, Lexis 118 (1838). For the 1814 Act, see Acts Passed at the First Session of the Twenty Second General Assembly, for the Commonwealth of Kentucky: Begun and Held in the Town of Frankfort, on Monday the Sixth Day of December, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirteen, and of the Commonwealth the Twenty-Second (Frankford, Ky.: Gerard & Berry—Printers for the Commonwealth, 1814), 211–212Google Scholar.

100 “Deposition of James Fishback,” p. 3, Bennett et al v. Curd et al, CJWCC, KDLA. Fishback quotes the “Webster Dict.” Underlined in original.

101 Shannon v. Frost, 42 Ky. 253, 255, 258, Lexis 151 (1842).

102 Gordon, Sarah Barringer, “The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property Before the Civil War,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162, no. 2 (January 2014), 309Google Scholar, 311. For a recent discussion of the process of disestablishment in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on legislative enactments, see Green, Steven K., The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; See also, in general, McGarvie, One Nation Under Law.

103 “Deposition of James McGee,” in Baptist Church of Lancaster v. Presbyterian Church of Lancaster (1855), Garrard County Circuit Court, Chancery/Equity Case Files, box 76, bundle 308, case 24-28, KDLA.

104 I have identified four other cases—Gibson v. Armstong, 46 Ky. 481, Lexis 63 (1847), Hadden v. Chorn, 47 Ky. 70, Lexis 121 (1847), Scott v. Curle, 48 Ky. 17, Lexis 5 (1848), Berryman v. Reese, 50 Ky. 287, Lexis 58 (1850)—which revolved around disputed property after a schism. During the post-bellum period, and in Border States especially, many church property conflicts centered upon racial ideology and not necessarily theological disagreements. For a work focused on Missouri, see Lucas P. Volkman, “Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms, Society, and Law and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri, 1837-1876,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri, 2012). Today, church property disputes have found new life due to the cultural politics of gay marriage. See, for example, Michelle Boorstein, “After Prolonged Legal Battle, Virginia Episcopalians Prepare to Reclaim Property,” The Washington Post, February 11, 2012, accessed August 26, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/after-prolonged-legal-battle-virginia-episcopalians-prepare-to-reclaim-property/2012/02/08/gIQAhfJI7Q_story.html.

105 Gordon, “The First Disestablishment,” 320.