FIGHTING FOR REVIVAL - Clemson University

Edgefield County in particular, differed from other Southern states from the outset in its
religious development. From the first settlements in Charleston, religious toleration had
been the norm, and as settlers moved westward, this trend continued. Edgefield certainly
fits squarely into this picture, as religious toleration and cooperation was present from the
earliest settlements in the region. 87 This development process will set the stage for
further analysis of how two dominant Southern ethics developed parallel to one another
and ultimately became mutually influential.
Evangelicalism, according to Christine Leigh-Heyrman, “came late to the
American South, as an exotic import rather than an indigenous development.” 88
Historians have generally agreed that the first forays of evangelicalism into the South
came as part of the Great Awakening during the middle of the eighteenth century, in the
form of New Light Baptists and George Whitfield’s Wesleyan Methodism. The pillars of
this Protestant evangelical faith flew in the face of many existing Southern cultural
customs, and initially it has been documented that this brand of religious faith was slow
to gain acceptance, and was confined to the lower classes in Southern society.
Though differences existed even between the different sects of Protestantism,
there were common moral foundations, a specific system of values that persisted in every
denomination. All were appalled by the apparent violence and licentiousness of Southern
culture and the social hierarchy inherent and reinforced in the establishment of the
87 Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House are Many Mansions (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 21-28; Walter Edgar, South Carolina:
A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 181-185.
88 Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.), 9.
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