Author: Jacob Huneycutt Major: History 

During the Spring semester of 2020, I began my Honors Thesis research, directed by history professor Dr. Jim Gigantino, on the Primitive Baptists in the North Carolina Piedmont region during the early nineteenth century. Before starting my research, when applying for the Honors College Research Grant, I laid out a basic outline of what my research project would be. I proposed that I would study the views on slavery held by Primitive Baptists in the North Carolina Piedmont during the nineteenth century. The Primitive Baptists are a group that split off from the mainstream of Baptist life around 1830, due to their objections over various modern methods for conducting missions and the forming of larger institutional networks; and they tended to be less-wealthy backcountry whites. This was especially true in the North Carolina Piedmont, which is an area that was socioeconomically marginalized compared to the coastal plain of North Carolina and had been settled by poor English, Scots-Irish, and German immigrants of various backgrounds. Moreover, there had been a history of resistance to the coastal elites in this region and a history of religious revivalism that created attitudes that were more egalitarian than the eighteenth and nineteenth century norms. Thus, I thought that the intersections of religious affiliation, location, and historical context with the Primitive Baptists in the North Carolina Piedmont might cause them to have a different view on slavery than the normative view held by white Southerners and Baptists in the South. Moreover, Primitive Baptists – especially Primitive Baptists in the North Carolina Piedmont, specifically – have rarely been written on. 

However, as I began reading through secondary literature last semester, I slightly modified the direction in which I wanted to take my research project. The inclination that I had about the Primitive Baptists in the North Carolina Piedmont having a different view of slavery seems to have some merit, but the problem is that there is just scant source material that would allow for a thesis-length exploration of that question. There is especially not a large amount of primary source material from average Primitive Baptist individuals, as they were not socioeconomically privileged and thus not putting out much written content. The best content regarding their relationship to slavery, however, comes in the form of polemical writings put out by leaders of the movement, and it all seems to focus on one main idea – that large slaveowners are greedy and lovers of mammon. Interestingly, this is one of the same major critiques that Primitive Baptist writers have of the Missionary Baptist organizations they were splitting off from – that they were composed of people who were greedy and had placed their love of mammon above their love for God and traditional church practices based on a strict interpretation of the Bible. The associations of both Missionary Baptists and slaveowners with greed seem to correspond with anti-Catholic ideas that had existed for a few centuries, and had especially ramped up in the American colonies in the eighteenth century, in the Protestant world – and this association is directly confirmed in some of the polemics written by Primitive Baptists at the time. 

I also have found in my review of secondary literature just how much the Primitive Baptist movement, especially in the North Carolina Piedmont, was not just a new, schismatic, movement that emerged in the nineteenth century, which is the predominant historiographical take on them, especially from historians who have written about them from within the mainstream Missionary and Southern Baptist traditions. Rather, the Primitive Baptists’ ideas and practice largely existed in continuity with the ideas and practice within the Reformed, Separatist, and Baptist traditions in England and the American colonies from the seventeenth century-onward; and, they also strongly complimented the views held by many people in the North Carolina Piedmont due to the the socio-political and economic context of the region. Both of these areas of continuity come together in the flashpoint issue of greed and the love of mammon – in the emphasis on the separation of the sacred and profane, and the anti-Catholicism within the religious tradition that the Primitive Baptists existed in; and in the emphasis on the independent yeoman farmer who had a right to land, liberty, and property in contrast to the aristocratic system of the coastal plain of North Carolina that dominated in the North Carolina Piedmont, due to its history of migration and religious revivalism, which had caused a full-scale rebellion in the late-1760s.  

For this upcoming summer, my research has obviously been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. I was expecting to be able to travel to North Carolina to do primary source research at the archives of various universities, but it looks like I may not be able to do this travel before the end of the summer. Thus, for now, I plan to spend my summer finding primary sources online in online archives and wherever else I can find them. Dr. Gigantino has helped me figure out how to begin conducting research online and what types of sources to look for and prioritize. Then, in the fall, I plan to begin the writing phase of my thesis project.