Ulster Covenants, Southern Petitions: How Whites and Blacks Used Covenanter Rhetoric to Moderate Slavery

Ulster Covenanters' most sacred acts were the symbol-rich ceremonies where the laity, regardless of social station, publically made the protest of a previous generation their own. Brandishing swords, they mocked the godliness, manliness, and authority of magistrates. They confronted slavery with similar zealotry, arguing it was an affront produced by an un-Covenanted king. Adapted to and transformed by new environments, this radicalism survived in the Southern backcountry. In 1801, 1834, and 1838 former Covenanters from Ulster gathered to sign public petitions to legalize slave literacy. Hundreds of common people mocked the manliness of state lawmakers for fearing literate slaves, challenged the godliness of forbidding reading, and pledged disobedience. One petition stated that slaves possessed civil liberties that could not be trampled upon. One hundred percent of slave literacy petitions in upcountry South Carolina came from this small group of religious dissenters formerly known as Covenanters, harnessing their radicalism into new, American, and Southern modes. In Abbeville, SC a slave named George was overheard casting an anti-slavery message to other slaves in this same religious language. For his defense, George stated that he was preaching a doctrine no different than these unique white Presbyterian neighbors. This paper argues that the act of signing the sacred covenants did not die out in the South. Rather the petition was given Covenant-like symbolism. It was public, it challenged the government, and it gave the laity a forum for re-affirming sacred tradition together. This story complicates understandings of sacred memory in Diaspora and public ritual in South Carolina society. It asks equally important questions about the nature of cultural transference and the meaning of message, as slaves utilized Ulster-dissenting language as protection for their own anti-slavery doctrine.