Religious Radicalism in the Colonial Southern Backcountry: Jacob Weber and the Transmission of European Radical Pietism to South Carolina’s Dutch Fork

In this vein, this paper will first examine the conditions that led to the Weber tragedy. In the mid-eighteenth century, imperial and provincial policies seeking to promote immigration in order to buffer the frontier created a patchwork religious landscape in the Carolina backcountry, what Woodmason characterized as a “mix’d medley” of churches and sects, some of them quite remote and chronically under-churched.3 At the same time, Indian policies designed to exploit the Cherokee during the Seven Years’ War backfired, leading to all-out war between South Carolina and the Cherokee in 1759. This combination of isolation, official neglect, and settler vulnerability provided fertile soil for the growth of radical spirituality, both in the backcountry in general and the Saxe-Gotha/Dutch Fork area in particular. In this sense, the Weber tragedy was not merely the result of religious delusion; rather, it was the unintended but by no means surprising consequence of the attempt by South Carolina’s planter elite to extend mastery over slaves, Indians, and poor white Protestants. The Weber sect was a casualty of this project. Turning from the local and provincial to the transatlantic perspective, this paper will also analyze the theological links between the Weberites and European radical sectarianism. For while the relative isolation of the backcountry explains in part why the Weber sect took root, the specific forms this sect adopted grew from the region’s connectedness to the ideological currents of the Atlantic world, particularly the currents of Continental Radical Pietism. Between the 1720s and the Revolution, Radical Pietist communities took root in the British American borderlands from New England to Georgia. The Weberites drew their breath from this diffusion of Radical Pietism, appropriating its communal, prophetic, and millenarian features, although these went awry in the crisis of the Cherokee War as the sect plunged into delusion and ritual murder. Placing the Weberites in the stream of transatlantic Radical Pietism sheds new light on the religious history of the eighteenth-century south. Traditionally, historians have depicted the early south as a religious backwater, where a moribund Anglican establishment and a few upstart evangelical sects existed alongside the unchurched masses until the evangelicals captured the region and transformed it into the Bible Belt in the two generations following the Revolution.4 Recent historians have challenged this picture, viewing the region on its own terms and stressing its religious diversity, creativity, and vitality.5 In this light, the Weberites remind us of what eighteenth-century religionists like Woodmason knew all along and what current historians are only now rediscovering: that the early south, far from being a religious blank slate, was instead rife with dangerous sects and wild-eyed enthusiasts. Theirs was a world was populated as much by wandering prophets, self-deifying mystics, and immigrant sects from the fringes of the Reformation as by evangelicals and Anglicans, a place where the threat of spiritual excess was just as real as that of worldliness and unbelief. Looking through the lens of the Weber sect while widening the angle to take in the Atlantic context, the early southern backcountry thus becomes a place of intense religious energy and creativity, not merely a spiritual backwater waiting for revival.