The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and
Architecture in Colonial South Carolina by Louis Nelson
Charleston, and the rest of the Carolina Lowcountry, was a place caught between God and commerce. Just take a look at Thomas Leech’s View of Charleston painted in 1774 and on view at MESDA. Charleston as painted by Leech is a narrow strip of land caught between rolling waves and a cloudless sky. On those waves ride ships that are the sign of Charleston’s success. But the sky is pierced only four times in Leech’s painting: by the British merchant ship dominating the foreground, by the cupola of the Custom House, and by the steeples of St. Philips and St. Michaels Churches . . . two signs of commerce, two signs of Anglican faith, and a landscape caught in-between. This landscape caught between commerce and God is the subject of Louis Nelson’s
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book The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina. Nelson, an associate professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia, traces the evolution of Anglicanism in early South Carolina through the lens of its material culture—the architecture, communion silver, gravestones, and other ritual objects that defined its practice and place in the world. Charleston was a city of many faiths. Founded with an eye towards tolerance,
South Carolina’s state-sanctioned Anglican church found itself struggling to assert its role during the Colony’s earliest years. The Anglican Church found a solution in architecture and town-plan- ning. St. Philips Church, completed in 1723, left Charlestonians with no doubt as to the place of the Anglican church in their society. Church Street swerved around the new building and a glance up the street looked directly at its façade. The completion of St. Michael’s church in 1761 underscored the role of the Church in the state. By then Charleston’s religious landscape included French Huguenots, Scottish Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Quakers, and even Jews; but only Anglican St. Michaels and St. Philips figure in Leech’s portrait of the city. Nelson is not content to let popular assumptions color his analysis. He marshals surviving physical
evidence to write of an enlightenment society in which deeply held faith continued to be an important part of everyday lives. Enlightenment ideas changed the physical manifestations of faith, but they did not negate it. One of Nelson’s greatest contributions is his insistence on seeing Charleston as part of the greater Caribbean. Americans too-often forget that the “sacred thirteen colonies” were just thir- teen rebellious ones out of the many British Colonies that stretched from Canada to the Caribbean. If Leech had painted Charleston’s portrait twenty-five years later, he would have painted a city of
many more steeples. Following the American Revolution, Charleston’s other faith communities began to assert themselves architecturally in ways that mimicked the previously state-supported Anglican Church. Even the Jewish synagogue had a steeple that mimicked St. Michael’s. The archaeologist James Deetz wrote, “it is terribly important that the small things forgotten be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured.” It is in these small things too often forgotten by text-centered historians that Nelson finds the essence of Anglicanism in early South Carolina. m
The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (UNC Press / 516 pages / $50.00)
Spring/Summer 2010
But the sky is pierced only four times in Leech’s painting . . . . Two signs of commerce, two signs of Anglican faith, and a landscape caught in- between.
Reviewed by Daniel K. Ackermann, Associate Curator of MESDA
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