The Slave Owning Presbyterian Church in Old Virginia

In her new book “Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680-1860,” Bloomsburg University historian Jennifer Oast examines the largely untold story of southern institutions that owned slaves, including church congregations, universities, free schools, and large industries. This excerpt 1 from Institutional Slavery takes us into the surreal world of slave-owning Presbyterian congregations in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

- Jennifer Oast

In 1766, the Presbyterian dissenters of Prince Edward County in Virginia, a group of prosperous farmers and tradesmen, confronted a serious problem. They had difficulty retaining a minister for their church, Briery Presbyterian, in part because they had so little to offer as a salary. Virginia Presbyterianism emerged as an important evangelical rival to Anglicanism— the established church —in the mid-eighteenth century. Before the American Revolution, religious dissenters like

the Presbyterians were still required to tithe to the Anglican parish in which they lived. The parish vestry employed these tithes to support the minister of the Church of England, maintain the parish church buildings, and care for the poor, but nothing was set aside to support dissenting groups like the Presbyterians. Therefore, the leaders of Briery Presbyterian, many of whom were slave owners, looked to their own experience, as well as the example of other early Virginia institutions, to find a solution to their church’s financial constraints. They decided to raise money through subscription for a permanent endowment which would be invested in slaves. The annual hire of these church-owned slaves, “and their increase … forever hereafter,” would pay the minister’s salary and fund other needs of the church, such as building maintenance. 2 For the next one hundred years, the members of Briery Presbyterian were the beneficiaries of the labor of these slaves and their descendants.