Most Americans today would not
think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be
hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral failings, or personal
squabbles to their kin and neighbors for judgment. But from the Revolutionary
Era through the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestants imbued local churches
with immense authority. Through their ritual practice of discipline, churches
insisted that brethren refrain from suing each other before
"infidels" at local courts and claimed jurisdiction over a range of
disputes: not only moral issues such as swearing, drunkenness, and adultery but
also matters more typically considered to be under the purview of common law
and courts of equity, including disputes over trespass, land, probate, slave
warranty, and theft.
In Law in American Meetinghouses, Jeffrey Thomas Perry explores the
ways that ordinary Americans—Black and white, enslaved and free—understood and
created law in their local communities, uncovering a vibrant marketplace of
authority in which church meetinghouses played a central role in maintaining
their neighborhoods' social peace. Churches were once prominent sites for the
creation of local law and in this period were a primary arena in which civil
and religious authority collided and shaped one another. When church discipline
failed, the wronged parties often pushed back, and their responses highlight
the various forces that ultimately hindered that venue's ability to effectively
arbitrate disputes between members. Relying primarily on a deep reading of
church records and civil case files, Perry examines how legal transformations,
an expanding market economy, and religious controversy led churchgoers to
reimagine their congregations' authority. By the 1830s, unable to resolve
doctrinal quibbles within the fellowship, church factions turned to state
courts to secure control over their meetinghouses, often demanding that judges
wade into messy ecclesiastical disputes.
Tracking changes in disciplinary
rigor in Kentucky Baptist churches from that state's frontier period through
1845, and looking beyond statutes and court decrees, Law in American
Meetinghouses is a fresh take on church-state relations. Ultimately,
it highlights an oft-forgotten way that Americans subtly repositioned religious
institutions alongside state authority.
Jeffrey Thomas Perry is an
assistant professor of history at Tusculum University.
This program is presented through
the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and its
Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan initiative. With
this support, the Filson will present a series of public programs and launch Resurrecting
the First American West, a digital exhibit on the diverse Ohio Valley
Frontier.