Raynor HCA 2014-04
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 5/1/2014
Broadside, “A Tribute I Owe to God and His People,” 10” x 12,” wide irregular margines, presented in two columns, Kentucky, c1807, VG. An interesting intersection of the business of slavery and religion, this apparently unrecorded broadside is a salvo in a bitter Baptist dispute during the Second Great Awakening. The broadside gives an account of a controversial episode in the career of Restorationist preacher Jacob Creath, Sr., defending him against charges that he had swindled Thomas Lewis in a swap of a slave girl. (Accounts would seem to suggest this tangle was a pretext by the hardshell Baptists to attack the moderate Calvinists of Town Fork Church and an underlying cause of the much lamented division of the Elkhorn and Licking associations.) The broadside is likewise a defense of Creath against pamphlet attacks made by fellow preacher Elijah Craig. The pamphlet title is not named here and seems unlocated in online catalogs, but is referred to in later accounts of the affair as "A Portrait of Jacob Creath." The attacks against Creath seem to have been prompted by a deal in which Creath and Lewis had swapped slave girls with differing appraised values, with Creath giving a note to pay the difference. When Creath's slave girl died, he refused to pay the note. Craig's pamphlet attacked Creath's fitness to preach in light of this business on some fourteen points, and the pamphlet's rancour evidently aroused enough sympathy for Creath that he called for a committee of helps (drawn from some eighteen churches) to try him on the charges - of which he was acquitted. This broadside would seem to date from during that late July trial, and the author here lays blame for the attacks on Creath to "four or five of the Priests and their party, with dark criminal designs v.s. Jacob Creath," suggesting the proposed committee has no jurisdiction over Creath, and that "the evidence of the original accusers v.s. Creath, on their own charges, was admitted as evidence - hearsay evidence, negroes' assertions, and excommunicants; the hearsay of men of the world, liars, drunkards, and negro quarter, and grave yard evidence, brought 500 miles, was all admitted, when distilled through the relations of parties. This is what they call supporting Craig's pamphlet. Which evidence the laws of God and man would condemn." A biography of Craig in a contemporary history of the Baptists in America notes that no provocation could justify the style of the said pamphlet, being extraordinarily vile and malignant. An interesting piece of Baptist history and an early and unrecorded Kentucky imprint.
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