Communal Violence in Early America Through the Present

Welcome once again to Converse. Today I have a special treat for you. We have a guest who has done a lot of study on what you might call ritual violence or cultural justice. I don't know. We'll see what she says about it.

But I don't know if you've heard, I'm sure you have, because I've heard for years that right-wingers, conservatives, especially southerners, are uniquely violent and they're uniquely evil people because of this, because they have something called gun culture and because they used to have dueling.

And there's a sort of a vigilante, almost, justice that they have. It's very decentralized where, as in more progressive regions of the country, people handle things in a civilized manner. And I want to explore and perhaps challenge this narrative today.

I think it will be a perspective you're not likely to hear anywhere else. Well, maybe somewhere, but not anywhere that's prominent. So with that, we have Nicole Williams with us. Thank you for joining us, Nicole.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you for asking me.

And you have a degree from the University of Strathclyde, which is over in jolly old Great Britain. And if people want to follow you, then go to NicoleW100, which is at Twitter. And the name of your dissertation is The Rights of Violence, Rough Music, Protest, Atrocity and Power, A Comparative Examination, Ulster and the Carolinas, 1760 to 1840.

So just to give a little background, I think I know you from social media, from Facebook and X, and we have mutual friends who are like some people that have gone to like Abbeville Institute and people who are interested in things like Southern history.

And I've been going through Albion's seed by David Hackett Fisher. And I was surprised. Some of the things that I knew about didn't surprise me, but there were things like the rough music. I actually didn't know a lot about that.

And of course, it sounds like what you're doing is something very similar to him, except you're getting into more detail. You're you're comparing these traditions that existed in Ulster and correct me if I'm wrong with what came to the United States and especially in the South.

And you're showing this cultural connection and how there actually was somewhat of a cultural order. There was there were circumstances in which people relied on these mechanisms to restore and justice and prevent evil and these kinds of things.

So I want to give a new category to the listening audience. Maybe consider all of this from a perspective they haven't. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Why did you choose to study this? What compelled you?

And I'm assuming studying it in Great Britain, that must have been they must have looked at you kind of odd. Like, why are you you know, they hate guns, right? They hate American. I mean, I don't know.

I'm the stereotyping here, but they must have given you the side eye.

I usually try to give everyone a little bit of a side. I know. Seriously, the Scots were great. Never had a problem. Very friendly people. Very, very communal. Do they do like to drink a little little much.

Cultural Memory, Southern Heritage, and the Study of Ritual Violence

But yeah, I originally came to this. I was always interested in history and our recent attacks on Southern culture and what you would call the American heritage culture really kind of spurred me on to want to study, to delve deeper into this and be able to speak more honestly as to who especially common people were.

A lot of times what people miss is the way ordinary common people lived two or three, four hundred years ago. And to that end, I started looking at cultural history and came across ritual violence and rough music.

And to break it down, Americans will be very familiar, at least if they've never really thought about it, with the term running someone out of town on a rail. That's essentially some of what this comes from is if someone offends the social and moral fabric of a community, they will literally put you on a rail and send you out of town.

And you also see this in if you've ever seen the HBO miniseries, John Adams, you'll see it in the tarring and feathering of a merchant, a tea merchant, who was stripped of his clothes, had tar poured on him, put on a rail and taken out of Boston Harbor.

The South was not immune to this. Matter of fact, there was there was a distinct form of southern ritual violence, which was different in many ways than northern ritual violence. But again, back up a little bit.

A lot of this ritual violence came out of England, Scotland, and to some extent, Northern Ireland and Wales. People in the medieval and early modern period had to have a way to moral police their communities.

And these were not stodgy, pious people, as we might think. They drank, they danced, they gambled. But one thing they did not tolerate was sexual immorality or breaking or violating the bonds of marriage.

So a lot of times people, if somebody was not adhering to gender roles or somebody was engaging in affairs or doing something that they ought not to be doing, more often than not, in the UK or Great Britain at the time, people would go to the person and say, you need to stop this or there's going to be consequences.

There was no police force that was going to enforce this. And the church necessarily wasn't always going to enforce it. And if warnings, one or two warnings were ignored, a lot of times they would come to the door, take the person out, possibly tie them up, put them up on top of a pole, parade them out of town, throw mud, rotten food at them, perhaps sing or chant a primitive kind of what they would call a nominee to humiliate them.

They're basically saying you're not wanted here, you're causing a problem. And it was also a signal to other people is if you violate our moral norms, this is what's going to happen to you. And on top of that, there were also protests during that same period of people, especially with food.

Food was a big issue with people and as capitalism started to really take off, people began to adulterate food with otherwise poisonous materials. And when people found out that they were being poisoned for goods that they paid for, a lot of times the gristmills, the gristmill operators who sold flour would find their gristmills destroyed by a mob.

And that this again was repeated again and again. And one of the interesting things about that is a lot of times the women were the ones who galvanized a lot of these mobs. I guess E .P. Thompson, who's an English historian said women were responsible for feeding the children.

So if their children were harmed, they were the first to become aggravated. And if they were aggravated, their husbands were aggravated. So in this type of behavior was, of course, culturally transmitted to colonial America.

But it was adopted for use, especially on the frontier. Painting a picture while you had these incidents of, you had British or English style ritual violence in the north. In the south, the south outside of Charleston and maybe some settlements in Virginia was much more sparsely populated.

And there was a lot more crime especially in, for example, South Carolina. South Carolina had, especially after the Cherokee war in 1760, had an outbreak of rapes, robberies, and murders. And there was no colonial authority outside of Charleston who were prepared to deal with this.

So the people were terrified. And several of the poor but more aspirational individuals who wanted to bring order to the situation took it upon themselves to galvanize into a vigilante force. And more often than not, the tool by which they dispensed justice was the whip.

They tied people up and whipped them to try to terrify and run off. Not just lawbreakers, but after a while they started to run off people who were, they beat prostitutes, they beat men who were beating their wives.

Anything to try to bring moral order to an otherwise anarchical situation because there was no, there was no authority. The authorities in Charleston were not interested in bringing order to this situation.

And that was, that was only but one example. I mean, it was completely, there was a different movement in North Carolina around the same period. It was more of a protest movement against what, and both of these movements, by the way, took on the name regulators, but they were, they had a completely separate genesis.

But in North Carolina, people were being fleeced by county agents for small fees because you had to pay fees to have marriages recorded or have a marriage license issued for burials or even just for general taxes.

People were paying upwards, I think it was like 12 pounds for sometimes for a license, 12 pounds in 1760. Even in North Carolina, proclamation money was a rather large amount of money. So a lot of times you had tax collectors who were beaten.

You had tax collectors who were put on horses and run backwards. You had houses literally pulled down. In one of the more infamous cases, there was a riot in the Orange County Courthouse in 1770. And in that incident, the regulators came to the court room, hit one of the Crown attorneys, grabbed one of their targeted individuals who was named Edmund Fanning, drug him out of the courthouse, beat him mercilessly, didn't kill him.

The judge got up to oppose them. They told the judge to sit down and shut up. And they said to carry about your business. The judge later that night absconded from the town. They pulled Fanning's house down after looting his liquor.

And then they threw someone who had already been executed by the court, they threw a corpse into the courtroom and left excrement in the judge's seat. This was a means of signifying anger, but the difference being is it was restrained.

Typically, no one was, they did not ever intend to kill anybody. It was a way to intimidate, drive off and say, we're bringing order to something that's either hurting us or where there is no order.

Restraint, Community Enforcement, and the Limits of Violence

Now, okay. So it's probably important for me to mention, we're not justifying any of this. We're not saying that.

No, no, no. I have always been clear, looking at it from the historical context, these things can be used for good or ill.

Right.

The fact of the matter is they do happen and they've even happened in contemporary times when people have felt rightly or wrongly if there's injustice. I've seen videos of it out of Ukraine.

Well, so it's not the ideal, obviously, but one of the things that I think we came close to considering a few years ago, especially is, okay, what happens when the entire system is completely corrupt?

You can't trust the mechanism of elections anymore to give you virtuous leaders. And this happens on every level. What recourse do you have left? And I think that's, these are the conditions that we are talking about as people who don't think they have any recourse left and what they did.

And it came, it developed into various different, I actually, I really liked the way that you said that there was some restraint in this because there were different traditions, even in the United States, maybe we can talk about.

But I've always thought even the whole matter of dueling, which I went to Liberty University and there's a place not far, right on the other side of Lynchburg, that's like the point of honor, they call it, where everyone would go to duel.

And it didn't happen like very often, but when it did happen, there's all these rules. That's the thing that I think struck me is like, you know, Southern gun culture, they're just shooting everyone and murdering.

And I'm like, well, I mean, and they point to dueling and I'm like, dueling had some really serious rules that you had to abide by. And if you didn't abide by them, then you're going to have a problem with the rest of society.

There really was an honor code that was kind of ingrained. So maybe talk about that a little bit. North, south, I don't know, Scots-Irish versus lowland cavaliers. What did ritual violence look like in some of these different regions?

And then, you know, how do we, do we see whispers of this today?

I would, well, I would say, first off, when you think about things like dueling, that was more of a province of the, at the time during the colonial period of the coastal Anglo elite. I originally went to University of Georgia and there was a, there's an area on North campus where there are two debate societies.

And I think it was in the early 1800s, they actually came to a debate, a pistol debate with one another. I think somebody was killed. But there was a sense of you can't defame someone's honor with impunity and get away.

With it.

But, and if memory serves, even John Randolph of Roanoke, who was one of my favorite senators in American history, was famously challenged Henry Clay to a duel. He had no intention of actually shooting Henry Clay, but he, he took it all the way to the brink.

And I think Henry Clay shot him through the coat. And John Randolph said, I can't believe you actually tried to shoot me.

Is my example bad? Is this outside the scope of ritual violence? Or, I mean, I.

No, it's related. I would say it's not entirely, but that has more to do with the question of honor, which is certainly, which is certainly an issue. Ritual violence, I think, was more the purview of the common person.

Okay, maybe let's get back to that then. So like the rough music and the more maybe communal would be the word.

You can use communal.

And community threats, handling community threats and not just personal abridgments of honor and so forth. So, so maybe talk about that then. How did this look different? And do we, do we see whispers of that today?

Ritual Violence, January 6, and Contemporary Echoes

Well, one of the things I included in my PhD dissertation, which I'm surprised wasn't more controversial with some of my examiners, is if you look at the raw footage of January 6, 2021, there's a lot of echoes in that incident.

People try to characterize that incident as an insurrection, which is funny because that word is used repeatedly throughout American history on ritual violence, when the reality is that they were protesting, rightly or wrongly, I'm not passing judgment, on what they felt were the norms of a free and fair election not being conducted.

So you saw chanting, you saw people singing, you saw property damage, you saw attempts at humiliation and intimidation. You also saw this, I would argue, in the, a year later, there were protests in Dublin against a crime committed by migrants, Dublin, Ireland.

I would say you probably even saw it in the English riots of last summer. Again, these are things that rise up when people feel like there's no other mechanism of the state that's willing to deal with their complaints.

So people get to the point that they don't feel like they have another choice. But again, it's still restraint. People aren't walking around the street. To your layperson, they feel like this looks horrible, this looks terrible, this looks like society's falling apart.

But you notice no one's getting killed, at least not on purpose. So you don't have people running around the streets, literally trying to end someone, to end someone else's life. And again, you saw this in different bits in the colonial period, as well as you saw in the antebellum period, north and south.

It was just manifest in different ways. Most often, property violence was a very easy way. People would burn someone's property down. Not with them in it, nine times out of ten, but it was a way of saying you can't live here anymore because your house is gone, your farm is gone.

You have to leave. You knew this was coming. Or like I said, there are several incidents where clergy in the colonial period and in the early antebellum period were driven off or attempted to be driven off through threats of violence, property destruction.

There was a famous published journal written by Charles Wood Mason, who I recommend everyone read if you want to have a very good idea of the way the old southern back country was in the years before the revolution, called the Carolina Back Country, the writings of itinerant Anglican Charles Wood Mason.

And Wood Mason went about his business and he comes off as a huge snob, but you do start to feel for him as he develops a relationship with these people. But he and the Presbyterians were at each other's throats, although the irony being is the Presbyterians and the Anglicans both seem to hate the Baptists.

Still do.

No, I'm just kidding.

But a lot of times the Presbyterians would get people intoxicated to try to disrupt Wood Mason's sermons, or they would send people to hoot and holler during some of the sermons to try to disrupt his ability from carrying out what he saw as his duty.

He was even assaulted a couple of times. He had his books and his horse stolen. These were things that he felt. But the people back there, a lot of them were Scott's Irish Presbyterians, were saying we don't want Anglicans back here.

We don't want to turn our people into Anglicans. The difference being, and this proved quite controversial with some other members of faculty, is during the Revolutionary War, there was a lot more violence that we would call unrestrained.

And I'm talking about off the battlefield violence, things that were almost nauseating to read. And this was not like the British did, the British bad Americans. Everybody engaged in this to some degree or another.

And it became more retributive. In other words, people were repeating patterns of violence simply out of revenge if something especially had happened, not only to themselves, but to members of their family, which somebody would think, well, that sounds like Hatfields and McCoys.

But in reality, it's something that's human. If somebody did something to someone in your family, obviously your first inclination is not necessarily going to go out and do something about it. But if you don't feel like someone else is going to do something about it, you as a husband and father are going to feel compelled to do something about it.

It's just a basic human emotion. It's just that in a lot of ways, the South and North weren't that different. It's just that there was a sense of there was so much violence that took place off the battlefield and people felt compelled to do what was necessary to eliminate that threat and to probably gain some perverse pleasure in doing it.

And again, this is when civil disorder breaks down. You know there's no one who's going to come and help you. There's not going to be a sense of justice in this. You know, you can't say I was wrong by somebody and the state's going to come by and arrest that person and charge them with something.

So you can see, again, you see these patterns repeated again and again and again. And when there's the more civil disorder breaks down, the more deadly the violence becomes. But when civil disorder goes away and order is restored, you start seeing a lessening of the violence over time.

Regional Variations in Rough Music and Communal Humiliation

So I guess I'm thinking of like Fisher when he talks about the Northeast being more communal in the way they handle justice and in the South being, I guess, a bit more decentralized. And I think, I think rough music was one of the things he used to, because they do, was rough music more of a regional thing?

Because he paints that like that's a cavalier thing to.

There were, there were, there were variations all over the UK. There were variations all over the UK, which were specific to various places. There were different names. I mean, there's rough music. Skimmington was very common.

You can even read colonial documents from the colonial period. They'll call it Skimmington. The difference being is when he talks about communal justice. A lot of times when I, when I was talking about tarry and feathering and riding someone out of town on a rail, you would have a great big show out of abusing somebody and humiliating.

Them.

That's what the Northerners did because they lived in more close-knit settlements where you can get a large population over a period of time. Southerners, again, were so dispersed from one another where you couldn't create a huge.

Show out of it.

So you really had to, you had to use tools like the whip. I mean, you could carry someone on a pole, but if there's five people there, what have you really accomplished? Have you really intimidated someone with a crowd of five people?

Probably not.

Right, right. Well, it's people are hearing us use these terms and many probably don't know. So the rough music, I mean, this is a fascinating thing. Paint a picture for us on what that looked like. Whether someone who's influential commits adultery or whatever, like what would happen if they did such a thing?

A lot of times it was, it was just very kind of if someone, a typical offense was either adultery or what they call cuckolding. In other words, where a husband was more submissive to his wife or that perception was, and the people in the town would come, come and grab the person usually at night at an unknown hour.

And they would have a, they would bind the person, possibly, usually put them up on a rail or sometimes on a cart. Drawing someone on the back of a cart was also humiliating. Again, throw rocks or food at them, not with the intention of killing them, but it was supposed to terrify them.

And it was also sending a message to the rest of the community that certain types of moral turpitude were not going to be allowed in the community, period. And a lot of times this especially had to do, again, with relationships, relationships that either transgressed marriage or things that people deemed improper.

It typically wasn't used for drunkenness unless someone became a real problem or dancing or something like that. But it really had to do with, we cannot let this type of behavior flourish in this community.

It was widespread throughout England, Scotland, especially, even in Wales. And that same behavior came to America, but in the South, due to the fact that there was not as much population density. You had people for a long time after they settled, especially the old back country where you had more poor people, there wasn't as much of a sense of order.

So a lot of times you found people engaging. I think Wood Mason said there were all kinds of children born out of wedlock who weren't being educated. And this, again, was in the 1760s. And you had men like those regulators and Wood Mason who encouraged the regulators to say, this is not going to be allowed.

We can't build a society out of this. And so they used different tools, which said more often the South was whipping. I think normally the normal punishment was 39 lashes, under most circumstances, to try to bring order to people.

I mean, there was a case where a man by the name of Samuel Boykin, who was later an American patriot in the American Revolution, there was a man named Dozier. And Dozier's wife came to him and said that he was not working, he wasn't providing for the family, and he was mistreating her.

Boykin came there one night, grabbed Dozier, tied him to a tree, whipped him 39 times. And according to the manuscript that I read to get this information, they said Dozier was a perfect citizen from that day forward.

No one ever had to complain about Dozier again.

Communal Enforcement, the Klan, and Moral Standards

This is interesting, because this, I think, lasted a long time, up into the 20th century. There's examples of this kind of thing. So I know someone, not like super close, but I met someone, I should say, at a conference.

And anyway, he said that his, I hope I'm not going to get in trouble. I don't think I will for sharing. It's just a story. But he said that his grandfather was in the Klan. And it's funny, that's a whole other story, I suppose.

I don't know if we'll get to that. But the Klan existed in various different forms in different time periods. And this would have been like the Civil Rights era Klan, I guess, you know, 1960s or whatever.

And this was down south, all right? So in the Klan, the area that I'm in now, the Klan was actually very active. It took on a different form. And it was against different immigrant groups. Anyways, this tangent.

But he said, in the case of his grandfather, he goes, the violence they did was mostly against white people. And it was for things like marital infidelity. So he said that there was this guy, I guess his grandfather must have told him this story, who he wasn't providing for his wife and his family, basically.

He was kind of a deadbeat, wouldn't get a job, that kind of thing. And so in this case, and I'm not justifying this, but the Klan showed up at his house and wrapped him in barbed wire and rolled him around.

And from that day forward, he got a job. He provided for his wife. So the point of me even sharing that is just to say that it sounds like there were forms in which, and in that case, I mean, it could have just been the men of the community in an organized, somewhat of an organized fashion.

It doesn't have to be the Klan or anything. It's just there were mechanisms that used to exist, I think more so that upheld social standards, even if they did it inappropriately or wrongly, or it was worst case scenario, or the guys doing it were nefarious.

I mean, all of these things can be true. But I suppose one of the big debates now is that I see in the church, at least in the more evangelical church is like, can you have Christian culture? Can you have Christian civilization?

And behind that, there is, I think, an assumption about the nature of politics and whether or not culture is downstream from politics or whether politics is downstream from culture. And can you use force to try to, we hear all the time, actually, like you can't do this, but can you use force to enforce a moral standard upon people?

And it sounds like for most of our history, it was very common for people to use coercion and force to uphold social mores, including things like infidelity, against infidelity and against the example I just gave, deadbeats and so forth.

So I don't know if you could talk about that a little bit, but I don't know where we got off track, if you want to call it off track, but like where we developed the assumption that like, oh, you can't use force to compel people to be moral because that's got to come from within them somehow.

Like, it sounds like your whole dissertation is about using force to compel moral behavior, and it kind of worked.

You know, as an aside, your little story just reminded me of something. I had someone tell me some years ago that they were in Monroe, Georgia, in the 60s, and there was some man, he was a white man from Detroit, who was down there trying to be a political agitator.

And they told this man, I'll give you $100 if you go up there and find out what that guy wants. And, you know, apparently this guy was some sort of organizer slash hippie. Anyway, the guy, when he heard that, he took his car keys and threw him way off in a field.

And then one of these old men, who was like in his 80s, came up off of a stoop and shoved a snub-nosed revolver in his throat and said, if you don't get out of here, I'm going to blow your head off. Now, nothing happened from that.

But that was, again, that was people saying, whatever you're doing here, you could do it somewhere else.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the perception was, for right or wrong, that this guy was causing a problem.

So, all right. So you said there's whispers of this, or there's like shadows of this that you think are still around as far as like people taking, when the other mechanisms fail, using intimidation tactics to enforce these moral standards and so forth.

Are there other examples other than January 6th where you see this?

Contemporary Disorder, Local Resistance, and Decentralized Authority

Uh, you know, the funny thing is, well, the funny thing is not, of course, I was I was in Scotland, but my PhD supervisor and I talked about there was one morning I woke up and there was a drug house in Ayr, Scotland, A-Y-R, Scotland, and the police refused to really deal with the issue.

And then the house apparently mysteriously was set on fire. And the people in the town said, we don't know anything about it, when it was pretty much obvious that the people living around there knew exactly who did it, but they didn't do it themselves.

But the police weren't going to deal with it. So they were going to deal with it. And I'm sure that there's so many of these incidents that go unreported. So it's not even, uh, anytime people feel like they're spiraling out of control, but they haven't reached total chaos.

Desperate people will take desperate measures to bring order to an disorderly situation.

How does this fit in with the American decentralized tradition? Because during our Revolutionary War, of course, we have these committees of correspondence that function as like a shadow government. And it, and there's always been, I think, a sense of like, you know, we, we handle things on the local level in our communities, a fierce kind of defense of those communities and not, not a, a wanting to meddle in other people's affairs, but just to kind of be about your own business.

But, you know, you saw how the Royal Governors were treated in the Revolutionary War era and, and how these, these shadow governments form. I mean, do you, do you, how do you, um, like, how do you see this in relation to America's decentralized tradition?

And, and do you think that these can constitute an actual legitimate government at times, you know, where if you have the prominent people of the town and they're being led by an authority figure and they have more of the social, um, capital and trust than the actual official leaders appointed by the King or, you know, supposedly elected it.

I mean, it would seem to me that you, you actually have like another government, you have a competing government. It's not just a vigilantes in a chaotic sense that are undermining the law. Like maybe the guys sometimes who are trying to enforce the law, who against corrupt officials, like they are actually the law.

So maybe talk about that a little bit.

Well, I think that that, that was a huge impetus in, especially the South Carolina regulators is that the, the law there, they felt like the regulators were a law unto themselves. They were, in other words, appropriating government action.

And they, that was the reason that they felt like they had to shut them down. These people weren't necessarily at the time revolutionaries. They weren't preparing for the American revolution, but they were appropriating the role of the government in lieu of the government, which made them a threat to the government.

A lot of this, a lot of these early forms of ritual violence, uh, states whipped people as punishment. There wasn't a lot of prison time handed out by the states. A lot of times people were branded or maimed, but more common people were whipped if they weren't executed or they were, they were just pardoned.

Um, people, uh, the governments weren't about to build prisons and keep people in prisons for years because that costs money. Um, so a lot of times you would find in these ritual punishments, people would start using the same punishments that the government was using to bring order.

In the more modern sense, I think what you were, what you were saying, it's been true up until the last couple of decades, people handling their business locally, uh, but unfortunately the long nose of the central government has stuck.

People are fearful of being caught, even if they're dealing with a problem. You know, you saw the Daniel Penny thing up in New York, uh, uh, and this also plays into something you were talking about a couple of days ago about being deracinated.

Uh, people are, people are stripped down now to think, they don't know anything that happened.

Before last week.

So their world is, I'm going to sit here, I'm going to watch TV, I'm going to be angry because I've worked in local government before. People can't even bother to show up to city council meetings. They just won't.

If you can't show up to city council.

Men are just citizens.

Citizens. They, you can't, you can't muster anybody. People will complain incessantly about a problem, but they won't actually show up to do anything.

About it.

Right.

So if you can't show up to do something about it at a council meeting, you're probably far less likely to go grab some guy out of bed and walk him out of town on a rail.

Right.

Now these things, these things still happen. There was a, again, not passing judgment. There was video during the BLM riots in Bethel, Ohio. You may have seen it where some people were marching through what was described as a red neck town.

I think it's in Southeast Ohio. And the citizens came out and drove them out of town. And some of these marchers came and went to the sheriff and said, you need to do something.

About this.

And the sheriff said, I don't know what you're talking about. That's more, that's more reminiscent of what, how Americans, even North and South handled their issues. And I think someone, one of the protesters said, if we can't, if we can't do this here, where can we do it?

The whole town pointed and said, Cincinnati.

Let's get out of our, yeah.

But we, I think we've, we've lost, I think because we haven't, people are very enraptured by their position, position and materialism. They don't have a sense now of who their neighbors are. If you don't know who your neighbors are, why in the world would you stand up for them?

Right.

Yeah.

So only in thick communities or functional communities, I know. It maybe sounds like an oxymoron, but you're going to have these mechanisms manifest themselves, I suppose.

No, I will, I will say it was. South Carolina historian, David Ramsey claimed as much that some of the worst habits of the common people were tempered after the second great awakening when people started going to church and people could, you know, if you were a Baptist, you go to Baptist church, Presbyterian, you go to Presbyterian.

If you want to go to the Episcopal church, Episcopal church. But there was a sense at that point that when churches became, they weren't mandatory. You were, you didn't have to tithe to a church, but people, if everyone in church, if everyone in town went to one or two churches and you committed a transgression, you better be repentant.