A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



The Lamb's 

 Army 



By David Cecelski 



1753, an English missionary named 

 Catharine Phillips passed through some of the 

 most remote swamps and forests along the 

 North Carolina coast. She was only 27 years 

 old, 3,000 miles from home, and among 

 strangers. 



Six years earlier, she had received the call 

 to preach at a Quaker meeting in her native 

 Dudley, in Worcestershire. "Having now 

 entered the list of publick combatants in the 

 Lamb's army," she wrote, "I pretty soon 

 became concerned to travel for the promotion 

 of truth and righteousness." 



Published in London in 1797, Memories 

 of the Life of Catharine Phillips is one of the 

 rarest of the many journals, diaries, and 

 memoirs penned by missionaries who 

 evangelized in the Carolina tidewater during 

 the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Quaker 

 missionary William Edmundson, who 

 proselytized along the coast in 1671, may have 

 been the first such writer. In his journal, he 

 described remote forests that were "all 

 wilderness [with] no English inhabitants or 

 pathways" and that had only "marked trees to 

 guide people." 



Fuming at earthly pleasures in the 

 colony's bedraggled, rum-soaked little ports 

 and backcountry villages, few of those early 

 ministers and lay preachers could boast much 

 success in the soul-saving way. The colony 

 eventually attracted a variety of religious 

 outcasts and dissenters — Quakers, Baptists, 

 and Moravians among them — but overall, 

 few tidewater people joined churches or looked 

 for evangelical preaching in colonial days. 



But if they rarely drew large crowds to 

 their makeshift altars, these itinerant preachers 

 still left priceless troves of documents 



chronicling the colonial landscape, a world of 

 vast longleaf pine forests, uncharted pocosins, 

 and great cypress and juniper swamps. The 

 missionaries' accounts, like Phillips's Memo- 

 ries, also reveal much about the colonists' 

 spiritual outlook toward what to them was a 

 strange, new land. 



Catharine Phillips was unusual among the 

 exhorters and evangelists. It was, after all, a day 

 when women did not travel by themselves and 

 were rarely allowed to preach in public; often, 

 they were excluded even from praying aloud in 

 their own churches. At one point, while visiting 

 a Friends meeting along the Perquimans River, 

 Phillips humbly acknowledged that the novelty 

 of an itinerant woman preacher might explain 

 her drawing power. "No women-ministers had 

 visited part of this country before us," she wrote, 

 "so that the people were probably excited by 

 curiosity." 



Yet a woman missionary like Phillips may 

 not have been an altogether rare sight, at least 

 not in 1753. The Quakers had always held that 

 God's "inner light" could be found equally in 

 every person, and they did not discourage 

 women from becoming "public preachers," as 

 the Religious Society of Friends called its 

 missionaries. Phillips came from a Quaker 

 family. Her father, a paralytic by the time she 

 left home in 1748, had been a Quaker mission- 

 ary. In North Carolina she found a sizable 

 Quaker community that was at least respectful 

 toward her. 



The Quakers were not the only sect in 

 which large numbers of women became 

 religious leaders during the First Great 

 Awakening, as the religious revivals that swept 

 the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s are 



C o n 1 i n u e d 



COASTWATCH 27 



