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Helping the Church Lead the Way to Confederacy
By Larry T. McGehee
8/27/2001 

Basil Manly is a name from Old South history with which to reckon. Unfortunately, he rests in nigh-oblivion. As much as any fire-eater southerner-whether John Calhoun or William Yancey-Manly caused the Civil War. But he did it from a pulpit rather than from a political office.

Born in North Carolina in 1798, son of a Revolutionary War hero, Manly joined the Baptist Church in 1816, and soon began lay preaching. He attended an academy in Beaufort, SC, and went from it to South Carolina College, then headed by the famous Thomas Cooper, graduating as valedictorian after two years. From there he went in 1822 to infamous Edgefield County (from which would come an array of controversial figures such as Louis T. Wigfall and James Longstreet and many South Carolina political leaders) as a Baptist minister.

Manly quickly made a mark as an amazingly successful revivalist. Interestingly enough, many Baptist churches in the early 19th century were integrated, and pro-missions evangelists such as Manley insisted that spreading the gospel was important, whether at home or abroad. Within a few months, Manly’s work became known as “The Edgefield Revival”, and he baptized hundreds of whites and slaves. The revival spread to near-by Georgia, and in no time at all, the young Manly was famous. IN 1825 he was invited to be minister of the Baptist Church in Philadelphia, PA, but declined, but in 1826 was called to Charleston’s First Baptist Church and went.

Eleven years later, Manly’s advocacy of education and the strong ties between old South Carolina and young Alabama led to his election as the second president of the University of Alabama. The first president, Alva Woods, was also a Baptist-although from Harvard and Brown University-and left after six years, but played a strong role in selecting Manly as his successor.

For the next 18 years Manly would be a prominent figure in Alabama affairs. He was on the lecture circuit almost constantly (mostly preaching at Baptist churches), presided over a rather good faculty that included two great scientists (F.A.P. Barnard and Michael Tuomey), was friend to a long line of Alabama governors, influenced legislators (the state capital was then in Tuscaloosa, near the university), and spoke out on political issues of the day.

Somewhere along the way-probably beginning with South Carolina’s failure to secede during the Nullification Crisis-Manly became convinced that separation of South and North were inevitable. Sixteen years before the Confederacy was formed and Civil War came, Manly helped lead the withdrawal of many southern Baptist churches from the National Baptist Convention, to form in 1845 the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1856 Manly would be president of that convention. He spoke often, in public and in private, of the inevitable separation of the states. A defense of slavery was at the center of the separation.

In 1855, he left the university and returned to Charleston, as pastor of the Wentworth Street church, but three years later he was back in Alabama, where he was more respected, at First Baptist in Montgomery. Fate brought him late in life to the first capital of the Confederacy. He did battle fearlessly against the Garrisonian abolitionists of the North, but even late in his life and owning about 40 slaves, he contemplated seriously accepting yet another call to Philadelphia.

Manly served as chaplain for the Alabama secession convention that took Alabama out of the Union, and then a few weeks later, he served as chaplain to the new provisional Confederate government, which had chosen Montgomery as national capital. And when Jefferson Davis stood on the statehouse steps (the place marked by a star even today), Basil Manly stood beside him, along with Vice President Alexander Stephens, as President Davis took the oath of office.

Throughout his long and successful career, Manly had been an advocate of Baptist education, and while he was not technically the “founder” of Furman University, Howard College (now Samford University), and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he was one of the most important partisans in their behalf. Manly died in 1868 in Greenville, SC, where both Furman and the seminary were then located, and is buried there.

Manly loved the limelight, and was a bit vain and obsessed with power and with recognitions, but in a South that was still virtually a developing frontier, he represented a radical regional consciousness and a drive for cultural institutions (schools, colleges, and churches) to civilize the savage breast.

A. James Fuller provides a wealth of details about Manley in Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (LSU Press, 2000, 343 pp., $49.95.) 

comments: mcgeheelt@wofford.edu
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