Otis Westbrook Pickett’s recently published work, “Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves” (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), is necessarily complicated. That observation is not meant to be critical. The book examines domestic missionaries in South Carolina between 1802 and 1874, a complex subject that few are willing to acknowledge as such, involving men who lived 200 years ago under circumstances of which we have no direct experience.
Pickett understands all these factors, unlike many who try to speak and write about the topic. Still, he sometimes strays into impugning motives or engaging in psychological history. In truth, after two centuries, we cannot know what a man was thinking unless he says it explicitly. But we are not all free of bias, so we sometimes drift into speculation, which can be more incendiary than insightful.
Nevertheless, Pickett’s drifts into these moments are few, and for that I commend him. At the end of his worthy work, he makes clear to his readers that the period under consideration is complicated. One must consider the details with caution, learning both the good and the bad from sinners saved by grace.
Pickett is the university historian and chief administrator of historic properties at Clemson University, a scholar of Southern religious history, and a PCA ruling elder. He considers four pastors who ministered among African-American slaves in the Southern United States during the 19th century. The first region is in rural South Carolina near Charlotte, North Carolina. Thomas Donnelly was opposed to slavery and led his Reformed Covenanter congregation to consider both the rights and privileges of slaves in the church as well as the issue of ownership. Pickett uses this example to “provide us with fresh insight as to how a biblically orthodox denomination successfully challenged the entrenched system…where so many other denominations failed” (19).
The next region was northern Mississippi (originally western Carolina). There, T.C. Stuart ministered among the Chickasaw people and their African-American slaves, and Pickett delves into the complexity of ministry in such a multiethnic context. In such an intricate setting, Pickett considers “how religion played a pivotal role in providing a space for interracial interaction and pluralistic religious expression” (39). In accomplishing this, Stuart and his wife sacrificed greatly and suffered much need.
Pickett then says, “While the direct answer [as to why southern Whites would sacrifice for this ministry] remains unknown, as we cannot see into the hearts and minds of men and women two hundred years ago, it is certain that missionaries to Native Americans sacrificed worldly interests for what they viewed as eternal kingdom work” (51). Here we see the author tempted to slip into psychological analysis but then pulls himself out with the reminder that you cannot see into the human heart. You must evaluate by what you do know and do see. What is evident from the history is that they were concerned for the welfare — physical and spiritual — of those to whom they sacrificially ministered.
The rest of the book is the most complex and, in many ways, the most remarkable. Pickett begins with the ministry of Charles Colcock Jones in the Georgia lowcountry. A scion of Midway Congregational Church in Liberty County, Georgia, Jones studied at Princeton Seminary, and there settled his life’s calling: ministry to the slaves of his home region. He returned from Princeton to begin work throughout the region, establishing chapels where he ministered to the slaves and urged the master class to do right by their commitments to fellow human beings made in the imago Dei.
Through his writings and activist societies, Jones became a leader in the spiritual care of the slaves in his region and beyond. He insisted that marriages should be public, and preserving slave marriages was a steady instructional note to masters. Despite state code, Jones wanted to teach slaves to read. Jones constantly stressed to masters their biblical duties toward their poor and needy subjects as frequently set forth in the Bible.
Pickett quotes Genovese approvingly when the noted Southern historian wrote, “The slaves knew that many of these white pastors cared about them. The Reverend C. C. Jones wore himself out in pursuit of the religious instruction of the blacks, as he called it” (85). With further detail, Pickett establishes the exemplary work of Jones, while rightly pointing out the common inconsistencies of men of his age. But he also provides us insight into Jones’ influence upon another work, bringing readers to the final theater of “Southern Shepherds” — Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1842, C. C. Jones published “The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States.” This volume quickly became a manual of the history of slaves in the United States, ministry to them, and instruction for a better future. In 1852, he gave the church “A Catechism of Scripture and Practice for Families and Sabbath-schools Designed Also for the Oral Instruction of Coloured Persons.” This volume was published by the Presbyterian Board of Publications in Philadelphia. Sandwiched in between these two publications, Jones was invited to Charleston by many of the leading civic and religious leaders of the city who asked him to help them better serve their slaves.
His trip to Charleston to lead a conference on ministry to slaves occurred in 1846 when Charleston native John Bailey Adger returned from the mission field. He returned determined to provide a distinct ministry to the slaves of his beloved city. The idea of establishing a church for them where they would be front and center, not relegated to some gallery overhead, had its origin out of Charleston’s Second Presbyterian and would eventually grow into a large congregation.
Adger’s health failing, he called upon the younger John L. Girardeau from rural Adam’s Run, a few miles to the south, to take up the work. The remainder of the book is about Girardeau and his extensive work that involved slaves ministering to their fellow slaves. The ministry included an extensive diaconal work before a Southern white culture could even acknowledge the qualifications of black enslaved men for an office of the church.
Before the Civil War, Girardeau — called “the Spurgeon of America” — preached to large crowds of both blacks (slave and free) and whites of all classes in the difficult setting of a segregated South. After the war, Girardeau received a remarkable and loving letter from the black leadership of the church, urging him to return to Charleston. He and his white elders would ordain several black men to the office of elder, the first such in the South. He alone would speak against segregation in the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1874.
The final chapter concludes with a detailed account of the complexities of men who (like all of us) have cultural blind spots, but who were nonetheless active in meeting the needs of poor and needy people. Is Pickett’s thesis — that shepherds were wolves — accurate? First, there is the problem of holding the two categories together in one office. The Bible juxtaposes the shepherds and wolves in opposition with contrasts (Ezekiel 34; Matthew 7:15; Acts 20:29). That aside, to prove his point, Pickett had to drift into reading the minds and hearts of men and women from time to time. He had to disagree with debated readings of Scripture.
The debated passages aside, the best Southern shepherds surely erred in not at least honoring the Jubilee provision for slaves. In the end, Pickett is honest in admitting the complexity of the period and sinners saved by grace. He doesn’t wholly discount the work of godly men like Jones, Adger, and Girardeau, just because they erred in part. We have a complex book about a complicated historical epoch that will help those who too often simplify the period. A worthy read.
C. N. Willborn is associate pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and adjunct professor of church history at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.