Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves

Presbyterian Church missionaries and the theology of race, enslavement, and Native American removal

In Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves, Otis Westbrook Pickett Sr. examines Presbyterian missionaries' attempts to live up to their understood calling from their God to serve as shepherds for their congregations. These missionaries, Pickett finds, faltered in this duty when faced with the racial hierarchy of an enslaved society. He focuses on individual missionaries, most prominently John Lafayette Girardeau and T. C. Stuart, who attempted to integrate enslaved, and later freed, men and women into the church. By examining these missionaries and mission churches, Pickett sheds new light not only on the complicated role that religion played in shaping slavery and Native American removal in the US South but also the fate of these ideas in the crucible of the Civil War and its aftermath.