“Like a Great Family”

One Saturday in January 1854, John Kelly stood up in Gum Branch Baptist Church in rural Darlington District and announced that “his wife Lenore Kelly had left his house.” As he stood there, supplicant, before his brethren, Kelly knew what he had begun, knew that he had just invited community intrusion into the most intimate aspect of his domestic affairs. In making the admission-in preempting accusation-he attempted, no doubt, to assert a measure of control over the disciplinary investigation that was sure to follow. And indeed, pained by the news, church elders appointed a “committy” of four to enquire into the trouble between Brother and Sister Kelly and to recommend a course of action. Few could have imagined the depth of trouble that lay ahead. Throughout the spring and summer of 1854, as John and Lenore Kelly, John’s kin, and the Gum Branch brethren struggled to contain the forces unleashed among them, the predominantly yeoman congregation gave powerful testimony to a whole set of assumptions and beliefs, usually unarticulated, about the workings of power and authority, domestic and public, in their small corner of the lowcountry world.

Art · Brother · False accusation · Nullification · Political science · Power (physics) · Sister · Sociology · Wife · Australian History and Society · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

• All for Keeping His Own Negro Wench”

  Open Access•Mark M Carroll•Law and History Review•2011

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