Disorderly Communion: Julia Chinn, Richard Mentor Johnson, and Life in an Interracial, Antebellum, Southern Church

Abstract

Great Crossing Baptist Church was founded in 1785 by white Baptists who migrated to Kentucky from Virginia. The founders included the parents of Richard Mentor Johnson, the nation’s ninth vice president. Great Crossing’s congregation included free blacks, enslaved laborers, plantation owners, and students from Choctaw Academy, a school for Indian boys located on Blue Spring Farm, the home of Julia Chinn, a black woman, and her husband, the aforementioned Richard Johnson. Great Crossing was not unusually tolerant toward its black congregants. But in this space, white Kentuckians interacted with their laborers, Julia, her daughters, and the students from Choctaw Academy, and they were forced to confront whether they were all “brethren in Christ.” It turns out that this was more complicated than it seemed, and they were not always sure of the answer. Examining one southern church with a prominent interracial family in its membership, this essay sheds light on the racial tensions inside Great Crossing and brings Chinn and other black persons to the forefront of the narrative.