The origins of the Southern Baptist Convention: a historiographical study: the purpose of this paper is to describe how white Baptist church historians of the South have interpreted the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention since 1845

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 2002 by Walter B. Shurden, Lori Redwine Varnadoe

In his annual sermon, Williams, while using different language, underscored the three major points Johnson had stressed thirty years earlier. As Johnson had done, Williams came down hardest on the constitutional issue, claiming that the Northern Baptists forced the separation by the "infringement" of southern rights. In one sentence, he combined Johnson's constitutional and historical arguments:

   The constitution of the Triennial Convention, as well as the history of its
   proceedings from the beginning, conferred on all the members of the Baptist
   denomination in good standing, whether at the North or the South,
   eligibility to all appointments emanating from the Convention or the Board.
   (16)

Williams was making the point, so crucial to the southern rationale, that neither constitutional statute nor historical practice had precluded slaveholders from serving in the missionary societies prior to 1844. Williams also echoed Johnson's missional point. Southerners created the SBC because the Triennial Convention had "cut off southern ministers from the privilege of spreading the Gospel to the heathen." (17)

While following closely Johnson's explanations for the SBC, Williams introduced emphases of his own. In addition to the constitutional, historical, and missional reasons for the SBC, Williams injected what he saw as a moral reason for Southerners to create the SBC. Ironically, it was an argument of equality! Northerners, by excluding slaveholders, had denied the moral equality of Southern Baptists. The Home Mission Society by its antislavery actions, said Williams, had declared "an unwillingness to work together with them [slaveholders] upon terms of Christian equality." (18)

Williams's moral argument certainly must be Exhibit A of the blinding force of culture on conscience! Miffed at having equality snatched from him, Williams, as most Americans of his time, never thought of equality as an issue between the races.

Besides his moral argument, Williams made at least three other points. One, he spoke of the inevitability of the schism, a point made often by Baptists north and south during the 1840s.

Two, Williams gladly quoted at length from a Northern Baptist newspaper of April 1845 which argued that the division would aid the cause of missions by causing both groups to double their efforts. Many seized upon this argument to justify the slavery schism.

Three, while the biblical sanction of slavery played only a small part in the rationale and defense of the formation of the SBC, it was certainly present in the nineteenth-century documents. After the Home Mission Society voted to appoint only slaveholders, Williams said, "Of course, therefore, only those can consistently work with it and under its appointment, who recognize the Scriptural propriety of such a restriction." (19)

J. Lansing Burrows, 1885

The SBC celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1885 by returning to the First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, the place of its birth. J. Lansing Burrows, (20) easily confused with his son Lansing Burrows, presented a "Historical Sketch of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845-1885." Burrows referred to Johnson's "Address to the Public," two articles published in Christian Review magazine in 1845 and 18467 and William Williams's 1871 convention address as documents presenting "the essential facts relating to the causes and principles involved in the [1845] division, and must ever be the principal documents upon which these events are to be woven into the history of the denomination." (22)