A Murderous preacher: lessons from the crimes of an extreme Baptist

Baptist History and Heritage, Summer-Fall, 1999 by Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven

Peter, the murderous preacher of this tale, was not just a Baptist; he was a faith doctor, an "ultra" Calvinist, and a slave living in the frontier region of southwest Missouri. How he came to murder three of his own children and his owner's wife is a complicated tale told by the Rev. Perry B. Marple in a sermon delivered on May 26, 1848, to the crowd outside the Dade County [Missouri] Court House. The assembled crowd was present to watch the spectacle of Peter's execution, but Rev. Marple assumed they were also in need of an authoritative explanation for this outburst of family violence. Consequently, the minister focused on explaining how such acts could have been committed by a respected figure in their community and what moral lessons his listeners could draw from the case. (1)

The actual killings were very bloody. The printing of Marple's sermon may have been calculated to profit from readers drawn to the case by curiosity, who wanted to see how Rev. Marple's description matched what they had heard about Peter's attack on his small children. The details provided were graphic and poignant; first, Peter "took up Mark, a boy about three years of age, and, after kissing him, buried a razor in his neck," the result of which was, "after some struggles, he died." Terrified by what they had just watched, the two older boys, Eli (age 8) and John (age 6), begged to live, but submitted to blindfolding when told that both parents would die with them. When shots to the boys' heads only injured them, Peter quickly used a razor to cut their throats. (2)

The murderer then turned on himself. Failing to do much damage with either a muzzleloader or pistol, Peter then snatched up the already bloody razor, making messy but ineffective cuts around his neck and throat. Grabbing a dull knife, Peter was trying to finish the jobs when he was interrupted by the arrival of his master, James Douglass, who had heard the gunshots. Peter had enough strength to quickly down the elderly man, bashing Douglass's head with the barrel of a shotgun. With Mr. Douglass down, Mrs. Douglass arrived at the scene, only to be beaten to the floor also. She might have survived the bludgeoning had not Peter returned from giving chase to his wounded master and found her stirring, something he stopped with a second, final beating.

The task of the minister in his carefully prepared, two-hour sermon was to explain this bloody horror. Yet, including a sermon in the 1848 execution ritual of the slave Peter, followed by the request of twenty-six leading citizens that this address be published, called attention to a kind of slave behavior whites generally kept secret. Slave violence was usually hushed because whites feared the news might inspire other slaves to similar actions and because such rebellion contradicted the widely held belief that slaves were content. (3) These citizens of Dade County, Missouri, acknowledged the unusual nature of their request, but they argued with some pride that the sermon was worthy of publication as a novelty, "the only oration of the kind ever delivered in South West Missouri." (4)

Ignoring the possibility that publicity about Peter might inspire further violence, these pioneer settlers-citizens instead believed the address would benefit potential readers, many of whom had attended the execution but due to the large crowd did not actually hear the sermon. (5) Clearly, those endorsing the sermon saw the time spent in broadcasting it as a way of restoring, not undermining, order in their community. (6) Analyzing the contents of the sermon and the circumstances surrounding its presentation provides clues about what problems, which kinds of disorderly conduct, leaders saw as most threatening to Dade County in 1848. What they feared most was the disorder and division caused by "ultra" Calvinism, not by slaves or slave rebellion. Consequently, leaders endorsed Marple's explanation of Peter's crime as their own, seeing the sermon as a way to dramatize the dangers they associated with the anti-missionary controversy. Despite the reality that Peter's actions constituted a violent act of slave rebellion, Marple, as spokesperson for the county's political leaders, explained Peter's case, not primarily as a case of slave inferiority or the careless behavior of white owners, but instead as a lesson about the dangers of wrong beliefs, the "ultra" beliefs which were creating much more serious schisms in southwest Missouri than differences over slavery or political parties.

Comparing Peter's case with similar cases from elsewhere in Missouri and other slave states suggests why Dade County whites were unconcerned about publicizing slave violence. Their reasons included the smallness of the slave population in southwest Missouri, the unusual character and work record of the slave Peter, and a concentrated effort on the part of leading whites to turn Peter's crime into a lesson on white sin and crime. As the sermon's negative references to Calvinism imply, conflict between "ultra" Calvinists, as Rev. Marple labeled Peter, and other kinds of Christians was a much greater threat to community than any debate about slavery. The differing religious affiliations of the criminal, a Calvinist Baptist, and those moderate Baptists and Cumberland Presbyterians presiding over his execution suggest that that the larger, more serious conflicts dividing the community were not slavery, but related in some way to religious affiliations.