Perhaps shocking to some today, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century the transportation and delivering of the U.S. Mails on the Christian Sabbath (Lord’s day) was a hot political and social issue during several periods. The first was during the War of 1812, when Protestant denominations – mainly Presbyterian and Congregational – and professing Christians, generally, protested the Sabbath’s profanation by sending petitions to Congress, which had passed an act requiring postmaster’s offices to be opened on every day of the week. Postmasters were “to deliver, on demand, any letter, paper or packet” to the authorized recipient. Historian Richard John argued that the 1810 postal statute was the first law of Congress that required certain behaviors on the part of citizens nationwide, in this case federal post masters, clerks, and mail carriers. In time, the petitioners relented due to the New Testament’s teaching on what are termed works of necessity, taught by Jesus Christ and recorded in Matthew 12, Mark 2, and Luke 6. In time of war, moving and delivering the mails was considered a work of necessity, even on Sunday.
But after 1815 the biblical rationale for secular labor on the holy Sabbath evaporated; expediency became the justification. For a decade, many Christians and churches around the country suffered quietly the demoralizing disregard of the weekly day of rest and worship tacitly promoted by the federal government’s postal practices. Most citizens were aware of the fourth commandment, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). Personal habits on the Sabbath varied widely, but many of the middling classes seemed surprised to see their government openly violating the moral law of God. The widespread Protestant view was that the weekly Sabbath served as the moral governor of the world, an institution so foundational that without it neither genuine religion nor civil liberties could continue to exist. This was not hyperbole, but a genuine conviction found throughout this period’s religious writings and periodicals, including many of the petitions themselves.
By 1828, patience came to an end. Sabbath profanation had been increasing year by year and seemed to explode nationally with the opening of the Erie Canal several years earlier. Leaders of the benevolence movement and several Protestant denominations organized a national Sabbath keeping union (you may thank me later for sparing you the full name). Aside from a few notable exceptions – Virginia Presbyterian minister Dr. John Holt Rice was one – there was low participation from the South, despite many in the region who valued the Sabbath, especially Presbyterians, Baptists, and, to some degree, Episcopalians and Methodists. A nationwide petition campaign of several months’ duration followed, timed for the session of Congress set to begin in December 1828. A second campaign occurred one year later.
Between late 1828 and early 1830, communities around the country mailed upwards of one thousand petitions protesting the postal law that required the daily moving and handling of the mails. Slightly more than one in ten came from the South (presumably still accessible at the National Archives, Record Group 233, House of Representatives, Post Office and Post Roads committee). Perhaps the majority of petitions were mass-produced but a considerable minority were handwritten, crafted by local leaders such as pastors, attorneys, justices of the peace, or post masters. Those handwritten documents, signed mostly by inhabitants of the town, district, or county nearby, reflected local sentiment and offered insight on the thinking of those mostly middling rank and some wealthier Americans who respected the Sabbath – almost none of whose names you will know. In that era, citizens treasured their First Amendment right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” They did so, probably for the most part never imagining that the National Legislature in Washington intended to violate the moral law of God summarized in the ten commandments, certainly not after they realized the strength of public sentiment on the matter.
In Camden, South Carolina, petitioners sent a mass-produced document in 1829 and a handwritten memorial the next year. In 1830, an impassioned personal letter accompanied their petition. Within the previous year the anti-Sabbath side led by Kentucky Democrat Richard M. Johnson had disparaged the petitioners severely and unjustly, capitalizing on the bugbear of a fantasized Presbyterian attempt to unite church and state.
While Methodist activity regarding Sabbath petitions may be documented in the South to a degree, in Camden it was exceptional. In the early nineteenth century the Methodists were the first to build a church edifice in town and they retained a strong presence. The matter intrigues, but perhaps the Sabbath convictions of local Methodists were due to no small degree to one conscience-driven, outspoken Christian and patriot. Joshua Reynolds (1786-1844), a drug store owner (among his varied interests) and a decades-long Methodist Episcopal churchman (steward, class leader, and trustee) – and apparently the third signer of the 1830 petition – wrote manfully to his representative in Washington. Reynolds’ letter to the Hon. James Blair began:
In consequence of the misrepresentation [begun by Johnson], got up in many places, and industriously propagated through the News-papers, with respect to the object of petitions in this matter . . . our present petition has but comparatively few names [54]. These things however move us not. The Sabbath of the Lord is [profaned]. The command to keep it inviolate is disregarded. We must therefore raise our voices, however few and feeble in humble and respectful remonstrance, so long as this state of things continues. We are Dear Sir, among those who know and feel that, “righteousness exalteth a nation,” whereas, “Sin is a reproach to any people.”[1]
A native of Armagh, Ireland, Reynolds emigrated to America as a young man and lived in Camden for nearly forty years, becoming a respected local figure. Sometime prior to Reynolds’s naturalization as a U.S. citizen about 1815, he married the daughter of a businessman in town, Miss Sophia Mathis. They were blessed with eight children, but Sophia died in 1834 at age 39. Around the year 1830 Reynolds was listed with a household of twenty, including about ten slaves, apparently at least one of whom was a member of the Methodist church. (As of 2025, his attractive, beautifully preserved residence houses a law firm, situated next door to the Camden Archives and Museum.)[2]
Continuing his letter and delving into British history from “the days of the good Alfred” to a more recent king who governed “with temperance & justice,” Reynolds credited “the glory and strength of the British nation” with its foundation of “strong religious feeling and spirit of the commonwealth.” He asked, “. . . how much more our existence as a great nation?” Reynolds mentioned those who had suffered for “their rights of conscience,” including “the persecuted protestants of France” – the Huguenots who had come to South Carolina. They were, he affirmed, “. . . patriots in the best sense of the word,” who kept the Sabbath “with a devotion [?] and sanctity to which I am grieved to say we are strangers.” Such American patriots “who are most zealous . . . to have this holy day kept sacred,” Reynolds assured his congressman, would not hesitate “to put themselves in the fore-front of the battle, against the enemies of their country, even on that hallowed day.” But these men “tremble at its violation,” on the ground taken by the advocates of Sabbath-day mails, in which case “necessity is not proved.” At once a Christian and patriot, Joshua Reynolds closed by expressing his personal heartache: “I would say, with the utmost truth, that, for its last fifteen or twenty years the carrying of the mail on the Sabbath, has been to me a source of grief and much uneasiness.”[3]
Reynolds’ letter accompanied his town’s petition which argued from the U.S. Constitution’s proscribing of a “religious Test” for “any Office or public Trust under the United States.” No doubt the native Irishman-turned-American knew something of the Test Acts from British history. Camden’s memorialists expressed the concern that the statute requiring Sabbath labor for those handling the mails
will in time be used as a precedent, for requiring public business to be transacted on the Sabbath in other departments of the Government, until those who reverence the Christian Sabbath although not less trustworthy than those who disregard it, shall be gradually excluded from all places of power and trust, and that thus in fact, if not in form, a Test Act will be established of the most odious character.[4]
Perhaps some petitioners had read an article five years earlier that appeared in a Camden periodical entitled, “Stealing from the Mail,” an account of a postal clerk in Montgomery, Alabama, caught stealing “a large sum of money in Post-Notes.” Mail thefts were a concern in South Carolina, too, suggested by the petition from the Poolesville Post Office neighborhood of Spartanburg District. Poolesville’s memorialists argued that the existing law effectively barred from employment in the post office department those guided “by the fear of offending God.” Amending the law to no longer require Sabbath profanation and, therefore, encouraging such men to serve as post masters and carriers “would introduce greater order into the whole Department, and probably lessen the number of Mail-robberies.”[5]
The final point in Camden’s document – which was signed by numerous Methodists including ministers, licensed preachers, and trustees – addressed the “collision” of State and Federal laws, a matter dealt with in certain petitions from several States (Greene County, Tennessee, was one). The postal statute was “in direct opposition to the Sabbath laws of several of the oldest States of the confederacy,” statutes that dated from the settlement of those States and “which have preserved a place in their Statute books through all the revolutions which have marked their history.” The petitioners hardly needed to state that “collision between the Federal, and local authorities, tend directly to weaken the union of the States, and that such collision is especially to be deprecated where the cause is not transient in its nature, but deeply seated in the religious principles, habits, and institutions” of the citizenry.[6]
Some careless souls ambivalent toward the Sabbath viewed the simple practice of setting apart one day each week for rest as something of too little account to bother with. But the Scripture teaches that seemingly insignificant practices will, over time, bear momentous consequences – for good or ill. We are not to despise “the day of small things,” writes Zechariah. On the other hand, a number of Sabbath defenders also grasped that the seemingly small matter of the example set for the community on the part of the only federal official that most Americans likely were ever to see in their villages or towns – their post master – could help erode respect for the holy Sabbath. Joshua Reynolds understood such things and did what he could alongside fellow Camden, South Carolina, Methodists to warn and persuade their legislators in Washington.
In time, not only for the sanctification of the Sabbath; also for the union of the States – momentous consequences came.
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[1] Letter, Mr. Joshua Reynolds to Hon. James Blair (U.S. House of Representatives), accompanying petition of inhabitants of town of Camden (and Kershaw District), So. Car., (received) Feb. 15, 1830, RG233 (National Archives), including quote; Joan A. Inabinet, Lyttleton Street United Methodist Church of Camden, S.C., A History (Camden, 2003), 47.
[2] Thomas J. Kirkland and Robert M. Kennedy, Historic Camden, Part Two, Nineteenth Century (Columbia, So. Car., 1963-73 [1905]), 425; handwritten note, citing Camden Journal, Aug. 21, 1844, Reynolds Family File, in Leonard C. Boykin Collection, Camden Archives and Museum; Inabinet, Lyttleton Street United Methodist Church of Camden, 66.
[3] Reynolds letter, accompanying Camden-Kershaw petition, 1830, including quotes [emphasis in original].
[4] U.S. Constitution, Article VI, including quotes 1-2; Camden-Kershaw petition, 1830, including quote 3.
[5] Southern Chronicle, And Camden Literary and Political Register, Jun. 11, 1825, including quotes 1-2; petition of inhabitants of Poolesville P.O. (including Spartanburg District), So. Car., Jan. 3, 1829, RG233 (NA), including quotes 3-4.
[6] Camden-Kershaw petition, 1830, including quotes. For about a dozen Camden Methodists who signed the second petition (some actually signed both the 1829 and 1830 petitions), see Inabinet, Lyttleton Street United Methodist Church of Camden, 47-71.
“We are not to despise ‘the day of small things,’ writes Zechariah.”
Three thousand years before “The Butterfly Effect.”
“…the petitioners relented due to the New Testament’s teaching…taught by Jesus Christ and recorded in Matthew 12, Mark 2, and Luke 6.” Did you know, Mr. Marion, or any professing Christian reading this, that those chapters just listed are on O.T. ground? There is no new testament until the death of the testator. Hebrews 9:16.
Important also, is the fact that there is no “Christianity” in the gospels. Its exclusively Judaism; its Gods program with Israel. John 1:31; John 4:22; Matthew 15:24; Luke 1:16; Luke 1:68; Romans 15:8. If at all.possible, check these references in a KJB, especially Romans 15:8.
So, the Sabbath was for Israel, and Israel only. Everybody else, all the Gentiles (heathen) were on the outside looking in. Romans chapter one explains why and when this happened. And it’s because of what happened after the flood through Genesis chapter 11, that God made the nation of Israel. God made them. If no one wanted God, Rom. 1, then He would make a people for Himself, and that’s the story through the rest of the O.T., the gospel’s, and early Acts. Its His program with Israel. There was a temporary interruption in that program, and so, so-called “Christianity” began, historically, with conversion of Saul of Tar sus in Acts ch. 9.
It’s a shame the recovery of Paul-ine truth began and proceeded so slowly. However, it did begin to gather steam in the 19th century with men like John Nelson Darby, Bullinger, and the former Confederate soldier C. I. Scofield, and a handful of other’s. In the 20th century the recovery of Paul-ine truth really accelerated beginning with men such as J.C. O’Hair, Charles Baker and C.R. Stam.
The Sabbath was, and only will be, the seventh day of the week, and it was for Israel. It’s not for the church the body of Christ to observe.
Colossians 2:16-17 “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.”
“Most citizens were aware of the fourth commandment, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8).”
A pastor, from Alabama, was asked if he thought believer’s should keep the 10 commandments. He replied, “Yes, but how are you doing with that?”
James 2:10 “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”
Galatians 3:10 “For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.”
The pastor from Alabama who asked how are you doing keeping the ten commandments, is one of those men who has stood on the great shoulders of O’Hair, Baker, and Stam. Thank God for these men who have helped so many in understanding the Word rightly divided.