Given his ancestry and European upbringing, Frontis enjoyed a greater appreciation for the consequences of the loss of the Sabbath day than did most of his American-born brethren. Even so, some American-born Presbyterians occasionally reminded their countrymen of France’s abolition of the Sabbath in lieu of the Decadi (every tenth day) – nearly forty years after the event.

Until the early to mid-nineteenth century, many Protestant ministers who crossed the Atlantic to serve the Lord Jesus in British North America and, later, the American republic, hailed from England or Scotland. One worthy exception was a Frenchman, Stephen Frontis. His mostly forgotten life and ministry are worth considering today, including his contentions for the Christian Sabbath.

In British North America the Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, was a pillar of the new society. This was the case in both spiritual and socioeconomic senses. Although the strict observance of the Sabbath in New England did not carry over to the Southern colonies, one historian of the Puritan Sabbath referred to the day’s observance in much of the South as “an island of rest in an ocean of endeavor.”[1] Colonial Sabbath statutes generally did carry over into the early national period, however, and in the 1820s at least 23 of the 24 states in the Union maintained some form of Sabbath ordinance. Additionally, many towns and villages had their own restrictions covering business as well as recreational activities.

Positively, the day afforded many with the opportunity for corporate worship and fellowship, as well as family gatherings, a degree of bodily rest from secular labor, and it marked the rhythm of community life. For many in that era, Sabbath customs and laws identified “these united States” – the plural was often used – as a “Christian nation.”

The federal government conducted almost no business on the Sabbath. The lone exception was the postal department, the largest department by far. The Post Office Act of 1810 probably seemed innocuous to many at first, but its consequences became apparent as the nation’s population and westward emigration increased dramatically, and as transportation options (macadamized roads, canals, steamboats) and cash-crop markets combined to place a premium on one’s ability to transport goods to market as quickly as possible – including on the Sabbath. Perhaps designed in part to offer protection to those postmasters and mail clerks who already were accustomed to performing secular labor on the Sabbath, the 1810 law required postmasters “at all reasonable hours, on every day of the week, to deliver” any mail or packages to those persons entitled to receive them. That included the Sabbath.[2]

During two brief periods between 1810 and 1830, many Christians as well as citizens seemingly unaffiliated with local churches in communities nationwide spoke out in defense of the day’s traditional observance. That is, they viewed the Bible’s fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy,” as the standard. They wanted it maintained, and they protested in print by means of petitions (or “memorials”) against that portion of the law which required postmasters and clerks to transgress the Sabbath. In the South – especially Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas – Presbyterians were the denomination most closely identified with Sabbath mails petitions sent to Congress (as well as the group responsible for the bulk of Sabbath-promoting publications in the South).

As occurred throughout the nation around 1830, citizens in a number of North Carolina locales petitioned Congress on the matter. A fair portion of the petitioners were locally recognizable if not prominent men, their signatures augmented by ordinary citizens, who viewed such practices – especially during peacetime – as unnecessary labor and, therefore, a violation of the fourth commandment. Postmasters, clerks, and the contractors who transported the mails, were deprived of their weekly day of rest and worship. (The same basic concern appeared in a recent U.S. Supreme Court case.)[3] In addition, the transporting of mails and opening of post offices appeared disruptive of Sabbath peace, order, and social harmony in communities. In North Carolina, memorials to Congress originated from at least eleven counties.[4]

Mecklenburg County (encompassing Charlotte) produced six memorials against Sabbath mails, more than any other community in the entire South. Two were handwritten documents. The other four were copies of a mass-produced (printed) North Carolina Memorial that also appeared in other counties in the state, indicating an organized petition campaign similar to that found in other areas of the country.

Another petitioning county, where Presbyterians were the dominant religious group, was Iredell, north of Charlotte. Most of the region’s early settlers were Scots-Irish Presbyterians. By the 1770s, Scottish Highlanders joined them as well as emigrants from Pennsylvania looking for good farm land. Many of the newly arrived were Presbyterians. Three of the earliest Presbyterian churches near Statesville, the county seat, were Fourth Creek, Concord, and Bethany.

In 1828, Stephen Frontis commenced his ministry at Bethany. Born in Cognac, France, near the height of the French Revolution’s terrors and reared largely without this father, Frontis survived a lengthy and treacherous trek to Switzerland when his mother, a Protestant from Geneva, decided to travel to her home. A biographer noted with considerable understatement: “She . . . undertook a very fatiguing journey of five hundred miles through a mountainous country with four children, the oldest only seven, the youngest [Stephen] two years old . . . [who was] feeble and sickly.” Surviving the journey and arriving in Geneva in June 1794, his mother brought up her children in the Protestant faith. There, Stephen attended a “singing school,” began his education, and learned the trade of a cabinet-maker.[5]

In 1810 – at a time when Napoleon’s army desperately needed young men – Frontis was allowed to travel to America to join his father who had settled in Philadelphia, while the rest of his family remained on the other side of the Atlantic. There Frontis worked as a journeyman and learned the English language. Walking along Fourth Street one Sabbath morning, he heard the voice of a preacher “speaking very loud.” Stopping to listen, Frontis heard something of the gospel. The preacher, he learned later, was Presbyterian pastor James K. Burch, whom Stephen came to consider his spiritual father. Frontis was to write that upon hearing the message, “I had read in the Old Testament that at the dedication of the Jewish temple, Solomon asked for wisdom and his request was granted. It occurred to me that I would do the same. I knelt down and prayed for wisdom. This was the first prayer I offered, without formality and in sincerity.”[6]

Received as a member of Burch’s church, Frontis accepted his pastor’s recommendation to pursue the gospel ministry. In 1817, Frontis accompanied Burch to Oxford, North Carolina, and assisted him briefly in an academy there, teaching French. Over the next ten years, Frontis taught French in Raleigh, North Carolina, then studied at Princeton’s theological seminary in New Jersey, and served as a Presbyterian evangelist in North Carolina, the Territory of Michigan (preaching in both English and French) and in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1824.)

At the end of 1827, Frontis received an invitation to visit the church of Bethany, in Iredell County. Returning to his adopted state, in the spring of 1828 he began preaching at Bethany. In May 1829, he accepted a call to become that church’s pastor as well as another’s – Tabor Presbyterian – devoting two-thirds of his time to Bethany and one-third to Tabor. During the winter of 1828-1829, Frontis led both churches in joining the nationwide petition campaign against Sabbath mails.[7]

In 1830, he married Miss Martha Dews of Lincolnton, N.C., whose family had come to America from the Channel Islands between England and France. They had three daughters and a son.

Rarely is it possible to identify the author of a particular Sabbath memorial, but the Iredell petition is one exception. The text of the document was penned in Stephen Frontis’ own “beautiful hand,” and his signature appeared just below the last line. That Pastor Frontis was influential in the petition effort – or that his views were in accord with those of other church leaders – was supported by the signatures of no less than eight of the eleven elders in the two churches. The signatures of five consecutive Tabor church members suggested the document was signed during a church gathering; probably on Sunday, February 1, 1829, the day before Frontis dated it below the last signature. Clearly, the Iredell memorial was the work of Presbyterians in the two churches led by Pastor Frontis.[8]

The petition’s text reflected Frontis’ thinking on the Sabbath. He believed the Sabbath afforded “the only adequate means for preserving the fear of God, the sanctity of oaths, genuine personal integrity, the public morals, & our civil & political privileges.” While acknowledging that there were many throughout the country “who practically disregard the Sabbath,” Frontis surmised there were but few “who would willingly see that sacred day abolished” – as the revolutionary government had done by design in his native France. Given his ancestry and European upbringing, Frontis enjoyed a greater appreciation for the consequences of the loss of the Sabbath day than did most of his American-born brethren. Even so, some American-born Presbyterians occasionally reminded their countrymen of France’s abolition of the Sabbath in lieu of the Decadi (every tenth day) – nearly forty years after the event.[9]

Consistent with other petition authors, Frontis believed the transporting of the mails and opening of post offices on the first day of the week “operate constantly & powerfully to bring the Sabbath itself into neglect & contempt . . . & that no remedy can be found, unless the national authority shall interpose to correct the evils.” The ills he alluded to grew tremendously during the period as the number of post offices increased greatly in size. In most communities the postmaster was the lone representative of the federal government, a respected figure. Even though most earned only modest revenues, each postmaster claimed the prestige of a federal office. His example was of considerable influence in the community, including his manner of keeping the Sabbath. Further, open post offices were popular gathering places for those looking for a reason to avoid attending public worship or seeking to escape the domestic circle.[10]

Having addressed spiritual concerns, in his conclusion Frontis emphasized temporal matters including the familiar connection between the Sabbath and republicanism:

The whole current of history & observation is in favour of the influence of the Sabbath upon the temporal prosperity of communities; that wherever this day has been con-secrated to religious instruction, & to the duties of public & private worship, the people have been distinguished for industry, peaceable habits, & especially for that intelligence & personal virtue, that sense of justice, of individual rights, & of the responsibility of rulers & private men to the Sovereign Ruler of all, which are essential to the existence of a free government.[11]

To any reader who may have glided over the above quote, please go back and read it again, slowly. Could there be anything more relevant in the America of the 2020s?

Frontis’ time at Bethany was of moderate duration: eight years, the last seven as her pastor. The main reason for his departure was one of the broad causes of North Carolina’s socioeconomic struggles of the period: westward, or southwestward, emigration, mostly in pursuit of richer, cheaper lands suitable for cash crops. Longings for the West contributed to upheaval in many communities and churches alike.

In Iredell County, from 1828 to 1836 the combined Bethany-Tabor membership lost 72 communicants, mostly due to emigration to West Tennessee. For a church that in 1836 counted 164 communing members, the losses were high. That year the dwindling flock led to a mutual decision leading to Frontis’ departure.

But Frontis was by no means the only local Presbyterian pastor concerned with Sabbath observance. Among North Carolina Presbyterians, the most active church court was Concord Presbytery, of which Frontis became a member in 1829. On four occasions between 1826 and 1836, Concord Presbytery directed her pastors to preach on the subject of Sabbath observance. Although four times in ten years may not appear overly impressive, it was unusual for a presbytery to direct its pastors to preach on specific topics.[12]

Following his pastorate at Bethany, Frontis served the First Presbyterian Church in Salisbury, N.C., for nine years, during which time two of his sisters were received into membership with certificates of transfer from their church in Geneva, Switzerland. Later, Frontis preached at several other area churches in the 1840s and 50s. For several years from 1858 he again taught French, doing so at the Presbyterians’ Davidson College, the precise location of which he had assisted in selecting some two decades earlier (he also served as a college trustee). He died in 1867, remembered as a man of great piety, “. . . deeply interested in everything that pertained to the advancement of the Redeemer’s Kingdom.”[13]

A faithful husband and father, pastor and churchman, native-Frenchman Stephen Frontis’ zeal for the Christian Sabbath may have been stirred by the bloody record of a Sabbath-less France in the 1790s as much as from his Bible and theological training. For Frontis and others of his era, the first day’s observance was an indispensable part of the serious and godly Christian life. Indeed, the Sabbath was a metaphor for the same: not one day a week, but every day. Today, we do well to remember the Sabbath, and the example of Rev. Stephen Frontis.

Requested byline:

Forrest L. Marion is a member First Presbyterian Church in Crossville, Tenn. This article stems from an ongoing study with the working title, “‘Stem the Torrent’: Southerners’ Contentions for the Christian Sabbath, 1815-1840.”

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[1] Winton U. Solberg, Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

[2] Forrest L. Marion, “The Gentlemen Sabbatarians: The Sabbath Movement in the Upper South, 1826-1836,” doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn., Aug. 1998.

[3] Chris Pandolfo and Bill Mears, “Supreme Court Hands Religious Freedom Win to Postal Worker Who Refused to Work on Sunday, Aquila Report [reposted from Fox News], Jun. 29, 2023.

[4] Petitions from the following North Carolina counties are held at the National Archives (NA), under Petitions Received, RG233: Cabarrus, Caswell, Cumberland, Guilford, Hertford, Iredell, Mecklenburg, Nash, Richmond, Robeson, and Rockingham.

[5] Joseph M. Wilson, The Presbyterian Historical Almanac, and Annual Remembrance of the Church for 1868, volume 10 (Philadelphia, 1868), 327-31; J. K. Rouse, “A Gifted Frenchman,” Daily Independent Magazine, Oct. 7, 1962; O. C. Stonestreet III, “19^th-Century Minister Founded Area Schools,” Iredell Neighbors, Jul. 9, 1989.

[6] Manuscript, Stephen Frontis, “Memoirs of my Life,” Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[7] As of 2006 the Presbyterian Department of History (PCUSA) at Montreat, N.C., displayed the Bethany church pulpit which was believed “to be the only 18th century North Carolina pulpit now in existence” – and from which Frontis preached.

[8] Petition of inhabitants of Iredell County, N.C., Feb. 2, 1829, Petitions Received, RG233, NA; “Bethany Presbyterian Church” abstract (original session books were penned by Frontis, clearly identifying his “beautiful hand”).

[9] Petition of inhabitants of Iredell County, N.C., Feb. 2, 1829.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Minutes of Concord Presbytery, vol. 2 (1825-1832), vol. 3? (1835), and vol. 4 (1836-1846), PCUSA.

[13] Stonestreet III, “19^th-Century Minister,” Iredell Neighbors, Jul. 9, 1989.