The slaveholding South took pride in its religious toleration, and Jews and Catholics freely attested that they found the South more hospitable than the North. Even religious skeptics could advance in politics and social life as long as they committed no gross indiscretions. Especially in South Carolina and Georgia, any number of prominent men admitted to agnosticism or were strongly suspected of being free thinkers without suffering ostracism.

A good many colonial southern planters, much like their contemporaries among European aristocrats, eschewed religion but at the risk of encouraging social disorder. Voltaire himself wanted his lawyer, tailor, valet, and even his wife to believe in God: “If they do I shall be robbed less and cheated less.” He asked dinner companions who flaunted unbelief in front of servants if they wanted their throats cut. Touring the mid–nineteenth-century South, both the slavery apologist Solon Robinson and the antislavery Frederick Law Olmsted found religiously skeptical planters who, convinced that religion was necessary for the maintenance of social order, publicly expressed little of their private views.

In 1851 John Hill Wheeler, a historian, portrayed seventeenth-century North Carolina as a bastion of religious toleration. On Governor William Tryon, “He was free from all religious intolerance, as he was destitute of any religious principles.”