Origins of the southern mind: The parochial sermons of Thomas Cradock of Maryland, 1744–1770

This study examines the ideas in the parochial sermons of Thomas Cradock (1718–1770) of Baltimore County, Maryland. Cradock's pulpit rhetoric, following in the tradition of moderate Anglicanism as transported to the shores of the Chesapeake, expressed what Richard Weaver, a southern scholar, has called the “roots” of southern thinking—a feudal theory of society, a code of chivalry, an education of a gentleman, and an older religiousness—roots that had begun to develop even earlier than Weaver traces them and from a denominational source he failed to examine.