supernatural?” (Southern white men, even when under religious conviction,
sometimes resisted this loss of mastery and self-control. One preacher remem-
bered a “fine, strong, good-looking young man” who felt himself giving in to
camp meeting preaching. He “found no relief until he drew a large pistole out
of his pocket, with which he intended to defend himself if any one should offer
to speak to him on the subject of religion.”)
The early southern evangelicals irritated and angered the elite and white men
generally, for they seemed to question not only worldliness but also the white
male dominance that held the southern world together. The conversion of wives
and children (not to mention slaves) could trouble southern families; the conversion of white men could render them “womanish.” The governors of southern farms
and southern families, however, had little to worry about. The Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of the South, though they never stopped railing against greed and pride, found that they could conquer the South and live comfortably with a system of fixed hierarchy and God-given social roles—with slavery and father-dominated
families in particular.
Slavery and
Slavery became a major case in point. For a brief period
Southern
after the Revolution, evangelicals joined with an elite
Evangelicals
minority of slaveholders to oppose slavery. Methodists and
Baptists preached to slaves as well as to whites, and Bishop
Francis Asbury, the principal architect of American Methodism, admired John
Wesley’s statement that slavery was against “all the laws of Justice, Mercy, and
Truth.” In 1780, a conference of Methodist preachers ordered circuit riders to
free their slaves and advised all Methodists to do the same. In 1784, the Metho-
dists declared that they would excommunicate members who failed to free their
slaves within two years. Many lay Methodists took the order seriously. On the
Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia),
for instance, Methodist converts freed thousands of slaves in the late 18th cen-
tury. Other evangelicals shared their views. As early as 1787, southern Presby-
terians prayed for “final abolition,” and two years later, Baptists condemned
slavery as “a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.”
The period of greatest evangelical growth, however, came during the years
in which the South committed irrevocably to plantation slavery. As increasing
numbers of both slaves and slave owners came within the evangelical fold,
the southern churches had to rethink their position on human bondage. The
Methodists never carried out their threat to excommunicate slaveholders, and
in 1816 confessed, “little can be done to abolish the practice so contrary to
moral justice.” Similarly, the Baptists and Presbyterians never translated their
antislavery rhetoric into action. By 1820, evangelicals were coming to terms
with slavery. Instead of demanding freedom for slaves, they suggested, as the
Methodist James O’Kelly put it, that slave owners treat slaves as “dear brethren
in Christ.” After 1830, with much of the planter elite converted to evangelical-
ism, this would evolve into a full-scale effort to Christianize the institution of slavery.
Family, Church, and Neighborhood: The White South
363
Gender, Power,
Southern white men, yeomen as well as planters, distrusted
and the
the early evangelicals for more than their views on slavery.
Evangelicals
The preachers seemed even more grievously mistaken about
white manhood and the integrity of white families. South-
erners were localistic and culturally conservative. They distrusted outsiders and defended rural neighborhoods grounded in the sovereignty of fathers.
The early evangelicals threatened southern patriarchy. They preached individ-
ual salvation to women, children, and slaves—often hinting that the “family” of
believers could replace blood ties. Churches sometimes intervened in family dis-
putes or disciplined family members in ways that subverted patriarchal control.
Perhaps worse, many of the preachers failed to act out the standards of southern
manhood in their own lives. James McGready and other camp meeting preachers
often faced hecklers and rowdies. When attacked, they either ran off or quietly
took their beatings. White men often met the turn-the-other-cheek meekness of
the preachers (not to mention the celibacy of the Methodists) with suspicion and
contempt. They felt the same about the hugging, kissing, crying, and bodily
“exercises” acted out in evangelical meetings.
As they had with slavery, southern evangelicals came to terms with the notions
of manhood and the father-centered families of the South. The preachers learned to assert traditional forms of manhood. Their fathers and often themselves, they said, had fought the British and Indians heroically. They revealed that they had often
been great drinkers, gamblers, fighters, and fornicators before submitting to God, and they also began fighting back when attacked. Peter Cartwright, who conquered much of Kentucky and southern Illinois for Methodism, told numerous
stories of how he outwitted and often outfought rowdies who attacked his meet-
ings. On many occasions, he walked out of the pulpit to confront hecklers, and
punched more than a few of them. The preachers also made it clear that they
would pose no threat to the authority of fathers. They discouraged the excesses of female and juvenile piety. At the same time, church disciplinary cases involving
adultery, wife beating, private drunkenness, and other offenses committed within
families became more and more rare.
Religious
More fundamentally, evangelicals upheld the southern world
Conservatism
of fixed hierarchy and God-given social roles, and their
churches reinforced localistic neighborhoods and the patri-
archal family. Some southern communities began when a whole congregation
moved onto new land. Others were settled by the chain migration of brothers and
cousins, and subsequent revivals spread through family networks. Rural isolation
limited most households to their own company during the week, but on Sundays
church meetings united the neighborhood’s cluster of extended families into a
community of believers. In most neighborhoods, social connections seldom
extended beyond that. The word “church” referred ultimately to the worldwide
community of Christians, and the war between the “church” and the “world”
referred to a cosmic history that would end in millennial fire. But in the day-to-day understandings of southern evangelicals, the church was the local congregation and the world was local sins and local sinners. Churches disciplined members for such 364