Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

In much of this study Edward R. Crowther addresses topics familiar from other works on proslavery religion and culture in the Old South. His extensive discussion of the secondary literature makes some sections read like interpretive essays. He does not focus on the more systematic proslavery theological writings and adds little to available expositions and analyses of the ideas they presented. Instead, he probes Southern personal writings and periodicals, and records of church bodies, to relate proslavery religious thought to the larger society and culture.

One of Crowther's particular contributions is his explicit interpretive argument about the origins of proslavery Christian thought. Much literature supposes that early Southern church leaders considered slavery immoral, but that, under particular pressures in the 1830s, Southern clergy developed new theological rationales to defend their embattled region. Historians often accept or reject that thesis tacitly, without explaining their reasons in direct interpretive debate. Crowther rebuts the thesis directly, arguing that antislavery thought was only a minority option in earlier Southern evangelicalism, and that clerical defense of slavery arose as a continuous development rather than an improvisation in crisis times. Crowther's interpretation is that proslavery theologians articulated, with increasing clarity and sophistication, ideas and practices that had long been widespread in Southern church life. His argument clarifies the issues in a controversy that has been evident but often muted.

Crowther's approach also illuminates the role of proslavery religious thought in its wider cultural context. By beginning his presentation with southern evangelicals' concern about death and afterlife, he keeps readers from reducing his topic to a device within social politics. Crowther presents religion as "an integral part of southern culture," one "element within the social matrix" (14). Some southerners, he knows, took religion much more seriously and understood theology better than did others. Nonetheless, by comparing secular and ecclesiastical sources, he shows that ideas of devout and theologically conscious church leaders extended, like ripples in water, to influence those in the more worldly sectors of southern life. Crowther sometimes (as in pp. 95-96) points out differences between the proslavery ideas of theologians and those of other Southern writers. To make the intellectual connections, he touches on Southern ideas about government, philosophy, and a range of other topics that sometimes appears arbitrary but provides social context for his subject.

In an important chapter of political narrative, Crowther traces Southern evangelicals' opinions about political events of the sectional conflict. His account, particularly full on the 1850 crisis, helps to show how a proslavery moral consensus often buttressed moderate strategies in earlier stages, but directed Southerners toward secession after the election of 1860. However, Crowther's broad scope—combining political events, church leaders' pronouncements, and the responses of a diverse southern public—blurs the focus of his narrative. He demonstrates that the influences he studies were at work, but shows little about the particulars of their contribution.

Crowther accepts a definition of "evangelicalism" as comprising the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist denominations. That definition is useful for studies of the Great Awakening—but in the antebellum generation Episcopalians shared the same community of discourse as the other denominations on most of the topics Crowther studies. Apparently influenced by definitions of "evangelical" that exclude Calvinism, he regards the Calvinism of southern Baptists as historical "baggage" that "remained" from some pre-evangelical era (68). Imprecise on denominational distinctiveness, he supposes that only Baptists called the eucharist "the Lord's Supper" (125). He exaggerates in considering Southern evangelicals not only predominantly, but universally, committed to Scottish common-sense realism to the exclusion of romanticism (16, 51-55).

Unfortunately, this valuable monograph has been published with an alarmingly high incidence of typographical and grammatical errors. Readers know how to read around particular inconveniences, but the abundance of errors does impede communication. In some instances, the apparent omission of...