Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South

Preface

I am grateful to Professors Michael M. Cass and Sarah Gardner as well as their colleagues at Mercer University for having honored me with an invitation to deliver the Lamar Lectures . Together with their students and the good people of the Macon community, they favored me with formidable intellectual challenges to accompany their cheering warmth and exemplary hospitality. I have rearranged the three lectures delivered at Mercer into four chapters. Where words appear in italics, the emphasis appeared in the texts quoted. Since the quotations contain so many errors or peculiarities of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, I have omittedsic. Although this little book should speak for itself, some brief clarification may be in order. A focus on the religious dimension of the response to slavery, military defeat, and emancipation risks distortion, as all analytical isolation must, but it cannot be understood without attention to the political and economic exigencies of slaveholding. The proslavery divines of the Old South understood clearly, as did the more acute abolitionists, that the social relations ofproduction—to invoke a Marxist category the slaveholders embraced without having Preface P R E F A C E read Marx—encouraged or retarded the spreading of the Gospel . Overwhelmingly, Southerners, even those who did not speak the language of "free will," agreed that everyone had to assume responsibility for his actions and inactions, but, in the eyes of the leading proslavery theorists, clerical and lay, social relations and material conditions affected the extent and pace of the spread of the Gospel and men's preparation to receive it. For proslavery spokesmen, "Christian slavery" offered the South—indeed, the world—the best hope for the vital work of preparation for the Kingdom, but they acknowledged that, from a Christian point of view, the slavery practiced in the South left much to be desired. For them, the struggle to reform or, rather, transform social relations was nothing less than a struggle to justify the trust God placed in them when He sanctioned slavery. This book explores the nature and consequences of their failure. I have also returned to the old, hotly debated question of whether Southerners felt guilty about their ownership ofslaves. Reviewing the work of those who have advanced the guilt thesis and rethinking my long-held opposition, I have concluded that we have all been excessively rigid in our formulation of the question and that a fresh look is needed. I first became interested in the problem of the response to the fall of the Confederacy when, many years ago, I read Bell I. Wiley's essay, "The Movement to Humanize the Institution of Slavery During the Confederacy" (Emory University Quarterly 5 [!949]: 207-20). In Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World theSlaves Made (New York, 1974), I stressed the extent to which the reformers aimed to strengthen rather than undermine slavery. Believing that much more needed to be said, I continued to xiv P R E F A C E XV pursue the subject with growing attention to the depth of its religious dimension. Along the way, other scholars have treated some of the relevant themes in different contexts and offered fresh interpretations of their own, notably Drew Gilpin Faust in The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge, La., 1988) and Mitchell Snay in Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York, 1993). I am deeply relieved when I agree with my learned colleagues, whose thoughtful evaluations of extensive primary materials command attention and respect. Where I disagree, the nature of the disagreements or, more likely, the different emphases will be readily apparent to those who have read these two books, as every serious student of Southern history must. Here, I wish to express my appreciation for Faust's and Snay's contributions and for the contributions of the many others—and, happily, there are now many— whose work on Southern religion is decisively reshaping our understanding of the slave society of the Old South. I thank Amy Scott for doing heroic work in discovering the hiding places of obscure publications, for helping to check citations and footnotes, and for her Christian cheerfulness in putting up with my incurable grouchiness. I cannot begin to express my indebtedness to the incomparably learned work of Jack Maddex—not only his articles on the religious dimension of the proslavery argument but the draft of portions of his forthcoming...