The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism

Preface

Engraving of anonymous Methodist circuit rider; from Daniels, The Illustrated History of Methodism, 519. Reprinted as the frontispiece of Pilkington, The Methodist Publishing House: A History, vol. 1, where the caption read, “On them mainly depends our hope of success.” Preface In a recent essay in the Journal of American History analyzing the current historiography on the causes of the American Civil War, historian Michael E. Woods notes that a broad consensus about the centrality of slavery as the primary reason for disunion clearly reigned in the first decade of the twentyfirst century. In terms of strategies to understand the Civil War, the “long view,” or an attempt to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries of American sectionalism, also prevails, as does a resurgent interest in the role of class and class conflict. Central to understanding both Confederate and Union nationalism has been the role of religion, whose relevance has been emphasized by commentators from Abraham Lincoln to modern historians such as George C. Rable. What is possibly a new direction for bringing all these elements to bear is the complex interaction of each of these important factors within and between subregions of the South such as East Tennessee. This is the topic of the present study: the Holston Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, before and during the war. If I ventured to offer a thesis for this study, I might well argue that in many important respects , the actual Civil War that began in 1861 unveiled an internal civil war within Holston Methodism that had been waged surreptitiously for the previous five decades. This study of the civil war within the Holston Conference during the Civil War began in the early 1990s when an elderly friend, Robert L. Hilten, a retired Methodist itinerant serving with me on the Holston Conference Commission on Archives and History, showed me a remarkable polemic published in 1868 by Jonathan L. Mann, attacking Holston ministers during the Civil War for their loyalty to the Confederacy. Since that time, our knowledge of early American Methodism has been wonderfully transformed by the addition of a remarkable collection of new monographs by Dee E. Andrews, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, and John H. Wigger that have informed my understanding of both Methodism’s structure, or polity, and its broader role in the early republic. Indeed, the Preface xii perspective of these scholars is what permits the long view of Methodism that is necessary to understanding the critical role later of the earlier antislavery movement within the denomination. I am also deeply indebted to older works by Donald G. Mathews and Russell E. Richey that have deepened my understanding of the Southern context of Methodism and its convoluted struggle with both slavery and an antislavery past. As breathtaking as these new studies of early Methodism are, however, they have not yet begun to move from the general themes to specific locations, and although we know a great deal more about Southern Methodism regionally, variations of annual conferences remain largely uncharted except for the work of local historians. In that regard, the Holston Conference is especially fortunate to have had such an able chronicler as Richard N. Price, whose five-volume history remains a superb example of how an extraordinarily insightful individual can illuminate a century of Methodism in one important border state conference. Although Price’s blatant racism often proved a fatal flaw to his interpretation of slavery within the conference, he nevertheless chronicled with extraordinary sensitivity the characters and motivations of his “brethren ,” the traveling ministers, or itinerants, as they were commonly called. The struggle among Methodists in the Holston Conference was nevertheless deeply rooted in East Tennessee’s long history as an alienated section protesting against its perceived discrimination by both the state of Tennessee and the larger South after the 1830s. East Tennessee exceptionalism, therefore, is both cause and effect of this struggle with the state of Tennessee and the larger region, but it also functions as a remarkable index into the internal civil war within the section, consisting of savage guerrilla attacks in almost every community that left a legacy of bitterness and distrust long after the Civil War formally ended. As Price would readily concede, the regionalism of Holston remained a constant factor throughout the nineteenth century, and much of the Holston Conference’s relations with the larger church and its neighboring conferences can be explained by this enduring...