And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (review)

280BOOK REVIEWS attune to the ambitions and the cultural values of the figures they study. Their work thus possesses a psychological dimension that only perceptive and sympathetic reading of the sources could produce . Where Quarles emphasized cooperation between black and white abolitionists, the Peases focus on discord and conflict. Where he found success or at least promise, they find frustration and defeat. Some years ago the authors discovered racial prejudice in the thought and action of prominent white abolitionists. Now they dwell on that trait as partial explanation for the manifold difficulties experienced by black proponents of abolition and equality. To that extent the present book fits a pattern set by J. C. Furnas' Goodbye to Uncle Tom (1956) and confirmed by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross (1974), histories in which white abolitionists are judged partly responsible for the plight of blacks. Thus twentieth century scholars burden white abolitionists with guilt comparable in effect to the antipathy pro-slavery Democrats and Colonizationists directed against them in the 1830's, a curious circumstance that an historian of the antic may someday explain. They Who Would Be Free is based on a wide array of printed and manuscript materials, many of them elusive and hitherto little-used. The emphasis is on eastern sources, however, and thus on eastern activity, though with numerous glances toward the West. Zebina Eastman's long-lived and informative free-soil newspaper, the Chicago Western Citizen, is not cited, nor does so important a black figure as James Jones of Chicago appear. But if omissions of this sort occur, the inclusion of unusually full—and meticulously accurate —accounts of such episodes (to cite one outstanding example) as the escape of Frederick Wilkins (Shadrach) provides compensation. Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University And They AU Sang HaUelujah: Pfoin-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845. By Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. Pp. xi, 155. $7.50.) Like the Indian, the past and present-day southern poor white is chiefly a figment of the national imagination. Depending on the viewpoint which the stereotype is supposed to illustrate, southern "plain folk" are conceived as besotted, mindless savages or noble children of the forest. Both the gothic and the sentimental representations —as phony as the tear-stained aborigine in a television commercial against countryside littering—have existed in popular thought at least since William Byrd's bigotries about North Carolina degeneracy and John Filson's celebrations of backwoods heroics. BOOK REVIEWS281 Modem writers do no better. Frederick Jackson Turner's self-reliant frontiersman and James Dickey's hillbilly sodomites in Deliverance share a common mythic function. In comparisons flattering or denunciatory , these polar images gauge the distance traveled by civilized man away from the Kingdom of Nature. At the present time, Americans cherish the romantic portrayal of the primitive world left behind. In some measure, Professor Dickson Bruce has met the ecological fashion of the moment, sufficiently so to win the James Mooney Award of the Southern Anthropological Society. In this much too brief study, the southern pious poor appear as yet another oppressed minority, bravely facing a contemptuous, planter-ruled, and literate world by the discovery of glorious meaning in camp-meeting experience . Bruce's analysis of revival rituals and songs provides some fascinating insights. Yet, the work is seriously deficient because of a reliance upon outdated, gushy secondary sources, especially in treatments of the southern social setting. The frontier concept, upon which Bruce bases his framework, is inadequate. Overladen with Gary Cooper style assumptions, the frontier thesis is at once so broad as to be meaningless and so narrow as to be geographically restrictive . Frank L. Owsley, William Warren Sweet, Wilbur J. Cash—all New Deal Turnerians—loom too large in a study supposedly anthropological in approach and technique. Furthermore, the author consulted no manuscript church records, diaries, and sermons, no county courthouse materials, legislative petitions, governors' papers, and census data. These resources are indispensable to the subject of nonslaveholding class life and religion. At the very least, he ought to have scanned a few of the plain-folk reminiscences gathered under the Federal Writers Project, a treasurehouse that students of...