In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Secession Sanctified
  • Bertram Wyatt-Brown (bio)
Mitchell Snay. Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xi 265 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95.

In Gospel of Disunion, Mitchell Snay offers an impressive exposition of the subtle ways in which southern churchmen advanced a sense of southern self-consciousness, handled the delicate, constitutional problem of church-state separation, departed from disapproving northern colleagues in the national denominations, and sharpened Biblical and natural-law rhetorical defenses of slavery. He insists that religion was central to southern life, and therefore the clergy, as pastors, preachers, editors, and educators, exercised much power in their advocacy of the rightness of human bondage.

In meeting the formidable intellectual agenda that he sets for himself, Snay builds effectively upon the work of important predecessors. Kenneth M. Stampp, Carl Degler and others all recognized that the sectional separations of the major denominations had an intimate relationship to political disunionism but failed in part to examine the intricate dynamics involved. That task was left to C. C. Goen in Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (1985). He submitted that the disaffected southern churches of the mid-1840s showed how the region’s institutions could thrive in independence. Slave-state politicians were duly impressed, and the lesson that southern churchmen offered was an ominous precedent for actions taken fifteen years later. At other times, the clergy adopted states’ rights language to justify breaking national ties. Snay carries these matters to greater complexity. He shows that far from being sectionally distinctive, northern and southern clergy shared religious traditions, theological assumptions and forms of logic even as they differed with growing bitterness on the morality of slaveholding. On these questions, Snay is persuasive, although only a thorough study of language patterns and logical strategies could really resolve the issue of sectional differentiations. 1

Whether nation-building or nation-destroying, pro- and antislavery camps, Snay argues, were bound to claim God’s preference for their respective causes. As a result, he justifiably begins his story with the Postal Campaign [End Page 40] under the evangelical leadership of the fledgling American Anti-Slavery Society. In the summer of 1835, the executive committee in New York distributed thousands of pamphlets to northern church people and politicians. Although dullish in content and crudely printed, these publications urged the immediate abolition of slavery on the grounds that God was no respecter of persons: kings and fools, masters and slaves all possessed a God-granted right to choose their autonomous destinies toward perdition or salvation. Some 20,000 mailings were also dispatched to leading figures in the South who were to begin at once the redemptive work of manumission. In outrage whites burned the materials, staged mass torch parades, and hunted down alleged abolitionist sympathizers.

Local clergy, as Snay recounts, found it necessary to defend their flocks against the charge of “man-stealing,” an epithet that Yankee challengers used to highlight what they regarded as mortal sin. The blasphemy of slaveholding consisted in the idea that ownership of souls could belong to man and not solely to God. In response clergymen did well to broadcast the efficacy of slavery or run risks of being thought untrustworthy. In fact, Snay might have made more of the political pressures under which so many ministers fulfilled their duties. As the author himself observes, not just for reasons of professional specialization did they evade political controversies.

In dealing with a topic that united such explosive moral and political concerns, the southern clergy had to overcome a distaste for sermonizing on controversial affairs. Moreover, they resented political officeseekers who competed with them to reach the same audience. Too often things of this world, including partisan loyalties, they discovered, crowded out anxieties about the next. In addition, battling politicians on their own turf could be hazardous. To expound on contentious topics of the hour might sunder congregations, embarrass the politically naive preacher, or, still worse, lead after service to outright unpleasantness with truculent worshipers. Although persuasive in handling these matters, Snay might have observed with even a touch of cynicism that when clergymen spied a local consensus...

Share