"The Quintessence of Sanctifying Grace": Amanda Smith's Religious Experience, Freedom, and a Temperate Cosmopolitanism

Amanda Berry Smith was born in slavery, but became an African American female evangelist, a Holiness missionary, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a named national evangelist for the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She was renowned for her preaching performances across the Midwest and abroad. As a missionary she traveled to India and Africa from 1878 to 1890, and upon her return published a substantial five-hundred-page autobiography. Little attention has been given to her autobiography or the cosmopolitan vision of her religious outlook, perhaps because of its idiosyncratic nature. She upholds some Victorian ideals of respectability but does not fall into an Anglo-Protestant mode; nor does she conform to the majority of abolitionist sentiments or faith in American progress. Her in-between status and a specific "transrational" and "transnational" religious orientation appear while she is participating in communal rituals with indigenous people in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Smith manifests a holy cosmopolitan "home" born from the legacy of slavery.