Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South by Charity R. Carney (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Ministers and Masters Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South Charity R. Carney Methodism, a British import to America and then a northern import to the southern United States, faced a number of challenges as it expanded south. Many features of early American Methodist belief, structure, and practice did not fit well in the developing southern culture, especially in its increasing reliance on the slave system. In fact, early Methodist circuit riders, most of who came from the North, often made it their distinct mission to rebuke southerners’ slave-owning, dueling, and perceived irreligiosity, and to redeem and transform the region. “Over time, however,” Charity Carney argues, “ministers became integrated into the society that they were trying to save” (10). Ministers and Masters, through a sustained focus on southern Methodist men, especially ministers, provides the best and most thorough answer to the question of how Methodism became successful in the South and how it changed in order to achieve this success. Carney’s book, based on her University of Alabama history dissertation, fills a few historiographical gaps. Readers likely will notice in its framework echoes of Christine Heyrman’s 1997 book Southern Cross. But whereas Heyrman’s questions remain broad, focused on how “evangelicalism ” became dominant in the South, Carney takes a sharper focus, zeroing in on southern Methodist men, mostly ministers, and especially circuit riders. Ministers and Masters could be classified in a number of ways—southern history, religious history, history of slavery and religion, gender history—but readers might best understand it as a denominational history of Methodism, since the church provides the most foundational category for organizing data. Although the study of American Methodism often has been hampered by its insular denominationalism , the church still proves a historically viable and useful analytic. Unlike too many Methodist histories, however, this book should appeal to historians with interests outside the church and its history. Because Carney’s primary concern is the story of how a denomination so out of step with southern society and culture became so successful, in telling that Charity R. Carney. Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 216 pp. ISBN: 9780807138861 (cloth), $35.00. BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2014 91 story she offers numerous insights about southern culture more broadly, especially at the intersections of masculinity, patriarchy, family life, and slavery. Circuit riders, at least early in their history, were predominantly single and presumably celibate . The church sought men willing to forsake the world, uninterested in political power and economic gain, a construction of manhood that stood at odds with southern patriarchs’ honor culture and slave system. Methodist men, Carney shows, found ways to navigate these tensions, remaking themselves in order to make sense as southern men but still critique southern manhood. For example, they told “tales that highlighted masculine boldness and ministerial piety” as they attempted to prevent duels (23). Over time, the ministers increasingly capitulated to southern society, but they forged a hybridized ideal of Methodist manhood, one “centered on spiritual fatherhood rather than temporal mastery” (64), that allowed them to fit more or less comfortably in both southern society and the church. Slavery became a ubiquitous issue for Methodists, especially in the South, and it hung in the background of most denominational debates (as in U.S. politics writ large). The issue prompted the church split along sectional lines in 1844, but tensions over slavery bubbled for decades before they spilled over. Carney devotes her final chapter to slavery, but its specter remains present throughout the book. In the final chapter , though, the dramatic changes in southern Methodist manhood became apparent. Carney argues that “by the 1840s and 1850s Methodist ministers had become absorbed into southern culture, and many of them supported slavery as fervently as the congregants that they served” (123). She does not use the word “declension,” but clearly little compromises, specifically in the reframing of masculinity, led to an eventual one hundred eighty-degree turn, and a once stridently abolitionist denomination became, at least in the South, unabashedly proslavery. Historians have described this transformation before, but Carney’s emphasis on the importance...