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Civil War History 48.3 (2002) 268-269



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Book Review

Chaplain to the Confederacy:
Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South


Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South.By A. James Fuller.(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2000. Pp. xvii, 343. Cloth, $49.95.)

A. James Fuller's intricate and penetrating account of the life of Basil Manly does what good biography should do: it masterfully weaves the career and thought of his subject into the context of his era and place so that the reader can envision distinctly the interaction of the man with the culture in which he lived. The result is a painstakingly researched and delightfully well-written examination of the ideas and work of a leading southern Baptist minister, educator, and secessionist, one that goes beyond mere biography to provide rich insights into multiple dimensions of the South's antebellum and wartime life. Religion, higher education, the family, the growth of Southern nationalism, and the early development of the Confederacy—all capture Fuller's, and therefore the reader's, attention.

First rate as intellectual biography, the volume is also one of the most complete studies to date of how Christian ministry occurred in both urban and rural settings [End Page 268] in prewar Dixie. In his depiction of Manly's ministerial career, Fuller employs the renowned preacher's more celebrated sermons to unveil his worldview, and then uses it as the vehicle for understanding his faith and work. Foremost among these discourses were his sermons on "Mercy and Judgment." Although written as a serial history of Charleston's First Baptist Church, Manly's longest pastorate, they are more important, in Fuller's view, as a summation of "Manly's "theory of history and life" (90). In them the Baptist leader expressed his conviction that "the Christian life was a mixture of the blessings of divine mercy and the pains of divine judgment," and that what emerges from the believer's struggle with that dialectic is the will to do "one's duty" (2). This theological theme runs throughout the book as it did in Basil Manly's life—from his conversion at the feet of a slave, through his call to ministry and consequent break with his disgruntled Catholic father, his leadership of revivals in South Carolina and Alabama, and his pastorate at the Baptist "cathedral" church in Charleston. Particularly intriguing is Fuller's explication of Manly's pastoral work in Charleston, where he shepherded both masters and slaves, enforced church discipline for both groups, and did so within the "limits and order" of Southern society (74).

Manly's public addresses inform as well Fuller's descriptions of his tenure as president of the University of Alabama and his role as the South's foremost Baptist spokesman. The move to Tuscaloosa in 1837 provided Manly with a "wider sphere in which to work," and his university presidency deepened the esteem in which he was held by Southern Baptists (131). While demonstrating a remarkably interdenominational spirit for that age, he used his public utterances to uphold his church's theology of baptism, support theological education, and champion mission work in America and abroad. Capitalizing on the role he now occupied as a "public man," Manly increasingly turned his attention to sectional and political issues. He became, in Fuller's well-chosen words, an "ecclesiastical politician" (3), supporting the states' rights ticket in South Carolina in 1832, steadfastly defending slavery, and seeking to "further the cause of Christ through politics" (138). All led him to play a major role in the secession of the Southern Baptists from the national body in 1845. No wonder, then, that when Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens rode in their coach to their inaugural in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861, the new pastor of that city's First Baptist Church, Basil Manly, sat beside them. The man Fuller calls "the most ardent secessionist of them all" had become Chaplain to the Confederacy (1).

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