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Chapter Tree “The Tenderest Solicitude for Her Welfare” Founding Texts of the Andrew-Kitty Narrative W hy did the story that Martin Porter told in Old Church in 2000 seem so profoundly moving to him and his white compatriots in Oxford and its environs, even as it deeply disturbed many of his African American neighbors? Part of the explanation , as I have tried to suggest, lies in underlying structural features of the narrative, when thought of in the classic terms of myth. Porter’s rendition intuitively “feels right” to nearly all of his local white interlocutors in part because it inverts standard racially charged depictions of choice and coercion and poignantly emphasizes Bishop Andrew’s predicament in a way that foreshadows the vast national tragedy of the Civil War. The story also resonates for its supporters with present-day racial politics in the South. The narrative emphasizes comity and mutual understanding between the races, in a way that is manifestly inclusive, summoning up the voice of a sympathetic, unthreatening African American character. “Every time I hear Martin tell the story of Kitty,” one of his white neighbors , a woman in her sixties, told me, “it just brings tears to my eyes. And frankly, it makes me proud to live here in Oxford.” For all its idiosyncrasies, Porter’s version of the narrative did not emerge out of whole cloth. It is the sedimented product of a cultural and political history that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century, produced through countless tellings and retellings, in speech and written word among white interlocutors. In this chapter and the one that follows, I revisit the story through a process of textual excavation, tracing the history of public narratives about Bishop Andrew and his connections with slavery from the 1840s to the present. I concentrate on close readings of published accounts, teasing out what the story seems to have meant to writers and readers at different historical moments, before the Civil War, during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, during the struggles in 68 ch ap ter thr ee the interwar period over the reunification of the Methodist Church, and during the civil rights movement and its aftermath. For a century and a half, the story of Andrew and Kitty has been retold and transformed in many hundreds of written publications. Nearly all of these published accounts are by white southern authors who treat Bishop Andrew with extreme sympathy, although abolitionist and African American demurrals have been printed from time to time. The variations among these successive retellings are often subtle, but they do illustrate what we might call the “mythological imagination” at work. This chapter concentrates on the primary sources for the AndrewKitty narratives, penned by those who were either personally familiar with the relevant events in Oxford or who lived through the 1844 crisis in the Methodist Episcopal Church. These persons include Bishop James Osgood Andrew himself, the southern Methodist scholar and advocate A. H. Redford, Bishop Andrew’s biographer George Gilman Smith, and Bishop Andrew’s close friend and passionate defender Bishop George Foster Pierce. Andrew’s May 1844 Letter The foundational text of what I have termed “the myth of Kitty” is a letter authored by Bishop James Osgood Andrew in May 1844, addressed to his fellow bishops at the General Conference in New York City of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Several northern antislavery members of the Conference had proposed that Andrew refrain from exercising his duties as a bishop as long as he continued to own slaves. The letter was reprinted in scores of newspapers in the North and South, and elicited widespread national discussion and debate: Dear Brethren:—In reply to your inquiry, I submit the following statement of all the facts bearing on my connection with slavery. Several years since an old lady in Augusta, Ga., bequeathed to me a mulatto girl, in trust, that I would take care of her until she should be nineteen years of age, and with her consent I should send her to Liberia and that in case of her refusal I should keep her and make her as free as the laws of the State of Georgia would permit. When the time arrived she refused to go to Liberia and of her own choice remains legally my slave, although I derive no pecuniary advantage from her, she continues to live in her own house on my lot, and has been, and still is, at perfect liberty to go to...

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