Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS271 females inferior, and America destined to fulfill special Providential purposes . Even in its more elaborate detail, this image is not novel; it has been traced before by students of American textbooks in several briefer historical treatments (including notably Richard D. Mosier's Making the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in the McGuffey Readers, which Elson unaccountably overlooked, along with several other valuable secondary sources). But Guardians of Tradition demonstrates, as has no earlier work, the sweep of ideological agreement among America's moralizing nineteenthcentury textbook authors. Elson's study thus brings greater depth and sophistication to innumerable broad questions of American intellectual and educational history. Her analysis understandably makes no claim to measure the influence schoolbooks exerted upon American youth. Nor is Elson's legitimate purpose thereby any the less well served. "To what extent an individual may be influenced by concepts implicit in his schoolbooks," she notes, "is a question that needs the attention of the psychologist as well as of the social scientist." One could nonetheless argue that her portrayal of the composite purpose of nineteenth-century schoolbooks does amount to an important suggestion about their influence. For the readers, spellers, arithmetics, histories, and geographies preached the same values regularly found in popular self-help literature, dime novels, magazines, sermons, and patriotic pronouncements in America. If we shall never know how studiously the nineteenth-century child used his textbook, there remains the assurance that multitudinous purveyors of informal education in American character stood ready to see that the lessons of the schoolbooks would not be neglected. Charles Burgess University of Washington Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845. By Donald G. Mathews. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Pp. xi, 329. $7.50. ) In this volume Professor Mathews has produced an exemplary monograph . The subject is significant, the study in depth, the conclusions based on a broad survey of primary sources, and the style most attractive. The publisher has cooperated to produce a clear type, footnotes at the bottom of the page, a full bibliography, and an adequate index. The author has stated his basic intention as being an examination of the various reactions to slavery in early America. For this purpose the Methodist Episcopal Church proves a handy vehicle. Essentially middle class in origin, its scope was national, and its membership sufficiently large to give a good cross section of American public opinion. Against this church history background, Mr. Mathews has produced a dramatic picture of the struggles of conscience and the compromises produced as this religious body sought to maintain its unity in the face of the most pressing social problem of the era. John Wesley, founder of the denomination, believed that Negro slavery 272CIVIL WAR HISTORY was one of the greatest evils that a Christian should fight, a view that was written into the General Rules of 1743. Yet as early as 1785, idealism had come into sharp conflict with the economic realities of American life. By 1800, public opinion, at least in the South, had forced the Church into a face-saving compromise with slavery. Methodist laymen simply did not want to free slaves which they either already owned or some day hoped to buy. Methodism was a people's movement, and the people either wanted slavery or feared emancipation. Four years later, the Conference suspended the whole "Section on Slavery" south of Virginia. Gradually the Church's official position became one of meeting its religious obligation to the Negro through the evangelistic Mission to the Slaves and support of the American Colonization Society. This, they felt, allowed them to avoid alarming the slaveholders in their congregations, to accept the legal status quo, and yet fulfill their moral responsibilities. The rise of abolitionism in the 1830's, however, severely threatened this peace-keeping arrangement. Increasingly, northern conferences called for a return to the original principles of Methodism and would no longer accept the Mission and colonization as a moral compromise. Southerners, on the other hand, would not grant the premise that slavery was a sin and that they, therefore, were sinners. Feeling themselves to be devout as any in the Church, the southerners became hypersensitive to any imagined insult...