The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism

The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism PDF Author: Durwood Dunn
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621900169
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism addresses a much-neglected topic in both Appalachian and Civil War history—the role of organized religion in the sectional strife and the war itself. Meticulously researched, well written, and full of fresh facts, this new book brings an original perspective to the study of the conflict and the region. In many important respects, the actual Civil War that began in 1861 unveiled an internal civil war within the Holston Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South—comprising churches in southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and a small portion of northern Georgia—that had been waged surreptitiously for the previous five decades. This work examines the split within the Methodist Church that occurred with mounting tensions over the slavery question and the rise of the Confederacy. Specifically, it looks at how the church was changing from its early roots as a reform movement grounded in a strong local pastoral ministry to a church with a more intellectual, professionalized clergy that often identified with Southern secessionists. The author has mined an exhaustive trove of primary sources, especially the extensive, yet often-overlooked minutes from frequent local and regional Methodist gatherings. He has also explored East Tennessee newspapers and other published works on the topic. The author’s deep research into obscure church records and other resources results not only in a surprising interpretation of the division within the Methodist Church but also new insights into the roles of African Americans, women, and especially lay people and local clergy in the decades prior to the war and through its aftermath. In addition, Dunn presents important information about what the inner Civil War was like in East Tennessee, an area deeply divided between Union and Confederate sympathizers. Students and scholars of religious history, southern history, and Appalachian studies will be enlightened by this volume and its bold new way of looking at the history of the Methodist Church and this part of the nation.

The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism

The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism PDF Author: Durwood Dunn
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621900169
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism addresses a much-neglected topic in both Appalachian and Civil War history—the role of organized religion in the sectional strife and the war itself. Meticulously researched, well written, and full of fresh facts, this new book brings an original perspective to the study of the conflict and the region. In many important respects, the actual Civil War that began in 1861 unveiled an internal civil war within the Holston Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South—comprising churches in southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and a small portion of northern Georgia—that had been waged surreptitiously for the previous five decades. This work examines the split within the Methodist Church that occurred with mounting tensions over the slavery question and the rise of the Confederacy. Specifically, it looks at how the church was changing from its early roots as a reform movement grounded in a strong local pastoral ministry to a church with a more intellectual, professionalized clergy that often identified with Southern secessionists. The author has mined an exhaustive trove of primary sources, especially the extensive, yet often-overlooked minutes from frequent local and regional Methodist gatherings. He has also explored East Tennessee newspapers and other published works on the topic. The author’s deep research into obscure church records and other resources results not only in a surprising interpretation of the division within the Methodist Church but also new insights into the roles of African Americans, women, and especially lay people and local clergy in the decades prior to the war and through its aftermath. In addition, Dunn presents important information about what the inner Civil War was like in East Tennessee, an area deeply divided between Union and Confederate sympathizers. Students and scholars of religious history, southern history, and Appalachian studies will be enlightened by this volume and its bold new way of looking at the history of the Methodist Church and this part of the nation.

A Long Reconstruction

A Long Reconstruction PDF Author: Paul William Harris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197571840
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? Conventional historical timelines mark the end of Reconstruction in the year 1877, but the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to wrestle with issues of racial inclusion for decades after political support for racial reform had receded. An 1844 schism over slavery split Methodism into northern and southern branches, but Union victory in the Civil War provided the northern Methodists with the opportunity to send missionaries and teachers into the territory that had been occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. To a remarkable degree, the M.E. Church succeeded in appealing to freed slaves and white Unionists and thereby built up a biracial membership far surpassing that of any other Protestant denomination. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. African Americans who joined did so in a spirit of hope that through religious fellowship and cooperation they could gain respect and acceptance and ultimately assume a position of equality and brotherhood with whites. However, as segregation gradually took hold in the South, many northern Methodists evinced the same skepticism as white southerners about the fitness of African Americans for positions of authority and responsibility in an interracial setting. The African American membership was never without strong white allies who helped to sustain the Church's official stance against racial caste but, like the nation as a whole, the M.E. Church placed a growing priority on putting their broken union back together.

The Civil War along Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau

The Civil War along Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau PDF Author: Aaron Astor
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625849362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau played host to some of the most dramatic military maneuvering of the Civil War. Straddling the entire state of Tennessee, the formidable tableland proved to be a maze of topographical pitfalls and a morass of divided loyalties. As Federal forces sought to capitalize on the capture of Nashville, they moved into a region split by the most vicious guerrilla warfare outside Missouri, including the colorful and intensely violent rivalry between Confederate Champ Ferguson and Unionist "Tinker" Dave Beaty. The bitter conflict affected thousands of ordinary men and women struggling to survive in the face of a remorseless war of attrition, and its legacy continues to be felt today.

Reform Movements in Methodism Brought on by Societal Issues 1830-1885

Reform Movements in Methodism Brought on by Societal Issues 1830-1885 PDF Author: Paul McCleary
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1503521796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A thoughtful critic of his denomination who sees its future bound to the way in which it reacts to reformers and reform movements. In times of social change, social institutions feel the stress to be faithful to their purpose as well as the tension to be relevant to innovation. The institutions that survive will be those which are capable of responding to change as well as continuing to be faithful to its loyal supporters. The best way to manage that tension is by understanding the organizations history in dealing with prior encounters with reform movements.

Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares

Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares PDF Author: John H. Matsui
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues that the political ideology and racial views of American Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative of the North versus the South. Moving beyond the traditional optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants of the Civil War era into “premillenarian” and “postmillenarian” camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing. This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances. Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to actively perfect the world via moral reform—of self and society—and free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans’ utopian plans to reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the reconstruction of southern society. Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union victory in 1865.

Our Country

Our Country PDF Author: Grant R. Brodrecht
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823279936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
On March 4, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, Reverend Doctor George Peck put the finishing touches on a collection of his sermons that he intended to send to the president. Although the politically moderate Peck had long opposed slavery, he, along with many other northern evangelicals, was not an abolitionist. During the Civil War he had come to support emancipation, but, like Lincoln, the conflict remained first and foremost about preserving the Union. Believing their devotion to the Union was an act of faithfulness to God first and the Founding Fathers second, Our Country explores how many northern white evangelical Protestants sacrificed racial justice on behalf of four million African-American slaves (and then ex-slaves) for the Union’s persistence and continued flourishing as a Christian nation. By examining Civil War-era Protestantism in terms of the Union, author Grant Brodrecht adds to the understanding of northern motivation and the eventual "failure" of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African American's equal place in society. Complementing recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, Our Country contends that non-radical Protestants consistently subordinated concern for racial justice for what they perceived to be the greater good. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather they expected to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogenous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause. Brodrecht eloquently addresses this so-called “proprietary” regard for Christian America, considered within the context of crises surrounding the Union’s existence and its nature from the Civil War to the 1880s. Including sources from major Protestant denominations, the book rests on a selection of sermons, denominational newspapers and journals, autobiographies, archival personal papers of several individuals, and the published and unpublished papers of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. The author examines these sources as they address the period’s evangelical sense of responsibility for America, while keyed to issues of national and presidential politics. Northern evangelicals’ love of the Union arguably contributed to its preservation and the slaves’ emancipation, but in subsuming the ex-slaves to their vision for Christian America, northern evangelicals contributed to a Reconstruction that failed to ensure the ex-slaves’ full freedom and equality as Americans.

Sacred Capital

Sacred Capital PDF Author: Hunter Price
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813951348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How Methodist settlers in the American West acted as agents of empire In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital, Hunter Price resituates the Methodist Episcopal Church as a settler-colonial institution at the convergence of “the Methodist Age” and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.” Price offers a novel interpretation of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a network through which mostly white settlers exchanged news of land and jobs and facilitated financial transactions. Benefiting from Indigenous dispossession and removal policies, settlers made selective, strategic use of the sacred and the secular in their day-to-day interactions to advance themselves and their interests. By analyzing how Methodists acted as settlers while identifying as pilgrims, Price illuminates the ways that ordinary white Americans fulfilled Jefferson’s vision of an Empire of Liberty while reinforcing the inequalities at its core.

Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States

Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States PDF Author: George Thomas Kurian
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442244321
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 2849

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Book Description
From the Founding Fathers through the present, Christianity has exercised powerful influence in the United States—from its role in shaping politics and social institutions to its hand in inspiring art and culture. The Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States outlines the myriad roles Christianity has played and continues to play. This masterful five-volume reference work includes biographies of major figures in the Christian church in the United States, influential religious documents and Supreme Court decisions, and information on theology and theologians, denominations, faith-based organizations, immigration, art—from decorative arts and film to music and literature—evangelism and crusades, the significant role of women, racial issues, civil religion, and more. The first volume opens with introductory essays that provide snapshots of Christianity in the U.S. from pre-colonial times to the present, as well as a statistical profile and a timeline of key dates and events. Entries are organized from A to Z. The final volume closes with essays exploring impressions of Christianity in the United States from other faiths and other parts of the world, as well as a select yet comprehensive bibliography. Appendices help readers locate entries by thematic section and author, and a comprehensive index further aids navigation.

Tennessee Historical Quarterly

Tennessee Historical Quarterly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South

An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South PDF Author: Ezekiel Birdseye
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499647
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
"This volume, a collection of letters written by an abolitionist businessman who lived in East Tennessee prior to the Civil War, provides one of the clearest firsthand views yet published of a region whose political, social, and economic distinctions have intrigued historians for more than a century." "Between 1841 and 1846, Birdseye expressed his views and observations in letters to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York reformer who arranged to have many of them published in antislavery newspapers such as the Emancipator and Friend of Man." "Those letters, reproduced in this book, drew on Birdseye's extensive conversations with slaveholders, nonslaveholders, and the slaves themselves. He found that East Tennesseans, on the whole, were antislavery in sentiment, susceptible to rational abolitionist appeal, and generally far more lenient toward individual slaves than were other southerners. Opposed to slavery on economic as well as moral grounds, Birdseye sought to establish a free labor colony in East Tennessee in the early 1840s and actively supported the region's abortive effort in 1842 to separate itself from the rest of the state."--[book jacket].