Whig Hill

evals

The CC evaluations are in. They're done voluntarily, online, so only about six students actually filled it out. (I'll offer credit next time. Then they'll all do it.) Here are all of the qualitative responses. I'm happy, because one or two of them got it, and one of them has a sense of humor.

What are the strengths of this instructor?

Communicates well

Explains and elaborates on facts and events very well, so there is no misunderstanding.

HE is very good on interactive disscussion, and has helped not to be quiet in class

Instead of giving memorized tests in this class, Mr. Graham asked us to read the information and we had full discussions each week on the material. In my opinion, this method allows for a greater understanding of the information than merely memorizing facts and then forgetting them. He has instilled greater concepts in this course, which I feel has a better, lasting impact. He also asked us to write 2 papers in this class. I think this is a good practice because there are too many students that need much improvement in this area.

The format of the class allows students to relate the material current events and keeps students engaged in the class.

What are the areas for improvement for this instructor?

A particular student tended to dominate the class, not to a serious extent but, enough to be annoying.

He self admits that he can have a difficult time focusing his thoughts and stating a clear question that he wants an answer to. His thought process comes through in the way he communicates. This leads to my only real feedback. It would be great if he could reduce the number of times he uses the word "um". It interrupts his flow of thought and also interrupts the flow of conversation, making him and the topic harder to understand and focus on. I counted once for curiosity purposes and the word "um" was spoken 17 times in about 8 minutes. It's just something that would make him even more effective if he reduced the use. He knows his history incredibly well and is a great teacher.

None

What are the strengths of this course?

He knows his history incredibly well and is a great teacher. I also really like the format of the class. No short term memorizing of facts, but in depth conversations of large topics and big picture points. These things stick with a person better than short term memorizing. He also really encourages the class to speak up and be a part of the topic. I think that builds confidence for students too. Helped increase my retention even more.

This class fills a space missing in the knowledge base of the average college student.

What are the areas for improvement for this course?

None

Coverage versus sort-of-uncoverage

Unexpected experiment this last semester. I had two classes on the same topic (Am. Hist. II) at two different schools. I used two different textbooks and attempted two different approaches to teaching this survey.

At the Community College (CC), I used The American Journey, and they read one or two chapters per week. I guess you might call this “coverage,” meaning that we strove to get a comprehensive picture of historical events between 1865 and now. In class, I used directed discussions to reinforce what they had read. (I also used weekly online quizzes to compel them to actually read. And that worked.) I’m not certain how the students felt about the actual textbook, but I like it. The chapters obviously reflect the latest historigraphical trends, are engagingly written, and—happily—emphasize those things in American history that I like to teach. (For instance—the continuity and, ahem, evolution, of the conservative sensibility from before Scopes and beyond. The model of conflating the “60s” and “70s” as one giant headache—the stagnation of the New Deal coalition—is refreshing, and makes a perfect foil for understanding the Reagan Revolution.) The problem here is that after a quick discussion of the main points, that was pretty much it. Class over. (CC class, once a week after everyone comes from a full time job, is not the place to assign extra reading or keep them in class once we’ve got past the primary intellectual struggle.)

This is all real nice and ordinary, but compare it to my Four Year College (FYC) class. For them, I assigned the Major Problems book, plus a raft of articles from J-Stor. For those who don’t know, the Major Problems books are not comprehensive historical narratives, but chronologically arranged considerations of a “major question” about time periods in the American past. The chapters contain about a dozen primary sources, and two historical essays that (ideally) argue opposing points. I wasn’t really practicing the “uncoverage” model of survey teaching, but using the MP book eschews a comprehensive narrative in favor of analytical focus on discrete parts of the story.

And that was the problem. For most of the FYC students, this was the first, and probably only, history class they would take. And most of them were not liberal arts majors. (This is about the only thing they shared with the CC students.) So, they were completely unprepared to jump into deep analytical discussions of turning points in American History. They largely didn’t know American History. In museums, we might say that they were not afforded an opportunity to become oriented to their surroundings. And this became a major stumbling block in the first half of the semester as I pressed them to consider aspects of industrialization or immigrant life while they had absolutely no concept of what it even meant to be in the 1880s. No safety net of a popular song or style, no life raft of recognizable president or event, no toe-hold on a defining characteristic of an age. (Demonstrating in a small way that historical thinking truly is an unnatural act.)

I became frustrated as the discussions foundered and the students obviously didn’t know what to do. (I’m going to discuss this particular problem in another post.) I wanted desperately to chuck the MP book* and just give them The American Journey book because that would provide a large framework for understanding where we were and what is going on. Orientation is good, but this felt like a backwards step in the pedagogy of history. We solved this by cutting back on analytical discussion and introducing “coverage lectures,” wherein I devoted lots of class time to…well…traditional lecturing, in an attempt to provide students a starting point. I think this worked, as the analytical discussion of the MP essays and documents became shorter, but far more rewarding (particularly as they blended with my lectures.)

*If Ed Blum is reading this…don’t worry, I didn’t, and I’ll use this book again.

Point is, I felt like the comprehensive narrative reading and approach conveyed best the important points in American history that students need to know. But teaching surveys is decidedly headed away from this approach. I eventually reached a point at the FYC where I felt comfortable with using the MP book, but that happened because I devoted more time to preparing for class, and didn’t get a thing done on my dissertation.

The other point is this: FUTURE EMPLOYERS—I am flexible, always learning and experimenting, and always turning to SOTL to improve my classes. This is a thing you want in a department member.

GR followup

I shouldn’t be so quick to say that the GRs didn’t practice church discipline in the Baptist way because I could not find records of trials. For one, I should go back to my own admonishment that discipline is not limited to church courts. Duh. The GRs did indeed take measures to ensure the integrity of a pious community. (And the Classis’ annual reports on the state of religion express a greater consciousness of the separation between the church and the world that had largely slipped away from Baptist and Methodist rhetoric by the 1850s.)

The Constitution of the German Reformed Church—oft-refered to in the Classis minutes—prescribed the standard ritual for enforcing discipline, which it defined as, “the exercise of the authority and the application of that system or laws, which the Lord Jesus Christ has established in his Church, with a view of preserving its purity and honor, either through the amendment or exclusion of unworthy members and ministers.” (Followed by the instruction, “All Christian discipline is spiritual.”) Punishable offenses included, “heresy, blasphemy, public schism, perjury, adultery, fornication, theft, fraud, lawless violence, contentiousness, intemperance, falsehood, filthy lucre, lascivious wantonness, gross profanation of the Lord’s day, impudent scoffing, cruelty to servants, and other of similar character.” They helpfully defined “private,” and “public” offences; private being those sins that only a small number of people knew about and could be rebuked privately, and public sins being those that had shamed the church, and therefore required public admonition.

The thing is…These rules are from the Constitution of the GR Church but I can’t find any actual reference to people being brought up on trial. Does that mean that people largely ignored official decrees of the Synod? Or did they just not record trials? Or, what?

What is apparent, at least in the Classis records—where you would expect to find such things—is a firm determination to maintain religious orthodoxy. (Remember, breaches of discipline—even down to drunkenness—was a “spiritual” sin.) They did so not only by protesting the Mercersburg Theology, but by adhering to the stated constitution. For instance, when Elder Peter Harman of Catawba County raised questions about the treatment of slaves, Classis enforced its opinion that “cruelty to servants” was prohibited, citing the specific article of the Constitution.

Still, I have no record of any church excommunicating someone for drunkenness or abuse of their wives.

As for the matter of why the GRs are even worth looking at, I will blatantly steal a Jeanne Boydston quote from a Monica Najar article, “anomalies are just what ought to interest us as historians—not so we can figure a way to force them to conform to the framework, but because they disrupt the common sense of the framework and may signal something that is being missed or suppressed within it.”

I just read Professor Najar’s book, and it is helping me fit together discipline, temperance, et. al., that I’m having so much trouble with right now.

What the GRs told me

Just had a couple of good days at the Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society at the Lancaster Theological Seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I did not find what I was looking for. (But I did slip over and visit Midtown Scholar, finally. Nice.)

I need evidence for how German Reformed congregations in Piedmont North Carolina practiced church discipline. Did they do the same as the Baptists and Quakers and admonish and rebuke people who drank, skipped church, or abused their families? Can we just apply what we already know about Bs & Qs to this small group that had a presence in my area?

The German Reformed were Calvinists, the same as Baptists. But unlike the Baptists, they had a catechism and a liturgy and various rituals (the Lord’s Supper) that structured their worship. But like the Baptists (and unlike their non-Calvinist Lutheran cousins), the GRs got into the whole revival and protracted meeting business.

So I couldn’t find any church (or, consistory) records that contained proceedings of disciplinary actions. The few church records I found (Stiener’s in Alamance, Pilgrim in Davidson) contained only membership lists and records of baptisms and communion services. Nothing on trials.

I’m thinking they didn’t really do discipline the way we think of it. What seems important to these GRs is the Lord’s Supper services, baptisms, and confirmations. We’ll get back to this lack of discipline in a minute.

I did find the manuscript records of the North Carolina Classis starting in 1844 (that’s the state-level organization, like the Baptist State Convention or the Presbyterian Synod.) From these records I learned quite a bit. For instance, they were late to the education and Sunday School bandwagon, the only time they engaged with missionaries was when they asked for some, and while they hated intemperance and other forms of drinking, they acted like they had never heard of the temperance movement. (This last fact already has a place in my temperance section.)

But in other ways, they are exactly like other evangelicals of the time and place. They advocate Christian slaveholding practices, promoted the concept of the family altar, and remained firmly orthodox on all doctrinal matters.

Their annual reports on the “State of Religion” sound just like the Methodist and Baptist versions. In fact, there is a standard evangelical trope/outline for how these reports are written:

            1. Things are gloomy. Religion and Truth are loosing ground,

            2. Because of impiety and neglect,

            3. We are thus paying for our sins,

            4. But there is hope, or daylight, ahead,

            5. If we continue to struggle, we can get there. (We are never there.)

            6. All of it, the neglect, impiety, and struggle, are bad, but not bad because they are firm            evidence and proof that God is at work. And that right there is reason for hope.

The good reports are just the opposite:

            1. Things are looking up. Revival is afoot,

            2. But there are still problems and we still need to struggle with them, or else.

I’m pretty convinced that the years 1849 through 1851 saw a general revival of religion across the Piedmont. I think nearly every denomination notes remarkable gains in piety and members during these years. Then it fades. (Yes, the same years of the Wesleyan episode. Not a coincidence.)

Anyhow, I didn’t see anything about church discipline in the Classis records, but I didn’t expect to. Classis didn’t do discipline any more than the Baptist State Convention did. It did, however, accept queries from churches, and in 1844, Brick Church in Alamance asked,   

“Resolved that Classis be requested to take under consideration and determine how long members of the German Reformed Church ought to be allowed to enjoy church membership after absenting themselves from the Lord’s Table and the house of worship, without a good excuse, before they be stricken off.”

Being absent from a Baptist church or a Quaker meeting will get you rebuked real quick. This is the kind of thing discipline was on top of because that’s how you remain vigilant for the health of your congregation. That a GR church obviously wasn’t paying attention to that suggests to me they weren’t really paying attention to that kind of discipline at all. The health of a GR church seems to have been measured by attendance at Lord’s Supper, by baptisms, and by confirmations. Those lists that make up most consistory records.

Classis responded that when a person was absent for a year, then they can be stricken off. Discipline taught patience, but that kind of laxity just ain’t gonna fly with the Baptists.

Why is any of this important? After all, the GRs don’t appear to have numbered more than 1,500 in a white population of 500,000. (The GRs pastors were terrible number crunchers, so that’s an educated guess.) There were more Methodists in Guilford County (probably, I don’t know) than all of the GRs in North Carolina.

Well, for one, everything we know about church discipline in the south, we know from the Baptists. (And you already know we don’t know about Methodist discipline, really.) So it’s nice to get the view of a different group, particularly if that different group did it…differently. (Remember, I’m interested in this region because it has a reputation for not being on board with the mainstream in some upcoming events.)

How the GRs approached discipline gives us an idea about how a whole group of people approached issues of morality and behavior in civic and political life. For instance, an outstanding scholar recently wrote an article in the NCHR about the temperance movement in Rowan County, the seat of the GR community. He noted that temperance didn’t do so well there because people in the countryside just were not interested in joining secular temperance societies. I think that the GR church was largely ambivalent about temperance is a better explanation than urban/rural divide he offered. (And you can bet that Baptists and Methodists in the countryside largely—but not always—went for temperance. Their preachers were pushing it.)

So, I still got a lot of thinking to do on this one.

My slight Caroline problem

When Caroline Brooks wed James Lilly, she married into one of the elite families of Montgomery County, North Carolina. The Lillys owned land and slaves, were politically consequential—James had served one term in the House of Commons in the 1830s—and were connected by marriage and acquaintance with other wealthy families along the Pee Dee River. The patriarch of James’ generation, Edmund, Jr.,--James’ older brother—had removed to Fayetteville and James lived at the family seat, Scuffleton, in the southwestern part of the county.

Why is this a problem? Because I am allegedly talking about common people yeomen ordinary people. To be one of the squirearchy seems by definition to not be ordinary. But I am continuing to call Caroline ordinary, and fiddling with the definitions and imagery of elite people and common people is part of the deal.

Part of the reason is that Caroline herself experienced poverty, marginalization, and ignorance in her own family growing up. Indeed, she was born illegitimate, raised partially by her grandmother and partially by her mother and stepfather, who put her to work in the kitchen and the field at an early age. She ended up in an elite family, but absolutely came of age in poverty, and remained painfully conscious of that fact for the rest of her life.

Another part is this—being elite in Montgomery County, North Carolina is not like being elite in Hillsborough, Charleston, or Natchez. James and his neighbors did not command legions of slaves, multiple farms, and small capital empires. In 1840, one year after their wedding, James reported the ownership of nine black people, only two of which worked alongside him in Scuffleton’s fields. (In addition to two men between ages 10 and 35, the Lillys owned four boys under 10, one girl under 10, and two women over 10.) Actually, one or two of these enslaved people might have been hired, and not owned by James and Caroline.

James’ status as a slaveowner certainly set him apart in Montgomery. In the East Pee Dee District (that part that became Montgomery after Stanly County split off in 1841), only 126 of 413 households owned slaves (about %30*). Of that %30, the average household owned 6 or 7 slaves. The largest slaveowner (John Steel) possessed 33 slaves. At nine slaves, James held just two more than the average, but did not stand out in any way. (*Vicki Bynum has %21 of free families owning slaves in Montgomery in 1860. I’m doing back-of-the-envelope math here.)

Here is one smaller problem. Caroline died in 1847. Between 1840 and 1850, James increased his holdings considerably. By that later date, the widower James reported ownership of eighteen slaves and two thousand dollars worth of land. This is a considerable increase, and the eighteen slaves nudges awfully close to the traditional academic definition of planter. But I don’t know under what circumstances this increase happened. Was it before or after 1847? I suspect it was gradual, part of a general rise in the value of southern plantations and slaves that increased slave-owners’ wealth across the board by 1857. (Caroline never talked of slave purchases, aside from the person James purchased for her upon their wedding.)

(I’ve complicated this all myself by thinking and saying that Caroline’s family owned nineteen slaves, which is not a real accurate statement, but something that has got lodged in my head. From what we know, when she was alive in 1840, they owned nine slaves. The difference makes my assertion that Caroline is ordinary, on its face, less striking.)

So we have a family in the 1840s that owned nine slaves (yeoman by almost any standard) and yet socially and politically sat atop a their community. Yes, James would likely have considered himself the political and social equal of Wade Hampton and James Henry Hammond. (McCurry is right in that.) But James worked in the crops and Caroline in her garden in a physical and daily way that those former men did not. (Caroline never worked in the fields like McCurry’s yeoman wives, but her physical labor in the garden, the flocks of fowl, the kitchen, and the loom—and her centrality to the household economy—is a major theme of her diary.)

So what am I getting at here? The Lillys undoubtedly enjoyed economic and social privileges that their landless and slaveless neighbors did not. But their lived experience (sorry)—especially hers—was so much closer to Strong, Flintoff, and other demonstrably ordinary people that I can’t think of them as anything but… average.

Strong Thomasson never owned slaves, and so according to historiographical convention, his actions don’t have to be rationalized.

 

An ordinary goals post

OK so the term and concept modern is just too huge and complicated to make any sense in my dissertation. It might could work if I were directly debating Genovese and Wyatt-Brown on the issue of pre-modern and modern economic styles and cultural codes. But this is not 1987, and while I am fundamentally taking a stance on all that, I need to not get bogged down in that language.

So, I’m going to drop references to modern, and will need to stop calling religion modern religion as a counterpoint to traditional practice.

(Can’t do that without the question: what do you call a cultural movement that you know—from historical perspective—will prevail over its competitors, without privileging it with providential language?)

To be more specific, I am dealing with the term middle class. That right there is also a huge and complicated discussion, but it bears more directly on what I am investigating, so I’ve got to engage it. The definition of that term is difficult, as you can configure it to mean something that developed only in northern urban areas before the war, or an ideal that was adaptable and abroad in many parts of the United States. Fortunately, for my musings here, I can respond to one work, John Wells’ The Origins of the Southern Middle Class (2004), as the most succinct and recent definition and description of this slippery group of people.

So what does Wells describe? He’s very E.P. Thompsonian with his description—paying close attention to that point when a self-conscious articulation of class solidarity appeared (he’s got it in the early 1850s.) The middle class developed, according to Wells, because of cultural and commercial connections to the north. It consisted of middling and wealthy professionals in urban areas. What I like best is his acknowledgement that historical explanations for the middle class phenomena break down into two parts: economic and cultural.

That’s important to me because I’ve got this rhetorical stance that my subjects offer a unique example of middle-classiness because their aspirations preceded economic change. So, I’m responding to the economic part of the broader discussion. I’ve been largely ignoring the cultural side and I’m not sure why. It could be that discussions of southern culture almost universally revolve around slavery and the efforts to maintain racial dominance by white people. That is rarely considered a, well, modern or middle class position. It could also be that aside from Jan Lewis, Jane Censer and some others, that middle class family forms that I’ve been focusing on up to this point, has been the realm of historians who look at economic change (Mary Ryan, et. al.) But the point is that the issue of middle class values in tandem with economic change is just not an issue when you look at cultural causes. And that puts my argument into a so what’s the big deal category? I mean, look at my previous post and the business with the literate culture. Markets, literature, commerce, ideas—they were all over the place and available to everyone in the antebellum south. This shouldn’t even be an issue.

I think I need to do a couple of things. The first is this: it would be awesome if I could better articulate my people as embodying a Thompsonian process, rather than an anthropological description of a thing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these rural people who practiced middle class styles of faith, social relations, and marriage self-identified as a class. But they do represent the inworking of a set of ideas.

What are these ideas that constitute my definition of “middle class values?” Well, ok, they are, 1. Individual autonomy in religious practice (this is complicated but improved by Bob Elder’s conclusions about religion being a bridge between tradition and, uh, modernity), 2. social relations that prioritized harmony and forgiveness, 3. Companionate marriages and domesticity in the household.

(One place where my description differs from Wells’ is that I’m seeing domestic—southern, particularly religious—sources for middle class type behavior.)

The second thing is this: fix this in relation to Wells’ people. His are decidedly urban and urbane. Mine are rural and rustic. In fact, he sets his middle classers apart from country yeomen, which makes me think that I might be able to adopt that term. But yeoman is so connected to tradition and pre-modernism that I’d hate to use it. And it does something I am trying not to do: tie these ideas to specific economic indicators. I’m trying to demonstrate that these ideas kind of swished around and spilled over traditional historical boundaries of class. (Yes, they spilled upward more than downward, but they are still very fluid.) This is also why I’m steadfastly refusing to give slave- and land-owning markers to these ideas and my people. (But that will be the subject of an upcoming goals post.)

I have been using the term “ordinary” do describe my folks, largely because “common folk,” “yeoman,” “countrymen” (which I like), “poor whites” (which my people are not,) and any other such descriptor have already been used in ways that weight these people with characteristics I’m trying to avoid.

So, here’s the problem—I’ve got a definition (see above). I need a unique name. But I don’t want to fix that name to describe yet another class. I want it to represent a cultural movement, or process.

Should I just go with middle class? (Wish I could just call them “the Caleb Garths of the world.”)

And, how should I refer to modern religious practice, as opposed to traditional, if I am not using that term. (I’m not sure that locating it in such a dichotomy is really useful anyhow.)

An illiterate goals post

The historical consensus is that between 1840 and 1860, one quarter to one third of free white people in the state could neither read nor write. There, the problems begin. Historians steeped in statistical methods have declared that census reporting on illiteracy (first in 1840) is completely unreliable. Not that one in four North Carolinians could not read is wildly inaccurate, but the reliable specificity of any estimate is questionable.

One trend, however, is apparent. After the funding of public common schools in the mid-1840s, the rate of illiteracy noticeably dropped.

More important questions about illiteracy arise beyond numbers. What did the ability to read and write indicate about a person’s value in society? To what extent did written culture advance and oral culture retreat, if at all, during this period? When a person strove to read and write, to what use did they intend to employ their skill? To make their way in the commercial world? To improve their moral selves by wide reading and reflection? To record mundane observations about the weather? To carve out a place as virtuous citizens by the mastery of the higher elements of language?

The use to which one might apply literacy is largely determined on an individual basis, but I think broad assumptions might be in order. Farmers and rural people used reading and writing largely to record mundane events and to improve their souls through study of the Bible and tracts and written reflection on their anxieties. In fact, I think men and women of all statuses used reading and writing for the later purpose. Middling folks (sounds so folkloric, but that’s not what I’m trying) did read to improve morals and advance status as virtious members of society. Elite people read and wrote for many of these reasons, but also to master the vocabulary of politics and command. Merchants, urban people, professionals, teachers, and many others understood the value of numeracy and the ability to speak the language of the ledger book.

 Despite the pioneering efforts of North Carolinians to establish public schools, the state had the highest rate of illiteracy in the south. But (and you could probably disagree on this) I’m not getting too caught up on those numbers because what is apparent that the culture of literacy had overswept the state in the early nineteenth century. Missionaries and visitors thought otherwise; frequent refrains that vast swaths of North Carolina lacked books in general are the most widely quoted. (Missionaries tended to conclude so when they didn’t witness the religiosity of their particular denomination; and Frederick Law Olmstead, well…. issues. Plus, complaints about Antimisson Baptists get all the attention because they’re funny, and they’re available.) But all kinds of literature—secular and religious, fiction and non-fiction, commercial and poetic—could be found in the remotest of places despite the claim otherwise. (Going to have to read my dissertation for that evidence.)

Since I’m concerning myself with “ordinary people,” it must be asked; did this literate culture—and the aspirations it nurtured—seep below the elite classes? Does a farmer who could write down his name represent a person who might tackle The Prince of the House of David just for aesthetic purposes? I don’t know. Probably some, probably not others. Just read Strong Thomasson’s complaints about attendance at his schools and we can envision a population that just didn’t care about reading and writing. At least that’s what he thought. But I generally think that this spirit of improvement through literacy did take hold among yeoman ranks and perhaps some poor people. At least, those poor people had access to it, even if most of them (or not) preferred to learn through hearing and talking, or rejected literate culture altogether. (What use did Edward Isham have for a tract? None, likely, but his less-murderous but equally riotous countryman William T. Prestwood devoured astronomical and anatomy books.)

My diarists? Yes, Caroline and Strong are clearly part of this literate culture. Does that make them representative, or exceptional? Well, see the previous paragraph. They were in the thick of it. John Flintoff? Obviously he could read and write, but he did not have the expansive literary imagination that Caroline and Strong possessed.

How’s that for avoiding the question?

I looked at Beth Schweiger’s recent article in the JER on grammar, and Keith Whitescarver’s dissertation on literacy and education in NC, for this.

Ok, on to contemplate the middle class.  

 

A modern goals post

Last Friday my dissertation reading group gave feedback on my chapter 3 article proposal. Thanks, group. So now I’m going to distract myself from chapter 2 (when I should be working on chapter 1) with some chapter 3 offshoot revisions. The reading group suggestions are forcing me to pin down some definitions I have been avoiding for two years now, clarify some new things, and re/consider the general format of this proposal. For instance…

I have been using the terms “modern” and “middle-class” interchangeably and in regard to culture in general and religious styles in particular. That’s got to end. Those are two different things. “Modern,” is, of course, a much larger topic and has a wider variety of definitions—from the self-conscious recognition of temporal difference in the sixteenth (or whichever) century, to the rise of individualism in the nineteenth century, or the technological shift in the twentieth. (And that’s just looking at western places—European definitions of modern get utterly stymied when considering the rest of the world.) I don’t know where my thinking on “modernisms” fits in here, but it doesn’t really matter because modernism isn’t the best definition for me. Hell, everyone in 1840s America is in the modern world, even enslaved people and Antimission Baptists.

(I have also been throwing around “modern religion” rather carelessly, too. I think a strict definition in the context of the western world is that modern religion derives its power from the experience of individual salvation while “pre-modern” religion focused on the actions of people in a community. Evangelicalism, thus, is a marker of modernity. But as Bob Elder points out, southern evangelicals can’t be easily placed into a pre-modern or modern camp—that they actually bridge those worlds. The religious practices I’m tracking are, indeed, those that will be adopted by more and more Americans in the near future—it has momentum—but they’re not really modern in a strict sense—any more than George Whitfield was modern one hundred years before Strong Thomasson was even born. So I need to make sure I switch those references to something like “middle class religion.”)

“Middle class” is really the thing I’m after. And middle class is a marker of modernity, which is the confusing thing. Historians who have studied such things look at the development of middle class values as a phenoneom of liberal capitalism—that certain family forms and expectations arise from a peculiar economic organization of society (which was lacking in the south). That formulation is key to my confusion because I always looked to Mary Ryan and Paul Johnson to define how middle class values fit into the scheme of economic and social change. I say confusion because plenty of historians have described a social world where liberal capitalism and its ideals (Hatch, Martin)—or at least the market in goods and ideas—preceded wholesale changes in economic organization. (Even folks like Oakes and Censer describe their subjects as practitioners of the newest form of economic life.) That means that people in the antebellum south didn’t have to experience the tumult of industrialization and the growth of professional classes to develop ideas about how husbands and wives should interact and raise their children. Again, I think my original contribution is to demonstrate (I hope) how these ideas actually insinuated themselves into the non-planter south.

Speaking of non-planters, I have been strategically avoiding defining a social class in my study and used the term “ordinary” to stand in for my imprecision. To me, the characteristics I am describing cross class boundaries (but admittedly flow toward the top rather than the bottom). Anyhow, the question of how I am framing this in relation to standard definitions always comes up and I need to get that out of the way. I’ve talked about it quite enough here, so won’t do so at this time.

Still, one of my diarists in this particular essay is a non-slaveholder; the other from twelve to nineteen slaves. I don’t think these facts are all that significant for my analysis and conclusion, but I need to definitively explain why, which is another thing I have been avoiding. Well, not avoiding because the explanations for my opinion on these two are in the introduction, which I simply have not yet written. But some articulation needs to be in this article proposal.

Another weakness I have is that because I’m describing a very small period of time, I’m not good at illustrating—or proving—conscientious change over time. One group member pressed me to demonstrate resistance to, or rejection of, old forms of family styles. Right now I am doing a lazy-historian thing and using a historiographic convention as a foil—that of the patriarchical planter/honor culture style. (That’s not hard to do—just look at how full my James Henry Hammond and Mary Chesnutt Bingo cards are!) Finding examples of actual resistance or rejection is difficult. Real difficult. I’ve talked before about how hard it is to find positive evidence of a determination to change when that determination meant inaction or politically invisible action. Nonetheless, I need to create a more historically specific foil.

The problem of literacy is also something I need to address. It doesn’t help that I can’t recall the literacy rates among antebellum white North Carolinians, but I’m thinking that the circulation of ideas, religious or otherwise, doesn’t necessarily depend on the ability to read. In fact, I have tried to include evidence that some of these ideas about family prayer was transmitted orally to people who couldn’t read. Nonetheless, my individual diarists are obviously well read and I need to address this fact better than I have.

In terms of organization, here’s the problem: for this proposal I lopped off eight pages of historiographical positioning and replaced it with a more readable set of anecdotes I hoped would suffice to introduce the problem. Everyone says my conclusion is strong, but without the historiography, no one knows where I am going with this. The sad fact of academic writing is that it has to plainly signal the author’s position and intent throughout. The one paragraph near the opening that retains a historiographical argument isn’t cutting it. I need to move it up and make it more explicit and efficient.

So I’ll be working on that this week. Or, at least trying.  

Goals post, discipline

So I read a book and dissertation on church discipline over the last week. I’m glad I turned around to work on this again. Gregory Wills’ Democratic Religion and the Emory dissertation* are both elegant explorations of theology and practice of church discipline. They, more than any other social historians of the south that I am aware of, describe discipline as not just the secular implications of church court proceedings, but as the many ways congregations and denominations created a sense of pious unity in a sinful world. This effects my own work because I had been trying to describe discipline like that, and doing a poor job of it—only because I had (up until this week), never seen it done. I think now I don’t need to work so hard to create a definition of discipline from scratch, which is fine, because that was never my main point in this chapter anyhow.

These two works don’t necessarily agree with one another. Wills’ book focuses on the internal tension of Baptist polity in Georgia. The Baptist were a particularly democratic group—meaning they had very little hierarchical authority in their churches, and their congregations did not bow to the authority of associations and conventions. Yet, the Baptists, stemming from their Calvinism, insisted that members submit to the authority of Baptist theology…and allowed fewer transgressions than any other denominations. Thus, Baptist churches spent a great deal of time “pruning” themselves with admonitions and expulsions in the hopes of ensuring church purity and continued revival and assurance of salvation.

The dissertation also explores church discipline, but with an eye toward reconsidering the oppositional positioning historians have placed evangelicalism and honor culture in. The author suggests that evangelicals understood very well the language of honor; that the sense of the individual evangelical self derived from the presence of an audience, as in honor culture. That audience was simultaneously God, the congregation, and the wider world. Churches enforced discipline as a way of protecting the honor of God and the church. Because of this familiarity of language, evangelicalism and honor culture actually blended very well in the first half of the nineteenth century. I haven’t really finished reading this dissertation yet, but it seems like a game-changer in how we talk about evangelicals in the south.

You see, the prevailing conversation in southern (white) historiography has been the struggle between radical evangelism and reactionary honor culture—and the subsequent capitulation of the former to the later in the period between 1800 and 1830. This is where I have to rethink what I’m saying, because I’m positioning evangelicalism against honor culture, but I think this dissertation is pretty compelling in its argument. (Then again, I do that positioning more in chapter 3, and not in this discipline chapter, which is geared toward evangelical sensibilities in the secular world.)

So do I still need to go find church records so I can create a more expansive description of discipline if I am going to draw on these two instead? Yes, I do. First, because it always helps to have more primary evidence. Second, because these two works are drawn almost entirely from Baptists (the dissertation does include an admirable number of Presbyterians.) We must have an idea about how Methodist discipline played out because the juggernaut of Methodist Arminianism might cause us to rethink our conclusions drawn from mostly from Calvinist denominations. Third, the region I am studying had too many other denominations—German Reformed, Lutheran, Moravian, Quakers—and the social ethos, or sensibility, arising from disciplinary practice might be different. (That said, I’ve got Quakers, and they’re really not that much different, and the population of non-Bapt/Pres/Meth adherents doesn’t add up to a super-significant number.)

So that’s where I am this week. I am also engrossed in turning chapter 3 into an article proposal (due to the reading group on Friday), and drawing up some conference proposals based on chapter 2, and something else entirely.

*Emory has, for reasons I don’t quite understand, embargoed this dissertation because a chapter is due to be published in an upcoming JSH. I don’t know how these things works, so I’m being circumspect just to stay out of trouble. But I will say the author is Bob Elder.

An attempted bit of seriousness that says nothing. But it is brief.

I’ve been enjoying the latest columns by AHA president William Cronon, here and here. I’ve also enjoyed the continued discussion of said columns by Tenured Radical and Clio Bluestocking. Quite a few others have commented, but these are two that have crossed my desk.

I like the general thrust of Cronon’s advocacy—particularly the need for professional historians to engage a broader public. (This gets into the whole “useable past” versus “past as a foreign country” thing. I’m not committed to either, but find that “useable past” to be a handier approach to teaching surveys of all kinds.) For some time now I’ve been conceptualizing the academic/popular divide as a conversation that two different groups are having about the same thing. The two separate conversations will have their own organization, dynamics, questions, directions, and outcomes and at no point do the two conversations interact with one another. I love both conversations and don’t really see the need to mash the two together, but wish there were a way for the two to better inform one another. (Thus my description of how I try to work with Glenn Beck Guy in class.)

Cronon’s concern about the divide is hardly new. Indeed, it is a perennial subject of hand-wringing by academics, and I’m sure everyone is tired of this problem that never gets solved. I share Clio’s reservations, but I have to admit I like the way Cronon talks and thinks about that problem better than anyone who has addressed it before.

There. I’ve got 250 words and I haven’t said a thing. At least I can scratch “post something about Cronon” off my list of things to do!