Whig Hill

An outburst I'm unlikely to have

Used to be—not more than ten years ago—that the resounding response from neo-Confederates to the charge that people in 1861 fought for slavery was this: Sure, they did. You have to embrace the uncomfortable truths about the past, and people then were racists. It was meant to come across as honesty as virtue, and it might have been for those who proclaimed it. But it wasn’t, really. It was a rationalization to blunt the racism charge. I heard this many times. I can name names. What a quick turnaround because today the very same folks will deny it so violently that they find themselves advocating a historical story of a happily multi-cultural south. (It’s an old saw and a new development.) Thus we have the nonsense with Black Confederates, a completely modern phenomenon. 

Seems this is not just a defense of the old south, but part of a larger conservative narrative today in which liberals and other do-gooders are the true enemy of minorities with their Socialist policies encouraging dependency, while conservatives remain black peoples’ most ardent and loving friends. They don’t seem to be aware that this is exactly what antebellum proslavery partisans argued. The echo is thundering.

Glenn Beck Guy is bringing this into my classroom. I don’t get confrontational, but try to direct the conversation back into the room and toward analysis, and, you know, historical evidence. Now, I like Glenn Beck Guy a whole lot. I really do. This happens to be an exceptional group of students and he just ads to the pleasure of being their teacher. Besides, and this may not be apparent, but I shrink from confrontation. It’s just not how I work.

Here’s what I’m noticing. Talking to students about historical thinking and analysis is one thing. They seem to get it. No problem. I make an almost daily effort to impress upon them that neither I, nor history, is trying to make moral judgments about people in the past. (At least not at the 101 level.) But it doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick because in the real world, history is a morality tale. And no one wants to be the bad guy in his own morality tale. Try as I might, I can’t create that historical, objective (forgive me), distance. And to be honest, this is a bigger problem with some of the white students.

I want to yell out

yes white people in the nineteenth century were racist and that’s not a moral judgment but the first step to understanding how many of our truly admirable modern concepts and aspirations have racial assumptions baked into them. But I am not calling those aspirations bad, or you a racist. I don’t believe you are, mainly because things change. That’s history and that's what we're doing here.

Once we get past this inarguable point, then we’re going to start talking about how historical thinking is not suited to Broad Generalizations, and a necessary skill to develop is balancing Broad (but true) Generalizations against the fact that most peoples’ everyday experiences just don’t fit readily into the contours of the Broad Generalizations. You are probably going to like this part. But those people in 1898 were still obsessed with white supremacy.*

But I’m unlikely to have this outburst.

Wasn’t going to talk about this but I see that another history teacher has the same problem (albeit with a slightly less volatile subject.) Plus, this week has been packed with infuriatingly bad history in the news.

Thank God for Ta-Nehisi Coates is what I mean to say.

*And apparently I’m obsessed with the methodology of my dissertation.

Accountability, week 4

Not certain what I need to do this week. I’ve got five school-related appointments scheduled, not including class Tuesday, and I haven’t thought about this since yesterday’s post. It could go in two directions. First, I could take what I have and edit it more. That’s a job that could take the whole week. (That's generous.) Need to clarify quite a number of my arguments, extend others, and beef up some evidence in a few places. Still have to find a replacement for the Usery case. But I think I’ve got section one of this chapter sort-of in place.

Second, I could pitch in to one of my diarists. That’s just fun. I have John Flintoff and Strong Thomasson slated to appear here. (I know, I’ve got a serious Methodist problem.) Here’s the thing: I’m dividing each of my chapters into two parts—the historical survey, then close examinations of individual experiences. It is methodologically weird (more on that some other time), but I think that format in chapter 3 turned out real well. The diarists’ experiences matched the survey in ways that made the overall argument work. I’m not, at present, seeing how that will happen in this chapter. For the survey I’m talking about the corporate-ness of discipline and how religious beliefs of a group transgressed (heh) congregational and public boundaries. But diaries only speak for individuals and these individuals—partially on account of their ordinariness—are not conscientious voices of large groups the way, say, James H. Hammond or James Henley Thornwell were. Flintoff, as far as I can tell, never joined a temperance society and never participated in a church trial. Thomasson was huge into temperance, but he was the most individual of all my people. So when I talk about them, the direct connections between their experiences and the previous section of the chapter will not be apparent.

But all is not lost. Both of them convey rather well, I think, the voice of individuals yearning to be a part of the larger world, and leaning heavily on their religious beliefs to guide them in that world. That hinges on the idea I’m trying to explicate in the first section that individual spiritual satisfaction was nearly indistinguishable from group/social spiritual satisfaction. That’s discipline.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I think that yes, going ahead with the diarists first would be a good idea because having a bead on them will help refine the first section when I get back to it.

So this week, John Fletcher Flintoff of Caswell County. Here’s a teaser—Flintoff’s story takes place mostly in Mississippi.  

Week 3 summary: Holiness v. Perfection

Did most of what I intended, but didn’t wield the hammer and tongs as much as I had imagined. Cleaned up the first section a bit, and pasted in the temperance stuff for forty pages. The later is still incongruous with the former, but I like the temperance stuff and kind of want to consider it as part of the larger section before altering it too much.

Found out where the German Reformed churches are hiding their manuscript records. Going over their catalog, however, revealed a provocative opportunity for interpreting discipline and temperance, but I want to consult with my local GR expert before I go overboard with that. Could be wrong, as always.

Had to move the William Usery case to the temperance section. (Actually, I had already used it in the previous temperance section and I like it better there.) So I’ve got to go find another case. I used it primarily because of its ordinariness. Usery got drunk, expelled, received back in, drunk again, expelled again, received back in again, drunk again, and expelled for good. This process took about two years and there never seemed to be any hard feelings on either side (admittedly, we don’t have Usery’s actual perspective.) The point is, it’s not sensational or scandalous like Warren Harrington or Maranda Sharpe’s cases, which are excellent windows into the gender dynamics of a congregation, but not really representative of the day-to-day experience.

Wrote a couple of pages on Quaker discipline. Quakers seem to forbear smaller transgressions until they add up. No one is disciplined for missing meetings, dressing fashionably, or being drunk. But quite a few people are disciplined for missing meetings, dressing fashionably, and being drunk, all at once. I take this to mean that individual and informal vigilance in the Quaker community took care of the small stuff, and the resort to official discipline happened when someone had gotten quite out of control. Also, Quakers were not evangelical and understood salvation and living in grace a bit differently from everyone else. So that has something to do with it. The most frequently disciplined action for Quakers was marrying without the permission of the Meeting.

Spent some time reading on Wesleyanism and Holiness and I’ve finally resolved some confusion in my thinking. What I have now is this: Wesleyanism and Holiness is not the same as the influence of John Wesley and the anxiety over achieving a state of perfection. (I know, you thought they were the same thing.) Wesleyanism should properly, I think, refer to the abolitionist-oriented, liberal theological movement associated with Orange Scott, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and Crooks and McBride. Holiness is connected to Phoebe Palmer and an impulse to make immediate, earthly, devotional decisions with the assurance that once accomplished, a state of perfection has been achieved. In the 1850s, these things have obvious theological distance from southern religious belief, but the two are deviations of the same eighteenth century impulse harnessed and directed by John Wesley. (And yes, I will suggest eventually that various Calvinists—ahem, Presbys and Baptists—in the south had drifted further than we give them credit for into Arminianism.) Southern religious people did read John Wesley’s Plain Account of Christian Perfection and some did pursue a post-conversion state of “entire sanctification.” They did make ascetic decisions about their daily lives based on these aspirations. The difference being that this journey for southerners seems to have been more fraught with anxiety than in Holiness practice, and thus much more pessimistic about achieving perfection, and losing it.

Anyhow, I’m working on that thought now and writing it out here really helps.

Zip City still brings the tears

(In case my recent posts haven't run everyone off...)

Brief thoughts on Christianity, history, and me

(Wherein I stake a claim to be first on John Fea’s list of bloggers he wishes would post less.)

Those who fear the academy is filled with atheists pushing a secular agenda would be shocked. So would smug lefties who imagine this place a refuge from irrational fundamentalists. The academic history world is filled with thoughtful skeptics and contemplative believers.

I didn’t expect to be working so deeply in religious history. In fact, most of what I know (or at least, perceive), I acquired after taking my comprehensive exams. My first dissertation proposal had religion as one chapter in a larger study of the ideologies of work and family in the nineteenth century south. Since then, I have been exposed to the sub-discipline and sub-culture of religious history. It is alive, but this isn’t a review of the field here. What strikes me is the differences between committed Christian historians and, well, folks like me.

I grew up in a Catholic church and am presently, and rather predictably, agnostic.* I’ve spent about thirty seven of my forty years just not thinking about it. So when I read historians who are self-identified Christians who grew up with, and live with, faith, I am reading sophisticated work attuned to the sensibilities of Christianity. I consider this an advantage of which I am jealous. (If I had been raised a Baptist and arrived where I am now, I’d be dangerous.) I have to learn the cues, the signals, the language, and the insights that are just part of the landscape for others. It humbles me greatly, and yes, I’ll admit to feeling like an outsider in the company of folks for whom faith is a part of their work.**

Not sure where I’m going with this and I’m not even articulating it well. I’m pretty happy with the historical work I’ve done so far, but it often feels shallow. I’ve been told that taking religion seriously yields fresh interpretive directions. Maybe, but that’s obviously condescending to all the great work done by people who already do.

*This dissertation—and simultaneous relationships in my life—have caused me to situate my own thoughts on sacred things, leading me to this conclusion for now.

**Saying this is not a claim to virtue or sympathy. It just is. I’ve never been made to feel that this is an actual problem.

Accountability, week 3

In the past three and a half weeks I’ve managed to stitch together almost thirty pages of something resembling the beginning of a chapter (kind of the way Frankenstein’s monster resembled a human.) This hot mess is a combination of detailed notes from secondary readings, unfocused and repetitive ramblings about abstract ideas, and copy-and-pasted text from a completely different source. First goal for this week is to print it all out and whack at it with the red pen, editing, rewriting, and filling in gaps as much as possible. I won’t be finished with this section, by any means. I just want all the parts to start working together. The pending archival work for this section is contingent on how the commo with the various church people goes, but I can’t imagine I’ll be sitting in front of any manuscripts this week.

Should I finish that, I will begin to paste in the work I did last fall on temperance societies. Several ideas here in this rough order: The evangelical sense of discipline fostered a spirit of improvement within congregations (coupled with quite a bit of anxiety) based on rejection of sin and sinful behavior. The boundary between the evangelical space and the world was not as well-defined for practitioners as it is for historians. Therefore, the impulse to create an environment free of sin easily spilled over to the public, secular, space. We see this in a variety of enterprises, including education/Sunday Schools/literacy and missions to the slaves and other domestic and foreign missionary projects. But the single largest effort at creating evangelically safe places in public is the movement to restrict or criminalize the distilling, vending, and use of spirituous liquors (to use their language). What I wrote last fall wasn’t intended for the context of the current chapter, so it will require plenty of nip and tuck. Best to think of it as a solid foundation for what I need to say about temperance societies.

That actually sounds more fun than the first goal. Can I skip the whole editing and rewriting part?

I’ll budget two days for teaching and another for general historian tasks (ahem, job search stuff), so when I come up short this time, I won’t be so disappointed.

Week 2 summary

Ok, so this week didn’t go so well. First, the start of the CC semester took more out of me than expected: time-wise, two full days instead of the expected one. (Another day spent in driving). Second, as previously noted I just don’t have enough notes on primary material to give the full account of church discipline I want. That stumped me a bit. I wrote up about six pages on what I do have. Problem here is that I take my narrative from the notes at hand, and I develop the narrative from the writing I’m doing at the moment. So the notes tell me X, X, X, and X, and I organize that first as A, which will naturally lead to B, which is followed perfectly by C, and D is the end of this argument. Now, when I collect up the primary sources to augment this section, they’ll appear in my head as y, WW, B1, and 13, meaning they don’t fit easily into the argument I presently have, and attempting to insert them as they are will make the whole thing just awkward. Oh well. To that end I’m in correspondence with a number of religious archives trying to track down the meeting minutes of a number of congregations. Unfortunately, the stuff I’m looking for may be spread out all over Pennsylvania.

Also, not sure I can use the Warren Harrington case. Thought I found a new case regarding the slander of Maranda Sharpe, but I’m not certain that will make a good example, either. (Church court determined that the stories about Maranda were true, therefore the person spreading rumors was not committing slander. Don’t know the nature of the stories, but if you know women and southern church discipline, you can probably guess with a certain degree of accuracy.)

On the good news side, I figured out how to cut and past important parts of my Wesleyan episode paper from last summer right into this chapter. (Not how to cut and paste, but how to fit one into the other.) The new context will require quite a bit of tweaking and massaging on the second (and third, and fourth, and fifth…) pass. But it’s there. The idea I’m working with on this section is rather abstract (see the post below), and I’ve got about three different versions with clear but different directions that I need to harness into a coherent line. I perceive that this whole chapter just isn’t going to lend itself to easy organization.

Next week’s work, I think, will be more cutting and pasting of old draft into new. That’s a nice feeling because of the appearance of progress, laying down pages and pages at a time. But we’ll get to next week tomorrow. Still have nine hours left of this week.

Question? Does anyone know how to pronounce the surname “Usery”? (sometimes spelled with two SSs) Is it “You-sery,” or “Uss-ery”? Thanks.

***

I want it official on this blog that I am distraught that the Kansas Museum of History has decided to end it’s Cool Things in the Collection podcast. I can’t think of a better example of public history programming out there in terms of accessibility, likeability, good history-telling, and general dorkitude (which I’ve established here before is a good thing.) It made this North Carolinian actually want to visit Kansas and see it’s history in person. I know why it happened (budgets), but it still sucks.

Fair warning

I didn’t write about teaching last semester because I didn’t teach. My department afforded me the opportunity to work on the dissertation full time. But it’s a new semester and I’m back at it. Two classes—a light load. First starts tomorrow at the Community College. Tuesday night American History II. I’m pretty excited, but in my absence the College switched over to Outlook email and that alone is a downer. Setting up the class on Moodle and adding the gradebook and SLOs was a breeze this time. And I already know the textbook and have the quizzes written up. So far, so good. You know I love the CC kids students, so I’m excited to meet them.

The second class is also American History II, but it is at a local four-year college (not my own). Different reading, different assignments, and different expectations, so a lot more effort is going into planning. In short, same topic but completely different class. It starts at the end of the month.

Point is, you’ll probably start hearing about this again. You’ve been warned.

Ambushed by Adam Crooks

Just as I said I’m going back to the Wesleyan episode stuff I worked on, Vicki Bynum posts this essay about Adam Crooks in Montgomery County. Providing Crooks is honest in his reporting (he is disingenuous at times in what he tells his accusers, but I think the overall recounting is good), the thing I find most interesting about his version of the event is the view of how proslavery/anti-abolitionist men actually thought on the ground. They do seem self-assured, but you can also sense their unnerved defensiveness. And you can see where they are making an argument based on false but genuinely held (if opportunistic) information. For instance, one of the proslavery men insists that Quakers are proslavery. Gimme a break. Everyone knew Quakers had qualms about slaveholding.

And then I sat down with a Randall Stephens essay in this book, also on the Wesleyan episode. I like his thinking and approach, but kind of disagree, mostly, with some of his assumptions. Stephens is concerned with the theological implications of holiness and perfectionism, which is particularly associated with Finney, Garrison, Weld, and other northern weirdos. Southerners, he says, did not embrace holiness because of its association with radicals and abolitionists.* Fair enough. We have an entire catalog of southern divines and politicians rejecting Finneyite holiness because of its theological heresy. The thing is that perfectionists and holiness practitioners strove to eject all sin from individuals and communities (including slavery). Calvinists—the theology attributed (rightly) to southerners—scoffed at the very idea that man could do anything toward his own salvation; thereby marking holiness a heresy. To toss all southern religious people in the Primitive Baptist dead-ender Calvinist corner of the theological spectrum is an issue for another day. While I do agree that southern theology across the board remained resolutely conservative, the actual practice of religion did not.

And that’s where I’m disagreeing on Stephens’ assessment of holiness in the south. The practice of church discipline by the late antebellum was essentially the same thing as holiness/perfectionism. By that I mean that discipline was the means for religious people to pursue and attain even greater levels of piety and purity. They used it to police, and to assist, each other in the avoidance of sin. They used it to maintain the purity of the convicted state. And they had few problems with taking the prescriptions of discipline and applying them to worldly activity: temperance reform, election (treating) reform, education, or missionary support. All of these efforts were directed toward the perfection of religious communities and their exterior, secular, worlds.

Southerners saw a theological and cultural strain in the north and identified it as heresy. They could articulate how what they saw as wrong, but they didn’t recognize that it was the same impulse that drove their own practice. The big gaping difference, of course, was slavery. To Northern perfectionists, it was a sin to be expelled. To Southern disciples, it was not a sin and was not in need of removal. Simple as that.

The chief sin—much worse than slavery—that haunted both parties was to be in communion with people who did not share your own doctrine and theology. So for instance, if you did not believe missionary principles to be scriptural but your church has adopted missionary principles, then you’ve got a problem. If your church believes in foot-washing and you think that’s bad theology, you’ve got a problem. If drunkards and malcontents plagued your church with strife, you’ve got a problem. Discipline in the south, however, had provided people the means for alleviating that sin: movement without strife. Can’t have communion with people you regard as unfortunate sinners? Just go to another church that agrees with you. But that was a last resort—most congregations met doctrinal disagreements with pleading, prayer, persuasion, which often proved enough to overcome a disagreement. It was a system perfectly tuned to avoid out-of-control conflict.

The issue of slavery tested that system, and the system didn’t always work. People moved quite a bit in the south over theological disagreements with slavery, but more people moved out of the south for those reasons (a workable solution, I guess). Most (white) southerners agreed that slavery was not a sin. Obviously, some did. What I’ve found is that a problem partially arose when the Wesleyans arrived in North Carolina and began universal condemnation of an entire religious environment, and did so without resort to traditional disciplinary methods of resolving differences. In the Wesleyan episode you can see this clearly in the reaction of the Methodist Protestant sect to the Wesleyans in the 1847-1848 period. The MPs raised the first alarm bells about the Wesleyans, not about their slavery teaching, but their over-aggressive church building style. The MPs thought the Wesleyans were unfairly stealing MP converts. (In the end, the MPs gained thousands of members where the Wesleyans only gained hundreds.) Where the system really broke down is in the face of the national debate over slavery. The bulk of hostilities in the Wesleyan episode occurred during the debate over what would become the Compromise of 1850 when everyone was attuned to elevated levels of toxic national discourse. Plus, one doesn’t just go into the south, call everyone a sinner, and not expect a resort to arms. Thing is, I’m not saying disciplinary practice made a comprehensive and effective course of action. It did break down when it got around to slavery. You’re just never going to escape that.

But I think that the practice of discipline significantly changed southerners in other ways (which is for Chapter 2, not this particular post) that had significant implications for how some of them viewed their place in a larger slaveholding, undemocratic, and materialistic world.

Pardon the rambling.

*This is not an original assertion, but is kind of the prevailing/conventional thought on this for a long time.

Accountability, week 2

In my last, I explained that I wanted to look beyond church courts for disciplinary action. But spending time with actual church court cases will be necessary. I’m more interested in the process (patience) and the prescriptions (forgiveness) than the actual punishments (few), and how the former contributes to a public ethos of… well, I won’t, and can’t, say non-violence, but something that is the opposite of violent behavior. To find that is where I have to go beyond the church courts and see how people practiced the lessons and behaviors they learned in public.

Well, for the former, I still have to look at cases. My goal this week is to go through archival notes I have on Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Quaker churches and describe the aforementioned process and prescriptions. I’m looking forward to further examining the cases of Peter and Martha May, who switched congregations over missionary principles; and Warren Harrington, who knocked up his sister-in-law, apparently. Don’t know how I’m going to use the Harrington case, but it’s been smoldering in my thoughts for a while. (This is a good place to note how much I loved how Martha Hodes wrote the first half of White Women, Black Men, and wish my work could turn out that way.)

This is all a reminder that I have yet to collect proceedings from Lutheran and German Reformed churches. That will require some archival research that will not be done this week. Besides, the primary research queue currently has “read Arthur’s Home Magazine” and “find and scour the American Sunday School Union papers” at the front.

This is where I usually say “anyhow.” So, anyhow, to see discipline in action on the secular scene, I’m going back to the Wesleyan episode I wrote on last summer and hope to integrate that stuff into this section. If I get my first goal finished, this will be the second. Very little reading this week, but quite a lot of agonizing over notes.