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.