Randall Stephens
A well-attended session on Thursday afternoon here at George Washington University dealt with what we can know or generalize about on a local level. What does the information at the local level tell us about slavery and freedom in the antebellum South? It deserves attention here. I include videos below of the presenters (due to youtube's 10 minute limit, I've only included the first 9 minutes or so from each):
"Does It Take a Small Window to See the Big Picture?"
Chair and Commentator: Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary
Presenters:
Nancy A. Hillman, College of William and Mary
“Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Biracial Fellowship and Black Leadership in Virginia Baptist Churches Before and After Nat Turner”
Jennifer R. Loux, Library of Virginia
“How Proslavery Southerners Became Emancipationists: Slavery and Regional Identity in Frederick County, Maryland”
Ted Maris-Wolf, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
“Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1856-1864: How Two Free Black Men Shaped a Law That Fueled the National Debate Over Slavery”
Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary
“What the Reviewers Should Have Criticized about Israel on the Appomattox, But Didn’t”
Ely summarizes the session as follows:
Histories of localities have won considerable attention over the years. Examples range from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and several important books on New England towns to Charles Dew’s Bond of Iron and Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox. Some distinguished reviewers have recognized the assiduousness of the research that underpins certain of these studies and even praised the “sophisticated” analysis they may offer—yet these critics tend to write off the stories these works tell as atypical, and to deprecate their local perspective as inherently unreflective of broader realities. Eric Foner has added that “local histories, so valuable in bringing into sharp relief the details of daily life, seem to have an inherent bias toward continuity as opposed to historical change,” especially when the locality in question is rural. Such critics typically go on to praise canonical histories of entire regions (for example, “the American South”) because they “allow far more scope for generalizations.” But how useful are generalizations that turn out to be contradicted on the ground in one locality after another?
The members of this panel recognize that the historian’s job is to gather, organize, and interpret data in ways that yield reasonably broad, meaningful conclusions. But we also contend that sweeping conclusions that cannot account for the complexities pervading the lives of real people are not worth very much. A signal challenge for historians in the twenty-first century is to ferret out the particulars of life as people really lived it and to draw from those details conclusions that are both well founded and widely significant. . . .
Each of us finds that local realities seriously complicate and sometimes contradict received generalizations. Laws passed following the Nat Turner rebellion did not end black preaching and church leadership in Virginia, thanks to the assertiveness of black Baptists supported by more than a few of their white brethren (Hillman). Whites in western Maryland, far from identifying instinctively with the North at the onset of the Civil War, wrapped themselves in the mantle of Southernness and of proslavery orthodoxy—yet within less than two years, two-thirds of the white men of Frederick County came to support Lincoln and Emancipation (Loux). The Virginia law of 1856 allowing free blacks to enslave themselves to white masters was not an expression of spiraling antipathy toward free African Americans or of a general desire among whites to reduce them to bondage; in fact, the law’s framers formulated it in concert with free blacks themselves as a measure to protect certain black individuals (Maris-Wolf). And in a society of profound inequality, many whites nevertheless adopted a live-and-let-live attitude toward free blacks (Ely). Ely chaired the panel; after the other panelists offered presentations of their work on the subjects just named, Ely offered a closing comment, drawing on those presentations and on his own work to address what this proposal has called the big questions.
Showing posts with label race and religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race and religion. Show all posts
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Race, Politics, & Religion in American History
Randall Stephens
"Devout Racism: A Review Essay"
Christian Century, March 11, 2009
God and Race in American Politics: A Short History
by Mark A. Noll (Princeton University Press, 2008)
The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia
by Charles F. Irons (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)
In the early 1900s an Englishman made his way across the American South. William Archer ventured by train and on horseback, observing the region's peculiar folkways. He met with
leading men, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois among them, and visited historic sites and thriving New South cities. For Archer the South was at once quaint, backward, hopeful, beautiful and grotesque. Relations between blacks and whites preoccupied him. In that regard, he was like so many other nonsouthern authors of Dixie travel literature—William Bartram, Henry Benjamin Whipple, Frederick Law Olmstead, V. S. Naipaul. But timing is everything.
Archer journeyed through the countryside not long after many southern states rewrote their constitutions, systematically excluding blacks from the electorate. Southern law enforcement officers could easily arrest blacks for vagrancy or some other trumped-up charge. The penalty for the accused: working hard labor in a gruesome prison camp, a fate that one historian calls "worse than slavery." In these years vigilante justice instilled fear in the hearts of millions as the lynching of black southerners reached an all-time high.
Archer didn't doubt that southerners, black and white, were intensely devout. The region was one of the most "sincerely religious" places he had ever visited. Yet, he sarcastically observed, most white southern Christians "would scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a southern railway station, through a gate marked 'for whites.'"
The illogic of Jim Crow justice still haunts America. The longstanding presence of racism in the church is hardly believable to some, a brutal fact to others. Looking at the sweep of American history, it's impossible to dissociate deep-seated racism from America's Christian churches.
Two recent books examine race and American Christianity. The authors ably trace how Americans—enslaved and free, northern and southern—have struggled with religion and race over the ages. Mark Noll's insightful God and Race in American Politics is a sweeping account of the subject from the 1820s to the early 21st century. In contrast, Charles Irons focuses on the fierce debates about slavery and Christianity that dominated the attention of Virginians from the late 18th century to the eve of the Civil War in his carefully researched and well-written The Origins of Proslavery Christianity. Read on>>>
"Devout Racism: A Review Essay"
Christian Century, March 11, 2009
God and Race in American Politics: A Short History
by Mark A. Noll (Princeton University Press, 2008)
The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia
by Charles F. Irons (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)
In the early 1900s an Englishman made his way across the American South. William Archer ventured by train and on horseback, observing the region's peculiar folkways. He met with
leading men, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois among them, and visited historic sites and thriving New South cities. For Archer the South was at once quaint, backward, hopeful, beautiful and grotesque. Relations between blacks and whites preoccupied him. In that regard, he was like so many other nonsouthern authors of Dixie travel literature—William Bartram, Henry Benjamin Whipple, Frederick Law Olmstead, V. S. Naipaul. But timing is everything.Archer journeyed through the countryside not long after many southern states rewrote their constitutions, systematically excluding blacks from the electorate. Southern law enforcement officers could easily arrest blacks for vagrancy or some other trumped-up charge. The penalty for the accused: working hard labor in a gruesome prison camp, a fate that one historian calls "worse than slavery." In these years vigilante justice instilled fear in the hearts of millions as the lynching of black southerners reached an all-time high.
Archer didn't doubt that southerners, black and white, were intensely devout. The region was one of the most "sincerely religious" places he had ever visited. Yet, he sarcastically observed, most white southern Christians "would scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a southern railway station, through a gate marked 'for whites.'"
The illogic of Jim Crow justice still haunts America. The longstanding presence of racism in the church is hardly believable to some, a brutal fact to others. Looking at the sweep of American history, it's impossible to dissociate deep-seated racism from America's Christian churches.
Two recent books examine race and American Christianity. The authors ably trace how Americans—enslaved and free, northern and southern—have struggled with religion and race over the ages. Mark Noll's insightful God and Race in American Politics is a sweeping account of the subject from the 1820s to the early 21st century. In contrast, Charles Irons focuses on the fierce debates about slavery and Christianity that dominated the attention of Virginians from the late 18th century to the eve of the Civil War in his carefully researched and well-written The Origins of Proslavery Christianity. Read on>>>
