Chaplain to the Confederacy


Book Description

As Jefferson Davis paraded through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, to take the oath of office as the first president of the Confederate States of America, two men accompanied him in his open coach: Alexander Stephens -- the vice-president-elect -- and Basil Manly. A noted southern Baptist preacher, educator, and the most ardent secessionist of them all, Manly had been selected to serve as chaplain to the provisional Confederate Congress and opened the inaugural ceremonies with a prayer. For nearly thirty years, Manly had worked devotedly for the establishment of a southern nation, and in 1861, his sermons and public prayers before church and congress lent moral and religious legitimacy to the new Confederate government. In this, the first full biography of Manly, A. James Fuller analyzes the life and career of this working minister, illustrating the central role of religion in the formation of the Confederacy. Fuller argues that Manly brought together the various themes of the broader culture into his own conception of Christian gentility, including his actions as the official chaplain to the Confederate government. In Manly's eyes, the Confederacy was the incarnation of God's plan for the South. A planter, slaveholder, and staunch defender of the peculiar institution, he hoped to temper the brutality of bondage by promoting the Christian duties of masters as well as slaves. In practice he tried to reconcile the traditions of honor and evangelical virtue, the contradictions of white liberty and black slavery, the ideals of the individual and the need for community in matters both sacred and secular.




Catholic Confederates


Book Description

How did Southern Catholics, under international religious authority and grounding unlike Southern Protestants, act with regard to political commitments in the recently formed Confederacy? How did they balance being both Catholic and Confederate? How is the Southern Catholic Civil War experience similar or dissimilar to the Southern Protestant Civil War experience? What new insights might this experience provide regarding Civil War religious history, the history of Catholicism in America, 19th-century America, and Southern history in general? For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism. Kraszewski argues against an "Americanization" of Catholics in the South and instead coins the term "Confederatization" to describe the process by which Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors. The religious history of the South has been primarily Protestant. Catholic Confederates simultaneously fills a gap in Civil War religious scholarship and in American Catholic literature by bringing to light the deep impact Catholicism has had on Southern society even in the very heart of the Bible Belt.




Desegregating Dixie


Book Description

Winner of the 2020 American Studies Network Book Prize from the European Association for American Studies Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.




Confederate Minds


Book Description

"A very clear and forcefully argued treatment of the drive for cultural independence in the Confederacy. It is based on exhaustive study of periodicals, pamphlets, and all kinds of printed G matter produced during the Civil War. A most original and significant contribution to southern intellectual history and to the history of the Confederacy."---George C. Rable, author of Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! "This carefully and exhaustively researched book brings into sharp focus the sheer number---and the sheer persistence ---of editors and educators who sought to create an intellectual culture in the South. Bernath's admirable study corrects anyone who thinks that wartime turmoil shut down the full-throated cry of antebellum Southern partisanship."---Steven Slowe, author of Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century During Ihe Civil War, Confederates fought for much more than their political independence. They also fought to prove the distinctiveness of Ihe southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through Ihe creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. In this important new hook, Michael rlernalh follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers---whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists---in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on northern hooks, periodicals, and teachers. This struggle for Confederate "intellectual independence" was seen as a vital part of the larger war effort. For southern nationalists, independence won on the battlefield would he meaningless as long as southerners remained in a stale of cultural "vassalage" to their enemy. Bernalh's exhaustive research into Confederate print literature reveals that Ihe war did not stop cultural life in Ihe South. Instead, wartime isolation sparked a tremendous literary outpouring, as southern writers and publishers rushed lo provide their new nation with its own native literature, one that surpassed in diversity and circulation anything before seen in the South. As the production of new Confederate periodicals, books, and textbooks accelerated at an astonishing rale and southerners look steps toward establishing their own native system of education, cultural nationalists believed they saw the Confederacy coalescing into a true nation. But it was not to be. In the end Confederates proved no more able to win their intellectual Independence than their political freedom, though they struggled mightily for both. By analyzing the motives driving the struggle for Confederate intellectual independence, by charting Its wartime accomplishments, and by assessing its failures, Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.







Catholics' Lost Cause


Book Description

Catholics' Lost Cause argues that the primary goal of clerical leaders in antebellum South Carolina was to unite Catholicism and southern culture to root Catholic institutions into the region.




Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church


Book Description

This book tells the story of one of the largest and most influential African churches in South Africa.







Baptized in Blood


Book Description

Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. “Civil religion” has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South’s relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause. While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson’s timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches. In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South’s tragic experience.