Sparks

On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1776-1876. By Randy J. Sparks. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Pp. x + 281.)

The contradictions of the Old South governed every facet of antebellum southern life. During the Revolutionary War southerners clung to their slaves, even as some planters (like George Washington) saw merit in freeing slaves if they fought for the Continental Army. Many of the South’s greatest contradictions hinged on slavery and republican rhetoric, but Randy Spark’s On Jordan’s Stormy Banks revealed another piece of the Deep South’s social life that never reconciled to the region’s public rhetoric. Southern evangelicalism, an increasingly influential system of thought among historical denominations, gained an increasing amount of adherents among Anglicans, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterians, and the myriad other denominations present in antebellum Mississippi. Evangelicalism, based on “love, egalitarianism, and selflessness” entered a region where economic and social life hinged on “violence, inequality, and materialism.”

Although a history of southern religion, Sparks’s work emphasizes the southerness of Mississippi soon after the region’s colonization in the late eighteenth century. Plain folk interacted with Spark’s “pillared folk,” who lived in grandiose mansions and assumed the role of the region’s aristocracy. While Christopher Morris saw Mississippi as a place in flux during the antebellum era, Sparks’ Mississippi shared many hallmarks with Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. The prevalence of Anglicanism remained the same, although Catholics predominated in the South and Presbyterians carried by backcountry settlers quickly created parity with Anglicans.

While settlers brought Scotland’s faith to Mississippi, the provenance of the region’s evangelicalism lay in the progress of itinerant preachers who scoured the countryside looking for converts and setting up camp meetings. Their messages lay outside of liturgical orthodoxy, but not necessarily outside of orthodox theology; plain folk embraced these preachers because the exciting parsons spoke in the language of the common people and relied on emotional exuberance to fire the heart of the listener. Sparks claimed that the power of evangelicalism was so total that these churches took the unprecedented step of welcoming slaves, who were treated as de-facto equals during the church services. Evangelicalism in Mississippi, mainly in Baptist and Methodist congregations, helped define the challenges to the dominance of large planters and increased the likelihood that democratic ideas could find fruition in a newly empowered evangelical majority.

Sparks confronted the relationship of race and evangelicalism. He argued that biracial congregations existed in Mississippi during much of the antebellum era and that these congregations were far more common than previously thought. Sparks’ detractors and older histories argued that evangelicalism remained patriarchal and authoritarian, but Sparks accurately noted that women and blacks enjoyed relatively active places in evangelical churched; but there remained a traditional orthodox understanding of gender roles. Women often testified, but rarely actually preached.

Evangelicalism underwent a major transformation in the Jacksonian Era. The production of cotton and the fear of slave rebellions revealed deep divisions within the movement. Modernist evangelicals hoped for a stricter church order and for a far more authoritarian view of women and blacks in congregations. Slaves were sectioned into balconies or separate areas of churches. The defense of slavery from pulpits also increased, and Sparks opined that the push to make evangelical pulpits more modern or mainstream in relation to other confessions led evangelicals to remove the very congregants that had flocked to the movement in its early days. Modernism in this case meant an abandonment of egalitarianism and a return to authoritarian visions of church order.

The experience of the Civil War changed the tenor and substance of Mississippi’s ministers. Pro-slavery rhetoric imbued Mississippi congregations with the belief that they were God’s chosen; now preachers bellowed that losses and setbacks to godless Union troops stemmed from southerners’ transgressions. The experience of Reconstruction, saw resentful and embittered southerners turn violently on their black neighbors, many of whom were former congregants in their churches.

Miles Smith Texas Christian University

Randy J. Sparks. On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773-1876. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Randy J. Sparks, professor of southern history at Tulane University, produced in 1994, a study on the birth and life of evangelical religion in antebellum era Mississippi. The author traces how Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians at first challenged the political and social structures of Mississippi. However, as the region increasingly grew dependent on cotton and slavery, during the 1840s, Mississippi’s denominational leaders supported the same institutions that they had earlier attacked. The writer, in a lively and accessible narrative, relates how these changes occurred.

Sparks begins his work with a discussion of how the evangelicals came to Mississippi. The first evangelicals arrived in the area during the period of Spanish colonial rule. Even after the United States gained control of Mississippi evangelical congregations remained small and localized. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, were usually small landowners of modest means who usually did not own slaves. The Mississippi evangelicals of the early nineteenth century also stressed egalitarianism which led many to question the institution of slavery. In addition, Mississippi evangelicals also encouraged African American slaves to join their congregations. Women also held positions of responsibility in the evangelical movement during the early years of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the evangelical message of equality changed as Mississippi became increasingly tied to the cotton economy of the Old South.

Mississippi evangelicals, after 1840, began to defend the institution of slavery. Sparks attributes this shift to many factors. The makeup of evangelical congregations changed as the early settlers of Mississippi moved into the planter class. This class who depended upon bonded labor deemphasized the egalitarian message of the early evangelicals. Instead, Baptists and others began to search for biblical justifications for slavery. Additionally, failures to colonize former slaves in Africa and increasing attacks by northern abolitionists also forced evangelicals into a defense of the peculiar institution.

Messages centered on equality vanished and were replaced by an adherence to patriarchy. The planter, who in the past had been a source of evangelical criticism, assumed an almost father like role that protected antebellum era Mississippi society. Southern evangelicals were estranged from their northern counterparts as the slavery question split the country. In the end, southern evangelicalism took on a decidedly sectional viewpoint as the Civil War beckoned.

Sparks also provides needed insight into several aspects of antebellum era evangelicalism. He notes that for many years southern evangelicals encouraged African-Americans to join their respective churches. Bi-racial congregations were the rule and not the exception in the years leading up to the Civil War. Eventually, Reconstruction led to irreconcilable schisms between white and black evangelicals. Southern evangelicals used their faith to defend the Lost Cause of the defeated Confederacy and blocked black attempts to assume leadership positions in the churches. These actions only hastened a withdrawal of African Americans from white denominations and ushered in an era of separation that persists to this day. In all, Sparks’s study presents an interesting portrait of antebellum era southern evangelicalism.

Randy A. Sparks, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Rice University, studied the social history of southern evangelism from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction by examining Mississippi’s three largest evangelical denominations (Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians). Thesis: Sparks argued that the early, democratically-based movement challenged the existing order but that after 1830 evangelicalism transformed, becoming institutionalized as part of the proslavery South. Of all the changes of the Civil War the greatest in religious terms was the division of churches along racial lines which directly led to the growth of black churches, the cornerstone of the black community in the twentieth century. Central to Sparks’ thesis is the idea that the rise of evangelism in the early 19th century was not just a religious movement but a powerful force of social change, akin to Perry Miller’s argument that revivalism was central to the search for national identity that challenged gentry domination and the hierarchical social structure.

Sparks argued that eighteenth-century evangelicalism in Mississippi was a revolutionary movement of plain folk who consciously opposed the region’s dominant hierarchical culture and accepted slaves as church members on terms approaching equality. The early biracial churches were never expressions of antislavery thought but did encourage cultural interchanges, shaping a new culture that flouted elite rules of dress, behavior, and language while linking evangelism with ideas of republican virtue. The movement also challenged the subservient status of women by allowing them to speak in services, teach Sunday Schools, and lead the congregation in song and prayer. The 1830s marked a transition as economic mobility spurred the replacement of cultural revolt by complacency, causing major splits as modernists and traditionalists squared off. The changes in evangelicalism reflected the democratic revolution of the 1830s that occurred as evangelicalism so permeated Southern culture that it reached denominational status. The process was complemented by a radical surge in population and church membership, especially in urban areas, and by an upward trend in average member wealth, a factor of general prosperity that enriched many of the plain folk and by incorporation of planter elites. As evangelical s became the mainstream they abandoned the idea of equalitarianism in favor of proslavery, replacing biracial services with segregation that increased black autonomy. The segregation of religion led to a missionary movement for blacks designed to counter abolitionist arguments, rectify the worst abuses of slavery, assuage the guilt of slave owners, and to make slaves more compliant.

From 1830 to 1860 major shifts occurred in southern evangelism as memberships increased dramatically. The number of Baptists grew from 5,000 in 1835 to 41,482 in 1860; Methodists from 2,235 in 1818 to 61,000 in 1860; and Presbyterians from 634 in 1830 to 7,136 in 1861, implying that evangelicals were no longer set apart from society but were society. Included with the maturation of evangelicalism was a trend in professionalization of the ministry, especially in towns; the replacement of congregational signing with choirs; to less emotional services; to the use of musical instruments; and to acceptance of slavery. Splits developed that followed general political overtones, traditionalists who opposed changes tended to live in more rural areas, to be Democrats, to see the emerging capitalist economy as a threat while modernists tended to the opposite.

The proslavery argument was part of a Southern reaction away from bourgeois development associated with the Northeast. By the 1830s evangelicals had shifted away from the individual and equality of believers to a more hierarchical view of religion that included, among other things, proslavery views in which modernists took the forefront, seeing abolition as a threat to the Southern hierarchy of authority. The evangelical identification with proslavery was part of the process of differentiation that set the South at odds with the rest of the nation and contributed to the growth of southern sectionalism and all its consequences. That vision of slavery had ramifications for women as well, relegating them to their subservient role. As secession loomed evangelicals did not lead but were swept up with the secession movement. As the tide turned against the South whites flocked to churches and turned religion into part of the Lost Cause idea. In Reconstruction blacks chose to form separate churches, an outgrowth of trends to separate begun in the antebellum period, which became a bedrock of the black community.

Sparks added a discussion of church discipline which he argued was not simply a social control device but an effort to foster self-control, crucial for a republican society. Discipline differed by class. White men tended to be disciplined for offenses against order, intoxication, fighting etc; white women received little discipline; black men were disciplined a the highest rates, most often for offenses against slavery, running away and theft; and black women suffered most often for sexual offenses. Sparks supported the societal value worth of discipline, admitting that it was a control device used against blacks but suggesting that it had beneficial effects on morality and order, that individuals, families, and the community were saved by church discipline. After the 1820s church discipline decreased, reflecting the move away from congregationalism to minister based churches, and might have disappeared entirely if not for the black missions.