Snay

Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. By Mitchell Snay. (New York: Cambridge University Press, c. 1993.)

Mitchell Snay’s Gospel of Disunion explores the links between religion and secession. Snay describes how Southern clergy defined a separate moral identity for their region in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. During the secession crisis, these ministers created a civil religion similar to, but separate from, that of the North. Snay is among the first historians to consider separatism in an area other than politics. Snay acknowledges debt to an extraordinary list of American historians. David Herbert Donald, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Eugene Genovese are among those who influenced Snay’s work. Snay relies heavily on sources created by the “Gentleman Theologians” of the Old South. These educated clergymen served wealthy urban congregations. Snay uses denominational newspapers and the records of church assemblies to represent the thoughts of less-elite congregations.

Snay argues that “religion contributed much to the origins of Southern separatism. It invested the sectional controversy over slavery with moral and religious meaning, strengthening those elements in Southern political culture that made secession possible” (p. 2). Only in the realm of politics, Snay writes, is the growth of Southern separatism as clear as in the religious sphere. Snay identifies three reasons why religion explains Southern separatism. First, religion was integral to the region’s culture and society. Second, both northern abolitionists and the Southern defenders of slavery used religious arguments. And, third, religion shaped American nationalism during the antebellum years and, therefore, must be assumed to be an influence on Southern nationalism.

In 1835, the American Anti-Slavery Society sent inflammatory abolitionist materials to select Southern leaders. The literature did not achieve the intended purpose of awakening a deep moral urge to free slaves. Instead, the propaganda mobilized the Southern clergy to defend slavery. Snay details how Southern clergy subsequently moved from defenders of slavery to active promoters of the institution who described it as divinely sanctioned. America’s major Protestant denominations—the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches—divided during the 1830s and 1840s with slavery contributing to or causing the schism.

Clergy in both the North and South connected religion to nationalism in antebellum America. Millennialism, the idea that reform could hasten the Second Coming of Christ by cleansing society, fused with Republicanism and convinced Americans “that their social and political institutions had a providential destiny to serve as a model for all humankind” (p. 5). The Southerners believed they inherited this charge. Ministers in both sections argued that the United States, once the Redeemer Nation, was in danger of failing in its duty to change the political destiny of humankind. Depending on the minister’s persuasion and region, God required the preservation of the Union or its severance.

Concerned primarily with the elite urban ministers in the deep South, Snay offers scant and sometimes contradictory accounts of clergy in the upper South and in the border states. Snay acknowledges the presence of religious Unionism in the upper South and notes that the churches and ministers expressed the political moderation of their states. He profiles some of these loyal clergymen and observes “the presence of Unionist clergy in the South of 1860–1 serves as a reminder that the antebellum South was not a single cohesive unit drifting uniformly toward secession” (p. 204). This observation seems to contradict his contention that clergy presented a unified front across the South.

The Reverend H.M. Painter of Boonville, Missouri, is among the few border-state preachers that Snay mentions. Painter, a Presbyterian, used rhetoric similar to his colleagues further south. Painter delivered the sermon The Duty of the Southern Patriot and Christian in the Present Crisis on Friday, January 4, 1861, a day of national fasting declared by President James Buchanan. Painter believed that God directed the rise and fall of nations. The minister attributed the increasing sectional strife to God’s punishment for the nation’s moral decline. He cited Sabbath breaking and profanity as examples of the nation’s wicked behavior. Painter thought the South, purged of the sinful North, would enjoy God’s favor.

Texas Christian University Jeff Wells

Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. By Mitchell Snay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1993), 265 pgs.

In searching for reasons for why the South seceded, historians must cautiously avoid what Joel H. Silbey described as the Civil War synthesis – the tendency, working backward from secession, to ascribe divisiveness to virtually all sectional differences. Mitchell Snay adroitly avoids this trap while making a strong but staid case for the importance of religion in the development of a separate Southern identity. Rather than causing sectionalism and secession, religion “invested the sectional controversy over slavery with moral and religious meaning, strengthening those elements in Southern political culture that made secession possible.” (2)

Snay traces this phenomenon through the clergy, whose sermons and contributions to newspapers and tracts offer the historian a rich written record. However, until the abolitionist movement inundated the South with anti-slavery propaganda in 1835, most clergy throughout the country maintained a rather strict rhetorical separation of church and state. Only when civil matters begged moral questions did clergy deign to enter into political discourse. The “abolitionist crisis” of 1835 blurred these lines significantly, and “drew Southern ministers into sectional politics” (20) as they countered the religiously intoned abolitionist movement on two fronts. First, Southern ministers selectively quoted Holy Scripture as a Christian justification of slavery. Because of this, on the second front, Southern clergy attacked their northern brethren for bringing religion into politics. If responsibility for that move lay at the feet of the Northern clergy, Southern ministers gladly bore the mantle and followed enthusiastically down a new rhetorical road.

The author next follows the work of various Southern clergymen’s attempts to fashion a moral defense of slavery. After justifying the existence of slavery by its occasional mention in the Bible, Southern ministers dismissed abolition as infidelity to the idea of the inerrancy of a literal body of Scripture. In addition to abolition’s infidelity to natural law, Southern clergy believed they could justify the peculiar institution on the basis of such shared beliefs. They further justified their interjection into a largely political debate by making themselves the arbiters of the institution’s morality. The more sinister motive, of course, was to project further control over slaves’ lives, especially in the wake of the religiously-intoned revolts of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Nevertheless, if slavery was “the cornerstone of antebellum Southern distinctiveness,” (109) religion explicated those differences in increasingly separatist terms.

Three denominational schisms further blurred the lines between religious and political discourse. Snay describes a sense of sectionalism within the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches, which split along sectional lines in 1837-8, 1844, and 1845, respectively. He carefully avoids a conflation of these schisms, but treats each individually while pointing out their significant similarities. Namely, slavery became the wedge that split the denominations along existing theological and doctrinal fault-lines. Snay quotes one unnamed observer as fearing that the intra-church schisms were “harbingers of [national] disunion,” (138) a view the author obviously shares. Indeed, he ascribes great significance to the Southern clergy’s notion that schism preserved doctrinal purity, an idea easily transmitted from religious to political discourse. In examining the sermons given by Southern ministers on fast days, which were themselves intended to focus the congregation’s attention on notions of spiritual purity, Snay discovers a tendency toward rhetoric of healing of disease, or purification, through separateness. As in 1835, this gave Southern clergy a justification for entering political discourse, as they increasingly deemed the question of secession to be fraught with moral implications.

Snay argues that this ultimately contributed to the creation of a separate Southern national, rather than merely sectional, identity. In the name of doctrinal-cum-social purity, schism became an acceptable and even desirable course of action. Snay’s final chapter provides an intriguing comparative analysis of Southern versus Northern sermons on the issue of slavery, and its findings lend considerable credence to his thesis. He concludes that the clergy in both sections of the nation constructed their religious-political discourse from the same essential religious and historical texts and histories. Certainly, ministers on both sides of the question of slavery constructed Biblical polemics to justify their political views. Interestingly, Snay finds greater adherence to a party line among Southern, pro-slavery ministers than among Northern clergy. Within the latter category, Snay suggests there existed a greater diversity of opinions on slavery, as some Northern clergy believed disunion to be more immoral than slavery, which they might therefore tolerate in the name of preserving union. Indeed, Snay determined that as many as one-fourth of the Northern, fast day sermons he examined for this comparative study might be labeled “pro-Slavery.” If representative, this finding goes a long way toward establishing the primacy of Southern clergy in engineering a unified Southern identification, one that facilitated, if not caused, secession.

During the 1840s, Methodist and Baptist churches in the South withdrew alliances from their Northern brothers to begin their own, regional denominations, a move that many Presbyterians had taken a decade before. With a Civil War still some fifteen years down the road, many Southerners felt a sense of foreshadowing as even the churches in the United States could no longer remain united. As the Charleston Mercury commented in 1844, “With religions arrayed against and scowling at each other on opposite sides of the line—not only with that peaceful influence lost, but with all its mighty power thrown into the scale of discord, how long will the political union of the North and South continue” (139). While those living through the antebellum era noticed the ties between religious and political strife, many historians have overlooked this religious connection, according to Mitchell Snay, professor of history at Denison University and author of The Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. In this work, Snay demonstrates the ways in which the religious culture of the antebellum South acted as one of several factors to erect a sense of Southern nationalism and sectionalism that would unite diverse groups of Southerners to form a new confederacy and fight a bloody war.

Snay begins his exploration with the first forays of Southern religion into sectional politics—the abolitionist crisis of 1835. In 1835, Northern abolitionists, spurred by recent revivals, took up a mailing campaign to distribute anti-slavery literature to Southern clergymen in hopes of turning some to their cause. Unfortunately for the abolitionists, the campaign as a whole backfired, as Southerners felt affronted by these lectures from their Northern counterparts and in turn began compiling religious defenses against abolitionism. The lynchpin to the Southern argument was the apparent sanctioning of slavery in the Holy Scriptures. Reading the Old Testament and explicit passages about the slave-holding patriarchs and the New Testament and the implicit references condoning slavery (most notably sections Saint Paul’s letters), Southern theologians argued that their side remained loyal to the Bible. On the other hand, Southerners argued that the abolitionist reasoning of these same passages only further demonstrated the heterodoxy of Northern Christians, who seemed to allow politics to shape their sermons and liberalism to shape their theology. Indeed, these Southern “Gentleman Theologians” felt confident that their conservative doctrines and emphasis of the spiritual over the political better reflected the true nature of the church.

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing into the 1840s, the split between Northern and Southern Christians grew, as abolitionism gained an increasing presence in denominational debate. With the pressure from Northern abolitionists to develop stronger denominational stands against slavery, Southerners began adopting rhetoric that would later also be used in the call to secede from the Union. In their mind, the Northerners were abusing their rights as the majority at the expense of the minority voices, breaking previously established covenants designed to cement unity, and corrupting the church itself, leaving the Southerners with no choice but to abandon the national institutions and form their own independent denominations, complete with local, regional control and allowance for and support of slavery. The denominational rifts provided for the Southern religious mindset an established Biblical defense of slavery, the concept of the battle between pro- and anti-slavery forces as a struggle between good and evil, and an example of both the inability for national camps to remain unified as well a demonstration of peaceful disunion.

As the Civil War drew near, the Southern clergy, and in turn the Southern churches, were well prepared to accept the idea of Southern separatism. Confederate arguments of the shredding of the Constitution by Republicans and the trampling of minority rights by an anti-slavery majority sounded strangely familiar in the ears of believers. After Lincoln called up troops, Southerners of various political and religious backgrounds joined together for the Confederate cause. According to Snay, “Religion invested the sectional controversy over slavery with moral and religious significance, reinforced important elements of Southern identity, and fostered a sense of separate sectional identity among Southerners”(211). Therefore, as one of several factors, the activities and arguments of Southern churches provided a “Gospel of Disunion” that gave the South a powerful religious justification for the war.

Snay’s work is well-researched and argued. He is correct in pointing out the connections between religion and politics as well as reminding his readers that these connections were not the only factors in disunion. At times, however, his narrative gives scant background of religious defenses of slavery in the Old South. Although he hints at the presence of earlier justifications for slavery, he seems to suggest that few arguments were made until the mid-1830s, when the abolitionists began their mailing campaign. In addition, as he uses various published resources from pro-slavery theologians, he seems to pay little attention to the publishing dates of his sources, quoting from items written in 1822, 1855, and 1860 all in the same paragraph, subtly suggesting that these thoughts dominated the entire span of the antebellum South. While there may have been very little change in the defense of slavery among clergy, it seems unlikely that there was no progress of thought over an almost forty-year period. These criticisms though should not detract from a fine study that goes a long way in explaining the entrenched relationship between the religion and the politics at the beginning of the Confederate South.