Freedom in Song?

Paul Harvey

Several posts ago John Turner referenced my review in Books & Culture of Scott Gac's excellent work Singing for Freedom, The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform. My review has now been posted here.

The review is nicely juxtaposed with Michael Linton's "Off Key: Making Too Much of Music," a review of a book called Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom In the World of Music.

Gac's work tends to emphasize the importance of music in abolitionism, in a manner akin to any number of works on music and the civil rights movement. As summarized in my review,

It's not hard to imagine the music's power, though. As a religious newspaper noted of their early singing at antislavery conventions in 1843, "The music of the Hutchinsons carries all before it … . Speechifying, even of the better sort, did less to interest, purify and subdue minds, than this irresistible anti-slavery music," garnering interest in the movement as well as followers for the Liberty and, later, Free Soil political parties. Here, one immediately leaps to the freedom songs of the civil rights era, with the SNCC Freedom Singers serving as the analogue to the Hutchinsons. The way powerful music can embolden a social movement comes across clearly, from the 1840s to the 1960s.

And yet, and yet . . . .

even the most sublime music harnessed to the most righteous purposes cannot bring about the millennium. The Hutchinsons learned the lesson of another musical sensation from a much later era: you can't always get what you want. Like many other utopian reformers, the Hutchinsons had condemned slavery as the root of all evils, and considered its extirpation a means to the millennium. Eventually, and to their sorrow, Gac writes, they saw that the end of slavery had "removed a foundational evil from American society without bringing about the apocalyptic change that the Hutchinsons and many of their antislavery friends had once predicted." The end of slavery did not bring justice for African Americans, and the antislavery cohort "downsized their vision of emancipation," still recognizing it as "part of a national story of progress, but no longer a story of eternal salvation."

Linton carries forward this last point with far more global skepticism than I evinced in my review. He writes, in a critical review of Resounding Truth--and, more generally, of the "Theology and the Arts" movement:

Begbie's thought largely grows out of two areas: his understanding of the role music plays in contemporary life, and the notion of a divinely ordained "cosmic order"—a notion combining the Pythagorean/Platonic "Great Tradition" and the acoustic phenomenon of the overtone series. But his analyses in both areas are problematic. Take this passage, for example:

Few doubt that music can call forth the deepest things of the human spirit and
affect behavior at the most profound levels. Anyone who has parented a teenager
will not need to be told this—study after study has shown that music often plays
a pivotal part in the formation of young people's identity, self-image, and
patterns of behavior.

Well, no. Not really, or not quite. Music's proven effect upon behavior isn't profound; it's actually pretty trivial. The tempo of particular kinds of music played in particular kinds of grocery stores can affect the speed in which shoppers will generally move through the aisles (but it isn't particularly good at selling individual products: funny animated critters are better—think of that lizard selling car insurance). And like the Chippendale furniture and brass sconces in the law office that suggest sober stability, music can be used as décor. As décor it can do all the things that décor can do: set mood, play upon cultural memory, suggest appropriate behavior—but music cannot dictate behavior any more than the furniture can get you to sign a contract if you don't want to. . . .

. . . Begbie argues against the position that understands music as "essentially a human construction and human expression, earthed in nothing bigger than the ideology of a culture, a social group, or the desires of the individual." But I think Begbie is wrong. Like grass huts and Coca Cola bottles, music is something we humans construct out of our environment. And what is and what is not considered to be a musical sound, a kind of sound that is found in a piece of music and distinguishes it from noise, is a cultural function.

Contra the "Great Tradition," music isn't a privileged form of communication that unlocks mysteries nothing else will reveal. Certainly music is a powerful medium of emotional self-discovery and expression, but so too are poetry and storytelling. And the Chinese have an ancient and sophisticated tradition of porcelain appreciation.

How much does music, ultimately, move the soul? These books suggest that it does, in a religious sense, but both books also provide fodder for skepticism, if not outright refutation. Your thoughts?

Inheritors of Unwanted Legacies

Today's post comes to us from our friend and occasional guest poster Judith Weisenfeld, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of the recent and excellent volume Hollywood be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949. Judith discusses some recent documentaries on the entangled history of race, slavery, communal myths, and religion in American history.

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Inheritors of Unwanted Legacies
Judith Weisenfeld

On July 29, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the non-binding respolution H.Res. 194 (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr110-194) formally “apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans” and committing to rectifying “the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.” Predictably, my reading of responses posted on online news sites turned up many people arguing that this as far too little and far too late and many insisting that these sins of the past have nothing to do with them. Some, however, took the opportunity to respond at length to the question of what kinds of responses to the legacies of slavery and racism are useful and appropriate.

Coincidentally, I recently saw two new documentaries made by white women dealing with the implications of their families’ histories as participants in America’s long traditions of racism. Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, which premiered on PBS’s POV in June, follows ten descendants of the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island as they struggle to come to terms with their ancestors’ tremendous success as slave traders from the mid 18th century through the early 19th century and slave plantation owners in Cuba well into the 19th century. The film follows this group as they retrace the steps of the slave trade from Ghana to Cuba to Bristol and consider the economic, political, and moral consequences of their ancestors’ business in each location. In addition to building the economy of Bristol through their active traffic in people, the DeWolfs were important figures in the local Episcopal Church. Many of the descendants featured in the film are active members of churches and see their work as fundamentally religious. The information the film presents about the profound ways in which Northern communities were implicated in the Atlantic slave trade and American, Caribbean, and Latin American systems of slavery is compelling and makes clear that, while the documentary began as a personal project, it is not simply the story of one family. At the same time, the focus remains on the individual emotional journeys of participants, with Browne serving as narrator and commentator. I sometimes found it difficult and at other times moving to observe their struggles, but was generally made uncomfortable by Browne’s sighing, worried narration which contributed to a certain aura of self-indulgence on the part of the DeWolf descendants.

A good deal of screen time is devoted to conversations among the ten participants about what, if anything, their inheritance enjoins them to do and, although no single path emerges, we do get a sense at the film’s end of the actions various family members take. One of these was a campaign to get the Episcopal Church to apologize for its involvement in the slave trade and in slavery. A dialogue project has emerged from the film and discussion materials and information about screenings are available (although I was a little taken aback by the division of viewing guides into ones for African Americans, “European Americans,” “multi-racial” people, and “other race groups and ethnicities”). Traces of the Trade is just out on DVD soon and so easily obtained.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths chronicles the 2007 Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, where she grew up. The oldest Mardi Gras in America, Mobile’s celebration remains racially segregated, with an all-white association crowning what they understand to be the true and only King and Queen of Mardi Gras. An all-black group, founded in 1939 in response to Mobile’s black residents only having access to the celebration as servants, musicians, or fire carriers (this remains the case today), crowns its own King and Queen. 2007’s white Mardi Gras Queen descends from an infamous slave trader who brought an illegal shipment of Africans to Mobile in 1860 and, as it turns out, that year’s black Mardi Gras Queen descends from one of the Africans on board that ship. The mystic societies that sponsor balls and parades – The Order of Myths is one of these – remain inaccessible to black members and many of the white participants Brown interviews insist that they simply want to maintain their traditions and, besides, the “coloreds” like it that way.

What makes this film so compelling is the skill with which Brown accomplishes observational, cinema verité documentary – she chose informational title screens rather than a voice-over narration – and refuses easy resolution. This is not to say that her perspective is not apparent. Her emotional presence informs everything, especially the editing, which moves the film along quickly primarily through juxtaposition of scenes of the separate black and white events. It did seem to me, however, that the editing sometimes relegated the black participants in service of Brown’s desire to show the separate but unequal nature of the celebrations rather than allowing these people’s stories their own integrity. We learn late in the film precisely how Brown is connected to Mobile’s Mardi Gras and it seems to me a good decision for her to have withheld that information for so long. It is clear that the filmmaker has an investment in the past and future of Mobile’s rituals and, despite a few missteps, she does a remarkable job of presenting a complicated vision of one small portion of contemporary American race relations. In his review in New York Magazine, David Edelstein sums up the source of the film’s power and effectiveness well: “In the telling, The Order of Myths sounds obvious, and its underlying racial politics might be. But Brown is scrutinizing the surface, the tension between individuals and their ways. You try to read their faces, and it’s as if they’re wearing Mardi Gras masks, held in place by… what? Fear? It’s no wonder. Without the order of myths, what’s left?” The film’s website has information on the limited schedule of screenings, but I sincerely hope that we will see a DVD release soon. [Editors' note: my Netflix queue gives a January release date for the DVD).
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Update: We have received the following information on getting the DVD, especially to show for classes and the like, for The Order of Myths: "it is available for purchase on DVD with Public Performance Rights. You can order it online through our website, at www.cinemaguild.com (select New Releases along the top), or by calling or faxing us directly at Tel: (212) 685-6242, or Fax: (212) 685-4717.

God and Race in American Politics

Paul Harvey

I've just had the privilege of reviewing an important new work by Mark Noll (to be published later in Christianity Today -- I'll put up the link or review later once it's available): God and Race in American Politics: A Short History, based on a series of lectures Noll gave at Princeton in 2006.

I'll post something more about the review later, but for the present here are a couple of paragraphs in the book's "Theological Conclusion," where Noll lays out some ideas for what might be called a moral history of religion, race, and politics in American history:

Throughout American history, what I have called the broad Calvinist tradition has been responsible for many of the achievements, but also many of the problems, that require a consideration of contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes. Most obviously, reliance on the Bible has produced spectacular liberation alongside spectacular oppression. . . . . The history of American race, religion, and politics from Nat Turner to George W. Bush is a narrative in which contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes abound. For making sense of this tangled history, it is helpful to proceed from a standpoint with a scope for moral complexity as wide as the heights of goodness and depths of evil within that history. Historic Christian faith offers suich a standpoint from which it is possible to see how much believers themselves have done to promote the evils of racism in American politics while at the same time recognizing how often they have offered hints of redemption as well.

Religious Liberties and Anti-Catholicism

Paul Harvey

A few days ago, I posted some bibliographic suggestions, from H-AMREL, for studies of early and more contemporary anti-Catholicism. Tracy Fessenden subsequently sent me a note about a forthcoming book from Oxford by Elizabeth Fenton (coming out in 2010 or thereabouts, I believe), which appears among other things to be a synthesis of much of this work, and something that many of you will look forward to. It reminds me of a more literary, American Studies take on some of the arguments Philip Hamburger proposed in Separation of Church and State. Anyway, for your interest, here's a precis and an appetizer:

Religious Liberties examines the anti-Catholicism’s seminal importance to the liberal democratic tradition in the United States. Charting the echoes of the Continental Congress’s early characterization of Catholicism as “dangerous in an extreme degree… to the civil rights and liberties of all America” through literary and political texts of the nineteenth century, this book argues that the rhetoric of pluralism so central to U.S. liberal democracy emerged in tandem with a discourse that characterized the U.S. as “free” by placing it at odds with the Catholic. The book begins by arguing that late-colonial responses to the toleration of Catholicism in Quebec laid the groundwork for an anti-Catholic liberalism and then goes on in its chapters to show how such anti-Catholicism structured early national novels concerned with territorial expansion, literary and political responses to the Mexican War, debates over women’s suffrage, antebellum colonization schemes, and late-nineteenth-century critiques of political corruption. Religious Liberties aims to illuminate the ways in which a variety of texts from the early and nineteenth-century U.S. aligned the nation with Protestantism and thereby ensured the mutual dependence, rather than the “separation” we so often take for granted, of church and state.

Anti-Catholicism Bibliography Addendum

To the previous post, Tracy Fessenden wrote the following comment, which I'll post here to make sure everyone sees it, and the reference to what appears to be a fascinating forthcoming book: I wanted to let readers know that Elizabeth Fenton is writing a book, "Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in U.S. Literature and Culture, 1774-1889," which should be out on Oxford in the next year or two. What I've seen of it is fabulous.

Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism: Some Bibliographic Suggestions

Paul Harvey

A few months ago, a subscriber to H-AMREL posted this inquiry, which I thought would be of interest to some readers of this blog:

I am creating a syllabus for a seminar in the History of American Catholicism, and I would be particularly interested in suggestions for good journal articles for the early republic and antebellum periods. Iwould be particularly interested in works on anti-Catholicism. Suggestions of full-length books would also be appreciated, but I am already familiar with several major works, and they all seem to be currently available in paperback. Although the matter is less pressing, suggestions for appropriate readings on the period between the world wars would also be appreciated.

The query received a number of replies, which add up to a nice beginning bibliography for the subject. Here's a compilation.

The first respondent wrote: Here are a few article possibilities on Catholicism in the early republic and antebellum period:

Carter, Michael S. "'Under the Benign Sun of Toleration": Mathew Carey,the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789-1791" Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Fall 2007).

Dolan, Jay. "The Search for an American Catholicism, 1780-1820," in Religious Diversity and American Religious History, ed. Walter H.Conser, Jr. and Sumner B. Twiss, University of Georgia Press, 1997, pp.26-51.

Dolan, Jay. "Catholicism and American Culture: Strategies for Survival," in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna, University of Illinois Press, 1997, pp. 61-80.

Fenton, Elizabeth. "Catholic Canadians, Religious Pluralism, and National Unity in the Early U.S. Republic," in Early American Literature, Vol. 41, No. 1, 29-57.

Lannie, Vincent P. "Alienation in America: The Immigrant Catholic and Public Education in Pre-Civil War America." Review of Politics, XXXII (1970), 503-521.

Lannie, Vincent P. and Bernard C. Diethorn. "For the Honor and Glory ofGod: The Philadelphia Bible Riots, 1840" History of Education Quarterly,Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1968): 44-106.

Next response:

All but one of these are full-length books, but I'm passing them along just in case they aren't already on your radar.

Early Republic and Antebellum periods: Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

The classic work on the subject, this book charts the rise and fall ofthe Know Nothings in the mid-19th century.

Davis, David Brion. "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 47, No. 2. (Sep., 1960), pp. 105-224.

Another classic, dealing with the interrelationships between these three forms of intolerance in the mid-19th century: Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).Excellent material, but a tough read. I would only recommend this for graduate students and advanced undergrads.J

john T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York:W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). The early chapters deal with the antebellum period.

Interwar: Lerond Curry, Protestant-Catholic Relations in America: World War I Through Vatican II (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1972).

The next response adds a few more:

Daniel Cohen. "Passing the Torch: Boston Firemen, "Tea Party" Patriots,and the Burning of the Charlestown Convent." Journal of the EarlyRepublic, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 2004), pages 527-586.

And then:

With regard to 19th century American Catholicism, I would draw your attention to two articles by Tracy Fessenden, "The Convent, the Brothel, and the Protestant Woman'sSphere." Signs, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 451-478, and "The Nineteenth Century Bible Wars and the Separation of Church and State." Church History." Vol. 74, no. 4 (December 2005), pp. 785-811. Also her recently published book, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular,and American Literature, which actually extends into the twentieth century. As with Jenny Franchot's work, this material is not an easy read, but well worth the effort.

For American Catholicism in the period between the two world wars, I have found particularly insightful William M. Halsey's The Survival of American Innocence (Notre Dame, 1980).

A graduate student respondent includes some articles that emphasize more religious cooperation than conflict and anti-Catholicism:

For different perspectives on American Catholicism andanti-Catholicism during the antebellum period, might I suggest:

Andrew Stern, “Southern Harmony: Catholic-ProtestantRelations in the Antebellum South,” Religion in American Culture 17.2 (Summer 2007).

Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852,” William andMary Quarterly 59.2 (2002): 409-448.

Joseph Mannard's work on Protestant-Catholic relations throughthe lens of gender studies could also be useful to you, and they are article-length pieces (as opposed to the Franchot book!) I particularly like:

Mannard, “Maternity. . . of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5.3-4 (1986):305-324.

Mannard, “Protestant Mothers and Catholic Sisters: Gender Concerns in Anti-Catholic Conspiracy Theories, 1830-1860,”American Catholic Studies 111 (2000): 1-21.

Gene Mills of Florida State adds:

And then don't forget:

Michael Pasquier, "'Though Their Skin Remains Brown, I Hope Their SoulsWillSoon Be White': Slavery, French Missionaries, and the Roman Catholic Priesthood inthe American South, 1789-1865" _Church History_ June 2008.

God's Country

by Randall Stephens

Religion in American History contributing editor John Fea has written an insightful piece on contemporary Christian providential views of history. ("Thirty Years of Light & Glory," Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/Agust 2008. Thanks to Don Yerxa, my colleague here at ENC, for pointing me to the review.) Fea highlights the work of Peter Marshall, son of Peter Marshall the famous chaplain to the United States Senate. Peter the younger has reportedly sold nearly a million copies of his 1977 book The Light and the Glory, co-authored with David Manuel. (I'm green with envy. Why don't people care this much about southern pentecostals?) Like Hal Lindsey's mega-selling apocalyptic romp, Late Great Planet Earth, or Rick Warren's soulfood for hungry Christians, The Purpose Driven Life, Light and the Glory does not come up on the radar screens of academics. Yet...

Here's Fea:

It is easy to understand why on the The Light and the Glory has had such staying power in the Evangelical world. While mainstream texts treat American history as if God did not exist, Marshall and Manuel offer a narrative of early American history focused on the sovereignty of God. The authors also tell their story in compelling prose. They occasionally inject their own voices into the narrative to explain how they crafted their argument through research and prayer.

Fea also observes:

Because Marshall and Manuel sought facts from history that seemed to fit their thesis, their narrative is dominated by the story of early New England.Jamestown is covered and dismissed in one chapter, and other colonies (such as William Penn’s experiment in Pennsylvania) and religious movements (such as the Baptists and Anglicans) that shaped early American life are ignored.

I emailed John and asked how Lord Dunmore's revolutionary proclamation freeing slaves who would fight for the Brits would fit into this story. Or, what are Christians in Virginia to make of the deadly combo of tobacco and slaves that so boosted the flagging Chesapeake colony? The triumphalism and selective literalism of so much providential history should warn off Christians. In addition to that one must acknowledge that things change over time. Old Scratch at work in late 17th century Salem is not the same devil that many Christians believe in today. And what made sense to 18th or 19th century Christians might seem utterly wrong or immoral to today's evangelicals. All that doesn't seem to bother providentialists. Certainly, the history writing of D. James Kennedy, Newt Gingrich, David Barton, and others is a creative endeavor. Many conservatives, Christians and others, are looking for a usable past. (See this Harper's reading I posted on my Early Republic syllabus site: Mark A Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell, America's Porvidential History.) Such efforts still seem senseless to the uninitiated.

Eyes Wide Shut

Paul Harvey

Recently I mentioned my deep admiration for Erskine Clarke's Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (which I've just recently, and very belatedly, gotten around to reading), and promised to blog some more on this richly humane and deeply affecting work (and, to repeat what I said earlier, Kelly Baker has blogged here about the work). It's the story of the lowcountry world of Charles Colcock Jones, the "apostle to the slaves," and his extended family, together with a parallel history of the slaves his family owned. That flat description scarcely captures the richness and pathos of this tale.

Before getting back to blogging on the book, I corresponded with a historian I admire: Beth Barton Schweiger of the University of Arkansas. Purely coincidentally, Beth sent me a review she had previously prepared of this work, but which did not as it turns out appear in print. So with her permission, I'm running her review here, which says pretty much (and much more eloquently) what I was going to blog more informally.

As a preview, here's my favorite paragraph, which provides me with this entry's title, "eyes wide shut":

Charles Colcock Jones died in the turbulent spring of 1863, lying on his bed at Montevideo fully dressed in black with a “pure white cravat.” Only his wife and daughter-in-law were with him at his death, but many of the slaves whom he thought he knew watched as the coffin, built by the carpenter Porter, was covered over with earth. Firm in the conviction of his sin and of his Savior, Jones died still closed to the full wisdom offered by his theology. Yet it was not that he saw the truth and chose to resist it. Instead, he grasped only a part of the truth even while he was convinced he had it all. “You can know a thing to death and for all purposes be completely ignorant of it,” a character in a recent novel opined. Erskine Clarke’s history warns us how little we can see, even when we would swear that our eyes are wide open.

Here's the full review.
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Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. Yale University Press, 2005. Reviewed by Beth Barton Schweiger.

In the late winter of 1796, a Georgia planter sent instructions to his wife about a slave he had leased to a neighbor some years earlier. “Make Old Jupiter go to Mr. Dowses and bring old Silvey home and set her to work,” John Jones wrote. Silvey was Jupiter’s wife. After years of doing everything in his power to get her returned, Jupiter rejoiced when his master finally relented. After the couple was reunited, Jones wrote again. “Tell [Jupiter] that as he has now got his wife back I shall expect he will do his best for me,” he told his wife. (3)
The twisted paternalism of American slavery is on full view in these two lines. Two couples, one enslaved to the other, knew one another intimately in life and in death. The mistress bathed the fevered back of the sick slave, the slave delivered and suckled the woman’s child. Master and slave, men and women, sang hymns together, prayed together, and wept together over their dead. Yet they did not know each other at all. Slave and master were bound together in a relationship so complex and ambivalent, Eugene Genovese famously wrote, “that neither could express the simplest human feelings without relation to the other.”[i] Indeed, John Jones needed his slave’s gratitude when he restored the precious thing he had so carelessly broken. And Jupiter felt the bitter edge of his joy, which laid bare his powerlessness to protect his family. Slave and master lived separate lives in a single place, unable to breach the terrible chasm opened when one human being claims complete power over another. John’s son Charles would later observe that masters “live and die in the midst of Negroes and know comparatively little of their real character.” (26)

In his Bancroft prize-winning book, Erskine Clarke shows over and over how the same event—a visit, a death, a birth, a purchase of property, a church service, a trip to town—meant one thing for the slave and another for the master. Leasing a slave was both a careless decision to bring in some extra cash and a wrenching end to marital intimacy. Clarke shows as no historian has done before that the history of American slavery should be written as a single narrative of “two histories of one place and one time.” (ix)

By far the more difficult of the two histories to write is that of the slaves. Clarke used an extraordinary collection of papers left behind by the family of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, scattered in archives from New Orleans to North Carolina. The family, one of the wealthiest families in one of the wealthiest slave societies in the world, meticulously recorded the births, deaths, sales, and movements of their slaves and many details of the material circumstances of their lives. In this, we are indebted to the paternalism that prompted such record-keeping. The voices of the slaves themselves are nearly always silent in these records, so Clarke draws on an anthropological model pioneered by the historian Rhys Isaac to reconstruct their experiences.[ii]

Accordingly, the book is filled with people moving across the landscape of coastal Georgia, which itself becomes a character in the story. There are carefully imagined meetings, conversations, and surreptitious gatherings by slaves on any one of seventeen plantations in the region. Most of these events are known to us only through accounts left by their masters, but Clarke richly reimagines them from the perspective of the slaves. One can only marvel at the exhaustive research and years of thought required to support such readings.

It is a cliché to say that a brief review cannot do justice to a book. Clarke’s beautifully-detailed history is as densely peopled and intricately plotted as a Russian novel, stuffed with magnificent detail. In these pages, we learn and relearn the epic of American slavery. Clarke writes unapologetically of a particular people in a particular place. We see the view across the marshes from the broad piazza of the big house at Montevideo and the view from the fires that burned in front of the cabins in the settlement at Carlawter. We watch as a Presbyterian session bowed to the absolute power of the master by declaring that Major, a church member, could marry again after his wife was sold away, as she was as good as dead to him. We see the only white man singing and praying with several hundred mourners at the slave preacher Sharper’s funeral, and watch as the ox cart bears the coffin down a dusty moon-lit road to the burial ground in the settlement. We see how the story of slavery moved towards bondage for the master and towards freedom for the slave, and how both master and slave were diminished.

The kind of slavery practiced on the Jones family plantations was not the only kind of American slavery. As Ira Berlin has emphasized, slavery changed dramatically in North America from generation to generation and region to region.[iii] The free people of Liberty County, Georgia thrived off the labor of their slaves for more than a century and a half before Federal troops invaded during the Civil War. The stability and prosperity brought by the labor-intensive rice cultivation meant that slaves in the region were able, more than many American slaves, to live in relatively stable families, to negotiate the task system of work with their masters, and to create a rich Gullah culture out of remembered African traditions. Yet these relatively stable slave settlements were under constant threat in the early nineteenth century, along with the rest of the seaboard South, from a new kind of slavery practiced in the lower Mississippi valley. The massive migration of more than a million slaves to till the rich soils of the interior, named by Berlin the “Second Middle Passage,” put constant pressure on plantations in the older seaboard states. Long before the thundering of Federal guns threatened to end plantation slavery as it was practiced in the Low Country, it was being threatened from inside the South.

Charles Jones was a sincere Christian man, and by any meaningful measure, a benevolent master. He had agonized over slavery in his youth, particularly during his years of study at Andover and Princeton, at one time declaring it unqualifiedly against the laws of God. He eventually silenced his own fears by devoting his life to “the religious instruction of the slaves.” If slavery must continue, Jones reasoned, then it must be reformed and brought under the supervision of Christian people. Accordingly, Jones devoted most of his working life to evangelizing slaves on his own and neighboring plantations. His optimism about the possibilities of moral reform to wrench society into the shape he thought best matched the fervor of any northern moral reformer of his day. North and South, all Americans seemed convinced of their power over history. And yet, even the relatively benign and deeply Christian paternalism of Jones and his wife Mary could never completely dull the sharp assertion of power by owners over what was owned. “They are traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber!” Jones exclaimed of his slaves in late 1863 as Yankee gunboats sailed up a nearby river, prompting the boldest of them to take flight. (415) And as her life lay in ruins after the war, the widow Mary demonstrated how easily pious pity for the slave hardened into racial hatred for freedmen and women. “With their emancipation must come their extermination,” she bluntly declared. “They perish when brought into conflict with the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian race.” (444)

Clarke is not the first to use the rich papers left behind by the Jones family. Nor is it the first time a study based on them has won national acclaim. In 1972, the literary scholar Robert Manson Myers published an 1,800-page colossus, The Children of Pride, which featured a selection of Jones family letters written between 1854 and 1868.[iv] The book was hailed by many critics and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 over some loud objections. One Georgia historian scorned the book’s warm reception by the “literate few in the fading Daughters of the Confederacy” and decried its “Gone With the Wind” southern apologetics, complete with “shadowy whites, invisible negroes, slavemasters of unbelieveable Christian rectitude, and flowers of chivalry.”[v]

Clarke’s achievement in Dwelling Place is to tell two histories where Myers told only one. The striking difference is apparent on every page of the book, but it is most starkly on display in the appendices. Children of Pride included almost 300 pages of a densely-printed “Who’s Who” of nearly all of the people mentioned in the Jones letters. Not a single slave appears in the hundreds listed there (although they do earn an index of their own by first name only.) By contrast, Clarke includes eight family trees of slaves owned by the Jones family. His painstaking work demonstrates visually what is made clear on every page of his book: that the slaves had their own family histories, that their low country settlements were composed “not simply of a mass of slaves, but of distinct men and women, people with names, with diverse personalities and personal histories.” (189)

Clarke’s contribution in this book extends beyond writing slaves like Jupiter, Sharper, Silvey, and Major and their masters into a single narrative. His book also reflects on the meaning of American Christian slavery and how best to write its history. Is the best history one informed by moral outrage? How much do we have a right to expect of the dead? Shall we use them only to measure our own progress? Historians of American slavery have long wrestled with such questions. Many who have claimed no interest in defending Christianity have been able to explain people like Charles Jones only by denying that they were Christians at all.

Clarke offers a different answer. He has expressed exasperation with those who deny that “Southern evangelicalism could be a part of an intellectual tradition worth exploring,” and like Donald G. Mathews, he takes for granted that “the slaveholding ethic was as natural an extension of Evangelicalism as was abolitionism.” [vi] In this, he offers a sharp rebuke to any who might claim that the Church is a culture. Charles Jones was very possibly the best Christian master that the system of American chattel slavery might have created, and yet it is nearly impossible to claim him as one of our own. Clarke refuses to make excuses for Jones’s sincere and ultimately misguided piety, or to claim that he was merely a rank hypocrite. He takes the costlier path of trying to understand him, wisely acknowledging that we have much to learn from staring down Christian slavery for what it was. Clarke is hardly an apologist for the South. But as a seminary professor with deep roots in the Low Country and in Jones’ beloved Presbyterian tradition, it is not possible for Clarke to stand outside of Jones’s world and point a finger at this preacher’s folly. Instead, he chose the more difficult task of standing with him. And it is only in standing with him that Clarke can tell us what he sees—a blind, visionary, noble, arrogant, thoughtless, wise, brave, cowardly, heartless, loving, and mortal Christian man.

Charles Colcock Jones died in the turbulent spring of 1863, lying on his bed at Montevideo fully dressed in black with a “pure white cravat.” Only his wife and daughter-in-law were with him at his death, but many of the slaves whom he thought he knew watched as the coffin, built by the carpenter Porter, was covered over with earth. Firm in the conviction of his sin and of his Savior, Jones died still closed to the full wisdom offered by his theology. Yet it was not that he saw the truth and chose to resist it. Instead, he grasped only a part of the truth even while he was convinced he had it all. “You can know a thing to death and for all purposes be completely ignorant of it,” a character in a recent novel opined.[vii] Erskine Clarke’s history warns us how little we can see, even when we would swear that our eyes are wide open.

[i] Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, (New York: Random House, 1974; Vintage Books, 1976), 3.
[ii] The Transformation of Virginia: Community, Religion, Authority, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
[iii] Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).
[iv] Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Myers also published a book on Jones’s experience at Princeton and wrote a play based on the papers. Myers, A Georgian at Princeton, (New York: Harcourt, 1976) and Quintet: A Five Play Cycle Drawn from The Children of Pride (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
[v] Charles Crowe, “Historians and ‘Benign Neglect’: Conservative Trends in Southern History and Black Studies,” Reviews in American History 2 (June, 1974): 163-173.
[vi] Review of Heyrman, “Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt,” Theology Today 55 (July, 1998): 283-5; Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xv.
[vii] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2004), 7.

Ghosts of Futures Past

Paul Harvey

Spiritualism continues to haunt and invigorate American religious history and studies. Despite excellent works by Anne Braude, Brett Carroll, and several others, there's much more yet to say about the far-reaching implications of the practice in the nineteenth century and beyond. Here's a new, innovative, dense and difficult, but rewarding new work for your interest (especially for you American studies types): Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press).

From the book's description:

Ghosts of Futures Past guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical combination of science and magic that called into question the very categories of male and female, material and immaterial, self and other, living and dead. Dissolving the boundaries between them opened Spiritualist practitioners to other voices and, in turn, allowed them to imagine new social worlds and forge diverse political affinities.

Nineteenth-century Spiritualists were the “other within,” McGarry suggests, in this cultural studies reading of Spiritualism: the widely popular practice of conjuring up spirits and ancestors of the past, often through the “mediumship” of younger women who could embody the voices of the disembodied. Mostly white and middle-class Americans, Spiritualists “claimed mysticism for white America, creating a spiritual practice out of a communion with difference.” They were harbingers of America’s first “New Age,” and practitioners of what Catherine Albanese has termed the tradition of “metaphysical religion.” Spiritualists identified with the other – men with women, whites with Indians, straights with “queers”; in this way, Spiritualists practiced transgressive politics, spiritualities, and sexualities, earning them the ire of Anthony Comstock and all those who searched for obscenity in every piece of mail.

This is a difficult but effective work; the combination of both is suggested by the chapter titles, which puzzle but tantalize:

1. Mourning, Media, and the Cultural Politics of Conjuring the Dead
2. Indian Guides: Haunted Subjects and the Politics of Vanishing
3. Spectral Sexualities: Free Love, Moral Panic, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law
4. Mediomania: The Spirit of Science in a Culture of Belief and Doubt
5. Secular Spirits: A Queer Genealogy of Untimely Sexualities

McGarry is at her best in the last chapter, in which she takes on reigning academic theories of secularity and new sexual categories (including that of the “homosexual”), and explores the relationship of religion and sexuality. Her subjects used “spiritual theories of embodiment and forms of memorialization” to find “transfigurative affiliation, consolation, and connection.”

"I Hope Their Souls Will Soon Be White"

Paul Harvey

Hot off the presses, a terrific article and must read for American religious historians, by our contributing editor Michael Pasquier: “ ‘Though Their Skin Remains Brown, I Hope Their Souls Will Soon be White’: Slavery, French Missionaries, and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the American South, 1789-1865,” Church History 77 (June 2008): 337-370.

Pasquier’s nuanced and well-researched piece argues this conclusion (among others):

“French missionary priests, who were immigrants for all intents and purposes, responded to the practice of enslavement as Catholics and ultimately justified the practice of enslavements as Catholics. They embraced the American institution of slavery by using non-American theological and philosophical arguments, ultimately finding commonalities in the conservative and authoritarian social orders of the American South and the Roman Catholic Church. But more important, they embraced the American institution of slavery because of their practical experiences as missionaries to enslaved persons and as owners of slaves. Put simply, the experience of evangelizing and owning slaves cannot be underestimated when explaining how ‘Catholics became American.’”

Later, he writes:

“The commonalities of southern Protestant and Roman Catholic social ethics hinged on a conservative understanding of the construction of a Christian social order. Despite their common conclusion, Protestant ministers and missionary priests developed their proslavery ideologies in different places and for different reasons. With the sectional conflict of the 1850s and 1860s, evangelical Protestantism and southern conservatism combined to produce an unintentionally common bond based on Christianity and slavery.”

And finally:

“the more French missionaries acted according to their understanding of Catholicism, they more they identified with southern culture and defended the institution of slavery.”

As it happens, I read this piece while making my way all the way through Erskine Clarke’s truly epic Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, which traces the life of the family, white and black, surrounding the family of the “apostle to the slaves,” Charles Colcock Jones. Jones found himself inexorably compelled to support the very institution that he bitterly criticized as a seminary student at Andover and Princeton. More on this book in a blog post in the near future – in the meantime, read Kelly Baker’s review/conference presentation on this book, from her previous blog post.

Ed Blum's Airplane Reading, Part III (Plus A Discourse on Donkey Kong)

Book Teasers for Your Next Flights
by Ed Blum

I’ll be so happy when we’re past November. Then, we’ll be able to think, talk, and write (oftentimes not necessarily in that order) about issues other than the upcoming presidential election. I wondered what the main topics of conversation would be in the post-election world; will Tom Cruise reprise his role in Top Gun? will the United States initiate new wars in the Middle East or elsewhere? will Paul Harvey win another blog award? What will be the major conversations among American religious historians? These were the questions I asked as a boarded a plane for Houston and then Indianapolis last week. It was the official end of my book tour and then the second Young Scholars in American Religion meeting. After discussing links between lynching, crucifixion, religion, theology, and politics at the University of Houston, I was jetting off to Indy to play some football, critique proposals on everything from Puritans in colonial Virginia (or is it “puritans” in Virginia) to links between evangelicals and technology, from notions of religious liberty to the brutalities of religious studies. All of it, combined with Paul Harvey’s less-than-amazing athletic abilities (think Eli Manning, only just exactly the opposite), made for an incredible trip (I’ll forget the horrible night I spent stuck at the Dallas airport).

On the various plane trips, I had two manuscripts (well, actually one full manuscript and the introduction to another). The first was Charles Irons’s The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia and the second was Katherine Carté Engel’s Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Thankfully, neither book was about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John McCain. Neither book claimed to tell us who would win, how they would win, or how they would lose. Neither Irons nor Engel is interested in the arts of divination. These were historical works written by insightful, exacting historians. Praise God!

Irons shows how colonial and antebellum religion in the United States South – at least Virginia – was the fruit of interracial interaction. Particularly, southern proslavery Christianity spun out of white action and black reaction, black action and white reaction, interracial conflict, cooperation, understanding, misunderstanding, exchange, and outrage. Taking his cue from recent work on the abolitionist movements in the North, Irons reveals convincingly how African Americans – from unnamed farmhands to revolutionaries like Nat Turner – drastically altered the terrain of southern evangelicalism. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity is exactly the kind of history called for by Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter. In Writing Across the Color Line, Painter urged historians to stop reifying segregation as if white and black worlds were ever truly separated. She urged scholars to defy notions of Jim Crow by showing the dynamic interactions between white and black voices, characters, aspirations, and imaginations. Charles Irons does this, and he does it … masterfully (oops, is that an acceptable word when writing about slavery?) The University of North Carolina Press has treated Professor Irons well, and for good reason. The book is available immediately in paperback and would be terrific for classes on the American South, antebellum America, and religion in American history.

After reading Irons’s work, I started to think about the long trajectory of white-African American religious interactions, how so often whites have based their politics, beliefs, and thoughts in relationship to African American religion. There are the messianic black leaders, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and his “I Have a Dream” speech; then there are the maligned prophetic figures, like Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Whether the antebellum world or the twenty-first century one, white and black religion seem to play games of tag, of cat and mouse, and of hide and seek. Then it dawned on me… I’m thinking about the present again; I’m thinking about politics. Even Charles Irons’s work, which his history at its best, forces me to think about now.

Closing up Irons’s manuscript at the airport in Dallas, I decided to take a break and play some video games. (I’m a sucker for a good game from the 1980s when video games weren’t about beating up police officers or honing military skill in WWII combat). Even in the realm of games, however, I could not escape the presidential election. I fed my quarters into Donkey Kong. Then I wondered – where was the donkey? I kept on playing, looking for a Democratic Donkey to flash across the screen, perhaps save me from turmoil, perhaps stop the evil Kong above from his relentless attacks. But I have news to the Democratic faithful; there was no donkey. He never came. My little plumber character died. I lost interest, and perhaps a part of my political soul.

I had to get out of the present; I had to get far away. And so I turned to the introduction of Katherine Carté Engel’s Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Like Irons, Katherine Carte Engel has written a story of exchange and interchange and of cooperation and conflict. Hers is in the form of markets and missions and centered on the Moravians of the middle colonies. The introduction took me away to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was back in the eighteenth century, chopping down trees and bringing the Moravian gospel to Native Americans.

I was looking with Engel’s characters across the Atlantic to England and Germany, to the arrivals and departures of missionaries on the same boats with raw materials and manufactured goods. Engel would not allow me to escape the present, though, any more than my playing of Donkey Kong. Her work forced me to wonder about the moral implications of individualist capitalism, and the market consequences of missionary activity.

And, of course, then I thought of how often current United States foreign interventions are connected to missionary efforts (religious freedom for Protestants) and market consideration (who doesn’t want cheap oil). Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America should be out by the end of the year. It promises to be another great book of American religious history from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

I’m so grateful to Engel and Irons for writing with brisk prose, for attuning closely to local details and historical nuance. If only I could stop thinking about the present, about presidential elections, and about wars that could go on for one hundred years. Who knows what my next historical escape will be; alas, it will probably just teach me as much about the present as it does the past – like the fantastic works of Engel and Irons.

Labors of Liberality

Paul Harvey

While we're on the subject of the Enlightenment and religion in eighteenth-century America (see the post just below, on John Fea's new book), here's some more good reading. The most recent Journal of American History features this article by J. M. Opal: "The Labors of Liberality: Christian Benevolence and National Prejudice in the American Founding" (History Cooperative access required). Here's a little appetizer:

Historians have also employed "liberalism" to make sense of early national Americans and their collective pursuit of happiness. "Liberal" in this vein connotes the rejection of aristocratic privilege and the embrace of progress, natural rights, and the good sense of the unsupervised people. Since the 1980s, there has been a tendency to fit liberal and republican values within broader traditions of early American thought and culture. James T. Kloppenberg, in particular, has called attention to another liberal tradition—familiar to Locke himself—that saddled the autonomous self with a range of duties derived from Christian morality. Perhaps, several scholars have suggested, the foundations of American politics have as much to do with Martin Luther and John Calvin as with Niccolò Machiavelli and James Harrington. Most recently, Philip Hamburger has demonstrated that while liberalism may qualify as the unwanted child of republicanism, throughout the eighteenth century, liberality signified "an elevated moral position." Far from an excuse for interest bartering or greed, liberality meant generosity and tolerance, the ability to approach problems with an open and candid mind.

This essay seeks to build on such insights by showing how the liberal "sensibility," as contemporaries knew it, contributed to both the political and ethical process of nation making during the 1780s. Liberality drew the religious, social, and economic aspirations of the Enlightenment into a devastating critique of "local prejudice," and for a brief period it dominated the public discourses and moral prescriptions of the newly United States. Despite their practical motivations and supposed disillusionment, the Federalists were the chief beneficiaries of this liberal ascendancy. Ministers and moralists such as Rev. Enos Hitchcock read liberality and "universal benevolence" into the origins and spirit of the Constitution, investing the federal design with the spotless values of unity and tolerance. But the victory they helped achieve during 1788–1789, combined with events in Europe and the Caribbean region during the next few years, gave rise to the most enduring prejudice of all: the belief that America was uniquely favored by God and that patriotism and other "religions of the heart" defined and delimited virtue. In short, a close study of liberality deepens our understanding of how and what the Federalists won and of the interplay between religion, politics, and nationalism in the founding period.

And here's the conclusion, one that allows us to comprehend both the "liberality" of the founding and the American triumphalism (and parochialism) which soon followed, one far away from the notions of liberality traced in this article:

The liberal values that Hitchcock faithfully upheld had played a vital role in the interval between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution, often called the "critical period" of American politics, both in unifying Federalist interests and deflecting Antifederalist attacks. Traces of liberality lived on in a general ethos of democratic give-and-take in the new republic, as well as in a host of "benevolent" organizations. But the ascendant dynamic of nineteenth-century democracy was the free play of illiberality within the rigid and mutually reinforcing boundaries of family, faith, and nation. Ironically, "liberals" across the Atlantic world became nationalists, champions of self-determination for discrete peoples who claimed a special, if not a sacred, identity. Even more ironically, the celebrated centerpiece of American political society became the Constitution itself, along with a civil religion that presumed God's exclusive blessing. That faith continues to authorize an aggressive parochialism in the United States, an illiberal belief in the superiority—and universality—of American liberalism.

Liberating the Founders

PAUL HARVEY

This week's Speaking of Faith features Krista Tippett's interview with Steven Waldman, who discusses at length Founding Faith.

From the Speaking of Faith newsletter, with more on the program:

Liberating the Founders

We liberate the founders from conservative and liberal captivity, by revisiting the real, messy history of religious history in early America with journalist Steven Waldman. We explore how this history might shake and reshape Americans' sense of what is at stake in current debates about the relationship between government and religion. Also, how a falsely harmonious sense of the American experience with religious liberty undermines the wisdom American history holds for developing democracies around the world.

Disspelling the Myth of Uninterrupted Triumph and Goodness

. . . Waldman reminds us that the genius of the U.S. founders was not in getting everything right from the outset, but in learning from their mistakes, with an eye out for the missteps of their own time. The first 150 years of colonial history, as he retraces it, involved a cascade of failed experiments with official state religions. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both became champions of the separation of religion and state — albeit with very different emphases — in part through their revulsion at the intolerance and violence that marked these experiments. . . .

[Waldman] dwells with some insistence — for our collective edification — on the dark side of this early history. . . . The facts, as he tells them, are shocking. At the same time, he finds a way to forgive our confusion, and our gloss on history. We come by them honestly — as a direct inheritance from the founders themselves, who were equally confused, and imprecise, and muddied by the politics of their moment in time.

. . . . A self-righteous sense of U.S. history as an unbroken arc of triumph and goodness does not serve us well as citizens and leaders in the 21st-century world. More positively stated: an active, self-aware memory of the difficulty and struggle, the violence and mistakes, that accompanied the birth of American democracy — and that only gradually and fitfully led to the virtue we now prize of separation of church and state — could be a great gift and resource in helping young democracies around the world. Our own history seen in the light of fact, and removed from the distorting divides of our time, could be a source of our greatest wisdom and reason precisely towards what is difficult and dangerous in the contemporary world.

Origins of Proslavery Christianity

PAUL HARVEY

My friend Charles Irons of Elon University is about to publish his long-awaited The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia; it's supposed to be out later next month, so get your post-Easter pre-Memorial Day book sale shopping list ready. Here's the description from Amazon:

In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery.

As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.

Transcendental Blues

BY PAUL HARVEY

Back in '99 I saw Steve Earle premier his song "Transcendental Blues" at a concert in NYC. His solo man-and-guitar version was great; the full-band CD version didn't appeal to me as much, so it faded a bit from consciousness.

But this week it's been running through my head again -- thankfully, not like some Celine Dion bombast that was haunting me after I pulled out the inevitable cheap-joke "Titanic" reference in class to graduate students a few weeks ago; in the short term it induced a little mirthless laughter, but God then punished me (for a few weeks), as Celine Dion tunes started inhabiting my inner ear like what's-her-name in Jane Eyre inhabited the attic. See, even thinking about Dion makes you dumb and dumber.

Thankfully she's been replaced (for now) by Earle, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, who came to me this week as I started reading Scott Gac's Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform, a history of the antebellum musical northern Baptist family who "sang for freedom" in the anti-slavery movement of the 1840s, becoming "stars" in the process. Like all good bands, they made some great music, counted their box-office take, slept around, quarreled, broke up, had some ill-advised solo engagements (at one of which Lincoln slumbered), and then had an endless string of reunions. At the end of the day, though, they were troopers for the most important social movement of American history, which is a hell of a lot more than I've ever done, or ever will do. I'll be writing a review of this fine work for Books and Culture -- a positive one, to be sure, but I'm waiting for a decently interesting idea to descend, or emerge, such that the review becomes something more than "good book, here's the synopsis, read it," the scholarly equivalent of "it's got a good beat, you can dance to it." More on this later.

Still waiting for that inner light, I came across (thanks to Ralph Luker) this review of Philip Gura's new book American Transcendentalism: A History. I've never researched or written or even taught very much (particularly) about these figures from the American Renaissance, but I can't seem to get enough of them, and the review captures some of the reason why:

Like art, music and literature, works of scholarship matter most when they trouble our minds and spirits right now. Even those perennial perplexities -- about love and religion and the proper government of the self and our role as citizens -- can and should be made relevant to our current confusions and grounded in the present, particular moment. Then, the deepest scholarship, like the greatest art, not only enriches our lives, but also implicitly asks us to examine them, even to cross-examine them.

On the surface, a history of transcendentalism hardly seems especially electrifying or contemporary. Isn't this a subject for one of those standard and rather tired seminars regularly offered in American studies programs, sometimes with a subtitle like "Emerson, Fuller and Thoreau"? But there's nothing perfunctory or dryly academic about American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura writes a lean, impassioned prose, chockablock with anecdote and information. By mixing a dozen brief biographies with sustained narrative -- about contemporary religious belief, social commitment, just and unjust wars, the rights and plights of women and African Americans -- Gura underscores how much we remain the descendants of these still too little known thinkers and crusaders. Above all, his exciting, even eye-opening book shows us that from 1830 to 1850 a group of New England preachers and intellectuals confronted what has proved to be the great polarizing tension in American history, that between hyperindividualism and the claims of social justice and human brotherhood.

For more, see The Web of American Transcendentalism, which might even chase away some blues.

Channeling Poor Richard

BY JOHN FEA

Rob MacDougall has an interesting and hilarious post on nineteenth-century spiritualists channeling the wit and wisdom of Benjamin Franklin. Yet another example of how Franklin managed to hang around in American culture long after his death. Here’s an excerpt:

A chat with Franklin was to spiritualism what “My Way” is to karaoke. From beyond the grave, Franklin transmitted messages to and from dead loved ones, spoke out for women’s suffrage and against slavery (as did the shades of Washington and Jefferson, claiming posthumous conversion to the cause), and lectured on magnetism and balloons. Dead Franklin apparently kept himself busy in the af