Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South by Janet Duitsman CorneliusReview by: Timothy F. ReillyLouisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Winter,2001), pp. 116-119Published by: Louisiana Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233725 .

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116 LOUISIANA HISTORY

Texas seceded in February 1861 and began seizing federal installations and raising troops. Over 90,000 Texans served in the Confederate army and saw combat in many battles. Within Texas there were numerous clashes with Indians on the frontier and significant Civil War battles at Galveston and Sabine Pass.

Life on the home front often was trying and difficult. Texans had to defend themselves against both Indian raids and Union thrusts and struggled to overcome material shortages caused by the enemy blockade. State officials often found themselves in conflict with Confederate authorities over such issues as conscription and the cotton trade, and there sometimes were disruptive Unionists. Women particularly were affected by the war because they were forced into the unfamiliar roles of running farms and plantations and becoming heads of households while their husbands served in the army.

The author has packed Civil War Texas full of information. It is not intended to be an in-depth study, but rather a brief overview of Texas in the Civil War, and thus would be appropriate for introductory level classes.

University of Louisiana at Monroe Terry L. Jones

SLAVE MISSIONS AND THE BLACK CHURCH IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH. By Janet Duitsman Cornelius. (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999, xii, 305 pp. List of illustrations, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-247-5).

Following publication of Albert J. Raboteau's broadly conceived Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (1978), together with a half-dozen books and twice as many articles by succeeding writers, comes a closely focused study of slave religion during the generation immediately preceding the Civil War. Janet Duitsman Cornelius's Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South examines the interrelationships between the slave and the white missionary and-in a selective way-shows how patterns of white paternalism, racial separatism, and black cultural improvisation helped to create an independent African

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BOOK REVIEWS 117

American religion. Initially in control, idealistic white missionaries who had beckoned the plantation slave and the free colored urban dweller eventually lost their authority with the emergence of the black preacher, new styles of syncretic worship, and a determination to lessen-even eliminate- certain constrictions of European Christianity.

While many of Cornelius's missionary characters may have been personally hurt or disappointed when the black convert eventually drifted away, others accepted the evolving black church as a normal and necessary manifestation of cultural autonomy. In fact, the white missionary's protective skills continued to be useful in helping the black Christian cope with an often hostile slavocracy far more concerned with profit and security than in saving black souls. Episcopalian and Presbyterian divines appealed to their well-heeled congregations on intellectual grounds, in addition to heavy reliance on scriptural directives. Remarkably, white Methodist and Baptist evangelists frequently garnered larger numbers of black than white converts within their mixed congregations. Inevitably, though, blacks and whites parted, and separate church buildings became the rule among the South's black and white plain folk. Among the more formal and tradition-bound denominations, black minority participants could be seen in separate seating areas of some churches. This was often true of Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Unitarian congregations. Only in Roman Catholic churches could blacks and whites sometimes be seen in unusually close proximity. Not surprisingly, these sects were less inclined to stimulate self-contained and quasi- orthodox religious spheres in order to satisfy their black adherents. As a result, the main currents of an enthusiastic black Christianity in the United States have remained deeply rooted in the freewheeling evangelical sector.

Much of Cornelius's research and study applies to the low- lying Tidewater region and, to a lesser extent, the Alabama Black Belt. These areas are logical choices for center-stage activity due to their relative ages, social stability, well-educated planter elites, and their fairly abundant church records and associated historical data. Examinations of other mission cultures, however, are sometimes abbreviated in content or they are mentioned in passing in order to buttress a broader heading. For this reason, alone, a reader in search of specific details outside of the author's chosen regions may have to look

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118 LOUISIANA HISTORY

elsewhere. Nevertheless, Cornelius is perceptive in briefly characterizing many of the more relevant themes, characters, and events occupying the sidelines of her study.

Although black and white interaction may have "re-created"' a black Christianity, Cornelius's deemphasis on "Africanity" places her among historians John W. Blassingame and John B. Boles, both of whom see the black church as an instrument of "Americanization." As another scholar, Charles Joyner, has so aptly pointed out, the relevant literature is generally divided into three schools: the "Americanizationists," whose research stems partly from the sociological work of E. Franklin Frazier; the "Afrocentrists" whose lineage can be traced back to anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits; and the so-called "convergence theorists," who claim that both white and black Christianity underwent significant transformation as a result of their intermingling.

In an important addendum, Cornelius interprets the Colonization movement as an alternative endeavor for white missionaries who were repeatedly frustrated by an antagonistic slave regime at home.

Gradual emancipationists, especially those in the South's Protestant churches, often succeeded in easing their individual consciences while at the same time maintaining their respectability through membership in the American Colonization Society. Through selective and lawful manumission, black families systematically departing for their ancestral African homeland could serve as God's agents in spreading a redemptive American Christianity in a benighted corner of the world.

Cornelius, Raboteau, and other slave mission scholars have given Louisiana peripheral treatment in part due to an atypical Catholicism in its southern parishes and a frontier Protestantism marginally concerned with slave amenities in its northern reaches. However, Cornelius does point out that an urban Catholicism-not only in New Orleans but in other coastal cities-was conspicuous for its racial inclusiveness, mixed gatherings, and its frequent inculcation of literacy whenever practical. She also contrasts the church's freedom in New Orleans with its more circumspect role in Charleston. In the former case, a Latin colonial heritage, together with a well established free colored caste, underpinned a "liberal spirit" at variance with Charleston's Anglican-Huguenot elite and its

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suspicion of an infant Catholic community comprised of Irish immigrants and-somewhat alarmingly-a growing number of Negro converts. However suspect the Catholic hierarchy may have been, wary church leaders were able to assure the church's survival by seldom, if ever, criticizing the chief institutions of Southern culture, particularly slavery. On the other hand, greater freedom was allotted to liberal Protestant leaders despite assorted irregularities and ambiguities.

The author's limited probe of Protestant missions among Louisiana's Negro population at least mentions the contributions of Leonidas K. Polk, William Winans, Benjamin Drake, and Holland McTyeire-along with the lesser known Joseph Willis and Nelson Sanders. Bishop Polk of the Episcopal Church was perhaps Louisiana's most conspicuous slave mission administrator. A president of Louisiana's Colonization Society, he founded St. Thomas' Church for free blacks and tirelessly sought to catechize plantation slaves. Winans, Drake, and McTyeire-all Methodists-were foremost among evangelical leaders in furthering slave and free colored missions in New Orleans and surrounding countryside. Each was strongly critical of common abuses associated with slavery and its practitioners. A list of other unmentioned missionaries, both white and black, might have included William Rondeau, Asa C. Goldsbury, Benjamin Davis, James A Raynoldson, Jerome Twitchell, Isaac Hoadly, and William Anderson Scott.

Perhaps most important of all, Cornelius's selective examinations of white and black missionaries further enriches the early history of black Christianity, especially that of the older eastern South. Additional research remains to be done not only in other antebellum regions, but in regard to postbellum leadership roles as well as evolving organizational forms and readjusted liturgies and philosophies. Remarkably, historians such as Cornelius and her predecessors have only recently presented a detailed opening story of an institutional force which has strongly influenced the changing relationship between the African American community and those outside of it, particularly in the last half-century.

University of Louisiana at Lafayette Timothy F. Reilly

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