These early sainted ministers of the Roanoke Missionary Baptist Association and its Middle Ground Union Meeting put on their long dusters, black beaver hats and satchels containing a Bible, and a hymn book, and traveled fifity-one miles down the long winding roads and muddy streams preaching the gospel from Edenton, N. C., to Nansemond County, Virginia via-the Edenton-Suffolk Highway, and to all points along the way. Upon arriving at their religious duty stations they preached to men who had been previously robbed by slavery of himself and made the property of another. In this position these preachers awaken the minds of their congregations to the fact that God had commissioned the Negro to a higher status in God's eye than those who oppressed him. This book records the quaterly 5th weekend sessions of those meetings. This book provides clear examples of the purposes of the Middle Ground Union Meeting: preaching, evangelization, education and general race uplift to include the power to believe in themselves as people with intrinsic values. Pulpit preaching with the church as the center for black caring, mobilized the black community in obtaining indemnity for the past, and security for the future. The Middle Ground Union Meeting Ministers used the pulpit as great preaching station to address the social ills of the era.
The centrality of religion in the life of the Old South, the strongly religious nature of the sectional controversy over slavery, and the close affinity between religion and antebellum American nationalism all point toward the need to explore the role of religion in the development of southern sectionalism. In Gospel of Disunion Mitchell Snay examines the various ways in which religion adapted to and influenced the development of a distinctive southern culture and politics before the Civil War, adding depth and form to the movement that culminated in secession. From the abolitionist crisis of 1835 through the formation of the Confederacy in 1861, Snay shows how religion worked as an active agent in translating the sectional conflict into a struggle of the highest moral significance. At the same time, the slavery controversy sectionalized southern religion, creating separate institutions and driving theology further toward orthodoxy. By establishing a biblical sanction for slavery, developing a slaveholding ethic for Christian masters, and demonstrating the viability of separation from the North through the denominational schisms of the 1830s and 1840s, religion reinforced central elements in southern political culture and contributed to a moral consensus that made secession possible.
Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Now, in God's Almost Chosen Peoples, Li
Using the Tennessee antievolution 'Monkey Law,' authored by a local legislator, as a measure of how conservatives successfully resisted, co-opted, or ignored reform efforts, Jeanette Keith explores conflicts over the meaning and cost of progress in Tennes