Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and ReconstructionEdward J. Blum, W. Scott Poole Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion. |
Contents
| vii | |
| xi | |
| 1 | |
| 15 | |
| 36 | |
One fold and One Chief Shepherd The Sewanee Conference of 1883 and the Beginnings of Racial Segregation the Episcopal Church | 53 |
That Was about Equalization after Freedom Southern Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reconstruct Redemption18611900 | 73 |
O God of a Godless Land Northern African American Challenges to White Christian Nationhood 18651906 | 93 |
Why Redemption? Religion and the End of Reconstruction 18691877 | 133 |
The End of Slavery the Origins of the Bible Belt | 147 |
No Disruption of Union The Catholic Church in the South and Reconstruction | 164 |
Betwixt and Between Topographies of Memory and Identity in American Catholicism | 187 |
Pageantry of Woe The Funeral of Ulysses SGrant | 212 |
Reproducing White Supremacy Racethe Protestant Church and the American Family in the Works of Thomas Dixon Jr | 235 |
Contributors | 257 |
Index | 259 |
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Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction Edward J. Blum,W. Scott Poole No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
African Americans Alabama American Civil War antebellum apocalyptic Archbishop August Baton Rouge cemetery century Chapel Hill Charleston Christian Civil clergy colored Confederacy Confederate congregations Convention County Creek Baptist Church cultural death Democrats denomination diocese emancipation Emmitsburg Episcopal Church Episcopalians faith federal freed funeral Georgia Press Gettysburg God's historians History James John Klux Klan Ku Klux Klan leaders Leopard's Spots Lincoln Lost Cause Louisiana State University memory ministers missionary Mississippi moral Mount Saint Mary's nation Negro North Carolina Press Northern Oxford University Press party political postwar Presbyterian Church President Protestant Protestantism race racial Radical Reconstruction redeem redemption reform religion religious Republican rhetoric role Saint Mary's College segregation sexual slavery slaves social gospel society soldiers South Carolina Southern churches Southern whites spiritual theology Thomas Dixon U. S. Grant Union University of North Upcountry Verot violence Virginia W. E. B. Du Bois white Southerners white supremacy William women wrote York
Popular passages
Page 122 - How they pale, Ancient myth and song and tale, In this wonder of our days, When the cruel rod of war Blossoms white with righteous law, And the wrath of man is praise!
Page 144 - Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain : let all the inhabitants of the land tremble : for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand...
Page 14 - Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Page 117 - Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Page 108 - of the Master, who summoned all them that labor and are heavy laden, making no distinction between the black, sweating cotton hands of Georgia and the first families of Virginia, since all distinction not based on deed is devilish and not divine. I believe in the Devil and his angels, who wantonly work to narrow the opportunity of struggling human beings, especially if they be black ; who spit in the faces of the fallen, strike them that cannot strike again, believe the worst and work to prove it,...
Page 108 - David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White...
Page 97 - And inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me...
Page 110 - Sit not longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!
Page 110 - God, crying: We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord! We are not better than our fellows, Lord ; we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed, — curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.
Page 85 - The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor...