Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the
Mind of the White Christian South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1998). Pp.
xiv, 175.
A Consuming Fire is vintage Genovese. The book has elegance, vigor,
originality, and single-mindedness. Reading his work conjures up the image
of the author speaking his text in staccato Brooklynese, with cigarillo in
hand for forceful punctuation and his face flushed by the excitement of his
argument. The dustjacket photo confirms the impression. Brief though it
is, this work enlightens us about several important aspects of cultural and
religious life in the two Souths of the nineteenth century--the Old and
New.
The first among his major points is
"Genovese writes
that James Henley Thornwell, Robert Dabney, Richard Fuller, and other
leading figures in the slave states carefully distinguished the exigency of
slavery from the particularity of race."
familiar. Genovese has long contended
that the proslavery clergy supported their case with a Biblical expertise
that far outstripped the unscriptural musings of their antislavery critics.
In his view, the most erudite Southern divines did not exploit the
narrative of Noah's curse to account for Africans' suitability for
enslavement. Instead, they concentrated on the many Biblical references to
slaveholding as a given, like death and taxes. Most Southern theologians
had the good sense to limit their claims for slavery, leaving the hot-eyed
politicians to exalt the institution as a "positive good." Genovese writes
that James Henley Thornwell, Robert Dabney, Richard Fuller, and other
leading figures in the slave states carefully distinguished the exigency of
slavery from the particularity of race.
The second proposition flows from the first: the attempt by slaveholding
churchmen to achieve the Christianization of the masters, the conversion of
the slaves, and the reform of the whole system. On the first two
strategies, progress was indeed heartening by 1861 with a vast increase in
churchgoing among whites and blacks. Regarding the third aim, the author
is convincing that the evangelical clergy were more outspoken than
historians recognize. They championed slave literacy (for reading the
Bible), legal integrity of families and marriages, shielding slaves from
inhuman cruelty, starvation, and other perils, and granting protections in
the courts. Richard Fuller, he notes, had the temerity to suggest that
absolute power of masters corrupted absolutely. More important, he shows
how, before and during the sectional war, Southern ecclesiastics warned
that God would not save from doom a slave regime opposing reformation of
habits and legal constrictions.
Wisely Genovese does not press his evidence too far. He admits that the
clergy were ineffectual political lobbyists. They lacked the
organizational drive that antislavery reformers gradually translated into
popular anti-Southern sentiment. For their failure to alter laws, the
slaveholding church fathers and white society in general cited abolitionist
intervention. Slaves might distort the reform agenda as a step toward
freedom and try to seize it on their own, with abolitionist aid. Genovese,
however, does not underscore the fact that Yankee concern conveniently
relieved the clergy from directly assailing abuses in a forceful way.
Moreover, just how far would the Christianization of masters and slaves
have proceeded without the pressure of outside criticism? The marshaling
of scattered pulpit references to correcting evils cannot hide
the suspicion that, in the vast number of sermons preached, few addressed
the slave issue at all. Finally, those urban and urbane divines who
underpin Genovese's argument were a tiny fragment of church leadership.
For most rural preachers, silence was a properly discreet course. In any
event, Genovese overstates the philanthropic boldness of Southern
antebellum Protestantism.
On the third point of this impressive if imperfect study, the Lamar
lecturer brilliantly draws a distinction between the proslavery clergy with
their inerrant Bible and the defenders of undisguised racism in the postwar
period. With the Holy Scriptures silent as death about the moral rankings
of human races, Genovese notes, the post-emancipation clergy adopted the
views of the scientific racists. Antebellum Southern ministers had scorned
Josiah Nott and company for their repudiation of Adam as father of all
mankind. Genovese approves their position and contrasts it with the late
nineteenth-century theologians who hypocritically accepted an American form
of apartheid and racial imperialism.
Despite the logic of Genovese's argument, the reader wonders if the
differences between the pre-Civil War and postwar positions of the clergy
were as sharply drawn as he claims. What separates an American
expansionism, which nearly doubled slaveholding possibilities after the
Mexican War, from the racist imperialism of the Spanish-American War?
Moreover, in the face of Confederate defeat, most ministers did not, as
Genovese claims, don the appropriate sack cloth. Methodist John Caldwell
of Georgia in 1865 preached that God had punished the South for upholding
the evil institution of slavery against His judgment. Caldwell had to flee
or
risk a likely martyrdom. Few worshipers wished to hear that secession
had earned the South a tragic alienation from divine favor.
Genovese's admiration for Christian proslavery logic should be tempered by
these parallels. The Bible accepted the economic and social usage of
bondspeople but also wine consumption and dancing, recreations that most
proslavery clergymen thought sinful. The abolitionists, on the other hand,
condemned all three with perhaps more consistency. In other words,
Biblical
literalism was more selective than he admits. Yet, while Genovese errs on
the question of proportionality, he compels us to reconsider our sometimes
smug explanations and wrestle with his interpretative genius, however much
we might disagree with it.
