Protestants, Politics, and Power: Race, Gender, and Religion in the Post-Emancipation Mississippi River Valley, 1863-1900
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Protestants, Politics, and Power: Race, Gender, and Religion in the Post-Emancipation Mississippi River Valley, 1863-1900 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Jemison, Elizabeth. 2015. Protestants, Politics, and Power: Race, Gender, and Religion in the Post-Emancipation Mississippi River Valley, 1863-1900. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467223 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Protestants, Politics, and Power: Race, Gender, and Religion in the Post-Emancipation Mississippi River Valley, 1863-1900 A dissertation presented by Elizabeth Jemison to The Committee on the Study of Religion in partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Study of Religion Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2015 i © 2015 Elizabeth Jemison All rights reserved iiii Nancy F. Cott Elizabeth Jemison Protestants, Politics, and Power: Race, Gender, and Religion in the Post-Emancipation Mississippi River Valley, 1863-1900 ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that Protestant Christianity provided the language through which individuals and communities created the political, social, and cultural future of the post- emancipation South. Christian arguments and organizations gave newly emancipated African Americans strong strategies for claiming political and civil rights as citizens and for denouncing racialized violence. Yet simultaneously, white southerners’ Christian claims, based in proslavery theology, created justifications for white supremacist political power and eventually for segregation. This project presents a new history of the creation of segregation from the hopes and uncertainties of emancipation through a close analysis of the Mississippi River Valley region of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Tennessee. Religious arguments furnished foundations for the work of building a new South, whether in newly formed African American churches and schools, local political debates, or white supremacist organizing. Studying both African American and white Christians during the years when churches quickly became racially separated allows this work to explain how groups across lines of race and denomination responded to each other’s religious, cultural, and political strategies. This dissertation centers these communities’ theological ideas and religious narratives within a critical analysis of race, gender, and political power. Analyzing theology as the intellectual domain of non-elites as well as those in power allows me to demonstrate the ways that religious ideas helped to construct categories of race and gender and to determine who iii was worthy of civil and political rights. This work draws upon a wide range of archival sources, including previously unexamined material. This dissertation advances several scholarly conversations. It offers the first sustained examination of the life of proslavery theology after emancipation. Rather than presuming that white southern Christians abandoned such arguments after emancipation, this project shows that white Christians reconfigured these claims to create religious justifications for segregation. Within these renegotiated religious claims about social order, African American and white Christians made religious arguments about racial violence, ranging from justifying the violence to arguing that it was antithetical to Christian identity. During the same years, African Americans argued that they deserved civil and political rights both because they were citizens and because they were Christians. This linking of identities as citizens and as Christians provided a vital political strategy in the midst of post-emancipation violence and the uncertain future of African Americans’ rights. Through its five chronologically-structured chapters, this project demonstrates Protestant Christianity’s central role in African American and white southerners’ political lives from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century. iv CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Christian Readings of Emancipation and Confederate Defeat, 1863-1867 29 2. Christians and Citizens?: Religion, Civil Rights, and Reconstruction, 1867-1874 61 3. White Supremacist “Redemption,” Resistance, and Yellow Fever, 1874-1882 101 4. Churches and the “Negro Problem” Under a New Regime, 1882-1890 147 5. Churches, Race, and Politics under Jim Crow, 1890-1900 193 Bibliography 239 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to have the opportunity to thank the many people who have aided my work on this dissertation, beginning with my dissertation committee. My advisor, Nancy Cott, has helped me become a far better scholar than I was when I began this project. Her high expectations have combined with the freedom to make this project my own. Her careful critiques of my work have taught me to write (and to think) more clearly. David Hempton has been a wonderful mentor over the past six years. Despite the demands on his time as Dean of Harvard Divinity School, he has continued to read drafts and to push my thinking further. I appreciate his encouragement to me to maintain a humane sensibility even while writing about deeply troubling history. Marie Griffith first inspired me to pursue an academic career a decade ago. I am grateful to have been her student at Princeton and Harvard and appreciate her serving on my dissertation committee while Director of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. My ideas about this project first began to take shape at Princeton University, and I remain grateful for the excellent mentors that I found in the Department of Religion as I prepared for doctoral work. In addition to Marie Griffith, I wish to thank Albert Raboteau, Leigh Schmidt, and Judith Weisenfeld. I have had several academic homes across Harvard University. Barbara Boles and Kate Bowen have helped me navigate the doctoral program in the Committee on the Study of Religion. Suzanne Rom at Harvard Divinity School has given me much encouragement, coffee, and scheduling help. The North American Religions Colloquium at Harvard Divinity School has been my primary intellectual community. I wish to thank past and present members: Christopher Allison, John Bell, Casey Bohlen, Colin Bossen, Ann Braude, Catherine Brekus, Deirdre Debruyn Rubio, vi Healan Gaston, Sara Georgini, Katharine Gerbner, Brett Grainger, Marie Griffith, David Hall, David Hempton, David Holland, Helen Kim, Dan McKanan, David Mislin, Max Mueller, Erik Nordbye, Eva Payne, Kip Richardson, Jon Roberts, Leigh Schmidt, and Cori Tucker-Price. The Gender and Sexuality Workshop in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has commented on several chapters, and I thank its participants, especially Ceyhun Arslan, Nancy Cott, Claire Dunning, Cara Fallon, Elizabeth Katz, Afsaneh Najmabadi, and Eva Payne. My writing group has provided a warm yet rigorous environment for fledgling draft chapters over the past two years; many thanks to Emily Owens, Sandy Placido, and Balbir Singh. I am grateful to have received several grants to support research for this project. Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History supported a summer of research travel to several states. A Merit Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate Society and a Research Fellowship from the Charles Warren Center each supported a semester of dedicated research and writing. The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation supported my final year of dissertation writing with the Whiting Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Archivists and research librarians near and far have made possible the extensive archival work that this dissertation required. Renata Kalnins at Harvard’s Andover-Harvard Theological Library has fielded many questions with patience. At Harvard’s Widener Library, Pam Metz and Fred Burchstead helped me to take advantage of Harvard’s immense library resources. Vincent Golden at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, assisted my requests for obscure nineteenth-century newspapers. Many excellent archivists assisted me in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. Chris Brown at Centenary College of Louisiana saved me a trip to Shreveport through his willingness to scan copies of relevant materials from his collections. At Emory University’s vii Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, I was fortunate to benefit from Randall Burkett’s encyclopedic knowledge. Debra Madera at Emory’s Pitts Theological Library guided me through her collections. Clinton Bagley, Grady Howell, William Thompson, and Anne Webster ably assisted me at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, and William connected me to Debra McIntosh at Millsaps College. Debra’s deep knowledge of the J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism at Millsaps College and her willingness to stay many hours after her workday ended allowed me to access immensely important sources. Dr. Jennifer Ford and her staff in Special Collections at J.D. Williams Library of the University