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Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law

except that of piety. As with children, southern ministers extended the notion of religious egalitarianism to slaves. To harmonize white supremacy with spiritual equality, Methodist publications featured stories of devout slaves converting irreligious masters. Ministers, Carney writes, “created a myth of the Christian slave that emphasized submission and subordination but, like the tales of religious children, also encouraged appropriate disobedience” in godly matters (p. 125). Such “disobedience” promoted the reprimanding and education of masters over religious issues, but never questioned the worldly authority of slaveholders or the institution of slavery itself. By giving religious authority to slaves, however, Methodists risked “inverting the traditional master-slave relationship and weakening the foundation of the very system many of them claimed to support” (p. 126). Carney’s book shines in its detailing of how Methodist patriarchal manhood was, like southern culture as a whole, rife with contradictions regarding fundamental points of social organization. She reveals the elasticity of southern patriarchy via the ways it could be challenged and stretched to occasionally allow poor white ministers, women, children, and slaves measures of independence without ever wholly losing its grip on regional culture. Carney mines an impressive number of periodicals, sermons, church histories, biographies, and pamphlets for source material, but curiously leaves out unpublished personal correspondence. She makes clear her interest in the ideology that bound Methodists together rather than “the reality of ministers’ situations” (p. 9), but one wonders if correspondence would reveal to what extent the stories of heroic clergymen, pious children, and devout slaves actually shapedministers’ daily lives. The role of black evangelicals’ religious initiatives in shaping proslavery Christianity, a topic explored by Charles Irons, is also largely absent from this study. These points aside, Carney has written an important book that should be of interest to all historians of antebellum southern culture and American religion.