The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism

Denominational history could not be better done.In the US it comes in several flavours: local, conference or state, national (mine/ours), and increasingly global. Seldom, at least in Methodist studies, do the local and conference/state treatments position regional developments in relation to national and national/denominational religious and social trends. Seldom, as well, do denominational studies make sense of Methodist life at the congregational level, bring the regional differentia into adequate view, or test national interpretive arguments against local and state patterns. One early exception to such foci-restrictive studies was The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769–1820 (1984). There William Williams set the pattern for much subsequent Methodist studies by closely examining American societal strains and patterns on race (including slavery), gender, class, politics, authority, and interdenominational conflict. He did so modelling how to address such huge issues with a regionally delimited and conference focus. Looking through the Delmarva lens, Williams saw and shot the big picture of Methodist history.Like Williams's study in its societal breadth but regional focus, Dunn's examines one loop on what was Methodism's greatest strength, the middle-states-and-west slave-owning and slavery-opposing belt across the nation (and devotes one of his five chapters to ‘Slavery and Free Blacks’). And also like Williams's, Dunn's can be read as a remarkable study of the whole denomination, of the conference(s) in east Tennessee (Holston), and of Methodism at the local level. Folks who know little about American Methodism (haven't read my/our books) can start here, get the big picture, understand the Church's adjustment to the new nation, and grasp the importance of denominational practices (class meetings, quarterly conferences, annual conferences, camp meetings, the several preacher levels, episcopal authority, Church college, and national and regional Methodist newspapers). All readers will come to grasp, especially, how racial traumas effectively broke the denomination's heart or broke it at its heart.The study is ‘Dedicated to the memory of the antislavery local preach- ers of Holston Conference who remained fiercely loyal to the Union.’ The dedication gets at one of the study's really important historiographical corrections, namely how, at least on that section of the Methodist belt, local preachers and conference members differed on slavery and slave-holding. Tracking Methodist life, with attention to gender, race, social status, and local patterns, Dunn demonstrates that the ministerial division and an intra- conference Methodist civil war on slavery had gone on for five decades before the nation itself divided. In tracking the yawning ministerial and ecclesial cleavage on slavery and on post-slavery race relations, he makes very effective and extensive use of the Church's regional newspapers, especially as edited by William G. ‘Parson’ Brownlow and Richard N. Price. The latter worked his slavery-glossing perspective as well into the important and here heavily used (and criticized) five-volume Holston Methodism from Its Origin to the Present Time (1904–13). The former, whose views on slavery evolved, became an important campaigner for northern Methodism's post-Civil War evangelization in Tennessee but also throughout the South (he served briefly as the state's governor). Dunn features these two, throughout the book, prominent actors in Methodism's dramatic division. Their vitriolic editorials contributed to the enmity that persisted in the largely overlapping conferences and competitive local ministries of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) and Methodist Episcopal Church South (MECS) up to the 1939 unification. No ‘brotherly love’ among these Christians: ‘every small town and village had two Methodist churches: one Northern and the other Southern’ (147).Two appendices, ‘Numbers of Traveling Preachers and Local Preachers, Holston Conference, 1838–1860’ and ‘Local Preachers Elected to Deacon's or Elder's Orders in the Holston Conference, 1824–1860’, the latter twenty pages in length, well illustrate how close to the ground Dunn takes this study. They also symbolize how remarkably he has unearthed and portrayed the ministries, advocacy, and courage of the local preachers whose important roles lay outside or beyond the Church's record-keeping. (Methodism's mistreatment of the locals constituted one of the organizing causes for the Methodist Protestants apparently not effectively championed in the terrain Dunn covers.)The local's anti-slavery and Unionist wartime commitments and harassment by slavery-embracing Church leaders led many into the newly formed northern (MEC) conference. And Dunn intimates that such Unionist behaviour on the part of the local preachers may have informed the MECS's structural and ministerial postwar changes, particularly those that effectively marginalized the local's role. ‘If American Methodism contained a single, deadly flaw in its operational structure’, insists Dunn, ‘that flaw was surely the institution of the local preacher’ (19). So, again, a conference-focused study that alters our view of a key Methodist office, two-thirds of preachers for the period covered, and so alters our understanding of American Methodism as a whole.Over fifty pages of endnotes and an extensive bibliography demonstrate as well his conversation with current and prior scholarship. Great graphics too.

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