From 1865 to World War I, southern resistance to “radical rule” in politics undergirded the rhetoric of white religious and cultural separatism. White southerners feared that northern religious leaders, like northern politicians, would foist a regime of social equality on the region. Once redemption was assured to all, fear of other forms of social disorder soon followed. Whether in manning the front lines in the battle for white supremacy, combating threats such as Populism, or fighting the demon rum, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in the late nineteenth century defended the conservative, hierarchical social order of the South. In the twentieth century, with the SBC becoming the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it became increasingly apparent that white southerners had lost the war but won their peace. White supremacy, bureaucratic centralization of authority, and paternalistic attitudes among elites all defined the “place” accorded to social groups in this order. The resistance such attitudes met—from the freed-people who rejected the place accorded them by whites, whites who distrusted centralized authority of any kind, and Populists who rejected conservative Redeemer rule—sparked confrontations in religion and politics that reshaped the cultures of the postbellum South.²

In private, however, there were doubts. In July of 1863, as he entertained thoughts of the eventual collapse of the Confederacy, Basil Manly Jr., a scion of the Baptist aristocracy, anguished that surely it could not “be God’s will to expose us to the treacherous & fiendish malice & band of robbers & murderers.” In South Carolina late in the war, looking after the recently opened Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, Manly wondered what hope “in maintaining] our independence” would remain if Charleston fell, and felt “a gloom & great darkness” in envisioning the future.⁴

White southern Christians felt “gloom and great darkness” as northern troops leveled churches throughout the region in the course of fighting. Federal armies destroyed all the church buildings of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Knoxville, and Fredericksburg. At least twenty-six Baptist worship houses lay in ruins in Virginia alone. Federal forces commandeered sanctuaries still standing for use as hospitals, barracks, and stables. Commanders turned over buildings to the appropriate northern missionary agencies. In February 1862, as a service began one Sunday in the Central Baptist Church in Nashville, news came of the surrender of Fort Donelson, “whereupon the congregation dispersed in the wildest confusion.” The pastor fled South, and the care of the congregation fell to a northern missionary who never gained the support of the members. Andrew Johnson, the Unionist governor of the state, ordered the jailing of R. B. C. Howell, the most senior southern Baptist clergyman in Nashville, for Howell’s refusals to take the required loyalty oath. Howell remained in jail for two months, while his congregation scattered. The black portion of the church, which met in an independent mission, doubled in size as freedpeople moved into Nashville. Years after the Civil War, the ex-slaves finished a new building and boasted of a membership of some 1,500, with meetings “full of life,” while their white counterparts struggled through a period of financial difficulties. As white southern independence seemingly waned, black Baptist freedom beckoned.⁵

Churches faced puzzling questions of discipline and theological explanation when members deserted from the Confederate army or sought protection from the draft by fleeing to the Union side. They called up members before the congregation to explain questionable actions such as hiding sons from the draft or refusing to pray for the new nation. Churches excluded members for “unchristian conduct in leaving the bounds of the church in disorder and voluntarily going off with our enemies.” In Burnt Corn, Alabama, a congregation disciplined a female member for pilfering bacon put in a storehouse “during the Yankee raid through this country last spring.” The discussions about these cases often turned acrimonious. Even more troubling to churches was the number of black members who fled to Yankee army camps for protection. Congregants expelled pastors opposing secession and compelled them to leave the state. In the Upper South, where loyalties and sometimes families were split, the war decimated religious work. At one church in southeastern Tennessee, for example, no meetings were held in 1863 and 1864 because “there arose a Rebelion People in force and Arms Against the Cuntry and Drove the male members nearley all from ther homes and throwed the Cuntry in such a deranged Condition that we thought it best not to mete for a while.” In Kentucky, Baptist minister and historian J. H. Spencer, accused of being a rebel by unruly congregants, found himself “threatened by a mob and a halter” during one service. The meeting ended, to his disappointment, with only “one accession to the church.” Recalling the period, Spencer noted how the “presence of soldiers irritated the people, and party spirit rendered every attempt to exercise discipline in the church futile.”⁶

After Gettysburg, as the war fortunes of the South declined, white Baptists pondered what lessons Confederate Christians should learn from their trials. Perhaps God was choosing this moment to chasten churchgoers in the region in preparation for greater glories to come. Whatever the theodicy used to interpret the Confederate decline, it appeared that the Divine had a different lesson to teach than the triumphalist one previously presumed. The final defeat of the southern forces proved difficult to accept, even for Christians who professed belief in God’s foreordaining of events. In early 1865, a Virginia Baptist Association assured its constituents that “the sore trials through which we have passed and the darkness which now overshadows us are a part of the workings of Providence”; they were “chastisements” that would work for “a far more exceeding and eternal glory.” By then, however, easy theological formulas no longer satisfied demoralized believers. The fall of the Confederacy “came as a revelation”; they learned that “their plans did not fit the divine purpose,” a Baptist minister from Richmond later recalled. When William Wingate, a minister and educator in North Carolina, heard the news of the South’s calamities in the spring of 1865, he “rose in rebellion against God,” as a friend of his later remembered. Wingate “loved our beautiful Southern Country and could not bear to think that it had been conquered and lay at the mercy of our enemies.”⁷

If the outcome of the war proved difficult to accept, Radical Reconstruction seemed an even greater cross to bear. Kentuckian and itinerant revivalist John H. Spencer questioned the institution of slavery and frowned on secession. He knew that war would disrupt his evangelizing. While maintaining a public stance of neutrality, his heart remained with white southerners as they fought what he deemed to be a war for their liberty. Recalling the condition of the South in 1866, he depicted the work of southern religious figures as “like that of God’s ancient people on their return from Babylonian captivity. It was a time for rebuilding from ruins and repairing breaches. Not able debates nor sage counsel in conventions but earnest labor among the churches, was the need of the hour.” D. P. Berton, a white minister in Alabama, tried to accept God’s edict for the outcome but bemoaned the conquering of a government ordained by Providence. “I hope to submit like a Christian to the dealings of my creator,” he wrote to a friend, “but I wish to have nothing to do with those who have ruined our country, stolen our property, burned our villages, and murdered our people.”⁸

Clerics such as the gentlemanly South Carolinian Richard Furman, who had opposed secession while defending slavery, advised Christians to “reverently acknowledge the hand of God in the great events which have transpired and calmly to acquiesce in the orderings of his Providence.” Few followed this advice, even in Furman’s home district of Charleston. One religious Redeemer in South Carolina, speaking of the war’s conclusion, granted that “God has brought it about” but disputed the necessity of loyalty to the reconstructed governments, a notion of “such daring and insulting blasphemy, that thousands here feel like abandoning a religion which gave birth to such atrocities.” Charles Manly, younger brother of Basil Manly Jr. and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa, swore in 1862 that he would have “lived too long” when he beheld “the horrors accompanying U.S. supremacy.” The prospect of civil rights for black Americans especially disquieted him. He acknowledged that his region deserved “chastisement” but felt that “to undergo subjugation and extermination at the hand of the Yankees is too much.” As late as 1904 he had not “learned to rejoice in our defeat” but had only “honestly and faithfully” submitted to an outcome “authorized by an almighty Providence, whose ways are often past finding out.” A northern observer noted the reluctance with which their southern counterparts relinquished the Confederate dream of a slave republic: “They submit to the new order of things as a necessity, from which there is no escape, but claim that they have been conscientious in treason and beneficent in slaveholding.”⁹

Lansing Burrows, a career Southern Baptist Convention official, witnessed the devastation of Richmond in 1865. He, too, struggled to accept defeat as “God’s will” but still remained an “earnest rebel.” A decade later, he came to understand the good purposes that the war served: “Many wrongs were perpetrated, but many rights have been established.” Burrows’s interpretation of the war as a divine instrument to unite Americans in a global mission crystallized into a resurgent nationalism in the late nineteenth century.¹⁰

Before the war, churches affiliated with the SBC claimed about 650,000 members, many of them slaves. Church rolls registered severe declines in the years just after the war, as blacks withdrew from white congregations and as white members drifted away from religious affiliation. Contributions to denominational organizations plummeted, reaching a low in the mid-1870s. In the early 1880s, northern Baptists were spending almost three times as much as their white southern counterparts for missionary work in the region. Subscription lists for regional denominational newspapers dwindled. Baptist colleges were decimated, as entire student bodies fell on the battlefield and endowments vanished. At Mississippi College, only 8 of 104 students returned from the war. Richmond College, a flagship Baptist institution, lost nearly $100,000 of its endowment. Howard College (now Samford University), used as a Federal hospital at the end of the war, counted its loss at $58,000.¹²

The physical and emotional devastation of the white South led some moralists to question the sacralization of their own cause. The male self-assertion required by the code of southern honor always had clashed with evangelical notions of humility. Ministers now singled out honor as a cause for defeat. Intending to humble a “proud vain-glorious vaunting people,” God allowed southerners to walk into their own destruction. It was, one minister intoned, “surely a most impressive lesson, if we had ears to hear, respecting the utter impotency of man, and our certain ruin without help from God.”¹³ Ultimately, however, white spiritual leaders preached that a sanctified, purified white South would rise from the ashes to serve as God’s “last and only hope” in a modernizing and secularizing nation. The war, they believed, was the necessary chastening experience that the region needed. Evangelicals closed ranks around the defense of white supremacy and evangelical Protestantism as the bulwarks of a stable order. The term “Redemption,” used by historians to describe the end of Reconstruction in the mid-1870s, assumed an especially powerful connotation for southern believers. Redemption signified individ...