Thoughts on Bernath's recent JSH article

It being a relatively mild, overcast, and dreary day in Durham, I woke up this morning and poured a cup of coffee and picked up the most recent edition of the Journal of Southern History. I went right for Michael Bernath's article, "The Confederacy as a Moment of Possibility," mostly because the title looked startlingly provocative. In the piece, Bernath revisits the argument that many powerful southerners, including Jefferson Davis, viewed formation of the Confederacy as a profoundly conservative revolution - the purging of the cancerous northern influences. It is well known that despite these conservative intentions, the necessities of war pushed the CSA to become more powerful and centralized. The ultimate defeat of the Confederacy led to radical changes that few southerners could have foreseen in the heady days of secession. But, as Bernath reminds us, many viewed the creation of a new southern nation and the resulting war as an opportunity to push new reforms that were, for a variety of reasons, unimaginable under the old Union. He uses the example of three reform initiatives: expansion of women's education, slavery reform, and reactionary antidemocratic activism. Bernath's article is thoughtful and convincing, and I want to take a moment to both add to his argument, but also to take issue with some of his assertions. 

First off, I'll say that I was largely unfamiliar by the antidemocratic forces in southern society in the 1860s, so I won't tread onto that subject. I am generally familiar with arguments in favor of women's education, but I'm much more comfortable with the discussions of slavery reform, so I'll focus on this part of Bernath's article. It needs to be said that slavery reform was a well-worn topic before long before most rational southerners seriously considered secession. Bernath, however, argues that many southerners felt that they couldn't speak out against the abuses of slavery so that the region could project a united front against the North. This is a valid argument, in as much as many southerners themselves made this very claim when advocating for reform. And while this is a critical and justified piece of Bernath's argument, he fails to remind the audience that by 1850 there was already a vast literature the need to reform the worst abuses of slavery. That southerners, willfully forgetting the voices of numerous antebellum reformers, pushed for reform using the newness of the nation and the pressures of war to push their agenda flows nicely with Bernath's argument. Readers should, however, be aware that many popular and quite outspoken southerners lambasted southern slavery in practice. Bernath correctly notes that some of the loudest proponents for reform after 1861 came from the clergy (including George F. Pierce, whom Bernath erroneously labeled as an Episcopalian; he was, in fact, a Methodist). He further makes the perceptive claim that the push to reform the worst abuses of slavery shows that southerners actually cared deeply about what the abolitionists thought. More correct Bernath could not be, but there many extended essays on this subject, dating back at least to the late 1840s, and perhaps earlier. In 1849, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention offered a $200 prize for the best essay on duties, both temporary and spritual, that masters had to their slaves. The Convention eventually published the top three essays in 1851. Methodist preacher and journalist Holland N. McTyeire took home first prize and claimed, as many of the advocates Bernath discusses, that it was patently sinful for masters to break up slave families, provide insufficient food, or overwork their slaves. McTyeire asserted that these abuses legitimately gave the abolitionists ammunition against the South and that southerners should go to their Bibles to properly understand their duties to their slaves. As Bernath also explains, these reformers felt that masters had a religious responsibility to their slaves. But again, the arguments that he places in this "moment of possibility" were nothing new. Again, McTyeire reserved harsh words for his fellow slave-holders, "Depend upon it, O Christian master, your servants will confront you before His bar with whom is known no respect of persons, and how can you be approved when they complain – No man cared for our souls?"  (McTyeire, Duties of Masters to Servants, 46). (John Patrick Daly's monograph, When Slavery was Called Freedom discusses these antebellum reformers at length, if you are interested.) To be fair, it is worth noting that many of the advocates in Bernath's article could have been patently ignoring this literature that existed because they felt that the time was right for reform once they had thrown off the shackles of the Federal Union, but I feel that Bernath should have, at the very least, noted that these arguments weren't as new as even the southerners who were making them believed them to be. This revelation complicates his argument and thus requires significant qualification of some of his more salient points.

And yet I do agree with that overall thrust of his argument is quite accurate. Again, Holland McTyeire (you'll have to excuse my focus on him, he was the subject of my master's thesis) argued that the forming of a new southern nation presented Christians with a unique opportunity to create a more righteous nation than the one they were leaving. There were even more issues at stake than the ones Bernath outlines in his piece in the JSH. By 1861, McTyeire was the editor of the Christian Advocate, the denominational organ of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South - one of the largest religious organizations in the region. He most assuredly had a wide audience. The stakes could not be higher, McTyeire argued, because if the South turned towards sin, God would destroy it as surely as he did Sodom and Gomorrah. The Confederacy should start by strictly adhering to the Sabbath. This is one of the great faults of the North, who allowed their mail trains to run and their army to work on Sundays. McTyeire, who was the editor of several Methodist newspapers in the decade prior to the Civil War, never wrote editorials concerning post office and army policy before secession. Even if it was a matter of religious prerogative, such speech would not have been considered appropriate in most southern religious newspapers because of it was already established as an overwhelmingly political issue in the early days of American Wesleyanism, a time when most Methodists were decidedly apolitical. But the dawning of the Confederacy, with all its newness, gave McTyeire and other religious editors a great opportunity to try to influence national policy and political culture because lines demarcating political and religious boundaries in the new country were still fluid. Anything was fair game because men like McTyeire could claim that God would damn wicked nations and they needed to build their nation on a firm foundation of righteousness.

So, while I do take serious issue with Bernath's lack of a robust context surrounding some of these issues, I think his article is an excellent starting point for exploring this issue more fully. I am confident that further research on this topic will reveal that southerners did view the formation of the Confederate nation as a unique moment in their history, one with unlimited possibilities to create what they felt was the correct kind of nationalism.