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The Unfinished South: Competing Civil Religions in the Post Reconstruction Era, 1877-1920 Arthur Remillard

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE UNFINISHED SOUTH: COMPETING CIVIL RELIGIONS IN THE POSTRECONSTRUCTION ERA, 1877-1920

By

ARTHUR REMILLARD

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006

Copyright © 2006 Arthur Remillard All Rights Reserved

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Arthur Remillard defended on August 24, 2006.

_______________________________ John Corrigan Professor Directing Dissertation

_______________________________ Elna C. Green Outside Committee Member

_______________________________ Amanda Porterfield Committee Member

_______________________________ Amy Koehlinger Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Map of the Unfinished South ........................................................................................................ iv Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................. v Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... vi

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1-23 1. RECONSTRUCTION, REDEMPTION, AND THE “GOSPEL OF MATERIAL PROGRESS”............................................................................................................... 24-55 2. THE UNFINISHED SOUTH AFTER THE “UNFINISHED REVOLUTION”: WHITE SUPREMACY, BLACK FREEDOM, AND CIVIL RELIGIOUS CONFLICT ...… 56-89 3. “NOBLE DAUGHTERS OF THE SOUTH”: DEVOTION AND SOUTHERN WHITE WOMANHOOD .................................................................................................… 90-121 4. “THE SOUL OF AMERICA IS THE SOUL OF THE BIBLE”: JEWISH CITIZENSHIP AND JEWISH UNITY IN A PROTESTANT SOUTH .................................................. 122-154 5. “TRUE” AND “UN-TRUE” AMERICANS: ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND CIVIL RELIGIOUS CONFLICT ...................................................................................... 155-186 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 187-193 NOTES ............................................................................................................................... 194-226 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 227-236 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ..................................................................................................... 237

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MAP OF THE UNFINISHED SOUTH

Source: Microsoft Mappoint, 2004

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ABBREVIATIONS

Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, AL (ADAH) Catholic Diocese Archives, Mobile, AL (CDA) Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, FL (FSA) Florida State University Library, Tallahassee, FL (FSU) Florida History Special Collections, P.K. Yonge Library, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (UF) Georgia State Archives, Atlanta, GA (GSA) Thomas County Historical Society, Thomasville, GA (THS) Thomasville Genealogical, History & Fine Arts Library, Thomasville, GA (THL) Thoronateeksa Museum Archives, Albany, GA (TMA) University of South Alabama Archives, Mobile, AL (USA) University of West Florida Special Collections, Pensacola, FL (UWF)

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines Southern civil religion in the post-Reconstruction era (c. 1877-1920). Geographically, it focuses on the “unfinished South” – an area encompassing Middle and West Florida, Southwest Alabama, and Southwest Georgia. Metaphorically, the word “unfinished” amplifies this study’s principal thesis. That is, after Reconstruction the many voices of the many Souths competed to have their civil religious values recognized and actualized. In the unfinished South, civil religion remained an unfinished product, a river-like demonstration of eternal flux influenced by the position of the speaker, the tenor of the time, and the topic under consideration. Previous histories concerning this topic have centered on the Lost Cause. These studies have sufficiently proven that after the Civil War, public devotions to the Confederacy became an important part of the Southern white identity. As this dissertation reveals, however, the Lost Cause was but one civil religious topic among many. Blacks, whites, men, women, Northerners, Southerners, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews each formulated unique civil religious worldviews. Furthermore, within each circle, variations existed. Some groups had more political influence, economic strength, or numbers than others did. Still, the politically disfranchised, the economically alienated, and the numerically diminutive had a picture for what they believed society ought to be.

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INTRODUCTION FLOWING RIVERS, CIVIL RELIGION, AND SOCIAL VALUES: COMPETING PERCEPTIONS OF THE GOOD SOCIETY IN THE POST-RECONSTRUCTION SOUTH

“You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.” – Heraclitus1 Religion is something of a river. While singular in form, the water’s flow is a demonstration of eternal flux, always subject to the changes in climate and geography. Historian David Chidester suggested that the history of Christianity has been one of river-like change, noting how sixth century Europeans combined pagan feasts with the festivals of Christian saints and eighteenth century Mayans blended their indigenous faith with Catholic practices. Chidester at the same time rejected a theory that religious “hybridity” suddenly has come to distinguish the new globalized Christianity. “[If] hybridity means mixing different cultural forms, then Christian hybridity has a long history.”2 A similar understanding of religion characterizes the scholarship of historian Robert Orsi, who focused on the Catholic faith practices of very specific populations. “Religion is always religion-in-action,” Orsi averred, “religion-in-relationship between people, between the way the world is and the way people imagine or want it to be.” Drawing on widely different sources, both scholars described religion as a living demonstration of continual development. Each began with the ostensibly stable subject of Christianity, and proceeded to explain the various means by which people have actualized their faith.3 Chidester and Orsi proposed that religion is in a perpetual state of becoming, always evolving alongside the dynamic forces of time and place. The present study introduces a similar river-like methodology to the study of civil religion in the post-Reconstruction South (c. 1877-1920).4 Previous monographs covering this subject have focused primarily on the Lost Cause. A product of the white middle- to upper-class, devotions to the Lost Cause romantically memorialized a Confederate past. While the Lost Cause was arguably very important for this population, it spoke for only one segment of a very diverse Southern society. Indeed, the post-Reconstruction South produced an array of civil religious worldviews. This dissertation will highlight some of these worldviews and reveal the multivocal reality of civil religion during this period.

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Perceptions of the “Good Society” Civil religion remains a unique academic category. Chidester and Orsi foregrounded religious denominations. With a focus on churches, theologies, priests, prophets, visions of God, and the like, neither historian needed to justify that his study was about “religion.” The subject of civil religion, on the other hand, does require an explanation. As we will see, the academic discussion of civil religion evolved partly from the religious theorizing of sociologist Emile Durkheim. In his attempt to describe the phenomenon of religion, Durkheim proclaimed, “the idea of society is the soul of religion.” According to the sociologist, religion maintains the cohesive bond of society.5 During the late 1960s and 70s, scholars used Durkheim’s formulation to explain the religious characteristics of the “American way of life.” With this, “civil religion” was born. Despite the various studies devoted to the subject, civil religion has remained a slippery concept, difficult to define. To provide a starting point, then, we borrow a distinction made by American philosopher John Dewey. Civil religion is about “the religious” rather than “a religion.” The latter, Dewey explained, refers to an institution that operates from a specific revealed tradition. The former is about a society’s “heritage of values” that they believe contributes to the “common good.”6 This dissertation is a study of the religious. Focusing less on specific religious doctrines, institutions, and creeds, it investigates, as sociologist Marcela Cristi summarized, peoples’ perceptions of “what is as well as what ought to be.”7 That is, chapters document how particular topics, ideas, and people evoked competing visions for society. As we will see, the normative pronouncements of Southerners frequently carried strong religious language. Still, their emphatic utterances did not always come with faith-based allusions. Whether their language was overtly religious or not, the following chapters highlight those voices whose words carried a firm sense of ultimacy and urgency. In this dissertation’s search for the competing civil religions of the post-Reconstruction South, we will make frequent mention of this era’s many perceived “good societies.” Sociologist Phillip Hammond explained that civil religion “is a religion not of salvation but of the good society.”8 Hammond’s reference to the “good society” – a phrase used often in the civil religion literature – links civil religion with a philosophical effort to describe an ideal state that maximizes unity, peace, and prosperity while minimizing conflict and strife.9 Plato’s good society, for example, required citizens to perform their duties for the sake of civic order. To enforce and promulgate this basic premise, he proposed a “single bold flight of invention,” called

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the “myth of the metals.” The myth dictated that each person was born with a certain metal in his or her blood. This metal – whether bronze, silver, or gold – determined each individual’s future role in society. Plato suspected that over time, new generations would believe the myth true. The result “might have a good effect in making them care more for the commonwealth and for one another.”10 In Plato’s discussion of the good society, we find an ideal state wherein collective harmony came into being through the propagation of a common myth. This good society existed only in the philosopher’s mind, and it took the shape of a single ideal. This dissertation argues that in the post-Reconstruction South, there were many competing perceptions of the good society. The qualifier, “perception” is important to note. The following chapters do not seek to determine whether any one society was, or was not, truly “good.” Instead, as Hammond suggested, we will talk about civil religion as a flowing river with “many forms” and an “identifiable current.”11 The post-Reconstruction South was a complex society with many diverse voices competing to have their perceived good societies recognized and actualized. The position of a speaker, the tenor of a given time, and the topic under consideration each influenced perceptions of the good society. While a concern for unity, peace, and prosperity was consistent throughout, the good society of this era remained a river-like demonstration of eternal flux. To assist in navigating the river of civil religion, the following chapters focus on specific social values as they related to perceptions of the good society. Simply put, social values represent the ethical and behavioral standards that people employ to judge right from wrong. As a result, values are the metaphorical bricks in the boundary walls that enclose a group’s perception of the good society. For example, as Chapter Two will detail, many Southern whites believed that white supremacy was an indispensable value for their good society. To achieve prosperity, whites contended that their race needed to dominate in social, political, and economic affairs. For scores of blacks, however, voting, office holding, and owning property became practices of a freedom they believed God granted and emancipation confirmed. The good society of Southern blacks imagined the race participating in social, political, and economic affairs equally and without the threat of violent reprisal. Thus, freedom was a cherished black value that meant unrestricted civil rights. For whites, the value of white supremacy turned black freedom into a profound threat. In each race’s direct and indirect confrontations, blacks and whites identified the other’s values as essentially contrary to the good society. Undergirding the

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value system of both perspectives was a strong sense that the perceived “outsiders” practiced the wrong values. Race was a ruling concern for whites and blacks living after Reconstruction. As the chapters will demonstrate, urbanization, industrialization, organized religion, temperance, and immigration were also important matters. Each evoked a complicated series of social values that sometimes changed over time. For instance, some Catholics participated in Southern white politics during the late nineteenth century. By the nativist 1910s, however, a number of Southern white Protestant politicians used the language of anti-Catholicism to win elected offices. In response, Catholics derided their opposition, calling them “un-true” Americans. Much like the discussion of race, the topic of Catholicism resulted in civil religious conflict. Each side solidified a perception of the good society by claiming that their values, not those of their opposition, would and should prevail. Returning to Hammond’s river metaphor, the “identifiable current” of civil religion in this study will be the “good society.” The “many forms” will be the various values that people believed contributed to and detracted from this ideal of unity, peace, and prosperity. Our goal is not to define the good society of the post-Reconstruction South. Instead, we will explain how perceptions of the good society changed according to the position of the speaker, the topic under consideration, and the conditions dictated by time. Regionally, this dissertation focuses on the Deep South sub-region of Middle and West Florida, Southwest Georgia, and Southwest Alabama. After Reconstruction, a sparse native populace confronted a host of new residents comprised of foreign and domestic laborers, farmers, industrialists, and tourists. With more voices came more versions of the good society. Speeches, letters, published and unpublished memoirs, newspaper articles, and sermons represent the bulk of the sources cited in the following chapters. While many sources present the views of a white Protestant population, the chapters also include perspectives from blacks, Northerners, Jews, and Catholics. We will also peer within the white Protestant circle to understand their conflicts, conformities, and differences. For each individual and group considered, we will discover that perceptions of the good society frequently formed by way of a dialectical relationship between perceived in-groups and out-groups.12 To understand the good society of a Southern white “redeemer” politician, for example, we must also understand that he believed the values of Northern “carpetbaggers” were inherently flawed. The good society of the redeemer,

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in other words, demanded that he remain firmly opposed to the supposedly debauched influence of the Northern carpetbagger. This introductory chapter will address some of the material and ideological changes that helped to define the region under consideration. First, though, in order to more precisely establish a conceptual embarkation point for this story, we will examine past and present trends in the civil religion literature. While the phenomenon is difficult to classify, scholars generally echo Hammond’s sentiment that civil religion is about the good society. From here, other scholars have defined America’s civil religion as a singular religious product. Believing that the appearance of a cohesive society implies the presence of religion, these academics have set forth to determine the basic qualities of American civil religion. Other studies, however, have argued that people manufacture civil religion to create unity. Thus, different segments of American society have managed to produce civil religions that speak directly to their concerns. The present study draws predominantly from the latter school. It describes how the civil religion of the post-Reconstruction South was a complex array of social values that resulted in many different perceptions of the good society. Civil Religion’s History and Debates Plato’s idealization of a harmonious society demonstrates that the substance of “civil religion” has long been part of Western thinking, even though the term first appeared during the European Enlightenment. Like the political philosophers of ancient Greece, modern European thinkers believed that a religious-patriotic faith, distinct from an organized religion, would legitimize common laws and bind together the people of a nation. According to historian Mark Silk, early discussions of this idea transpired by way of historical examples and often referenced Numa Pompilius (715-673 B.C.E). Numa was the legendary second king of Rome who succeeded the warmonger, King Romulus. Accounts of Numa cast him as a peaceful sage who united the disparate kingdom and brought prosperity to the land. The king’s success, the stories have suggested, resulted from his “civil theology,” which comprised of a religious calendar, the cults of Mars and Jupiter, the vestal virgins, and the temple of Janus.13 In his history of Rome, Livy claimed Numa’s civil theology “tinged the hearts of all with piety” and “the nation was governed by its regard for promises and oaths, rather than by dread of laws and penalties.”14 Early Christians such as Saint Augustine labeled Numa an evil pagan, but the twelfth century humanist intellectual John of Salisbury gave the king a favorable appraisal. John commended Numa’s

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ability to cultivate “civil affection.” Unlike Augustine, John encouraged Christians to follow Numa’s example. Renaissance philosopher Niccoló Machiavelli had equally effusive praise for Numa. “I conclude that the religion introduced by Numa was among the first causes of the happiness of that city. For it caused good orders; good orders make good fortune; and from good fortune arose the happy successes of enterprises.”15 For Machiavelli and those preceding him, Numa’s civic theology became the standard for explaining how religious-patriotic practices could create a common ethic and influence social unity, peace, and prosperity. French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau likewise admired Numa’s “Roman religion” and the resulting “solid and lasting” nation of Rome. With Numa serving as a backdrop, Rousseau coined the term “civil religion” in his 1762 Social Contract. A concern for the “good society” was at the heart of his political ponderings. Like the philosophers before him, Rousseau’s good society referred to an ideal state that was unified, peaceful, and prosperous. The ideal citizen of this state would act freely, but his or her behavior would never contradict the common good.16 Organized religion, Rousseau criticized, detracted from actualizing the good society by advancing dogmas the philosopher believed resulted in intolerance and ignorance. He still believed that the moral function of religion was essential for a society. Guided by a minimum set of beliefs, or “positive dogmas,” Rousseau’s concept of “civil religion” sought to eliminate intolerance and enhance personal liberty for the sake of creating a good society.17 The idea of civil religion thus had an extensive history before it appeared in Robert Bellah’s 1967 essay entitled, “Civil Religion in America.” In America, he proposed, “there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and wellinstitutionalized civil religion.” This “American way of life” has provided the nation with a shared set of values derived from a common history and institutionalized through national myths (George Washington crossing the Potomac), symbols (the Statue of Liberty), and rituals (Memorial Day ceremonies). Bellah explained that these items bulwark the “central tradition” of American civil religion, which has been, “the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it and in terms of which it should be judged.”18 Bellah used civil religion to discuss the “ethical principles” that he believed defined and sustained American society. He also explained how certain practices – reminiscent of Numa’s civic theology – have helped to establish, transmit, and/or confirm these principles. While

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mentioned in the essay, Rousseau was not Bellah’s primary methodological foundation. Instead, another Frenchman, sociologist Emile Durkheim, served as a key theoretician for Bellah’s work. Durkheim believed that religion existed as a necessary element of social cohesion. “If religion gave birth to all that is essential in society,” resolved Durkheim, “that is so because the idea of society is the soul of religion.” Durkheim posited that religion was the figurative glue holding together a “moral community.”19 Bellah’s definition of civil religion drew from Durkheim’s conclusions. Not blind to the conflicts and diversity of America’s past and present, Bellah remained confident that American society, if it was a society at all, shared a common set of “ethical principles” that allowed the nation to remain intact.20 The language of “values” would become a significant part of the civil religion discussion. What, though, are values? Sociologist Talcott Parsons called social values, “a set of normative judgments held by the members of the society which define with specific reference to their own society, what to them is a good society.” Interestingly, Parsons drew a direct link between social values and the good society. As we have seen, while existing only as an ideal, the good society refers to a unified, peaceful, and prosperous social condition. Social values, according to Parsons, are the “standards” people use to define their good society.21 Bellah, a student of Parsons, also explored the intersection of religion, values, and the good society. Bellah confirmed, “religion is close to the core of any social value system.” Similar to his mentor, Bellah claimed values, “indicate what is a good society, what is good social action, what are good social relations, what is a good person as a member of society.” Moreover, values represent, “[the] possibilities and impossibilities for social action.”22 With Bellah in mind, then, we can understand values as the metaphorical bricks in the boundary walls surrounding a collective perception of the good society. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz, another Parsons disciple, arrived at a similar conclusion. Geertz explained that the values of a religious system assume “the appearance of objectivity” because they define a way of life that people believe is true and beyond question. Moreover, Geertz described values as having “positive” and “negative” forces. A value has the potential to both “[celebrate]” and “[condemn]” certain people, beliefs, or behaviors.23 As we will see, people of the post-Reconstruction South used positive and negative values to define their good society. When identifying an undesirable person or group, speakers pointed to what they believed were the value deficiencies of their opposition. Through this dialectical process of defining in-groups and out-groups by using

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positive and negative values, many perceptions of the good society competed for recognition and actualization. A negative image of the drunkard, therefore, became part of the prohibitionist’s perception of the good society. As imagined by the prohibitionist, the drunkard practiced values that contradicted a “dry” ideal. A flood of literature followed Bellah’s initial essay.24 The definitions of civil religion proliferated.25 Some expanded on Bellah’s definition, while others criticized its ambiguity and questioned the very existence of an American civil religion.26 In his 1989 literature review, sociologist James A. Mathisen argued that the civil religion discussion peaked during the early 1980s and sharply declined by the decade’s end. The sociologist attributed civil religion’s “waning” scholarship to the term’s hazy and contested definition. He observed that even Bellah abstained from referencing “civil religion” in his 1985 Habits of the Heart. This indicated for Mathisen that the sociologist who started the debate had forsaken the conversation.27 In his response, Bellah explained, “I . . . grew weary of the whole definitional debate, since I was always interested in the substantive issues, not the definitions.” Habits, Bellah retorted, remained “very much concerned with the same substantive issues as my writings on civil religion.” The “substance” that concerned Bellah had been what he called, the “religio-political problem.” Much like the philosophers of ancient Greece and the Enlightenment, Bellah was interested in how societies confronted matters of “ultimate” importance such as life and death.28 He continued exploring the substance of civil religion in the aptly entitled, The Good Society. Again avoiding direct reference to civil religion, Bellah and his co-authors identified what they believed were the important and debated values of American society.29 Bellah was not the only one who stopped using the term civil religion. An additional pioneer of the discussion, Phillip Hammond, also admitted that there has been a “conceptual fog” hovering over the category. Frustrated with the definitional debate, the sociologist began using the term “legitimizing myth.” The new phrase, Hammond insisted, allowed him to evade the problem of definition and concentrate on the “stuff” of civil religion.30 While not directly commenting on the matter, sociologist Rhys Williams has also avoided the civil religion terminology. However, he has employed the term “good society” in a recent article. Here, Williams examined the differing positions of both religious and secular organizations that have battled over the contentious issues of late twentieth century American political culture. He resolved that both groups have spoken with an equal sense of urgency and ultimacy, even though

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secularists have not regularly employed religious rhetoric. Each side has held a belief that their values would fulfill the “true” promise of American society. Even though Williams did not reference civil religion, the category’s substance forthrightly appeared. As we have seen, the idea of civil religion has long been part of Western thinking. Although the term may not appear as often in contemporary literature, the essence of civil religion has.31 In addition to the definition, the reality of American diversity has also plagued the civil religion discussion. Critics have charged that the first wave of civil religion scholarship implicitly assumed that the values of the white middle- to upper-class spoke for the entire nation. Hammond warned scholars not to overlook the perspectives of blacks and Indians. To remain a reputable discussion, he concluded, future studies would need to widen their source base to account for those left to the periphery.32 Revisions to the definition of civil religion have done just this. Sociologist Michael W. Hughey, for example, emphasized that the values defining civil religion, “always express the needs, aspirations, and ideal and material interests of particular groups of people existing in particular times, places, and institutional contexts.” The discussions of civil religion offered by Bellah and others, Hughey criticized, had only explored the “orthodox values” of white men and overlooked values of “different groups.”33 Observing the political disputes between religious liberals and conservatives, sociologist Robert Wuthnow resolved that the nation’s civil religion has been “deeply divided.” Similar to America’s church religions, civil religion “does not speak with a single voice, uniting the majority of Americans around common ideals.” Instead, Wuthnow argued that political debates have resulted in different people “offering different visions of what America can and should be.”34 Instead of civil religion having one set of shared values, Wuthnow and others began thinking of America’s many civil religions. Sociologists N.J. Demerath and Rhys Williams were instrumental in rethinking the category of civil religion to account for national diversity. As a starting point, the sociologists confirmed that civil religion refers to a society’s ideal “political and moral vision.” In a complex society, however, the “key values” of a civil religion may differ according the speaker’s agenda. The sociologists charged that many definitions of civil religion have failed to account for these differences.35 Consider historian C. Conrad Cherry who called civil religion “a national faith made up of images and beliefs that Americans can hold in common.”36 Much like Bellah, Cherry’s definition of civil religion implied that America’s status as a unified society indicated the existence of a singular cohesive force. Such definitions of civil

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religion, reasoned Demerath and Williams, relied too heavily on Durkheim’s definition of religion. As previously noted, Durkheim argued that religion is a spontaneous product of society. Demerath and Williams proposed that this foundation prompted scholars to define civil religion “as a cohesive force, a common canopy of values that helps foster social and cultural integration.” The “complex reality,” countered the sociologists, has been that “[civil religious] discourse has become a tool for legitimizing social movements and interest-group politics.” Demerath and Williams favored Rousseau’s philosophy. In contrast to Durkheim’s “bottom up” definition of religion, Rousseau’s civil religion “was to be constructed and imposed from the top down as an artificial source of civic virtue.” The sociologists used Rousseau to argue that civil religion is a manufactured tool for influencing social cohesion, rather than an inevitable product of social existence. Instead of trying to define America’s single civil religion, then, Demerath and Williams asserted that further studies would need to describe “the contexts and uses of civilreligious language and symbols, noting how specific groups and subcultures use versions of civil religion to frame, articulate, and legitimate their own particular political or moral visions.”37 Demerath and Williams essentially challenged scholars to diversify the civil religion discussion. Whether the inclusion of Rousseau into the category’s theoretical development would truly influence this end, remains questionable. In their study of civil religion and the presidency, historians Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Linder outlined Rousseau’s civil religion and its philosophical antecedents. Unlike Demerath and Williams, the historians found more conformity between Durkheim and Rousseau. Durkheim “agreed with Rousseau’s contention that a common, overarching civil religion was constitutive of the unity and character of every society.” Moreover, both concurred that, “expressions of civil faith were generally tolerant of all except those who would not accept its simple dogmas.” The contribution of Demerath and Williams was not their philosophical reconfiguration. Rather, it was their call for diversity. Consider that Pierard and Linder suggested that the American president has become, “the foremost representative of civil religion in the United States.” With Demerath and Williams in mind, we may argue that the historians overextended their sources. Pierard and Linder made the “orthodox values” of presidents the standard values for the entire nation.38 The presidency may have captured the civil religious values of some Americans. The historians, however, did not convincingly prove that all Americans shared these values.39

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Sociologist Rita Kirk Whillock drew directly from the Demerath/Williams thesis when discussing the “competing value systems” of American civil religion. On contentious political issues, Whillock found a myriad of conflicting groups, each “seeking to define what America is and the values that should prevail.”40 Whillock’s conclusion clearly contrasted with similar studies performed by sociologists James A. Christensen and Ronald C. Wimberly. They asked sample audiences questions related to God, American patriotism, and national chosenness. The researchers concluded that many people responded positively, but a minority of religious and political liberals tended to be more critical. Christensen and Wimberly resolved that the dissenters were not sufficiently “civil religious.”41 Using her own data, Whillock’s study offered a different interpretation. Rather than understanding civil religion as an institution open to most and closed to some, she looked at each group’s value system. Whillock discovered that where matters of American destiny were at stake, people have claimed that their common good was the common good. Her findings highlight an important point. When we define civil religion as a perception of the good society – regardless of whether that perception is a majority of minority view – we begin seeing how different people have different understandings of America’s “calling and destiny.” Historian Randi Jones Walker also referenced the Demerath/Williams thesis when comparing the civil religions of New Mexico and Boston during the early nineteenth century. Her study began with two “mythologies of origin.” Examining speeches delivered in 1832 by Antonio Jose Martinez in Taos and Francis Gray in Boston, Jones compared each speaker’s story of independence. She described two mythologies that were products of two different cultural backgrounds. “The society of the United States,” Walker emphasized, “is too complex to be understood in terms of a single myth of origin, no matter how dominant.” She argued that too many scholars have used civil religion to impose “unity” upon “a fragmented society.” In the process, they have diminished other civil religious perspectives. According to Walker, “unity will not be found in a single mythology, no matter how powerful the dominant stream of society may be.” She beckoned civil religion scholars to democratize their studies and explore the “rich tapestry of symbols and mythologies” that have emerged from “the complexities of American experience.”42 Walker poignantly observed that that many studies of civil religion have tried to create unity where it has not existed. She turned the old approach on its head and embraced the diversity of America’s past.

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Walker and others have begun democratizing American civil religion, yet univocal accounts continue to emerge. In his history of the Supreme Court, historian John E. Semonche called the Justices the “priests and prophets” of America’s civil religion. Like Bellah and others, Semonche drew aim on the structures of American government. “American nationhood rests upon a common faith in a civil theology, largely composed of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the elaborated rights of the individual as found in the Constitution with its Bill of Rights.” The decisions of Supreme Court Justices, argued Semonche, have shaped how people interpret and practice the laws of the Constitution.43 Similarly, historian Jeffrey F. Meyer examined the “myths in stone” captured in the monuments and buildings of Washington D.C. such as the Capitol, White House, Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, and National Mall. Meyer explained that definitions and interpretations of these structures may have changed over time, but their central place in the nation’s common faith has been constant.44 Communications scholar Craig R. Smith wrote a civil religious biography of Daniel Webster that focused on the public official’s oratorical ability and frequent references to national myths and symbols. A member of the house and senate, and twice the secretary of state, Webster delivered a highly influential speech leading up to the Compromise of 1850. “For Webster,” Smith wrote, “the Declaration of Independence [served] as the baptism of the new nation [and] the Constitution was its confirmation. These were sacramental moments in America’s civil religion that could be shared again and again through the agency of Webster’s oratory. His rhetorical ability allowed him to lead the public in mass celebrations that consecrated America’s most sacred values.”45 Readers attuned to the scholarship of Demerath and Williams, Walker, and Jones may ask Smith, “Whose ‘most sacred values’”? The quality of scholarship represented in Smith’s monograph, along with the others, is excellent. However, the authors, like many before them, overextended their sources. They assumed that the words, deeds, and symbols of a largely white, upper-class, male, Protestant population have conclusively defined American civil religion. On the surface, historian Richard T. Hughes’s rethinking of American mythology represents a step toward diversifying the civil religion discussion. He explained that the criticisms delivered by Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, exposed the “corrupted” myths of whites.46 For Hughes, racism represents an American civil religious failing. However, the author did not take the next step to examine the unique civil religious worldviews of American

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blacks. Instead, the racial minority was only a voice of opposition to “the” American civil religion created and perpetuated by white elites. In his review, historian Ira Chernus repeatedly highlighted this shortcoming both in Hughes’s book and in the entire civil religion discussion. According to Chernus, academia had “largely abandoned [civil religion] years ago, and with good reason.” The problem, he wrote, had been the “‘we’ of civil religion literature.” Chernus argued that studies of civil religion have centered solely on the values of “wealthy white men.” Despite his indictment of the term, Chernus concluded with a hint of optimism. For civil religion to remain relevant, he proclaimed, scholars needed to “claim no supposed consensus but allow ‘us’ to speak in all our diversity.”47 Contrary to Chernus’s claim, the civil religion discussion has not been “abandoned.”48 He was probably aware of this; his scholarship on religion and the Cold War has explored the intersection of religion and politics.49 Chernus was likely criticizing the univocal definition of civil religion he saw in the scholarship of Hughes and others. Some civil religion scholars have articulated a definition of civil religion that conformed precisely to Chernus’s prescription. In her extensive review of the topic, for example, sociologist Marcela Cristi reiterated the Demerath/Williams thesis. She too challenged scholars to diversify the study of civil religion and understand that different segments of a given society “will likely produce different civil religions.”50 This dissertation will adopt a point of departure similar to that advocated by Cristi and others by focusing discussion on the competing civil religions of the post-Reconstruction South. Recent histories of this era have begun paying close attention to race, gender, and class. In contrast to previous studies that described the South’s religion in singular terms, these new histories have revealed the era’s complex faith practices. The study of Southern civil religion after Reconstruction, however, remains captive to the Lost Cause. Public devotions to the Confederacy became a significant part of the Southern white identity during the postwar years. This civil religious mentality, however, was neither fully inclusive nor fully representative of the entire Southern population. In other words, the Lost Cause was one civil religion topic among many. We must now address the question: “What about everyone else?” Captives of the Lost Cause In an effort to decide what made Southern religion unique, the first significant wave of Southern religious histories endeavored to define the common elements of this region’s faiths. In 1963, historian Kenneth Bailey argued that the Southern Baptists, Methodist Episcopal Church, South,

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and Southern Presbyterians had minor sectarian disputes, but all agreed on issues of “Biblical inerrancy,” “individual repentance,” and “intense religious emotions.”51 Historian Samuel S. Hill extended Bailey’s thesis in 1966 in an effort to distinguish the “central theme” of Southern religion. The “culture-religion” of the South, argued Hill, arose from the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century. This culture of revivalism settled deep into the Southern marrow, and the region’s faith practices became solely conversion-focused. Hill theorized that the South practiced a “historic religion” much like the faith of pre-Reformation Europe. In both eras, members of religious communities became obsessed with salvation and dismissive of thisworldly concerns.52 In 2002, historian Paul Harvey summarized that the writings of Bailey, Hill, and others of this generation, “understood southern evangelicalism as a solid and singular formation.”53 According to Harvey, this changed during the 1980s and 1990s when historians, influenced by poststructuralist methodologies, decentered their stories.54 These “‘splitter’ historians,” as Harvey called them, explored the “contrasting layers and individually interesting pebbles” of Southern religion. He used Beth Barton’s Schweiger’s “splitter” history of the Southern ministry as an example. Schweiger examined documents from over eight-hundred Virginia Baptist and Methodist pastors over a one-hundred year span. She concluded that this cache of ministers, “transformed themselves from self-educated stump-speaking revivalists early in the century into professionals who valued seminary degrees and polished pulpits.” Having deconstructed the historiographical stereotype of the anti-modern, anti-intellectual, anti-progress Southern preacher, Schweiger revealed how ministers developed bureaucratic, educational, and social programs that modernized Southern religion during the postwar era.55 Harvey also referenced “splitter” race histories. The significance of this literature, he professed, was in recasting blacks as participants in the development of Southern religion rather than “victims or foils to white history.”56 In 1999, Hill admitted that “a real weakness” in his earlier scholarship was his treatment of race. He lamented not having “at least acknowledged how interactive the two racial religious formations [black and white] had been, how mutually implicating they were.”57 Studies considering racial interactivity, according to both Harvey and Hill, forever changed the contours of Southern religious history. Having included black voices into the history of the South, the solid formation of Southern religion revealed its interconnected layers and obvious cracks. A decentered history of Southern civil religion, however, remains an unfinished project.

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Charles Reagan Wilson’s landmark 1980 book, Baptized in Blood, argued that the Lost Cause and its “set of values” became the centerpiece of Southern civil religion after the war. “Without the Lost Cause,” Wilson asserted, “no civil religion would have existed. The two were virtually the same.” Like other studies of civil religion in the 1970s and 80s, Wilson defined civil religion using exclusive language. For the historian, the Lost Cause was the product of community that derived its value system from their shared experience of the Civil War. From Virginia to Louisiana, monuments devoted to Confederate heroes such as Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis represented stone manifestations of a Southern white civil religion. This common faith created from “the heritage of the Southern past,” explained Wilson, fueled many white Southerners’ profound distrust of Northerners and New South advocates. Such misgivings only began to dissipate after the Great War.58 Harvey contended that Wilson’s thesis, “contrasts with much of the newer ‘splitter’ scholarship, which emphasizes the diversity and variety to be found even in white southern evangelical churches and depicts ministers who served as agents of bourgeois progress and change.” Harvey referenced historian Gaines Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy, which made precisely this point.59 Foster argued that the Lost Cause had a minimal impact on the South. Far from defining the Southern white identity, he resolved that the Lost Cause simply, “eased the region’s passage through a particularly difficult period of social change.” As the century unfolded, “the ghosts of the Confederacy” lingered but the Lost Cause “had become too elusive and ephemeral to define its identity.” According to Foster, then, the Lost Cause was of minor importance. As the years passed, white Southerners became more involved with, and accepting of, the culture of progressivism. Additionally, Foster dismissed the entire concept of civil religion. Like other critics, he claimed that the term had no clear definition.60 Similarly, historian W. Scott Poole criticized the definition of civil religion, which he believed implied that an entire society could share a “dominant set of values.” He thusly avoided “civil religion” and used “Confederate religion” in its place. To isolate his claims, Poole also focused on the Southern sub-region of the South Carolina upcountry. Here, “Confederate religion” nurtured a culture of conservatism that led whites to “[practice] the values of the past in the present.”61 Poole’s study modified Wilson’s Lost Cause thesis and wisely limited claims to one population and one region. In doing this, Poole did not overextend his sources. Like Wilson and Foster, however, Poole did not look beyond the Lost Cause for the substance of civil religion. None of

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these studies considered the possibility that other topics may have evoked similar civil religious sentiments. Foster did discuss the importance of progressivism, but only in an effort to dismiss the category of civil religion and its relationship to the Lost Cause. Historian Andrew Manis, on the other hand, took steps toward liberating the idea of civil religion from the Lost Cause. Manis criticized Wilson for not considering the diverse “patriotic loyalties” during the years following Reconstruction. Focusing on the Civil Rights era, Manis identified the “the south’s two civil religions,” one black and one white. Using an “interactive” approach, Manis explained how the races appealed to different definitions of “America’s calling and destiny.” For blacks and whites, desegregation became a “symbol” of freedom and racial degradation respectively. The term “civil religion” as Manis used it referred to the conflicting interpretations of “America’s key values” during the Civil Rights era. He reminded readers that the idea of civil religion relates to the “symbols that tell the citizens the ultimate or sacred meaning of their nation.” Foster and Poole dismissed the idea of civil religion, because they believed the term related to a single faith of an entire nation. Manis drew from a different definition of civil religion – one that stressed diversity instead of singularity. He was, what Harvey would have called, a “splitter” historian. Manis decentered the story of civil religion by exposing the different racial worldviews that collided during the Civil Rights era. Through opposition, each side defined themselves by identifying the other’s values as inherently detrimental to their perception of America’s “calling and destiny.”62 This dissertation will investigate, as Manis suggested, the “key values” of blacks and whites that related to each race’s perception of the good society during the post-Reconstruction era. Furthermore, it will reveal value variations within the white Protestant sphere, while also lending attention to the key values of Jews and Catholics. While Manis identified the South’s “two civil religions,” therefore, this study will make no definitive claims. Instead, this dissertation argues that there were numerous perceptions of the good society after Reconstruction, each continually changing much like the flowing waters of a river. The “Unfinished South” Regionally, this dissertation will focus on Middle and West Florida, Southwest Georgia, and Southwest Alabama – collectively referred to as the “unfinished South.” The towns and cities most frequently referenced will be Tallahassee, FL, Pensacola, FL, Mobile, AL, Thomasville, GA, and Albany, GA. Because of Florida’s relative absence of people and underdeveloped

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material resources, historian Dewey Grantham labeled it the “unfinished state,” but Southwest Georgia and Southwest Alabama were equally “unfinished” in this regard.63 Metaphorically, labeling this region “unfinished” amplifies this study’s thesis that perceptions of the good society remained in a continuous state of re-definition. To be sure, Grantham did not use the word “unfinished” in this manner. Nevertheless, he did reference the profound political and material happenings of this era. Railroad and port developments along with a concerted effort to attract tourists and farmers helped spur growth in the area. When compared to the rest of the former Confederacy, 64 the population gains in the unfinished South were prolific.65 As this study will suggest, the material and demographic developments of this era influenced peoples’ perceived good societies. Prior to the war, the unfinished South was a sparsely populated frontier known principally for its cotton plantations and meager ports. While on the outskirts of the Confederate states, the unfinished South saw a series of conflicts during the Civil War. The Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, for example, began with fourteen Union ships led by David Farrugut. The battle nearly ended when a mine struck the first ship, bringing the vessel and its crew to the bottom of the bay. The fleet stopped, Farragut surveyed the battle scene, and proclaimed, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.” The new flagship safely navigated the bay and the Union earned a critical victory. At that stage of the war, Mobile Bay was the final port east of Texas not in Union hands. 66 Florida’s ports also saw a series of wartime skirmishes. Most of Pensacola’s minor battles resulted in Union victories. In March 1864, however, the Confederacy’s fortune changed at a battle just south of Tallahassee. Union General John Newton received reconnaissance that the Confederate soldiers in Tallahassee were leaving to defend South Florida. Consequently, Newton deployed 1,000 Union troops to Saint Marks hoping to capture the final Confederate capital not in Union hands. Word of the Union’s arrival quickly reached Tallahassee. In response, militia members and cadets from the West Florida Seminary gathered and marched south. The quickly assembled Confederate forces succeeded in repelling Union troops at Natural Bridge. This victory became a proud moment for many Southern whites of the region, but Confederate loss was soon to come.67 In the unfinished South that existed during the Civil War, the North and South stood uneasily across from each other. More often than not, they lived together in a seemingly unending tension – bullets rarely flew, but their fingers were always on the trigger. In a sense, this strange

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ambiguity continued to pervade the land after the war. White Southerners living in the unfinished South, in other words, had an unfinished notion of what Northerners meant, and whether or not they were a threat or an asset. When the war ended, the unfinished South slowly began developing its resources and populating its uninhabited lands. Railroads represented one momentous change during the postwar era. Lacking a sufficient prewar railroad system, forests, marshes, and swamps made traveling through states like Florida nearly impossible. Following Reconstruction, Florida legislators relaxed railroad regulations in hopes of attracting developers. Henry Plant and Henry Flagler, both Northerners, managed to forge amicable relationships with many members of Florida’s Democratic legislature. Between 1879 and 1901, Plant and Flagler received eleven million acres of state land. The “Plant System” consisted of railroads and hotels developed all along the central Gulf Coast. Flagler visited Saint Augustine in 1883 on his honeymoon and saw great potential for the area. Like Plant, Flagler’s railroads and hotels ran along Florida’s east coast and eventually extended to Key West in 1912. The railroads of Plant and Flagler expedited trade and provided the means for Northern tourists to visit Florida and prospective landowners to relocate there. The state’s entrepreneurs sent travel books and brochures north touting the state’s scenery, rich soil, and “healthful” air and water. Efforts to populate Florida produced positive results. The population rose forty-two percent from 1900 to 1910 and twenty-nine percent in the following ten years. The state’s growth was twice as high as the national average. Railroads forever changed Florida, but not everyone believed these were positive changes. In this era of Southern urbanization, the majority of Floridians inhabited rural locales. In 1900, approximately eighty percent of the state’s population still lived outside of major towns and cities. The political tensions between town and city were intense, as the “silk hat” urbanites regularly conflicted with an obstinate “wool hat” majority. Florida’s successful politicians, therefore, balanced the concerns of rural whites with the promises offered by outsiders like Plant and Flagler. At least in rhetoric, politicians preached to white rural concerns and assured that outsiders would not overtake the state.68 Alongside railroad growth, the unfinished South’s ports also grew. Pensacola’s port became a depot for the booming timber industry in the late nineteenth century. It also briefly profited from the railroad growth happening just north in Alabama. From 1885-1905, Alabama’s total mileage of railroads more than doubled. Cotton, lumber, iron ore, coal, coke, and pig iron all traveled these railways and eventually funneled to Pensacola, until Mobile modernized its port. Federal

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grants from 1880-1901 made it possible for Mobile’s port to develop. During these years, the value of the port’s exports grew 142.7 percent.69 For inland towns like Thomasville, new railways enabled farmers to send cotton crops more efficiently to Savannah’s port. Prior to the war, Thomasville transported goods to Florida’s Gulf ports via circuitous railways and inefficient roads. When Thomasville became the final stop for the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad, the town gained a direct route through Waycross, Albany, and Savannah. In addition to moving material goods, this rail connection enabled the growth of a profitable tourist industry. Wealthy Northern visitors from cities like Chicago came through Savannah and stayed in Thomasville’s various extravagant hotels.70 Railroads also made the unfinished South more accessible and more attractive to prospective farmers and visitors. The population grew, but this new body of people was mostly white. In 1900, blacks represented 43.6 percent of Florida’s population, but their numbers declined by approximately half in the coming years. All the while, Florida became a notoriously violent state. Between 1882 and 1930, the state had 226 lynchings and the highest lynching percentage in the South.71 The material changes of the unfinished South influenced perceptions of good society for both black and white. In Florida, maintaining the good society necessitated, for whites, acts of vigilante violence. Race will be one of a variety of topics addressed in the coming chapters. As we will see, perceptions of the good society evolved alongside the rapidly changing Southern landscape. As the population grew and new railroads sprouted, Southerners of all stripes struggled to define and redefine the key values of their good society. The continual cycle of redefinition left the unfinished South truly unfinished. North, South, black, white, male, female, Catholic, Jew, Protestant, Republican, and Democrat – each had a particular agenda and each articulated a vision for what they believed the ultimate destiny of the region was. The unfinished South, in this study, refers to both a geographical region and the unfolding perceptions of the good society. As the chapters progress, we will discover that the good society of this region had neither a central theme nor a single unifying value. Instead, the many voices of the many Souths all competed to have their perception of the good society recognized and actualized. The Many Voices of the “Many Souths” Journalist Wilbur J. Cash wrote, “if it can be said that there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South.” His “one South” was the property of Southern whites. In this

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study, we appropriate and redefine Cash’s “many Souths.”72 In the unfinished South that existed after Reconstruction, blacks, whites, men, women, Northerners, Southerners, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews each formulated unique perceptions of the good society. Within each circle, more variations existed. Some had more political influence, economic strength, or numbers than others did. Still, the politically disfranchised, the economically alienated, and the numerically diminutive, had a picture for what they believed society ought to be. This study’s frequent references to the “many Souths,” then, helps to further emphasize the diverse civil religious worldviews of this era and region. The Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among many in the unfinished South. To be sure, there were many white devotees to the Southern past. Others within this population, though, idealized the region’s “progressive” future. Chapter One will examine the ways that Southern whites valued material progress in the immediate years following Reconstruction. This population frequently told a “redemption narrative,” which described Reconstruction as an era of profound disorder, and political redemption as a moment of divine liberation. With the South in Southern white hands after 1877, the narrative resolved, an era of “true progress” ensued. Railroads, education, agricultural advancements, and sectional unification, were all proofs for Southern whites that the redeemed South was a blessed land. While a cherished value for some, the symbols of progress such as railroads risked provoking the anti-Northern ire of white Southerners. For this group, a respectable Southern progressive balanced the impulses of progress with regional pride. In West Florida, William D. Chipley was this kind of Southern progressive. Chipley actualized what white Southerners believed political redemption made possible. A Civil War veteran, industrialist, and Democratic politician, Chipley’s railroad through West Florida made Pensacola’s port more accessible to outlying areas. In Chipley, admirers saw a leader of their good society. They even erected a monument to this “up-builder of West Florida” to celebrate his “progressive spirit.” This chapter will begin to deconstruct the historiographical assumption that the Lost Cause definitively captured the South’s civil religion. Statues to Lee, Jackson, and Davis littered the South, but this monument to Chipley spoke to another, future-oriented, perceived good society. In their redemption narratives, Southern whites commonly blamed Northern “carpetbaggers” for Reconstruction chaos. These “political vampires,” Southern whites criticized, delayed the region’s prosperity and left a pile of ashes behind. Another constructed culprit of Reconstruction

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chaos was the incompetent “freedman,” who whites believed did not have a proper understanding of freedom. Yet for blacks living in the unfinished South, freedom was a cherished value and political redemption was a dreadful fear. Chapter Two will consider how race became a particularly divisive civil religious topic after Reconstruction. For many blacks living in the unfinished South, the good society was the free society. Freedom meant civil rights, material prosperity, and legal protection. For whites, though, the good society was a white society. For the sake of unity, peace, and prosperity, Southern whites maintained, the code of white supremacy was a social necessity. In 1904, rumors of “Before Day Clubs” spread throughout the unfinished South. While never proven to exist, these imagined black-led murder clubs met in churches and planned to kill prominent whites. This image of unrestricted black freedom originating in the one place where blacks exercised complete control – their churches – provoked white terror and the occasional lynch mob. This chapter will focus on civil religious diversity and civil religious conflict. In the unfinished South, blacks and whites constructed radically different perceptions of the good society. These differences rested beneath the many racial conflicts of the era. While whites had more political, legal, and social influence, blacks continued to deploy their vision for how society ought to function. Power alone, in other words, should not tell us whose civil religion was the civil religion of this region and era. Rather, we need to consider those voices of dissent and difference, regardless of their political, social, and legal status. In the midst of the rapid changes of the post-Reconstruction era, the Lost Cause became one way that nostalgic white Southerners expressed their most sacred values. It was, however, only one civil religious topic among many. Chapter Three will examine three contexts where Southern whites talked about female devotion – only one of them will refer to the Lost Cause. First, some Southern white men idealized women’s supposedly inherent religious devotion. Men pictured women as the epitome of Christianity and the moral center of the family and society. Second, as advocates of temperance, some Southern white women publicized their devotion when trying to eliminate alcohol consumption. Here, devotion linked to Southern white concerns regarding Christian reform, female preaching, family stability, and social purity. Finally, female devotion came to imply a commitment to the Lost Cause. To preserve and perpetuate a “true” history of the South, these voices proclaimed, was an inherently “noble” female activity. While previous histories have made the Lost Cause the center of this era’s civil

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religious activity, this chapter situates it as one perspective among many. Some women wanted to create an ideal future, where alcohol consumption did not exist and Christian families flourished as a result. Others focused their efforts on spreading a “true” history of the South, which among other things, diminished the role that slavery played in the pre-Civil War buildup. Numerically dominated by Protestants, the unfinished South had a small but active Jewish community. Chapter Four highlights the civil religious perspectives of Southern white Jewish men. Many of them conjoined civic involvement and Jewish unity into a binary value. Southern Jews idealized a good society wherein coreligionists were both active in the affairs of society and bound together under their common faith. In essence, they wanted to marry “American” and “Jewish,” without having any sense of contradiction. Many Southern white Protestants admired both the religious and social commitments of their Jewish counterparts. Still, the seeds of antiSemitism sometimes sprouted in the South. From stereotyped stage images to the lynching of a pencil factory owner in Atlanta, Jews lived in a South where some among the majority remained suspicious of their presence. Still, a significant portion of non-Jewish Southerners condemned anti-Semitism. While white Protestants and Jews differed in their institutional religious practices, many shared a similar civil religion. That is, their respective good societies coexisted with relatively little discord. Religious devotion, philanthropic work, civic involvement, military service, and Democratic Party politics, were each key features in the good society of Jews and Protestants. This chapter will show the relative unimportance of size when considering civil religion. Rarely representing more than one percent of the South’s total population, the presence of Jews in the unfinished South profoundly influenced how many people in the region idealized society. During the nativist 1910s, many Jews were politically involved in the unfinished South, yet scores of Catholics were politically alienated. Chapter Five examines the conflicting perceptions of the good society that existed between Catholics and Protestants during the 1910s. Following a national trend, numerous Southern white Protestants began valuing anti-Catholicism, which they believed would protect the civic and religious integrity of the South and nation. In 1916, Sidney J. Catts won the governorship of Florida largely because of his anti-Catholic platform. Letters sent to Catts from Florida and beyond praised his stance against “political Rome.” They called him a “true patriot.” For Catholics, however, Catts became a symbol of social disorder. Without religious freedom, Catholics feared, the fabric of social life would disintegrate into sectarian

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violence. The murder of Father James Coyle in 1920 became a violent confrontation between two groups. For Catholics, the murder confirmed that the nativist mentality was inherently destructive and disordered. This chapter will consider yet another venue where civil religious conflict erupted in the post-Reconstruction South. In the midst of this hostile battle, arguments over who was, and was not, a “true” American unfolded. Catholics lost this battle at the polls and in the courts, yet their voices continued to form a ripple of water in this era’s river of civil religion. The coming chapters represent an effort to identify the complexities that characterized the civil religious worldviews of a sub-region of the American South that existed after Reconstruction. White Protestant men may have controlled the political and economic affairs of this era, but their voice was neither univocal nor definitive. Civil religion was a flowing river of meaning after Reconstruction. Perceptions of the good society proliferated as differing values evolved alongside the position of the speaker, the topic under consideration, and challenges of the time. In an atmosphere of tremendous economic and demographic change, the many voices of the many Souths all competed to have their good society become the good society.

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CHAPTER ONE RECONSTRUCTION, REDEMPTION, AND THE “GOSPEL OF MATERIAL PROGRESS”

As a category, civil religion deals less with churches, creeds, and dogmas, and more with individual and group perceptions of the “good society.” For philosophers, the good society refers to an ideal state wherein peace, unity, and prosperity reign supreme. In the historical arena, though, we find that different people frequently generate different definitions of the good society. These definitions inevitably reflect the position of the speaker, the topic under consideration, and the tenor of a given time. In other words, individual or group perceptions of the good society are the products of a particular historical context, in all of its complexity. With its focus on the post-Reconstruction era, this dissertation investigates the perceived good societies of the unfinished South – a region encompassing Middle and West Florida, Southwest Alabama, and Southwest Georgia. To do this, chapters study particular social values, or the normative standards that a person or group uses to judge that which they believe relates positively or negatively to their good society. This chapter principally examines how Southern whites living after Reconstruction generated a good society wherein material progress became a key value. Southern whites heralding the “spirit of progress” after Reconstruction made railroads, public schools, modern farming methods, and reunification into essential features of their good society. Quite often, the language of progress was, for this population, connected to the South’s political redemption of 1877. In their minds, Reconstruction’s end marked the South’s liberation from “radical rule” and beginning of a better, and often blessed, time. The troubadours of material progress sang the praises of political redemption, while simultaneously demonizing the presumed bringers of chaos, such as the Northern “carpetbagger.” Remembered by Southern whites as morally bankrupt political opportunist, carpetbaggers came to symbolize the perceived disorder of Reconstruction.1 Southern whites did not vilify all Northerners, admitting that “a better class” from this region positively contributed to the South’s developments. As a value, then, Southern whites made material progress into a metaphorical brick in the boundary walls separating the “redeemed” South from the preceding era. In some contexts, Northerners were the bringers of chaos. In other contexts, they were the assistants in rebuilding. As we will see, Pennsylvania

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Congressman William D. Kelley also believed that material progress was valuable for the postReconstruction South. For the Northerner, however, progress came southward when the unfinished South jettisoned its “misguided” past and, ultimately, became more Northern. Many Southern white Democrats indirectly disagreed, arguing that the Old South’s mentality enabled the New South’s progress – a progress that white Southerners often claimed Northerners delayed during Reconstruction. Between Kelley and his counterparts, the position of a given speaker influenced how people defined material progress. Southern white Democrats and Northern white Republicans had different political agendas and, as it happened, different perceptions of the good society. This chapter does not seek to determine whose good society was truly “good.” Instead, it will show that the post-Reconstruction South was a complex world with many voices, all competing to have their perceived good societies recognized and actualized. This chapter will also begin dismantling the historiographical assumption that this era’s civil religion was solely the product of the Lost Cause. Speaking only for the Southern white middle- to upper-class, the Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among many. Within this collection of Southerners, many placed civil religious import upon the programs of progress. These programs were frequently subject to criticism by ardent Lost Causers. Nevertheless, both civil religious perspectives coexisted in the post-Reconstruction South.2 Redemption and “The New South Creed” This chapter will investigate how Southern whites valued material progress after Reconstruction. The origin and influence of “Southern progressivism” remains subject to historical debate. The controversial political victories in Louisiana and Florida in 1876 coupled with the contested presidential election of Rutherford B. Hayes resulted in Reconstruction’s end. In what followed, a theme of restoration characterized Southern white political rhetoric. These Democratic “redeemers” envisioned a postwar South that maintained its prewar political and social structures. The redeemer’s words could not change the fact that the South’s planter-dominated past had disappeared. In its place stood a new order of white leadership comprised of middle- toupper class political and industrial leaders who spoke optimistically of an Edenic “New South.”3 The “New South creed,” wrote historian Paul Gaston, became a “pattern of belief” for bourgeois leaders who described a Southern future of wealth and success. Public education, railroad reform, agricultural modernization, and reunification became some defining characteristics of

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this creed.4 While similar reforms appeared in the North, historian Dewey Grantham called Southern progressivism “an indigenous phenomenon.” Those preaching the “gospel of material progress” delivered a “promise of material advances” that they believed remained consistent with Southern tradition.5 Recent histories have called into question the “indigenous” character of Southern progressivism. Looking at church life, for example, Beth Barton Schweiger argued that Southern ministers used Northern models to build denominations and educate churchgoers.6 For the most part, the present chapter avoids claims regarding the origin and influence of Southern progressivism. Instead, it focuses on how people idealized material progress and made it into a key value for their perceived good society. For Southern white Democrats, in particular, the features of material progress proved for them that the South was inherently better without Northern Republicans. This theme appeared forthrightly in, what we will call, the Southern white “redemption narrative.”7 An oft-repeated story, the Southern white redemption narrative made Reconstruction the epitome of social chaos that ended with political redemption. Selfgovernance, the story confirmed, eventuated in Southern prosperity. In essence, this story idealized the South’s supposed Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of Reconstruction. The redemption narrative was something of a “myth of origin.” Sociologist Robert Bellah called the “myth of origin” a “strategic point of departure” for understanding a society’s “most basic self-conceptions.” The word “myth,” Bellah qualified, can imply an untruth. He used the term, however, to describe how a story of national foundation radiates “moral and spiritual meaning.”8 Similarly, the Southern white redemption narrative serves as this chapter’s “strategic point of departure.” The story describes a transition from chaos to order using the images of Reconstruction and political redemption respectively. When speaking of the new era, whites placed heavy emphasis on the positive developments that they believed resulted from Reconstruction’s end. Railroads, schools, agricultural advances, and sectional reunification, the narrative proclaimed, each evoked a sense of pride and joy for Southern whites. The story also repeatedly cast the Northern “carpetbagger” and the incompetent freedperson as harbingers of Reconstruction chaos. The next chapter will examine how Southern whites characterized freedpeople. Here, we will illustrate the ways that the imagined carpetbagger epitomized disorder for Southern whites. We will also see how the narrative distinguished between “carpetbaggers” and welcome Northerners. The former became the epitome of evil, yet the latter was an assistant in the rebuilding process.

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Southern whites recalling Reconstruction regularly cast their Northern counterparts as unscrupulous bringers of chaos. In Mobile, Episcopalian Bishop Richard Wilmer sarcastically recalled that “the more violent members of the ‘Republican party’” during Reconstruction, considered the American Constitution a “‘covenant with Hell’” because “it protected the South in their property.” Wilmer called the Constitution a “solemn compact between the States, and the sole guaranty under which the Southern States held their institutions.” The Constitution represented, for the bishop, a “sacred” promise between the states. The North, he reasoned, had breeched the “solemn compact” by repeatedly violating the South’s “property” rights throughout Reconstruction. Wilmer’s repeated religious allusions punctuated his perceptions of right and wrong as it related to Southern society and history. Other whites would make similar judgments, using both religious and secular language. The good society of Wilmer and others was without Northern Republicans. The “carpetbagger” became the image of disorder and chaos. For Wilmer in particular, this imagined enemy broke a “sacred” promise that he believed held America together.9 Penned in 1887, Wilmer’s words resonated themes expressed by Mobile attorney Stephens Croom over ten years prior. In his diary, Croom bewailed that Mobile “had sadly receded from the proud position she occupied before the war, when she was the second cotton exporting port in the United States – when wealth and luxury resided within her limits, and all was activity and hope.” The “carpetbaggers” of Reconstruction, Croom resolved, created an environment where “idleness has impoverished and corrupted her people,” and left Mobile without the industrious “spirit of yore.” Mobile’s population, “once so hospitable, so liberal, so refined lighthearted and active,” had fallen victim to the “baleful influences” of Reconstruction. The communal “despair,” Croom concluded, “makes me heartily wish I had lived in some land where there was promise.”10 Unlike Wilmer, Croom did not use overt religious language. Still, a similar sense of absolute righteousness appeared in both accounts. Reconstruction was a time of “despair,” they claimed, because the South was not in Southern hands. The prewar South became Croom’s image of order and goodness. It was, in other words, his good society. For many Southern whites living during the Reconstruction era, self-rule was a critical element of their good society. Antipathy toward the North prompted some Southern Democrats to vigorously resist the prescriptions of Republican politicians during Reconstruction. As a result, Southern obstructionists often received lofty praise from fellow Democrats. In 1868,

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Georgia legislators called for a convention to incorporate the Fourteenth Amendment into the state’s constitution. Settling on Atlanta as a location, the mostly Republican convention leaders requested funding from Georgia’s Democratic governor, Charles J. Jenkins. Jenkins refused. In response, the Federal government removed Jenkins from office. Before leaving, however, the former governor secured Georgia’s official seal, an assortment of records, and $400,000 of state money. In an 1871 special election, Southern Democrats regained control of the governorship and state legislature. To celebrate the victory, Jenkins returned Georgia’s official seal.11 Shortly after the special election, Florida’s former Reconstruction governor, David S. Walker, praised Jenkins while addressing the graduating class of Young’s Female College in Thomasville.12 Walker called Jenkins a “patriot” who kept the state’s “venerated emblem of her ancient liberties . . . unpolluted from the touch of the usurper.” Georgia’s political victories, Walker attested, replaced the “pangs” of remorse in Florida’s “own bleeding heart” with “a song of gladness.” “Yes, thank Heaven, Georgia is once more ‘the home of the free.’ She has always been ‘the land of the brave.’” Throughout Walker’s address, he continually likened Florida’s Reconstruction government to unjustified captivity and Georgia’s political redemption to liberation. Georgia, he confirmed, had “shook off her shackles” while “Florida, my own beautiful State, is still in the house of bondage.”13 “The Democratic Redeemers,” confirmed historian Edward Ayers, “defined themselves, in large part, by what they were not.”14 Indeed, for Walker, the South was anything but Northern or Republican. His words of region-envy effectively transmitted a longing for governmental independence and simultaneous disgust with Republican politics. Independence was the standard Walker used to determine the political goodness of Georgia and political deficiency of Florida. The former was the embodiment Walker’s good society, while the latter still waited for the return of Democratic rule. After 1877, Southern whites continued equating political redemption with independence. As we will see, schools, railroads, agriculture, and reunification became features white Southerners believed signaled a better future for the region. The programs of progress, this population claimed, were distinctly Southern and differentiated from the Northern past. Written in 1892, Mobile’s Kate Cummings recalled that Reconstruction brought “troubles too numerous to mention” and left the “hearts” of Mobilians filled with “apathy and despair.” Writing in the same city as Stephens Croom, the word “despair” characterized both authors’

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description of Reconstruction. With the advantage of hindsight, Cummings claimed that the “despair” of Reconstruction “passed away forever” after 1877. Since then, Mobile became “one of the most favored spots on this beautiful earth” by developing its “various industries.” Writing during this “truly marvelous” time of material prosperity, Cummings declared, “God is indeed showering his blessings upon this sunny land, for which I trust we shall ever be grateful.”15 The supposed favor of God played an important role in Cummings’s narrative. When political redemption swept the South, the Southern condition improved and realigned with what she believed was the will of God. Cummings’s invocation of divine favor punctuated her contention that Mobile was inherently better under Southern white rule. With the future in Southern white hands, Cummings described the redeemed Mobile as a place of flourishing industry and unlimited prosperity. Counterbalancing this image was Reconstruction, an era that she believed epitomized social disorder. In other recollections of Reconstruction, some bitter white Southerners claimed the Reconstruction was a time of political and religious oppression. Caroline Mays Brevard of Tallahassee complained that during Reconstruction, “There was no commerce,” “currency,” “legal status,” “system of labor,” nor “certainty of the peaceable possessions of homes and lands.” Additionally, she charged that the agents of Reconstruction had stripped religious freedom from Floridians. “In a land where the separation of church and state was supposed to exist, clergymen were ordered to pray for the President of the United States, under penalty of imprisonment and the closing of the churches.” In one instance of forced prayer, Brevard remembered church members departing, thus “leaving none to say ‘amen’ but the troops who were present to enforce order.” Federal officials arrested one man, Brevard sardonically scribed, for his “too free expression of opinion while conversing with a federal official” at a church service.16 Similarly, in Mobile, Bishop Wilmer alleged that during Reconstruction, the North “had abrogated all the sanctions of our former legislative, judicial, and executive government.” Wilmer told his congregation to express “more earnest prayers unto God that He would give grace to these soldiers who held us under the bayonet, to ‘execute justice, and maintain truth.’” The bishop decreed it inconceivable to pray for the “‘health, prosperity, and long life’” of the president. When “officers with swords at their sides” demanded that Wilmer offer such a prayer, the bishop claimed he and his “brethren” refused. Moreover, Wilmer directed his fellow clergymen to do the same, calling the prayer “out of place and utterly incongruous.”17

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Brevard and Wilmer made carpetbaggers the epitome of immorality, lawlessness, and disorder. Praying for their continued rule, therefore, became unthinkable for the Southerners. In their minds, the Northern “occupiers” had inherently deficient political, moral, and religious standards. However, neither cast all Northerners into this unsavory category. Brevard rejoiced when recalling Reconstruction’s end. In the following years, “Florida’s progress” appeared in the form of railroads, public education, and industry. She maintained that progress continued to flower into the twentieth century because Floridians carefully combined “elements of both south and north” to develop the state’s “rich resources.” Florida’s “coming history,” Brevard supposed, “should be as glorious as the past has been – perhaps more glorious.”18 Not completely condemning of the North, Brevard viewed the era’s “progress” as a product of both sections. Similarly, Bishop Wilmer distinguished between two types of Northerners. There was the “large body of people” from the North, “whose culture, refinement, and large-hearted generosity” earned the bishop’s “admiration” and “gratitude.” But there was also a “fanatical” and “dominant” population in the North. According to Wilmer, they “waged a destructive war,” “laid waste to our territory,” “revolutionized our domestic and political life,” and “persistently [aimed] at our humiliation.”19 For both Brevard and Wilmer, the North was both evil and admirable. The “fanatical” Northerner was the intrusive carpetbagger of Reconstruction; but the “large-hearted” Northerner helped rebuild the South. When relating their redemption narratives, Southern whites were both critical and appreciative of Northerners. Carpetbaggers were harbingers of evil, yet the “better class” of Northerner helped the South rebuild. The good society of many Southern whites, then, was an ambiguous place where walls stood between North and South, yet small doorways allowed in their former wartime foes. In a speech before a United Daughters of the Confederacy gathering, Susan Bradford Eppes of Tallahassee constructed her own redemption narrative. Eppes left little doubt that self-rule was a necessity in her good society. At the same time, though, she praised those who tried to heal the wounds of the past. When the war ended, Eppes wrote, “the South entered upon that awful period known as the days of Reconstruction.” She warned that recalling this memory could only “stir up bitterness and the horror.” So instead, she focused on political redemption. For Eppes, political redemption resembled the story of “Sampson of old” because the South “rose in her might and broke the shackles that bound her.” In the following years, Eppes assured, the South had been “vindicated in the eyes of the World” and “none now deny the

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Constitutional right of secession, and the fact remains that the South was absolutely within her rights in leaving the Union.”20 While critical of Reconstruction and its agents, Eppes also praised the Northern presence after the war. It was the former wartime foes, she remarked in another writing, who “helped the poverty-stricken Southerner” after Reconstruction. In the following years, Eppes claimed that these collaborations continued, producing similar positive results and making Florida the “peacemaker” state. “Florida has done much to heal the wounds of the War Between the States; today, there is less of bitterness on the part of the Floridian than in other States, the settlers coming in from the frozen North meet with nothing but kindness and welcome from the friendly hand of the Floridian.” Eppes wondered whether this cooperation meant that “[Florida had] been ‘Blessed of God?’” For Eppes, reconciliation had divine implications. Scornful toward the agents of Reconstruction, she and others also looked to their former foes as potential assistants in restoring the region and influencing national unity.21 Through their redemption narrative, Southern whites made material progress a key value for their perceived good society. Similar to Eppes, in a 1920 speech, Pensacola’s John B. Jones averred, “real progress and prosperity” in the form of paved streets, buildings, parks, and churches appeared in force after Reconstruction. He proudly reasoned that Pensacola had since “won a place among the most progressive cities of the South.” Further, Jones remained confident that “[the] spirit of progressive Americanism urges us on to greater, and better efforts.”22 In an additional writing, Jones described Reconstruction as a “reign of debauchery and terror.” Those who “took control of Pensacola,” were “corrupt and designing ex-Federal Army officers, . . . camp followers, carpet-baggers, and political vampires.” The result was “deplorable and disheartening,” Jones concluded. Political redemption ended “radical” rule, he celebrated, and restored Southern Democrats. He then distinguished between the different types of Northerners. Assisting in the rebuilding process, he claimed, were “some Northern immigrants who composed the better class of the white inhabitants.” Together with Southerners, the population “[revived]” Pensacola and improved the city’s “conditions socially, economically, and politically.” For Jones, the “civic pride” and “moral stamina” of “virtuous women and heroic men” had “saved Pensacola from destruction and depravity.” Because of such efforts, Jones announced, “the progress and prosperity of Pensacola [has] steadily increased.”23 Unlike previous accounts, Jones’s narrative lacked overt religious references. Nevertheless, he implicitly contrasted themes of good and evil via the images of Reconstruction and political

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redemption. Reconstruction’s reign of “destruction and depravity” was his radical opposite to the “spirit of progress” that marked the following era. For Jones and others, Reconstruction diminished Southern liberty, but political redemption restored self-governance. A period of unprecedented progress resulted. Lacking direct religious references, his words carried a level of ultimacy and intensity that matched those who did employ divine imagery. In this dissertation, we examine the normative language of people like Jones, even when there is no direct link to an organized religion. Civil religion is not a religion of churches, creeds, and dogmas. Instead, it is a religion of the good society. Civil religion is about what people believe contributes to, and detracts from, actualizing a social ideal that maximizes unity, peace, and prosperity, while minimizing conflict and strife. For Jones and others, the good society was a place where Southern whites controlled the region, prosperity flourished, Northern carpetbaggers were nowhere in sight, and welcome Northerners assisted in the rebuilding process. The principle objective of this study is to understand the perceived good societies of people like Jones, and contextualize them within the flowing river of meaning that traveled through the unfinished South. The good society of this region was a demonstration of eternal flux. John Jones represented one voice among many, each competing to have their values and their good society recognized and actualized. Material progress was a standard that white Southerners such as John Jones used to measure what they believed was good and true in society. In addition to railroads and industry, many Southern whites also made public schools a positive feature of material progress. Historian Dewey Grantham wrote, “the school was almost always regarded by the reformers as a redemptive force in the development of a better South.”24 In other words, reformers hoped that public schools would produce a more knowledgeable and productive Southern population.25 When a Pensacola public school opened in 1877, the local newspaper called it one of the “brightest” moments in “the history of Pensacola’s progress.”26 In her opening address, Elma MaClay outlined the school’s purpose. A teacher at the school, MaClay envisioned children coming to the building “with willing feet and glad hearts to meet their teachers, knowing they will find a pleasant smile and a gentle hand to lead them up to all that will make life good and noble.” The “good and noble” curriculum, assured MaClay, would differ from the “charity institutions” of Reconstruction, which had “thrust upon us northern ideas and systems.” She declared that the new public school would teach “southern education, southern culture and

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[southern] refinement.”27 The “good and noble” South envisioned by MaClay lacked any hint of carpetbagger-ism. For the newspaper and MaClay, the public school was a welcome addition and a fitting symbol of the city’s progressive spirit. MaClay’s proclamation, however, assured listeners that the curriculum would affirm her understanding of Southern tradition. The instructor’s definition of material progress included a stipulation that Southern tradition needed to be the cornerstone of a progressive education. The emphasis on commending the people and mentality of the South appeared in other redemption narratives. In addition to schools, the modernization of agriculture also became a feature of material progress for Southern whites.28 In 1876, Thomas Janes, Georgia’s Commissioner of Agriculture, wrote the “Handbook of Georgia.” In it, Janes tried to convince farmers that recent technological advances would help them acquire more positive crop yields. In his “View of the Future,” Janes implored fellow Georgians to “look forward” and recognize that “the future of the state is full of hope.” This sense of “hope,” Janes contended, came from the people of the state. “The best inheritance of the New South from the Old South is the Southern people,” he argued, whose “progressive energy” would result in a proliferation of agricultural and manufacturing advances.29 In addition to his commentary on agriculture, Janes repeated the rhetoric of regional respect. His transitional narrative chastened Reconstruction, but handled the Old South with a gentle hand. In 1878, Lucius C. Bryan of Thomasville launched a short-lived monthly periodical, the South Georgia Agriculturalist, donning the motto, “Devoted to Agricultural, Literary and Scientific Knowledge.”30 In his first edition, Bryan called the periodical “a storehouse for the deposit and preservation for public use, of all such valuable materials as may have been provided for the defense, support and convenience of the society.” He printed the publication for agriculturists and non-agriculturists alike, writing, “the effort to aid the farmer in his great work of feeding and clothing the human race, will meet the approbation of every intelligent progressive mind.” Bryan had grand visions of his periodical becoming “an omnibus” that would deliver “a perpetual record of the progress and improvement of both the physical and mental operations of the people of Southern Georgia.”31 For Bryan, the farmer was a symbol of nobility and Thomas County was the “garden spot of the South.” In one article, he commended the region’s people and “agricultural reputation.” “The truth is, that when the people of Thomas county [sic] determine upon a success, they never fail to achieve it. The reason is, that they have all the

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material in hand. They have the climate, soil and variety of productions for the best fair in the South, and they have men of intelligence, enterprise and vim to ‘put things together right.’” Bryan speculated that new agricultural advances, combined with the “vim” of the people, resulted in the “[increased] . . . wealth and importance of the section.”32 Both Janes and Bryan made farmers into “redeemers of the soil” whose “progressive energy” helped rebuild the South.33 Not every account of the rural South and its people was this affectionate. One anonymous male author, who claimed he was a native Southerner, relocated to Thomas County in the 1880s, hoping to exploit the farming potential. The removed Southerner recalled feeling “sick and faint” when he arrived. Facing a potentially “blank future,” he labeled the “very kind-hearted people . . . very ignorant as to the ways of the outside world, or the laws of God or the country.” Railroad expansion, roads, crop development, and Sunday schools helped reverse this supposed disparity, according to the author. The “progressive” age had come, he cheered, and the county had finally moved “upward and onward.”34 This brief account contrasts with the previous two. Lacking in this account was a favorable appraisal of the past and its people. If we understand material progress as an important value that Southerners believed ought to prevail, then we must also recognize that its rules could change from person to person. For Bryan, the people of Thomas County in the 1870s were progressive, enlightened, and industrious. The relocated Southerner, however, described the 1880s as a time when mental torpidity was the dominant characteristic of the people. Bryan believed the people of Thomas County made progress happen, and the other claimed progress transformed the people. With these two voices in mind, we begin to see how material progress was a value with many definitions. Thus far, we have seen the Northern Republican only as an imagined foil to post-Reconstruction progress. In what follows, we find a Northern Republican whose political position undoubtedly influenced how he defined material progress. The redemption narrative of the Southern whites surveyed this point made carpetbag Northerners the bringers of Reconstruction chaos. This imagined Northerner embodied everything that many white Southerners believed was wrong with Reconstruction. In this respect, the carpetbagger ironically became an irremovable part of how white Southerners defined their good society. White Southerners repeatedly made the redeemed South radically different from the previous era of “political vampirism.” The Northerner was not just an imagined counterpoint, however. Consider Pennsylvania Congressman William D. Kelley who

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visited the unfinished South in 1867. While not a carpetbagger in the traditional sense, he did support Reconstruction in a way that irritated many Southern whites. Kelley delivered a series of lectures expressing his hope that Reconstruction would hasten industrial expansion and racial harmony. Much to his disappointment, Kelley discovered that Southern whites were not receptive to his message. One of his lectures in Mobile prompted a race riot.35 In the 1880s, Congressman Kelley wrote about his visits through Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.36 The Old South’s single crop economy, resolved Kelley, left it “a land of desolation,” where “fields were fenceless and uncultivated, and her people were without reproductive stock.” He reasoned that Reconstruction worsened the Southern condition by leaving people “without seed or food crops,” dependent instead on government assistance. Not helping was the “record of blundering egotism” that was Reconstruction politics.37 Kelley admitted that Southern redemption brought positive developments to the region. He gave particular attention to Florida, which he believed developed slower than the other states. By the late 1880s, though, the people of Florida “[accepted] the progressive life of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and [yielded] to the spirit that is animating, illuminating, and blessing the New South.” The “progressive life,” Kelley affirmed, drew from the “impulses” of modern Christianity that propelled “the advance of civilization, [and] the progress of wealth and refinement.” For Kelley, Florida’s greatest assets were its diverse resources and warm climate. By exploiting this, he concluded that Floridians broke “from the thralldom of a misguided past” and embraced what he considered the divine qualities of progress.38 For the Pennsylvanian, the single crop system of the Old South was neither “truly” progressive, nor “truly” Christian. We previously witnessed white Southerners who imagined progress as an indigenous phenomenon. Some referenced the “progressive energy” of the Old South and others assured that public schools would inculcate “Southern culture.” Kelley viewed the region’s progress differently; labeling Florida’s past decidedly “misguided.” Kelley’s Old South was ignorant, backward, and deficient. His religious allusion punctuated an assertion that the New South was truer and better because it had radically changed directions. While critical of Reconstruction, Kelley implied that the South had finally accepted the North’s progressive prescriptions in the years following political redemption. When comparing Kelley’s account with those given by Southern whites, we see how their respective positions resulted in different definitions of material progress. Both believed material progress was valuable, but vulnerable.

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Southern whites blamed the likes of Kelley for supposedly blocking the path toward progress. Kelley blamed the obstinacy of Southern whites and the inefficiency of their economy. Both sides were firmly convinced that their version of material progress was divinely ordained and best for society. To be sure, Kelley was not a Southerner. As such, he pictured a social ideal for the unfinished South that radically differed from his regional counterparts. The post-Reconstruction South was a complex world. In it, Northerners and Southerners occasionally announced different social values and different perceptions of the good society. This dissertation does not seek to determine whether one good society was indeed “good” in the unfinished South. Neither does it wish to claim that any one group had civil religious superiority over another. Instead, the aim of this study is to understand the diverse ways people that defined their most sacred social values in the years following Reconstruction. In Kelley, we find a different definition of material progress that was no less civil religious than accounts previously cited. In the following section, we return to a Southern white perception of the good society that cherished Democratic Party politics and loathed Northern Republicanism. Those who influenced political redemption, like Senator Charles W. Jones of Pensacola, became heroes of the era. Senator Charles W. Jones and “The Purity of His Political Reputation” For many Southern whites, material progress was a value that meant, in part, self-governance. Those politicians who helped actualize political redemption sometimes assumed a saint-like status. Commenting on the postwar South, one Union officer remarked, “Every community had its great man, or its little great man, around whom his fellow citizens gather when they want information, and to whose monologues they listen with respect akin to humility.”39 For many white West Floridians, Senator Charles W. Jones of Pensacola was “a little great man.” A Democrat, Jones earned a reputation as an agent of material progress after Reconstruction. In death, white citizens remembered him as a politician who always stood “for the people.”40 In 1874, Jones, a native-born Irish Catholic, won a tightly contested race for a federal senate seat. The first Florida Democrat to hold this position, he aligned with conservative Southerners and worked to end Reconstruction.41 After 1877, Jones used his political post to help develop Florida’s industries and resources. He acquired federal funds for Pensacola’s naval base, initiated the building of various public buildings, and redirected postal routes through more sections of the state. A local newspaper cheered his re-election in 1881, proclaiming, “[it] was

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demanded by the people, who appreciated the ability and faithfulness which he served his state.”42 A newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama also commended the senator. “No member of the Senate has achieved a wider or more deserved reputation which, we may say, is coexistive [sic] with the limits of the Union.”43 With the memory of Reconstruction likely fresh in his mind, Jones’s re-election speech made disparaging remarks about the preceding era. Reconstruction, he charged, made the South’s governmental agencies into “little more than the organ of those who [administered] it.” With this “corruption” gone, Jones called his victory “a free and fair expression of the public will.” He asked voters to “rejoice and be thankful to heaven” that the South could again practice democracy. Through “the providence of God,” the senator exclaimed, the voters were again empowered to “bring [government] back to what it was intended to be – a creation in their own ‘image and likeness.’” According to Jones, Democrats were winning elections, but he warned that Republicans had malevolent plans for the future. “After trampling under foot every sacred right and maxim which was cherished among the jewels of freedom at the South,” Jones contended, “this same party, flushed with power” may do the same to the North.44 The Northern politician of Jones’s narrative was, indeed, a harbinger of corruption that still lurked in the shadows. Disrespectful of “free and fair” elections, the Northern politician of Jones’s imagination deplored the “sacred rights” of the South. With religious allusions abound, Jones’s redeemed South was a truer land, but one whose people needed to stay vigilant. Jones was an agent of political redemption and a force behind the region’s progressive developments. For this, he earned re-election and praise from his white devotees. Near the completion of his second term, however, Jones’s image began to tarnish. Following the spring session of 1885, an exhausted Jones retreated to Canada and then to Detroit. His vacation ran longer than expected and the senator missed the December session. Media rumors claimed that Jones had been unsuccessfully pursuing a 35-year-old love interest, Clothide Palms. Throughout the spring of 1886, numerous senators – both Democrat and Republican – along with Florida’s Governor Edward Perry tried to convince Jones to return for the next session. Jones refused. Meanwhile, Jones lost his committee seats and Governor Perry temporarily replaced him with General Jesse J. Finley. In 1888, Florida elected Samuel Pasco to Jones’s seat. Though homeless and broke, the unstable Jones ignored his family’s pleas to return to Florida, choosing instead to follow his wealthy mistress. Jones also believed that many mysterious “enemies”

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followed him and sought his demise. Detroit, the former senator speculated, was his only safe haven.45 An Alabama newspaper claimed that Jones had a “brain disease.” The article cited an anonymous senator who explained, “Jones is crazy on several subjects – on religion, on women, on liquor, and on the Constitution. It is a sad case.” The paper lamented Jones’s “unfortunate” condition. “[Jones’s] lovable, genial, almost boyish temperament, allied to great strength of mind and body. He showed his mental progress from the bottom of the ladder almost to the top.”46 By May of 1890, Jones’s son, John, committed his father to the Saint Joseph’s Retreat, an insane asylum in Dearborn, Michigan. There, the former Florida senator remained until his death on October 11, 1897.47 John Jones wrote a gleaming obituary for his father. The senator “was always on the side of the people,” according to John, and fought for “the rights of common people.” The elder Jones purportedly refused to submit when unscrupulous sources promised him “great wealth” in exchange for political favors. “Senator Jones remained without even the shadow of suspicion to darken the purity of his political reputation.” The father’s “public life was distinguished by the strictest integrity and honesty as his private life has been by the utmost purity.” Diminishing any sense of a dishonorable demise, John reported on his father’s death and potential afterlife. “His faith was most beautiful. Although having a strong desire to live, he resigned himself to the holy will of God. After receiving all the consolation of his holy religion, he died a most beautiful death.”48 John Jones’s obituary notably affected William Blount, an attorney in Pensacola who had opened a law office with Charles Jones in 1875. Blount wrote, “What you have is the record of a great man and one which should be distributed as much as possible.”49 One Pensacola newspaper called the Catholic burial of Jones “touchingly eloquent and comforting.” In summation of the service, the author mourned, “Thus endeth the last chapter of the life of a great and distinguished Floridian. When in years to come the roll of our state’s distinguished men shall have been called none will shine more radiantly to her credit or her fame than the name of Chas. W. Jones, patriot, senator and Statesman. Fare thee well.”50 Controversy marked the final days of Jones’s life, yet admirers memorialized what they believed was his “pure” political and personal reputation. He was an ideal leader in their good society. Pensacola’s Daily Times, which tended favorably toward Jones during his political career, did not immediately run an obituary. The omission prompted an anonymous writer to voice disapproval. “No man was more of a democrat [sic] than Ex-Senator Jones: no man served

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Florida in the federal senate more brilliantly than he, and no city could boast of achievements by one of its citizens which it could be more proud of than those accomplished by the late ExSenator Jones.” The author called the paper’s oversight “simply inexcusable, and positively shameful.” The editor, L. Hilton Green, responded that he personally attended the funeral, but lacked the time to compose a befitting obituary. Regarding the letter writer’s criticism, the editor countered, “I would hardly take notice of your correspondent X’s letter were it not that I am quite sure that all the city authorities hold in deep respect the memory of the late ex-Senator Jones, and certainly disclaim the despicable allusions suggested by your correspondent, X.”51 Each account made Jones’s memory a gleaming light of public nobility. None of the Southern obituaries mentioned Jones’s peculiar end. The New York Times, however, did. After noting Jones’s senate career, the paper recalled his story of political abandonment and unrequited love.52 For those who admired Jones, his supposed “for the people” Democratic politics made him a respected figure, worthy of a heavenly afterlife according to the son. So powerful was his image, that his admirers ignored his inglorious end. We should note that in what was a Protestant South, this Irish Catholic earned two election victories. By the 1910s, many white Protestants in this area became profoundly distrustful of Catholic politicians. Many whites in West Florida mourned the loss of Jones in 1897, but supported one of their own, Sidney J. Catts, during the 1916 Florida gubernatorial election. This dissertation’s final chapter will explain how Catts earned support from Florida and the nation for his anti-Catholic platform. From Jones to Catts, we see how perceptions of the good society can change over time. The wave of nativism blanketing the nation reached the South and significantly changed its political climate.53 Nevertheless, Jones’s contributions to political redemption and material progress left a community in mourning after his death. Admirers apotheosized his memory and ignored his foibles. The same year Jones died, West Florida lost another admired white political and industrial leader. Credited with the “upbuilding of West Florida,” William D. Chipley became another icon of material progress for Southern whites. The “Sacred Charge” of William D. Chipley For many Southern whites living after Reconstruction, material progress was an important value within their perceived good society. For this population, railroads, public schools, port developments, and the like, indicated that the South was more peaceful, unified, and prosperous than it was during the preceding era. Southern whites who praised the “spirit of progress,” then,

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often criticized the agents of Reconstruction in the same breath. Those who Southern whites believed actualized the programs of progress, such as Senator John Jones of Pensacola, became civic saints. For his admirers in West Florida, Pensacola’s William D. Chipley also became an icon of material progress. Soon after his death, Pensacola citizens erected a monument to Chipley, which read: Soldier – Statesman – Public Benefactor. On the battlefield he was without fear and without reproach; in the council of state he was wise and sagacious; and in his public and private benefactions he was ever alert and tireless. The history of his life is the history of the upbuilding [sic] of West Florida; and its every material advancement, for two decades, bears the impress of his genius and his labor. He fought for the Confederacy . . . bled for her at Shiloh and Chickamauga. He was creator and builder of the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad, President of the Board of Trustees of the Confederate Memorial Institute, Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the Florida State Agricultural College, member of the Board of Trustees of Stetson University and Tallahassee Seminary, chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Florida, Mayor of Pensacola, and State Senator of Escambia County. In all, he did his duty thoroughly and well.54 During the late nineteenth century, granite and marble replications of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson littered the South. These heroes of the “Lost Cause” captured, for many Southern whites, the social values that they considered most important. While some historians have argued otherwise, this study suggests that the Lost Cause was one civil religious perspective among many. The ardent advocates of the Lost Cause frequently chastened the New South programs of progress. Yet, as this statue would indicate, many other Southern whites admired those who were both Confederates and agents of material progress. Both civil religious perspectives existed in the Southern landscape, yet historians have left the progressive worldview unattended. A closer examination of Chipley’s life will help us to understand how material progress became a critical civil religious value for many Southern whites. Their good society had people like Chipley leading the way. Born in 1840, Chipley, the grandson of a Baptist minister, attended the Kentucky Military Institute and Transylvania University before enlisting in the Confederate Army at the age of 21. He served in the Ninth Kentucky Infantry and rose quickly through the ranks, having earned the rank of Captain upon completion of his service. Adversity characterized Chipley’s Confederate career. He sustained injuries at the Battle of Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Peachtree Creek, where he also became a prisoner of war. By the war’s conclusion, Chipley returned to Columbus where

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he began a brief but successful career as a corn and bacon merchant. Reconstruction tensions led to the decline of his business and his relocation to Pensacola. There, he directed the building of a trans-panhandle railroad that eventually became part of the Louisville & Nashville line. West Florida’s new accessibility allowed Chipley to build the Florida Chautauqua, one of only a handful in the former Confederacy.55 Chipley’s permanent relocation to West Florida was the result of Reconstruction tension. Between midnight and one a.m. on March 31, 1868 in Columbus, Georgia, five armed and hooded men stormed a black brothel and drew aim on a disoriented George W. Ashburn – a white resident of the establishment. Rising from his bed and grabbing a pistol, Ashburn tried in vain to defend himself. The mysterious men quickly overpowered Ashburn and shot him several times. In the immediate aftermath, rumors flourished. Most of Columbus’s citizens believed the perpetrators were representatives of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan. Ashburn was a former slaveholder and an established citizen of Columbus before the war. After the war, however, he aligned with Northern Republicans, served as a delegate at the 1868 Reconstruction Constitution Convention in Atlanta, heralded “radical” Republicanism, and vehemently criticized the area’s Democrats. The “scalawag” Ashburn also took residence with Hannah Flourney, the mulatto owner of Columbus’s lone black brothel.56 After the murder, federal authorities launched a manhunt targeting anyone known to be near the brothel that night, or persons who possessed a mask. On the evening of Ashburn’s shooting, Chipley hosted a masquerade ball for Columbus’s white socialites. This unlikely coincidence resulted in the arrest of Chipley and eleven of his guests. At the July trial at Fort Pulaski, former Georgia governor, Joe E. Brown, served as the prosecuting attorney. Former vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, argued on behalf of the defense. Before the trial, Brown sent Stephens a letter offering Chipley’s release on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Chipley demurred and chose to stand trial with his fellow defendants.57 The trial drew national attention. Each day reporters detailed the drama between the defense and prosecution. Charges of prisoner abuse soon emerged, adding more intrigue to the story. In spite of all the excitement, however, when the Fourteenth Amendment passed General Meade sent orders from Atlanta to terminate the trial. With no verdict delivered, all of the accused were set free.58 Chipley’s merchant business deteriorated in his absence and he declared bankruptcy in 1872. He then began working in Georgia’s booming railroad industry.59 In 1876, Chipley relocated to

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West Florida and served as the general manager for the Pensacola Railroad. He quickly gained the confidence of the state’s legislature, who granted him land in West Florida to construct a new rail line. In 1881, Chipley led a 2,200-person workforce that cleared land for a railroad connecting Pensacola to River Junction (outside of Tallahassee). Pensacola’s Commercial commented favorably on Chipley’s endeavors. “Capt. Chipley is among the most enterprising liberal and public-spirited citizens of Pensacola and if the benefits derivable from our railroad lines were in his hands alone . . . our city would be the main terminal and principal depot of these railroads.”60 The author’s wish that Pensacola would become a central railroad depot soon materialized. On January 1, 1885, the Louisville & Nashville line incorporated Chipley’s independent railway. Throughout Reconstruction and afterward, the L&N played a critical part in the South’s rebuilding.61 The merger connected what was an isolated Pensacola port eastward to Jacksonville and Saint Augustine, and westward to Mobile and New Orleans.62 Chipley’s trans-panhandle railroad earned him the title, “Mr. Railroad of West Florida.” The new line made transporting commerce and travelers in and out of Pensacola more efficient and practical. Prior to this, cotton growers floated crops on the Chattahoochee River to Columbus and risked losing goods when the river was low. Additionally, sawmills opened along the new railroad, which advanced the region’s lumber and turpentine production. For some white Southerners, railroads symbolized a positive change. Writing in 1879, for example, General Henry Morgan of Albany, Georgia claimed that emancipation and Reconstruction brought a sudden “shock” that “paralyzed the whole Southern country.” The South began recovering, claimed Morgan, when Southern white Democrats “gradually recuperated the almost desolate country.” As the rebuilding process unfolded, Morgan posited, “[businesses] began to revive, and Albany, like other Southern towns and cities, soon took a new start in the stride of progress and improvement.”63 He credited much of this “progress” to the 1869 completion of the South Georgia & Florida Railroad, which connected Thomasville to Albany.64 Railroads meant material progress for Morgan, but for others they were a source of conflict. Many railroads in the South were Northern-owned, sparking the suspicion of Southern traditionalists wary of outside intrusion. Moreover, railroads sometimes sparked intra- and interstate rivalries. In the years after Reconstruction, for example, politicians from Florida’s panhandle threatened to secede to Alabama unless Florida met the region’s rail needs. Conversely, Mobile officials criticized businesses in central Alabama for sending more goods through Pensacola’s port.65 In

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Pensacola, some viewed Chipley’s railway as a positive change for the area, but others did not. The Commercial, while favorable toward Chipley early in his career, began feuding with the builder, calling him “the little octopus” who had “a slender following in this county.”66 Rival politicians, like West Florida’s Wilkinson Call, also charged that Chipley’s railroad dealings were less than honorable. Indeed, not everyone in West Florida admired the “upbuilder.” In Chipley, detractors saw political corruption and a disingenuous example of the Southern white Democrat. In the unfinished South, the values of some were the vices of others. When examining the objections of Chipley’s competitors, we see that within the Southern white circle, differences existed concerning the wisdom and need for progressive reform. As we will see in a moment, Chipley was not a legitimate Democrat in Wilkinson Call’s mind. Both competed in the same region during the same time to have his values and his perceived good society recognized and actualized. The good society of the post-Reconstruction South was a multivocal creation, with no discernable center.67 Drawing criticism from some, Chipley’s railroad earned him the respect of many others. While railroads prompted West Florida’s industries to flourish, they also provided Northern tourists with an expedient means to travel southward. With Chipley’s founding of the Florida Chautauqua in 1885, Northerners had more reason to journey south for the winter. During the late nineteenth century, the “Chautauqua movement” spread rapidly through the North and Midwest. All the while, many Southern whites remained wary of the organization’s liberal Protestant underpinnings. The movement began with the efforts of Ohioan Lewis Miller, a Methodist layperson, and John H. Vincent, a Methodist minister and former circuit rider from Illinois. The duo’s common concern was religious education. As the Sunday school movement developed after the Civil War, Miller and Vincent worried that instructors lacked a proper education. 68 On August 4, 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, New York, Miller and Vincent organized the first Sunday School Normal Assembly of Methodists, a two-week-long educational forum for Sunday school instructors. The following year’s meeting adopted the name of its location and drew national attention due to the attendance of General Ulysses S. Grant. Reporting that he enjoyed the peaceful setting and opportunities for learning and reflection, Grant thrust the Chautauqua into the national spotlight. Other Chautauquas soon sprouted elsewhere in the nation. Like the original, attendees were mostly white middle-class Protestants. Fine arts,

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music, dance, and self-improvement were popular topics. While not officially tied to any denomination, liberal Protestantism informed the Chautauqua’s social message. Lectures on suffrage, racial equality, and public school reform appeared often on meeting programs.69 Historian Andrew C. Reiser observed that the Chautauqua movement made little headway in the late nineteenth century South. By 1900, 101 Chautauquas existed nationwide and only ten were in the former Confederacy. The movement’s “liberal creed,” wrote Reiser, aligned the Chautauqua’s reputation with, “U.S. Grant, the Republican Party, and the [Grand Army of the Republic].” Where Southern Chautauquas did exist, organizers borrowed the Northern format, but incorporated Southern content on matters of political and social importance. Meetings took place in bucolic settings, attendees stayed in extravagant hotels, and university professors led sessions in magnificent meeting halls. Sessions concerning racial equality, female suffrage, and the social gospel – which became common at Northern meetings – appeared nowhere on Southern programs. Instead, sectional reunification was at the forefront of Southern meetings.70 Vincent himself hoped the Chautauqua movement’s move southward would “mitigate sectional antipathies.”71 In 1888, New South spokesperson Henry Grady organized a Chautauqua near Atlanta. Two years prior Grady delivered his infamous “New South” speech in New York wherein he assured Northerners that the South had “wiped out the line where the Mason Dixon’s line used to be.”72 With this same conciliatory tone, Grady invited Northerners to attend the meeting. For his Southern attendees, however, Grady held a Confederate Memorial Day celebration and displayed a fifteen-foot portrait of Jefferson Davis for the Fourth of July. Grady’s Chautauqua appealed to attendees from both North and South. For the former, he promised warm weather, learning, and hospitality; and for the latter, regional pride and Southern distinctiveness. For both, Grady used the Chautauqua to advance his message of sectional reunification and mutual prosperity, both key features of his good society.73 In August 1884, Rev. Dr. August H. Gillet of Cincinnati journeyed to Jacksonville, Florida in search of a location for a winter Chautauqua. When the word reached West Florida, Chipley promptly sent C.C. Banfill to Jacksonville, who then convinced Gillet and Rev. C.C. McLean to visit Lake DeFuniak. Upon seeing the lake and its surroundings, Banfill and McLean deemed it an ideal locale.74 Largely through Chipley’s effort, the state legislature incorporated the Florida Chautauqua on February 12, 1885. The Chautauqua’s official purpose was “to establish and maintain an educational institution known as an assembly on the general plan of Chautauqua

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Assembly, in the State of New York.” That same year was the first Chautauqua meeting, and Chipley sat on the executive committee. He was instrumental in advertising the event to Northerners. Chipley sent promotional pamphlets northward, offered convenient transportation on his railroad, secured 200 acres of land, and ordered the construction of the extravagant Hotel Chautauqua. The Chautauqua officers wrote in appreciation of “the services [Chipley] has freely rendered, and desire their patrons to know to whom they are indebted for many of the conveniences of the grounds and comforts of travel in coming and going.”75 The Chautauqua had a Northern origin, but this mattered little to admirers of West Florida’s Assembly. For many whites, their good society had a place for Northerners who did not carry the taint of carpetbagger-ism. Differentiating between the welcome and intrusive Northerner, many white Southerners made the former an invaluable assistant in rebuilding the South, and the latter an irredeemable obstruction. In their reflections on the Chautauqua, North and South alike imagined that the meetings were a location where the sections contributed toward reconciliation.76 Some histories of Lake DeFuniak and the Chautauqua have emphasized such a reunion theme. A small town east of Pensacola, Lake DeFuniak was a product of Chipley’s Pensacola & Atlantic railroad. In May 1881, while traveling through the then vacant Walton County, Chipley and a surveying party came upon a circular lake one mile in diameter. Writing an account in 1911, John McKinnon’s prophetic story claimed that Chipley “seemed to have unbounded faith in the future prospects of the place.” One of Chipley’s traveling partners, Col. T.T. Wright, imagined Lake DeFuniak becoming the religious incubator for sectional reunification. According to McKinnon, Wright urged Chipley to build a “tabernacle . . . for the gathering of the clans, for the mingling and intermingling of people from all over this great country of ours, so as to . . . bring about better political, moral and social relations between the people at large.” Chipley’s Chautauqua, the author confirmed, had brought Wright’s vision into reality. Because of the Chautauqua, McKinnon wrote that the town had become a model for sectional reunification. “There is not a town south of this fading, imaginary ‘Mason and Dixon’ line in which there is a broader, a more catholic spirit, especially among the veterans of the two armies of the late war.” Personifying his conclusion, McKinnon recalled the recent death of the town’s oldest Union soldier. At the funeral, three Union soldiers and three Confederate soldiers served as pallbearers. “This spirit of faith in our founders seemed to take hold on people from its incipiency.”77

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McKinnon’s account placed reunification at the core of Lake DeFuniak’s identity. The Chautauqua, in the author’s mind, institutionalized a spirit of reconciliation that – during this era – had become a bedrock issue for many Southern progressives. Historian Paul M. Gaston claimed that New South spokespeople made “the gospel of union” a prominent part of their message. By collaborating with their former foes, Southern progressives hoped that both sections could achieve greater material prosperity.78 Blended into their message was a respect for the South’s traditions. The New South advocates had the daunting task of advancing the region’s material growth and assuring Southern white traditionalists that their culture would not disappear in the process. The leaders of Florida’s Chautauqua preached with vigor this “gospel of union.”79 While modernization was a principal theme in the progressive agenda that fueled the Southern Chautauqua, Florida’s first Assembly meeting was “conservative” on matters pertaining to the Sabbath. “The tendency in many parts of our country,” the program read, “is toward the entire destruction of sacredness hitherto belonging to the Sabbath day.” In an attempt to remain “on the conservative side of all questions affecting public morals,” the Assembly leaders claimed they would respect the “Christian ideas concerning the observance of the [Sabbath].”80 Sabbath maintenance became a prominent social concern for Southern reformers after the war, according to historian William A. Link. Ministers in particular worried that breaking the Sabbath “would bring the decay of religion” and leave “ignorance and vice” in its place.81 Many white Southerners living after Reconstruction struggled to find space between change and tradition. The matter of Sabbath maintenance became part of this struggle. This example shows that the purveyors of progress at this Chautauqua meeting also had “conservative” concerns. Their good society was both open to the changes proposed by reformers, and mindful of the traditions that they believed were important and necessary. As the Florida Chautauqua grew in following years, promoters idealized the location to both Northerners and Southerners. In January 1886, August Gillet published the first monthly edition of the Florida Chautauqua from his hometown of Cincinnati. The publication labeled DeFuniak Springs82 a veritable paradise. Using poetic prose, Methodist Bishop W.F. Mallalieu wrote, “The grand old pines are here, tall and straight. The Winter sun makes brilliant their long, green leaves; the balmy odor exhaled from every tree fills all the air with soothing, health-giving influence.” Extending this portrait of perfection to the rest of the climate, he further declared, “The soil of this locality is open, sandy, porous loam, so that, rain as it may, mud is an unknown

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thing; and what lovely rides and walks along these winding paths and noiseless woods. Then the water is pure and clear.”83 Mallalieu also wrote to Floridian audiences in Mount Dora’s Voice. “[The Chautauqua] is a haven of repose for the weary. It is a scene of heavenly activities for the strong and vigorous. . . . It has kindled pure, holy, manly, womanly aspirations in scores of thousands whom without it life would continue to be as it has been, a ceaseless, round of duties and drudgeries.”84 The 1886 Assembly bore the fruits of Gillet and Millalieu’s efforts. The five week meeting drew record numbers. Also significant for that year, Chipley offered reduced train rates to Florida’s schoolteachers and administrators. Furthermore, he convinced the state to pay the salaries of the 345 educators who attended the meeting.85 In addition to drawing Northerners to the region, then, Chipley used the Chautauqua to benefit his own state.86 As the Florida Chautauqua grew, attendees occasionally commended Chipley’s foresight and the Chautauqua’s role in supposedly reunifying the sections. In an 1896 Chautauqua lecture, General George B. Loud, a former Union soldier from New York City, delivered a stylized account of Chipley’s discovery of DeFuniak Springs. “After his days of weary tramping through a semi-tropical forest, Mr. Chipley, as he gazed up at the dark, graceful pines waving high above his head, and looked into the crystal waters of the lake flashing back the deep azure of the vaulted heavens, as they lapped the white sands at his feet exclaimed, ‘Here a town shall be built.’” In this rugged “garden of the gods,” Chipley and his fellow laborers “bravely put their shoulders to the wheel and bore the burdens of those early days.” From their efforts, “loud hosannas of thousands who have gathered there from all America” have ever since resonated. From every “hamlet in the Union,” Loud postulated, people had come to “stimulate thought and to cultivate a desire for a higher and better civilization.” The “devotees of science and letters,” returned to their homes and “devoted their lives to the enlightenment and advancement of the human race.” For Loud, Chipley’s efforts had earned him a “place of honor” in Chautauqua history. The Assembly, Loud concluded, was an “enduring monument” to Chipley’s “genius” and “labors for the advancement and betterment of mankind.”87 Loud’s good society saw the sections reunited in a common cause to “advance the human race.” On this topic of sectional reunification, we find North and South in agreement. Yet elsewhere, we found significant discord between voices of North and South. Along with the position of the speaker, and the tenor of a given time, perceptions of the good society may change alongside the topic under consideration. While certain topics became points over which Northerners and Southerners

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differed vehemently, other topics had become more agreeable. At least in this case, the Chautauqua’s supposed ability to promote reunification was an agreeable subject. As the Union general implied, bringing the sections together would result in a “higher and better civilization.” In addition to helping the Chautauqua develop, Chipley built a political career in West Florida. He entered politics soon after returning from the war. During Reconstruction, Chipley served as the chair of the Democratic executive committee in Muscogee County, Georgia. In Pensacola, Chipley held the office of Mayor and City Commissioner.88 In 1887, the City Commission elected Chipley as its president. Pensacola’s Advance-Gazette cheered the decision, suspecting that he would “proceed to use his utmost endeavors to put the city affairs in the best condition possible.” Likewise, the Weekly Floridian in Tallahassee read, “He is eminently the right man in the right place as his administration will prove, and the record of his long usefulness to Pensacola will be enlarged by what he will accomplish for her advancement.” Speaking on his own behalf, Chipley labeled his new position “a sacred charge.” He assured listeners that he would conduct business “without fear or favor” and “as long as I retain the trust you have placed in my hands I will endeavor to do my whole duty, for all things which redound to the advancement of Pensacola will be with me a labor of love.” 89 Chipley’s “labor of love” as a politician would center on the “advancement of Pensacola.” For his admirers, Chipley’s material “advancements” made him a civic saint of the region. Their good society found people like him at the helm. But the civil religion of the post-Reconstruction South was a complicated river of contrasting values. While popular in some circles, Chipley had political enemies who believed his politics were genuinely disordered and contrary to the common good. In October of 1895, Chipley, then the state senator for Escambia County, announced his intention to run for the United States Senate. He sought to replace fellow Democrat and political rival, Wilkinson Call. At the May caucus, Chipley initially garnered a 49 to 47 advantage over a fellow Pensacola resident, Stephen R. Mallory. However, after a series of political maneuverings, Senators Rawls, Morgan, and Barber changed their votes, thus transferring the victory to Mallory.90 Afterward, the defeated Chipley refused to shake hands with Rawls, calling him a “traitor” whose first initial, J., stood for “Judas.”91 A political charlatan for some members of the state legislature, Chipley was a hero for many whites living in his section of Florida. For his admirers, Chipley’s return to Pensacola became an opportunity to express their high regard. In spite of the defeat, Pensacola’s Daily News

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described Chipley’s homecoming as a triumphal return.92 On his train ride through West Florida, the paper described, Chipley met sympathetic crowds in many of the towns that he had founded. In DeFuniak Springs, for example, devotees held a sign reading, “Hon. W. D. Chipley. Honor to whom honor is due.” The cheering community of Bonifay reportedly flooded the train station, giving Chipley “an inkling of the reception that awaited him at his home.” There, the “strong men” who met Chipley, “give way to their emotions and weep as they took him by the hand.” When he arrived in Pensacola, the newspaper depicted an unprecedented “exhibition of loyalty and confidence.” Fireworks exploded, the Chipley Light Infantry fired “six follies in honor of the man whose name they bear,” and the Pensacola’s Third Battalion band greeted him with a tune. Meanwhile, “ladies and gentlemen rushed forward to greet the man whom they had come to honor.” The streets, reported the article, “were thronged with men . . . loudly cheering,” and women “filled the galleries [and] waved their handkerchiefs to manifest their enthusiasm.” Observing the “thousands of lovely women and brave men,” the author speculated, “no defeated candidate in any state ever received such an exhibition of loyalty as was given by the thousands of lovely women and brave men to W.D. Chipley.”93 The newspaper continually mentioned the “treachery” of Chipley’s foes and his “honorable” response to the defeat. The author concluded that Chipley, through his composure, “had redeemed Florida” from its political wrongs. In his own speech at the Opera House, Chipley repeated these themes. The defeated candidate thanked those in attendance, commenting favorably on the “glare of fireworks,” “sweet strains of music,” and “presence of lovely women and true men.” Calling himself, “the proudest man within the limits of Florida,” Chipley avowed, “a great feeling of contentment fills my heart.” He then relayed the story of the caucus, telling of the “treachery” of his foes. Chipley wondered why “the Christian, Rawls, would violate his pledge.” Rawls, Chipley puzzled, “is a man so good that he quit his church because no organ was introduced into its sacred precincts; yet this truly pure, good man broke his pledge, which, with the treachery of Morgan and the perfidy of Barber, compassed my defeat.” All of these politicians were Democrats, but for Chipley, they were not noble. They violated a political promise and crossed a Christian behavioral norm, according to Chipley. Almost dismissively, Chipley assured the audience that he bore “no resentment” toward his political foes, in particular Mallory with whom Chipley had a longstanding rivalry. “I only mention them because I am reciting history; they are unworthy of mention in any other connection.” Had he earned “the

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most exalted position” of senator, Chipley speculated, he would have helped “bring peace to our party.” Chipley then qualified the statement. “I do not mean the peace that characterizes the lion and the lamb when they lie down together, with the lamb inside the lion, but honest harmony, with mutual respect, mutual recognition and forbearance.” Chipley believed such peace was possible “with the aid and guidance of Him who ruleth all things well.” The Daily News summarized the speech calling Chipley “an inspiration to all men in public life who desire to so act that they may return to their constituents with clean hands and receive the plaudit of ‘well done, thou good and faithful servant.’”94 Chipley’s commentary on the status of his party effectively defined how he believed a “true” Democrat ought to conduct politics. The presumably “untrue” Democrats of Chipley’s mind were those who were “unworthy of mention,” the “traitors” who changed their vote and denied him victory. In his good society, political “peace” existed, seemingly, when Democrats such as himself occupied elected offices. As we have already seen, the white redemption narrative portrayed Southern Democrats as the enablers of post-Reconstruction progress. While white Democrats became heroes in this story, Chipley’s political failure shows us that there were divisions within the Southern white ranks. Chipley’s version of Christianity provided a moral code that he believed differentiated him from his opposition. He identified the “Judas” figure, Rawls, who Chipley believed had violated this code. The overt religious language and allusions peppering Chipley’s speech punctuated his contention that his actions were upright. Moreover, the actions of his “unworthy” enemies were incommensurate with the codes of conduct guiding his good society. Amid this process of political division and differentiation, we discover further layers of complexity lying within this era’s civil religious landscape. Southern white Democrats were the heroes of the redemption narrative. In daily practice, however, they were not all imagined as morally upright ushers of the good society. Chipley and his admirers believed that his enemies were “unworthy” Democrats whose behavior conflicted with the “true” moral codes of society. Those who admired Chipley agreed with his conclusions. He was, for this population, the model “upbuilder of West Florida.” When Chipley died in Washington D.C. on December 1, 1897, the ensuing lamentations solidified his stainless image for many West Floridians. Pensacola’s Daily News wrote a somber description of Chipley’s funeral in Columbus, Georgia. Many placed flower arrangements on his tomb, which emitted a “fragrance seeming to exhale the sweet incense of love that prompted the

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givers.”95 Dr. J. William Jones, a Baptist minister, presided over the funeral. Jones claimed his eulogies were generally short, but “if I should do so on this occasion it would not be in accord with the wishes of our lamented friend or his family.” The minister’s account of Chipley’s Civil War service was providential. When war broke, proclaimed Jones, Chipley “could have honorably avoided taking part,” however, “he unhesitantly [sic] cast his fortunes with his beloved South and drew his sword in her defense.” Following the war, continued the eulogy, Chipley returned to a land of “ruined homes and blighted hopes that caused tears to flow.” Rather than “[raking] the ashes of the dead past” the “man of wonderful energy” set forth to “make a glorious future for his beloved South.” Jones’s account was something of a redemption narrative. Describing the postwar South as a land of chaos, Jones made Chipley into one who put the past behind him to rebuild “his beloved South.” The minister also mentioned Chipley’s supposed Christian commitment. During his final moments, Jones relayed, “[Chipley] did not speak of the victories that he had won, but simply breathed the simple prayer of his childhood ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’” Pausing, Jones turned to the crowd and asked, “Can you doubt that its incense ascended to Heaven?” The minister addressed the Confederate veterans in attendance whose “eyes were wet with grief.” Jones, a wartime minister, empathized with his fellow Confederates “in the hour of defeat.” The Confederate ranks were “thinning fast,” Jones continued. He then asked the soldiers if they would be “ready” like Chipley “when the summons of death” arrived. From the choice to serve in the Confederacy to his presumed final words, Jones contended that Chipley would find a heavenly afterlife. The minister created an idyllic image of the deceased veteran, and then used it to convert the unconverted.96 For Rev. Jones, Chipley was both an ideal patriot and an ideal Christian. Others mourning Chipley’s death often heralded his postwar career. On the day of Chipley’s passing, Mr. A. Stoddard of New York, sent Pensacola a letter of condolence. Labeling Chipley “Florida’s greatest citizen,” Stoddard proclaimed the deceased “did more by a hundred-fold to develop the resources of the state than any other man in it.” Chipley’s “unusually great brain power and wonderful executive ability . . . will not be appreciated when it is found that no one in Florida will be able to fill his place.” In his concluding remarks, Stoddard proposed that the “best and most lasting monument [to Chipley] will be the great public improvements which he brought about during his lifetime.”97 For Stoddard, Chipley’s monument was his progressive spirit, a

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sentiment repeated by the leaders of Florida’s Chautauqua. That year’s Assembly printed a lengthy obituary. “To his keen foresight, contagious enthusiasm, and inspiring generosity, DeFuniak and her Chautauqua owes everything.” Calling Chipley “true, honest, devoted and fearless,” the eulogy resolved, “he ‘possessed the courage of his convictions,’ such men will make enemies, but on the other hand will win strong and devoted friends. Over his bier all unite saying, ‘here was a man.’” Organizers planned to build a monument in Chipley’s honor, but they suspected that it would be insufficient. Chipley’s “enduring” memory, they resolved, was “in the hearts” of those who remembered him.98 For those Southern whites who valued material progress, Chipley was their standard-bearer. During the 1899 spring legislative session in Tallahassee, Chipley’s political colleagues made their memories public record. A special committee prepared a resolution that labeled Chipley “a man who had employed every effort, and used every influence, to secure the prosperity of this State, by the up-building of its agricultural, mineral, and [manufacturing] industries, and its charitable and educational institutions.” Senator O’Brien spoke first. “His life work, and the monument of affection and esteem which it has builded [sic] in the hearts of all Floridians, speak in tones more eloquent than I can use in his praise.” O’Brien proceeded to give a biography of “one whom I loved and honored in life.” He commended Chipley’s “Southern patriotism” during the Civil War and “active part in the political, financial and agricultural upbuilding [sic]” of Georgia during Reconstruction. Florida, O’Brien announced, “needed” someone like Chipley. Through his “confidence in her future” and “untiring work,” Chipley exploited the “many undeveloped resources” of Florida. O’Brien also claimed that the builder had “[overcome] the evils of the war and the annihilation of the barbaric system of reconstruction [sic] that had been left as a legacy to the oppressed people of the South.” After Reconstruction, the senator reminisced, his colleague became “in every sense a man of progress.” Again, we see Chipley’s image placed at the heart of a redemption narrative. The “oppression” of Reconstruction in Florida left the land desolate in O’Brien’s mind. Chipley’s “progressive spirit” delivered the South from disorder and toward prosperity. The senator balanced the language of progress with a sense that Chipley committed himself to Southern tradition, mentioning his effort to erect Pensacola’s monument to the Confederate soldiers. The monument, O’Brien relayed, stood “in recognition of the valor of his comrades in arms, his belief in the justice of their cause, and his love and admiration of the Southern soldier.” The eulogist ensured that Chipley “took a serious

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loving interest in all that concerned the perpetuation of Southern heroism displayed during the trying times of war.” However, “he was no more partisan in his views to the extent that he loved the South more and his country less.” Chipley’s “hope and ambition” for the South helped heal “the scars of war, bury all of its animosities and bitter memories, and unite the whole country in peace, concord and prosperity.” The eulogy made Chipley both the embodiment of progress and regional distinctiveness. In the speaker’s mind, Chipley transformed the “underdeveloped” land of Florida and was a nonpartisan advocate of “Southern patriotism.”99 The unfinished South was an unfinished ideological battleground. Within the Southern white circle, people struggled to reconcile the changes of the present with the traditions of the past. To commend Chipley’s memory, obituaries such as this made him the one who perfectly straddled the fence separating past from future. Senator Myers also delivered a glowing tribute to Chipley. Like the others, Myers believed the “marvelous growth and development of that section of our State,” was the “imperishable monument to [Chipley’s] broad philanthropy and enlightened public spirit.” Myers further contended that, from the “many peaceful and contented homes, established by his assistance,” arose “the benedictions of grateful hearts like a sweet incense to his memory.” While repeating the idea that Chipley’s developments were his monument, Myers departed from the norm and retold the story of Chipley’s senatorial run. Much like his admirers in Pensacola, Myers complemented Chipley on his supposed composure. “I [have never] known a man to conduct himself, under trying circumstances, with more dignity and consideration, than did W.D. Chipley during that memorable session.” While Chipley was “goaded in debate to an extent that would have exasperated most men, he seemed to panoply himself against the shafts of his adversaries in the dignity of his exalted aspirations.” For Myers, Chipley’s behavior only confirmed that the deceased was an exemplary politician.100 Monuments were a common theme in the eulogies, and Senator Galliard’s was no different. A poem read: His deeds become his monument Better than brass or stone, They bore his name on glory’s roll Unrivalled and alone.101 Galliard, Stoddard, the Chautauqua, and others believed Chipley’s political, charitable, civic, and material deeds were his monuments. Pensacola’s citizens, however, sought to remember him

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through material measures. On July 12, 1899, a committee in Pensacola paid $3,000 to the Muldoon Monument Company in Louisville for a nearly forty-foot granite monument dedicated to Chipley’s “upbuilding of West Florida.”102 Memorializing the “Spirit of Progress” The Southern white redemption narrative imagined that political redemption delivered the South from Reconstruction chaos and into a new era of unprecedented prosperity. Railroads, schools, agricultural advancements, and the like, each symbolized what Southern whites believed political redemption made possible. With self-rule intact, proclamations of the narrative found an ideological enemy in the Northern “carpetbagger.” This imagined greedy politician was everything that Southern whites believed their redeemed South was not. While critical of some Northerners, the narrative also identified a “better class” of Northerner who supposedly helped the region rebuild. The ambiguous definition of the Northerner emanating from the Southern white redemption narrative exemplifies this dissertation’s principal thesis. That is, the civil religion of the unfinished South was an unfinished product that changed according to the speaker, topic, and time. Northerners were both a welcome presence and a dreaded imposition for Southern whites, who even among themselves were unsure about who “truly” represented the region. Within the Southern white Democratic circle, different people had different ideas for what they believed was, and was not, best for society. William D. Chipley was a hero to some, but he was the “little octopus” to others. More, Chipley categorized his Democratic foes as “unworthy” members of his party. Their presence, he claimed, detracted from bringing “peace” to the party. The example of Congressman William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania provided another civil religious dimension to our puzzle. The South’s newfound prosperity, the Northerner posited, came when people of the region abandoned a “misguided” past and embraced the same “Christian” progress that was “animating” the North. While many white Southerners made progress the result of an Old South mentality, Kelley clearly did not. Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners – all lived in the unfinished South and all competed to have their good society recognized and actualized during the years following Reconstruction. This chapter showed that one value, material progress, could evoke a host of complimentary and contradictory definitions. It also redirected focus away from the “civil religion of the Lost Cause.” The Lost Cause was important to many Southern whites, but it did not conclusively

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define the region or its people. In this chapter, we found Southern whites who memorialized not only the war, but also a memory of redemption and rebuilding. In 1897, Charles Bliss of Pensacola wrote, “Without the name of William Dudley Chipley the history of Pensacola could not be written.”103 Indeed, remembered as the “upbuilder of West Florida,” Chipley achieved a saint-like status for many West Floridian whites. He became a model of material progress for those who believed his industrial efforts and politics were genuinely beneficial for social peace, unity, and prosperity. Lacking in this chapter has been a discussion of race, which was a consuming topic after Reconstruction. The next chapter is about race and civil religious conflict. Here, we will see another layer of civil religious diversity, one that formed along racial lines.

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CHAPTER TWO THE UNFINISHED SOUTH AFTER THE “UNFINISHED REVOLUTION”: WHITE SUPREMACY, BLACK FREEDOM, AND CIVIL RELIGIOUS CONFLICT 1

Studies that look at civil religion consider how people create, maintain, defend, and propagate their perception of the good society. Traditionally, the “good society” refers to an ideal state that maximizes unity, peace, and prosperity, while minimizing conflict and strife. In the American South that existed after Reconstruction, there were many different visions for what the good society was, and was not. This dissertation examines some of these diverse perspectives and their negative counterparts. To recognize their distinguishing features, chapters examine specific social values. Values are the standards that individuals and groups use to judge that which they believe contributes either positively or negatively to their social ideal. Previously, we identified material progress as a Southern white value. In the wake of Reconstruction, material progress meant railroads, education, agriculture, and sectional reunification. These markers of prosperity sprang forth, Southern whites reasoned, when the Northern “carpetbaggers” left the region. As we saw, though, one white Northerner had a different definition of material progress. For him, the markers of prosperity appeared when the South became more Northern and shed its “misguided” past. Many of his Southern counterparts did not define material progress in this manner. Yet, the opinions of this Northern white Republican still existed. His was one of the many voices of the many Souths, each competing to have their good society recognized and actualized. With its focus on race, this chapter is about both civil religious diversity and civil religious conflict. The good society of many Southern whites was a white society. Accordingly, white supremacy became a crucial value that they hoped would protect this ideal. For many blacks, however, the good society was a free society. As a value, freedom meant liberation from slavery, civil rights, material prosperity, and social equality. In their direct and indirect conflicts, Southern whites continually mocked black culture and depicted unrestricted black freedom as a sure path toward social degeneration. Southern blacks countered, often arguing that white supremacy unnecessarily alienated their race. The topic of race became particularly divisive in the years following Reconstruction. The legal and political system of this era favored whites, but

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this did not preclude blacks from forming a picture for how they believed society ought to function. Regardless of their legal and political status, then, both races confirmed that their good society must become the good society. This chapter’s biracial exploration of civil religion finds a methodological counterpart in a similar study conducted by historian Andrew Manis. Examining the “patriotic loyalties” in the Civil Rights era, Manis identified the “the south’s two civil religions,” one black and one white. His “interactive” approach took into account the words and deeds of both black and white Baptists who had created “conflicting images of America.” Manis’s primary aim was to “[describe] the ways desegregation was perceived to thwart (for some whites) or fulfill (for some blacks) the hope of actualizing their vision of the ideal America.”2 Just as Manis examined dueling perceptions of an “ideal America,” the following sources reveal two competing visions of the good society after Reconstruction. For both blacks and whites living after Reconstruction, religious references and allusions punctuated their beliefs regarding what they believed society ought to be. Their key social values became the essential standards that both believed the region required for the sake of peace, unity and prosperity. Moreover, members of both races contended that their opposition’s values compromised any hope for social stability. This chapter’s discussion of race and the competing perceptions of the good society will begin with a white perspective. White supremacy, for this population, became an important social value that they believed would ensure both social stability and a prosperous future. The “Creed of the [White] People” For many Southern whites, white supremacy became a principal social value after Reconstruction. Their good society was a white society. And white supremacy became a guiding standard that they hoped would actualize this end. In 1914, Thomas P. Bailey of the University of Mississippi summarized the “common opinion” of whites regarding race. The “creed of the people,” Bailey resolved, mirrored the “leadings of Providence” and thusly dictated that blacks were “inferior” and that whites “must dominate.”3 Commenting on Bailey’s “racial creed,” historian Leon Litwack observed that the Southern intellectual’s resolutions did indeed capture the “common opinion” of whites. “[Fears] of racial impurity and degeneration,” Litwack affirmed, prompted whites to create a “prescribed place in southern society” for blacks.4 The word “prescribed” is noteworthy. For whites, racial supremacy meant in part, prescribing a passive identity for blacks. Many whites wanted a black population that unquestionably

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followed every written and unwritten white law. For the sake of unity, peace, and prosperity, scores of Southern whites essentially committed themselves and their institutions toward upholding this “creed.” Also noteworthy is the overt religious language used by Bailey. Religious words frequently peppered the speech of Southern whites like Bailey, amplifying their resolution that the good society was the white society. Civil religion is not a church religion, but a religion of the good society. Nevertheless, as we consider those values that people believed were essential for social stability, divine invocations such as Bailey’s will inevitably appear. In each case, such utterances highlight the speaker’s deepest convictions regarding how he or she believed society ought to function. White supremacy was a standard that Southern whites used to differentiate between that which they believed did, and did not, contribute toward actualizing their good society. The ideology of white supremacy was not solely a Southern white invention, however. In his 1898 Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Columbia professor William A. Dunning employed racial theories derived from social Darwinism and eugenics, sometimes referred to as “scientific racism.” At its core, scientific racism reasoned that blacks had not progressed as far along the evolutionary path as whites. The former was, theorists reasoned, “naturally” inferior.5 Dunning used this methodology to argue that Reconstruction blacks were intellectually unable to understand and exercise the rights and duties that “radical Republicans” had conferred upon them. Northern meddling, he resolved, was the final reason for the “disaster” of Reconstruction.6 According to historian John David Smith, for white Southerners, scientific racism “buttressed white supremacy and justified the second-class citizenship accorded blacks.”7 The ideology of white supremacy was a national phenomenon. In the South, race theories from the North supported the already prevailing desire among Southern whites to enforce racial superiority.8 The idea of black equality was profoundly disturbing for many Southern whites, who believed that social stability and prosperity relied on white rule. In the unfinished South, some defining features of white supremacy appeared in the Southern white redemption narrative. Previously, we talked about the white “redemption narrative,” which was something of a “myth of origin.” This common story declared that Reconstruction was a time of chaos, and that only political redemption delivered unending prosperity to the region. In some accounts, race contributed to the supposed chaos of Reconstruction. As historian Paul Harvey noted, Southern whites saw in political redemption, “freedom’s coming for the body’s soul and for the body

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politic.” Among the “sins” absolved by redemption was “the staining presence of ‘Black Republican’ rule.”9 Alongside “carpetbaggers,” then, Southern whites blamed freedpeople for producing Reconstruction disorder. Erwin Craighead, a newspaper editor in Mobile, maintained that Reconstruction left the town in a “chaotic state.” “[The] white men of the South [were] disfranchised because of their participation in the conflict – and the negroes, recently freed, [were] crowding into the cities, to exercise and enjoy the privileges of citizenship newly conferred upon them.” Whites, he continued, were unraveled because the “service class” suddenly had “the position of power and political control over more intelligent people.” Whites trembled with a “fear of the unknown,” recalled Craighead, wondering if blacks would “concert together” and stage an “attack.”10 The “fear” expressed by the editor became the counterbalancing image whites used to justify white supremacy. To maintain social order, people like Craighead repeated, racial supremacy was a social necessity. For Craighead, the good society was the white society – and Reconstruction was neither. Also in Mobile, Kate Cummings remembered that emancipation eventuated in a destabilizing “revolution in the social customs.” The “suddenly enfranchised” freedperson, she wrote, had “no idea of freedom, excepting that it would give him a life of idleness and pleasure.” Cummings concluded that blacks could not “make use” of their “independence.” Chaos was the result. She complained that blacks “became more intolerant every day” after emancipation. To illustrate her point, Cummings recalled returning home from church with her niece one Sunday, only to find the route crowded with “gaily dressed” blacks. Maneuvering through the sidewalks, Cummings charged that none “moved to let us pass, so we were compelled to take the middle of the street.” Upon confronting a gathering of black children, she claimed to have “politely” asked them to move. To Cummings’s horror, one child replied, “The middle of the road is for you and the sidewalk is for us.” Her “blood was at fighting heat” because of the incident. For Cummings, the confrontation symbolized Reconstruction’s chaos at its worst. Without the supremacy of whites in place, she saw disorder and horror –the customs of society that she believed were essential existed no longer. The agitators of racial discord, according to the author, were the “carpetbaggers” who “caused much of the subsequent trouble in our city.” These “unscrupulous men” won political posts “through the vote of the negro.” Cummings conjectured that if white Southerners had been in control after the war, blacks “could have been molded to our interest.”

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She championed political redemption as a time when Mobile became “progressive,” but lamented what she believed were the lingering wrongs of Reconstruction.11 Previously, we saw how the white redemption narrative frequently posed the carpetbagger as the harbinger of Reconstruction chaos. From Cummings, we again see the imagined conniving politician who, in this instance, manipulated blacks for political gain. Other white Southerners repeated this theme. In 1877, one Tallahassee newspaper commented on the difficulties faced by Northern businesspeople who found themselves “ostracized socially.” The paper speculated that this alienation was “universal through the South.” “It has been taken as an indication of deepseated and undying hostility to the North and the Federal Government.” The problem, according to the paper, was an omnipresent memory of Northerners who “organized the negroes into secret societies, led them up to the polls and instructed them in politics.”12 For some Southerners, there certainly was an “undying hostility” toward the North. Nearly fifty years after this newspaper account, Tallahassee’s Susan Bradford Eppes recollected when “the ‘carpetbaggers’ swarmed like a flock of vultures” southward after the war. She resolved that their “ultimate intentions” was “to pit the two races against each other.”13 Like Cummings, Eppes believed that the Northern “vultures” worsened the racial condition after emancipation. She further argued that emancipation “should have been gradual.” “[Freed] before they were ready for freedom,” Eppes wrote, “[blacks became] citizens before they even knew what [freedom] meant.” In the formerly enslaved, Eppes viewed a population that had an insufficient understanding of freedom, which she believed plagued their religious practices. Freed blacks, she charged, knew “nothing of a spiritual nature” and had little sense of “moral ethics.”14 Eppes traced this perceived religious deficiency to Africa. The practice of “Voo-Doo,” she wrote, made the race “the most superstitious of human beings.” Slave owners “were thoroughly imbued with the responsibility of saving these heathen souls,” but according to the author, emancipation came before the “civilization” process could finish. Commenting on black religious practices in her time, Eppes called the members of the race “devout worshipers” who “[participated] in the singing and praying.” However, she did not believe these religious expressions were genuine. “[Negroes] will stay up night after night at the ‘distrac-tid meetin’s,’ making noise enough to really distract everybody in the vicinity, then go to their work next morning and drowse over it all day, truly not earning the salt in their bread.”15 Eppes’s unsavory appraisal of “the average Negro of today,” continued, branding them “[shiftless], untruthful,

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unreliable,” devoid of “moral obligation,” and “[selfish].” The “exceptional” black person, however, “[lived] up to their opportunities” and “[looked] down upon” the “average” blacks. She then wondered if some “educated, earnest-minded Christian men” could “undertake to build, in the minds and hearts of the Negro race, a broad and deep foundation on which his emotional religion could rest.” In Eppes’s mind, such efforts could create, “a foundation of truth, honesty, purity and love – a foundation which would hold solid against temptations of flesh – a foundation on which the tottering structure of emotional religion would become as adamant.”16 For Eppes, black freedom contributed to the supposed chaos of Reconstruction. In the formerly enslaved, she envisioned a class that was mentally inferior and religiously inept. Eppes seemed slightly optimistic that racial harmony was possible if whites could establish a healthy relationship with blacks. Others had less hope. John Crary of Pensacola, for example, believed that the mass deportation of blacks to Africa was the only way to solve the “race problem.” Crary’s history of slavery supposed that Africans had “passed unchanged through over thirty centuries in hopeless savage barbarism.” Slavery, he insisted, undid the “barbarism” of the black past. Crary hypothesized that, on the plantations, enslaved people received Christian instruction that eventually “civilized” the Africans. Emancipation, he further maintained, signaled the end of this process. For Crary, “The hand of Providence” guided this transition from slavery to emancipation. This did not mean, however, that he advocated equal rights for blacks and whites in his own time. The “colored race,” Crary wrote, could have some “political right,” but they needed to remain “passive factors.” He asserted that blacks could never “attain a literary position higher than any white man.” For the author, this would be disastrous. To avoid any discord, he suggested deportation. Calling Liberia the “great inviting prospect” in the “most favored part of the Globe,” Crary suspected that here, blacks could “improve their race” and enjoy “freedom, civilization, true religion, arts of peace, commerce, and the grand and noble work of transforming . . . the most naturally favored quarter of the earth.”17 Crary’s deportation solution echoed elsewhere in the South. Virginia aristocrat and historian Philip A. Bruce, for example, believed that emancipation had left newer generations of blacks “more headstrong than their immediate ancestors.” Bruce was something of an alarmist. After surveying the 1880 census, he worried that blacks were increasingly competing with whites for jobs. For the sake of the white South, Bruce could see no option other than deportation.18

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Cummings, Eppes, Crary, and Bruce each valued white supremacy and feared black freedom. Within this circle, there were slight differences regarding the nature of black freedom. Cummings and Eppes seemed to suggest that whites could undo the past, whereas Crary and Bruce did not. Even between Crary and Bruce, the former looked at Liberia as a haven for blacks, while the latter made it the only salvation for whites. In each, there were common strains and subtle differences. This dissertation compares civil religion to a flowing river in an attempt to illustrate the category’s dynamic quality. Each Southern white voice sampled above believed whole-heartedly that white supremacy was essential for their good society and that black freedom was a profound threat. Yet the unsettled differences between them require that we consider each individually, and investigate the meanings and implications therein. Their good society was a white society, but what exactly this meant depended upon their particular biases regarding black freedom. The post-Reconstruction South’s civil religion was a river of meaning, always subject to change. From different speakers, topics, and times, we have found different perceptions of the good society. As we will see, when Southern white entrepreneurs spoke of race, their language was rather unique and influenced by their profit-motivated objectives. In their calls northward to potential travelers, entrepreneurs diminished the any hint that racial discord existed in the South. While alarmists like Phillip Bruce proclaimed the coming of a racial apocalypse, then, Southern entrepreneurs spoke of racial harmony.19 In 1886, Henry Grady, the editor of the widely read Atlanta Constitution, delivered a speech to a New York audience entitled, “The New South.” The Southerner denounced the Old South for relying too heavily “on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” Grady backhandedly admonished Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech” of 1861, which labeled slavery the “cornerstone” of Southern life. Stephens’s kind, Grady asserted, no longer inhabited the South. Grady’s “New South” was “a perfect democracy” with “a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core.” On race, his New South was a place where blacks enjoyed, “the fullest protection of our laws and the friendship of our people.”20 Grady’s sanguine portrayal of the South seemingly intended to assuage Northerner fears of racial unrest in the region. Before and after Grady, enterprising whites in the unfinished South made similar statements. In 1877, Pensacola’s William D. Chipley wrote a travel pamphlet that

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called Florida “the Italy of America.” His portrait of Florida was ideal in nearly every sense. The pamphlet claimed, for example, that during the summer months, “heat is tempered by a gulf breeze of softness and purity unsurpassed.” Northerners expecting hostility from locals or exhibitions of racial strife, wrote Chipley, would not find it in Florida. “The people are pleasant, refined, and intelligent, and the stranger is surprised at the cordial hospitality extended from every quarter.”21 A Thomasville pamphlet devoted an entire section to “The Relations Between the Races.” Misinformed politicians, the pamphlet read, wrongly claimed that racial conflict characterized the area. Thomasville’s blacks, the author assured, were “perfectly kindly,” a fact that “thousands and thousands” of Northerners would confirm. “Every man, white or black, is free to think and act for himself, so he does not violate the law. And that law is made to apply to all without distinction of race, color or previous condition.” Blacks “have prospered,” the pamphlet attested, because in Thomasville they have full “civil, political and religious” rights. “[Blacks] receive every possible encouragement to become good citizens of a common country,” provided they “are orderly, law-abiding and contented, and are availing themselves of the opportunities afforded to obtain information and an education.”22 In Tallahassee, a pamphlet aimed at attracting visitors and farmers, gave a similar portrait of racial harmony. “The Civil War swept negro slavery away,” the pamphlet declared, leaving only farmable land for blacks and whites.23 After Reconstruction, scores of non-Southern whites traveled south seeking financial gain and warm weather. To attract travelers who may have worried about racial discord, Southern entrepreneurs wrote pamphlets that frequently advertised racial harmony and black prosperity. This markedly contrasts with the accounts we previously read, wherein white Southerners continually berated blacks. For those Northerners who did travel southward, they often observed something quite different from what the pamphlets promised. Writing in his diary from Thomasville in 1895, visiting Northerner G.B. Zimmerman questioned the prosperity of Georgia’s blacks. Attending a church service, he listened to a sermon on black education. A Baptist minister visiting from Mercer University, the Northerner wrote, was “a good sensible, spiritual, [and] practicable talking” speaker. The minister continually pointed to the poor condition of blacks. At one point, Zimmerman claimed, the minister recalled meeting a black child on his way to school with a lunch consisting of “only a piece of corn bread and . . . sugar cane.” “His talk was good,” Zimmerman reflected, “and should do the community good, in the

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way of creating more interest in schools in this community, for they are very deficient.”24 Southern entrepreneurs wanted to lure Northerners like Zimmerman to the South. In the process, they created an ideal image of the Southern racial condition that many visitors never witnessed. Zimmerman’s brief observation shows someone who did not see the level of black prosperity described in travel pamphlets. Other more detailed accounts came to the same conclusion. In addition, some Northerners reported having something of an ideological conversion.25 Leaving during the winter of 1877, Chicago’s Erastus Hill traveled southward by rail through Louisville, Atlanta, and Macon on a “delightful trip for this season of the year.” His gleeful disposition soon turned sour when he discovered the absence of sleeping cars. Hill rued the thought of “sitting up with niggers and crackers all night.” The former, he complained, “don’t know as much as a good intelligent mule.” With contempt brewing, Hill “talked politics” with his Southern white travel companions and found that he agreed with them on many matters. Hill affirmed that, “without exception,” Northerners like himself were “tired of this continual wrangle” of Reconstruction and wanted “peace and prosperity and no more agitation on political subjects.” Echoing a Southern racial ideology, Hill then asserted that, if the “niggers in this state” would vote for Democrats, the South’s problems would dissipate. He then criticized Northern “carpetbaggers,” claiming that they “lied to and cheated” blacks during Reconstruction. Southern whites, he determined, were the “real friends” of blacks. With a new political worldview, the Northerner declared, “my mind has changed wonderfully.” Suddenly he understood why the “decent white man” of the South was a Democrat. Hill speculated that Republicans had “forced” upon the South a “diabolical set of rascals” who “[plundered]” the region after the war. Armed with a new political posture, Hill reached Gainesville. While initially appealing, its favor diminished for the Northerner. On Saturday evening, he complained, “the niggers in the night” were “shouting and hollering.” The next morning, the sleep-deprived Hill scornfully remarked that he would attend church, because “even in this country the Sabbath is observed.”26 In Hill’s example, we see a story of transformation. Having become more sympathetic to his Southern counterparts, Hill’s new racial posture rested upon the rock of white supremacy. Consider again the Atlanta newsman Henry Grady. In front of a Southern audience in 1887, Grady averred, “The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro resisted at all points and all hazards – because the white race is the

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superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts.” Grady spoke optimistically about the racially harmonious “New South” to his Northern audience, yet to his fellow Southerners he confirmed their racial agenda. Unity, peace, and prosperity, for the newsperson, required that the code of white supremacy “must be maintained.” For some Northerners like Hill, this ideology apparently became perfectly reasonable. Neither used overt religious language when talking about white supremacy. Nevertheless, both emphasized that their “racial creed” was a “truth” that Southern society needed to uphold, at all costs. This dissertation’s discussion of civil religion seeks these sorts of perceived “truths.” We find overt religious expressions throughout this study punctuating the values that people believed were essential for society. Grady’s normative language may not have invoked direct religious language, but it did transmit a sense that his good society was a white society. This “truth” could not change.27 Northerners coming south in the years after Reconstruction confronted a racial setting that was likely unfamiliar. Some experienced cultural conversions, seemingly adopting the Southern white worldview on matters of race. Coming from Wisconsin in 1921, William George Bruce experienced such a conversion. He traveled to Florida, intent on desegregating the schools. “Their law was inhuman, unjust and un-American, and we the people of the North would boldly tell the southerners what was what.” When reaching his destination, Bruce confronted school officials in Florida. They informed Bruce of “the danger of exposing little white girls to contact with negro children who knew no sense of modesty and who came from families utterly lacking in morality.” Convinced by the reasoning, Bruce and his fellow protesters, “tore up our resolutions, and became ashamed of our intrusive attitude.” He admitted that Southerners “understood their own problem better than we.” Moreover, if placed in a similar situation, Bruce surmised, “we would meet the school question exactly in the manner in which the southern people were now meeting it.” When faced with the reality of racial intermingling, Bruce simply did not believe desegregating schools was an option. The Northerner’s words lacked any direct religious references, but it clearly had civil religious import. That is, his statement described the standards that he believed were unquestionably necessary to maintain a unified, peaceful, and prosperous society. Racial segregation, for Hill, was a normative condition for social stability that, in his mind, could never be otherwise.28

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Hill and Bruce were Northern converts to the Southern racial worldview. After visiting the region, both agreed that Southern white Democrats could manage racial relations properly. Not every relocated Northerner ascribed to this reasoning, however. In 1907, a Pensacola newspaper interviewed the seventy-year-old Maine native, J.E. Callahan, who discussed his experiences during and after Reconstruction. A self-described “carpetbagger,” Callahan was a mill owner in Pensacola. Reflecting on Reconstruction, Callahan defended the North’s actions before, during, and after the war, claiming that his section fought “in the defense of their Country and in the cause of Human Freedom.” Northerners, he explained, “were not a band of heartless wretches, plundering the helpless,” but rather, “plain every day Americans.” Born in Ireland, Callahan presumed that his early experiences with “oppression” there motivated his “lively interest in opposition to Human Slavery.” He left a “lucrative business” in Maine before the war to help the “holy cause” of evacuating the enslaved from the South. “I believed, as many others of my associates did, that the Negro if he had his freedom, with his acquaintance with the agricultural and mechanical labor of the South, well acclimated, and a powerful physique, would become an important factor in the development of the resources of the country.” Callahan’s tone quickly shifted from optimism to “disappointment.” Emancipation gave blacks “all the advantages” and “privileges” they needed to prosper, he charged, but “comparatively few of them have met my expectations.” Callahan compared blacks with European immigrants, who he presumed came to America “without knowledge of the language, of the labor, or of the climate, and becomes a useful and worthy citizen.” Blacks, however, lacked “[gratitude],” “character,” “responsibility,” and “earnestness of purpose,” which left “little in the negro character to be admired.” Callahan called his initial optimism, “one bad calculation.” Still, he made white Southerners “entirely to blame” for trying to “re-enslave the Negro” after the war. The new generation of white Southerners, Callahan suspected, were “less under the influence of designing politicians whose whole motive was to hold up the ‘nigger and carpetbagger’ to scare white men into Democratic ranks.” The former abolitionist was a critic of slaveholders and redeemer Democrats. Yet, his appraisal of freed black was harsh. More, Callahan made racial equality an unthinkable proposition. The Northerner assured that neither he nor his fellow Republicans “favored and practiced social-equality with the negro.” Announcing that he “opposed social-equality in every respect,” Callahan concluded, “No Northern man invited a colored man to his table, or to his family circle.” Callahan’s view of the South came filled with qualifications. Calling himself an

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advocate of “human freedom,” he denounced racial equality. Neither bashful nor apologetic about being a carpetbagger, the former mill owner believed his cause was good. The outcome was disappointing, for Hill, but he blamed the politicians of the South. Many white Southerners hoped the South would improve with the old mentality reinstalled. Callahan believed this group of “misguided and conniving” politicians had perverted values that the new generation had abandoned.29 Like Southern whites, Northern whites did not share one racial worldview. At the same time, each Northerner sampled above assured that white supremacy was a critical element of their good society. None advocated racial equality.30 Previously we saw how whites from the North and the South made sectional reunification part of the progressive program. At Chautauqua meetings in West Florida, representatives from the sections gathered and spoke of healing old wounds. Similarly, in this section, we occasionally saw whites from the North and South differing on particulars, yet seemingly united in a belief that unrestricted black freedom was a sure path toward social instability. Black Freedom and the “Good of the Community” For Southern whites and many of their Northern counterparts, the good society was a white society. As a value, white supremacy promised them that the integrity of this racially exclusive world would remain intact. Blacks had a different perceived good society, wherein freedom promised civil rights, material prosperity, and divine liberation from the chains of slavery. While entirely threatening for many Southern whites, the formerly enslaved struggled to have their perceived good society recognized and actualized during the post-Reconstruction era. For the members of “slave culture,” wrote historian Elizabeth Grace Hale, emancipation confirmed a promise of freedom that blacks believed existed between them and God. As Reconstruction unfolded, freed blacks entered Southern society with a new sense of “agency,” assured that their freedom was a divine mandate.31 This black determination to enjoy freedom, however, met an obstinate wall created by white supremacy. In the aptly entitled Freedom’s Coming, historian Paul Harvey noted that freedpeople quickly realized, “freedom would come only through a constant struggle.” Throughout his account, Harvey described how blacks adopted different approaches in their “struggle” for freedom.32 In other words, the meaning of freedom within black circles assumed multiple definitions. Some linked freedom with accommodation. In 1895, Booker T. Washington traveled to Atlanta determined to convince blacks that they could become

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prosperous in spite of segregation. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” he proclaimed, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”33 Washington advocated a self-help ethic and avoided confrontation with whites. If blacks became diligent and successful artisans, businesspeople, and property owners, Washington conjectured, whites would grow to accept them.34 W.E.B. DuBois, on the other hand, deemed Washington’s ideology to be complicit and misguided. Self-help was part of DuBois’s rhetoric. But he included a tone of defiance that Washington avoided, proclaiming that blacks “must unceasingly and firmly oppose” the repressive forces of white society. Washington’s optimism, DuBois criticized, could not erase the oppressive white culture of the South. With irony and remorse, DuBois observed that during the era of supposed racial “progress,” he rode through the mountains of Tennessee on a Jim Crow car.35 To understand DuBois’s social philosophy, we should note his academic influences, particularly that of German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel. “The history of the world,” Hegel assured, “is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” The philosopher reasoned that the seed of freedom existed within all individuals. Through time, societies have slowly made their collective seeds grow into perfect freedom. According to Hegel, though, the major historical shifts have been necessarily violent. When radically opposing ideals meet, he hypothesized that warfare would result. From such conflicts would emerge a truer freedom that, Hegel reasoned, united the best qualities of the formerly warring factions.36 To instigate this traumatic process, the philosopher believed the cause of freedom required a “world-historical individual” like Caesar or Napoleon. Armed with “the instinct that fulfilled what the time intrinsically demanded,” Hegel concluded that these individuals set freedom on a better path.37 With this Hegelian “dialectical” model in the background, DuBois described the history of slavery and freedom. Slavery, he speculated, produced a black population that “worshipped Freedom” with “unquestioning faith.”38 As freed blacks entered white America, DuBois foresaw a Hegelian clash of diametrically opposed ideals. Perhaps optimistically, DuBois hoped this confrontation would result in a stronger black race and American nation. Reflecting on Dubois’s philosophical background, historian Joel Williamson concluded, “DuBois, more than any other person, gave black people in America the concept of soul as a way of organizing their lives. In doing so he gave them a vital and enduring idea that not only gave them a present, it also gave them a past, and a promising future.”39 DuBois’s “concept of soul” combined a profound respect

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for blackness and hope for a better future. While he and Washington made freedom the heart of their respective ideal societies, DuBois embraced the conflict that Washington eschewed. Emancipation signaled a new era for the formerly enslaved. Suddenly, blacks imagined a good society wherein freedom promised unity, peace, and prosperity. As a black value, the meaning of freedom varied according to the individual speaker’s agenda. In the unfinished South, the voices of black ministers frequently depicted a good society marked by freedom. In some public pronouncements to white audiences, black ministers used a tone of cooperation reminiscent of Booker T. Washington. In April 1899, blacks and whites in Albany, Georgia attended a funeral for Frank W. McCarthy, a prominent black citizen. Rev. William D. Johnson of Albany’s A.M.E. church described the event in a white newspaper. “The action of the white citizens of Albany on Wednesday afternoon demonstrated the fact that any man will be respected when he properly respects others.” Continuing with this theme, Johnson wrote, “The presence of so many of our white friends at the funeral showed to all of us how we will be respected when we learn to respect ourselves and each other as we should.” Speaking on “behalf of my people,” the minister expressed appreciation to “our white friends” for “the tears shed,” and “sympathy manifested so feelingly for the loving wife and precious children of our deceased brother.” In return, Johnson promised that Albany’s blacks would assuredly, “ask God’s rich blessings, in copious showers upon you.” Moreover, they would strive thereafter “to lift our people to that high type of manhood and Christian citizenship” modeled by McCarthy.40 Perceptions of a good society frequently picture unity as an ultimate goal. In spite of individual differences, in other words, a person or group’s ideal society would find people cooperating and working toward this common end. In this account, we find a minister who lamented the death of a colleague who he believed helped further the cause of racial harmony. McCarthy’s “Christian citizenship” became, for Johnson, a model for how he believed the races could and ought to “respect” each other. Continually thanking the white population, the minister projected a social condition wherein the meeting of black and white at McCarthy’s funeral was emblematic of the age. Echoes of Booker T. Washington’s hope for “mutual progress” also circulated. In other words, McCarthy’s eulogy called out to blacks to improve themselves and become productive members of society. For many blacks, the path toward freedom required self-improvement and the willingness to properly contribute to the emerging progressive Southern landscape. A black newspaper in

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Waycross, Georgia wove the language of freedom and progress into a demand for improved political leadership. If “intelligent people” became black leaders, the article read, blacks and whites would develop a relationship of respectful cooperation. The “law of progressiveness,” the editorial continued, dictated that people would advance only as far as their leaders would permit. Thus, the writer implored black leaders to become “the most able, worthy, and in short the best men and women, in every sense of the word.” Such leaders would bring “respect” to the black community, affirmed the author, “and make it a power for good in the affairs of men.” The article claimed that elsewhere in the nation, “true men and women” had “animated and actuated by the Finest principle and noblest purpose” of public service. The editorial called such leaders, “a tower of strength for any race” and “the hope of ours.” A “better day” would come when more leaders exercised their “sacred duty.” The author assumed that a newly “awakened” white population would listen to qualified black leaders, so long as they demonstrated an impeccable sense of “Morality, manhood, loyalty to race, love of truth, [and] nobleness of purpose.” If these were the “required [standards]” for black leadership, the author exclaimed, blacks would bring about “the progress of the race.”41 With an eye toward a “better day,” the author called out to black leaders to perform their “sacred duty” and usher in greater “progress.” In the previous chapter, we saw how the good society of many Southern whites was a progressive society. Railroads, port developments, public buildings, and agricultural advances each became symbols of improvement for Southern whites. For this population, progress had racial implications. As historian C. Vann Woodward famously proclaimed, “Southern progressivism generally was progressivism for white men only.” The “paradoxical combination of white supremacy and progressivism” was one feature Woodward believed distinguished the South from the North.42 Certainly, whites believed progressivism belonged to their race, but as we have seen blacks also appropriated the language of progress. The aim of the present study is to investigate the various ways people living in the post-Reconstruction South idealized their society. For blacks and whites, progress became a standard that they believed positively contributed toward creating a more prosperous future. Whites had a monopoly on the political and economic affairs of the post-Reconstruction South. Thus, the opportunities for advancement within black circles met the obstinate wall left by white supremacy. Still, for many blacks, their good society was both free and progressive. After

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Reconstruction, many blacks struggled to have this perceived good society recognized and actualized in spite of their cultural and political limitations. Between blacks and whites, different ideas for what progress meant emerged after Reconstruction. Whites believed that they owned progress, yet blacks often saw themselves as equal sharers of this social ideal. Within black circles, there exited further divisions for what, exactly, progress meant. Some sought to create a mutually progressive future, while others believed it had already arrived. The proliferation of railroads and the timber boom in West Florida brought a myriad of economic opportunities to Pensacola’s seaport. In the woods and on the docks, blacks experienced a moderate level of financial prosperity.43 In 1897, F.E. Washington wrote an article in the white-operated Bliss Quarterly commenting on the black achievements in the region. Since “the shackles of American slavery” had broken, Washington began, freed blacks made “such remarkable and almost marvelous advancement . . . and we are now contributing our share towards its progress.” Blacks, he pronounced, had ascended a ladder “that leads to enlightenment and civilization of mankind.” As a result, “we find ourselves higher than we can fully realize.” Washington proceeded to list the men and women in Pensacola who had contributed to “the mental and moral advancement of people.” In labor, education, health, law, and religion, Washington listed those he believed contributed to Pensacola’s “progress.” He called Pensacola’s ministers “intelligent and highly respected men,” and focused specifically on the Baptist Dr. Abbot, “a fair example of what the colored people attain when imbued with a progressive spirit.” Abbot attended Roger Williams University, the University of Raleigh, and the Richmond Institute. In Pensacola, Washington proudly noted, the minister shared his education with his congregation. Washington then turned to “the friendly relation that exists in our city between the races.” The “close observer” would assuredly see that Pensacola had far fewer “prejudices” than other Southern cities. Blacks, he maintained, could live freely and secure “fair wages” for their labor. Because of the efforts of “progressive merchants and men of energy and capital,” Washington forecasted a better future for the race. Concluding on a tone of racial cooperation, he wrote, “Our white friends’ hopefulness of a new era of commercial advancement for Pensacola is deeply shared by our people.”44 Looking at his surrounding and speaking before a white audience, Washington saw in Pensacola a place where the culture of progress benefited the black community. His good society was racially harmonious and mutually progressive – both features he found in Pensacola.

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Another Washington arrived at the same conclusion. Booker T. Washington took notice of Pensacola in his 1907, The Negro in Business. The book addressed black progress broadly, but focused on Pensacola for an “intimate study.” Washington found in Pensacola “that healthy progressive communal spirit, so necessary to our people.” He listed Pensacola’s black advancements in organized religion, labor, education, professional work, newspapers, and political life. The businesspeople in particular, Washington concluded, showed that “in the more progressive colored communities in the South, members of the Negro race are learning to do their own business and direct their own affairs.” Like F.E. Washington, Booker T. Washington linked material progress with racial harmony, commenting on the “relations of helpful cooperation” existing between the races.45 In Pensacola, both Washingtons found their good society. They claimed to have witnessed blacks working prosperously and whites cooperating as a result. Neither F.E. nor Booker T. Washington made overt religious allusions in their reflections on Pensacola. Still, both imagined an ideal society – marked by unity, peace, and prosperity – wherein blacks were industrious and whites were cooperative. Civil religion is not about direct references to divine beings. Instead, we find civil religion in each speaker’s respective appeal to a perceived social truth. Pensacola’s racial condition was, for both Washingtons, inherently good for all persons. Other blacks commenting on their perceived good society did employ direct religious rhetoric. Such language punctuated the normative behaviors and beliefs that the speaker believed would contribute best toward actualizing a unified, peaceful, and prosperous society. Thomasville’s Rev. Emanuel K. Love, for example, made education, racial harmony, and denomination building the cornerstone of his ministry. A graduate of the Augusta Institute, Love became the pastor of Thomasville’s African Baptist Church in 1879. In the following two years, he baptized 450 people and raised roughly $1,000 to improve the physical condition of his church.46 Impressive enough was Love’s success that Thomasville’s white newspaper remarked, “The colored churches are better here than are the white churches.” In 1881, Love left Thomasville to assist the missionary efforts of the American Baptist Publication Society. In his resignation letter, Love defined how he believed a pastor ought to develop his ministry. The effective minister, he reasoned, always worked for “the good of the community.” For Love, this meant “rebuking sin and wickedness in high places,” waging an “uncompromising war against whisky,” furthering the “right, to work untiringly for education,” and preaching “faithfully the

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word of God.”47 The white newspaper in Thomasville bade Love a pleasant farewell, commenting favorably on his ministry efforts. “Rev. E.K. Love has the entire confidence and respect of the citizens of Thomasville, white and black. He has stayed here long enough for them to know his sterling worth. Georgia is a big field, but if there is a man who can work it up, that man is E.K. Love.”48 In 1885, after working the mission fields in Florida and Georgia, Love assumed the pastorate at the First African Baptist Church in Savannah. Upon his appointment, a white newspaper just north of Thomasville, praised the move. “He is indeed a very intelligent and able man and the church has done well to secure his services. Withal he is pious and devoted to his work. We congratulate all parties.”49 For the “good of the community,” Love prescribed for blacks an ethic of self-help and a lifestyle he believed was godly and moral. No matter how many white papers complimented his “sterling worth,” however, Love still lived in a South where whites did not tolerate racial intermingling. In 1889, Rev. E.K. Love and a number of Georgia delegates traveled to the Black Foreign Missionary Convention in Indianapolis. Prior to the departure, an agent from the East Tennessee, Virginia, & Georgia Railroad asked Love to patronize the line. By the 1880s, most major railroads had segregated cars and refused to sell blacks first-class tickets.50 The railroad agent assured Love that he and his fellow travelers would have a segregated first-class car. After purchasing a first-class ticket, Love published an article in the Georgia Baptist encouraging delegates to follow suit. When boarding the train, the travelers quickly discovered that there was no segregated car. Moreover, the train had only one first-class car and one smoking car. The delegates – who opposed smoking and drinking and held first-class tickets – seated themselves in the first-class car. The train departed and the white passengers and rail conductors began to anxiously murmur. A black porter quietly informed Love that a telegram had reached the next stop announcing the arrival of the desegregated train.51 As the train rolled into the Georgia station, Love claimed, “a dozen rough looking men boarded the train and ordered us out of the car. We didn’t go, and we were assaulted.” The “rough” men drew revolvers, beat the delegates, and forced the travelers off of the train. Without the “interference of the conductor,” Love speculated, “I think some of us would have been killed.”52 Love was one of five battered delegates who forged ahead to Indianapolis. The assaulted published an article in Philadelphia’s National Baptist describing the event and expressing their disgust at white America’s lethargic reaction to race violence. “We look to God and ask what

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are we to do? What is the use of appealing to the Government? Our suffering and inhuman outrages are known. The crimes are not committed in a corner – the men were not masked.” The authors concluded, “the glory of American citizenship means no glory for us.”53 While Love preached the gospel of self-help, he too found deficiencies in a white system that allowed injustices against blacks to go unpunished. Love’s good society established a set of laws that protected all people equally, regardless of their color. In a small Georgia town, Love and his traveling companions confronted a white mob that acted on a firm belief that racial equality was a perversion of social order. White supremacy emerged as perhaps the most important value for many white Southerners. So embedded was the value that whites readily fought and occasionally killed to maintain it. In Love’s good society, however, actions of this manner would receive quick punishment. The lax reaction from the white legal system was, for the minister, a sign that this population sustained an improper value system that unnecessarily excluded blacks. From the pulpit, Love aggressively criticized what he believed were the shortcomings of this white worldview. At the Baptist Missionary Convention in 1897, Love decried the “unjust discrimination” of blacks, but reasoned that, “every race should recognize its racial distinction.” Love’s acceptance of segregation was not a product of acquiescence, but rather a statement of racial pride. “I would rather be with a Negro than with any body else on earth, and I believe no white man when he tells me that he prefers to be with Negroes to being with his own race.”54 Love turned the logic of white supremacy on its head. It was whites, he resolved, who did not deserve to share space with blacks. Having witnessed the hostility of white supremacy firsthand, the minister concluded that blacks were simply a better class of people. For Love, black freedom was a divine right that whites would soon need to recognize. He emphasized this point in an 1891 sermon in Augusta, Georgia entitled, “Emancipation Oration.” Love labeled slavery, “the most cruel and diabolical system . . . that ever disgraced this or any other country.” Emancipation, however, was the moment when, “the mighty arm of Jehovah was moved in our defense.” Love denounced the likes of Atlanta newsperson Henry Grady, who tried “to prove the inferiority of the Negroes.” Grady was “dead and gone,” Love cheered, “and the Negroes still live and yet will come.” The minister then listed the qualities he admired most in blacks, including, “moral courage, sweetness of disposition, loving spirit of forgiveness, meekness, humbleness, tenderness of heart, devotion to God and physical discipline.” In sum,

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the minister determined that blacks represented, “the development of true manhood, which is heaven’s idea of greatness.” For “any other nation under heaven,” Love concluded, blacks would be a cherished asset. But in America, this was not the case. Whites “may extol their superiority and greatness,” but blacks live in “the next valley just ahead of them and eternal fate has decreed that the Negroes shall make the grand stand first.” The only thing holding blacks in place, Love continued, was the “ignorance” of American culture. “It is God’s plan that intelligence – righteous intelligence – should rule. An ignorant man should not be placed in authority even though it be myself.” Drawing this into a direct commentary on the nation, Love resolved, “ignorance is weakness, and the more ignorance this government has, the weaker it is.” He then criticized the white press for creating a “public opinion” that alienated blacks. Love also decried the printing efforts of his own race. Blacks “have done nothing like their duty in rallying to the support of the Colored Press. As a rule the Negroes take a paper for one year and seem to think that will do forever.”55 White claims to racial superiority, for Love, were simply wrongheaded and misinformed. His good society was a free society that had not actualized because of white “ignorance.” Love believed that “righteous intelligence” would eventually rule. His words were also a plea for blacks to continue struggling for the freedom that he believed they deserved. The minister was forceful, confrontational, and demanding of both whites and blacks. Certainly, Love was an advocate of self-help, but he was unafraid of condemning that which he believed contradicted his social ideal. Within the black community, there were differences regarding what freedom meant and how blacks could best bring this into being. When identifying these differences, we discover that the perceived good society of Southern blacks had a malleable shape that defied a univocal description. However, in some cases, the boundaries between the respective good societies of blacks and whites during this era were clear. As Love’s confrontation with a Georgian mob proved, blacks and whites did not agree on where the limits of black freedom began and ended. Freedom’s “Terrain of Conflict” According to historian Eric Foner, “freedom” in the post-emancipation South “became a terrain of conflict, its substance open to different and sometimes contradictory interpretations, its content changing for whites as well as blacks.”56 The meaning of freedom was, then, a rather unstable thing. For whites in particular, this perceived instability evoked deep fear. Sometimes

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this fear manifested into acts of vigilante justice. In his 1913 history of Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis, a native of Pensacola, wrote: The criminal demoralization of the Reconstruction period was frightful. Men formed the habit of defying the law and resorting to violence to attain their ends. The Southerner was certainly face to face with negro domination foisted upon him by Federal law. He arose to protect his own unwritten laws in order that his property, his self-respect, and his family might not be injured or destroyed. He resorted to physical violence under cover, in one of the most sinister and interesting contests of modern times. And in this contest for a very necessary supremacy many a foul crime was committed by white against black. Innocent people suffered. There is no mercy and scant justice in social adjustment. The negro was first freed, then enfranchised, then launched in practical politics, and then mercilessly beaten into subjection.57 Calling white supremacy “very necessary,” Davis indicated that the very fabric of society was at stake after Reconstruction. From Davis and others, white supremacy was a key social value. It was a standard they used to judge whether a given person or behavior contributed to, or detracted from, actualizing their good society. The thought of “negro domination” was, for Southern whites, enough to justify lawless acts of violent retribution. In their examination of civil religion and violence, religion theorists Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle discussed how nations sometimes mobilize the “killing energy” of citizens for the sake of protecting group unity. A “totem crisis,” they explained, refers to a collective “uncertainty about the essential borders that demarcate [a] group.”58 The assault of Rev. Love and his colleagues was essentially a white reaction to a perceived border crisis. The assailants’ good society was a white society wherein blacks lived by certain written and unwritten laws. Rev. Love held another civil religious worldview – one that cherished unrestricted freedom and firmly opposed the “killing energy” that motivated the white mob who attacked him. For the minister, mob justice was an affront to a color-blind system that he believed social stability required. In the end, Love and his colleagues endured a beating and saw no support from the white legal system. Many other blacks would meet a similar fate to Love’s and find a similar apathy in the legal structures of the South. This chapter is about both civil religious diversity and civil religious conflict. Blacks and whites formulated different perceived good societies in the years following Reconstruction. While blacks often found themselves on the losing end, their words and deeds continued to idealize their good society. When Reconstruction ended, two murders in central Florida foreshadowed the coming history of violence that plagued the state. In November 1876, an

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anonymous Northerner traveled through Florida investigating cases of voter fraud in the election. Passing through Gainesville, he claimed white and black Republicans “[expressed] fears for their personal safety.” When he reached Hernando County, the Northerner collected the election results and charged County Commissioner Arthur Saint Clair, a black Baptist minister and farmer, with bringing them to Tallahassee. Saint Clair supposedly refused, claiming that he feared for his life because a fellow black political leader recently “had his back filled with buckshot from a shot-gun in the hands of a Democrat.” The minister knew the murderer, but the author wrote, “his fear is so great that nothing will induce him to divulge the name.”59 Saint Clair likely had good reason to be wary. In late June of 1877, he and fellow congregant Henry Loyd traveled from Hernando County to Tallahassee intending to meet with an assembly of black Republicans convened by Simon B. Conover, a white Republican senator. At the assembly, Conover addressed issues of importance facing blacks and assured that the future would bring prosperity to the race. Saint Clair and Loyd never arrived at the meeting. On June 26, two white men assassinated the travelers in Hernando County.60 The black response to the murders was prompt and reproving. The New York Times printed a resolution written by a collection of black ministers who met in Key West. Calling Saint Clair and Loyd “martyrs of our race,” the ministers announced their “solemn protest and unqualified condemnation of so dastard and inhumane an act.”61 In Florida, Rev. W.G. Stewart of Tallahassee’s A.M.E. Church denounced the murders in a letter that he sent to a local newspaper. Stewart, a former enslaved person, aligned with the Republican Party after the war and became a leading black politician in Middle Florida.62 Similar to the Key West ministers, Stewart’s message demanded justice for the murders. He charged that the victims “were shot down brutishly, and killed instantly” for their skin color and Republicanism. The murders, Stewart concluded, indicated what Democrats would soon do to the “rights” of all blacks. The region’s blacks were fearful, according to the minister. While the “revival” atmosphere kept the black population “alive in Christ Jesus,” Steward claimed that they prayed out of “fear.” The November gubernatorial election of Democrat George F. Drew, left blacks “ruined,” because “the Democratic party was no friend to them.” The “restoration” of the Democrats, Stewart worried, came “with the prospect of their ruling over us, as they had formerly done.” Stewart expressed little “hope of future prosperity” since few whites seemed willing to grant “all the rights belonging to us.”63 The deaths of Saint Clair and Loyd were omens of things to come for

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Stewart. His good society gave political opportunities to blacks, enforced a color-blind legal system, and certainly did not have white Democrats alone at the helm. In our previous discussion of the white redemption narrative, we saw that whites looked at the election of the likes of Governor Drew as a divine blessing. For whites, political redemption restored a perceived order to the region and hastened material progress. Stewart gave something of a counter-redemption narrative. In his mind, the “rights” of the past had disappeared and more blacks would soon face the fate of the Hernando County “martyrs.” For Stewart, in other words, political redemption marked the beginning of an era of social chaos. Stewart’s lamentations were disingenuous and misguided, according to the newspaper’s editor, C.E. Dyke. The editor’s lengthy response belittled the minister’s “religieo-political blast” and called it a “curious mosaic” of untruths. Dyke informed readers that Stewart was Tallahassee’s postmaster – a position, Dyke claimed, that afforded Stewart a $2,600 annual salary. The newsperson then leveled criticisms against black religion and politics. Black revivals, he wrote, made participants “better and happier, enlarging their views of duty and purifying their hearts.” Mockingly, the editor reasoned that the “happy effect” described by the “Reverent Post-master” contradicted his claim that blacks were in dire need of justice. “Instead of vexing his righteous soul over an ‘adversity’ that has ‘gloriously prospered’ [in] his Church, and laying schemes for thwarting the designs of providence, he should, like the apostle, ‘thank God and take courage’ and pray for a little more of the same sort.” For Dyke, Stewart’s religious message was as defective as his political statement was. The editor called Stewart’s mentality the product of the “political adventurers” of Reconstruction. Carpetbaggers, continued Dyke, had kept blacks “in a state of excitement by appeals to their passions and their prejudices of race and by indoctrinating them with just such false ideas.” The “naturally excitable” black race, the editor resolved, would only “run into extremes in politics or what he calls religion.” He continued that in politics, a black person “becomes a fanatic,” and in religion, “an enthusiast.” “Take away politics and his excitable nature becomes absorbed in ‘religion’ and ‘revivals.’” Dyke assured that blacks would keep their “rights.” The murders of Saint Clair and Loyd, he admitted, were indeed “horrible [crimes].” However, “it is not just to attribute that murder to a Democratic victory or to cite it as proof that the rights of the negro are less secure than formerly.”64 This exchange contained themes that defined many racial debates during the following decades. In Dyke’s mind, the good society was a world led by Southern white Democrats. The

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ideal black person was, for the editor, subservient, passive, and accepting of Democratic rule. Stewart, on the other hand, foresaw chaos. Without the Republicans, the minister worried that more blacks would encounter the same fate as Saint Clair and Loyd. Both speakers identified the other’s worldview as inherently defective and contrary to the common good. In the unfinished South, white supremacy and black freedom were unfinished social values. The debate over these racial values continued and additional Southern blacks met fates similar to those of Saint Clair and Loyd. After Reconstruction, conflicts between blacks and whites found both races continually proclaiming that their good society was the good society. While Dyke was highly critical of Stewart, not every white appraisal of the minister carried the same level of vitriol.65 In 1882, Stewart asked Ellen Call Long to relate the condition of Florida’s blacks to a Congressional delegation in Washington. Long, a wealthy white member of Tallahassee’s elite, agreed. When a friend questioned her decision, she replied, “It is a conviction of mine that when a negro proves himself worthy morally and capable intellectually of the rewards of citizenship by the practice of honesty, soberness and discretion, he is entitled to enter the list for competitive places of preferment.” For Long, Stewart had made himself “worthy” of recognition through his supposed intellectual and moral uprightness. Dyke gave a very different depiction of the minister. For these two white voices, then, Stewart was both a despised threat and a “worthy” citizen.66 Not every Southern white person reacted with immediate disapproval when confronting a freed black after Reconstruction. Still, whites heavily patrolled their racial dividing lines. In moments of a perceived crisis, the “killing energy” of Southern whites could manifest in a lynch mob. In many ways, Stewart’s prediction about the future of Florida following the fate of Arthur Saint Clair and Henry Loyd arguably materialized. Florida had become a notoriously violent state. From 1882 to 1930, Florida had the highest lynching percentage in the South.67 Previously, we saw that Booker T. Washington labeled Pensacola the ideal black society. Marked by black industry and racial harmony, Washington found in this small Southern port city, his good society. There was, however, an alternative perspective. In 1887, S.D. Jackson of Pensacola wrote, “I will tell you [what] they are doing with us down South. They are shooting us down as so many partridges; don’t allow editors to speak the truth always through their papers to the people; kicking us off trains whenever they see fit to do so; distribute the school funds as their conscience directs, charging us very often as high as 24 per cent per annum for money

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when we are compelled to borrow it from them, and thousands of other things too numerous to mention.”68 In contrast to Booker T. Washington, Jackson’s West Florida was a land of chaos. For the critics of white society, the lawlessness described by Jackson proved that white supremacy was a disordered social value. The good society of many Southern blacks upheld a color-blind justice system. In 1893 from his home church in Savannah, approximately 1,500 people listened to Rev. Emanuel K. Love’s sermon that vehemently denounced lynching. Love called to “good people everywhere to condemn and put down ravishers and lynchers and removing these awful crimes from our lovely southland.” Love contended the “law of reason” could counter the outbreak of black lynching. His message came with a tone of cooperation, telling his listeners to “appeal to these white people as our friends.” If blacks only “stand off and scold them and regard them as our bitterest enemies, we can never reason any subject of difference with them.” Condemning crime in general, Love assured that he had “no sympathy for the ravishers nor do I weep at their death. Every guilty man of them ought to have died.”69 Love differentiated between the whites who he believed would listen, from the “ambitious, wicked, designing politicians,” who kept “the fire of dissention and race hatred in an everlasting blaze.” All “virtue-loving” people, Love proclaimed, would not tolerate crimes such as rape; however, “lynching is not the remedy for rape. . . . The remedy is in the open law.” Love’s social criticism then recalled the “sin” of slavery. For North and South, emancipation became “the day of retribution.” Yet, he lamented, the presence of lynching signaled that America “has not yet fully recovered from that terrible judgment.”70 Love’s good society valued black freedom and denounced what he believed were the lawless codes of white supremacy. By way of contrast, the Tallahassee newspaper editor cited above valued white supremacy and foresaw a profound threat in what he believed was unrestricted black freedom. After Reconstruction, the racial worldviews reflected in these two examples met on an ideological terrain of conflict. Both races fought to have their good society recognized and actualized in the unfinished South. In law and politics, whites frequently won this contest. Through their words and deeds, though, blacks continued to articulate their prescriptions for social stability. If we say that the post-Reconstruction South had a civil religion, then we must admit that it had both black and white voices. These voices created a complex civil religion that both valued and feared white supremacy and black freedom. Moreover, this ambiguous reality of competing civil religions fed the era’s many violent racial confrontations. No doubt, the many

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voices of the many Souths created perceptions of the good society that sometimes had irreconcilable differences. Before Day Clubs Despite efforts to condemn lynching from Love and others, the epidemic continued.71 Sometimes, rumors were enough to instigate lynch mobs or at least cause speculation that one may form. Rumors of “Before Day Clubs” began circulating through the unfinished South during the summer and fall months of 1904. The stories generally claimed that militant blacks led the clubs, which met in churches and plotted the murders of prominent whites. While most white newspapers eventually admitted that these clubs did not exist, the printed rumors often helped stoke the fires of racial discord. The image of Before Day Clubs seemingly inferred a form of black domination that had long been the subject of white paranoia.72 Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey, and Nat Turner organized slave revolts in the early nineteenth century. Each found inspiration from the liberation narratives of the Bible. In 1800, Prosser assumed the identity of “Black Sampson” and led one thousand slaves in a failed attack on Richmond. In 1822, Vessey, an ex-slave and African Methodist, found encouragement from the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho. City officials exposed his plan to overrun Charleston, South Carolina and executed Vessey. Finally, Turner’s 1831 slave revolt was the bloodiest in history. A Baptist preacher, Turner led an insurrection that left sixty white men, women, and children dead. In reaction, wrote historian Albert J. Rabateau, whites declared that the revolts were the products of “false teachings.” White missionaries thereafter set forth to “regularize and pacify relations between slaves and masters.”73 After Reconstruction, black schools taught children that Turner was a misguided malcontent who murdered “innocent” whites for no good reason.74 For whites living before and after the war, each revolt symbolized the dreadful result of black domination. Whites remembered the slave revolts undoing the very fabric of their society, which contained an absolute imperative for white rule. In 1904, rumors of Before Day Clubs in the unfinished South carried with them the spirit of the slave revolts.75 On July 28, 1904 in Statesboro, Georgia, “Boss” Woodrum and Tom Woodcock investigated the burning house of a white farmer, Henry Hodges. Amid the flickering flames, the pair found Hodges and his family murdered. Statesboro officials promptly arrested approximately a dozen blacks before formally charging Paul Reed and Will Cato. In her statement to the police, Reed’s wife, Harriet, implicated both of them in the murder. After the arrests, newspapers claimed that Reed

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confessed to having belonged to a “Before Day Club.” Two black ministers, Reed reported, organized the club with the intent of murdering more whites in Bulloch County. He also supposedly named other members living in the area. Meanwhile, a rumor circulated through Statesboro that claimed Hodges’s daughter offered a nickel in exchange for mercy just moments before the murderers caved in her head. No proof ever validated the story. The angry white population did not seem concerned, however, as a series of minor racial conflicts arose in Statesboro.76 The threat of lynching prompted Statesboro officials to transport Cato and Reed to Savannah. Even with this measure, a Savannah newspaper morbidly speculated, “the chances of the murderers being legally hung are very slim.”77 In mid-August, the trials proceeded in Statesboro and Captain Robert M. Hitch’s Light Infantry division guarded the courthouse, armed with unloaded rifles. The all-white jury quickly found Cato and Reed guilty and sentenced them to hang. After hearing the case, Judge Daley decided to return the prisoners to Savannah in hopes of avoiding a lynching. This angered an already rowdy, drunken, and armed crowd of approximately 1,000 convened outside the courthouse. The mob overpowered Hitch’s troops and absconded with Reed and Cato. Despite the pleas of Rev. H.H. Hodges, the murdered farmer’s brother, the crowd dragged Reed and Cato out of their cell and through town. The mob settled on a location, poured ten gallons of oil on the convicted, snapped photographs, and set them ablaze. Reed and Cato begged to be shot as the crowed watched the two die slow deaths. After the fire calmed, the mob dispersed with relics of the lynched. Statesboro’s white residents soon bought prints of the gruesome lynching photographs for twenty-five cents.78 After the lynchings, racial tension in Statesboro stayed high and more rumors of Before Day Clubs spread. Fearing further reprisal, many area blacks relocated. Officials conducted a perfunctory investigation into the lynchings, but indicted no one. A black newspaper in Savannah expressed regret over the “unfortunate” murders of the farmer and his family, but refused to “forgive the lynchers.” The white officials, the paper scornfully read, “are opposed to doing anything that looks like protection to the dangerous Negro element and prefer for them to see what is likely to happen if they attempt assault and wholesale murder.”79 Accepting that Reed and Cato were guilty, the paper denounced the lawlessness and immorality of the lynchings. In other words, for the author, a truly good society did not permit vigilantism when the rule of law would suffice.

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By September’s end the Statesboro News, a publication largely responsible for stirring the pot of paranoia, admitted that a Before Day Club likely did not exist.80 When rumors appeared elsewhere, admissions of their falsity soon followed. Nevertheless, the mention of Before Day Clubs sparked both white paranoia and black fear. The image of a militant black club organized in churches stood in stark contrast to a white version of the good society, which wanted a passive black population and desired white rule at all costs. Blacks, on the other hand, wanted to quiet the rumors and offer assurance that they were cooperative members of society. In September 1904, a newspaper in Milledgeville, Georgia claimed that an area black man was planning to organize a “murder club.” An anonymous source cited by the newspaper claimed that he saw, “suspicious Negroes going to a certain church in this county.” Additionally, the report maintained that a merchant sold firearms to the unknown blacks who attended this church meeting. After receiving word of the rumors, A.M.E. ministers C.J. Jones and F.L. Fleming convened a meeting of area ministers to investigate the matter. The gathering soon issued a public message. “We found no such order existing,” they assured. One pastor had “some trouble with one of his members” and the ministers speculated that this had sparked the rumor. “It is our intention,” the statement concluded, “to give the white people our cooperation in running all such lawlessness down and uphold the law at all times.”81 Calming the fears of whites, the ministers stressed their willingness to cooperate. Wanting harmony rather than disunity, they sought to avoid the conflict a rumor like this could provoke. Also in September 1904, Talbotton, Georgia officials briefly detained five suspected Before Day Club members. The group allegedly planned to murder two white citizens in nearby Poplar. A judge ruled that the accusations were unjustified and released the prisoners. Soon after, two of the previous suspects died at the hands of a small gang of white mounted riders. Unlike Statesboro, Talbotton’s white citizens immediately denounced the action. A petition quickly circulated through Talbotton and the paper reported, “Not a man to whom it was presented hesitated to attach his signature.” The town’s white leaders convened, hoping to capture and convict the white perpetrators. At the meeting, former United States Congressman Henry Persons commended the general atmosphere of lawfulness in the county. The murders, averred Persons, “cast a blot upon the fair page of the county’s history.” Their resolution acknowledged the “alarm” caused by rumors, but concluded, “‘Before Day Clubs’ do not exist in Georgia to the extent that some fear and believe.” The resolution stated that townspeople “earnestly” wanted to

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“promote the welfare of the community and encourage a spirit of fairness and justice.” A newspaper report observed that the “sentiment in Talbot County was clearly shown by this meeting to be in favor of guaranteeing to Negroes protection.” The author, however, attached a qualifier. Such “protection” came “so long as negroes remain in their proper sphere, at all cost.” The paper claimed the county’s racial relations had been “most friendly” and that area blacks were “as a rule, obedient, respectful and kind. The treatment which they receive from the whites is all that they could ask for or expect and they are contented and happy.”82 Talbotton’s Before Day Club rumor had a series of unique features. Like Milledgeville no whites had actually died. Unlike the other cases, though, whites expressed outrage over the lawlessness of the murders. In the process, the white newspaper made the racial lines patently clear. The ideal black, according to this report, remained “obedient” and in his or her “proper sphere.” In this case, the good society of Southern whites granted justice to the unjustly killed, but reinforced the code of white supremacy at the same time. Even in this moment of cooperation, the newspaper restated the white creed of racial differentiation. Rumors of a Before Day Club also circulated in Thomasville in September 1904. A newspaper article claimed that James Horne, a white storeowner, received an anonymous letter that declared him “marked for slaughter by a ‘Before Day Club.’” Soon after, Horne’s store caught fire, but neighbors quickly extinguished it leaving minimal damage. Immediately, Thomasville’s Mayor, S.A. Roddenberry, along with R.W. Branch, the Presiding Elder for Thomasville’s A.M.E. Church, called a meeting to address the matter. “The meeting seemed to clear the atmosphere,” a newspaper article assured, “and it is now thought, that no trouble will follow. The negroes seem to be anxious to avoid the trouble. They have submitted the books and by-laws of all lodges to the inspection of the whites.”83 Similar rumors lingered elsewhere, prompting two hundred black leaders to meet in Thomasville. “[We] regard the Before Day Club bug-a-boo as a relic of mythology,” their resolution read, “and that we colored people assembled, do disclaim even any remote knowledge of the existence of any such organization.”84 Despite every contention that the Before Day Clubs did not exist, rumors continued to flourish. On September 3, 1904 Nicholas Ware Eppes, the white Superintendent of Public Instruction of Leon County, traveled from Tallahassee’s downtown to his plantation home in Bradfordville. Before reaching his destination, an assailant carrying a shotgun shot and killed Eppes at close range. Shortly after the murder, authorities arrested three black men, Isom

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Edwards, George Caldwell, and Nelson Larkin.85 Hoping to avoid a lynching, police transported the suspects to nearby Live Oak. While in transit, Edwards supposedly confessed to the murder and declared himself a member of a Before Day Club. The club reportedly met at Tallahassee’s Mount Zion Church and planned to murder more area whites.86 Within days, Jacksonville’s Times-Union alarmed Tallahassee residents when it alleged that five other clubs existed in Leon County. Providing background, the article claimed the club first formed in Richmond, Virginia through the efforts of an unnamed black man, “who made an incendiary speech, advising members of his race to do a manner of mean things.” The report noted the anxiety of Tallahassee’s white community, but suspected that the town’s “best negroes” had no “sympathy with such an organization.”87 The article further hoped that Tallahassee’s white residents were “willing to see the negroes have a fair trial.”88 Blacks and whites in Tallahassee knew the Eppes name well, so the violent death likely came as a shocking surprise.89 One article claimed a “spirit of sadness” overcame Tallahassee after the murder. “His many admirable traits of character and his genial manner won him friends everywhere. His home life was beautiful, where he was devotion itself. Here is where he will be most missed and the hearts of hundreds go out to his bereaved family.” Another article called Eppes’s murder “a thing too bad for words to depict.” Condemning the murder as a “cowardly act,” the paper read, “No one ever dreamed of any one harming a man so universally known and so perfectly innocent of doing any one any harm. His death was a shock to everybody, most especially coming from the source it did.” The “source” of the murder was the mysterious Before Day Club, but the author reasoned that Tallahassee’s blacks did not sympathize with the group. The “colored teachers” who worked for Eppes, the paper reported, felt the “sharp sting” of the loss and condemned “the parties accessory to the unmanly crime and want to see them punished to the fullest extent of the law.” The article then applauded the white people of Leon County for their “coolheadedness.” “We say in all crimes let the law take precedence – let us respect our laws – let us be law-abiding citizens.” Another news report noted that blacks in Tallahassee held a meeting “at which resolutions were passed condemning the murder of Mr. Eppes, and promising vigorous co-operation with the whites at any and all times in maintaining law and order and putting down crime.” The author called this “a step in the right direction” that would “tend toward the restoration of confidence in the colored population of Leon County, who have hitherto been considered law abiding, as a whole.”90 In spite of the murder of a prominent

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official, the newspaper author implored the region’s whites to respect the law. Mob justice, the article claimed, was not an appropriate means for handling the matter. Correspondences sent to Eppes’s family continually denounced the murderers and extolled the murdered. Susan Bradford Eppes, the deceased’s wife, received letters from well-wishers expressing remorse and anger. Writing from Monticello, Florida, Josir Kimudy lamented, “God alone knows how my heart goes out to you and your dear children in this dreadful hour of grief and trial.” He called the murder “dreadful,” and labeled the suspected perpetrators as a “gang of black ruffians.”91 Nicholas’s sister wrote Susan from Orlando. The bereaved sibling called her brother “grand and gentile and kind” and could not “fathom” how he became “the victim of such a plot.” Expressing her fear for Susan, the letter concluded, “I feel so afraid for you all seem surrounded by a set of demons, God grant they may all be caught and punished.”92 Susan’s sister, Martha, wrote to the Times-Union asking them to publish an obituary in memory of Nicholas Eppes. Martha claimed that he had the “very best blood of the South . . . in his veins.” He was a “faithful and loyal as a friend – upright and honorable in every walk of life.”93 Words of sympathy also came from blacks in the area. Robert Williams of Thomasville wrote Eppes on behalf of “the colored people who knew and loved Mr. Eppes.” The region’s blacks, Williams assured, “feel deeply and keenly the awful tragedy that has caused such a sore affliction to befall our community. . . . He leaves as universally regretted and sadly mourned.”94 At the funeral, the deceased’s wife reportedly “made a very pathetic address” to the blacks who attended.95 Meanwhile, all eyes turned to the accused who sat in a Jacksonville jail. In an interview with the Times-Union, the detainees gave their accounts. Edwards spoke first. His circuitous account ultimately indicted Caldwell as the lone murderer. On the night of the murder, Edwards recalled that he went to Larkin’s store, bought three shells, and borrowed Larkin’s shotgun “to kill some bats.” Edwards then left the store, but Caldwell took the gun and proceeded to confront Eppes. According to Edwards, Caldwell intended to retrieve money that he had previously lent to the superintendent. The ensuing confrontation eventuated in Eppes’s death at the hands of Caldwell. While Edwards relayed his story, Caldwell and Larkin repeatedly interrupted and called Edwards the lone murder. “Isom Edwards,” Caldwell asserted, “had me arrested as being an accomplice in the murder because I was with him at Larkin’s store that night.” Like Caldwell, Larkin said that Edwards acted alone. The reporter claimed the three fought throughout the interview but

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agreed on one point. “The three negroes stated positively that they were not members of any ‘before-day’ club, and that they never heard of the existence of such a club.”96 The Before Day Club rumors diminished as the trial drew near. A preliminary hearing in early September concluded that Edwards was the principal murderer and that Caldwell and Larkin were accessories. A newspaper article covering the verdict briefly mentioned the Before Day Clubs, “and the opinion prevails that the existence of such clubs is very doubtful.” Townspeople, the paper reported, believed “the crime was committed solely for the purpose of robbery, and all belief in the ‘Before Day Clubs’ in Leon County is dying out.”97 The trial in January 1905 resulted in three guilty verdicts and three death penalties. Lawyers for the accused appealed to the State Pardon Board after the Florida Supreme Court refused to overturn the sentences. Governor Napoleon Broward and the other members of the board upheld Edwards’s sentence but agreed to consider the other two.98 Meanwhile, the state set November 3, 1905 as Edwards’s execution date. Just prior to his death, Edwards made a series of startling confessions to a Jacksonville reporter. He admitted to having killed Eppes by himself. Additionally, Edwards claimed to have murdered Anna Paine three months prior to the Eppes affair. Paine was a black mother of seven who lived near Lake Hall. According to the reporter, Edwards went to Paine’s house, began arguing with her, and then choked her to death. “Nobody knew that I committed the murder,” confirmed Edwards, “though at that time some of the negroes did accuse me of killing her.” Edwards laughed while he told the reporter that he was a pallbearer for the funeral. The reporter queried why he laughed and Edwards responded, “I was just thinking that old woman tried to holler when I choked her.” The article concluded, “[Edwards is] without a doubt the most cold-blooded murderer that has ever occupied a cell to the Duval County jail. . . . Now that he is doomed to die on the gallows he apparently cares nothing and freely tells about the murder and the way he committed the crime.”99 A crowd of approximately five thousand people watched Edwards step to the gallows, accompanied by a Catholic priest. Prior to his death, Edwards confessed to the murders of Paine and Eppes and restated that Caldwell and Larkin were completely innocent. According to the Times-Union, “His statement was lengthy and he spoke with a strong, clear voice, warning members of his race and the public in general to avoid evil companions and to meet him in heaven.” The crowd of blacks and whites remained orderly throughout the hanging. Recollecting the story of the murder, the news report mentioned earlier claims about the Before

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Day Club. “This confession caused much excitement in Leon County,” but the paper assured that the club had never existed.100 After the execution, one newspaper again confirmed that Before Day Clubs did not exist. To Eppes’s family, however, this was a false conclusion. Days before Edwards’s execution, Governor Broward met Edwards. The condemned supposedly confessed to the murders and assured Broward that Larkin and Caldwell were innocent.101 Almost a year after Edwards’s hanging, Broward and the pardon board reduced Larkin and Caldwell’s sentence to life in prison.102 Edward Eppes, Nicholas’s son, disagreed with the pardon board’s findings. He stayed convinced that Caldwell and Larkin were the murderers and that Edwards was their pawn. In November 1905, Eppes wrote Isaac White, the editor of The World in New York City. His father’s death, charged Eppes, was a “political assassination” orchestrated by the superintendent’s political opponents. “[Certain] white politicians,” the son claimed, bribed the “negro leaders” of a “criminal organization” to murder his father. The administration of Florida “had fallen into the hands of some very corrupt officials,” who approved secret, illegal, public land deals. Eppes alleged that his father was “strongly opposed to all such corrupt practices.” This “ring” of crooked politicians subsequently contracted the murder and later orchestrated the commutation of Caldwell and Larkin death sentences. The supposed murderers, Eppes announced, “will never confess while they have any hope of escaping the gallows, and the white men who instigated the crime are therefore doing all they can in secret to save them.” Eppes revived the Before Day Club rumor, claiming the “negro crime organization” was still “wide spread over this section of country.”103 The controversy had not ended for Eppes.104 In his account, we see not only a revival of the rumor, but also his perception of dishonest white politicians. To Edward Eppes, the supposed enemies of his father practiced a deficient form of Democratic Party politics, one that patronized black murder clubs. Newspapers continued to deny the existence of Before Day Clubs, but Edward Eppes believed otherwise. Organizing in churches where white eyes could not inspect, these clubs supposedly plotted the overthrow of white society. For some whites, the existence of these clubs confirmed a belief that certain blacks wanted to dominate the South. All along, the language of white supremacy solidified white racial boundaries. From the black perspective, the events surrounding the appearance of these rumors prompted them to affirm their key values. Blacks believed that freedom gave them the right to receive a legal punishment. Lynch mobs did not

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fulfill this standard of justice for blacks. Instead, lynch mobs were a symptom of a flawed white worldview, which did not respect the reality of black freedom. The white voices of the South sometimes denounced the lynch mobs, but quickly reasserted their creed of racial inequality in the process. There was, for both blacks and whites, great diversity between and within their respective perceptions of the good society. While white supremacy and black freedom were central values for both, the definitions of each remained subject to change. An Unfinished Conflict in the Unfinished South From the Before Day Club example, we saw each race articulating what they believed was, and was not, good for society. Matters of life and death were at stake for both blacks and whites, so each side firmly emphasized their stance. This chapter has been about civil religious diversity and civil religious conflict. Both blacks and whites believed that their values would best contribute to communal unity, peace, and prosperity; and that the other’s values were fundamentally detrimental to this end. In the unfinished South, the races sometimes met along an ideological terrain of conflict, and blacks often found themselves on the losing end. Still, blacks continued to articulate how they believed Southern society ought to function. Amid this river of civil religion, the topic of race became a significant stream of water. Arguably the most important and pervasive issue of this era, the complexities between and within these two racial groups were many. After Reconstruction, the racial values of the unfinished South certainly remained an unfinished project.

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CHAPTER THREE “NOBLE DAUGHTERS OF THE SOUTH”: DEVOTION AND SOUTHERN WHITE WOMANHOOD

This dissertation is a history of civil religion after Reconstruction. While studies of revealed religions deal with dogmas, creeds, and theology, civil religion refers to collective perceptions of the good society. That is, a professed social ideal wherein peace, unity, and prosperity flourish, and conflict and strife are minimal. Material progress, white supremacy, and black freedom were all valuable standards of social life for those living in the unfinished South after Reconstruction. The conditions of each value changed alongside the position of the speaker, topic under consideration, and influences of the time. White supremacy and black freedom, for example, were both cherished truths and abhorrent threats. The definitions of these values largely relied on the speaker’s race. The good society of many Southern whites was a white society. For this group, then, white supremacy became an esteemed standard that they believed ensured social stability by promising white control and black subordination. For many blacks, however, the good society was the free society. From these voices, freedom was a key standard for social stability that promised civil rights, social equality, legal protection, and material prosperity. The value systems of Southern blacks and Southern whites were radically different, and conflicts resulted. Here, both competed to have their good society recognized and actualized. They announced their position by using the language of divinity and ultimate truth, while dismissing the validity of their opposition’s values. When examining the perceived good societies of blacks and whites, we found an unfinished South with an unfinished civil religion that divided along racial lines. Between and within these social groups, significant differences existed that contributed to the complication of this era’s civil religious world. The present chapter investigates three contexts wherein Southern whites valued female devotion. First, some Southern white men – ministers and laypeople – valued the presumed inherent religiosity of women. Men frequently identified women as the epitome of Christianity and the moral center of the family and society. Similar to other values mentioned in this study, this brand of female devotion had limits. Playing cards, “Woman’s Rights,” and even Catholicism became, for some Southern white men, the practices of the improperly devoted

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woman. In our second context, we examine how women practiced devotion through social reform efforts aimed at advancing their good society. As advocates of temperance, some Southern white women publicized their presumed religious devotion when trying to eliminate alcohol consumption. The good society of temperance advocates was a dry society that the devoted woman helped to actualize. Female devotion to the Lost Cause will be the third context considered in this chapter. The “noble” woman, for these voices, devoted herself to preserving and perpetuating a “true” history of the white South. While previous histories have made the Lost Cause the central civil religious theme of this era, the present dissertation makes it as one topic among many. As we have already seen, blacks, whites, Northerners, Southerners, Democrats, and Republicans all lived in the unfinished South. Each competed to have their version of the good society recognized and actualized. As such, this dissertation is a decentered history of civil religion. It avoids identifying only one theme as having civil religious precedent over all others. Chapters examine the various ways that people created a good society that they believed would best contribute toward peace, unity, and prosperity. To give preference to one group or theme would overlook the various other voices of this era, each of whom had a unique perspective. Devotion and the “True Woman” In this chapter, we look within a middle- to upper-class Southern white population in an attempt to understand the different ways that this population valued female devotion. The overt religious references cited below frequently carry civil religious weight. That is, from their direct religious allusions regarding gender, we will see the moral and behavioral standards that Southern whites believed the good society demanded. In the post-Reconstruction South, many white men made white women into the ideal Christian practitioner whose moral sensibilities were beyond reproach. Conflating religious devotion with womanhood was neither unique to the South nor nation. Piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity were all the “cardinal virtues” of the “cult of true womanhood,” identified by historian Barbara Welter. In antebellum America, claimed Welter, religion and family life became the “property” of the woman, who was “domesticated,” “emotional,” “soft,” and “accommodating.”1 The antebellum “Southern lady” also radiated these “cardinal virtues,” confirmed historian Anne Firor Scott. Scott further described how women after the war used this image to advance political campaigns such as temperance. Later in this chapter, we will lend more attention to social reform. For now, we will focus on the ways that

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Southern white men idealized Southern white female religious devotion. For men, this type of devotion was something to value. Further, it was a standard used to differentiate between their “true” woman and their religiously deficient woman. Some white Protestant men made card playing, “Woman’s Rights,” and Catholicism characteristics of the supposedly impious woman.2 At point in the dissertation, our discussion of civil religion has referenced railroads, politics, race relations, and rumors. In this chapter, we will see frequent mentions of family life. “Preaching and writing about the religious responsibilities and joys of family life,” wrote historian Ted Ownby, “ministers and laypersons alike asserted that marriage and parenthood were religious concepts.” As one Georgian minister proclaimed in 1883, “the family was the basis for the church – & the corner stone of civil government.”3 Positive proclamations of family life often contained references to female faith practices. Within these statements was an imperative: society needed stable families and stable families needed a “true woman.” “Did you ever get religion?” asked the revivalist. “Well, I should say so – 138 pounds of it,” replied the man. “A hundred and thirty-eight pounds of religion!” cried the revivalist. “How did you get that?” “The only way that a good many men ever get religion,” was the reply, “I married it.”4 Printed in a Pensacola newspaper in 1900, this offhand quip reflects an oft made male assumption that women were the natural curriers of religion. Women were essential, men often announced, for the religious uprightness of the family and society. On August 15, 1906 Thomasville’s Mary Ann Hansell died, prompting a local newspaper to write a glowing tribute.5 The obituary labeled her a “central figure” in Thomas County, and a “highly esteemed [citizen]” who had earned “the deepest love and respect” of all who knew her. Hansell, the author concluded, was “an example of true womanhood,” whose house “has ever been surrounded by a Christian spirit and the sacred teaching of the Holy Word.” The obituary recalled that her five children were “a monument of the purity of the life she has lived.”6 This metaphorical monumentalizing of Hansell transmitted the author’s contention that the deceased embodied a noteworthy and exceptional “Christian spirit.” The religious language employed here also punctuated an assertion that the “true womanhood” of Hansell was inherently good for her family and society. For the sake of human goodness, some Southern white men reasoned that women needed to be models of faith. In many cases, men seemingly assumed that women were natural conveyors

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of religious piety. Writing from Tallahassee in 1901, Methodist minister Henry Partridge reflected on the profound religious influence of his mother. Recalling his youth, Partridge wrote, “my spiritual nature grew under the influence of my Mother’s piety, teaching and prayers.” Through his mother, he “felt prompting to a religious life” at an early age. I remember the earnest prayers of my Mother who often took me with her to her place of retirement; as well as her prayers and talks in class-meetings and love feast, I believe the Spirit led me into the light before I was aware of the fact of justification; For I prayed, felt, resolved, tried, loved and trusted in my little child way, long before I thought it was religion. . . . I thank God for the Loved Ones who so tenderly shielded me from bad associations. Through his mother’s supposedly “pious” example, Partridge recognized his path to the ministry.7 He also found models of piety in women other than his mother. Commenting on his sister, Sarah Ann, Partridge noted her pleasant “disposition” as a child, which he believed “predicted the sweet, pure, gentle, loving, earnest womanhood of her after life.” As an adult, Sarah Ann was a teacher. In this vocation, she “taught always conscientiously generally successfully; and impressed not only the needs but the moral nature of her pupils.” In her many difficulties as a teacher, an admiring Partridge wrote, “she passed through the fire of trial to come out like the gold . . . to be fashioned for the vessel for the Master’s use. Pure Gold . . . the Master formed a vessel of fairest symmetry and most exquisite adorning; filled it with the sparkling waters of his grace till it overflowed; then after emptying its contents on all around.” He mourned that she “left us for Heaven” in spring 1873, but left behind “an object lesson of what religion is, and will do.”8 Leaving little to doubt, the Methodist minister saw in his sister the essence of religious devotion. He imagined her as a positive “moral” influence on those she instructed, and a perfect reminder for all of “what religion is.” Partridge also mentioned the supposed religious piety of women who were not family members. When attending Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Partridge lived with a “noble” attorney and his “gentle” wife. The husband was “honored and beloved by all” as a “prominent” member of society and church. His wife “was a queen in her home and unselfish as she was . . . to what makes womanhood honored and loved.” Partridge identified the couple’s daughters, Leila and Ella, as “well read and intelligent; cheerful in disposition; easy and refined in manners; with high ideals of womanly purity.” He rejoiced that the faith-filled atmosphere of his home “thus continued around me. . . . My Heavenly Father has thus most graciously prepared

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me for a true and noble life.”9 As with his sister and mother, Partridge found “true religion” in the “pure” women of his adopted family. The “pure” woman was, for men like Partridge, the epitome of Christian living and morality. Accordingly, some ministers who held similar views worried about the implications of female “impurity.” In 1904, Methodist revivalist Sam Jones delivered a sermon before a crowd of over one thousand in Lake City, Florida. Here, Jones spoke on the necessities of female “purity and character.” For Jones, “facts” were “something that you can’t get over, you can’t get through it, neither can you get around it. It stands right there in your pathway an unmoved obstacle.” One “fact” that Jones listed was that “[purity] and character are the only two pillars that holds [a] woman up in this world.” If one “pillar” broke, Jones warned, “she then comes crumbling to the ground a wreck [and] the more you try to patch up the worse it will get. It is like cutting a ditch; the more you cut the bigger and deeper it will get.” He implored the audience to nurture female “purity and character” and avoid the “fall of a girl,” which Jones believed “nine times out of ten, is irreparable.” The crowd was apparently receptive to Jones’s message; a newspaper reporter wrote that the audience “could not help but agree with all the hard things he had said.” The sermon’s message, the reporter concluded, “was what Lake City had been needing for a long time”10 For Jones, female impurity was a disaster he wished every listener would avoid.11 The good society of Southern whites like Jones had “pure” and “pious” women giving moral direction to the family and community. The revivalist contrasted what he believed were positive and negative images of women. Other ministers used the image of the pious woman to call attention to the supposed moral shortcoming in men.12 In 1896, Episcopal Bishop Richard H. Wilmer of Mobile delivered a sermon contrasting female piety with the “unreligion [sic] of our men.” He chastened listeners who automatically assumed that women were de facto inheritors of religion, decrying the “different standard of morals for man and woman.” A parent, Wilmer exclaimed, “looks trembling to the future of his boys,” yet “confidently to the time when his daughters shall unfold the graces and refinements of the Christian womanhood.” The bishop disclaimed any hint that the “Divine Being” ordained this supposed spiritual disparity. Men, he assured, were “originally not less religious than the woman,” and the “Divine mind . . . recognizes no such distinction.” Instead, Wilmer claimed that God’s “distribution of . . . mercies” and “enforcement of . . . authority, knows neither male nor female.” He labeled male

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“unreligion” a “self-made distinction” that improperly permitted men to behave in ways “considered wrong and denied to the woman.”13 For Wilmer, Christianity was essential for his good society. And women – while not inherently more religious than men for the bishop – served as an example for what he believed the “moral” lifestyle looked like. In his sermon, Wilmer used the “pious” female image to chasten the “unreligion” of men. In other ministerial accounts, women were not the acclaimed models of faith. In his posthumously published 1900 memoir, Methodist Minister Simon Peter Richardson of Augusta, Georgia recalled visiting Albany, in 1851, a town he called “a hard place in more respects than one.” During one of his sermons, the wife of a wealthy merchant, who Richardson called a “nominal member of the Church,” grew visibly upset. Calling her “Sister H.,” Richardson recollected that she objected when he “denounced parlor card playing and dancing.” After the service, Sister H. reportedly complained to her husband “who was a man of good sense and, though not in the Church, knew what a good woman ought to be.” Because of the husband’s seeming moral intelligence, the merchant “took sides against his wife,” causing her to reflect. Wearing a conservative sunbonnet at the next morning’s service, Richardson recalled, Sister H. “came to the altar” and then “rose up and gave the church a scrap of her experience.” She had “no where to go except to God” after the minister’s “reproof.” Thus, she chose to confess her sins and renounce her previous life. Richardson summarize that the woman “lived long” and “was faithful to God and the Church” all along.14 In Sister H., Richardson identified the “good woman” by using contrasting images of the same person. The converted Sister H. was his ideal, and the seemingly obstreperous woman was not. When compared to other accounts, Richardson made men – to include himself – the instigators of Sister H.’s supposed salvation. Rather than juxtaposing the sinful man and pious woman, then, Richardson reversed the roles. In other accounts, Richardson invoked a contrasting image of female piety and male sinfulness. Recalling his 1851 visit to Tallahassee, Richardson declared it a place of “peace and prosperity” and “religion and morality.” The reason for this supposed social harmony was Tallahassee’s Methodist church and its “deeply pious” women who positively influenced nearly everyone in the community. The minister recalled confronting one wealthy merchant who, while a member of the church, also sold whiskey. This was evidence for Richardson that the merchant did not “live in line” with his faith. Thus, during a service, the minister refused communion to

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the man. A church official “excitedly said that by my rashness we had lost three hundred dollars.” Richardson reassured the official, speculating that the denied communicant would recognize his error and abandon his liquor business. Soon after the confrontation, the minister reported seeing discarded barrels of whiskey in front of the merchant’s store. The merchant confronted Richardson “cordially,” and assured the minister that “he would sell no more whisky.” According Richardson, the merchant then fitted him with a new suit and the two became “lifelong friends.” The minister concluded, “His convictions were right and in line with his preacher, but, like thousands of Church members, his life was wrong.”15 In this ministerial reminiscence, we find a source that linked social stability with religious devotion and temperance. He claimed that Tallahassee, with its “pious” Methodist women, was a place of “peace and prosperity” that had overcome its tremulous past. To sustain this moral atmosphere, he believed that all alcohol consumption needed to cease. As we will soon see, many ministers and women teamed in the years following Reconstruction to further the cause of temperance reform. The ideal society that they sought to create was one without alcohol consumption, an activity that they believed contributed to communal decay. The description given by the minister outlined his belief that the whiskey-selling merchant, much like the card playing Sister H., led a “wrong” life. When this behavior ceased, Richardson perceived a moral good that he believed would benefit all of society. Woven into his accounts was a sense that the religiously devout woman did not behave like the argumentative Sister H., but she was the “pious” caretaker of Tallahassee’s Methodist church. The “true woman” was the religiously devoted woman for Richardson and others. With the assistance of “pious” women, a society could progress along a supposedly more moral path. Laypersons also drew connections between womanhood and the moral lifestyle. Samuel Floyd of Apalachicola, Florida frequently lamented what he believed was his sinfulness while recalling his “pious” mother. In 1872, this single 26-year-old lumber inspector kept a diary of his daily events and reflections.16 In his mother, Floyd reminisced, “truth and honesty were virtues that never shone so brightly.” While he listed nothing specific, Floyd worried that his frequent moral shortcomings dishonored his “poor mother” and ignored her “[virtuous]” teachings. Calling himself as a “model moderner, [sic]” he wondered whether he had succumbed to the “improvements made in this human progression.” Continuing, Floyd questioned whether he had “purchased” his success “at the expense of morality.”17 Floyd’s writings brought the discussion

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of female “piety” directly to the changes influencing the unfinished South. As we previously witnessed, after Reconstruction, material progress became a prized value for many Southern whites living in the region. The good society of these Southern whites made railroads, ports, and modern agriculture proof that political redemption had delivered prosperity to the region. For this “model moderner,” however, we find someone struggling to reconcile the culture of progress with his moral direction. When reflecting on the social realities of his time, Floyd’s rock of Christian morality was decidedly feminine. The Christian mother was, for many men like him, essential for developing a moral intelligence. The realities of the post-Civil War South motivated some people to rethink how women could remain active cultivators of personal morality. With fewer Southern men returning from the battlefields, postwar marriage rates declined.18 Suddenly, fewer women had an opportunity enter into family life. Southern educational reformers hoped that these single women could become mothers to society. Through female educational institutions, male educators hoped to create a socially involved gathering of “true women” who could positively influence public morality.19 Because female education was relatively new in the South, some white male educators spoke both optimistically and tentatively about the topic. In 1896, Charles C. Cox, the president of Georgia’s Southern Female College, authored the school’s promotional pamphlet. Evenings at the college, he wrote, were a “beautiful and impressive scene,” with students and teachers attending prayer meetings, reciting Bible verses, “earnestly” singing hymns, and praying “in solemn petition.” The college’s religious purpose, Cox proclaimed, was “to organize Christians for practical, systematic work.” He then recalled the influence of the college’s founder and first president, Milton E. Bacon. Cox called Bacon a “knight” whose uncommon “ability, zeal, and chivalry” prompted him to begin the “novel and doubtful” endeavor of educating women. Commending his predecessor, Cox maintained that Bacon, “entered with whole soul into the arena for woman’s cause” where he battled the “prejudice” of those who disapproved. The founder’s ultimate purpose, Cox conjectured, was to create a school that would produce “the ideal woman” who was “consecrated and cultured.” Bacon’s “antebellum Southern conception and conservatism,” Cox qualified, would have revolted at the “ideal of womanhood” that adopted “masculinity and ‘Woman’s Rights.’” Continuing, Cox criticized “the heathen” who advanced “Woman’s Rights” and thereby “denied to woman the existence of

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soul . . . [and] her mind.” For the educator, “Woman’s Rights” kept women from becoming “penitent servants of the Christian faith.”20 After the Civil War, Southern white men like Cox reconsidered what “true womanhood” meant. He believed that female education had great potential for producing an “ideal woman,” who was “pious” and committed to building a “Christian” society. Cox’s definition of the “ideal woman” set limits for what he believed was, and was not, properly feminine. Clearly, “Woman’s Rights” fell outside of his “ideal woman” archetype. Our discussion of civil religion has focused on social values because they serve as the metaphorical bricks in the boundary walls surrounding the many perceived good societies of this era. Southern white men valued female devotion because they believed that the “pious” woman was a model for personal and social morality. For Cox, female devotion meant prayer and singing, but it did not mean “Woman’s Rights.” Cox was a Southern white progressive who believed that female education would produce positive results for society. While heralding this new effort, he also tried to place limits on how he believed women ought, and ought not, to behave in society. In essence, his “ideal woman” was neither too vocal nor too publicly involved. Other ministers, however, wanted to grant women more authority – particularly when temperance reform was at stake. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) formed in Ohio in 1872. Historian Ruth Bordin argued that the lingering tensions left by the war and Reconstruction delayed the organization’s growth in the former Confederacy. Southern white men, in particular, distrusted the Northern-born organization, which gave women a public voice and supported causes such as woman’s suffrage. By 1890, however, every former Confederate state had a chapter. Frances Willard, the WCTU’s national president from 1879-1898, helped allay Southern suspicions. In 1881, she toured the South and slowly convinced men and women to begin forming chapters. As we have repeatedly seen, many Southern whites made the image of the Northerner both demonic and welcoming. The “carpetbagger” was the harbinger of Reconstruction chaos, while the “welcome Northerner” was an unobtrusive assistant in rebuilding the South. While initially aligned with the former image, the WCTU lost its unfavorable implications for many Southern whites. They hoped that the organization would eliminate alcohol consumption – a vice they believed contradicted the moral character of their ideal society.21

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Recall that the educator Charles Cox tried to set limits on female involvement in society. An advocate of female education, he wanted to enforce a “conservative” prewar gender standard that he believed every “true woman” followed. By way of contrast, Methodist revivalist Sam Jones encouraged more female involvement in society when he commented on temperance.22 In one sermon, the former alcoholic Jones asked churches to lend more support for the WCTU. Saloons, the revivalist proclaimed, were “the greatest obstacles which lie in the way of our triumph of Christ and His Church in the world.” Many in the religious community, he argued, suffered from a “stultifying lethargy” when it came to “the evils of the saloon, and a disposition to evade responsibility.” To shift this tide of apathy, Jones called out to “aroused and consecrated [workers] for souls” such as the WCTU, who “[stand] for the ecclesiastical emancipation of [women].” He believed that women, when given a chance, preached “the risen Christ as acceptingly and as effectively as any one on whom holy hands have been laid in ordination by the church.”23 Countering those who wished to prohibit female preaching, Jones assumed that women would be effective ministers in the temperance movement. Pointing specifically to the “sainted” Mary T. Lathrap, Jones resolved that she was “called [by] God to preach the gospel.” Yet her own church, “refused to recognize officially that call because she was a woman.” The mention of Lathrap was particularly noteworthy. A Michigan native, Lathrap was a principal voice in the WCTU’s formation. In 1878, she became a licensed Methodist preacher and gave a rousing sermon at a WCTU meeting at Grand Rapids, which later circulated throughout the state. More women like Lathrap, Jones resolved, could reach “thousands of souls who are now untouched . . . if our churches would but acknowledge and officially recognize God’s call to women to preach the gospel.” The revivalist claimed that women comprised two-thirds of his church’s membership, and their “loyalty,” “devotion,” and “faithfulness under this system of justice” had been exemplary. Jones foresaw a “glad day when there shall be no sex distinction in service for the King of Kings.” Concluding his plea for more female involvement, Jones declared, “Oh, woman, heed God’s call to you! Join our ranks, and in addition to your church work, work for Him along the lines of prohibition and woman’s emancipation.”24 Traditionally, the “good society” relates to a philosophical effort to describe an ideal social condition that would maximize unity, peace, and prosperity while minimizing strife and conflict. Jones’s good society was a dry society. Alcohol, he averred, could only splinter society and

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alienate it from a Christian ideal that he sought to create. The “ecclesiastically emancipated” women of the WCTU were central in his account. With the power to minister, he hoped “devoted” women would help actualize this end. An enormously popular revivalist, Jones’s advocacy of temperance met favor with some women in the unfinished South. Writing in 1925, Mattie Coyle of Moultrie, Georgia called the 1880s a “turbulent period” in the area’s history. This “era of lawlessness,” she recalled, “was not checked until the good citizens of the County, after a hard fight, banished saloons.” She remembered citizens voting on the matter twice. Both times, however, the results favored “wet” advocates. According to Coyle, Sam Jones arrived in 1902 and “savagely [attacked] the saloons.” The sermon, she conjectured, prompted some citizens to form a “dry council,” made up of ministers and lay persons, who eventually cancelled eight to ten saloon licenses. “The banishment of saloons was a forward step in the moral, religious and educational progress in the County. Churches and schools came into existence, and the morale of the County rapidly improved.”25 As the saloon population decreased, Coyle resolved, the area’s moral condition improved. We see in this example a contrast between chaos and order. With Jones as the motivating impulse, Coyle affiliated alcohol consumption with the area’s disorder and prohibition with prosperity.26 The good society of many Southern white ministers was the dry society. Sam Jones and others appealed to women to assist in the effort, reasoning that their “devoted” presence would hasten a social good. Methodist minister, Rev. Alfred L. Woodward of Tallahassee also railed against alcohol use. “Bless every man and woman, every agency and instrumentality,” he wrote in 1915, “which has for its object the abolition of the infamous traffic in intoxicating drink. A traffic which is the blackest blot on the civilization of the age, the remaining relic of a barbarous past.” Woodward claimed “intoxicating drink” was the enemy of the “progressive” Southern family because it “produces crime,” “degrades manhood,” and “debauches youth.” Its toll on the family was, for Woodward, disastrous as it “makes women widows, and children orphans.” For the “drunkards wife,” Woodward announced, “the love-light has forever flown.” “Sobriety had its reward in the happy family life.” The juxtaposition of these images by Woodward was a stark illustration of the opposing lifestyles of a drunken and sober man. In the preacher’s eyes, the sober man was a necessary feature of his “progressive” good society.27 Women were not just victims for Woodward; rather, they were also his allies. The WCTU, a Northern institution, apparently carried no taint of carpetbagger-ism for Woodward. In 1909, he served on the

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temperance committee for the Florida Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. His committee issued a resolution, “to express our appreciation and approval of the work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of the State of Florida, and pledge them our support.”28 With Sam Jones and Woodward in mind, we see two white men who looked fondly upon the socially engaged woman. For the ministers, the devoted woman was an advocate of temperance and, by this association, a fellow laborer for a measure that both believed would eventuate in greater social stability. The “devoted” woman could be a positive influence for temperance reform, in the minds of Woodward and Jones. For others, the “ideal woman” was more reserved and avoided public advocacy and “Woman’s Rights.” In this study, we compare civil religion to a river. Just as the contours of a river are in a state of constant flux, the civil religious world of the postReconstruction South had neither one shape nor one voice. Instead, the many voices of the many Souths each competed to have their good society recognized and actualized. For different men of the post-Reconstruction South, “devoted” women were both socially active and socially withdrawn. In both instances, men identified what they believed the “ideal woman” was and was not. In the following decades after Reconstruction, Southern white Protestants began questioning whether a Catholic woman was, indeed, a “true” woman. The final chapter will examine in greater depth the influences of nativism in unfinished South during the 1910s.29 For now, we will investigate two opposing definitions of female devotion – one Catholic and the other Protestant. We will see how the religious position of a speaker shaped their definitions of female devotion and their perceptions of the good society. During the 1910s, nativism gripped the South and Catholics and Protestants began differing over what was, and was not, a proper expression of female religious devotion. In July 1916, Alice Ketchman took her Simple Vows as a Benedictine Sister at the Sacred Heart Academy in Cullman, Alabama. Thereafter assuming the name Sister Fidelis, her obligation lasted until July 2, 1919. In May 1919, however, Fidelis’s step-father, Ralph McCraney of Athens, Georgia, wrote Bishop Allen in Mobile demanding the immediate dispensation of his step-daughter. McCraney alleged that Fidelis had entered the convent at age seventeen, without parental consent. Moreover, he claimed that her mother was terminally ill and required Fidelis’s accompaniment for a trip to New York. Religious reasons also prompted the demand. “We being Protestants cannot take things in a Catholic light.” Claiming he had “no objections to her

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being a Catholic,” McCraney did not “intend for her to be a nun.” Contentiously, McCraney concluded that he would remove his step-daughter with or without the dispensation.30 Allen promptly responded. “I would not feel justified in dispensing Sister Fidelis from her vows because her relatives are opposed to her being in the convent.” Allen then rebutted the step-father, writing that Fidelis did indeed enter the convent as an adult; therefore, she was old enough to choose her religious vocation. Concluding with his own stern warning, the bishop wrote, “I would not advise you to interfere one day before that time. I have never yet seen anyone that interfered with a vocation of a son or a daughter happy over the result. Indeed I have seen more than one bitterly bewail the day that they interfered with a son or a daughter’s vocation.” Allen’s message left little doubt about his position. “No one has a right to come between the soul and Almighty God.”31 In the step-father, Allen saw a shortsighted man whose beliefs clearly conflicted with divine will. Holding a similar sense of defiance, McCraney did not recognize the legitimacy of Allen’s faith, nor his daughter’s vocation. Sister Fidelis also wrote Bishop Allen to “state her case.” She confirmed that religious “prejudice” had prompted her family to demand dispensation. “[Surrounded]” by Protestant relatives who would “not permit” her “to make vows,” Fidelis worried that her staying at the convent would “cause a great disturbance.” She sensed that it was “God’s will” for her to leave, and asked the bishop for dispensation. Fidelis assured Allen she was “firmly enough instructed in my Holy religion to never fall.” Her parents, she regretted, planned to “take me by force” if necessary.32 Allen replied sternly, “I cannot understand how the views of anyone should come between you and Almighty God. You promised before God’s altar to devote yourself, in the Benedictine community to his service for three years.” Without “a just cause,” Allen saw no reason for dispensation. “[The] whim of your parents or relatives is not a just reason for dispensing you or anyone from your solemn obligations to Almighty God.” If her parents were “reasonable,” Allen resolved, they would permit her to fulfill the obligation. The bishop then reminded Sister Fidelis that she was twenty-two, and “free to decide” if she felt “called to religious life.” She could depart in June, he assured, “without any stain on your career” or “opposition from your superiors.”33 The Superior of the Academy, Mother Ottilia, wrote to inform Allen that Fidelis had received his letter. Fidelis’s mother, Ottilia confirmed, was ill; however, Ottilia suspected that the entire situation was “a scheme of her non-Catholic relatives on the mother’s side (who are very bitter).” The bewildered nun then claimed that Fidelis’s

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mother “spent a few days here with her daughter” and “sent material for her religious garb.”34 Later, Ottilia wrote Allen to confirm that Ralph McCraney had arrived on June 4, and “forced” Fidelis to leave. “Under the circumstances it may be best that she did go. It might have caused an endless talk and scandal in the daily paper.”35 When considering Allen and McCraney, we see how the position of the speaker – one a Catholic bishop and the other a Protestant layperson – influenced their definitions of female devotion. In this case, both sides saw the other’s concept of female devotion as inherently defective. Allen was particularly insistent that Sister Fidelis’s term was nothing short of sacred. Moreover, he believed that the step-father’s tampering would result in divine disfavor for all involved. McCraney obviously disagreed, finding no validity in the Catholic vocation. The “true” woman of McCraney was anything but Catholic. Both were residents of the South, yet their contrasting perceptions of religion and gender characterized the tensions of an era. In 1916, Florida elected Sidney J. Catts as governor, an inexperienced candidate whose controversial antiCatholic platform plank undoubtedly won him a surplus of votes. Many white Protestants in the region distrusted Catholics, believing that their “patriotic” loyalties rested with Rome and Rome alone. Catholics rebutted, arguing that nativist propagandists had manufactured such claims, which had no foundation in reality. The Sister Fidelis controversy, then, contained broader implications about what one’s religious affiliation meant for social stability. Scores of Southern nativists fretted that Catholics were planning to overtake America. Concerned Catholics asserted that nativists were wrongfully alienating members of the faith from public life. As this contest continued, each side articulated their vision for what America ought to be and, in the process, made their values seem inherently better than their opposition’s values. As a value for Southern white men, female devotion came to have many meanings. We have seen how references to female devotion could imply both restrictions on, and enhancements of, female public involvement. One male educator assured that the “ideal woman” avoided “Women’s Rights” because it would detract from what he believed was “true” female piety. Some ministers, however, imagined “devoted” women as valuable advocates of temperance reform. Because of their religious devotion, the ministers reasoned that women could help actualize a “dry” society. The controversy surrounding Fidelis’s departure from the convent provides another interpretation of female devotion. For the Catholic voices involved, the actions of the Protestant family were the product of a flawed understanding of religious devotion.

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Likewise, Fidelis belonged to a family that believed Catholic devotion lacked validity. The collective meanings, implications, and uses of female devotion identified thus far helps further reveal the multivocal reality of the unfinished South’s civil religious landscape. As we shifted from different topics – albeit education, temperance, religious vocations, or anti-Catholicism – we found different ways that men characterized what female religious devotion was and was not. The Devoted “New Woman” After the Civil War, Tallahassee’s Susan Bradford Eppes recalled, “the Southern woman, throughout the poor conquered South, realized her duty; sacrificing self upon the altar of love and, putting her shoulder to the wheel, she made ready to help men.” The “crushed and conquered” soldiers returned to “poverty and want,” she wrote.36 “[The] Old South was dead, her economic system was in ruins, her wealth had taken wings, her man-power was depleted.” According to the author, the “[heart]-sick and weary” men “gathered up the threads of life” and rebuilt the South, “aided and upheld by that which was ever been to man an aspiration and a light in the dark hours of life, the unselfish love of woman.” It was this “[heavy]-hearted” woman who “resolutely put aside all semblance of woe” and “performed the heaviest and most disagreeable tasks with a smile and a song.”37 Eppes’s “Southern woman” was an essential feature of her redemption narrative. Earlier we identified the “redemption narrative” as a common story told by Southern whites about war, Reconstruction, and political redemption. The story glorified the supposed transformation of the post-Reconstruction South. With political redemption in hand, whites believed that a new era of material progress unfolded, through the aid of white Democrats, industrious builders, and even unobtrusive Northerners. In Eppes’s story, we see the “devoted” woman contributing to society in a way that she had not previously done. Indeed, with war, Reconstruction, emancipation, urbanization, and industrialization, came many new roles for white women in Southern society.38 In 1894, Josephine Henry identified the “The New Woman of the New South” as educated, urbane, and socially active.39 Historian Anastasia Sims described how the “new women” in North Carolina kept “tenacious hold” on the “feminine ideal” of the antebellum South. In the new urban South, the historian explained how women brought “the power of indirect influence and moral authority” from their Old South world into the social reform campaigns of the New South. Long before they could vote, Sims averred, women became politically influential as they conducted “the chores of public housekeeping.”40 For many Southern white women, religious

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devotion became a value that compelled them to become more socially involved. Their good society found women who were active civic participants. While Southern white men heralded the “pious” example of the “Christian mother,” then, some Southern white women brought this image into public space. 41 By the end of the nineteenth century, missionary activity became one way that Southern women engaged in social matters.42 In the North, foreign missions appealed to women wanting to become independent representatives of their respective faiths in foreign lands. Likewise, in the South, some educated middle- to upper-class women joined the effort with similar intentions.43 In 1882, the Christian Index, a Baptist publication from Atlanta, printed a letter from an anonymous female missionary. With the gospel in hand, the missionary wrote, any woman could take “her God-appointed place in human society.” The author theorized that since “the Fall,” women had become fervent advocates of faith, offering “the divine remedy for sin.” She exclaimed, “the evangelization of the world” required that more women become missionaries. Those unwilling to leave the South, the author continued, could minister to “the spiritually destitute in our own land.” Here, “multitudes of godless” people needed a female influence. “Is it consistent with the lessons and the example of Christ,” the missionary asked, “to neglect the poor who are famishing for the bread of life in our own country?” To her “dear sisters in Christ,” the author requested continued support for the evangelization of “those who are far removed from the sanctuaries of God, shut out from Christian associations and Christian sympathy, denied, with their children, the sweet influences of God’s holy day.”44 Using the image of female devotion as a recruiting tool, the letter writer asked more women to follow her lead. Worldwide and regional “godlessness” was the enemy that she hoped the devoted female missionary would defeat. This author’s good society was a Christian society, her scope was both domestic and worldly, and her agents of reform were those who she believed were devoted women. For many female Southern white missionaries, devotion meant converting the unconverted at home and abroad. An 1885 pamphlet by the Women’s Missionary Society (WMS) of Florida printed a letter sent to Mary A. Turnbull of Miccosukee, from Laura Haygood, a missionary in Shanghai, China. Born in Watkinsville, Georgia, Haygood began teaching in Atlanta in 1872 while also helping with domestic missions. In 1884, an Atlanta preacher’s sermon regarding foreign missions motivated Haygood to join the endeavor. Her first mission was to Shanghai

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where, before her death in 1898, Haygood founded the McTyeire Home and School.45 In the letter to Turnbull, Haygood beseeched readers to keep “broader room in your hearts” for the “work,” “hope,” and “plans” of the WMS. Describing the conditions of her mission, Haygood observed that Chinese parents had begun allowing their children to attend “foreign schools.” She suspected that missionaries had “overcome” the initial “prejudices” they once faced. With more children coming to the schools, Haygood reasoned that her fellow missionaries presently had “the best access to homes and mothers.” This made Haygood particularly optimistic. To spread “Christian truth,” she resolved, the missionaries would need to convert the mothers of China.46 In Haygood’s mind, a converted mother meant that a converted family was soon to follow. As more women like her became involved in social endeavors, the definition of female devotion assumed a new character. Haygood’s good society was Christian, whether in the South or abroad. To influence this end, she created a truism that equated the devoted woman with the stable Christian society. In addition to foreign and domestic missions, the temperance campaign became another venue for female social involvement. As with the mission example, here we find women mixing Christian language with social imperatives. In Pensacola, the WCTU sent a form letter to “Christian” men to vote for prohibition. Writing as “The women of Escambia County,” their “plea for help” claimed that the “safety and . . . happiness” of women was at risk. The letter called “the liquor traffic” the “curse of the world.” Escambia County, the letter continued, was “groaning under its burden of cost and crime” due to this “deadly enemy of our happiness,” which ruins families and “[costs] us many sleepless nights and crushed the hopes and prospects of hundreds of our homes by claiming our loved ones as its victims.” Because they could not vote, the “helpless” authors called for “protection” from those who possessed “true manhood.” “We plead that you can come to our rescue and cast your vote on the first day of October in defense of our home for the protection of our boys who are yet in their innocence.”47 Appealing to both the practical and religious, Pensacola’s WCTU equated alcohol consumption with chaos and despair. Continued alcohol use signaled, for the women, the degeneration of family life and the continuance of social sin. Southern white ministers expressed similar concerns. For both, the good society followed a Christian code that they believed would prohibit all alcohol consumption. In this example, we find women becoming agents of prohibition, united in their own organization and speaking on their own behalf. Even though

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they could not cast a ballot, this collection of women endeavored to pass a measure that they believed would eventuate in a more stable society. For the female agents of the WCTU, their religious language punctuated their sense for what society ought to be. By bringing their faith into the public square, in other words, Southern white women competed to have their good society recognized and actualized. Their good society was a “dry” society. Alcohol consumption, subsequently, symbolized social disorder. Female religious devotion made prohibition happen in Leon County, according to Tallahassee’s Luella Knott. In 1905, Knott told a WCTU convention about how Tallahassee became “a prohibition city.” “Well, it was hard work and prayer that did it,” she declared. Knott recalled a critical town meeting where “both sides, the wet and the dry” stated their case. She and some other women attended the meeting and “kept on praying,” petitioning God “to confuse the speakers and not let them make good speeches for the wet side but to make the speakers for the dry side silver-tongued orators.” The delighted Knott relayed, “God heard all of our prayers.” Calling the “wet” speaker “one of the most brilliant men in the State,” he climbed to the podium and “lost his place in the manuscript.” For the remainder of his speech, Knott recollected, “he mumbled and grew red in the face and had to sit down – and God did that for us.” The “dry” speaker, on the other hand, “made some brilliant points and God helped him.” Citizens voted on the matter soon after the meeting, and Knott alleged that “wet” advocates began recruiting black voters. “We prayed that God would let the negroes put ‘no’ where they should put ‘yes,’ and ‘yes’ where they should put ‘no,’ and sign them in the wrong places – and they did just what we asked God to make them do.”48 Many Southern whites believed the enfranchised blacks were incapable civic participants. For Knott, the petitions of devoted women helped reverse this perceived deficiency and contribute to the “transformation” of Tallahassee. For Knott, female devotion meant praying for prohibition. The actualization of this end proved to her that God had favored both her prayers and social intentions. She became one of a chorus of female voices, each claiming that sobriety marked the good society. A member of Albany’s WCTU had a similar message of divine providence, female devotion, and prohibition. “[With] prayer and unswerving faith,” the author proclaimed that her chapter of the WCTU “worked zealously and untiringly to interest other Christian men and women in the great temperance cause.” At the start, she claimed that prohibition “was not a popular subject.” However, the townspeople soon grew accepting. The author called July 30, 1907, “a memorable

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day in Albany,” because “the Empire State of the South” became the fifth state to pass “the statewide prohibition law.” As the “church bells rang out the glad news,” the “faithful” women of the WCTU sent “Prayers of praise and thanksgiving . . . from [their] hearts.” Just as with previous accounts, the image of evil and good respectively aligned with wet and dry. Georgia after prohibition, she reasoned, was a better place because “Christian men and women” voted for prohibition. Furthermore, she placed the “zealous” religious devotion of the WCTU at the heart of this transitional narrative. Just as Southern white men made redeemer Democrats responsible for political redemption, this author made the WCTU responsible for what she believed was a divine end. Our discussion of the good society has emphasized change and fluidity. When we discussed white perceptions of political redemption earlier, we found a collection of voices whose primary concern was ridding the South of the “radical” Republicans. Political redemption meant for them, divine liberation and an era of progress. The author of this account, however, had a different agenda and, therefore, pictured the good society in a different, “dry,” light. The civil religion of the post-Reconstruction era was diverse. From white Democrats in 1877, to white female reformers in 1907, different goals resulted in different visions of what each believed society ought to be.49 In both missionary activity and temperance reform, we find the devout woman working to reform the South and the world. Their frequent Christian allusions punctuated a belief that their actions would bring about greater unity, peace, and prosperity. We must note, however, that while evangelical Protestantism was numerically dominant in the South, non-Protestant women were also involved in social reform. The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) formed in 1893 after the Jewish Woman’s Congress at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. By 1896, a chapter formed in Mobile. Here, Jewish women thereafter became a visible part of the culture of female social activism. Maintaining a distinct Jewish identity also became a key purpose of the organization.50 Their stated purpose was to forge “closer relations among Jewish Women” and encourage “social reform” motivated by “the best philanthropic thought.” In 1912, Mrs. J.S. Simon, the President of the Council, commended the organization’s efforts to help with schools and hospitals in Mobile. She also commented on Jewish family life. “The aim of each member of this Council should be to revere and to sustain our religion, and to do our utmost to transmit religious fervor to our families.” Drawing attention specifically to religious observance, she announced, “The efforts of the committee to protest against Sabbath shopping we endorse, as

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we should, respect as much as we can our Holy Sabbath, and show our faith in Judaism by a more frequent attendance at Divine Worship.”51 Simon believed members of her organization were religiously devoted agents of social reform.52 As we will see in the next chapter, white Jews and Protestants in the unfinished South practiced different institutional religions, but many shared a similar civil religion. That is, members from both faith communities tended to express agreement about the defining features of their good society. While differing from their Protestant counterparts on religious doctrine, both placed “philanthropic thought” at the forefront of their collective efforts. In mentioning this example, we see that female devotion was not the lone property of Southern white Protestants. Jewish women publicized their religious devotion, while also trying to unite the faithful within their small collection of practitioners. If we place this example in conversation with the other voices sampled thus far, we find that female devotion was an unfinished value. The devoted woman was both socially involved and socially reticent; she was both a committed Protestant and a Catholic nun; and she was both a philanthropic Christian and a philanthropic Jew. Next, we will focus on yet another context where men and women idealized the devoted women, the Lost Cause. When placed in context with the rest of this study, we will see that the Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among many. For white female missionaries and temperance advocates, the good society was “Christian” and “dry.” Speaking with a same tone of ultimacy, male and female agents of the Lost Cause pictured a good society where Southerners always remembered their “true history.” The “ideal woman” within this society assured that this history would remain in the minds of white Southerners for generations to follow. The “Glorious Women” of the Confederacy “The highest symbol of Southern virtue was the Confederate woman,” affirmed historian Charles Reagan Wilson. “Southern ministers,” he continued, “viewed woman as virtuous because she was the symbol of home and family.” Women, then, represented “the old-time virtue” ministers wanted to publicize as the currents of the New South brought change to the region. Consistent with Wilson’s observation, some white male Lost Causers in the unfinished South made women the epitome of “Southern virtue.” Idealizing her supposed nationalistic and religious devotion during and after the war, men frequently leveled glowing remarks about Confederate “true womanhood.” With our previous discussions in mind, however, we begin to see how the Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among many. “Without the Lost Cause,” Wilson charged,

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“no civil religion would have existed. The two were virtually the same.”53 Departing from Wilson, the present study seeks not to discover “the” postwar South’s civil religion. Instead, it is a decentered history of civil religion. Chapters examine the similarities and differences existing within and between the various social groups of this era and, as a result, claims no civil religious consensus. Northerners, Southerners, blacks, whites, ministers, laypeople, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews each had unique agendas and unique perceptions of what the South ought to be. Even within the Protestant white upper- to middle-class, different topics evoked different perceived good societies. Men and women frequently linked femininity with religious devotion, but leveled a series of rules to define this value. Devotion could mean a restricted education, a greater role in ministering in foreign missions, a commitment to legally enacting prohibition reform, or the avoidance/honoring of a vocation commitment. What follows describes how some Southern whites idealized a form of female devotion that related to the Lost Cause. From memorial activity, to diminishing the role of slavery as a reason for the Civil War, to casting Abraham Lincoln as an illegitimate idiot, some women believed that their devotion to the Lost Cause would help the South remember its “true history.” Just as some Southern white men linked female devotion to temperance reform, others delivered glowing remarks for Confederate women and their female ancestors. Identifying himself as a “Veteran,” one member of Thomasville’s Co. A. 57th Georgia Infantry – or the “Dixie Boys” – wrote an obituary for Amanda Seward, who died September 3, 1897. The author observed that many years had passed since the war, but the “boys in gray” would never forget Seward’s “bountiful hand” and “sympathetic spirit” that “so generously supplied the wants” of soldiers. For this, he wrote, Steward stood “in the front rank in the memory of Confederate Veterans.” The author called her a “glorious women” whose “spirit of love and patriotism” was remarkable. Steward, he claimed, gave freely from her “large wealth” to feed “hungry Confederate soldiers.” Her “good cheer” came to them in the form of “heavy-laden boxes of good things prepared and dispatched by her loving hands.” When “exposed to the cold winds,” the author remembered soldiers “[called] down the blessings of Almighty God upon Mrs. Amanda Seward, who had provided him with warm and comfortable clothing, at her own expense, and from pure devotion to the Southern Cause, and her unselfish love for the ‘Boys who wore the Gray.’”54 In his reminiscence, the author idealized Steward’s “pure devotion,” and related it to her wartime service. Similarly, in April 1897, the Albany chapter of the United

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Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) hosted a Confederate Memorial Day celebration. The newspaper article promoting the event called it a “pretty idea,” and characterized the women as “full of enthusiasm” and “determined not to let the spirit of their order die.” The women of the UDC, the article read, wanted “to make pleasure for those who did so much for them in the past.” Concluding, the author praised the “peculiarly appropriate” efforts of the UDC. “[It] ought to touch a responsive chord in the breasts of our veterans.”55 For both authors, the “pure devotion” of Confederate women both during and after the war was a clear social asset. Other Southern white men would repeat these themes. In this context, the “true woman” of the Confederacy pictured by men was sufficiently “devoted” to the South. For many Southern white men, the “patriotic” woman devoted herself to the Southern cause both during and after the war. At a Confederate Memorial Day celebration in Monticello, Florida, Scott D. Clarke commented on the “instrumental” role women had played since the war in erecting monuments to the South’s “fallen heroes.” He contended that this “should never be allowed to go backward or stand still.” Monuments, qualified Clarke, could never fully do “justice” to these Confederate soldiers. But the stone representations would “at least testify in some enduring form our admiration of the greatest traits that have over adorned and dignified character.” He then faced the women in the audience responsible for the monuments. “By their spirits and their deeds the women of the Confederacy are equal sharers with its soldiers of a glory which one could not have achieved without other.” For their “devotion,” “heroism,” and “Christ-like ministrations,” Clarke resolved, “let the recording Angel dipping his glowing pen in the golden chalice of the sun write upon the great scroll of Heaven ‘immortal.’”56 For Clarke, the “devoted” Confederate woman was destined for immortality. The connection of devotion, religion, nationalism, and womanhood appeared in other pubic speeches delivered by admiring men. In 1910, the UDC in Lakeland, Florida invited Tallahassee’s Park Trammell to speak at a monument unveiling. Admitting that he was not a wartime veteran, Trammell claimed that his Southern background nevertheless made him “naturally proud of the invitation to join with you in paying honor to the loyal followers of the Southern cross” and “doubly proud . . . because it came to me from the Daughters of the Confederacy.” The “noble” members of the UDC, he remarked, descended from the “devoted and loyal women who suffered and sacrificed” during the war. Commenting on the monument, Trammell called it a “beautiful,” “magnificent,” and “glorious . . . memorial to the sacred memory of our gallant dead.” Moreover, the

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“memories” of “sorrow,” “grief,” “affection,” and “romance” captured in the monument testified to the “consistency,” “true devotion,” “ardent prayers,” and “loving deeds” of the “noble daughters of the South – then as now as pure and true women as ever lived to bless the sons of men.” According to Trammell, no “tongue or pen in all the world” could “pay a fit tribute to the women of our South land.” Continuing, he speculated that during the war, women remained safe from “the rude contact” of battle, but still “was left to her the sole management, not only of her children and household, but the vast estate and dependent people.” The wartime women “hesitated not to take upon her shoulders more severe duties and responsibilities.” Through “her energy, her foresight and business ability,” Trammell announced, she provided “raiment and food” to Southern soldiers, while helping “the sick and the wounded” by “sacrificing her own clothing for lent and bandages.” In the Southern woman, he reflected, “[blooms] the rose of all the world; her fragrance like some subtle perfume, penetrates all life and lifts it up to purer, nobler heights.” Because of the monument, the speaker concluded, “we are made to know that the patriotic love and devotion of the women of the South of those days has been transplanted into the minds and hearts of the women of the present generation.”57 In Trammell’s speech, we see the “true womanhood” moniker applied to female Confederate devotion. Speaking before an audience of committed Lost Causers, Trammell repeatedly commended the “true devotion” of the women seated before him. To preserve the past, he announced, was a “noble” deed worthy of great praise. For Trammell and others, the good society was mindful of its past – and women were the “devoted” caretakers of this tradition. As we previously witnessed, for some Southern white ministers, the “true woman” practiced a form of religious devotion that hastened temperance reform. In mentioning these differences, we begin to see the various concerns Southern whites had in the unfinished South after the war. Some wanted to change the future by eliminating alcohol. Others wanted to preserve the past by building monuments. Both competed to have their perceived good societies recognized and actualized in the unfinished South. When we listen closely to the voices of the Lost Cause, we hear a population who valued a form of female devotion that promised to preserve the past. Both men and women sent lavish praise to these devoted “Daughters of the South.” On February 1, 1865, a woman identified only as “Miss B.” reportedly delivered a speech to Thomasville’s returning troops as they traveled through Columbus. “Soldiers of the Army of Tennessee!” she proclaimed, “The ladies of

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Columbus, [are] fully aware of the severe reverses which have befallen you.” She commented on their “matchless valor” and ability to bear “hardships and privations of no ordinary character.” Continuing, Miss B. announced that even if the South became “demoralized” in loss, “the women and the army will ever be undismayed and undaunted.” She lauded the “high type of manliness” of the returning troops, claiming that even when facing “a foe always numerically superior” they “retired only when bravery availed nothing.” “Thank God,” she declared, “the spirit that animated the martyred dead who have fallen in this contest for freedom still lives within you.” Because of this, Miss B. continued, “We have no fears for the future. Our honor and welfare are in the keeping of brave hearts and strong arms.” She concluded that, even though women did not share “the dangers of the battlefield, our prayers shall follow you, and history, in recording your virtues, will write in letters of living light ‘They endured and conquered.’”58 The ideal woman imagined by Miss B. was a recorder of the male “virtues” that she believed appeared most forthrightly on the Civil War battlefields. For Miss B., the devoted woman was ceaselessly mindful of her Confederate past. Similar themes rang forth in a eulogy to Ella K. Trader of Mobile, written by Kate Cummings. Cummings commended Trader’s career as a Civil War nurse. The author doubted that “any war ever developed a more patriotic and whole-souled woman than [Trader].” Trader apparently died during the war. But before dying, Cummings recalled, Trader “intended [to open] an institution for soldiers’ orphans.” This left Cummings to conclude, “her noble life . . . will ever remain as a memorial of what can be done by a true woman.”59 The “true woman” of Cummings and others was a wartime hero and Lost Cause devotee. In a related commentary, Ella Davis of Albany called “Southern women” the unrivaled providers of “humanity” during the war. In this role, she wrote, women gave their “unselfish . . . devotion to the Southern soldiers.” Davis gave particular praise to Miss Lou Smith of LaGrange, Georgia, calling her one of the “active young women” whose “heart and soul” was “devoted to the cause of the South.” According to Davis, Smith was on a train to Atlanta when she received the news of Georgia’s secession. Smith and two other women bought materials at the next stop and “had the red and white bars together with a blue union in the upper left.” Davis triumphantly recalled that the flag hung from the engine’s front when it arrived in Atlanta, which evoked “the cheers and hurrahs of the people.” Smith’s brand of “devotion,” Davis continued, continued to unfold

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through the efforts of the Ladies Aid Society when it formed in January 1866. Year after year, she recalled, women “[scattered] flowers on the graves of the Confederate soldiers” and eventually raised enough money to build a monument.60 Also commenting on grave decorating, Annie White of Thomasville recalled how the tradition began. Living in Columbus, Georgia at this time, White remembered that the women of the town “had decided it would be a fitting Memorial to our dead who had given up their lives for their Country, to remember them by placing flowers on their graves annually, and thus keeping fresh their services to home and Country.” In the years that followed, she affirmed, others did the same and “Wherever a Soldier was buried, throughout our Southland, someone made an effort to have his grave decorated.”61 Sewing flags, spreading flowers, and erecting monuments were behaviors that many white Southern men and women associated with their ideal “Daughter of the South.” Each behavior symbolized devotion to a history that they desperately wanted to remember and honor. From this collection of voices, we find how this population’s good society had a gathering of women that devoted themselves to preserving a memory. Exemplary members of groups like the UDC earned merit from admirers, who believed the organization was a positive and necessary influence. In 1906 when Pensacola’s Emily C. Jones died, a statement from the UDC called her a “faithful and loyal Daughter of the South.” To the “noble soldiers of the Confederacy,” of whom her three brothers belonged, “she gave . . . her sympathy and aid.” When the war finished, the statement continued, “she chose from that army of heroes ‘A soldier of the Confederacy’ for her life’s companion.” She was, the writing concluded, a “thoughtful,” “kind,” and “fearless champion of the ‘Lost Cause.’”62 For Jones and the likeminded, the UDC was a place where women practiced their devotion to the Lost Cause. The UDC and the previously mentioned WCTU were two of the many organizations of this era. Each spoke on behalf of a different perceived good society. One group wanted to rid the South of alcohol, and the other wanted to preserve the past. Yet, at the same time, this image of female devotion – in the form of a profound commitment to a specific cause – was prominent. Understanding white perceptions of the good society after Reconstruction requires that we continually reorient our focus. In doing this, we begin to see how a value like female devotion could assume a host of meanings and connect to a broader array of happenings that characterized the era. The unfinished South was a land of tremendous change after

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Reconstruction. With populations growing, railroads sprouting, cities developing, and industry flourishing, many white Southerners struggled to maintain a sense of distinctiveness. Despite its quest to retain Southern tradition, some historians have identified the UDC as the offspring of the South’s new culture of progress. Historian Elizabeth Grace Hale argued that the UDC’s rhetoric of “Old South nostalgia” was actually “the funhouse mirror of New South progress.”63 According to historian Karen L. Cox, the organization’s emphasis on education certainly bore the mark of a progressive culture. Cox asserted that the UDC cemented “Confederate culture” through perpetuating a Southern-favoring “true history” of the Civil War – which among other things, downplayed the role that slavery played during the prewar buildup. Calling the UDC “Confederate Progressives,” Cox noted how their emphasis on institutionalizing education and influencing legislation resembled other progressive movements of the era.64 Echoing a similar conclusion, historian Edward Ayers claimed the UDC “was not simple evidence of Southern distinctiveness,” but rather “ironic evidence that the South marched in step with the rest of the country.” The organization was one of nearly five hundred social clubs forming in the North and South, each unifying around shared histories and geographies. Many of these groups – the UDC included – used the innovative organizational techniques of the time to advance their message.65 The women of the UDC combined their efforts to perpetuate a “true history” they believed future generations needed to hear. While frequently critical of the New South, the UDC’s organizational structure and social agenda were indicative of the progressive era. In the unfinished South, the call for “education” was a common sound from the UDC. Through monuments, newspaper articles, speeches, and formalized education, these women entered a campaign to sustain a memory that they believed was sacred. With the stated goal of educating “the children of the Southland,” women in Pensacola formed a chapter of the UDC in 1899. Organizers foresaw the UDC instilling in future generations, “loyalty and devotion to our country and [to] our flag,” while also promoting “admiration, reverence, and love [for] the brave men . . . who laid down their lives in defense of the purest principles of patriotism in 1861-65.”66 To excite interest in the group, Mrs. A.E. McDavid began writing a monthly newspaper column in 1907. In her first article, she called out: Daughters of our dear Southland, awake! Before you is a great and noble work. Think of why your fathers and mothers bore and accomplished during the four long, weary years in

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which war raged in our fair country. Think of the brave boys who went to the front, never to return; of the dear ones at home, of the Confederacy. A Confederate past, McDavid worried, would fade without the UDC’s “noble work.” She asked all women to “[bond] together,” and “hand down to future generations the story of how the gallant southern soldiers fought.” Devotion to the Confederacy was, for McDavid, an imperative for Southern women. Forgetfulness, she fretted, would leave the “children of the Southland” without the education she believed they needed.67 In another article, McDavid emphasized that the UDC would not contribute to continued sectional agitation. She painted a scene wherein two former Confederates meet at a memorial unveiling. One veteran “warmly decried” the Confederate memorial “or any organization of Confederates,” claiming that such things kept “bitterness of the strife” alive, leading “rising generations” to “continue their hatred toward each other.” The other veteran posed a counterargument. Confederate organizations, the fictitious soldier retorted, prompted younger generations to “search for the truth” about “the conflict.” With this “truth” in hand, “future generations” could make “correct historic statements” that would “benefit” all members of “our common country.” Not surprisingly, McDavid reasoned that “the latter was right.” For her, “education” meant remembering the UDC’s version of the Southern past, but forgetting the sectional strife. In her good society, women were the “devoted” caretakers of this “noble” memory.68 Education was a leading concern for the UDC. At public events, women often told their “true history” of their Confederate past to achieve and promote this end. To raise funds for the Loring Monument in 1907, Saint Augustine’s UDC sold a pamphlet with a printed speech by a woman identifying herself only as “the Historian.” Speaking in the third person, she began by expressing her “honor,” “love,” “loyalty,” and “enthusiasm” for her “beloved South.” After lending praise to Confederate veterans, she declared that it would be “impossible not to include the women” who “inspired” and “encouraged” soldiers, and “gave and sacrificed” with “dauntless enthusiasm and fortitude” during the war. The Historian urged attendees to “represent their mothers not less than their fathers” in their remembrances. The “sacred lives” of wartime men and women, she continued, would remain alive in “song and story” as well as “the steadfast preservation” of Southern “principles and ideals.” She suspected that memorials suitably captured the “undying deeds” of the past, but this alone could not “render our heroes immortal.”

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For the legacy of the Confederacy to continue, she claimed that future generations would need to hear the “true history” of the South. The Historian recoiled when imagining a future generation that thought their relatives had “died in vain.” She demanded that Southern women “chisel the principles” of the past onto the “hearts and souls of the Southern children to the second and third and the fourth and the fifth generation.” With caution, she warned the audience to avoid “[stirring] up strife or [raking] the smoldering ashes of enmity and wrath.” Rather, the Historian encouraged attendees “to keep sacred the deeds of our dead by giving to those who shall follow us, the heritage of a just and truthful record of how their ancestors died and why.” She imagined a future where “no haze of ignorance nor smoke of prejudicial dim” would “obscure the clear portrait of their patriotism from the eyes of their descendants.” The principal content of the Historian’s “true history” was the “undying principle” of “state’s rights.” The “signs of the times,” she lamented, showed that “Federal encroachment” had persisted in an “unceasing effort to centralize power.” If Southerner’s forgot the “undying principal” of their past, the Historian warned, “misrule and tyranny” would result. If, however, the UDC “educated” Southerners, she believed that they would have the “courage,” “fortitude,” and “steadfastness” to “sustain them through” the “struggle” for “state’s rights.” Calling again to the audience, the Historian beckoned, “forget not that your most magnificent inscription to the Southern dead cannot be written on marble or parchment alone.” While “heavenward” monuments could “display the glory of our dead, they shall have crumbled and faded” over time. She concluded: The Star Spangled Banner waves over an united country, God grant that it may continue to do so; but to that end teach the children to love and reverence it as the upholder of constitutional freedom, not military despotism, as the emblem of the Right and the Liberty for which its great God-father meant it to stand; and never let them forget that the Stars and Bars and the Starry Cross of the Southern Confederacy are twice holy; as the symbols of Eternal Truth, springing pheonix-like from the ashes of her dead defenders; and as the pass of Glory covering sacred graves.69 In the extended commentary of the Historian, we find one who considered the “true woman” of the South to be a devoted patron of the Lost Cause and its “true history.” Without devoted women to “educate” coming generations, the “undying principles” of the South would fade, and the nation would crumble. Her good society was mindful of a particular version of the Southern past. Yet at the same time, the Historian was a product of her era. She spoke to a large audience in a time when Southern women had a more prominent role in public affairs. Her principal concern was building a good society, wherein her “true history” guided the Southern white mind.

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To do this, she called out to likeminded women to become pious devotees of the Lost Cause. Other women of this era committed themselves with a similar vigor and intensity to different causes. The “ideal woman” of the unfinished South could be a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Woman’s Missionary Society, National Council of Jewish Women, a Catholic convent, or the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In each organization, women pictured themselves as devoted agents of a particular cause, which they believed contributed positively to society. These women were some of the many voices of the many Souths, all in competition against different forces to have their social values recognized and actualized. The Historian’s organization was arguably the offspring of a progressive society. Her push for education mirrored national efforts to inculcate the nation’s youth in institutionalized settings. The UDC’s concern for educating future generations eventuated in the formation of the Children of the Confederacy (CC) in Alexandria, Virginia in 1896. A 1915 program of the national UDC meeting in San Francisco printed a “Ritual” designed to open CC meetings, which tied together themes of education, religion, and the Lost Cause. We have met together, our Heavenly Father, to study and to discover the truth of history. Keep out of our hearts all bitterness – knowing that bitterness engenders strife; keep out of our minds all narrowness, knowing that narrowness weakens character; keep out of our hearts all injustice, knowing that injustice is sinful.70 As CC Chapters appeared in the unfinished South, each aimed to “discover the truth of history.” In Thomasville, CC meetings opened with a pledge of allegiance to the United States and the Confederacy. In the latter, children would declare, “I salute the confederate [sic] flag with affection, reverence, and undying remembrance.” Explaining the pledge and its purpose, a CC pamphlet claimed it would help “perpetuate, in love and honor, the heroic deeds of those who enlisted in the confederate [sic] army and upheld its flag through four years of war.” Moreover, this “pledge” sought “to preserve pure ideals: to honor our veterans; to study and teach the truths of history.” Parenthetically, the author mentioned that “one of the most important” “truths” was that “the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was the underlying cause to sustain slavery.”71 In Albany, Mrs. Peter J. Nix organized a chapter, hoping that it would enlighten new generations to the “nobility” of their “illustrious fore-fathers and mothers.” One article on Nix’s CC, proclaimed that through the organization, “children of cherished Confederate ancestry” had “enthusiastically” contributed to the “preservation of Confederate history and true Southern

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ideals.” The author then applauded Nix’s “capable” leadership, and her “reverence,” “love,” and “devotion to Southern traditions and ideals.”72 By bringing the “true history” of the South to new generations, Nix became an ideal devotee of the Lost Cause for one observer. An imperative for “state’s rights” was one feature of the UDC’s “true history,” so too was negating any sense that slavery prompted the Civil War. As historian David Blight argued, white Southerners deployed nostalgic accounts of the past that intentionally diminished the role that slavery had played in the prewar buildup.73 No doubt, the “true history” of the South as described by UDC often left slavery out of the wartime equation. The afore-mentioned “Historian,” argued that the “Daughters of the South” needed to teach their children the “truth” about slavery, an institution that she believed was not a “potent” cause for the war.74 Similarly, when recalling the early 1850s, Susan Bradford Eppes, a leading member of Tallahassee’s UDC, lambasted the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Mrs. Stowe knew nothing whatever of the South or its people,” Eppes charged, because Stowe “had never been South, but she was gifted with a vivid imagination and she had, also, a total disregard for the truth.” The book, Eppes continued, came “just when the time was ripe for such a fire-brand; the abolition of negro slavery was ‘the burning question of the hour.’ . . . Brotherly love was lost sight of; Christian charity died a natural death and these apostles of abolition proclaimed ‘A Higher Law.’” For Eppes, Stowe gave an improper depiction of Southern slavery that only the “true history” of the UDC could correct.75 For the Lost Cause devotee like Eppes, educating the public meant convincing onlookers that the Southern cause was just. To do this, she disclaimed the accounts of people like Stowe and, in one instance, took aim at a hero of the Union, Abraham Lincoln. In an effort to impugn the “great emancipator,” Eppes sent a manuscript to a New York newspaper contending that that South played no part in Lincoln’s assassination. Rather, Northerners who believed that the president was incompetent had orchestrated the murder. Eppes alleged that Lincoln was the product of “THREE GENERATIONS OF ILLEGITIMACY,” “three generations of unbridled passions,” and “three generations of corrupt living and selfish disregard for the feelings and rights of others.” When he won the presidency, she continued, Lincoln was “almost totally unknown,” and worse “he was ‘A POLITICAL MISTAKE’” who was “deplored by his constituents.” Eppes claimed that his cabinet had picked Lincoln because they believed he would be “putty” in their hands. They grew disillusioned, however, and found that Lincoln was

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morally and mentally inept. “In the midst of the most serious consideration of the problems of War, when each member of the Cabinet was trying to concentrate on the subject of the hour, Mr. Lincoln would interrupt with some dirty joke or smutty story – but what else could be expected?” Eppes further charged that Lincoln “never had in all his life any feeling which could be defined by the name CONVICTION.” As far as his “great intellectual ability” shown in speeches, Eppes speculated, “we do not know the true source of these speeches but if he really entertained the views he expressed, then his actions prove him a consummate hypocrite – a moral and spiritual DERELICT – tossed about on the sea of life by the wind that blew the strongest.”76 Lincoln biographer, David Herbert Donald, wrote that rumors of Lincoln’s supposed illegitimacy probably began circulating during the Civil War. Accidental castration or mumps, the story usually claimed, left Lincoln’s father impotent. “Abraham Enlow” was the supposed real father. Herbert called the rumors “utterly groundless.”77 Eppes’s history followed the path of the other Lincoln despisers, as she claimed that Enlow was Lincoln’s “real” father. While a hero for many, Eppes had another, less reputable, image of the president. An advocate of the Lost Cause, she went to great lengths to discredit his reputation and the entire Northern wartime effort. Her “true history” made the South victors in loss. To educate future generations about this history was, for her and others, proof of a woman’s “true womanhood.” While products of their progressive culture, Lost Cause devotees such as Eppes believed that the good Southern society stayed mindful of this version of the past. Relearning the Past and Reforming the Future In this chapter, we saw one exchange that seemingly captured the principal thesis of the dissertation. When the religious fate of Sister Fidelis was at stake, we found a Catholic bishop and Protestant step-father with radically different ideas about what was, and was not, “true” religious devotion. In one perceived good society, women were free to choose their faith orientation. In the other perceived good society, Protestant women would never join a convent, and violation of this norm justified her forcible removal. Neither the bishop nor the step-father was willing to yield to the other’s position. Thus, we found a values conflict, wherein two sides disagreed about what a “true woman” was, and was not. Our investigation of civil religion has identified exchanges like these in an attempt to prove that after Reconstruction, different people, topics, and times evoked different perceptions of the good society. As a value, female devotion was an unfinished product that differed not only between members of different faiths, but also

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within different contexts. Temperance, education, missions, religion, and the Lost Cause were all settings where the “true woman” assumed different meanings. Industrialization and urbanization eventuated in more opportunities for Southern women in education and public affairs. However, for some men, this ignited a fear that women would wander too far from an Old South ideal, and embrace “Women’s Rights.” In other contexts, such as temperance reform, men implored women to join the effort. For their own part, many Southern white women became agents of temperance, believing that the good society was the “dry” society. In their Lost Cause activities, women made their devotion to the past evident through memorials, speeches, and the propagation of their “true history.” While previous accounts of this era have identified the Lost Cause as the South’s civil religious center, the present study is a decentered history of civil religion. In the unfinished South, men, women, Northerners, Southerners, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, blacks, and whites all competed to have their good society become the good society.

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CHAPTER FOUR “THE SOUL OF AMERICA IS THE SOUL OF THE BIBLE”: JEWISH CITIZENSHIP AND JEWISH UNITY IN A PROTESTANT SOUTH

The present study investigates the civil religious worldviews of the unfinished South in the postReconstruction era. In essence, civil religion deals less with dogmas, creeds, and theologies, and more with how people define their “good society.” The term, “good society,” refers to a philosophical effort to define an ideal state that maximizes unity, peace, and prosperity while minimizing conflict and strife. The post-Reconstruction South was a complex society, and as a result, perceptions of the good society both between and within certain social groups were diverse. To emphasize this complexity, we have taken particular note of how people defined their most cherished values. Social values are the metaphorical building blocks in the boundary walls of a perceived good society. They are the standards that people use to determine which actions, beliefs, and behaviors are, for them, inherently true and proper. Some white Southerners, for example, valued material progress. They believed that material progress symbolized the arrival of prosperity to a region depleted by war and Reconstruction. Some values spoke to the unfinished South’s racial conditions. Southern blacks and Southern whites formulated opposing definitions of black freedom and white supremacy respectively. The former wanted expanded rights and mobility. The latter desired a more “passive” black race. Conflicts emerged, as members of both races painted the other’s values as being inherently defective. The previous chapter considered the different ways Southern whites valued female devotion. Female devotion could refer to religious piety, temperance reform, foreign missions, and the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause has been the civil religious center of many previous studies on this era. As this dissertation has thus far shown, however, the Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among many. In each chapter, we have found the many voices of the many Souths competing to have their perceived good societies recognized and actualized. Some had more political influence, economic strength, or numbers than others did. Still, the politically disfranchised, the economically alienated, and the numerically diminutive, had a picture for what they believed society is and ought to be. As we wade through this era’s river of civil religion, we find an unfinished South with an unfinished definition of the good society.

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The present chapter will spotlight the civil religious perspectives of Southern white Jewish men. For this population, civic involvement and Jewish unity became a key binary value. Civic involvement meant becoming active and visible citizens, whether through politics, business, fraternal organizations, or the military. As the same time, many Jews emphasized the need for Jewish unity. Jews rarely represented more than one percent of the Southern population.1 For those living amid a sea of Protestantism, therefore, uniting the faithful became a significant concern. In their good society, coreligionists were both committed “patriots” and committed Jews. These two aims fed from each other, as reflected in one Southern Jew’s following proclamation, “an American Jew cannot be a true Jew unless he is a true American and he is not a true American unless he is a true Jew.”2 Many Southern white Protestants admired the religious and social commitment of their Jewish counterparts. Still, the seeds of anti-Semitism frequently sprang forth in the South. From stereotyped stage images on the stage to the lynching of a Jewish pencil factory owner in Atlanta, Jews lived in a South that sometimes alienated them. Even during the nativist 1910s, however, a collection of Jewish white men in the unfinished South involved themselves in public life at various levels. While white Protestants and Jews differed in their institutional religious practice, many shared a similar civil religion. Religious devotion, philanthropic work, civic involvement, military service, and Democratic Party politics, were each key features in the good society of Jews and Gentiles. Jews were small in number, but their influence was noteworthy. To include their voices will once again show how the civil religious worldviews of this era assumed many forms. The “Reform Spirit” of Southern Jews After Reconstruction, many Southern white Jewish men spoke of citizenship and religious unity in the same breath. They believed that the faithful needed to both improve civilization and remain a solid religious body. Surrounded by Protestants, Southern Jews continually cast themselves as positive and necessary influences in social life. The majority of the Jewish men cited in this chapter were from the Reform tradition, whose members frequently proclaimed that America was their new homeland.3 By the early twentieth century, many American Reform Jews practiced their faith and citizenship by engaging in philanthropic efforts. While mirroring the Protestant social gospel movement, the prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Micah served as textual precedent for Reform Jews. The resulting Jewish “civil religion,” historian Jonathan Sarna wrote, saw Jews who “linked their own destiny to that of the United States so as to legitimate

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their place in America and to demonstrate their sense of belonging.”4 Similar to Sarna, historian Jonathan Woocher called philanthropy “a precept of Jewish religion on which all could agree.” The resulting “civic Judaism,” he explained, “expressed and sustained the unity American Jews felt among themselves, legitimated the endeavors of the community to maintain Jewish group life while promoting maximal involvement in American society, and inspired Jews to contribute to the support of other Jews and the pursuit of social justice.”5 American Reform Jews blended religion, nationalism, and philanthropy, thus creating a civil religious worldview wherein they pictured themselves as both committed citizens and committed Jews. 6 Southern Jews like Albany’s Charles Wessolowsky certainly articulated this worldview. After serving in the Confederate army, Wessolowsky established residence in Albany. There, he performed rabbinical duties for the area’s approximately thirty Jewish families. Wessolowsky initiated a Hebrew Benevolent Society, Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society, and a Sabbath school. He was also a politician, having served as the County Clerk of the Superior Court from 1871 to 1875 and as a state senator in 1875.7 Wessolowsky belonged to a host of fraternal organizations to include the Masons, where he assumed the office of Grand High Priest of Georgia from 1895 to 1897. His reputation as a committed Jewish practitioner and citizen gained favorable notice outside Albany. Published in Atlanta beginning in 1878, Rabbi Edward Browne’s Jewish South was a Southern version of Isaac Mayer Wise’s Cincinnati-based Israelite. Hoping to tailor a message to Southern ears, Brown published stories that he supposed the region’s Jews would want to read.8 The rabbi quickly recruited Wessolowsky, and made him the publication’s associate editor. In this capacity, Wessolowsky traveled to Jewish communities in Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas promoting the periodical during the spring seasons of 1878 and 1879. On this tour, he often delivered a speech entitled, “The Jew as a Citizen and Politician.” In it, Wessolowsky explained to Jewish and Gentile audiences that Jews needed to become active participants in the South’s emerging political, economic, and social structure.9 During his 1878 and 1879 tours, Wessolowsky sent letters to Rabbi Browne in Atlanta describing the various people and communities that he visited. In these correspondences, Wessolowsky commended those who he believed were civically involved and committed to the “cause” of Judaism. In Greenville, Mississippi, Wessolowsky praised the Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Society, claiming the organization “[aided] and [alleviated] the wants of unfortunate

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young men who cannot obtain work.” In Uniontown, he mentioned a Jewish woman whose house remained open to orphans from “all denominations” and “relieved many a poor one in the spirit of true charity.” In Farmersville, he applauded the “noble mothers, in Israel,” who formed the Ladies Benevolent Society. Wessolowsky called one member, “a charitable and benevolent lady” who along with the others, “undoubtedly deserve the respect and honor of all Israelites.” In Little Rock, Arkansas, Wessolowsky took notice of the Hebrew Children’s Mite Society, which provided “a nice sum of money,” for the New Orleans Orphans Home. He labeled the group, “noble,” “generous,” and “praiseworthy.”10 Clearly, Wessolowsky looked favorably at those he believed were charitable. Acts of public kindness, to the traveler, were a way of becoming involved in society and sustaining a Jewish community in the rural South. The good society of Wessolowsky was a place where Jews were both civically involved and religiously united. Through their philanthropic efforts, he expected that Southern Jews could achieve both ends. Wessolowsky’s letters were not always commendatory. To him, a deficient Jewish community avoided both public service and Jewish practice. In Monroe, Louisiana, for example, Wessolowsky reported a “lukewarm” and “indifferent” Jewish community. Their presence, he wrote, was “an obstacle in the path of those who are anxious and desirous of promoting and elevating our holy cause.” His ideal Southern society found Jews both active participants in society and united in their faith community. Monroe was everything that he believed the “true” Jewish community was not. “The modern tendency of American Judaism,” Wessolowsky lamented, “has alienated the Jew from his brother.” In Mobile, however, he found an active B’nai B’rith lodge, which he called, “A wonderful band of Union.” The B’nai B’rith was a place where Wessolowsky believed the Jewish man felt “at home and amongst brothers.” In his letters, Wessolowsky continually praised the scattered B’nai B’rith lodges, believing they encouraged both civic service and Jewish unity. Not every lodge met his expectations, however. In Brenham and Hempstead, Texas, Wessolowsky encountered settlements comprised of immigrants from Western Prussia. He relayed to Rabbi Brown, “we regret exceedingly that we are forced to say that we found no unity nor sociability among them.” The town had one lodge where, Wessolowsky commented, members expressed neither “‘unity’” nor “Brotherly love.” Instead, “we found Jewish children regularly attending ‘Christian’ Sunday school, to receive the most useful instruction that Jesus is the ‘Saviour of all mankind.’”11

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The boundary walls of Wessolowsky’s good society sought to keep out those who he believed were not active Jewish citizens. His deficient Southern Jewish community was uninvolved with civic affairs and unconcerned with the “holy cause” of Judaism. The traveler’s ideal Jewish community, however, found unity in fraternal organizations like the B’nai B’rith. Literally meaning “Sons of the Covenant,” the B’nai B’rith formed in New York City in 1843. Armed with the motto, “Benevolence, Brotherly Love, and Harmony,” founders sought to “unify” Jews from different ethnic backgrounds.12 In previous chapters, we have seen instances where Northern institutions had a difficult time allaying the suspicions of Southern whites. In the minds of some, for example, Chautauqua meetings carried what they believed was the rankness of Republicanism and liberal Protestantism. At Northern meetings, female suffrage and racial equality may have been common discussion topics, yet in the South, these items likely never appeared on Chautauqua programs.13 For Wessolowsky, a former Confederate, the Northern origin of the B’nai B’rith appeared inconsequential. Instead, he believed that the Order could promote both civic involvement and Jewish unity. These were the key standards that Wessolowsky believed distinguished the “true” Jewish community from the deficient one. He spoke for a small percentage of the Southern population. Despite their size, however, Southern Jews were part of the era’s complicated civil religious landscape. Similar to Wessolowsky other Jewish political leaders in the unfinished South encouraged coreligionists to remain both active citizens and religiously united. A Democrat and member of the Reform temple, Lazarus Schwarz was a visible public figure in Mobile during the early twentieth century.14 In 1911, the city’s Orthodox community celebrated the laying of their synagogue’s cornerstone. Then a member of the City Council, Schwarz spoke at the event. “[The] American progressive spirit,” he opened, “has taken root in the orthodox [sic] congregation.” Schwarz then curiously commended their “reform spirit,” but quickly qualified his remark. Not “reform of religious ceremonies,” he corrected. Instead, Schwarz took “reform” to mean, “the improvement of your standard of American citizenship.” Jews, the councilman remarked, “have always and everywhere been noted for their refinement, their charities to all creeds, and their love for the flag of our country.” He suspected the Orthodox synagogue would contribute to each “noted” endeavor. Schwarz then emphasized the need for Jews to become civically involved. He called the American government “the greatest . . . on earth,” because it “opened its arms to you, [gave] you its protection, [and embraced] you in the folds of its flag –

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that emblem to you as to all others of liberty and freedom.” His “most sincere wish” was for Orthodox community to “impress” upon their children a sense of “respect and honor for our flag.” We noted previously that non-Jewish Southern whites spoke glowingly about postReconstruction progress. Railroads, schools, agricultural advances, and sectional reunification, they proclaimed, were all positive features of the era. In the building of a Jewish synagogue, Schwarz found the “spirit of progress” influencing the Jewish community. Linked to his progressive ideal were comments regarding Jewish unity and citizenship. His good society was one where Jews built synagogues that would contribute to both the Jewish community and the American nation.15 Articulating the same themes, Rabbi Alfred G. Moses of Mobile’s Reform synagogue also spoke at the new Orthodox establishment.16 “Rejoice that you live in a free country,” the rabbi proclaimed, “where religious tolerance prevails and all bigotry is banished.” The “blessings of religious liberty and freedom,” Moses continued, both permitted and encouraged Jews to become active religious practitioners. “Religion means nothing if it is not practiced.” For Moses, however, “practice” meant that Jews would improve their “domestic life.” A “house of God,” Moses worried, “is a mockery unless it makes men better.” Like Schwarz, Moses’s idea of religious practice necessitated civic involvement. “God fearing honest citizens,” he announced, needed to commit to “charity and benevolence.” Moses hypothesized that through the “charitable causes” enacted by “noble and respected” American Jews, members of the faith have “earned” the respect of non-Jews “by the sweat of our brows and [our] sacrifice on the altars of patriotism.” The rabbi concluded, “Unfurl the banners of Israel and America and stand steadfast under both of them.”17 In Moses, we find a Jewish voice who conflated Jewish citizenship with religious unity. Emphasizing religious freedom, philanthropy, and patriotism, Moses hoped that Jews could forge a favorable space for themselves in Mobile and the nation. He would repeat this message in many of his public addresses. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt designated November 30 a National Day of Thanksgiving. Henry Hanaw, a member of Moses’s Reform synagogue, organized for that day a celebration of the “250th anniversary of Jews in America.” Hanaw hoped that Mobile’s Jews could come together on this day and celebrate the “land where we have founded our homes, in which liberty, religious and civil, free speech and equal rights always prevail.”18 At the celebration, Rabbi Moses gave a public address asking Jews to appreciate “the

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blessed privilege of being citizens of America and members of the household of Israel.” The rabbi then recognized those who he believed were upstanding Jewish citizens, such as “the gallant soldier” Major Adolph Proskauer, who during the Civil War, “marched forth from his city with many brave Jewish comrades to join the Southern army.” Using Proskauer as an example of the Jewish “patriot,” Moses then linked the destiny of Judaism with America. In America, “Israel has at last found the spiritual paradise.” American Jews, he maintained, needed to recognize this and “discard” their faith’s “encrusted” traditions in order to “develop its sublime teachings along the lines of progressive humanity.” One element of “progressive humanity” extolled by Moses was service to the “poor and unfortunate.” Such a commitment, he resolved, had become prime evidence of how his coreligionists could demonstrate their “genuine attachment” to the nation and its people.19 With words of faith saturating his speech, the rabbi portrayed Jews as having a rightful place in the American landscape. The good society of Rabbi Moses was an American society where “progressive” Jews were unified participants in civic life. The “encrusted” customs of Judaism, Moses speculated, had kept members from becoming involved citizens and committed Jews. In his 1905 history of Mobile’s Reform congregation, Moses expanded on this message when detailing what he called “spiritual Judaism.” The essence of Judaism, Moses declared, was “the glorification of God in acts of humanity, kindness, charity and intellectual growth.”20 In other words, practicing “spiritual Judaism” meant, in part, becoming a more charitable citizen. Moses’s 1906 eulogy to Sigmund Schlesinger again repeated this message. The rabbi claimed that Schlesinger “was not religious . . . if religion is measured by the yardstick of creed and dogma.” If, however, “true religion means high and exalted conduct, self-sacrifice and charity, a spotless character and an unflagging devotion to duty, then he was truly a godly man.” Calling Schlesinger “a real believer,” Moses resolved that the deceased “revealed God in his thought and action” and had a “[remarkable] ethical and religious nature.”21 Moses highlighted Schlesinger’s intellect and willingness to give indiscriminately. The deceased was Moses’s ideal Jewish citizen. For the rabbi, the “true” Jew practiced his or her faith through “action.” In an almost backhanded manner, Moses deployed a subtle criticism of Orthodox Judaism. As we will soon see, the rabbi would continue to claim that Orthodox Judaism had contributed to Jewish disunity in his time.

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For Wessolowsky, Schwarz, and Moses, Judaism was, as one Southern rabbi remarked, a “religion of action” not a “religion of creed.”22 Their ideal Jewish community was a place where members of synagogues cultivated among themselves philanthropic, nationalistic, and Jewish interests. Their ideal Jewish citizen was part of the “progressive” white South in nearly every way, except for religion. We have also begun to see that there were not only religious differences between Jews and Protestants, but there were also variations within the Southern Jewish population. As Charles Wessolowsky discovered, some Jews in the rural South did not find it necessary to practice their faith. Some went so far as to send their children to Sunday school, an act that Wessolowsky vehemently denounced. These groupings of rural Jews became the antitheses of what the traveler believed the “true” Jewish community ought to be. For Moses, Orthodox Judaism had become a deficient form of the faith. He believed that followers of this tradition overemphasized ritualistic behavior at the expense of civic activism. Firmly ensconced in the Reform tradition, Moses continually heralded those who he believed were “active” and, as a result, “true” Jews. In what follows, we will take a closer look at Rabbi Moses’s career. As we have continually noted, perceptions of the good society change alongside the conditions and challenges of a given time. For Jews in the South and nation living in the early twentieth century, Christian Science and New Thought threatened to deplete their ranks. Moses confronted this challenge with his own religious invention, “Jewish Science.” In his outlining of this practice, Moses further criticized Orthodox Judaism, believing that such forms of the faith had driven Jews toward Christian Science and New Thought. More, Moses used the platform of Jewish Science to encourage coreligionists to become active citizens. Rabbi Alfred G. Moses and “Jewish Science” Born in New Hampshire in 1821, Mary Baker Eddy suffered from a series of physical ailments before meeting Phineas P. Quimby in 1862. A mesmerist, he taught that physical healing could come through positive thought rather than medication. Quimby died in 1866, but Eddy continued developing his methods. Like her predecessor, Eddy maintained that sickness, pain, sin, and the like were illusions, the offspring of a mental and spiritual misalignment with the “infinite Mind” of God. Positive thought became a central tenant of her new “Christian Science,” as it had been with other emerging religious movements such as New Thought and Theosophy. The latter two differed from Christian Science, however, by deemphasizing the Christian element that Eddy, a committed Calvinist, believed was essential.23

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Christian Science grew rapidly in the North during Eddy’s time. By the time she died in 1910, there were nearly 100,000 adherents, some of whom were Jews. According to historian Ellen M. Umansky, Christian Science’s “promise of health, peace, and comfort” in an age of “rapid urbanization,” made the faith appealing to many American Jews. The number of Jews who practiced Christian Science during its boom years of 1906 to 1926 remains unclear. Estimates range from four thousand to forty thousand.24 Nevertheless, Jewish leaders were wary of Christian Science’s influence. In 1911, the B’nai B’rith addressed the issue, declaring that the two traditions could not coexist. In 1919, Henry Frank wrote a book entitled, Why is Christian Science Luring the Jew Away from Judaism? In it, he argued that Jews discovered physical, social, and spiritual benefits in Christian Science that they did not find in their own tradition. In the South, Rabbi Max Heller of New Orleans came to a similar conclusion. “Christian Science has caught us napping,” wrote the rabbi. He agreed that Judaism’s overemphasis on “knowledge and conduct” stripped the “vitality and intensity” from the faith. To reverse this, Heller suggested that Jews rediscover the “spirituality” of Judaism.25 For these Jewish commentators, formalized religious practices were to blame for the Jewish exodus to Christian Science. Mobile’s Rabbi Alfred G. Moses agreed. He also composed a counter to Christian Science. In his two books published in 1916 and 1920, Moses detailed the tenants of “Jewish Science.” The central “thesis” of Jewish Science, Moses explained, “[is] that the mind influences the body and life-states. This truth is clearly expressed in the Proverb: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.’”26 Positive thought was at the core of Moses’s creation. However, the rabbi was quick to note that the teachings of “Jewish Science” were nothing new. The word, “Science,” he reassured readers, correlated directly to the Hebrew word “Chachmah” or “divine wisdom or truth.” He thusly resolved, “The word Science, in a religious sense, is strictly Jewish in origin and the entire phrase of Jewish Science is in keeping with the faith and practice of Judaism.”27 Among Moses’s principal motivations for writing about Jewish Science was the rabbi’s ardent desire to keep coreligionists from leaving their faith. Thus, he continually claimed that Jewish Science was essentially Jewish, and that Orthodox Judaism had forsaken the faith’s “true” teachings on “spirituality.” Moses’s ideal practitioner of Jewish Science was both committed to the religion and socially active. “Faith,” he affirmed, “implies deed, not creed. True religion according to . . . our prophets is an immanent process and not a far-off mystic speculation.” In

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Moses’s mind, then, “true religion” meant both individual spirituality and a commitment toward “social betterment.” His commentaries regarding civic and philanthropic involvement often came laced with “patriotic” proclamations. The rabbi extolled what he believed were the glories of America, claiming that in this nation, “The individual is entitled to the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Continuing, he assumed that those who “honestly” gained wealth did so through positive thought. For the rabbi, poverty was “abnormal” and “a mental state that can be overcome.” As Moses explained, the Jewish Scientist who earned wealth through his or her “godly powers” could use these refined “mental” faculties to produce “practical results.” Hence, the ideal wealthy Jewish Scientist was charitable, but not foolhardy with his or her funds. “The greatest good cannot be done by merely giving the poor material means for food, clothing and shelter. A man is helped by being trained to help himself. By self-discovery and self-realization, one may find the road to success and achievement.”28 Moses’s thoughts on wealth and charity sounded strikingly similar to Pittsburgh’s Andrew Carnegie, who penned the “Gospel of Wealth” in 1889. For Carnegie, three “sacred” principles of American “progress” were private property, free competition, and free accumulation of wealth. With this “triple law” protected, he suspected that individualism could flourish and laziness would not receive any rewards. Carnegie’s wealthy person did not horde his or her resources, nor did he or she thoughtlessly give wealth away. Instead, the true “trustee for the poor” used his or her talents in distributing resources to the needy.29 Whether intentional or not, Moses preached a Gospel of Wealth similar to Carnegie’s. Both believed that the wealthy deserved their status, and that the wealthy should be caretakers to the poor. Furthermore, each author emphasized that everyone could attain wealth through hard work. Moses, however, linked his message to Jewish Science and the Jewish tradition. “[Myriads]” of Americans, Moses asserted, had “raised themselves from the worst conditions” to become wealthy. Moses, a born Southerner, then used a curious example. “Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin, came to the highest estate. By faith and spiritual power, inspired by the Bible, the great emancipator overcame all obstacles and made himself the saviour of the Union. His example may be multiplied in every age of American history.” Calling America a land of “great achievement and prosperity,” Moses made a special effort to show how the Bible shaped America and how Jewish Science drew from the same principles. “America has grown and prospered in accordance with the Biblical teaching of liberty under law. Our blessed land, the home of the free, is the creation

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of the spirit of individual freedom that moved over the face of the wild wilderness.” Moses reflected, “The soul of America is the soul of the Bible.”30 Moses made the message of Judaism part of the American historical landscape. The curious mention of Lincoln highlights a difference between Moses and the Lost Causers of his time. The rabbi did not borrow from the white Southern rhetoric that made Lincoln an evil despot or bumbling idiot.31 Instead, he used the example of Lincoln to personify his convictions regarding poverty, American opportunity, and the responsibilities of the “true” Jew. Moses may not have shared the partisan worldview of many white Southerners of his time, but his voice was present in the years after the war. In the rabbi, we find a proud Jewish voice who firmly believed that members of his faith rightfully belonged in America. Moses actively and frequently implored Jews to remain civically involved and religiously unified. His optimistic portrayal of American religious freedom did not address the fact that the specter of anti-Semitism lurked in the South during his own time. Instead, Moses focused attention on convincing Jews that they were proper member of the American citizenry. For some Southern whites, the good society did include Jews; but for others Jews were an unwelcome presence. Anti-Semitism and the “Friendly Relations” of Jews and Gentiles Rabbi Moses found his good society in America and in the city of Mobile. In his writings and public addresses, he continually announced that Jews could be both committed faith practitioners and committed patriots. By focusing on Moses, we found a layer of civil religious diversity in the post-Reconstruction South. A Southern white Jew, Moses differed from his Protestant counterparts over organized religion, yet seemingly agreed on a host of other matters. Additionally, even within the small Jewish population, differences existed. Moses’s good society found Jews discarding the “encrusted” traditions of Orthodox Judaism – a faith practice that he believed drove Jews into the ranks of Christian Science. The present study embraces these sorts of complexities. By doing so, we have discovered that the many voices of the many Souths frequently competed to have their good society recognized and actualized. For many white Protestants, Jews were a positive influence on society. Not everyone shared this opinion, however. Anti-Semitism both was, and was not, part of a civil religious worldview of white Protestants. Consider the Jewish place within the Southern white “redemption narrative.” In our previous mentions of this narrative, we explored how Southern whites emphasized the positive developments that they believed resulted from Reconstruction’s end. In

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some accounts, Jewish and non-Jewish commentators made the religious minority a positive influence. Reflecting on the years following Reconstruction, Rabbi Edmund Landau of Albany spoke fondly about the role of Jews. Writing in 1922, Landau recalled that the approximately three hundred Jews of his region “generously contributed” to the efforts related to “progress in communal life” following the war. For Landau, Albany’s “higher progress” came through Jewish “business” endeavors, which he believed served as “the foundation” for “municipal growth.” The rabbi noted that the “loyal” Jews of the “progressive community” helped establish a Chautauqua, hospital, and various centers for “recreation and amusement.”32 For Rabbi Landau, Jews were noteworthy participants in the postwar rebuilding process. No doubt, many Jews in the unfinished South had the means and ability to bring needed goods to the inland region. In the 1850s, Jewish peddlers transported materials from Savannah and other ports to the rural unfinished South. Historian Thomas D. Clark speculated, “Few things brought the isolated rural family more excitement than the visitation of a pack peddler.” As the South developed after the war, many peddlers became established merchants and continued to provide goods to the largely Gentile population.33 Grateful Gentiles occasionally echoed Rabbi Landau’s remarks, commenting on the religious minority’s ability to contribute both materially and philanthropically to the community. In Valdosta, Georgia, one journalist made Jews an important part of his redemption narrative. Writing on the region’s post-Reconstruction material developments, the author referred to Jews as “servants of God without whom progress would be unreal.” This was not the first time the non-Jewish press expressed admiration for the region’s Jews. When anti-Semitic sentiments arose during Reconstruction, the Valdosta newspaper quickly responded, calling attention to the religious minority’s “kindness” and commitment to the region’s “poor,” “widows,” and “orphans.”34 For their role in developing the unfinished South’s economy and their various benevolent endeavors, Jews won a favorable place in this redemption narrative. However, we must highlight that this last example was a response to antiSemitism. Whether through words or deeds, Jews did live in a region where their presence was not always welcome. When examining the voices of anti-Semitism, we discover that the unfinished South both was, and was not, a welcoming place for Jews. In their redemption narratives, many Southern whites cast Jews as helpful assistants in the postwar rebuilding process. However, not everyone in the region believed the Jewish mercantile presence was beneficial to the common good. In 1865, Northerner George F. Thompson, an

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inspector for the Freedmen’s Bureau, determined that Jews were irredeemably detrimental for society. Thompson explicitly criticized Jacksonville’s Jewish merchants for not closing on a national day of thanksgiving. “It is remarkable how the Jew finds his way into every nook and corner of the country, large enough to squeeze a three cent piece into it.” Thompson expressed “decided opinions” against whether “this class of trades people” were a “desirable population for any country.”35 From this, we find a person whose good society presumably lacked Jews. We should note the author’s regional origin. Were Southerners as anti-Semitic as this Northerner was? Historian Leonard Dinnerstein argued that the South’s “Protestant fundamentalist culture,” fed a distinct brand of Southern anti-Semitism that resulted in “a pervasive sense of anxiety” for Jews. The ability of Jews to “survive, thrive, and interact pleasantly” in the South existed because they, “[acculturated]” and established “a facile cordiality with Gentiles.” While the religious minority contributed to “rebuilding the southern society,” they also “did nothing to disturb community tranquility.”36 Having made Southern anti-Semitism a unique breed, Dinnerstein’s picture of Jewish life in the South was one marked by oppression and anxiety. Historian Leonard Rogoff offered another perspective. “Southern anti-Semitism borrowed from the national culture,” he contended, thus it was not an exceptionally potent sentiment in the former Confederacy. Nor, Rogoff continued, was anti-Semitism particularly socially crippling. In 1910, North Carolina’s Rev. Arthur T. Abernethy wrote The Jew a Negro, which attempted to cast Jews as “the kinsman and descendant of the Negro.”37 For many Southerners, Rogoff explained, Abernethy’s anti-Semitism “was a product that ultimately failed to sell” and the book received little attention. As Jews came to the South and adopted the racial ideologies of their fellow whites, Rogoff claimed that they “assimilated” and thereby “ceased to be a marginal people.”38 Both Dinnerstein and Rogoff agreed that Jews were able to acquire wealth and status through their ability to “assimilate.” They agreed that anti-Semitism did exist. The historians differed, however, on the uniqueness and intensity of Southern anti-Semitism. In the coming paragraphs, we will find a collection of voices that tend to confirm Rogoff’s argument. Anti-Semitism was a Southern reality, but many Jews in the unfinished South were active members in society. None of what follows indicates that these Jews engaged in public life with disingenuous intentions or “facile cordiality.” Instead, we will see a group who firmly believed that they were rightful members of Southern society.

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For Jews who imagined themselves and their coreligionists as being valuable citizens, antiSemitic sentiments represented an affront to their good society. Remembering his childhood in Mobile, Joseph Proskauer spoke glowingly of his family lineage, making special mention of his “legendary” uncle, Major Adolph Proskauer, who fought in the Civil War. “I was, so I believed, a good boy. I was a patriotic American, and my uncle had surely earned for my family a deserved reputation for loyalty to Alabama.” To the younger Proskauer’s dismay, however, while traveling home one day after school, a group of classmates “bloodied my nose on the astounding theory that I was a ‘Christ Killer.’” Reflecting on this confrontation, Proskauer claimed that this was one of many “physical and metaphorical” bloody noses. He remembered vowing early in life to “destroy this ugly excrescence on the American way of life.” Proskauer later relocated to the North where, he reported, the battles against anti-Semitism continued.39 As Proskauer inferred, stereotypes such as “Christ Killer” often marked anti-Semitic exchanges in the nineteenth century North and South.40 For the author, anti-Semitism was an insult to the “American way of life,” and a perversion of his good society. The “Shylock” stereotype was another label white Protestants occasionally bestowed upon Southern Jews. According to historians Robert Rockaway and Arnon Gutfeld, frustrated American Gentiles regularly deployed the “Shylock” moniker in the nineteenth century, particularly in moments of financial crisis.41 In Thomasville, Jews became subject to this image in 1862. A Union blockade along the Florida Gulf Coast made food and supplies coming to the region scarce. Ignoring this reality, Colonel J.L. Steward blamed Jews for the paucity of goods. Charging Jewish merchants with profiteering, Steward’s scathing oratories motivated Thomasville’s elected officials to pass a resolution banning Jews from city limits. The measure drew quick criticism. Savannah’s Daily Morning News called it “at war with the spirit of the age – the letter of the constitution – and the principles of religion – and can find no parallel except the barbarism of the Inquisition and the persecution of the Dark Ages.”42 Also in Savannah, Private Charles Wessolowsky of the Confederate Army led a protest. He lamented that his “adopted country” dishonored Jews who “[sacrificed] all that is dear to us” for the Confederacy. 43 A peddler before the war, Wessolowsky came to Georgia from Prussia in 1858. After Reconstruction he traveled through the rural South promoting Jewish civic involvement and religious unity. According to historian Louis Schmier, Wessolowsky’s amicable dealings with rural Southerners before the war led him to conclude that the South lacked the anti-

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Semitism of his homeland. While disturbed by the resolution, Wessolowsky took comfort from its widespread denunciation. In Thomasville, little became of the matter. Most Jews did not leave. And during the following years, the religious minority built an active community.44 For many Protestants and Jews in the unfinished South, anti-Semitism ran counter to their perception of the good society. In the minds of both groups, Jews were valuable and respectable members of society. Consequently, the Thomasville resolution was, for the defenders of Jews, an improper measure. These Jews and Protestants differed on institutional religion, but both of their perceived good societies had ample space for Jews. For some Protestant involving themselves in this discussion, there remained something of an agenda. As historian Jonathan Sarna explained, “Christians coupled their love for Jews and support for Jewish rights with the hope that Jews would ultimately be incorporated into the Christian fold.” According to Sarna, this was a common theme running throughout much of the nation’s history.45 For those who believed American society required Christianity, Jews failed to meet this criteria. Favoring “love” over violence, many set forth to convert their Jewish neighbors. While tolerant of a Jewish presence, there were Southern white Protestants who drew lines between the faiths. Inside the minds of some Protestants, there existed a hope that Jews would cross this line. Writing before the war as a student at the University of North Carolina, Stephens Croom of Mobile warned that if the “march of civilization” were to continue toward “happier days,” Christians needed to eliminate the “old revengeful hatred” of Jews. Croom called Europe an “intolerant” continent and implored America to “guarantee to the Jew all that we guarantee to others.” The “persecution of the Jews,” Croom avowed, was “unlawful,” unchristian,” and “unmanly.” The author then expressed “hope” that “true” Christians could mold the Jew into “a true man, a true Christian, [and] a true American.” The Christian citizens of Croom’s America could then demonstrate to God, “not that we have persecuted the Jew, but that we have converted him.” He called conversion “noble,” “Christian,” and “worthy of a true republic.”46 When talking about the good society, we have identified statements that indicate the speaker’s firmest beliefs and deepest convictions. As we have seen, religious allusions and language often punctuate these assertions, further emphasizing the individual’s picture for what they believe society ought to be. Croom’s “true” American society was Christian, and Jews did not meet this standard. This did not justify persecution. Instead, Croom demanded that the “true Christian”

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use his powers of persuasion to redirect Jews toward what he believed was the correct religious and social path. Similarly, Rev. Simon Peter Richardson, an itinerant Methodist minister from Augusta, Georgia, admitted that he once harbored “prejudices” against Jews, but later amended his opinion. Calling Jews “mistaken” in religion, Richardson confessed, “they are certainly true to their convictions.” Jews “carry with them the revelation of the true God wherever they go.” The minister specifically complemented Southern Jews for their “remarkable moral record” and commitment to education. He then recalled a conversation with a Jewish rabbi. From the “broad-minded” rabbi, Richardson reportedly acquired “valuable information on the Old Testament.” Moreover, the two discussed the New Testament, which the rabbi had read “with great care.” The rabbi soon began visiting Richardson’s Methodist services, claimed the minister. “[He] could accept Christ as the manifestation of God, but not as God,” wrote Richardson, because for the rabbi “there was but one God.” Using this friendship as an example, Richardson concluded, “If Christians would treat the Jews more kindly, they might do them more good. They feel that all Gentiles are their enemies, and that all Christians hate them. My friendly relations with the priest [sic] brought many of his people occasionally to my church.”47 Richardson hoped that by establishing “friendly relations” with Jews, he could make inroads toward bringing them into “the Christian fold.” Croom used similar language and insisted that the “true American” was a “true Christian.” Both characterized Jewish practice as inherently deficient, yet they found admirable qualities in their religious counterparts. More, they identified virulent anti-Semitism as a detriment to their good society. While many shared the tolerance of Richardson and Croom, the metaphorical attackers of Joseph Proskauer lurked in the shadows, waiting to emerge without warning. The 1913 trial and 1915 lynching of the National Pencil Factory superintendent Leo Frank became prime evidence of the South’s underlying anti-Semitic scorn. Following the death of his employee, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, police charged Frank with her rape and murder. Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian stoked the fires of anti-Semitism and cast Frank as a “lascivious pervert.” The prosecution’s evidence was circumstantial and flimsy. Nevertheless, the jury took less than four hours to convict Frank, bringing cheers from the crowd of over three thousand gathered outside the courthouse. After two years of appeals, the case came before the Supreme Court where judges upheld the decision. Following this, Governor John M. Slaton became Frank’s final hope. Slaton received a petition on Frank’s

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behalf with over one million signers (ten thousand of whom were Georgians) and commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment. The governor fled Georgia fearing mob retaliation, while twenty-five men calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan broke into the prison farm that housed Frank. The mob proceeded to hang him from a tree near the birthplace of Phagan in Marietta.48 The Frank lynching stands to demonstrate that for some Southern whites, Jews were not worthy members of their good society. Historian Leonard Dinnerstein claimed that the “outburst” of anti-Semitism following the Frank case had a “devastating” effect for “assimilated Southern Jews.” “As the case evolved,” wrote Dinnerstein, “it proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that no matter how hard they tried to acculturate, in a crisis the Jew would never be seen as a true southerner.”49 Dinnerstein indicated that the Frank lynching lingered in the Southern Jewish mind for the next half-century. Similarly, historian Steven Hertzberg showed that from their earliest settlements in Atlanta, Jews were indeed “strangers.” Nevertheless, Hertzberg argued that Atlanta stayed relatively hospitable for Jews after the Frank lynching, due in large part to a continued common interest in material matters.50 While Hertzberg identified economics, many Jews and Gentiles also shared common political proclivities. Historian Raymond Arsenault demonstrated that Southern Jews actually became “more active and more visible” during the 1910s. Arsenault pointed to the Jewish politician Charles Jacobson of Arkansas. Jacobson shared a political friendship with the Baptist and “neo-Populist” Jeff Davis. “A Karl Marx for Hill Billies,” Davis appealed to a disaffected Arkansas population who elected him governor in 1900 and United States senator in 1907.51 Although the two friends parted paths, this relationship propelled Jacobson into public life. In 1910, Jacobson ran for and won a state senate seat. Much like Davis, Jacobson’s “progressive” politics embraced a white supremacist worldview and distrusted Northern businesses. According to Arsenault, “in [Jacobson’s] style of speech and dress – indeed in every respect but religion – he was a classic New South gentleman.” Jacobson’s success in politics, in other words, came because he shared “the values of the dominant culture.”52 How much, then, did the Frank lynching influence Jewish life in the South? For Dinnerstein, the Frank case proved that Gentiles would never consider Jews “true” members of society, particularly in moments of “crisis.” Hertzberg and Arsenault, however, asserted that Jews were “strangers” in religion, but they shared other key values with the white majority. Similarly,

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Louis Schmier claimed that the lynching “hovered like a foreboding raven about the heads of Jews, evoking fear and insecurity.” Still, Schmier continued, Southern white Protestants tended to respect Jews for their charitable deeds, business acumen, and commitment to the Old Testament.53 If we consider each historian’s position, perhaps it is safest to conclude that nonJewish Southerners both practiced and denounced anti-Semitism before, during, and after the Frank lynching. Clearly, the mutual admiration between white Southern Jews and Protestants did not exist everywhere in the South. Tom Watson’s voice represented one, profoundly antiSemitic and highly influential, perspective. Yet, at the same time in the unfinished South, Jews held political office and earned the respect of their non-Jewish counterparts. While members of the two religious groups differed on institutional religion, then, there existed a substantial civil religious accord. The religious commitment and philanthropic endeavors of Jews were two admirable qualities frequently noted by non-Jewish commentators. In 1910, a regional B’nai B’rith convention came to Mobile. The Jewish South reported that visitors “found the proverbial ‘welcome’ and the hearty greetings, typical of Southern hospitality” from the entire city. Mayor Pat J. Lyons spoke at the convention’s opening. “It affords me pleasure,” proclaimed Lyons, “to pay some tribute to you men of the Jewish race, for you constitute one of the greatest civilizing agencies of the world.” Jews, the mayor continued, had always stood “for peaceful methods and stable government.” The mayor claimed that the city’s jails, “are not built for the Jew; and our poorhouses know him not. You take care of your own poor and distressed in addition to lending aid to others and in your organization in this respect the rest of us in Mobile could follow with profit the example set by your Order of by systematizing our individual charities and putting them on an effective business basis.”54 For the Protestant mayor, Jews were an invaluable social asset. Not only, claimed Lyons, did Jews ensure stability within their own ranks, but he believed that their benevolent campaigns benefited the entire community. The mayor essentially commended the values that Jews prized among their own ranks. As we have noted, civic service and religious unity was an important binary value for Southern Jews living after Reconstruction. In their good society, Jews were both part of the larger non-Jewish culture and unified among themselves. Other non-Jewish voices in the unfinished South gave equally effusive praise to the civic and religious efforts of Jews. In 1916, Erwin Craighead, the Protestant editor of Mobile’s Register, wrote a character

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sketch of the Jewish English immigrant, Israel I. Jones. Jones organized a Jewish congregation in 1840, and contributed to numerous “progressive” advances such as the building of street railroads in 1860. Craighead remembered that all of Mobile “sorely” grieved Jones’s death. His “big heart” was “gentle as a woman and generous to a fault.” The “singularly devout man,” Craighead continued, owned a house that abutted the Protestant Orphan Asylum. Every Christmas, Jones “never [failed] his little protégés” and gave “a great feast to all the fatherless little ones in that institution.” Craighead concluded, “many is the Christian prayer that ascended to heaven in thankfulness for the kindly beneficence of that true-hearted Jew.”55 As we have mentioned, philanthropy was one means by which Jews united the faithful in a common cause. For these efforts, Protestant observers grew to admire followers of the faith. In Tallahassee, Julius Diamond drew accolades from the Masons.56 Upon Diamond’s 1914 death, they wrote a glowing obituary, emphasizing his supposed mental acuity and active citizenship. Calling him “an honored, useful and greatly beloved citizen,” the authors lauded Diamond’s “strong mind” and “[good] conscience.” This combination “marked his dealings with fellow men and won for him an enviable representation for justice and fairness in the daily transactions of life.” The “deep thinker” Diamond, read the obituary, had a mind that “was a veritable storehouse from which seekers for knowledge derived both profit and pleasure.” Diamond put his “knowledge” to use by advancing “the cause of civic progress.” He “freely gave of his time and talents . . . and served his people to their advantage and his distinction in the positions of honor and trust.”57 Methodist minister Alfred L. Woodward of Tallahassee sent similar praises, but also emphasized Diamond’s religious activity. Woodward met Diamond after the Civil War and found the “modest Hebrew youth” to be “plain,” “unassuming,” and “rigidly upright.” A devoted Jew, Diamond “was no sectarian,” according to the minister. While “loyal to the faith of his Fathers . . . he ‘loved his fellowmen’ and his great heart included in its sympathies both Jew and Gentile.” Like Lyons and Craighead, Woodward admired Diamond’s widespread philanthropic activities. The minister also highlighted his friend’s political career, recalling Diamond’s tenure as the chair of the Board of Leon County Commissioners. “[Diamond’s] just and impartial rulings,” according to Woodward, “were recognized by all.” In business, the minister called Diamond “a man of deeds” who displayed “rigid honesty,” but “was never too busy to pause in his work upon my entrance, adjust his pen behind his ear, and listen kindly and

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patiently to what I had to say.” Woodward’s concluding “encomium” proclaimed Diamond “a worthy son of a noble Sire, emulating the example and walking in the footsteps of his father. . . . Like Enoch of old in life he walked with God, and now ‘he is not far God took him,’ and God is keeping him against that day; for Jew and Gentile alike have this common faith in the resurrection of the just.”58 The Methodist minister differed in his religious orientation from Diamond, but shared a “common faith” with his Jewish friend. For this non-Jewish observer, Julius Diamond was an exemplary citizen. His commitment to civic ventures and devotion to faith made him an admired public figure. Sidney Diamond continued his father’s legacy of public service when, in 1915, he ran for the County Judge of Leon County. Before announcing his candidacy, Tallahassee’s newspaper quickly endorsed Diamond. The “young lawyer,” the article read, was “intelligent,” “brainy,” “industrious,” and “thoroughly competent for the position.” If elected, the endorsement speculated, Diamond “would discharge the duties of the office without fear, favor, or affection,” thus resulting in “a clean, just and equitable administration.” Evoking the memory of his father, the author called Sidney “a worthy son of a noble sire,” who also performed “his duties with competency” and earned the “entire satisfaction of the people of the county” as a “sterling” businessperson.59 In the years that followed, Diamond continued winning the favor of Protestant colleagues. During World War I, he applied for a position with the Judge Advocate General’s Department. Letters of recommendation continually referenced Diamond’s “patriotism,” intelligence, and loyalty. Florida Governor Sidney Catts called Diamond “capable,” “honest,” and “exceedingly anxious to get into the service of the United States Government during this War.” The governor was confident that Diamond would serve “with great credit, honor and distinction,” and could “be trusted with any and all secrets.” Diamond’s character, “fidelity,” and “faithfulness to people,” wrote Catts, was “beyond praise or value.”60 J.B. Christian, Florida’s Adjutant General, claimed that the “splendid lawyer” was “eminently fitted” for the position. “Mr. Diamond is personally well known to me as a gentleman of excellent habits, as to sobriety and moral character, standing high in his community as a good American Citizen, as well as a lawyer of the highest legal attainments, always progressive and identified with every movement looking forward to the best interests of State and Nation.”61 From the “highest to the most humble,” wrote Florida Secretary of State H. Clay Crawford, Tallahassee’s population recognized Diamond as “a man that can be trusted with the most vital matters.” Crawford acclaimed the

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“patriotism,” “ability,” and “pleasing personality” of the “valuable man” Diamond.62 Florida Attorney General Van C. Swearingen likewise applauded Diamond’s education and legal acumen. “[Knowing] him as I do I am sure his high sense of honor and his ability, as well as his unbounded patriotism would make him of inestimable value to any department of the service.”63 None of the remarks referenced Diamond’s religious orientation, but each portrayed him as an ideal American citizen. Consider that these overwhelming words of praise came in the wake of the Leo Frank affair in Atlanta. Catts’s letter may seem surprising, since he was an ally of Leo Frank’s principal agitator, Tom Watson. Catts called Watson “the great Apostle of Americanism,” and the Georgian likewise labeled Catts a “friend and champion” of the white South. On matters of religious prejudice, the two found common ground in anti-Catholicism, but not anti-Semitism. Catts’s letter made Diamond seem like an exemplary citizen. Additionally, when rumors circulated during the governor’s tenure that he supported anti-Semitism, Catts moved quickly to reject the accusation.64 When thinking about Catts and Watson in contrast, we begin to see how different value systems can produce different perspectives of the good society. To modify Dinnerstein’s phrasing, for some like Catts, Jews were “true Southerners.” At the same time, for the likes of Watson, Jews were not. Both perspectives existed in the same region during the same time. Added to this were the voices of Jewish white men themselves, who frequently attested that they were rightful members of American society. In their good society, Jews were both active citizens and active religious practitioners – in early twentieth century Mobile, Leon Schwarz would become a prominent advocate of this binary value. The “True Jewish Spirit” of Leon Schwarz In the unfinished South that existed after Reconstruction, perceptions of the good society were an unfinished product. Jews were numerically diminutive, yet their presence became highly influential. To ignore them, or favor white Protestant perspectives, would diminish the very real presence that Jews had during this era. The present chapter’s concentration on the Jewish South hopes to further complicate our understanding of the region’s civil religion. Not only were there differences separating Jews from non-Jews, but there were also divisions within the Jewish circle. For those sampled thus far, we have seen that civic involvement and religious unity emerged as a key binary value. The advocates of this value used it as a standard to judge the beliefs and behaviors that they believed contributed to, and detracted from, bringing about their good society. Charles Wessolowsky worried that apathy and disconnectedness would dissolve

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Jewish communities living in the rural South after Reconstruction. Rabbi Moses spoke to a mostly urban Jewish population in the North and South, encouraging them to look within Judaism to find answers for health and healing. Both hoped that Jews could remain committed citizens and religiously unified. Yet their messages and audiences differed. With Moses in particular, we saw a Reform Jew who labeled the “encrusted” practices of his Orthodox companions outdated. For the sake of Judaism, he insisted that members of the faith would need to embrace his Reform ideology and live by “deed, not creed.” So even within the Southern Jewish world, subtle divisions existed, thus demonstrating that even this small population spoke with many unique voices. The Jewish unfinished South was a diverse sub-section of a diverse sub-region of the American South. Between Orthodox and Reform, between rural and urban, and from the 1870s to the 1910s, Jews talked about their most sacred values using distinctive language. The following section gives an intimate profile of Mobile’s Leon Schwarz. In the initial chapter, we detailed the career of William D. Chipley. To his admirers, Chipley was the “upbuilder of West Florida,” whose image they emblazoned on a marble statue. We used Chipley to spotlight the key values held by many Southern whites in the region during his time. Similarly, we will use Schwarz to focus on the value systems of his contemporaries. This committed Jew differed from his Protestant counterparts over organized religion, yet in many ways shared a similar civil religion. Schwarz was a soldier, fraternal “joiner,” businessperson, politician, and member of Mobile’s Reform synagogue. Schwarz envisioned a good society that was both distinct from and similar to his Protestant neighbors. As a result, we will once again see that the civil religion of this era did not speak with one voice. Instead, it was the combination of many voices, some of whom were of a decided minority like Schwarz. 65 Raised in Perry County, Alabama, Leon Schwarz was the son of a German immigrant, Ruben M. Schwarz. The elder Schwarz was a planter before the war, Confederate soldier during, and successful merchant after. After his passing in 1909, the Knights of Pythias called Schwarz “one of our best known and most beloved members.” They further commended his “long and noble career,” “splendid citizenship,” “loyalty to friends,” “patriotism to . . . his adopted country,” and “his many kind and charitable acts.” Schwarz reportedly held “firm . . . religious convictions,” but his “liberal” outlook “towards all mankind” resulted in a “love of humanity and charity . . . [that] knew no creed but that of devotion to duty.” The obituary continued, “next to the

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Fatherhood of God was the Brotherhood of Man, and by his every word and act he endeavored to put these teachings into practice.”66 We have heard a series of non-Jewish voices that admired Jews for their supposed nonsectarian attitudes. This obituary was no different. In military service, religious commitment, fraternal devotion, and charity, claimed the author, Schwarz was an exemplar, in part, because of his “liberal” outlook toward members of all faiths. The nonJewish commentators of Schwarz’s son, Leon, would echo the same message.67 Like his father, Leon Schwarz was a soldier. He served with the Alabama National Guard for over a half-century and fought in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. While at the University of Alabama, Schwarz roomed with William Brandon, who later became Alabama’s governor. While students, the pair published the Citizen Soldier, a monthly periodical “devoted to the welfare of the volunteer soldier,” and “military preparedness on the part of the citizen and the nation.”68 Some Alabamans admired Schwarz’s military activities.69 When the aged Captain Schwarz volunteered for active duty in 1918, the governor of Alabama, Charles Henderson, wrote a letter on Schwarz’s behalf commenting on his lengthy career and “unquestioned . . . loyalty to his country.” General Hubbard had similar remarks, calling Schwarz a “loyal, faithful and efficient” leader who “preached ‘preparedness’ at all times.” Mobile’s mayor, Pat J. Lyons, characterized Schwarz as “active and energetic in practically all matters pertaining to civic and public welfare.” Lyons specifically pointed to Schwarz’s “reputation” for being “an advocate of the doctrine of national defense and preparedness.”70 Like others of his era, Schwarz showed reverence toward his Civil War ancestors, but also expressed the occasional qualification.71 In 1907, letter writers inundated a Montgomery newspaper voicing concerns regarding “Confederate Memorial Day.” Hoping to offer a suitable compromise, Schwarz proposed that the government “set apart” one day “not to be known as Federal Memorial Day or Confederate Memorial Day – but as Civil War Memorial Day.” On this day, Schwarz hoped citizens could “decorate the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers, wherever they may lie buried, North or South, for they died fighting for what each thought was the right.” He envisioned the nation memorializing “American valor” on this day, and reflecting on “the fact that our terrible internecine war is now but a sad memory and that the American people will never again be rent asunder by civil strife.”72 Despite Schwarz’s suggestion, Alabama made the fourth Monday of every April “Confederate Memorial Day.”73 After returning from the war in Europe in 1920, Schwarz observed the holiday and helped

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decorate graves at Mobile’s Magnolia Cemetery. The intent, Schwarz proclaimed, was to “honor” both those “buried under the poppy-studded sod of France” and “the soldiers of the sixties, who set the example in patriotism to their sons and grandsons who fought in the recent war.”74 Similar to many other white Southerners, Schwarz showed reverence for his Southern past while also trying to ease sectional strain. In addition to his military service, Schwarz was a politician. In 1906, he met William Jennings Bryan and remarked, “Mr. Bryan, I am an Alabama Democrat – is that a good brand?” Bryant reportedly replied, “There is no better in the country.”75 In politics, Schwarz made a habit of supporting his college friend and fellow Democrat, William W. Brandon. In 1906, Brandon ran for and won the office of State Auditor. Writing Schwarz, Brandon thanked “the friend of my boyhood days” for his “loyal and true” support. Brandon confirmed that such friendships “are more lasting and more beautiful than any perhaps, unless it be the strong tie that binds man to woman when they have joined their lives in holy compact.” Continuing, Brandon proclaimed, “I attribute my success as much to your efforts as to any other one man in Alabama, and I want you to know that next to my own family, there is no person in all Alabama who is closer to me or has a warmer place in my affection, than yourself.”76 In his other letters to Schwarz, Brandon expressed great respect for Jews. In 1907, Schwarz sent Brandon a book about Jews in America, and the State Auditor responded, “You know that I have been deeply interested in the study of the Jew, and this work gives me additional information as to their greatness and value as citizens.” He labeled all “prejudices” against Jews to be, “baseless, groundless and unworthy of true American principle.” Brandon continued that most Jews shared the “loyalty, virtue and steadfastness” of Schwarz. “[Jews] are a most trusted friend, when trusted, and are loyal in the hours of prosperity and do not desert you in the hours of adversity.” Brandon concluded that the “Jews of America” were a population “our entire citizenship would do well to study and emulate.”77 This friendship later served to advance Schwarz’s political career. In 1924, Brandon made Schwarz the Sheriff of Mobile after a “liquor upheaval” ended with the former sheriff’s resignation. According to Brandon, scores of Mobilians proposed Schwarz as a competent replacement. The requests, the governor reported, characterized Schwarz as “a business man who had not been handicapped by political entanglements or affiliations.” In a letter to Schwarz, Brandon claimed he was not surprised to see “the multitude of endorsements from Mobile.”

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“Knowing, as I do, his boyhood habits, his ideals of constitutional government and enforcement of law, his love of his country and flag as demonstrated in two wars, his business ability, and his loyalty to his state, I am today, upon my own responsibility, appointing you, my old-time friend and companion, sheriff of Mobile County.” The governor assured Schwarz, “I would not appoint any man sheriff of this great and growing county whom I did not believe would rigidly enforce the law and bring to speedy justice all violators, great or small, rich or poor.” Brandon was “confident” that his friend would “take the lead in making our great port city a clean, lawabiding, orderly city.” Brandon then referenced the state’s efforts to develop Mobile, “in a material way in building her port.” He speculated that Schwarz would enforce the city’s “laws” and “morals” so that citizens would stay “united in a common bond to make Mobile our great port and her future prosperity an assured fact.” Wishing his friend farewell, Brandon wrote, “In the divine discharge of your important task, I ask the Divine Ruler to guide and lead you, and to crown your administration with achievements that will vindicate my judgments in thus placing in the hands of my friend this important office.”78 In Schwarz, Brandon described a valuable civil servant, who had a deep religious commitment, had given readily to the nation’s conflicts, and would ensure Mobile’s material progress as sheriff. With this, the governor believed that his Jewish friend would strengthen the “common bond” of Mobile’s society. Also, Brandon’s commentaries reveal one who was deeply troubled by religious “prejudice.” Anti-Semitism was, for the governor, inherently flawed and contrary to his good society. Jews were a numerical minority in the South. Yet, for Brandon, his ideal society needed Jews like Schwarz. The governor believed that the “true” Southerner recognized and cherished the “true” commitment of people like Schwarz. Schwarz and Brandon agreed that the good society was welcoming to Jews and intolerant of anti-Semitism. At a 1905 Thanksgiving Day celebration in Mobile, Schwarz proclaimed that area Jews had “[united] with the nation in thanksgiving and gratitude to God for manifold blessings bestowed upon the people of our country.” These “blessings,” continued Schwarz, were not available for all of the world’s Jews. He prayed for God’s “intervention in behalf of oppressed and suffering victims of other lands,” and expressed thanks “that in this, our country, the exiles of our faith were afforded rights of settlement.” In America, he affirmed, “religious liberty and free speech are firmly established.”79 By contrasting religious freedom and persecution, Schwarz cast America as the epitome of the former. His good society was a place

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where Jews were free to become both active citizens and active faith participants. Affronts to this freedom, whether in America or abroad, earned his quick condemnation. The religiously intolerant society was, for the Southerner, an inherently defective nation. In his rhetoric, Schwarz frequently made America into his ideal society. Here, he believed that people from all faiths could and ought to worship freely. Along with other Jewish leaders in Mobile, Schwarz spoke at the 1911 ground breaking of the Orthodox synagogue in Mobile. Proclaiming himself a native of the “American Southland,” Schwarz first made a distinction. The Reform tradition, Schwarz remarked, had “undergone changes which, in the opinion of wise leaders of modern times, were deemed necessary in the onward sweep of evolution.” Those of “the old school” in the audience, Schwarz observed, “worship their Maker and Creator in a form or manner entirely different in name and plan.” No matter the differences, Schwarz proclaimed, “‘God bless you, too, and keep you steadfast to your religious faith as you are given to see it.’” The two hands of America, Schwarz continued, held both “the Tablets of Law which God gave to your law-giver, Moses, on Sinai’s Mount” and “the greatest document ever penned by man, the American Declaration of Independence.” Because of this ideological founding, Schwarz believed, “Synagogues, temples, [and] churches,” could coexist and “be filled every week with God-fearing, law-abiding, law-supporting, home-loving, and country-loving fathers, mothers and children.”80 In an American South where Jews were a numerical minority, internal divisions existed. Schwarz acknowledged these differences and showed respect for the “old school.” In his good society, members of both traditions had the “freedom” to worship. Whether Orthodox or Reform, Schwarz often encouraged Jews to practice their faith and become civically involved. One place he chose to practice his citizenship was in fraternal organizations.81 In 1910, he gave ten reasons why he was “the most ardent Pythian who never held an office.” 1. Because I am a believer in a Supreme Being – and my membership in a fraternal order is . . . evidence of such a belief. 2. Because I believe that the Supreme Being is Father to all mankind, thereby making every man my brother, ‘The Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of man’ is fraternal order doctrine. 3. Because I love and am devoted to my family – and I believe that those in my family are better protected if I hold membership in one or more fraternal orders. 4. Because I love my country – and my patriotism is strengthened by my membership in fraternal orders because they teach love of country, devotion to good government and antagonism to anarchy and revolution.

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5. Because I believe that man should be charitable and benevolent – and both by percept and example are those virtues taught and urged upon those in the ranks of fraternal orders. 6. Because I believe in friendship and in forming friendships with my fellow men. There is no better medium for the promotion and cultivation of friendship and comradeship between man and man than in the lodge rooms of fraternal orders. 7. Because I believe in intellectual advancement and regard fraternal work and the association with those engaged in fraternal work as promoters of culture and intelligence. 8. Because I am a believer in temperance. This general application means that man should be temperate in drink as well as in all other things. The fraternal orders teach and promote this doctrine. 9. Because I believe in purity and chastity in our daily lives, having special regard for the maintenance of those holy principles in my own as well as in the families of my brethren. Membership in fraternal orders teaches, fosters and insists on the observance of such holy law. 10. To sum it all up – Because I believe that membership in a fraternal order and adherence in part or in whole to its teachings and principles and purposes makes a man a better citizen, better father, better husband, better son, better brother, a Better Man.82 A self-proclaimed “joiner,” Schwarz’s statement drew a positive link between fraternal organizations and faith, nation, family, and morality.83 In addition to the Knights of Pythias, he was particularly active in the B’nai B’rith. At a 1907 regional B’nai B’rith conference in Memphis, Schwarz was a member of the committee on “Intellectual Culture.” In a written statement, the committee reminded readers that the B’nai B’rith aspired “to elevate the mental and moral character of our people whether in or out of the Order.” The statement recommended that lodges conduct “English night schools” in locales where numerous immigrants resided. The purpose, wrote the committee, was for immigrants to learn English and “American customs,” so they could quickly “earn a livelihood in this blessed land.” The statement speculated that the educational forum would “without a doubt” increase “the earning capacity” and “elevate the mental and moral character” of the new residents.84 At stake for Schwarz and his coauthors was the acculturation of American Jews. His good society found incoming coreligionists quickly contributing to the economic and civic affairs of the nation, while also sustaining their commitment to Judaism. For Schwarz, the good society found Jews both civically engaged and religiously united. Through the B’nai B’rith, he further emphasized this binary value. As a Southern Jew who valued both civic participation and a united body of coreligionists, Schwarz hoped an annual event called, “B’nai B’rith Day,” would influence these ends. In 1907, he beseeched his home

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lodge to organize the event, “to bring forcibly to the attention of our co-religionists the principles and purposes of our benevolent order.”85 That December, Mobile’s B’nai B’rith celebrated the event, which began by reading the Order’s constitution. The Independent Order of B’nai B’rith has taken upon itself the mission of uniting Israelites in the work of promoting their highest interests and those of humanity; of developing and elevating the mental and moral character of the people of our faith; of inculcating the purest principles of philanthropy, honor and patriotism; of supporting science and art; alleviating the wants of the poor and needy; visiting and attending the sick; coming to the rescue of victims of persecution; providing for, protecting and assisting the widow and orphan on the broadest principles of humanity. The key themes outlined in their constitution – unity, patriotism, and benevolence – inundated the following speeches. On unity, Schwarz proclaimed that the B’nai B’rith “platform” was “strong enough and broad enough for every Israelite, be he Orthodox, Reform or otherwise.’” Rabbi Brill then discussed the Order’s “mission of uniting Israelites in the work of promoting their highest interests and those of humanity.” Brill further praised the organization’s efforts to augment the Jewish, “mental and moral character,” and “[alleviate] the wants of the poor and needy.” Widows, orphans, and “victims of persecution,” announced the rabbi, had all received care from the B’nai B’rith.86 Sigmund Hass recollected the “sainted memory” of Oscar Cohen, a former rabbi in Mobile. Hass claimed Cohen used the Order to unite “those most interested in progress.” Henry Hanaw’s speech cited Mrs. Hugo Rosenberg of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, President of the National Council of Jewish Women. Through her efforts, Hanhaw continued, the Council and B’nai B’rith “have often been brought together by their mutual love for humanity.” A. Leo Oberdorfer of Birmingham, then discussed “the amalgamation of Jews of all nations into one patriotic democracy” in America. Jews “playing in the great march of mankind” had made “progress toward a great ethical purpose” and contributed to the “growth and practice of brotherly love.” Orberdorfer then praised Clara Barton, whose “humanity, and the establishment of the Red Cross” helped “alleviate the horrors of war” and direct “efforts toward the realization of a universal peace.” He believed Barton and her companions modeled an admirable “new patriotism” much like B’nai B’rith’s “higher ideals of duty and honesty.”87 The “new patriotism” of Orberdorfer and others made Jews both citizens and unified practitioners of their faith. In each speech, philanthropy represented a principal means for influencing both ends. Schwarz and others spoke fondly about an America where they believed religious tolerance was a widely practiced behavioral norm. In their good society, people of all faith backgrounds

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practiced often and freely. Still, they lived in a region and nation where the specter of antiSemitism lingered in the shadows. A 1907 Jewish Ledger article mentioned a confrontation between Schwarz and a Mobile theatre owner over a character in a play – the “Jew Pawnbroker.” Schwarz and the theater’s manager, who was also a Jew, exchanged a series of letters on the matter. The paper summarized that Schwarz calmly “placed the matter in the proper light,” and the owner quickly admitted “the justice of Mr. Schwarz’s position.” Schwarz’s letter to the Ledger explained how he believed Jews needed to confront similar situations. “We do not intend to be offensively and obnoxiously caricatured on the stage in Mobile, and such can be stopped by Jews in every theatre in the country if the Jews will only watch it and protest.” Echoing Schwarz, the Ledger encouraged Jews to protest “offensive characters and caricatures,” rather than standing “idly by.” The “better” course of action “is to reach the theatrical magnates of the country.” The author speculated that such tactics would earn “a respectful hearing” from managers. When facing continued obstinacy, however, the “respectable Jews should persevere their dignity by withdrawing their patronage from theatres which present offensive caricatures, be they Jew, Dutch, Irish or Dago.”88 Schwarz made his aggressive stance against stereotyping known in the B’nai B’rith. In 1913, the same year as Leo Frank’s trial in Atlanta, Schwarz’s district issued a resolution condemning “offensive caricaturing of the Jew in moving picture shows, vaudeville and other theatres.” He relayed that in Mobile, “Local theatre managers promptly expressed a willingness to co-operate to eliminate anything of an offensive nature in their play houses.” This level of accord, Schwarz warned, came only after some “[agitation],” “complaint,” and “protest.”89 For Schwarz, his good society was religiously tolerant and respectful of its Jewish members. In the “stage Jew,” Schwarz saw an improper treatment of the Jewish image and an affront to his social values. As a member of the B’nai B’rith, Schwarz characterized Jewish stereotypes as contrary to his good society, where religious freedom reigned supreme. In his mind, religious freedom meant that American Jews could unite and practice their faith to the benefit of all humanity. For Schwarz, practicing Judaism meant, in part, acting on behalf of those in need. In 1908, the Jewish Leger commended the “splendid projects” orchestrated by Schwarz’s Order. The city’s B’nai B’rith had become, the article read, “the champion for Jewishness all over the world.”90 Schwarz’s charitable reputation gained notice within the B’nai B’rith. From 1912 to 13, he assumed the presidency of District No. 7, in “recognition of his earnest and fruitful service in

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benevolent and philanthropic work among his co-religionists.”91 Reporting on his election speech, the Ledger wrote, “Mr. Schwarz, was, to use a favorite phrase of his own, ‘born, bred and buttered’ in the State of Alabama. He is intensely proud of his religion and his nationality and boasts that the title ‘American Jew’ is the proudest that can be held by any person.” In his acceptance speech, Schwarz commented on Judaism and America. One “gave to the world . . . the Ten Commandments” and the other, “the Declaration of Independence – humanity’s two most precious documents.” The new president, the Ledger wrote, had a “strong argument” that “an American Jew cannot be a true Jew unless he is a true American and he is not a true American unless he is a true Jew.”92 As Schwarz assumed the office of B’nai B’rith president, the proud Southerner proclaimed that “true” Judaism meant committing one’s self to the betterment of the nation. This resounding theme of Jewish citizenship marked his administration. More, Schwarz outlined the shape of his good society, and the place of Jews within it. Continually emphasizing the connection between America and Judaism, the Mobilian made the destiny of each inseparable. As the district president, Schwarz promoted a form of Jewish citizenship that emphasized both civic participation and Jewish unity. At one level, “service” meant involvement with the military. He encouraged his own lodge to support a new Jewish organization in New York called, “The Patriotic League of America.” The group appealed to Schwarz because “the purpose of the society is to foster and further among Jews, patriotism and love for our common Country.” For Schwarz, “patriotism” meant “acts” and “not in mere words, among our coreligionists.” To act as a Jewish patriot in Schwarz’s mind, meant “service for the flag in the Army, Navy or National Guard.” In addition to prompting Jews toward military service, Schwarz claimed the group could advance “the religious and general welfare of soldiers of the Jewish faith regularly enlisted in the Army or Navy.”93 A career soldier himself, Schwarz linked “patriotism” with military service and encouraged those within his faith to follow his lead. In his good society, Jews both contributed to regional and national endeavors and remained united as a whole. Military service was one way Schwarz believed Jews could become active members of American society. Still, the B’nai B’rith president worried about the disparate groups of Jews in his region and nation. Soon after becoming president, Schwarz sent a letter to Albert Herskowitz, editor of the newly founded Oklahoma Jewish Review. Schwarz hoped the

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periodical would prompt the formation of more lodges in the state. “[Every] community where there exists a thriving B’nai B’rith lodge there is too at the same time a community there filled with the true Jewish spirit – supporting its congregation or congregations and everything else of a worthy Jewish nature as well – and in contrast, where a B’nai B’rith lodge does not thrive the Jewish spirit is likewise apathetic or decadent.”94 Along with showing “apathetic” Jews the “true Jewish spirit” of the B’nai B’rith, Schwarz also targeted the Orthodox community. Writing to an Orthodox rabbi in Mobile, Schwarz opened, “Our official position and titles differ but we are engaged in a common cause.” Schwarz repeated his assertion that communities with B’nai B’rith lodges possess the “true Jewish spirit.” For “the cause of JUDAISM,” he asked the rabbi to help “strengthen the B’nai B’rith” by directing his men to Mobile’s lodge.95 Within the small Southern Jewish circle were even smaller sub-sections. Schwarz represented one Reform Jewish voice, but he was obviously not representative of every Southern Jew. In spite of their differences, Schwarz hoped that a level of cooperation could exist between all Jews of the region. His good society saw a united Jewish body, joined by his “true Jewish spirit.” Schwarz’s recruitment efforts proved effective. Following the end of his presidency, the Jewish Ledger reported that the Order experienced its highest single year membership gain, adding approximately seven hundred members to bring the total to 5500. An article cited the “devoted” efforts of Schwarz, who “[traveled] hither and thither . . . to solicit applications for membership.”96 Schwarz’s tenure was exemplary, according to a 1920 article in the Jewish Monitor. The paper criticized presidents who came after Schwarz for allowing the numbers to dwindle and doing “absolutely nothing for the hundreds of Jewish men in the many army camps in his District.” The article proclaimed, “How the administration of Leon Schwarz looms up! Comparisons are odious – and they would be in the cases we have in mind. But we can’t help recalling the glories of the Schwarz administration – glories which become the more illustrious as time goes by. We recall the sacrifice, the indomitable energy, the deep devotion of Leon Schwarz, to the cause – an attitude of mind which made the Order the greatest Jewish propaganda institution in the Southwest.”97 In addition to recruitment, Schwarz used his presidency to promote philanthropy. In a letter to the district, Schwarz suggested that the Order’s efforts for “doing good . . . assume a wide scope.” The Order, announced the president, needed to “stand ready to enter any field of endeavor where it may serve to uplift mankind – be that non-Jewish as well as Jewish.”98

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Speaking at an orphan home in New Orleans, he commended Jews for their institution. “This is our home, just as it is your home, because it is a Jewish home, and these are your children and our children, because they are Jewish children.” He implored Jews to become agents of “personal service” saying, “there is none so exalted in station, social or financial position, to whom the call [to personal service] does not extend.” While the faithful could “supply beautiful temples and synagogues,” this was inadequate for Schwarz. For him, “personal service” and “attendance” were noble ends. To be effective personal servants, Schwarz believed that Jews needed to become active citizens. “In citizenship it is not sufficient that you furnish good laws for your citizens, but through your personal service and example furnish good citizens for your laws.” Finally, he linked personal service to “family life.” While “the lord and master” may provide material goods for his family, he needed also “to give personal service to wife and children in the form of companionship, affection, and love.”99 Personal service, for Schwarz, had a broad definition. Central to his message was a notion that Jews needed to be involved in public affairs. In addition to domestic charity, Schwarz frequently commented on immigration, calling it the “uppermost problem now before American Jewry.”100 When Schwarz finished his term, his departure speech referenced a recently vetoed federal immigration bill.101 This was, he confirmed, “a source of gratification to American citizens truly imbued with the American ideal of liberty, equality and opportunity in this land.” Schwarz recalled that the bill’s author, a congressman from Alabama, wrote Schwarz claiming the bill “would have no effect upon the Jewish immigrant.” Schwarz acquiesced to this point. However, the B’nai B’rith president still opposed the bill, “as a matter of principle.” The “objectionable” bill, declared Schwarz, was detrimental to his America, that was “a haven” for “honest” immigrants “from all lands be he Jew or not, seeking to better his condition.” With this, we see Schwarz’s oft-repeated concern for the common good of America, his region, and his religion. His ideal Jewish citizen did not isolate his or her actions to those within the faith. Instead, this individual spoke to the broader American audience. Of course, Schwarz did have concerns for his fellow Jews, and particularly their plight against “prejudice.” To overcome “prejudice,” he advised Jews to “educate” the public. “I believe that the more knowledge the non-Jew has of the history and traditions of the Jewish race the less prejudice and the more respect he has for him.” Schwarz lived in a region that harbored anti-Semitic tendencies. Casting anti-Semitism as outside the norm, the optimistic Schwarz continued claiming that his

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“true” America was religiously tolerant. He concluded the address, reflecting, “I have simply tried to respond to that word which Robert E. Lee said was the sublimest in the English language – ‘DUTY.’”102 Different Institutional Religions – Similar Civil Religions This chapter brought some Jewish perspectives into our discussion of civil religion in the postReconstruction era. Similar to Leon Schwarz, many likeminded coreligionists imagined a good society where Jews were dutiful citizens and active religious practitioners. Schwarz was a unique brand of Southerner with a value system that his religion clearly influenced. Still, like many of his non-Jewish compatriots, he was the son of a Confederate, a soldier, a Democrat, a “joiner,” a businessperson, and a philanthropist. Institutional faith made Schwarz unique in the unfinished South. But for his Protestant admirers, this did not merit alienating him. Instead, Schwarz was for them a “true” citizen precisely for his civic endeavors and religious commitment. While their institutional affiliations differed, there existed something of a civil religious agreement between Schwarz and the non-Jewish population. Civil religion, as we have noted, is not about theologies, creeds, and doctrines. Instead, it is about the values that people believe contribute to, and detract from, social unity, peace, and prosperity. Schwarz lived in a South where white Protestants often described their good society using Christian language. Despite their exclusivist claims, many from this population believed Schwarz and others were “true” Jewish citizens. At the same time, however, there were those like Tom Watson in Atlanta and the attackers of Joseph Proskauer in Mobile. Each acted upon anti-Semitic sentiments. The river of civil religion cut many paths in the years following Reconstruction, and the voices and presence of Southern Jews contributed to this fluid reality. In the final chapter, we will examine anti-Catholicism and civil religious conflict. While Jews like Schwarz contributed to the unfinished South’s political culture, Catholics during the 1910s became political pariahs, cast by nativists as being decidedly “un-American.”

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CHAPTER FIVE “TRUE” AND “UN-TRUE” AMERICANS: ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND CIVIL RELIGIOUS CONFLICT

To use the concept of civil religion, one must investigate how a person or group defines its good society. The phrase, “good society,” has a theoretical foundation in the philosophical effort to describe a state that maximizes social unity, peace, and prosperity and minimizes conflict and strife. In complex societies such as the post-Reconstruction South, many perceptions of the good society existed. To mark these differences, this dissertation has identified particular social values. Social values are the standards used by a person or group to differentiate between that which they believe does, and does not, contribute toward their desired common good. In previous chapters, we have seen many different social values and many different perceived good societies. If we say that there was one civil religion in the unfinished South, then its key values both welcomed Northerners and loathed “carpetbaggers;” celebrated black freedom and cherished white supremacy; placed restrictions on female activism and called for more women to “Christianize” the world; and commended the “patriotism” of Jewish politicians and expulsed Jews from the city limits. When we understand civil religion as a perception of the good society, we discover that after Reconstruction the good society was an unfinished project, littered with contradictions. Similar histories covering this topic have emphasized the Lost Cause. While highly influential, the Lost Cause spoke on behalf of a nostalgic, white, Protestant middle- to upper-class. Practitioners of the Lost Cause were agents of one civil religious perspective in a land where many others existed. Blacks, whites, men, women, Northerners, Southerners, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews each formulated unique good societies that reflected their interests and agendas. Moreover, within each group, variations existed making it even more difficult to limit the discussion of civil religion to one “central theme.” In the years after Reconstruction, the many voices of the many Souths competed to have their perceived good societies recognized and actualized. In the unfinished South, some groups had more numbers, political influence, affluence, legal status, and social stature than others did. Still, the numerically diminutive, politically disfranchised, poverty stricken, legally alienated, and socially ostracized claimed that they knew what society needed most. This chapter turns our

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attention to Roman Catholicism. When comparing Southern white Catholics and Jews, we find both similarities and differences. Both were religious minorities living in a land where Protestants numerically dominated. Both had to deal with religious prejudice, particularly during the 1910s. Anti-Semitism was a Southern reality, as demonstrated by stereotyped “shylocks” in plays and the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta. Anti-Catholicism was also a Southern reality. Its rise coincided with nativist fears concerning immigration and the paranoid prospect of papal rule. One difference between the religious groups was the level of political, legal, and social exclusion that each experienced. As we saw, Jews such as Mobile’s Leon Schwarz and Tallahassee’s Julius Diamond managed to achieve economic, political, and social success before, during, and after the infamous Frank lynching. During this same time, Catholics in the unfinished South became social pariahs. The propagators of anti-Catholicism in politics won widespread support from likeminded voters. Protestant politicians who appeared sympathetic toward Catholics, however, had limited electoral success. For many whites in the unfinished South, anti-Catholicism became a central social value. To sustain unity, peace, and prosperity, they reasoned, the region needed to rid itself of Catholics. For them, the “true” American was decidedly not Catholic. For white Catholics and their non-Catholic sympathizers, however, expressions of anti-Catholicism signaled social disorder. A society that disqualified Catholics from public life or legal protection, they argued, was inherently flawed. Catholics, then, defined themselves as the “true” Americans, and their opposition as anything but. A value for some and a vice for others, anti-Catholicism assumed radically different meanings during the 1910s. The unfinished South, then, sustained an unfinished idea about what Catholics meant for the good society. The “Arena of Contested Meanings” Civil religion, observed historian R. Lawrence Moore, has the potential for creating “an arena of contested meanings where Americans make assertions about what makes them different from other Americans.”1 During the 1910s, Catholics and nativist Protestants in the unfinished South faced off in such an “arena of contested meanings.” There, each side argued that they knew who was, and was not, a “true” American. The word, “true,” has appeared throughout this study. After Reconstruction, the unfinished South saw tremendous railroad growth, population gains, port improvements, and industrial developments. Many Southern whites claimed that “true progress” came when white Democrats assumed control and Northern “carpetbaggers” departed.

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“True womanhood,” for numerous white Protestant Southerners, implied a special devotion to religion, prohibition, and/or the Lost Cause. On the latter effort, female devotees preserved their “true history” by erecting monuments, delivering speeches, and promoting Confederate organizations. Southern white Jews frequently heralded a binary value of civic service and religious unity. As one rabbi asserted, the “true religion” of Judaism was “patriotic,” “spiritual,” and devoted to social betterment. Southern white Catholics also cast themselves as “true” Americans. However, in the unfinished South, scores of non-Catholics remained unwilling to recognize the validity of this Catholic patriotism. This chapter is both about institutional religion and civil religion. Matters pertaining to religious doctrine appeared in nativist and Catholic exchanges. Underlying this rhetoric were concerns regarding social unity, peace, and prosperity. Nativists claimed that Catholics threatened to unravel America’s social fabric. Catholics objected, countering that the actions of nativists ran contrary to constitutional guarantees regarding religious freedom. Both assumed that they were the “true” Americans, and that their opposition was not. Catholics were a numerical minority in the unfinished South, but their presence influenced how many non-Catholics perceived their good society during the 1910s. This was a new era of nativism in the South and nation. Nativists, wrote historian Dan T. Knobel, “believed that they knew best who was really ‘American.’” He explained that the nativist movement became powerful enough to “mobilize a significant portion of the American electorate for political action and actually achieve many of its goals.” To do this, nativists created a “perception of world, of self, and of symbols separating participants from outsiders.” During the 1910s, nativists made Catholics into social “outsiders.” They feared that Catholics were loyal to Rome and Rome alone. Nativists subsequently worried that followers of the faith would, if left unchecked, negatively change the character of America.2 The “perception of the world” created by Southern nativists determined that Catholics were inherently “un-American.” Behind this reasoning was a rather circuitous and ironic history of the American South’s immigration efforts. After Reconstruction, a number of Southern white progressives conjectured that European immigrants could contribute to the region’s financial growth, while also eliminating the need for black labor. As we recall, material progress became an important social value for many Southern whites after Reconstruction. Railroads, agriculture, industry, and the like came to symbolize, for this population, the coming of a better age. White

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supremacy was also a prized value for many white Southerners. For the South to remain unified, peaceful, and prosperous, whites averred, their race needed to dominate. In 1904 and 1905, Southern railroad companies brought an Italian ambassador to the United States for a tour of the existing Italian communities. Mississippi and Arkansas had relative success with Italian laborers in the cotton fields.3 In 1906, a Mississippi newspaper commended Louisiana for introducing foreign labor. In addition to the economic benefits, the paper supposed the racial situation had improved. “The influx of Italians between 1890 and 1900,” the paper positively proclaimed, “had made Louisiana a white state.”4 The journalist assumed what many other Southern whites did – that is, their good society was white and materially prosperous.5 Despite the optimism of some, the push for foreign immigration was largely unsuccessful.6 As historian Leon Litwack summarized, Southern white planters sustained a belief “that blacks would perform labor and submit to treatment self-respecting whites would refuse to tolerate.”7 In other words, planters believed that black laborers would willingly perform duties that white immigrants would not. Immigration, then, was not the labor panacea that some Southern white progressives wanted. By the 1910s, nativism swept the nation and the American South. All the while, white Southerners continued to question the wisdom of importing immigrant labor. One Memphis newspaper asserted that the South’s “race question” had to be “solved on the old line of Anglo-Saxon and African. We do not want the ignorance and vice of Europe to complicate it.”8 In 1913, a New Orleans newspaper warned, “Safety first for our native stock should be the watchword of the South in dealing with immigration. Material progress had better slacken than be furthered at the sacrifice of the higher good.”9 In 1915, Methodist minister Alfred L. Woodward in Tallahassee implored legislators to confront the “urgent” and “pressing” matter of “white immigration.” While perhaps helpful for the region’s prosperity, Woodward worried about the potential “moral retrograde” that, for example, Germans and their “breweries and beer” would bring. 10 Our previous discussions of material progress have shown that Southern whites frequently placed limitations on what they were, and were not, willing to accept for the sake of progress. Maintaining the “higher good” for these speakers meant precluding immigrants from entering the South. Similar to the rest of the former Confederacy, the immigrant population in the unfinished South grew rapidly after Reconstruction. Florida had a small but vocal collective supporting the importation of foreign labor in the late nineteenth century. In 1877, the state’s Bureau of

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Immigration distributed pamphlets in Europe entitled the Florida Settler and Florida Immigrant. When the native population began voicing opposition to the effort, the governmental push for foreign labor ceased.11 This did not stop the flow of immigrants to the state, however. Instead, Florida’s foreign population grew from 1900 to 1920, unlike its neighboring states where the rates stayed consistent.12 As more immigrants came to Florida, the state’s Catholic presence grew and became strongest in urban centers along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. 13 By the 1910s, this fact caught the eye of the state’s nativist legislators. In 1913, Florida passed a law banning the instruction of whites by blacks, and blacks by whites. The law had no overt markers of anti-Catholicism. But during the years 1909-1910, 337 black students attended Catholic schools staffed by white nuns. Also in 1913, a pamphlet entitled “Knights of Columbus Oath, Extract 4th Degree” appeared in Florida’s congressional records. While fake, the pamphlet spoke directly to nativist fears. The fictitious inductee pledged to “defend His doctrine and His Holiness’s right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority.” The imagined knight then promised to “wage relentless war” against Protestant “heretics” and “hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” Vowing to vote for Catholics, the invented inductee also promised to “place Catholic girls in Protestant families [so] that a weekly report may be made of the inner movements of the heretics.”14 For the nativist Floridians, Catholics were an organized band of religious fanatics who planned to overthrow the nation’s Protestant authorities. The nativist good society, then, lacked a Catholic presence. So pervasive was this fear that legislators created laws aimed at limiting Catholic freedom. In the unfinished South, some believed that this brand of legislative antiCatholicism was supremely disordered. In Saint Augustine, Bishop Michael J. Curley called the 1913 bill banning interracial instruction evidence of Florida’s “wave of anti-Catholic hysteria.” In the following years, Curley continued fighting the religious “hysteria” of his state. In 1915, when speaking at a reception in Jacksonville, the bishop again commented on what he believed were the wrongheaded prejudices of the region. “Patriotism of the highest order,” Curley proclaimed, “flows from the very essence of Catholicism.” For Curley, members of his faith were valid patriots, and nativist claims to the contrary were simply misguided.15 In Florida, some non-Catholics shared Curley’s religiously inclusive perception of the good society.

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However, if elections were any indication, many others did not. Catholicism became a point of heated debate during Florida’s 1916 election season. A candidate’s position regarding the Catholic place in public life frequently determined his electoral success or failure. Park Trammell and the “True Patriotic People” Bishop Curley’s perception of the good society made Catholics viable patriots in a land where many non-Catholics firmly disagreed. By the 1910s, Southern white nativists made antiCatholicism part of Florida’s legal makeup, partially, by banning interracial instruction. In April 1916, Governor Park Trammell received a petition claiming that white nuns teaching at the Saint Joseph’s convent in Saint Augustine were teaching black students.16 He contacted the sheriff, confirmed the claim, and ordered the nuns’ arrests.17 In his public statement, Trammell maintained that he enforced “a good law.” Racial distinctions, not religious ones, were at stake for the governor. “I do not think we should encourage anything which would tend to make the negro believe he is on social equality with the white people.” The nuns, he relayed, received a warning, but “they claimed it was not a violation of the law.” Thus, Trammell declared that he completed his “plain duty,” attesting again that that race motivated his actions, not religion. Catholic newspapers, the governor lamented, “are unfair and try to mislead and deceive the people of Florida.” Offering assurance, Trammell reaffirmed that he had “absolutely no religious prejudice” and wanted all Floridians “to enjoy their own religion.”18 Not everyone agreed that Trammell’s actions lacked an anti-Catholic component. Commenting on the affair, one Jacksonville journalist lauded the “good sisters” for their “educational work.” The citizens of Jacksonville, the article speculated, had expressed “much indignation” over the affair, believing it “deplorable that any law should be countenanced which has for its object the prevention of gratuitous education of the colored boys and girls of the state by white teachers.”19 Trammell insisted that his actions were not products of religious prejudice, yet letters flooding his office commended the governor for just this. For many Southern white Protestants, the good society was both free from Catholics and dominated by whites. Trammell became their “patriotic” standard-bearer. From Ft. Lauderdale, one supporter wrote approvingly of Trammell’s handling of “the nigger teacher question.” The author worried that “some of our courts will upset every thing when it comes to Catholics and the law,” because “they seem to have a different opinion.”20 H. Witaker of Muscogee applauded Trammell’s “stand . . . on the side of the patriotic people” of Florida and “against Rome.”21 From Okeechobee, J.L. Crews

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expressed pleasure that Trammell “[advocated] one of the best” laws in existence, which he believed would contain “[this] Roman Catholicism.” The author worried that if “something isn’t done shortly that we the Protestant People” would have “some fight on our hands.”22 PostMaster and Justice of the Peace in Tropic Indian River, George Ensey, thanked Trammell for his “prompt, fearless action” against “the powerful Catholic Hierarchy.” Ensey wrote that the “socalled ‘Church’” had become “the most powerful political machine in the world.”23 Giving a word of warning, J.B. George of Morristo wrote, “Be on your guard as I think the Catholics are going to try to turn a trick on you. I have been told that the Catholics of South Florida are claiming that they are supporting you.”24 For this group of Trammell supporters, Catholics were deceitful, conniving, and harmful to the social order. The governor’s actions promised them that the “political machine” of Catholicism would not overrun Florida. For Florida’s nativists, Catholics were neither “true” Americans, nor socially benign. In the wake of the Saint Augustine affair, Trammell claimed he held no malice toward Catholics. Yet for his supporters, the governor’s actions made him an exemplary “patriot.” Some Trammell admirers gave more attention to the event’s racial implications. In one correspondence, R.C. Hodges, a former Confederate, proclaimed that Trammell’s position “against Negro Equality” would assure “all the old soldiers” would vote for him.25 “I take sides with you commonly speaking,” wrote Y.J. Holder. “I don’t think white and black should class up with one another anyway. They think themselves on equality with white people. I hope you will get that law in force [so] that white teachers shall not teach in negro schools.”26 A.C. Pierce of DeLand, wrote to assure Trammell “that as long as you stand as you do against the whites teaching negro schools you will have the People of the South for you.”27 The “People of the South,” for this letter writer, were clearly the white people of Florida. Trammell himself continually asserted that his actions had intended to preserve the line separating the races. This imagined line was, for the governor and his admirers, necessary for social stability. Some letters assured Trammell that his actions in Saint Augustine would guarantee him votes in his upcoming run for the federal senate. Okeechobee’s chief of police, William Collins, maintained that when the elections came in June, “I will say that I am proud to know that I voted for [Trammell].” Collins suspected “quite a number of people” in Okeechobee felt the same.28 The principal of the Montverde Industrial School, H.P. Carpenter, pledged his vote. “Allow me to say that we are for you first, last, and all the time. All right thinking people approve of your

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action in the Saint Augustine affair.”29 Also promising support, Dr. R.L. McMullen of Largo proclaimed, “you have doubly endeared yourself to me” by opposing the “abominable” situation in Saint Augustine.30 D.A. Reid of Perry relayed that the public support for Trammell there had become “very strong” since the affair.31 R.L. Park, the editor of a newspaper in Crystal River, wrote that Catholics in his area had drafted a letter condemning the governor. “I refused to publish it,” reported Park. “I assure you that I shall continue to do all in my power for you. I think you will carry this place almost solidly.”32 Throughout our discussion of civil religion, we have endeavored to identify the values that people believed were essential for actualizing their good society. For his “right thinking” admirers, Trammell became a protector of white supremacy. He was also a “patriot” for those who suspected that Catholics were loyal to Rome rather than America. Governor Park Trammell was a Southern white Democrat living in a region where Southern white Democrats dominated politics. For many sharing this political affiliation, Catholicism and racial equality threatened their perception of the good society. Not every Trammell supporter was a Southern Democrat, however. C.A. Stanford of Minneola confessed that he was a Republican, but “I must say I approve of the stand you have taken.”33 Another Northern Republican who relocated to Ocala expressed a similar opinion, calling Trammell’s decision, “THE PROPER THING TO HAVE DONE.” The author suspected “nearly all right thinking people” of Florida would vote for Trammell because of it. Public schools were the Northerner’s principal concern. “To my mind,” he wrote, “there is no question” that the “the Roman Catholic church” wanted to “‘do’ our school system ‘dirty.’” Claiming to have voted against candidates who “[cater] to Romanism,” the author proclaimed, “I believe the time has come when Americans must be put in office. Rome has had her day in office, and those that she now fills must be taken away from her as fast as Americans are found to take them, and hold them – for the good of America.”34 L.M. Drake of Daytona claimed he supported Trammell even though his wife and daughter were Catholics. Drake called the “blatant bitter” denunciations from the “Catholic press” nothing more than “political chicanery.” He regretted that Trammell would lose votes from Catholics. Drake believed “any fair-minded man” could see the governor was simply executing his “sworn duty.” “Laws are made for all alike, regardless [of] politics or religion.”35 Even for his Republican and Catholic-favoring admirers, Trammell’s actions contributed to the “good of America.” Trammell supporters sometimes claimed different political affiliations, yet all seemed to agree

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that “right thinking” people supported the governor’s decision. The “right thinking” person, from this perspective, valued white supremacy and believed the “patriot” was anything but Catholic. Trammell gained a great deal of momentum from the Saint Augustine affair. He distanced himself from any sense that religious prejudice motivated his actions. But supporters frequently praised what they believed was the governor’s “noble” stand against Rome. Trammell’s Democratic opponent for the senate seat, Nathan P. Bryan, tried to use the governor’s antiCatholic image as a liability. In a pamphlet, Bryan alleged that Trammell belonged to a secret fraternal order named, “The Guardians of Liberty.” The “chief purpose” of the Guardians, averred Bryan, was to keep “Catholics out of office.” This, he continued, violated the provision “that church and State should be kept separate.” Trammell’s political opponent saw in the Guardians an irredeemable flaw, “The Guardians of Liberty is Know Nothingism revived.” For Bryan, anti-Catholicism was not an endearing political value. He hoped that the state’s Democratic voters felt the same. In addition to decrying Trammell, Bryan’s pamphlet offered something of a defense for his having appointed Peter A. Dignan, a Catholic, as Jacksonville’s postmaster. Political opponents had used this appointment to argue that Bryan kept secret ties with the Catholic Church. “I am not a Catholic,” countered Bryan, “I did not recommend Mr. Dignan because he is one.” Calling Dignan “my personal and political friend,” Bryan maintained that he made the appointment because “He had the confidence and respect of the people of this city.”36 Hoping to discredit his opponent, Bryan tried to link Trammell to the Guardians of Liberty. As Bryan suggested, the Guardians of Liberty were a secret organization that endeavored to keep Catholics out of elected offices. In essence, the Guardians were an institutionalized product of an anti-Catholic movement during the early 1910s. In 1911, Missouri’s Wilbur Phelps began publishing an anti-Catholic periodical, The Menace. Subscriptions reached 1.5 million in four years. Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine soon joined the fray, publishing articles with headlines reading, “The Roman Catholic Hierarchy: The Deadliest Menace to Our Liberties and Our Civilization,” “The Murder of Babes,” “The Sinister Portent of Negro Priests,” “How the Confessional Is Used by Priests to Ruin Women,” and “One of the Priests Who Raped a Catholic Woman in a Catholic Church.” By 1912, Lt. General Nelson A. Miles, ex-Congressman Charles D. Haines, and Charles B. Skinner formed the Guardians of Liberty in Atlanta. With Tom

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Watson’s support and a culture of anti-Catholicism brewing, the Guardians became a strong political force in the unfinished South.37 Trammell denied having belonged to the Guardians, but he admired the organization nonetheless. “I am not a Guardian of Liberty,” he announced, “but I know many of them who are good Democrats.” Trammell continued, warning that Bryan’s politics would “[discriminate] against a large number of Protestants, and [favor] a large number of Catholics.”38 While Bryan tried using the Guardians as a political liability, Trammell embraced the organization. They were, for the governor, “good Democrats.” Between Trammell and Bryan, we find two white Protestant Democrats with differing perceptions of the good society. One aligned with an organization that sought to alienate Catholics from public life. The other unapologetically appointed a Catholic to a civic post. On the matter of Catholicism, the white Democratic South was not an ideological monolith. Trammell’s following was larger in number, thus eventuating in his victory. The voice of Bryan spoke for another value system that, while less popular, still became part of the era’s political rhetoric. Bryan’s supporters also hoped to manufacture a link between Trammell and the Guardians. Before the election, Bradford Byrd of the Atlanta Journal received a letter from the editor of Tallahassee’s Florida Recorder, Herbert Felkel. Felkel informed his colleague that Trammell and Sidney Catts – a leading candidate for governor who we will discuss in a moment – were Guardians. The Guardians, the editor alleged, had accepted black members into its ranks, which in Felkel’s mind, further discredited the organization. The letter requested that Byrd ask his cartoonist to draw an illustration showing blacks repeating the Guardian oath. “Have it in a negro lodge room,” Felkel wrote, “with an alter [sic] and negroes and whites in the meeting in the background sitting together.” Byrd sent an irate reply. “I must be candid and say that your proposed ‘stunt’ of cartooning a negro administering an oath to a white to be printed in a southern paper does not appeal to me personally.” The implications of the cartoon were particularly disturbing for Byrd. “The placing of whites and blacks on the same level, by cartoon or story, creates in the negro the feeling of equality, and you know what that leads to. No white man, no matter what your personal feeling toward him may be, is low enough to be placed on the level with a negro.” Byrd forwarded the letters to Trammell, and assured that the Journal would offer no assistance to the Tallahassee publication. 39

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Despite the admonition from Byrd, Felkel continued claiming that the Guardians had a substantial “negro membership.” “Oh! You Gardeens! [sic],” read one article, “Do you believe you can stand this, you men of the South, who fought with Lee, Jackson and Johnson? And how stand the sons of these men? Do you want a return to the troubles of Reconstruction days? If so, go to it. Organize the colored people into Courts of Guardians of Liberty; and the days of the ‘Befo’ Day Clubs’ we sink into insignificance, and you’ll have all the troubles you desire.”40 Leaving little doubt, the article linked the Guardians to behaviors that many white Floridians believed epitomized social disorder. Consider the author’s reference to the “Befo’ Day Clubs.” As we previously discussed, the summer of 1904 saw a series of Before Day Club rumors spread throughout the unfinished South. White newspapers claimed the groups plotted to kill prominent whites in the region. In Tallahassee, the murder of Nicholas Eppes, the white Superintendent of Instruction, generated a wave of racial discord. Rumors promptly formed that a Before Day Club orchestrated Eppes’s murder and that the county had five more clubs. 41 By linking the Guardians with the Before Day Clubs, Felkel seemingly hoped to cast the former as a disreputable organization. Letters sent to Trammell, however, continually lauded the Guardians and its efforts to limit the Catholic presence in public life.42 Trammell’s opponents campaigned with a hope that affiliations with the Guardians of Liberty would injure the governor’s campaign. For many Trammell supporters, however, the Guardians were a noble organization. The group became the anti-Catholic protectors of a perceived good society that had no Catholic representation. The Justice of the Peace in DeLeon Springs, Fred Taylor, commended Trammel’s stance against “nuns teaching negroes.” Voters, Taylor scribed, “want clean, strong, bold, patriotic” Americans like Trammell. Then, using rather cryptic language, Taylor wrote, “I belong to a certain order, and I believe you also belong to the same at a certain lodge . . . here. You received our endorsement unanimously.” Taylor’s letterhead read, “Are you a Patriot? Then subscribe to the American Citizen.” Beside this Taylor penned, “and The Menace.”43 The Citizen was the official organ of the Guardians of Liberty, thus Taylor was probably a member. Trammell continued claiming that he did not belong to the organization, but supporters like Taylor seemingly hoped otherwise. For Trammell, the Guardians of Liberty were a political asset. For Bryan, the Knights of Columbus – a Catholic fraternal organization – became a political liability.44 During the election, rumors surfaced that the Knights of Columbus had secretly supported Bryan’s

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campaign. Letters coming to Trammell occasionally referenced the supposed link between Bryan and the Knights. From Tropic Indian River, one letter writer pledged that his family would provide “three easy votes” for Trammell. “We all glory in your spunk as regards this Catholic question.” Bryan’s chances were “dead,” proclaimed the writer, “simply because he chose to affiliate himself with the Knights of Columbus.”45 More letter writers made malicious mentions of the Knights in correspondences sent after the election. On June 8, 1916, Trammell won the senate seat convincingly, receiving approximately twice the votes as Bryan. In his concession speech, Bryan was adamant that he lost because he refused to appeal “to passion or to prejudice.” In other words, Bryan believed that his tempered respect for Catholics hastened his defeat.46 Letters to Trammell seemingly confirmed this contention. The “Catholic element,” wrote W.S. Moore of Hawthorn, opposed Trammell during the election, but ultimately failed.47 In Lake City, Dr. Warren B. Rush suspected that many voters had been misled into supporting Bryan, “who stands for the whiskey ring and K.C.” Rush claimed he recruited “intelligent voters” to vote for Trammell. “Now I shall expect you to Stand [sic] against the Catholic in every instance and I will [be] fully rewarded.”48 T.J. Bunting of Milton called Trammell one of the “true patriotic” elected officials in the nation. If more “patriots” like Trammell won elections, Bunting hypothesized, “there will not be so many [Catholics] in congress.” Until that happened, the letter writer asserted, Trammell needed to “go to Washington” and “watch the Catholic Senate and [Congress] and not let them past [sic] any Bad Bills.”49 W.T. Brantley, pastor of the Apalachicola Methodist Church, sent regrets that Franklin County did not vote for Trammell. “But, as you know, the Knights of Columbus and the Church of Rome are firmly entrenched here.”50 Frank E. Patten of Jacksonville wrote, “‘Three Cheers for the Stars and Stripes’ and another three to the manhood of the State of Florida.” The election results, resolved Patten, showed “the present generation” had become “true Americans standing for Americanism and American institutions. The POPE of Rome must not rule America and I feel that this is only a beginning of what must come if we want to remain a free and independent people.”51 Escambia County Clerk of Court, A.M. McMillan, announced regrets that the county could not offer more votes. “I presume you know something of what we had to contend with on account of Bryan playing to the Catholics.”52 The “true American” imagined by Trammell’s supporters opposed any Catholic presence in Florida and the nation. Fearful of groups like the Knights of Columbus and eternally paranoid

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about the “POPE of Rome,” backers lauded Trammell as a “true patriot.” Trammell’s enforcement of one law in Saint Augustine drew favor from white voters who believed that Catholicism and black equality were threats to the nation. Bryan tried to use Trammell’s religious prejudice as a detriment, and one newspaper claimed the Guardians favored racial equality. Neither effort was particularly effective. In the metaphorical river of civil religion of the 1910s, Catholicism became a particularly noticeable stream. Election campaigns revolved around the issue. Civil religion is about perceptions of the good society, and these perceptions may change according to the speaker, topic, and time. Anti-Catholicism was a cherished value for many, but for Bishop Curley in Saint Augustine, it was a profoundly ignorant pattern of thought. More, Curley asserted that Catholics were indeed valid patriots. So too did the Protestant, Nathan P. Bryan. Still, both Curley and Bryan lived in a state where the majority of voters believed otherwise. Sidney J. Catts and His “WHITE DEMOCRATIC VOTERS” A particular perception of the good society is subject to change over time. Consider Senator Charles W. Jones of Pensacola, who was the first Democrat elected to the federal senate from Florida during Reconstruction. After 1877, the Catholic politician’s legislative efforts helped instigate the region’s material developments. When Jones died in 1897, his devotees in Pensacola made the Catholic politician something of a civic saint. They obscured his inglorious end and apotheosized the “purity of his political reputation” instead. One obituary proclaimed that the “distinguished Floridian” was an exemplary “patriot.”53 While Jones was “patriot” for some in 1897, the image of the Catholic politician became profoundly threatening for many Florida voters by the 1910s. During Florida’s fall 1916 elections, the politically inexperienced Baptist minister Sidney J. Catts made an improbable run for governor. From DeFuniak Springs in West Florida, Catts came from the region that produced, supported, and heralded Jones only a few years before.54 Anti-Catholicism was a foremost feature of Catts’s campaign. To announce his candidacy, Catts took out an ad in Jacksonville’s Times-Union. His fourth plank read: Nothing in Florida above the Nation’s Flag. As Roman Catholicism puts her allegiance to the pope above the flag, Mr. Catts stands against the invasion of the state of Florida in her politics. As Roman Catholicism opposes our public school system, Mr. Catts opposes Roman Catholicism in the state of Florida in the realm of educational views. As Roman Catholicism believes in the celibacy of the priesthood and the confessional, Mr. Catts stands squarely against them, and is ready to fight from the state of Florida this great

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menace to the peace of home, the maintenance of our public schools, and the enjoyment of quiet religion at all hazards.55 Jones’s Catholic faith did not keep the senator from winning two elections. Only a few years later, though, Catts spoke to a different audience, one worried that Catholics pledged their allegiance to Rome and Rome alone. Catts’s good society made no space for Catholic politicians – and as letters to the candidate reveal, many found this to be a “patriotic” trait. For many of Florida’s non-Catholic voters in 1916, the conditions of their time produced a new vision of the good society that systematically alienated Catholics. During his campaign, Catts traveled through Florida’s rural locales hoping to gather support. Of the total 24,650 Catholics living in Florida during 1916, 21,477 lived in eleven counties, most with large urban centers like Jacksonville. According to Catts’s biographer, Wayne Flynt, “anti-Catholicism became an emotional political issue, thriving on rural ignorance and evangelical intolerance.”56 Catts ran as a relative outsider in a state where the majority of the population lived in rural locales. Lacking sufficient contact with Catholics, this population relied on anti-Catholic media sources for information. Catts intentionally played to these fears and letters to the candidate reflected its effectiveness. 57 In the 1916 gubernatorial election, Catts did not win counties with significant urban populations. Nevertheless, many letters to the candidate came from Florida’s cities. T.J. Morris of Jacksonville reported that he was “charmed” by Catts’s “platform and your promise of allegiance to the American citizens of Florida.” The concerned Morris wrote, “As day and night cannot abide together so papal rule and liberty can never exist together.” The “gigantic political machine” of Catholicism, Morris asserted, opposed “fundamental American rights” such as “freedom of conscience, of speech and the press.”58 Another Jacksonville resident called Catts an “AMERICAN CITIZEN” whose platform was “bold and fearless.” Terming Catholicism an “ungodly ecclesiastical body,” the author lamented that some “Christian ministers” lacked “the backbone” necessary to speak against “this politico-ecclesiastical machine.” “If every minister of the Baptist, Methodist, Christian, Advent, Presbyterian and other Protestant churches would do their duty and enlighten the people of this state as well as other states we would soon break up the mighty political power of this so-called church.”59 Even though she could not vote, Mrs. Irvin Kelsey of Griffin assured Catts, “if I could and had ten thousand votes they would all be yours.” Before coming to Florida and neighboring with the Seminole tribe, Kelsey reported, her

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family lived in a “Catholic neighborhood.” “[For] a friend I prefer the Seminole. He is less treacherous despite the stories told of Indian treachery.”60 From Tampa, Herbert M. Brockell wrote to express support for Catts’s “stand . . . in regards to Roman Catholicism.” The author hoped Catts’s “admirable” campaign would be “crowned with success.”61 In Dade City, O.N. Williams expressed his “great pleasure” at Catts’s platform. While the “Catholic loving papers” would criticize, Williams suspected that “masses” of Floridians would support Catts. Still, Williams worried that the “Knights of Columbus” may “get” Catts and advised the candidate to contact The Menace.62 To his rural and urban admirers, Catts’s anti-Catholic platform plank made him an “AMERICAN CITIZEN.” The good society, for Catts and his supporters, lacked a Catholic presence, which they believed threatened America’s very stability. As his campaign progressed, Catts found support from outside the state. From Aurora, Missouri, the editor of The Menace, B.M. Phelps, wrote Catts commending “the noble stand which you have taken against Romanism in Florida.” Phelps confirmed that his publication chronicled “the great work which was done by Patriots in the recent election in Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and New York,” and thought the same could happen in Florida. The Menace, he assured, was “a great negative power in a campaign.” Phelps boasted that articles in his publication influenced local newspapers, which “begin running such ads as ‘Mr. So and So’ is a Roman Catholic, gives liberally to the church and attends mass.” Such “trickery,” he suspected, would propel Catts’s campaign to victory.63 For the editor, Catts was a “patriotic” ally. The patriot, from this perspective, vowed to keep Catholics out of office, an end the editor believed justified any means. Letters coming to Catts from within and beyond his home state frequently commended his stance against “political Rome.” This, they believed, affirmed his status as a “true” patriot. From Jacksonville, one avowed member of the Guardians of Liberty pledged his “moral support.” The author hoped Catts would “[awaken] the people” to the “insidious efforts” of the “Roman hierarchy in attempting to control our government.”64 Another Jacksonville Guardian anticipated that Catts would counteract the “counterfeit that calls itself the Catholic church [sic].” Catholics, warned the author, wanted “to get control of our country and destroy our institutions.”65 Another letter came from “A POWERFUL SECRET SOCIETY OPPOSED TO PERVERSION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS.” The “patriotic American issue” outlined in Catts’s platform, scribed the author, “attracted wide attention over all the State, and especially in

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Jacksonville.” With a “growing sentiment against the invasion of American politics . . . crystallizing,” the letter claimed “a vigorous movement” now existed to “eradicate ecclesiasticism as a pest from American politics and government.” The author believed that the movement would not stop until “every American Catholic” made “his oath of American allegiance paramount.”66 For the likes of the above-cited authors, “patriotism” meant that one was firmly opposed to the perceived political “invasion” of Catholics. For this population, the path toward actualizing a unified, peaceful, and prosperous good society necessitated valuing anti-Catholicism. Some Catts supporters were particularly forceful when pronouncing their anti-Catholic stance. Consider Jacksonville’s Richard Hargrave who advised Catts to gather more Guardian support. Hargrave worked for Van C. Swearingen, the former mayor of Jacksonville and organizer of Catts’s campaign committee.67 Commenting on Jacksonville, Hargrave reported that the Samaritan Knights and Masons were reluctant to support Catts. There was, however, a “powerful secret order” that Hargrave suspected was “the most promising of all the anti-papal organizations yet organized.” He then warned that Jacksonville’s Knights of Columbus were prepared to bring “violence and trouble” to Catts supporters. The Knights, Hargrave suspected, did not “understand how a body of determined men can be ready for bloodshed if necessary” and still “rise above the low-browed reprisals to which poor papists resort whenever they think they are threatened in their privileges.”68 In Hargrave’s mind, there was a violent religious war brewing in Jacksonville that Catholics instigated. Like other Catts supporters, he saw Catholics as an imminent threat in need of forceful eradication. In the election, Catts gained the majority of his votes from rural counties. Yet, in Jacksonville, Richard Hargrave and others were strong supporters of the candidate. For those who opposed Catts, the candidate’s anti-Catholic platform became a major point of contention. From Tampa, one letter writer charged that Catts’s platform “breeds hatred and is diametrically opposed to the tenants of the constitution of the U.S. and more important, the teachings of Christ.”69 An anonymous letter from Pennsylvania read, “[I was] astonished that such a statement should come from a sane American citizen.” Catholicism, claimed the Pennsylvanian, was essential in the forming of America. The faith existed “a few hundred years before you were born, and will be here when everybody on this continent will have forgotten that Sidney J. Catts even lived, and the Catholic Church will be greater and grander than ever.”70 From Louisville, P.H. Callahan of

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the Knights of Columbus expressed his disbelief and dismay. “Would you kindly advise me just the conditions in the State of Florida, making it necessary to insert Plank No. 4 in your platform, which, according to the space allotted it, seems to be of greater importance, in your opinion, than any of the rest of your principles.” Catholic governors in Massachusetts and Illinois, wrote Callahan, brought “progress and development” to their states. Callahan called Catts’s platform a fitting example of “religious prejudice,” and proceeded to cite the liberal Protestant clergyman Washington Gladden. “‘[We] Catholics and Protestants are going to live together in this country and we might as well learn to do so in peace and harmony.’”71 In the minds of Callahan and others, Catts’s anti-Catholic stance was essentially harmful for social “peace and harmony.” Their “sane American citizen” was not Sidney Catts. Here again, we find an example where the good society of the unfinished South was an unfinished product. To exclude Catholics, the letters proclaimed, was to defile both the U.S. Constitution and the Christian faith. For Catts’s supporters, however, Catholic detractors to his campaign were misguided and, simply, wrong. Referencing the above-cited letter from the Knights of Columbus, Richard Hargrave wrote to Catts and alleged that a recent press report “proved the existence of a plot by that dastardly ‘Commission on Religious Prejudices’ to involve the Federal Government.” Such action, he wrote, further proved “the boldness with which the Pope tries to strike a fatal blow at all America just while the war is at its height.”72 In a letter sent to P.H. Callahan, Jacksonville’s Guardians of Liberty admonished the Catholic. The federal government, read the letter, had “absolutely NO JURISDICTION or part in the political affairs of Florida.” Continuing, the authors criticized that the Knights perpetuated an “alien idea that a Pontiff has some jurisdiction in State affairs in Florida.” The letter sarcastically suspected that Callahan did not want “the privileges” of “liberty and Justice [sic]” offered in America. “[Respect] the liberties of fellow citizens to run on whatever constitutional platforms they please.” Referencing Callahan’s plea to “come together,” the authors wrote, “we cannot go to you without prejudice to our liberties, which we will never surrender.” The letter then set forth a litany of criticisms, aimed toward convincing Callahan to “declare your complete independence of the Vatican at Rome.” You should voluntarily cease to oppose freedom in all forms; to oppose free schools as these are the bulwark of enlightenment and help all religious faiths in proportion to degrees of light; to oppose the unrestricted reading of the Scriptures by the laity as this cannot jeopardize any faith; to oppose the Bible in the public schools; to seek to

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bastardize all children born without your sanction or marriages non-Catholic in performance; to practice the confessional in America, since it puts intelligence in the possession of a celibate order of friars non-compatible with the interests of free government; to maintain the cloister of American soil at all; to levy blackmail on the souls of human beings by pretending to ransom them from future perils for any consideration to the parish or priest payable; to maintain any longer the condition of celibacy as an order among priests.73 This diatribe left little doubt that for the Guardians, Catholics were neither genuine religious practitioners nor genuine American citizens. With every word, the letter cut clear boundaries between the nativists and their Catholic counterpart. On the other hand, we saw this same normative language coming from Catts’s Catholic opponents. In Catts, they perceived a perverted worldview, which they believed wrongly alienated Catholics. These opposing perceptions of the good society remained in conflict and competition during the campaign, and further convoluted the diverse civil religious waters of this era. Catts’s critics continued writing to the candidate, claiming his presence was essentially detrimental to American society. E.S. Morrison of Jacksonville asked Catts, “do you expect to get the support of any real clean protestant [sic] if you do you are sadly mistaken, this B.S. you are hauling out won’t make a vote for you and you bet here is one protestant that is going to work tooth and nail against you.” Morrison then recalled that during the yellow fever epidemic, he “saw the protestant ministers flying.” Yet, “the Catholic priests and sisters remained here worked with the sick it made no difference to them whether you were Catholic or protestant or black or white.” Morrison resolved that events like this proved that Catholics had always been committed “patriots.”74 When receiving the letter, Richard Hargrave promptly wrote to Catts. The “brutal, vulgar and obscene” letter, wrote Hargrave, was inexcusable. “[The] term ‘B.S.’, used in the sense in which this brute employed it, constitutes a degree of obscenity which makes him liable to the incriminations of the Federal Postal laws for an improper use of the mails.” He advised Catts to keep the letter, “in case you might later wish to find and punish this rough-neck for his brutality.”75 Later, Hargrave theorized that “William Burbridge” was the true author of the “vulgar” letter.76 Writing as the “Florida State Committee of Civil and Religious Liberty,” Hargrave informed Burbridge, “that the highest consummation of Christianity and social culture is displayed in those men and women whose capacity for religious and sectarian toleration is most conspicuous.” The Catholic Church, continued the letter, did not permit such toleration. “[The]

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attitude of the Catholic Church towards the civil authorities is inimical to free speech, free press and free schools.” Hargrave asserted that the Catholic “influence” was continually “subversive of the rights, liberties and highest development of society.” In “the Pope’s own land,” there existed “widespread poverty and a high percentage of illiteracy.” The scathing letter then alleged that in Spain and Central America where “the ‘Padre’ is the alpha and omega of authority, illiteracy reigns supreme, and priestly benevolence reaches it’s [sic] most sublime altitude in it’s [sic] handling of the connubial relations.” In America, Hargrave concluded, the Catholic hierarchy wanted “to strangle freedom of thought, conscience and education and usurp the powers civil government.”77 Hargrave demonized the institutional religion of Catholicism, disclaiming any sense that its members were “true” Americans. Along with scores of other nativist Floridians, his good society was free from a Catholic presence that he believed only threatened social order. Perceptions of the good society during the 1910s found Catholics becoming a central point of political controversy. For his anti-Catholic stance, many Florida voters endorsed Catts, while others despised him. In the June primary election, after a great deal of confusion, the results showed Catts the victor having garnered 33,893 votes. His opponent, William V. Knott, earned 33,439 votes.78 Knott took the election before the Florida Supreme Court and, with some political wrangling, won the nomination. Infuriated, Catts published an open letter. “In order to get his Nomination,” Catts alleged, Knott secured the backing of “the Supreme Court, the Big Moneyed Interest, Roman Catholic Hierarchy, the Knights of Columbus, the Little Court House Rings and the men who have been in office since they were little Calves and they are now Crumpled Horned Steers.” Catts suspected Knott would “qualify the Negroes” to gain more votes. “I shall be elected,” Catts announced, “as a ‘WHITE DEMOCRAT’ by the ‘WHITE DEMOCRATIC VOTERS.’ Don’t let anybody fool or mislead you. I have an overwhelming majority of the WHITE DEMOCRATIC VOTERS supporting me and this support cannot be overcome by any combination of Big Business, Political Crooks and the Roman Hierarchy.”79 To continue his run, Catts aligned himself with the Prohibition Party.80 As the campaign unfolded, Catts and his supporters would continue linking Knott with the Catholic Church. Knott adamantly denied the allegations. More, he expressed tempered respect for Catholics. The November 4 election found Catts earning 39,546 votes, compared to Knott’s 30,343. Reflecting on the election, one Baptist newspaper reported, “the common people” believed

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“Catts is one of them” and “voted for him because they fear the political influence of the Catholic church.”81 In his victory statement, Catts downplayed his image as “a fanatic.” Calling himself “broadminded,” Catts pledged to “upbuild, not tear down.” “You have honored me by your vote, and whether you be Catholic or Protestant, gambler or saint, rich or poor, you will receive fair and considerate treatment at my hands.”82 Catts’s victory speech transmitted an air of religious tolerance. Yet the Baptist newspaper made clear that his anti-Catholicism had endeared the candidate to Florida’s “common people.” Likewise, letters to the governor-elect cheered the victory and its anti-Catholic implications. From Lisbon, Jefferson McClillun proudly labeled Catts “the leader of American AntiCatholicism.” Calling the win “God’s will,” McCillun hoped it would start “a national victory over catholicism [sic].” He then suggested that Catts appoint people to educate the public to the “abominable crafts” of Catholicism. Claiming to be a keen student of Tom Watson’s writings, the letter writer humbly offered his services for this position, “regardless of salary.” “I may have the great pleasure of being helpful in controlling Political Roman Catholicism.”83 In Orlando, George R. Mauck complained that the “insults” of the anti-Catts press had been disgraceful. The Reporter Star in Orlando, he continued, had wrongfully opposed Catts and nearly incited “mob violence.” “I would like to see the same loyalty to Rulers in our great Country as is shown the Kaiser of Germany; [when] a German says ‘To Hell with the Kaiser’ he soon goes to that place himself, for he is shot down for the remark.”84 In Catts’s victory speech, he spoke with a tone of reconciliation. For his supporters, though, his anti-Catholic platform promised that “Political Roman Catholicism” would not overtake the state. To supporters, Catts’s anti-Catholicism became a noble political stance. It proved his worth as a “true” patriot and defender of his faith. Catts’s prohibitionist rhetoric was also appealing for supporters living outside Florida who opposed both “rum and Rome.”85 From Tyler, Alabama, J.A. Minter wrote, “I am glad that you won out over the forces of ‘Rum and Romanism.’” He hoped Florida would set an example for Alabama where “prohibition is certainly needed.”86 An avowed prohibitionist, LeGrand W. Jones, of Texarkana “rejoiced when you put to flight the enemies of God, of Americanism and of good government.”87 G.W. Nance from Refugio, Texas, called himself “a strict Baptist prohibitionist” who never attended a dance or “knowingly darkened a saloon door,” and firmly opposed “the hidden doings of the Romanists.” Nance hoped the spirit of Catts’s victory would influence his hometown, where “the dance, the saloon,

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and Romanism” had become “popular evils.”88 J.P. Stephens of Tabor, North Carolina, expressed disappointment that Catts was “hissed at, and ‘spat upon’ for doing good.” He sent Catts a pamphlet entitled, “Behold I show you a Mystery – Christ and the Church.” The pamphlet, Stephens summarized, predicted that between 1914 and 1921, “the old order (The Romanized system of governing the nations) [would go] to pieces.” In its place would be “a righteous government” of “good laws (God’s law).” “I have the feeling that God will use you prominently, in the starting of ‘Solomon’s temple’ – house of God – righteous governmental, through which the mind of the people will be renewed.”89 Anti-Catholicism and prohibition were validating qualities for outside admirers of Catts. He was their enforcer of “good laws.” Catts’s victory earned the governor-elect praise from writers in his region and the nation. Chicago’s Virgil G. Hinshaw of the Prohibition National Committee expressed his pleasure with Catts’s defeat over the “pro-Catholic, anti-prohibition people.” Hinshaw expressed his “[earnest] hope” that Catts “may be known as a party prohibitionist. It is not so much the party I desire to have aided as the prohibition cause.” He suspected Catts’s election meant that “some good men of the Democratic party” would join the prohibition effort and “bring about a moral regeneration of this nation.”90 The Prohibition Party’s Chairman in Drewry’s Bluff, Virginia, declared Catts “our National standard bearer in 1920.” The author protested that Catts had been “defrauded out of the [Democratic] nomination . . . by the machinations of a few sore headed politicians and the Catholic church.” To the chairman’s delight, the minister returned to take victory. The letter speculated that Catts would do “great things” by creating a “pure government.”91 Here, we find an example of someone who believed the “pure government” put people like Catts at the helm, while summarily discarding the supposedly flawed politics of his opposition. Clergymen from outside Florida also sent notes of congratulations. From the Evangelical Church in Laurel, Iowa, Pastor L.J.U. Smay wrote with elation that Catts had won “upon the cleancut [sic] issues of PROHIBITION and AMERICANISM.” Both issues, affirmed Smay, “are paramount today in American politics.” He suspected members of the nation’s “great patriotic societies” would carefully monitor the “progress of your legislative program in Florida.” The “great battle” of Catts, the minister pronounced, “constitutes an epoch in the progress of true AMERICANISM and in the defense of our distinctively American institutions.”92 From the Swedish Baptist Church in Prentice, Wisconsin, Pastor Carl V.

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Anderson congratulated Catts for fighting “brilliantly against the machine element.” “God grant that political Rome may feel itself in the sweat box during your administration as Governor of Florida and I hope the day may dawn soon when every state shall follow Florida’s valuable example.”93 The “great patriotic society” of this collection of voices found candidates like Catts winning elections. From North and South, supporters seemingly agreed on what they believed the good society did not include. Alcohol and Catholicism, the letter writers affirmed, were incommensurate with a “pure government” that they believed God blessed and Catts protected. With The Menace paying special attention to Catts’s race, Northern readers received updates on the campaign and heralded the victory. From Asbury Park, New Jersey, Menace subscriber Nelson Parker wrote, “you have won for our lord [sic] and savior Jesus Christ, I feel it my duty to let you know that my heart and soul is with you in the continuation of such work.”94 Also a subscriber, O.F. Garner of Chicago, commended Catts’s “hard work.” When some “counted out” Catts, Garner claimed that he always prayed for the candidate. “I was more rejoiced at your election than I was at our own state which put a Romanist out and a Protestant in as Governor.” Garner hoped that as governor, Catts would “continue the fight against Rome in politics and force open for inspection all Convents, Houses of Good Shepherd, nunneries, etc.” Proudly declaring himself a prohibitionist, Garner proclaimed that he “would hail the day that I could vote for you for the highest office.”95 Praise for Catts came from many corners of the nation. There was, though, a vocal opposition. When in office, Catts called for legislation to tax church property, test private school teachers, and give legal officials the authority to inspect convents.96 The “inspection bill” eventually passed, but the state never enforced it. Bishop Curley in Saint Augustine was infuriated, calling it “an implied and outrageous insult to women who rank with the best, purest and noblest on God’s earth.”97 For Curley, the legislation contradicted both his religion and the nation’s prescriptions for religious liberty. For many nativist Protestants, however, the bill was an encouraging sign. Writing from Statesville, North Carolina, Thomas J. Conger commended Catts’s “courage to stand for the Right.” The bill, Conger hoped, would help “patriotic” Americans further reveal “the dark deeds of old Blind Rome.”98 From San Francisco, California, T.W. Morgan expressed his “pleasure and gratification” for Catts’s law “establishing police protection for the inmates [of] parochial schools, convents and nunneries.” Morgan hoped that

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other politicians would enact such laws that would protect the “guarantees” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that he suspected Catholics threatened.99 A.D. Bulman of the “Patriotic Lecture Bureau” offered his services to help pass the bill. A circuit speaker, Bulman claimed to have evidence showing the “abominations” done against “inmates of Roman Catholic institutions.” In his possession, Bulman continued, were pictures of children “that were debauched by both priests and nuns of the Catholic church, and were made sexual perverts of by those same vampires.” Bulman enclosed one of his fliers entitled, “Romanism Exposed. The Man Who Put the TEST in ProTESTant.” Outlining his three-day lecture series, the final evening was “For Men Only.” During this meeting, the male audience would listen to what “celibate priests” taught “young brides,” “married women,” and “young boys and girls of tender age.” This information was “so vile and filthy that it dare not be published in the English language because the publisher would be sent to prison for a long term.”100 Catholics were relatively small in number in the unfinished South. But in 1916, Catholicism had become a prevailing political concern. Anti-Catholicism was a key value for nativists. It was a brick in a boundary wall that nativists believed separated them from the “un-American” Romanists. For his admirers, Catts’s victory represented a positive step in actualizing a good society that was free from Catholics and alcohol consumption. Those who disagreed argued that Catts’s anti-Catholicism was dangerous, ignorant, and decidedly “un-American.” From both voices came a sense that they knew who was, and was not, a “true” American. In elections, the nativists won, yet the opposition continued competing to have their good society recognized and actualized. Father James E. Coyle and “The un-Americanism of the Anti-Catholic Campaign” Anti-Catholicism inspired many to pull a lever for Catts and Trammell in 1916. By 1920, antiCatholicism motivated one Methodist minister, Edwin R. Stephenson, to pull a trigger. The 1920 murder of Father James E. Coyle in Birmingham, Alabama prompted the immediate outrage of Catholics and some Protestants. Stephenson’s subsequent “not guilty” verdict confirmed that, within the South’s legal structures, anti-Catholicism was an overriding precedent. With themes of race, gender, and religion peppering the story of Coyle’s death, the competing civil religions of nativists and Catholics came into direct conflict. To discuss the murder of Father Coyle, we return to the 1916 election of Governor Catts in Florida. Following his victory, Catts traveled to Birmingham and visited his son and daughter-

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in-law. At the request of local officials, the governor-elect delivered a speech. Claiming that God “called” him to run, Catts announced, “The Catholics were about to take Florida and I told the people about it wherever I went.”101 The “True Americans,” a secret influential anti-Catholic organization in Birmingham, joined local newspapers to express fervent approval of Catts’s speech. The paper’s editor, O.T. Dozier, soon published pamphlets warning, “The Pope seeks to control American politics.”102 Birmingham was not necessarily in the unfinished South, but the ideological landscape of both regions was strikingly similar. Anti-Catholicism influenced elections while it became a major point of conflict between nativists and Catholics. In Birmingham, like in Florida, Catts found a receptive audience in the growing nativist population. He also met opposition, particularly from Father James E. Coyle of Saint Paul’s Parish in Birmingham. Commenting on Catts’s speech, Coyle criticized the governor, claiming that his rhetoric belonged “in the malodorous gutter press of Georgia and Missouri.”103 Unafraid of entering the public debate, Coyle had long opposed the city’s anti-Catholic forces. Mobile’s Bishop Edward Allen, however, did not always approve of Coyle’s extra-ecclesial doings. In 1915, for example, Coyle wrote a Saint Patrick’s Day poem that sparked an anti-Catholic backlash. Calling the situation “unfortunate,” Allen asked Coyle “to bring the discussion to a speedy close” and heed the instructions of Pope Benedict XV, “to remain neutral and let the voice of Faith, Hope and Charity alone be heard about the clang of arms.”104 Coyle apparently failed to follow the bishop’s instructions. After Catts’s speech, the Birmingham priest continued writing to newspapers. In a letter to Allen, Coyle claimed he could not remain silent. The “antiCatholic atmosphere,” he worried, was festering as the “True Americans” continued “stirring up trouble.” The priest expected Birmingham would be “flooded with all sorts of nasty literature.”105 To Bishop Allen, Coyle admitted his “bad judgment,” but insisted “that old quack Dozier” and his “glorified Baptist sheet” needed the opposition.106 During Coyle’s tenure, Birmingham’s Catholic population grew as rapidly as the ensuing “anti-Catholic atmosphere.” In 1908, Birmingham had only 38,000 residents. Two years later, “Greater Birmingham” grew to 132,000. Industry, in the form of iron and steel mills, transformed Birmingham into the “Pittsburgh of the South.” Like other cities of the era, the limited supply of white labor prompted industrialists to seek foreign workers. The influx of Catholic immigrants, however, eventuated in a series of conflicts. In 1916, in nearby Pratt City, arsonists burned a Catholic church and school to the ground. The following year, a plot formed

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among Birmingham’s anti-Catholic factions to burn down Saint Paul’s, but federal authorities warned Coyle before anything happened. The fall 1917 elections found the subversive True Americans behind an effort to oust City Commission President George Ward. The Episcopalian Ward drew criticism for not banning Sunday movies, having a lukewarm view of prohibition, and supporting Birmingham’s Irish Catholic police chief, Martin Egan. During the election leadup, the True Americans circulated literature warning that the Knights of Columbus were on the brink of overtaking the city, and that Ward was their trojan horse. Ward’s opponent, Nathanial Barrett, won convincingly. Upon assuming his office, Barrett removed the Catholic police chief from his post.107 Similar to Florida, politicians won or lost in Birmingham based partly on their relationship with Catholics. Many successful politicians in the unfinished South and elsewhere during the 1910s preached to the anti-Catholic prejudices of the electorate. For Catholics in the region, such politicians epitomized social disorder. In his letters to Bishop Allen, Father Coyle frequently referenced the problems of religious prejudice in Birmingham. Commenting on a 1916 political race, Coyle mentioned a “bitter political campaign” between two “fair and bigoted non-Catholics,” a Baptist and Methodist preacher. Neither candidate, he lamented, offered any hope for area Catholics.108 Some of his political observances were critical of his own parish members. “If we had any competent laymen with sufficient backbone to come and depend on the Church and point out the un-Americanism of the anti-Catholic campaign it might be a good thing.” The city’s “Catholic men,” Coyle lamented, “seem to have a streak of yellow and are afraid to offend their nonCatholic neighbors. It would of course be better still if some decent fair minded non-Catholics would come into the open but at least up here the decent element shrug their shoulders and say it’s not our fight.”109 For Coyle, the good society was summarily inclusive of Catholics. The activities of those who believed otherwise, for the priest, were “un-American.” Living in a region where many viewed Catholics as a symbol of social disorder, Coyle spoke to an audience that did not always receive him well. Nevertheless, in Coyle, we find one whose ideal citizen was both religiously tolerant and had the “sufficient backbone” to fight for religious liberty. Coyle’s “true” American was inclusive of Catholics – and the “True Americans” were, for the priest, “un-American.” During the 1910s, both Catholics and nativists defined American “trueness” through mutual opposition. That is, both identified their own patriotism as inherently superior to the supposedly flawed versions of their ideological enemies. The tension over what

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anti-Catholicism meant for Southern society continued into the 1920s. By 1920, Birmingham’s population reached 200,000. With twelve Catholic churches, Birmingham had the largest Catholic population in Alabama. That year Birmingham’s Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 drew a strong following through the recruitment efforts of James Esdale. The growth of the Klan paralleled the rise of religious violence in Birmingham. In nearby Sylacauga, a gang of twenty masked men severely beat Pearce H. DeBardeleben, a Catholic druggist. The attackers alleged that DeBarbeleden was a philanderer and a threat to the women of the town. In July, after the Klan held a parade in downtown Birmingham, members flogged a white man and woman, both Catholic, accusing them with separate acts of miscegenation.110 On August 11, a heated confrontation between Edwin R. Stephenson, a Methodist minister, and Father Coyle ensued on the rectory porch of Saint Paul’s Church. The point of dispute was Stephenson’s eighteen-yearold daughter, Ruth. Just prior to this encounter, Coyle had wed Ruth to Pedro Gussman – a forty-three year old Catholic Puerto Rican immigrant and widower of eleven years. The shouts grew louder and, suddenly, three shots rang from Stephenson’s pistol. The forty-eight year old Coyle fell to the ground with one bullet lodged in his head. Coyle’s sister, Marcella, heard the commotion from the rectory kitchen and rushed outside only to find her mortally wounded brother. Coyle soon died in Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Meanwhile, Stephenson stumbled to the courthouse, gun in hand, and confessed to Police Chief T.J. Shirley.111 The murder of Father James Coyle quickly became a national sensation as reporters from near and far flooded the city. Reporting for the Nation, Charles Sweeney labeled Birmingham “the American hot bed of anti-Catholic fanaticism.”112 Anti-Catholicism was a central component of the murder and ensuing court case, but also woven into the story were fears concerning race and gender. While Gussman was not black, the defense team tried feverishly to prove that the olivetoned Puerto Rican was. Thus, a veiled fear of miscegenation combined with the jury’s embedded nativism all but assured Stephenson’s acquittal.113 The following paragraphs examine the details of Coyle’s trial. We will see two radically different perceptions of the good society. For Catholics, the good society enforced a justice system that convicted murderers, regardless of the racial and religious implications. For the nativist majority, however, fears of racial mixing and Catholic domination silenced the voices of dissent. For Birmingham’s outraged Catholic population, the murder of Father Coyle confirmed their contention that nativists harbored a distorted worldview. Following the priest’s death, Bishop

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Allen shared his indignation with the Catholics of Birmingham in a eulogy. “[Coyle] preached the word of God in season and out of season, visiting the sick, instructing the little ones, and helping the poor, the needy and the afflicted.” Coyle’s commitment to church life, the bishop continued, influenced his civic ventures. “[A] great patriot,” Coyle “loved his native land” and “was devoted to the best interests of his adopted country.” Referencing World War I, Allen recalled that Coyle did “[all] that a leader of God’s people could do . . . to advance the interest of our country during the late war.” The bishop reported having visited Birmingham twenty-five years prior. “[I] was highly pleased,” Allen remembered, with the “cordial greeting” from Catholics and “our non-Catholic brethren,” who were then “broad-minded,” “generous,” and “kindly.” This level of accord lasted “until 1915.” “What brought about the change? What caused the distrust and suspicion in this community? Who is responsible for bringing in disreputable lectures . . . to misrepresent the doctrines of the Church, to assail her clergy, and malign her consecrated virgins, the noblest women in the land?” Allen’s answer: “disreputable politicians and secret societies.” For the angry bishop, the “true Americans are un-American, because they are false to American principles of charity, justice and equality for all.” He suspected that “the great majority” of Birmingham’s residents did not endorse “these sentiments.” However, Allen charged, “they allowed this miserable clique to misrepresent and dishonor them.” The bishop branded Stephenson an “unfortunate man” with a “distorted view of the Catholic Church” and wondered if “he knew what the Catholic Church teaches and what the priesthood represents?”114 The “true Americans,” for the bishop, had “distorted” perceptions of the world. Allen’s “true” American citizen was someone like Coyle, who the bishop believed embodied the proper form of patriotism. In his closing remarks, Allen summarized, “Father Coyle was a noble, selfsacrificing and devoted priest, a martyr to his duty.”115 The “duty” of Coyle, for the bishop, was to both his parishioners and nation. For Allen, Coyle was both a patriot and a priest. Allen also called Coyle a “martyr,” declaring the dead priest a soldier who advanced the Catholic flag on hostile Southern battlefield.116 The martyrdom theme regularly appeared in letters of condolence sent to Allen. Philip Pullen of Saint Michael’s church in Pensacola wrote, “We were all shocked and grieved at the news of Fr. Coyle’s tragic death. He is a great loss to the diocese. Still his death may bring a blessing on us, since it was that of a martyr.”117 From Rhode Island, one letter writer expressed feeling an “awful shock” when hearing of the murder. “I can’t keep the affair

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out of my mind,” exclaimed the mourning Catholic who “prayed often for poor Fr. Coyle.” The letter continued, calling Coyle “a sterling good priest” and “a martyr like his ancestors.” The author hoped Coyle’s “sacrifice” would end Birmingham’s “religious bigotry.”118 From Pittsburgh, Mother Aloysia sent her “heartiest sympathy to you and the bereaved diocese.” She prayed that “the zealous priest” would find “his eternal reward.”119 Mother Praxedes of Kentucky suspected that the “appalling tragedy” had likely impacted “the heart of the Bishop, whose spiritual son has been cut down by an assassin.” Praxedes then wondered why this happened to “a man so good and useful, so widely known, respected and loyal.” She continued, calling Coyle a “martyr to duty” and condemning the South’s “rampant [bigotry]. . . . The blood of martyrs must be productive of good; if Birmingham prove unworthy, some other part of the Diocese will be blessed.”120 Bishop Allen was neither alone in his outrage, nor his perception of the good society. Resonating from these letters was a strong sense that Southern Catholics needlessly faced “rampant” levels of religious prejudice. This atmosphere, they affirmed, ran contrary to their claim that Catholics ought to live peacefully in the South alongside their Protestant neighbors. To influence this idealized end, the letters echoed a hope that the “martyr” Coyle would be the final blood sacrifice for their cause. Many suspected that the trial would be a step toward validating the Catholic presence Birmingham. They would be disappointed. On August 13, the county coroner J.D. Russum testified at a grand jury trial that Stephenson was guilty of first-degree murder. The evidence against Stephenson was overwhelming, but by the opening of the October 17, 1921 trial, many factors played into his favor. The foreman of the all-Protestant jury was the Klansman, James Esdale. Arguing before Judge William E. Fort on behalf of Stephenson was a talented quartet of attorneys led by Hugo L. Black. Stephenson, who earned a living by marrying couples at the court house, could not pay his legal team. A sympathetic band of supporters, likely the True Americans and Klan, raised the necessary funds. Hugo Black was a successful politician in Birmingham, having served as the police court judge and county prosecutor. He also was a supporter of prohibition and anti-gambling legislation. In 1923, Black joined the Klan along with 1,700 others. This alliance helped him win a federal senate seat in 1926, a post where he remained until earning an appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1937.121

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Before the case opened, media attention focused on Stephenson’s daughter, Ruth. Readers discovered that Ruth had a series of disputes with her parents over her religious affiliation. At the age of twelve, Ruth reportedly began asking Father Coyle about Catholicism. Thereafter, her interest in the faith developed. Ruth’s parents protested. According to the daughter, Rev. Stephenson “wished the whole Catholic institution was in hell,” and her mother “wished a bomb was under Saint Paul’s.” Ruth also alleged that her father belonged to fraternal organizations where members wore white robes. In April 1921, Ruth secretly began taking steps toward joining the Catholic faith. When her parents discovered this in May, Ruth fled for refuge with her Catholic godfather, Fred Bender, a Birmingham merchant. Rev. Stephenson and the police found Ruth at Bender’s home. According to Ruth, when they got home her father beat her with a razor strap.122 The trial opened when Joseph Tate, the prosecuting attorney, called five witnesses: Coyle’s sister, three witnesses who were standing near the rectory, and the physician who examined Coyle’s wounds. Tate wanted to prove that there was no physical encounter between Stephenson and Coyle before the shooting, and that Stephenson shot a seated Father Coyle. Black and his team then called witnesses for three days. Witness after witness testified positively to Stephenson’s character. They also claimed that the minister never beat Ruth. Black then tried to argue that the confrontation between Stephenson and Coyle erupted into a fight before the minister fired shots. Chief Shirley and his deputies testified that Stephenson had a lump on his head and a broken belt. On October 19, Stephenson stepped to the witness stand dressed in his clerical garb. He called himself a good citizen who had no religious prejudice. The minister then began recounting the details of the murder. Stephenson alleged that he did not know that Ruth had married Gussman until Coyle arrogantly informed him on the rectory porch. The weeping minister then recalled having shouted at Coyle, “you have treated me as dirty as a dog. . . you have ruined my home, that man is a negro.” Coyle then rose, according to Stephenson, and “told me I was a heretical son of a bitch, and knocked me to my knees against the post, and kicked me in the side, and caught me in the suspenders and jerked me to my feet . . . and I fired.”123 When Tate questioned Stephenson, the prosecutor reminded the jury that the coroner found no physical evidence of a struggle. Such inconsistencies in Stephenson’s testimony would prove rather inconsequential later. Black’s best defense strategy was Ruth’s husband, Pedro Gussman.

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Gussman took the stand near the end of the trial. One news article reported that when Gussman walked into the court, “lights were arranged . . . so that the darkness of Gussman’s complexion would be accentuated.” Gussman, who spoke with a thick accent, testified that he had been in America for nearly twenty-four years and his parents were of Spanish decent. Black’s initial questions accused Gussman of proposing to Ruth when she was thirteen. Ruth had spread this rumor in her interviews prior to the trial. Gussman repeatedly denied it. Black then showed to the jury a newspaper photo of Gussman. The attorney wanted them, “to see this picture taken before the witness had his hair worked on.” Black turned to Gussman and remarked, “You’ve had the curls rubbed from you hair since you had that picture taken?”124 Black wanted the jury to believe that Gussman was, in fact, black – thus appealing to both their religious and racial prejudices. Assistant Solicitor John Morrow would try to rebut this claim in his closing arguments. “The eyes of the entire country are turned upon this Birmingham jury,” Morrow concluded. “They want to see whether a Southern jury will free a murderer because of prejudice.” In his final remarks, Black retorted, “If the eyes of the world are upon the verdict of this jury, I would write that verdict in words that cannot be misunderstood, that the homes of the people of Birmingham cannot be touched. If that brings disgrace, God hasten the disgrace.” Continuing, Black insisted that Coyle’s vocation did not make him “divine.” Ruth could not have possibly converted, Black insisted, without the undue influence of Coyle. “A child of a Methodist does not suddenly depart from her religion unless someone has planted in her mind the seeds of influence. . . . [No] man has the right to invade the home of another in an attempt to induce any member of that household to accept a new religion.” Stephenson’s behavior, continued the attorney, was the result of “an uncontrollable impulse.”125 Combined with the case’s underlying racial component, Black appealed to the deepest fears of his white Protestant jury. After the attorney finished, the jury left for deliberations. Before the trial, some Catholics were optimistic. Father Joseph Sheridan of Saint Anne’s in Albany wrote, “I do not think there is any danger of the dastardly act being repeated.” He believed that the verdict would be “the death sentence of bigotry in Birmingham.”126 Others were less hopeful. Father Kitrick of Ensley, Alabama, gave a dire picture of Birmingham after the murder. “The murder of Father Coyle and horrible subsequent comments show the intensity of hatred the non Catholic [sic] citizenry in general have for a foreign born public man. The hatred was all the more intense because that public man was a priest and an Irish priest.”127 A member of Saint

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Catherine’s in Pratt City observed that “the respectable elements” of Birmingham recognized the severity of the crime. The “viler class,” however, were “outspoken in their approval of the murders.”128 Father Joseph Malone of Saint Catherine’s wondered, “What will be the verdict? No one can tell.” He had little confidence in the jury. The Catholic consensus, he claimed, was that “Stephenson will not get his just deserts. Some think there will be a quick verdict [and] claim there is no grounds for anything but an acquittal.”129 After one vote and four hours, the jury delivered a verdict of not guilty. Stephenson wept and shook hands with Black, the jury, and the judge. “I am a broken-hearted man,” Stephenson sobbed, “but I am going to try to live so that no man on the jury will ever be sorry for the verdict rendered.” Judge Fort then announced, “no one can properly criticize the honest verdict of twelve honest men.” For many, the decision was anything but “honest.” In the wake of the trial, Catholics and non-Catholics alike called the decision a fundamental injustice. Former Alabama governor Emmet O’Neal, a Presbyterian, called the decision a deplorable example of “religious intolerance and bigotry.” The verdict “made an open season in Alabama for the killing of Catholics. . . . We have not advanced far from barbarism if murder is to be justified on account of the religious creed of the victim. Whatever may be our wealth and resources, they will be but dross in the balance if Alabama is a state where murder is justified and where religious hate and intolerance sway the admiration of the law.” He advised the audience to “select judges of our criminal courts men who are able, courageous and learned lawyers, and not merely self-seeking politicians.”130 Expressing a similar opinion in a letter to Bishop Allen, the Bishop of Natchez wrote, “I wish to offer you a word of sympathy on the infamous verdict which was given in Birmingham. It would seem that killing is no murder and no crime in that part of Alabama.”131 From New York, W.H. Zinn wrote Allen to warn that a priest in Anniston was making “imprudent remarks” that were drawing attention from the Klan. Allen replied, “If the reverend gentleman mentioned in your letter thinks it advisable to say a word of condemnation of the atrocious verdict in the Stephenson case, no one can reasonably blame him for this.”132 Critics saw only social disorder in the Coyle decision. Catholics, they suspected, would not find justice in a land where religious affiliation precluded the possibility of a fair trial. In Birmingham, the advocates of nativism believed otherwise. Their “true” American was both white and Protestant. For this Birmingham jury, the Catholic claim to patriotism lacked sufficient evidence.

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The New Threats of the New South In this study, the “unfinished South” has referred to both a region and a metaphor. As a region, it encompasses Middle and West Florida, Southwestern Georgia, and Southwestern Alabama. As a metaphor, it amplifies the study’s core thesis that perceptions of the good society change according to the speaker, topic, and time. The unfinished South produced and supported a Catholic senator in the years following Reconstruction. A hero of material progress, many white West Floridians remembered Charles W. Jones as a civic saint. As nativist fears grew nationwide during the 1910s, a segment of the white Protestant South cultivated an anti-Catholic sentiment that successful politicians easily exploited. Social stability, for this group, meant an absence of Catholics from politics and America. Catholics were small in number, yet people like Father James Coyle gave voice to another perception of the good society that was necessarily inclusive of Catholics. Admirers of the priest believed he was a “true” patriot, but the nativist population of Birmingham believed otherwise. Both existed in the same time and in the same space. And both competed to have their good society recognized and actualized throughout the land. Catholic lost at the polls and in the courts, but their voices continued to echo the sound of dissent in a land where so few believed they were “true” Americans.

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CONCLUSION THE “MANY TRUE STORIES” OF THE UNFINISHED SOUTH

“If historians can agree on little else, at least they should rejoice in the realization that they have many true stories to tell about the human past.” – Mark T. Gilderhus1 Civil religion, explained sociologist Phillip Hammond, “is a religion not of salvation but of the good society.”2 Focusing less on specific religious institutions and creeds, studies that concern civil religion look at peoples’ perceptions of “what is as well as what ought to be.”3 Just as Hammond linked civil religion with the “good society,” so too has the present study. The “good society” – a phrase used often in the civil religion literature – associates civil religion with a philosophical effort to describe an ideal state that could maximize unity, peace, and prosperity while minimizing conflict and strife. This dissertation has identified some of the many perceived good societies of the post-Reconstruction South. Chapters argued that the position of the speaker, the topic under consideration, and the concerns of a particular time influenced each perceived good society. As such, the present study described civil religion as a concept marked by eternal flux. It borrowed again from Hammond and compared civil religion to a flowing river with “many forms” and an “identifiable current.”4 To navigate this river of civil religion, chapters identified and examined certain social values. Sociologist Talcott Parsons called social values, “a set of normative judgments held by the members of the society which define with specific reference to their own society, what to them is a good society.” 5 As we have seen, social values became the metaphorical bricks in the ideological boundary walls of the South’s many perceived good societies. To emphasize the civil religious fluidity of this era, this dissertation’s geographic focus has been the “unfinished South.” Because of Florida’s relative absence of people and underdeveloped material resources, historian Dewey Grantham labeled it the “unfinished state.” However, Southwest Georgia and Southwest Alabama were equally “unfinished” in this regard.6 More so than the material developments, though, this study unveiled the “unfinished” social ideology of the region. Social values such as material progress, white supremacy, black freedom, female devotion, Jewish citizenship and unity, and antiCatholicism meant different things for different people. These values did not exist in isolation from each other. Instead, they all drifted about in a river of meanings with no discernable center.

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Decentering the South The civil religion of the unfinished South was an unfinished product. With fluidity marking its methodological foundation, this study avoided creating a “central theme.” This is a significant departure from historian Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood. “Without the Lost Cause,” Wilson wrote, “no civil religion would have existed. The two were virtually the same.” For Wilson, the Lost Cause united a moral community around the shared experiences of the Civil War. This landmark study has made civil religion, the Lost Cause, and the postwar South seemingly inseparable.7 Critics, such as historian Gaines Foster, argued that the Lost Cause had a minimal impact on the South. As the years passed, he contended, white Southerners became more concerned with the culture of progressivism. Historian W. Scott Poole criticized proponents of civil religion who have assumed that a society could share a “dominant set of values.” He thusly avoided “civil religion” and used “Confederate religion” instead, claiming that the latter term more accurately captured his historical focus.8 Neither historian considered whether a civil religious quality existed outside of the Lost Cause circle. Moreover, despite their objections, historians have continued linking civil religion with the Lost Cause.9 Wilson’s thesis has also influenced some non-academic treatments of the era. In 2004, PBS ran a documentary on Reconstruction that mentioned the “civil religion of the Lost Cause.”10 This dissertation has shown that the Lost Cause was only one civil religious topic among many. Indeed, the many voices of the many Souths all competed to have their version of the good society recognized and actualized in the years following Reconstruction. As the river of civil religion flowed through the unfinished South, its shape changed alongside the position of the speaker, the topic under consideration, and the tenor of the time. To understand these changes, chapters focused less on specific religious institutions and creeds, and more on peoples’ normative pronouncements. Chapter One considered how material progress became an important value after Reconstruction. For many Southern whites, political redemption signified the liberation of the South and an unending future of prosperity made possible by the native population’s “traditional” worldview. For some white Northerners in the region, however, material progress meant that the South had become more Northern and shed its “misguided” past. Members of both sections valued material progress, believing that the good society was the prosperous society. Yet they defined this value differently by either cherishing or chastising the past. This chapter began deconstructing the historiographical assumption that

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the Lost Cause defined the South’s civil religious landscape after Reconstruction. William D. Chipley, the “upbuilder of West Florida,” became a regional hero whose admirers erected a monument celebrating his, “progressive spirit.” Chapter Two discussed civil religion in relation to the region’s racial conflicts. When the question of race appeared, the good society of Southern whites was a white society. White supremacy, therefore, became a crucial value they hoped would protect this ideal. For blacks, however, the good society was the free society. Freedom became a key value that meant, for blacks, civil rights, material prosperity, and social equality. In their direct and indirect conflicts, both races heralded their own values, while negatively portraying the values of their opposition. Blacks lived in a region where whites largely controlled the legal and political culture. Black calls for recognition, therefore, often went unheard by a white society that felt no need to listen. Still, blacks imagined a society where their definition of freedom became the law of the land. This chapter showed the civil religious diversity that existed between different racial groups in the unfinished South. While radically different, the good societies of blacks and whites competed in the same region during the same era. Chapter Three looked at how Southern whites valued female devotion. Some Southern white men – ministers and laypeople – idealized the supposed inherent religious devotion of women. Men identified women as the epitome of Christianity and the moral center of the family and society. Female devotion could also imply a commitment to temperance efforts. As advocates of temperance, some Southern white women publicized their devotion when trying to eliminate alcohol consumption. In yet another context, female devotion implied a commitment to the Lost Cause. The “noble” Southern woman, men and women claimed, would preserve and perpetuate the “true” history of the South. This chapter peered within a middle- to upper-class Southern white population to find the diverse ways that they defined female devotion. Here, we discovered once again that the Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among many. Chapter Four explained that many Reform Jews in the unfinished South valued both citizenship and religious unity. By articulating this binary value, Jews set forth to define a space for themselves in a largely Protestant region – a space that allowed Jews to be both active citizens and committed faith practitioners. While white Protestants and Jews differed in their institutional religious practice, many shared a similar civil religion. Religious devotion, philanthropic work, civic involvement, military service, and Democratic Party politics, were each features of the good society for Jews and Gentiles. In this chapter, we discovered the relative unimportance of

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size when considering the subject of civil religion. Southern Jews represented less than one percent of the total Southern population. Still, this small gathering idealized a good society wherein coreligionists remained both united in faith and active in civic service. Chapter Five focused on another religious minority, Roman Catholics. Unlike Jews, Catholics found themselves alienated from public life and ignored by the justice system during the 1910s. The nativists valued anti-Catholicism and advocated the wholesale removal of Catholics from the American landscape. Catholics were small in number, yet people like Father James Coyle gave voice to another perception of the good society that was necessarily inclusive of the religious minority. This chapter was about civil religious conflict. Coyle was a “true” patriot for his admirers. For the anti-Catholic nativists, however, the priest threatened a perceived good society that functioned without “Roman” influence. In the unfinished South that existed after Reconstruction, blacks, whites, Northerners, Southerners, men, women, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews each formulated unique perceptions of the good society. Within each circle, more variations existed. Some had more political influence, economic strength, or numbers than others did. Still, the politically disfranchised, the economically alienated, and the numerically diminutive, had a picture for what they believed society ought to be. This study has undertaken the task of identifying some of these perceived civil religious worldviews. The result has been a complicated narrative marked by a series of historically situated social values that often assumed many meanings. Chapters did not set forth to prove that any one good society was, or was not, truly “good.” Rather, each section allowed the many voices of the many Souths to speak for themselves, thus unveiling the diverse reality of this region and era. This dissertation examined the many perceived good societies that emerged in the decades following Reconstruction. In many respects, it followed the lead of historians such as Edward L. Ayers. In The Promise of the New South, Ayers intentionally avoided “the illusion of a seamless story” and “shifted from one perspective to another.”11 In his review, historian Howard N. Rabinowitz detailed the intricateness of Ayers’s “New South in flux.”12 No doubt, Promise delivered a dynamic image of the South, one that lacked coherence but captured a certain humanity that linear narratives often lack. Southern religious historians, such as Paul Harvey, William Montgomery, and Edward Blum have adopted a similar approach. These “splitter”

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histories, as Harvey labeled them, have aimed toward showing a more complex religious South.13 Indeed, the present study has been a “splitter” history of civil religion in the American South. “Splitter-ing” Civil Religion This dissertation’s “splitter” approach looked between and within the many voices of the many Souths to understand the ideological diversity and variety that pervaded the landscape. The same decentering tendencies influencing Southern religious history have also changed how civil religion theorists talk about their subject. The civil religion discussion began with an effort to define the “common faith” shared by all Americans. Robert Bellah’s initial article on the subject drew directly from the religious theorizing of sociologist Emile Durkheim. “If religion gave birth to all that is essential in society,” resolved Durkheim, “that is so because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”14 As such, Bellah’s discussion of civil religion examined what he believed was “essential” in American society. In the process, he and others frequently overextended their arguments and made the values of some American’s characteristic of the entire nation.15 Newer definitions of civil religion have argued that American society is simply too diverse and complex to have one common transcendent ethic. Just as Southern religious historians have “splitter-ed” their subject, so too have civil religion theorists. Sociologist Marcela Cristi’s comprehensive treatment of the subject argued that the discussion had been “too narrowly conceived.” As she explained, different civic groups, “will give different responses to the problem of collective identity, to the problem of meaning and purpose, and to the politicoreligious problem, and thus they will likely produce different civil religions.”16 Similarly, historian Randi Jones Walker argued that too many scholars have used civil religion to impose, “unity to a fragmented society.” According to Walker, “unity will not be found in a single mythology, no matter how powerful the dominant stream of society may be.” She envisioned a future where new studies of civil religion would uncover the nation’s “rich tapestry of symbols and mythologies.”17 Cristi, Walker, and others have begun redefining civil religion to account for the nation’s diversity. This dissertation has taken steps toward bringing this new definition of civil religion into an old discussion. Due in large part to historian Charles Reagan Wilson’s highly influential study, civil religion, the American South, and the Lost Cause seem essentially bound to this era’s historiography. As we have seen, however, the Lost Cause was one civil religious topic among

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many. Chapters demonstrated that the “good society” was a product of a particular person, time, and topic – thus, perceptions of the good society remained in a state of ceaseless flux. The Past and Future of Civil Religion By writing a “splitter” history of civil religion, the present study hopes to challenge scholars bring this methodology into other historical contexts. Frequently, mentions of civil religion create a world of “insiders” and “outsiders.” The “civil religious” person is often from a numerical or political majority. By contrast, the “civilly irreligious” person is an ideological, economical, numerical, or political minority.18 Consider historian George M. Marsden who talked about civil religion in relation to war. Citizens of the United States, he wrote, have willingly made “the supreme sacrifice” to their nation through engaging in warfare. Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Moravians, however, were what Marsden called the “major exceptions.” He noted that the dissenters earned traitorous reputations from fellow Americans for “refusing to fight in a good cause.”19 Were these pacifists truly civil religious “exceptions”? Or did they have a different, albeit controversial, civil religious worldview wherein peace was an uncontestable “good cause”? The framework put forth in the present study encourages scholars to consider the latter option. The historic “peace churches,” in other words, articulated a different civil religion wherein “sacrifice” implied avoiding warfare. The present study also asks scholars to expose the inconsistencies of history. While many Quakers have historically avoided warfare, this has not been a hard rule. Generals Thomas Mifflin and Nathanial Greene both were Quakers who chose to fight in the American Revolution. Major General Smedley D. Butler, nicknamed the “fighting Quaker,” was the most decorated Marine Corps officer of the early twentieth century. Interestingly, Butler became a harsh war critic as a civilian. “War is a racket,” he declared in 1935. “It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” The corporate interests, Butler argued, stood to benefit most from war, while the warriors of many nations had forsaken their lives.20 Butler’s example discloses the complex reality of America’s many civil religions. Varying American perspectives of the good society have embraced war, rejected war, and in Butler’s case, both. The challenge for scholars now is to consider each position, and place them each in conversation. Rather than limiting America’s past to one civil religious voice, we must begin considering other perspectives – irrespective of their size or popularity.

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Civil religion is, and should remain, a topic of conversation for religious studies scholars. In 1989, sociologist James A. Mathisen asked, “Whatever Happened to Civil Religion?” He suggested that the discussion had come and gone and would soon be a distant memory.21 In spite of Mathisen’s prognostication, however, mentions of civil religion continue to appear on the pages of historical surveys and encyclopedias of American religion.22 One also finds references to the category in journalistic contexts.23 In each, readers hear about the American civil religion, which rarely includes the voices of dissent and difference. This study aspires to start a new discussion of civil religion – one that includes more voices and more perspectives. With this, perhaps the future narratives, encyclopedias, monographs, and documentaries will give proper credit to the “many true stories” of America’s civil religious past.

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NOTES

Introduction 1

Heraclitus, “Universal Flux,” The Presocratics, ed. Philip Wheelwright (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1966), 7071. 2 David Chidester, Christianity: A Global History (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 166, 365-70, 557. 3 Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950, Second ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xx. See also, Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 4 The dissertation does not rigidly contain itself within these years. I settled on this span because it affords me the opportunity to evaluate two to three generations and examine how certain social values took shape and/or changed over time. 5 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, [1912] 1995), 421, 44. 6 John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 87. 7 Marcella Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 225, 242. 8 Phillip E. Hammond et al., “Forum: American Civil Religion Revisited,” Religion and American Culture 4, no. 1 (1994): 5. 9 Malcolm Schofield, Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms (New York: Routledge, 1999). 10 Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 106, 107. 11 Phillip Hammond, “The Sociology of American Civil Religion: A Bibliographic Essay,” Sociological Analysis 37 (1976): 173. 12 John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). This dissertation operates from a similar framework as the one employed by Corrigan. The Businessmen’s Revival, or Union Revival, occurred during a time of great economic crisis and demographic change. As a result, the white Protestant culture felt a strong need to affirm a distinct identity, differentiated from the perceived undesirables such as blacks, abolitionists, and Irish Catholics. Attended principally by businessmen, others in attendance included, women, sailors, and young men. Each practiced a form of emotionality that confirmed an identity pertinent to a specific group. Moreover, practices of emotion defined the “in-groups” from “out-groups” (2). While promoters called the revival an exercise in unity, therefore, meetings also became an exercise in differentiation. “Protestant revivalgoers operated out of a set of assumptions about emotionality that allowed them to characterize out-groups as emotionally defective. That is, they cast African Americans, Irish, and abolitionists as either too emotional, not emotional enough, or both” (231). The parallels between Corrigan’s study and mine begin with the climate of change and continue to the dialectical relationship of unity and differentiation. Stricken by economic depression and population change, many white Bostonian businessmen felt lost in a wilderness of ambiguity. The revival gave them a sense of identity that, in turn, created “group boundaries” that identified who they were, and were not (251). 13 Mark Silk, “Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 4 (December 2004): 890. 14 Livy, Livy, trans. B.O. Foster, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 73. 15 Niccoló Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 35. 16 Schofield, Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms. 17 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_04.htm (accessed October 2, 2005). For commentary on Rousseau, civil religion, and the “good society,” see: Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics, 17-30. “Rousseau’s notion of civil religion has to be placed in the context of his broader theoretical preoccupation with legitimacy and the nature of a ‘good society.’ Indeed, his overall concern in the Social Contract, and other political writings, is to provide practical political principles by which to evaluate a legitimate social order” (17).

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18

Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, ed. Robert N. Bellah (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 168. Reprinted from, Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (1967). 19 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 421, 44. 20 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 183-86. Reprinted from, Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.” Bellah claimed that the Western notion of church/state separation has blinded many to the notion that the religious can exist outside a particular church. “The Durkheimian notion that every group has a religious dimension, which would be seen as obvious in southern or eastern Asia, is foreign to us. This obscures the recognition of such dimensions in our society” (187). 21 Talcott Parsons, Religious Perspectives of College Teaching in Sociology and Social Psychology (1951), 2; Talcott Parsons, “Durkheim’s Contribution to the Theory of Integration of Social Systems,” Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 122. 22 Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 115. 23 Clifford Geertz, “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 131. 24 For overviews of the literature as it developed, consult, Hammond, “The Sociology of American Civil Religion: A Bibliographic Essay.”; James A. Mathisen, “Twenty Years After Bellah: Whatever Happened to American Civil Religion,” Sociological Analysis 50, no. 2 (1989); Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics. Some early studies on civil religion include, John A. Coleman, “Civil Religion,” Sociological Analysis 31 (1970); Michael C. Thomas and Charles C. Flippen, “American Civil Religion: An Empirical Study,” Social Forces 51 (1972); Will Herberg, “America’s Civil Religion: What it is and Whence it Comes,” Modern Age 17 (1973); Alfred Balitzer, “Some Thoughts about Civil Religion,” Journal of Church and State 16 (1974); Martin E. Marty, “Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion,” American Civil Religion, eds. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); James Leo Garrett, “‘Civil Religion’: Clarifying the Semantic Problem,” Journal of Church and State 16 (1974); Charles P. Henderson, Jr., “Civil Religion and the American Presidency,” Religious Education, no. 70 (1975); Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976); Elwyn A. Smith, “The Civil Religion: A Viable Concept,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 14 (1977); Robert N. Bellah and Phillip Hammond, eds., Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). 25 Some definitions of civil religion can be found in: C. Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, second ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1971] 1998), 13; John F. Wilson, “Common Religion in American Society,” Civil Religion and Political Theology, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 111; Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 16; Robert Wurthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 244; Richard V. Piernard and Robert D. Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency (Zondervan, 1988), 22-23; Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999), 433; Randi Jones Walker, “Liberators for Colonial Anahauc: A Rumination on North American Civil Religions,” Religion and American Culture 9, no. 2 (1999): fn. 199; Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics, 3; Michael Angrosino, “Civil Religion Redux,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 241; Jo-Ann Harrison, “School Ceremonies for Yitzhak Rabin: Social Constructions of Civil Religion in Israeli Schools,” Israel Studies 6, no. 3 (2001): 115. Conrad Cherry, “[civil religion is] a national faith made up of images and beliefs that Americans can hold in common.” John F. Wilson, “[civil religion] concerns the possibility that specific social and cultural beliefs, behaviors, and institutions constitute a positive religion concerned with civil order in the society.” Catherine Albanese, “civil religion generally refers to a religious system that has existed alongside the churches, with a theology (creed), an ethic (code), and a set of rituals and other identifiable symbols (cultus) related to the political state. As a shorthand definition, civil religion might be called religious nationalism.” Jonathan Woocher, “Civil religion . . . serves to link the ethos of a group to a worldview which renders the ethos supportable, and which is at the same time itself made plausible by the behaviors and sentiments it inspires. The beliefs which a civil religion propounds and the mode of conduct it prescribes sustain one another and together offer a coherent way of understanding and responding to the conditions of group life. These beliefs are often embodied in myths, sacred stories which recount paradigmatic events in the life of the group.” Robert Wurthnow, “civil religion consists of Judeo-Christian symbols and values that relate the nation to a divine order of things, thus giving it a sense of origin and direction. The utilitarian ideology, emanating from Enlightenment political philosophy, provides

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the nation with a sense of proper governmental procedure, as well as fundamental guiding values such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Robert D. Lindert and Richard V. Piernard, “[civil religion is] the widespread acceptance by a people of perceived religio-political traits regarding their nation’s history and destiny. It relates their society to a realm of ultimate meaning, enables them to look at their political community in a special sense, and provides the vision which ties the nation together as an integrated whole. It is the ‘operative religion’ of a society – the collection of beliefs, values, rites, ceremonies, and symbols which together give sacred meaning to the ongoing political life of the community and provide it with an overarching sense of unity above and beyond all internal conflicts and differences.” Marcela Cristi, “[civil religion] tends to sacralize certain aspects of civil life by means of public rituals and collective ceremonies. In so doing, beliefs and behaviors, acquire a ‘religious’ dimension. As such, civil religion may be considered a belief system or, a surrogate religion, that expresses the self-identity of a collectivity. Yet, like secular ideologies of different kinds, civil religion may also attempt to force group identity and to legitimize an existing political order, by injecting a transcendental dimension or a religious gloss on the justification.” Michael Angrosino, “American civil religion is an institutionalized set of beliefs about the nation, including a faith in a transcendent deity who will protect and guide the United States as long as its people and government abide by his laws. The virtues of liberty, justice, charity, and personal integrity are all pillars of this religion and led a moral dimension to its public decision-making processes quite different from the realpolitik that presumably underlies the calculations of states not equally favored by divine providence.” Randi Jones Walker, “[civil religion refers] to religious motifs, symbols, and forms that work to explain or justify political and civic practices and ideologies related to national identity and purpose.” Jo-Ann Harrison, “Civil religion is comprised of a sacred system of beliefs, myths, symbols, and ceremonies that give meaning to the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state.’ Whether imposed from above or emerging from society, civil religion presents an understanding of a society’s role in history and each person’s role as a citizen.” 26 Richard Fenn, “The Process of Secularization: A Post-Parsonian View,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 9 (1970); John F. Wilson, “The Status of ‘Civil Religion’ in America,” The Religion of the Republic, ed. Elwyn A. Smith (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971); Donald G. Jones and Russell E. Richey, “The Civil Religion Debate,” American Civil Religion, eds. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Leo Marx, “The Uncivil Response of American Writers to Civil Religion in America,” American Civil Religion, eds. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Henry Warner Bowden, “A Historian’s Response to the Concept of American Civil Religion,” Journal of Church and State 17 (1975); Michael Novak, “Peril to Christianity or Opportunity for Ecumenism?: A Consideration of American Civil Religion,” Encounter 37 (1976); Richard Fenn, “Bellah and the New Orthodoxy,” Sociological Analysis 37 (Summer 1976); Smith, “The Civil Religion: A Viable Concept.” 27 Mathisen, “Twenty Years After Bellah: Whatever Happened to American Civil Religion.” Others criticizing the ambiguity of civil religion include, John F. Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 145; Robert D. Linder, “Civil Religion in Historical Perspective: The Reality that Underlies the Concept,” Journal of Church and State 20 (1975); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7-8; W. Scott Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 3. 28 Robert N. Bellah, “Comment,” Sociological Analysis 50, no. 2 (1989): 147; Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Bellah discussed the “religio-political problem” in, Robert N. Bellah, “Introduction,” Varieties of Civil Religion, eds. Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980). He wrote, “While the exact application of the term civil religion can be debated, the ubiquity of what can be called ‘the religio-political problem’ can hardly be doubted. In no society can religion and politics ignore each other. Faith and power must always, however uneasily, take a stance toward one another. The polity, more than most realms of human action, deals obviously with ultimate things. With respect to both internal deviants and external enemies, political authority has claimed the right to make life-and-death decisions. Religion, on the other hand, claims to derive from an authority that transcends all earthly powers. The possibility of conflict between these potentially conflicting claims is always present, yet collisions are not necessarily constant” (vii). 29 Robert N. Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991). In his rejoinder, Mathisen conceded to Bellah’s point that the content of civil religion would remain an important topic. Mathisen, “Twenty Years After Bellah: Whatever Happened to American Civil Religion,” 149. 30 Hammond et al., “Forum: American Civil Religion Revisited,” 2, 5.

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31

Rhys H. Williams, “Visions of the Good Society and the Religious Roots of American Political Culture,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 1 (1999): 1. 32 Hammond, “The Sociology of American Civil Religion: A Bibliographic Essay.” Charles H. Long delivered a similar criticism regarding the exclusion of black perspectives. See, Charles H. Long, “Civil Rights-Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion,” American Civil Religion, eds. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 33 Michael W. Hughey, Civil Religion and Moral Order: Theoretical and Historical Dimensions (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 172. 34 Wurthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 244. 35 N.J. Demerath and Rhys Williams, “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society,” Annals of the American Academy 480 (July, 1985): 166. See also, Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics, 5. 36 Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, 16. 37 Demerath and Williams, “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society,” 154, 156, 166, 165. 38 Piernard and Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency, 36, 64, 32-64. 39 Demerath and Williams, “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society,” 159. 40 Rita Kirk Whillock, “Dream Believers: The Unifying Visions and Competing Values of Adherents to American Civil Religion,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1994): 375, 387. 41 James A. Christenson and Ronald C. Wimberly, “Who is Civil Religious?,” Sociological Analysis 39 (1978). See also, Ronald C. Wimberly, “Testing the Civil Religion Hypothesis,” Sociological Analysis 37 (1976); Ronald C. Wimberly, “Continuity in the Measurement of Civil Religion,” Sociological Analysis 40 (1979). 42 Walker, “Liberators for Colonial Anahauc: A Rumination on North American Civil Religions,” 184, 199. Others employing the Demerath/Williams thesis include, Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews; Harrison, “School Ceremonies for Yitzhak Rabin: Social Constructions of Civil Religion in Israeli Schools.”; Whillock, “Dream Believers: The Unifying Visions and Competing Values of Adherents to American Civil Religion.”; Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics. 43 John E. Semonche, Keeping the Faith: A Cultural History of the U.S. Supreme Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 6. 44 Jeffrey F. Meyer, Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington D.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 23, 78. 45 Craig R. Smith, Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 9-10. 46 Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 2, 192. 47 Ira Chernus, “Review of, Myths America Lives By,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (June 2005): 539-41. 48 Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics; Harrison, “School Ceremonies for Yitzhak Rabin: Social Constructions of Civil Religion in Israeli Schools.”; Gerald Parsons, Perspectives in Civil Religion, Vol. 3 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2001); Grace Davie, “Global Civil Religion: A European Perspective,” Sociology of Religion 62, no. 4 (Winter 2001); A. James Reichley, “Faith in Politics,” Journal of Political History 13, no. 1 (2001); Angrosino, “Civil Religion Redux.”; Christopher H. Evans, “Baseball as Civil Religion: The Genesis of an American Creation Story,” The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture, eds. Christopher H. Evans and III William R. Herzog (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002); Albert G. Miller, Elevating the Race: Theophilus G. Steward, Black Theology, and the Making of an African American Civil Religion, 1865-1924 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003); Silk, “Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West.”; Smith, Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion; Andrew M. Manis, “The Civil Religions of the South,” Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005). 49 Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986); Ira Chernus and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); Ira Chernus, Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear Age (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991); Ira Chernus, General Eisenhower: Ideology and Rhetoric (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002). In spite of his criticisms, Chernus did recommend Myths for undergraduate reading in the review. Chernus also used it for his course, “American Civil Religion(s).” In the course syllabus, he

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listed Cristi’s From Civil Religion to Political Religion as required reading, indicating again that he is aware of the new definitions of the category. See, Ira Chernus, syllabus for “American Civil Religion(s),” University of Colorado homepage, http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStudies/chernus/CivilReligions/SylabusFall2004.htm (accessed November 21, 2005). 50 Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics, 242. 51 Kenneth K. Bailey, “Southern White Protestantism at the Turn of the Century,” The American Historical Review 68, no. 3 (1963): 635. 52 Samuel S. Hill, Jr., Southern Churches in Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), 73-88, 121-22. Hill’s use of the term “historic religion” drew from, Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29 (June 1964): 366. 53 Paul Harvey, “Religion in the American South Since the Civil War,” A Companion to the American South, ed. John B. Boles (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 390. The trend toward diversity in the historiography of the postwar South drew from a widespread effort to do the same among American historians. See, Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Mark T. Gilderhus, History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2000). Gilderhus summarized this change writing, “Although particularities and divergences of many sorts characterize the craft of history in the present day, one thing seems reasonably clear. History no longer sets forth common stories that presumably speak for the identity and experience of all readers. For many consumers of history, the narratives centering on the activities of white male elites no longer provide either satisfaction, stimulation, or a means to truth. We no longer possess a past commonly agreed upon. Indeed, to the contrary, we have a multiplicity of versions competing for attention and emphasizing alternatively elites or nonelites, men or women, whites or persons of color, and no good way of reconciling all the differences. Though the disparities and the incoherences create terrible predicaments for historians who prize orderliness in their stories, such conditions also aptly express the confusions of the world and the experiences of different people in it. If historians can agree on little else, at least they should rejoice in the realization that they have many true stories to tell about the human past” (126). 54 While difficult to define, poststructuralism generally refers to a decentered epistemology that radically differed from the teleological epistemology of the Enlightenment. In opposition to the truth claims of the Enlightenment, linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that words were symbols that created ideas. He devised a linguistic model that identified the “signified” and “signifier.” The former referred to the sound of a word and the latter referred to the concept behind the word. For Saussure, the connection between the signifier and the signified was arbitrary, making meaning a product of convention. Implicit in Saussure’s new “structuralist” theory of language was that words no longer referred to facts, but social constructions. Heavily influenced by Saussure, Claude LéviStrauss planted the seeds of poststructuralism and continued to understand the problem of language. Lévi-Strauss also challenged the Western belief that undeveloped societies represented a less-evolved form of humanity. The theory of progress espoused by Hegel, Marx, and others tended to view Western society as the best development of human civilization. Lévi-Strauss opened a door of possibility for understanding cultures on their own terms rather than importing value judgments about the level of the other’s mental development. Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault came to epitomize poststructuralism by problematizing the distinction between the signifier and signified. Whereas structuralists claimed to identify certain universal features in language, poststructuralists posited that language represented an unstable web of meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana, 1967 [1916]); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Jacques Lacan, The Language of Self, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1968); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse of Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). For an introductory discussion of ancient and modern philosophy see volumes One, Six, Seven, and Eight in, Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1964). For an overview of structuralism and poststructuralism see, John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Straus to Derrida (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). For more on poststructuralism and its influences on history see: Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997); Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind; Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse; Ewa Domanska, Encounters: Philosophy and History after Postmodernism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).

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55

Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. 56 Harvey, “Religion in the American South Since the Civil War,” 403, 388. The histories concerned with religion and race referenced by Harvey are, Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Harvey’s own work has explored the developments of “interracial exchange.” Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Paul Harvey, “God and Negroes and Jesus and Sin and Salvation: Racism, Racial Interchange, and Interracialism in Southern Religious History,” Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, eds. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 57 Samuel S. Hill, Jr., Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), xix-xx, 10. 58 Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 12-13, 98-99. 59 Harvey, “Religion in the American South Since the Civil War,” 394. 60 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913, 6, 198, 7-8. 61 Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry, 53-54. 62 Andrew M. Manis, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Black and White Baptists and Civil Rights, 1947-1957 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002 [1987]), x, xi, 5-7. 63 Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 64. 64 “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States,” U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056.html (accessed October 12, 2005). South includes: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. South Atlantic includes: Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. Year South South Atlantic Florida Georgia Alabama 1870 Total 12,288,020 5,853,610 187,748 1,184,109 996,922 (Black) (4,420,811) (2,216,705) (91,689) (545,142) (475,510) 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

16,516,568 (5,953,903) 20,028,059 (6,760,577) 24,523,527 (7,922,969) 29,389,330 (8,749,427) 33,125,803 (8,912,231)

7,597,197 (2,941,202) 8,857,922 (3,262,690) 10,443,480 (3,729,017) 12,194,895 (4,112,488) 13,990,272 (4,325,120)

269,493 (126,690) 391,422 (166,180) 528,542 (230,730) 752,619 (308,669) 968,470 (329,487)

65

1,542,180 (725,133) 1,837,353 (858,815) 2,216,331 (1,034,813) 2,609,121 (1,176,987) 2,895,832 (1,206,365)

1,262,505 (600,103) 1,513,401 (678,489) 1,828,697 (827,307) 2,138,093 (908,282) 2,348,174 (900,652)

“County Population Census Counts 1900-90,” U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/cencounts.html (accessed October 12, 2005).

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Year

Leon County (Tallahassee)

1870 Total (Black) 1880

15,236 (12,341) 19,662 (16,840) 17,752 (14,631) 19,887 (16,001) 19,427 (14,726) 18,059 (12,167)

1890 1900 1910 1920

Escambia County (Pensacola) 7,817 (2,880) 12,156 (5,302) 20,188 (8,706) 28,313 (11,929) 38,029 (15,111) 49,386 (15,221)

Mobile County (Mobile)

Thomas County (Thomasville)

49,311 (21,107) 48,653 (21,443) 51,587 (22,804) 62,740 (28,434) 80,854 (34,719) 100,117 (39,667)

14,523 (8,363) 20,597 (12,213) 26,154 (15,028) 31,076 (17,450) 29,071 (17,086) 33,044 (17,263)

Dougherty County (Albany) 11,517 (9,424) 12,622 (10,670) 12,206 (10,231) 13,679 (11,228) 16,035 (12,049) 20,063 (13,370)

66

Quoted in, James M. McPherson, Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 761. 67 Canter Brown, Jr., “The Civil War, 1861-1865,” The New Florida History, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). On Natural Bridge, Brown wrote, “The Union defeat at Natural Bridge briefly lifted the spirits of die-hard Confederates, but by early March 1865 most Floridians had accepted the fact that the South ultimately would lose the war” (244). 68 Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, 60-64; Samuel Proctor, “Prelude to the New Florida, 1877-1919,” The New Florida History, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 69 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 125-26; Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, 47-51. 70 William Warren Rogers, Thomas County, 1865-1900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973), 102, 98154. 71 Black lynchings in Florida were 79.8 per 100,000; Georgia, 41.8; Louisiana, 43.7; Mississippi, 52.8. Steward E. Tolonay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynching, 1882-1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 37-38; Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 61-63. 72 Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), viii. Chapter One 1

Generally, “carpetbagger” was a pejorative label given by white Southerners to Northern white Republicans who moved South during Reconstruction and assumed political positions. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 22; Charles Reagan Wilson, “Reconstruction,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 658. 2 Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 13; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 153-69; W. Scott Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 3 Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913. See also, Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a comprehensive study of Reconstruction consult: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). The term “New South” initially was the title of a Port Royal, SC newspaper established in 1862 and published by Adam Badeau, a Union Captain. In April 1870, Edwin DeLeon’s “The New South: What it is Doing, and What It Wants,” in Putman’s Magazine, argued that the postwar South had to adopt a new economy. DeLeon was an early voice denouncing the single crop past of the Old South and advocating industrialization and

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agricultural diversity. See: Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970). 4 Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, 214. 5 Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 25, xv; Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913. From Woodward, “The Southern counterpart of a Northern progressivism developed nearly all traits familiar to the genus, but it was in no sense derivative. It was a pretty strictly indigenous growth, touched lightly here and there by cross-fertilization from the West” (371). 6 Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also, William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 18801930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Michael R. Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers: Hill Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Ann-Marie Szymanski, “Beyond Parochialism: Southern Progressivism, Prohibition, and State-Building,” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 1 (2003); Samuel L. Webb, “Southern Politics in the Age of Populism and Progressivism: A Historiographical Essay,” A Companion to the American South, ed. John B. Boles (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). 7 The Latin root for redemption (redemptio) translates as “to buy back,” thus referring to a payment for liberation from an oppressive condition. My use of the “redemption narrative” begins with a perception from Southern whites that Reconstruction represented a chaotic and oppressive time that ended with the political redemption. To avoid confusion, I use the term “political redemption” to refer to the events of Reconstruction that led to the election of Democratic politicians. The term “redemption narrative,” while part of political redemption, deals more with the perceived metaphorical transition from Reconstruction chaos to post-Reconstruction prosperity. For a brief and cross-cultural overview consult, Ileana Marcoulesco, “Redemption,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MaCmillan Publishing Company, 1987). For a description specific to Christian theology consult, Gerald O’Collins, “Redemption,” The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8 Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 3. 9 Richard H. Wilmer, The Recent Past From a Southern Standpoint: Reminiscences of a Grandfather (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1887), 30. Elected in 1861, Wilmer (1816-1900) was the second Episcopal bishop of Alabama, and the only bishop consecrated in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States. See, Edgar L. Pennington, “The Organization of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 17 (December 1948). 10 Stephens Croom Diary, November 8, 1875, quoted in, Paul M. Pruitt, Jr. and David I. Durhan, eds., The Private Life of a New South Lawyer: Stephens Croom’s 1875-1876 Journal, Publication of the Bounds Law Library, University of Alabama School of Law, Tuscaloosa, 2002, 57-58. Political redemption in Alabama came in 1874. 11 Olive H. Shadgett, “Charles Jones Jenkins, Jr.,” Georgians in Profile, ed. Horace Montgomery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 220-44; William J. Northern, ed., Men of Mark in Georgia (Atlanta: A.B. Caldwell, 1911), 281-93. For basic information on Reconstruction in Georgia see: David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); C. Mildred Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political (Savannah, Georgia: The Beehive Press, 1972). 12 Young’s Female College took its name from Elijah Remer Young, a Thomasville Planter and officially opened in February 1869. See: William Warren Rogers, Thomas County, 1865-1900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973), 220-21. 13 David S. Walker, “Commencement Address Delivered before the Graduating Class of Young Female College,” Thomasville, GA, June 25, 1872, Hopkins Collection, THL. 14 Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 8. 15 Kate Cummings, Gleanings from the Southland: Sketches of Life and Manners of the People of the South Before, During and After the War of Secession (Birmingham, AL: Roberts & Son, 1895), 10, 11. Cummings was one of the most famous Confederate nurses during the Civil War having directed hospitals in Tennessee and Georgia. Richard B. Harwell, ed., Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959); James M. McPherson, Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 478-80.

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16

Caroline Mays Brevard, A History of Florida From the Treaty of 1763 to Our Own Times, vol. I and II (Deland, FL: The Florida State Historical Society, 1924), 124, 25. Brevard was an established member of Tallahassee’s elite. Her grandfather, Richard Keith Call, was twice a territorial governor in Florida (1836-39, 1841-44), and wealthy planter in Leon County before the war. See, Herbert J. Doherty, Jr., Richard Keith Call: Southern Unionist (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961). 17 Wilmer, The Recent Past From a Southern Standpoint: Reminiscences of a Grandfather, 141, 143. 18 Brevard, A History of Florida From the Treaty of 1763 to Our Own Times, 203. 19 Wilmer, The Recent Past From a Southern Standpoint: Reminiscences of a Grandfather, 12-13. 20 Susan Bradford Eppes, “The Battle of Natural Bridge,” delivered to the Anna Jackson Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, no date, Susan Bradford Eppes Papers, FSU. “Vindication” was a common word in Lost Cause rhetoric. The history of white Southerners often absolved the section from having done any wrong that would have led to the war. Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, 161-82; Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 310-38; Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 120-52. 21 Susan Bradford Eppes, “What Does Florida Mean to the Tourist and what does the Tourist Mean to Florida,” no date, Susan Bradford Eppes Papers, FSU. 22 John B. Jones, “Pensacola,” draft copy of a speech, c. 1920, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 23 John B. Jones, “Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Pensacola, Florida,” unpublished manuscript, October 1924, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 24 Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, 274, 249-74; Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 417-20. 25 Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930, 124-59; Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 417-20; Judith N. McArthur, Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women’s Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Mary S. Hoffschwelle, Rebuilding the Rural Southern Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998). 26 “Dedicating the New School Building,” Weekly Floridian, January 6, 1887; Advance-Gazette, January 4, 1887. 27 Miss E.L. MaClay, “Public School Reminiscences: Pamphlet for the Dedication Exercises of the New Public School Building No. 1 in Pensacola, Florida,” January 3-4, 1887, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 28 Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, 320-48. 29 Thomas P. Janes, “Handbook of the State of Georgia,” Atlanta, GA 1876, Hopkins Collection, THL; Northern, ed., Men of Mark in Georgia, 182-85. 30 Rogers, Thomas County, 1865-1900, 385-87. Bryan was a lawyer in Thomasville who began his journalistic career in 1855 with his Whig-slanting Southern Enterprise. During the Civil War, the Enterprise ceased operations while Bryan served with Georgia’s Fifty-Seventh Infantry Regiment. In 1865, Bryan revived the newspaper; but by 1873, local competition combined with economic depression forced him out of business. 31 L.C. Bryan, “Editorial,” South Georgia Agriculturist (Thomasville, GA), January 1878, 7-8, Hopkins Collection, THL. 32 L.C. Bryan, “The Thomasville Spring Fair,” South Georgia Agriculturalist, April 1878, 151-52, Hopkins Collection, THL. 33 The phrase, “redeemers of the soil” comes from, Edwin Mims, “The South Realizing Itself: Redeemers of the Soil,” Workers World 23 (November 1911). 34 “When Will Wonders Cease?” by “One Who is Proud of the Seventeenth,” c. 1920, news clipping, Hopkins Collection, THL. 35 David Montgomery, “Radical Republicanism in Pennsylvania, 1866-1873,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography LXXXV, no. 4 (October, 1961); Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, “The ‘Pig Iron’ Kelley Riot in Mobile, May 14, 1867,” The Alabama Review XXIII, no. 1 (January, 1970). 36 William D. Kelley, The Old South and the New: A Series of Letters by Hon. William D. Kelley (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1888). For more on the Northern perspective of Southerners after the war, consult, Nina Silber, “Intemperate Men, Spiteful Women, and Jefferson Davis: Northern Views of the Defeated South,” American Quarterly 41 (1989). 37 Kelley, The Old South and the New: A Series of Letters by Hon. William D. Kelley, 1-2, 19. 38 Ibid., 161-62.

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39

Quoted in, George B. Tindall and David E. She, America: A Narrative History, 5th ed., vol. II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 846. 40 Samuel Proctor, “Prelude to the New Florida, 1877-1919,” The New Florida History, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 278. 41 Judy Nicholas Etemadi, “‘A Love-Mad Man’: Senator Chares W. Jones of Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (October 1977). 42 “The Election of Senator Jones,” Weekly Floridian, January 18, 1881. 43 “Florida and Senator Jones,” Weekly Floridian, from Montgomery Advertiser, January 25, 1881. 44 “An Address Delivered by Hon. Charles W. Jones,” Weekly Floridian, January 25, 1881. 45 New York Times, November 24, 1887. 46 “Ex-Senator Charles W. Jones,” New York Times, from Hot Blast (Anniston, AL), October 16, 1887. 47 The bulk of Jones’s biographical information in this paragraph comes from: Etemadi, “‘A Love-Mad Man’: Senator Chares W. Jones of Florida.” 48 John B. Jones, “Biographical Sketch of Charles W. Jones,” manuscript, c. October 1897, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 49 Letter from William A. Blount, Pensacola, FL, to John B. Jones, Pensacola, FL, November 30, 1897, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 50 “In the State He Loved,” Daily Star (Pensacola, FL), c. October, 1897, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 51 Pensacola Daily Times, c. October, 1897, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 52 “Charles W. Jones Dead,” New York Times, October 13, 1897. 53 See, Chapter Five. 54 Quoted in, Lillian D. Champion, Giant Tracking: William Dudley Chipley and Other Giants of Men (Columbus, GA: A Quill Publication by Columbus Book Binders and Printers, 1985), 1-2. 55 Edmund C. Williamson, “W.D. Chipley, West Florida’s Mr. Railroad,” Florida Historical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1947). 56 Like “carpetbagger,” the term “scalawag” was a pejorative label that applied to Southern whites who belonged to the Republican Party. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 129-36; Wilson, “Reconstruction,” 658. 57 Rowland H. Rerick, Memoirs of Florida, 482. Rerick claimed that Elizabeth Chipley, William’s wife, had the letter written from Brown to Stephens. 58 “The Ashburn Murder Trial Suspended,” New York Times, July 23, 1868. 59 For studies of Chipley and/or the Ashburn affair, see: Jesse Earle Bowden, “The Colonel from Columbus,” Iron Horse in the Pinelands: Building West Florida’s Railroad, 1881-1883, ed. Virginia Parks (Pensacola, FL: Pensacola Historical Society, 1982); Jesse Earle Bowden, “Colonel Chipley Builds a Railroad,” Iron Horse in the Pinelands: Building West Florida’s Railroad, 1881-1883, ed. Virginia Parks (Pensacola, FL: Pensacola Historial Society, 1982); Williamson, “W.D. Chipley, West Florida’s Mr. Railroad,” 334-35; Rowland H. Rerick, Memoirs of Florida (Atlanta, GA: The Southern Historical Association, 1902), 481-82. 60 Pensacola Commercial, November 10, 1883. 61 Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913, 6-10. 62 Dudley S. Johnson, “The Florida Railroad After the Civil War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Jan. 1969); Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Building of the Railroad that Crossed the Ocean (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002). 63 General Henry Morgan, “History of Albany,” 1879, from Daughters of the American Revolution Thronateeska Chapter, ed., History and Reminiscences of Dougherty County Georgia (Albany, GA: 1924), 18. 64 Peter S. McGuire, “The Railroads of Georgia, 1860-1880,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly XVI, no. 3 (September 1932): 98-127. 65 Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 9-13; Johnson, “The Florida Railroad After the Civil War.”; Mark W. Summers, “Railroads,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 656-58. 66 Pensacola Commercial, November 6, 1886, quoted in, Williamson, “W.D. Chipley, West Florida’s Mr. Railroad,” 339. 67 Ironically, Call had once unknowingly defended Chipley on the federal senate floor. In 1868 the Florida senator voiced support for “citizens of Columbus,” saying they were “falsely accused of the murder of the miserable wretch, Ashburn.” Quoted in, Albert Hubbard Roberts, “Wilkinson Call, Soldier and Senator,” Florida Historical Quarterly 12, no. 14 (1934): 194.

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68

Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 69 Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Movement: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Joseph E. Gould, The Chautauqua Movement: An Episode in the Continuing American Revolution (New York: State University of New York, 1961); James R. Schultz, The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). Southern Chautauquas were in, Hillsboro, VA (1877), Purcell, VA (1878), Mountain Lake Park, MD (1883), Monteagle, TN (1883), DeFuniak Springs, FL (1884), Siloam Springs AK (1886), Lexington, KY (1887), and the Piedmont Chautauqua, GA (1888). 70 Rieser, The Chautauqua Movement: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 12, 142, 139-145; Benjamin W. Giffith, “Chautauqua,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 276. 71 Quoted in, Giffith, “Chautauqua,” 276. 72 Henry Grady, “The New South,” The New South: Writings and Speeches of Henry Grady, ed. Mills Lane (Savannah, Georgia: Beehive Press, [1886] 1971), 13. 73 Rieser, The Chautauqua Movement: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 143. 74 Dean DeBolt, “The Florida Chautauqua,” F.E.H. Forum VIII, no. 3 (Fall 1990); Matthew A. Beemer, “The Florida Chautauqua as Text: Creating and Satisfying a Disposition to Appropriate Cultural Goods in Northwest Florida” (Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1997). 75 “The Florida Chautauqua,” program for the First Annual Session, February 10 to March 9, 1885. 76 Acts of Florida, 1885, quoted in, Dean DeBolt, “The Florida Chautauqua: An Overview of its History and its Cultural Impact on West Florida,” Threads of Tradition and Culture Along the Gulf Coast, ed. Ronald V. Evans (Pensacola, Florida: Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference, 1986), 114. 77 John L. McKinnon, “History of Walton County,” typescript copy, c. 1911, 161, FSU 78 Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, 86. 79 Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, xv-xix, 3-9; Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 21, 310, 332, 333. 80 “The Florida Chautauqua,” program for the First Annual Session, February 10 to March 9, 1885. 81 Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930, 54. See also, Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 35-43; Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, & Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 122-45, 194-212; E. Clinton Gardner, “Christian Ethics,” Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill, Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 234-35; Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia, 145-46. 82 A group of professors at the 1885 Chautauqua discovered that the lake was actually a spring. DeBolt, “The Florida Chautauqua.” 83 Florida Chautauqua (Cincinnati, OH), January, 1886. 84 Bishop W.F. Mallalieu, “Another Chautauqua,” Mount Dora (FL) Voice, April 23, 1886. 85 DeBolt, “The Florida Chautauqua: An Overview of its History and its Cultural Impact on West Florida,” 360; Rerick, Memoirs of Florida. 86 Williamson, “W.D. Chipley, West Florida’s Mr. Railroad.” He was an advocate of Florida’s educational endeavors, sitting on the Board of Trustees for the Florida State Agricultural College, Stetson University, and the Tallahassee Seminary. Worth noting that by 1890, the teachers association discouraged members from attending the meetings. 87 General George B. Loud, “A Chautauqua in the Wilds of Western Florida,” program for the 12th Annual Session, February 20-March 18, 1896, 4-5. 88 Rerick, Memoirs of Florida, 482. 89 Pensacola Advance-Gazette, October 1887, quoted in, ibid; “Pensacola,” Weekly Floridian, October 13, 1887. 90 Williamson, “W.D. Chipley, West Florida’s Mr. Railroad,” 348-52. 91 Daily Florida Citizen, May 15, 1897; Pensacola Daily News, May 19, 1897. 92 Chipley had initially funded this newspaper and first announced his intention to run for senator in it. For a study of Pensacola newspapers, see: Jesse Earl Bowden, “Editors and Other Hell Raisers in West Florida Journalism,” Threads of Tradition and Culture Along the Gulf Coast, ed. Ronald V. Evans (Pensacola, Florida: Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference, 1986), 14. 93 Pensacola Daily News, June 8, 1897. 94 Ibid.

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95

Pensacola Daily News, December 4, 1897. Ibid. In their resolution, the faculty of Florida Agricultural College, declared, “We share in the grief of their surviving loved ones and extend to them our deepest sympathies, cheering them with the thought that faithful workers for the good of others lose not their reward in the life beyond.” 97 Letter from A. Stoddard, New York, NY, December 1, 1897, printed in the Pensacola Daily News, Dec. 4, 1897. 98 “The Florida Chautauqua,” program for the Fourteenth Annual Session, February 17- March 23, 1898, 5. 99 “Resolutions and Remarks of the Memorial Exercises in the Senate of Florida on the Death of Hon. W.D. Chipley and Hon. Chas. J. Perrenot,” April, 13, 1899, 3-9. 100 Ibid., 15-17. 101 Ibid., 9. 102 Contract between the W.D. Chipley Monument Committee, Pensacola FL, and the Muldoon Monument Company, Louisville, KY, July 12, 1899, Beggs & Lane Collection/Blount, Blount & Carter Papers, UWF. 103 Charles H. Bliss, “Pensacola’s Social Features,” Bliss Quarterly (Pensacola), January 1897, 121, UFL. 96

Chapter Two 1

I have adopted the phrase “unfinished revolution” from, Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 2 Andrew M. Manis, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Black and White Baptists and Civil Rights, 1947-1957 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002 [1987]), x, xi, 7. 3 Thomas Bailey, Race Orthodoxy in the South (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1914). His fifteen premises are: “‘Blood will tell;’ The white race must dominate; The Teutonic peoples stand for racial purity; The negro is inferior and will remain so; ‘This is a white man’s country;’ No social equality; no political equality; In matters of civil rights and legal adjustments give the white man, as opposed to the colored man, the benefit of the doubt; and under no circumstances interfere with the prestige of the white man; In educational policy let the negro have the crumbs that fall from the white man’s table; Let there be such industrial education of negro as will best fit him to serve the white man; Only [white] Southerners understand the negro question; Let the [white] South settle the negro question; The status of peasantry is all the negro may hope for, if the races are to live together in peace; Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro; The above statements indicate the leadings of Providence” (92-93). 4 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 219. 5 John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 49-96. 6 William Archibald Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York: MacMillan, 1898), 74-80. 7 John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 10. See also, Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Harvey identification of “theological racism” referred to “the conscious use of religious doctrine and practice to create and enforce social hierarchies that privileged southerners of European descent” (2). 8 Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor for the American Home Mission Society, 1885); Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 268-74. Scientific racism also found a place in white theological circles. A mid-Westerner, Josiah Strong’s 1885 Our Country emphasized a need for a worldwide “Anglo-Saxonizing” to correct what he believed were society’s sins. 9 Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era, 7. 10 Erwin Craighead, From Mobile’s Past: Sketches of Memorable People and Events (Mobile, AL: The Powers Printing Company, 1925), 128. From a chapter entitled “The Iron Boy,” that was dated May 14, 1916 (128-132). 11 Kate Cumming, Gleanings from the Southland: Sketches of Life and Manners of the People of the South Before, During and After the War of Secession (Birmingham, AL: Roberts & Son, 1895), 9, 259, 264.

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Weekly Floridian, May 15, 1877.

13

Susan Bradford Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1926; reprint, Facsimile Reproduction), 301. 14 Susan Bradford Eppes, The Negro of the Old South: A Bit of Period History (Chicago: Joseph G. Branch Publishing Company, 1925), 182-83. 15 For more on the “civilization” argument and white perceptions of black religion, see, Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 107-35. According to Wilson, white Southerners “refused to admit that God’s displeasure with the peculiar institution was the cause of Confederate defeat. They never abandoned the belief that slavery was a divinely ordained institution or the idea that Southerners had helped Christianize the Negroes, which seemed to them God’s plan in bringing Africans to America” (68). Harvey detailed how whites commonly described black services as over-emotional, impulsive, or not genuine. As Harvey noted, though, whites also were fascinated with black culture, often depicting “Sambo” stereotypes in literature and stage shows. See also, Clarence E. Walker, A Rock in a Weary Land: The African Methodist Episcopal Church during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 18485; Paul Harvey, “God and Negroes and Jesus and Sin and Salvation: Racism, Racial Interchange, and Interracialism in Southern Religious History,” Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, ed. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Allison Dorsey, To Build our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 69. 16 Eppes, The Negro of the Old South: A Bit of Period History, ix, 175. 17 John Williamson Crary, Reminiscences of the Old South From 1834 to 1866: Things Noted Not Found in History (Pensacola, FL: Perdido Bay Press, 1984), 61-62. 18 Philip A. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as Freeman (New York: 1889), 261; Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 211. See also, Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912, 30-56. 19 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 310-338. On the promotion of the unfinished South, see: William Warren Rogers, Thomas County, 18651900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973), 146-53; Clifton Paisley, The Red Hills of Florida, 15281865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); Clifton Paisley, From Cotton to Quail (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1968); Sheldon Hackney, Populism and Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). 20 Henry Grady, “The New South,” The New South: Writings and Speeches of Henry Grady, ed. Mills Lane (Savannah, Georgia: Beehive Press, 1971), 11, 9; Harold E. Davis, Henry Grady’s New South: Atlanta, A Brave and Beautiful City (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990). 21 William D. Chipley, “Pensacola (The Naples of America) and its Surroundings Illustrated,” pamphlet, (CourierJournal Press, Louisville, 1877), UWF. 22 “Thomasville, Georgia: The Health Resort,” by The Hopkins Real Estate Agency, H.W.Hopkins, 1891, Hopkins Collection, THL. 23 Tallahassee Board of County Commissioners and the Board of Trade, “Tallahassee Leon County Florida,” Arnold Printing Company, no date, UFL. 24 G.B. Zimmerman Diary, March 24, 1895, GSA. 25 Samuel Proctor, “Prelude to the New Florida, 1877-1919,” The New Florida History, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 26 Erastus G. Hill Diary, January 19, undated, February 2-3, 1877, Florida Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection. UFL. 27 Quoted in, Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 218. 28 William George Bruce, “A Short Visit South Milwaukee-Wisconsin,” memoir, c. 1921, William George Bruce Papers (1881-1978), UWF. 29 Interview with J.E. Callahan of Pensacola, “The Carpet-Bagger’s Defense,” no author, October 13, 1907, Florida Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, UFL.

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See, Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and African Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). Blum argued that after the war, the white North and South began finding common ground on matters of “whiteness, godliness, and American nationalism” at the expense of racial reform (19). 31 Elizabeth Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 15, 24-31. 32 Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era, 46, 47-106. 33 Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 34 Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 150-63, 241, 309-322, 329, 388-89, 492; Dorsey, To Build our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906, 151-54. Both Litwack and Dorsey explained that the uplift ideal advocated by Washington sometimes attracted white violence. They used the Atlanta race riot of 1906 as an example. White mobs, wrote Litwack, entered black middle-class neighborhoods intending “to teach the presumptuous, uppity, and ‘highfalutin niggers’ . . . lessons they would never forget.” Blacks thereafter came to realize, “Neither a deferential accommodation nor economic success guaranteed them their civil or human rights” (317). 35 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, [1903] 1979), 44. See, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” and “Of the Meaning of Progress.” For a comprehensive biography of DuBois, see: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993). 36 Often, Hegel’s philosophy of history comes with a tripartite discussion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. History progresses when a foundational assumption (thesis) conflicts with its radical opposite (antithesis), and from this union a new ideal emerges (synthesis). As philosopher Terry Pinkard noted, however, this was not Hegel’s design, but a creation of Heinrich Moritz Chalybaus – a philosopher Pinkard called, “obscure and well-forgotten.” Terry Pinkard, “Hegel on History, Self-Determination, and the Absolute,” History and the Idea of Progress, eds. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1995), 31. 37 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), 32; Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1980] 1998), 178-79. 38 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5. 39 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 404, 413, 402-413. 40 “Communications: From Two Well Known Colored Citizens of Albany,” Albany Daily Herald, May 13, 1899. 41 “Negro Leadership,” Gazette and Land Bulletin (Waycross, GA), January 27, 1900. 42 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 373, 369-95. 43 Donald H. Bragaw, “Status of Negroes in a Southern Port City in the Progressive Era: Pensacola, 1896-1920,” Florida Historical Quarterly 51, no. 3 (January 1973). 44 “Pensacola’s Colored People,” by F.E. Washington, Bliss Quarterly (Pensacola), January 1897, 138-141, UFL. 45 Booker T. Washington, The Negro in Business (New York: AMS Press, 1907), 230, 236. 46 Rogers, Thomas County, 1865-1900, 188-89. 47 Thomasville Times, October 28, 1891, quoted in, ibid., 188. 48 Thomasville Times, no date, quoted in, E.K. Love, History of the First African Baptist Church (Savannah, GA: The Morning News Print, 1888), 90, 98-99. 49 Camilla (GA) Clarion, no date, quoted in, ibid., 100 50 Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 142-43. 51 James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 147-51. 52 “Race Prejudice,” New York Times, September 13, 1889. 53 Philadelphia National Baptist, October 10, 1889, quoted in, Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power, 150. 54 Minutes from the Home Missionary Convention of Georgia, 1897, quoted in Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900, 248.

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E.K. Love, “Emancipation Oration!” delivered in Augusta, GA, January 2, 1888, Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress. 56 Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 35. 57 William Watson Davis, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, [1913] 1964), 586. 58 Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996): 767, 774, 769. Their use of “totem crisis” is an adaptation of Rene Girard’s concept of the “sacrificial crisis.” Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 36-67. 59 “The Strongholds of Democracy,” New York Times, December 4, 1876. The article was unclear about how the correspondent had the authority to collect the election results. For brief biographical information on Saint Clair, consult: Canter Brown, Jr., Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 128. 60 Edward C. Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 1877-1893 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1976), 36-37. 61 “Political Murders in Florida,” New York Times, July 29, 1877. 62 Larry Eugene Rivers and Canter Brown, Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord: The Beginnings of the AME Church in Florida, 1865-1895 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), 24-28, 91, 103; Canter Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924, 128-29. Born a slave in Decatur County, Georgia and sold to a family in Northeast Florida, Stewart’s education came during the Civil War when he was an escaped slave living in Beaufort, South Carolina. After his ordination, Stewart relocated to Jacksonville in June of 1865 and soon moved to Middle Florida. In addition to trying to convert black Floridians, Stewart became a prominent Republican figure in Tallahassee’s political arena during and after Reconstruction. In 1873, he served both in Florida’s House of Representatives and was a city councilman for Tallahassee. This same year he became the postmaster for Tallahassee, a position he held until 1886. In 1883, he was a delegate to the Republican Convention. As a politician, Stewart strove to secure basic rights for blacks in Florida while also advancing social causes such as temperance. 63 Rev. W.G. Stewart, “The Tallahassee District,” Weekly Floridian, November 20, 1877. 64 Weekly Floridian, November 20, 1877. 65 We should also note that Stewart was a highly respected figure within Tallahassee’s black community. See, S.S. Herndon, “Tribute to a Most Worthy Negro,” by S.S. Herndon, Weekly True Democrat, June 16, 1911. After his 1911 passing, Herndon, the Presiding Elder of the AME Church, wrote a letter to Tallahassee’s white newspaper. Herndon subtly criticized the paper for not producing an obituary. “The news of his death failed to reach many who would have been glad to pay a tribute of respect to this great, good and useful and exemplary husband, father, citizen and churchman.” Herndon called Stewart a “progressive pastor” who “was of usual high moral character” and the “excellent characteristics he possessed and displayed are rare and seldom found in his age.” 66 Ellen Call Long, Florida Breezes, or Florida, New and Old (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, [1883] 1962), xvii. Long made frequent references to race that were reminiscent of other Southern white accounts. Consider the following. “Slavery was God-appointed, and it is infidelity to reject it. It has had its uses as means of civilization to a benighted race; giving to them the knowledge of a Creator, and the habitudes of progressive man; while missionaries have failed with the aid that church and societies could give to make any evident change in their rational condition. A time will come, probably, when you of the South will yourselves renounce the name, for as far as my knowledge goes that is the only offense” (no page listed). 67 Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 61-84. 68 S.D. Jackson, “Pensacola Letter,” Christian Recorder, October 27, 1887, quoted in ibid., 63. 69 Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 70 E.K. Love, “A Sermon on Lynch Law and Raping,” delivered at the First African Baptist Church, Savannah, GA, November 5, 1893, Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress. 71 Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 72 Dorsey, To Build our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906, 151. The image of a black dominating in political life, wrote historian Allison Dorsey, was part of a multitude of factors feeding the Atlanta race riots of 1906.

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Albert J. Rabateau, Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 164, 163-65. 74 Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 71. 75 William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 18651900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). 76 John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 13235; Charlton Moseley and Frederick Brogdon, “A Lynching in Statesboro: The Story of Paul Reed and Will Cato,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1981). 77 Savannah Morning News, August 15, 1904. 78 Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920, 132-35; Moseley and Brogdon, “A Lynching in Statesboro: The Story of Paul Reed and Will Cato.” 79 Savannah Tribune, November 5, 1904. 80 Statesboro News, September 23 and October 4, 1904. 81 “Negro Preachers Score Lawlessness,” Atlanta Constitution, September 20, 1904. 82 “Two Negroes Shot Apparently Without Cause,” and “No Before Day Club,” Talbotton (GA) New Era, September 22, 1904; “Mass Meeting Denounces Shooting of Negroes,” ibid., September 29, 1904; “A Proclamation,” ibid., September 29, 1904. 83 “Thomasville Man’s Store Fired, Professedly by Before Day Club,” Florida Times-Union, September 16, 1904. 84 Thomasville Weekly Times-Enterprise, October 7, 1904, quoted in, William Warren Rogers, Transition to the Twentieth Century: Thomas County, Georgia, 1900-1920 (Tallahassee, FL: Sentry Press, 2002), 152. 85 “N.W. Epps [sic] Brutally Assassinated Near His Home in Leon County,” Florida Times Union, September 5, 1904. See also the introduction to the 1968 reprint of Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years, xvi-xx. Here, Joseph D. Cushman gave a brief recounting of the murder and the events surrounding it. 86 “Before Day Murder Club has Organized in Leon County,” Florida Times-Union, September 6, 1904. 87 “Five Before Day Clubs Organized in Leon County,” Florida Times-Union, September 7, 1904. 88 “Eppes Murderers Brought Here,” Florida Times-Union, September 8, 1904. 89 Eppes was a wealthy Confederate veteran and a prominent political figure in Tallahassee. Moreover, his father, Francis, came to North Florida from Virginia and was Thomas Jefferson’s grandson. Francis Eppes was a successful planter, a principal lay figure in the Episcopal Diocese of Florida, and the former mayor of Tallahassee. Biographical sketch included in the Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. 90 News clipping, no date, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. 91 Letter from Josir Kimudy, Monticello, FL, to Susan Bradford Eppes, Bradfordville, FL, September 7, 1904, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. Kimudy refers to Susan as “Aunt” and Nicholas as “Uncle,” although I cannot tell if there is an existing bloodline. 92 Letter from W.V.G., Orlando, FL to Susan Bradford Eppes, Bradfordville, FL, September, 9, 1904, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. 93 Letter from Martha Bradford Houston, Ashville, NC, to Susan Bradford Eppes, Bradfordville, FL, September 15, 1904, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. The letter is handwritten and is likely to be a copy from the one Houston sent to the Florida Times-Union. I could not determine whether it was published. 94 Letter Robert Williams, Thomasville, GA, to Susan Bradford Eppes, Bradfordville, FL, September 7, 1904, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. 95 “Funeral Services of Hon. N.W. Eppes,” Florida Times-Union, September 8, 1904. 96 “Edwards Insists that He Had Help,” Florida Times-Union, September 9, 1904. 97 “Corner’s Verdict in Eppes Murder Case,” Florida Times-Union, September 10, 1904. 98 For a study of Broward, consult, Samuel Proctor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward: Florida’s Fighting Democrat (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1950). While a comprehensive biography, Proctor’s treatment of Broward does not cover the events surrounding the Eppes murder. 99 “Self-Confessed Double Murderer Laughs as he Tells of Crimes,” Florida Times-Union, November 2, 1905. 100 “On to Death Goes Isham Edwards,” Florida Times-Union November 3, 1905; “Confessed Crimes on the Gallows,” Florida Times-Union November 4, 1905. 101 Florida Times Union, October 23, 1905. 102 “Death Sentence was Commuted,” Florida Times Union, August 4, 1906. 103 Letter from Edward Eppes, Tallahassee, to Isaac D. White, New York, November 23, 1905; letter from White to Eppes, December 7, 1905; letter from Eppes to White, December 10, 1905, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU.

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Letter from an anonymous author, to the editor of the Tallahassee True Democrat, c. May 1906, Pine Hill Plantation Papers, FSU. Eppes was probably not alone in keeping the rumors alive. An anonymous letter to a Tallahassee newspaper also expressed outrage over the pardon of Caldwell and Larkin. This account made no mention of conniving politicians, but instead, charged the duo with having been the prime actors in the murder. The author claimed Edwards was “the tool” of his more “charming accomplices,” Caldwell and Larkin. At Larkin’s store, which was full of stolen merchandise, the letter read, blacks “gambled and fought.” Mothers of the neighborhood’s “better class,” claimed the author, “openly bewailed [Larkin’s] evil influence over their young sons, saying Larkin was too smart and cunning to be caught himself and that he did not mind what trouble he got them into.” The writer then recalled the events of the murder and claimed that Edward Eppes, investigating the crime scene, found the blood-soaked shirt of Caldwell. “[Respectable] colored men in the community said they would swear to it the clothes belonged to George Caldwell.” Chapter Three 1

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1960,” American Quarterly 18 (1966); Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860,” Clio’s Consciousness Raised, eds. Mary Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 138. 2 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930 (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1970). 3 Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, & Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4, quoted 5. See also, Jean E. Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill: University Press of North Carolina, 1985), 11027. 4 “How He Got Religion,” Pensacola Daily News, November 29, 1900. 5 William Warren Rogers, Transition to the Twentieth Century: Thomas County, Georgia, 1900-1920 (Tallahassee, FL: Sentry Press, 2002), 124. Hansell’s husband, Augustus, was a judge and politician in Thomas County. 6 Thomasville Press, August 15, 1906, Hopkins Collection, THL. 7 Henry Partridge Diary 1873-1888, entry entitled, “Summary of Events in My Earlier Life,” August 24, 1902, FSA. 8 Henry Partridge Diary 1873-1888, April 19, 1873, FSA. 9 Ibid. 10 Sam Jones, “A Synopsis of Rev. Sam Jones’ Lecture Delivered at Lake City, Fla.,” April 23, c. 1904, scrapbook clipping, Samuel Porter Jones Papers, Woodruff Library Special Collections, Emory University. 11 Ann Braude, “Woman’s History is American Religious History,” Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Braude discussed the contrasting images of women as “Handmaidens of the Lord” and “Handmaidens of the Devil” as a continued dialectic in American religious history. “While the shift toward positive views of woman’s nature is a major event in the story of American religion, it is crucial to remember that it remains by definition incomplete, that it is not a positive valuation of woman qua woman, but rather of an ideal that few women ever can attain” (100). See also, Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, & Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920, 103-21; Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women’s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 6-53. 12 Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, & Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920, 103-21. “Central to white Southern culture, was the notion that men were more sinful than women” (11). 13 Bishop (Richard Hooker) Wilmer, “Counsel to Men: A Sermon Preached at Christ Church, Mobile, To the United Congregations of the City on the Eightieth Anniversary of his Birthday, March 15th, 1896,” pamphlet, (Geo Matzenger’s Print), 260, UWF. 14 Rev. Simon Peter Richardson, The Lights and Shadows of Itinerant Life: An Autobiography of Rev. Simon Peter Richardson, D.D., of the North Carolina Conference (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1900), 122-23. Two years before his 1899 death, the North Carolina Conference requested that Richardson write his memoirs. 15 Ibid., 105-06. 16 Samuel A. Floyd Diary, January 3, 11, 1872, FSA. When writing about his single life, Floyd often commented on the women he encountered in town. He wrote, for example, that respectable “young ladies” would fervently disapprove of magazine articles that contained “words about ‘lewd women.’” Pristine appearance was also a

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concern of Floyds, writing that the “uncommon face” of one woman reminded him “of a summer sunset where everything seems glowing in an atmosphere of purple warmth.” 17 Samuel A. Floyd Diary, January, 19 1872, FSA. In 1880, Floyd apparently reviewed this portion of his diary, and wrote “Damnably unintelligible,” probably because much of what the younger Floyd wrote lacked coherence. 18 See, Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900, 94-95. 19 Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 154, 155. Schweiger noted that the progressive reformers who turned to education felt a desperate need for “the firm moral influence of Christian women.” 20 In 1895, Cox moved the college from LaGrange, Georgia to College Park. Charles C. Cox, “Souvenir of the Southern Female College,” pamphlet, (College Park, GA, 1896) 23, 28, 32, 39-40, Geiger Family Papers, GSA. See also: Southern Female College Records, Troup County (Georgia) Archives. 21 Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 22 Richard L Wilson, “Sam Jones: An Apostle of the New South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 57 (Winter 1973). 23 Sam Jones, “Why Should a Church Member Belong to the W.C.T.U.?, “ undated typewritten sermon, Samuel Porter Jones Papers, Woodruff Library Special Collections, Emory University. 24 Ibid. On Jones and his reform efforts, see: Kathleen Minnix, Laughter in the Amen Corner: The Life of Evangelist Sam Jones (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). On Lathrap see: Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900, xiii. 25 Mattie Oglesby Coyle, “History of Colquitt County, Georgia and Her Builders,” (Moultrie, GA, 1925), pamphlet, Hopkins Collection, TLH. 26 Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 160-77. 27 A.L. Woodward, “Eloquent Prayer for Prohibition: Extract of a prayer Offered in Trinity Methodist Church, Tallahassee,” Tallahassee Daily Democrat, April 12, 1915. This prayer came a day before Florida’s vote for prohibition that passed 57-14 through the House. 28 Journal and Yearbook of the Florida Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Sixty-Sixth Annual Session (Lakeland, FL: Tribune Printing Company, December 15-20, 1909), 10. 29 On anti-Catholicism during this period, see Chapter Five. 30 Letter from Ralph McCraney, Athens, GA, to Bishop Allen, Mobile, AL, May 19, 1919, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 31 Letter from Bishop Allen, Mobile, AL to Mr. and Mrs. McCraney, no location listed, June 2, 1919, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 32 Letter from Sister M. Fidelis, Florence, AL, to Bishop Allen, Mobile, AL, May 31, 1919, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 33 Letter from Bishop Allen, Mobile, AL, to Sister M. Fidelis, Florence, AL, June 2, 1919, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 34 Letter from Mother M. Ottilia, Cullman, AL, to Bishop Allen, Mobile, AL, c. May-June 1919, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 35 Letter from Mother M. Ottilia, Cullman, AL, to Bishop Allen, Mobile, AL, June 7, 1919, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. See, Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Ayer, 1978); Mary Ewens, “Women in the Convent,” American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989); James J. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroads, 1990). 36 Susan Bradford Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1926; reprint, Facsimile Reproduction), 267. 37 Ibid., 370. 38 Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Corrie E. Norman, Heather E. Barclay, and Nancy A. Hardesty, “Women and Religion in the South: Myth, Reality, and Meaning,” Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts, eds. Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 15.

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Josephine Henry, “The New Woman of the New South,” Arena 11 (1894-95); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 40 Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women’s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 18801930, 4. Sims’s argument draws closely from: Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930. Ideals of womanhood in the Old South and Civil War receive a full treatment in: Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War; Laura F. Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 41 Many historians debate the level of authority gained or lost by Southern white women after the war and Reconstruction. This section largely avoids this debate and concentrates on how women idealized and employed the language of female devotion in their social reform efforts. Those arguing for an increase in authority tend to look at women’s actions dealing with social issues such as temperance, suffrage, nonviolence campaigns, education, mission work, and welfare reform. See: Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930; Monica Maria Tetzlaff, Cultivating a New South: Abbie Holmes Christensen and the Politics of Race and Gender (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Pamela Dean, “Covert Curriculum: Class, Gender, and Student Culture at a New South Woman’s College, 1892-1910” (PhD Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1995); Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States; John Patrick McDowell, The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman’s Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886-1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women’s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930; Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida 1880s-1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). On the other side, the argument generally examines the male backlash when they returned from the war. Lee Ann Whites, for example, claimed that the increase in female authority led to a male gender “crisis.” Suzanne Lebsock pointed to the postwar legal measures that limited female property ownership, thus showing the male effort to enforce “traditional” gender roles after the Civil War. LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Suzanne Lebsock, “Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women,” The Journal of Southern History 43, no. 2 (May, 1977). 42 Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia; Lynn Lyerly, “Women and Southern Religion,” Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, eds. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 252; Norman, Barclay, and Hardesty, “Women and Religion in the South: Myth, Reality, and Meaning,” 15-16. Schweiger wrote, “The determined involvement of women across the South in missionary and other benevolent agencies during the last two decades of the nineteenth century marked the triumph of organization in the Christian life” (163). 43 Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). 44 “An Earnest Appeal to the Baptist Women of the South,” Christian Index, March 30, 1882. 45 Charles Yrigoyen, Jr., “Haygood, Laura Askew,” American National Biography, ed. Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Her brother, Atticus, was an influential bishop in Georgia after the war. See: Harold W. Mann, Atticus Greene Haygood: Methodist Bishop, Editor, and Educator (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965). 46 “A Message from China to the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South,” letter printed as a pamphlet written by Laura A. Haygood, Shanghai, China, sent to Mrs. Theo. Turnbull, Micossukee, FL, October 19, 1885, Yarbourgh family papers, 1880-1940, FSA. 47 The Women of Escambia County, “An Earnest Appeal,” form letter for prohibition election, October 1, 1907, Pensacola Misc. Items Concerning Prohibition, Florida Misc. Manuscripts, UFL. 48 Weekly True Democrat, May 12, 1905. Knott was the wife of then State Treasurer William V. Knott, 49 “History of the Albany Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” Daughters of the American Revolution Thronateeska Chapter, ed., History and Reminiscences of Dougherty County Georgia (Albany, GA: 1924), 306, 307. 50 Faith Rogow, “Gone to Another Meeting”: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993). Rogow argued that the group mirrored the era’s new focus on upper-class domestic female social activism, but also stressed the maintenance of Jewish identity. Rogow focused mostly on the North, but Jewish women in the South had similar concerns.

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“The Year Book, Mobile, Alabama, Section Council of Jewish Women, 1911-1912,” pamphlet, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 52 Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women’s Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 18801930, 79. 53 Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 46, 48, 13. 54 “A Noble Woman,” Thomasville Times-Enterprise, September 5, 1897, Hopkins Collection, THL. 55 “A Pretty Idea, And One We Hope to See Duly Encouraged,” Albany Daily Herald, April 25, 1897, Geiger Family Papers, 1868-1903, GSA. 56 Scott D. Clarke, “Memorial Address,” delivered at Monticello, Florida, April 26, 1902, Florida Misc. Manuscripts, UFL. 57 Park Trammell, speech delivered at an unveiling of a Confederate monument in Lakeland, FL, June 3, 1910, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1935, UFL. 58 “Delivered on the night of Feb. 1, 1865, to 57th GA Regt. Cleburne’s (old) Division, Army of Tennessee, by Miss B. of Columbus, GA,” undated news clipping, Hopkins Collection, TLH. 59 Kate Cumming, Gleanings from the Southland: Sketches of Life and Manners of the People of the South Before, During and After the War of Secession (Birmingham, AL: Roberts & Son, 1895), 274, 275. 60 “Dougherty’s Women During the ‘60’s and After,” by Mrs. W.L. (Ella Catherine) Davis, Thronateeska Chapter, ed., History and Reminiscences of Dougherty County Georgia, 367, 271, 273, 275. 61 Mrs. Thomas (Annie) White, “The First Memorial Day,” John B. Gordon Chapter, UDC, Thomasville, GA, c. 1926, Hopkins Collection, THL. 62 “In Memoriam” for Mrs. Emily C. Jones, dated Feb. 1906, UDC Pensacola Meeting Minutes, April 1899 to November 18, 1906, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Pensacola Papers, UWF. 63 Elizabeth Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 86, 53. 64 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 73, 94, 101. Formed in 1894, the UDC became the largest single woman’s group in the South by World War I. The UDC essentially united the various Confederate female organizations such as the Ladies Memorial Association. 65 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 334. See also, Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 109-13; Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, 203. 66 “Constitution and By-Laws of the Pensacola Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, established April 4, 1899.” United Daughters of the Confederacy, Pensacola Papers, UWF. 67 Mrs. A.E. McDavid, “United Daughters of the Confederacy,” Pensacola Journal, July 2, 1907. 68 Mrs. A.E. McDavid, “Two Views of Memorial Exercises,” Pensacola Journal, July 2, 1907. 69 “‘Lest we Forget’: Memorial Address delivered before Anna Dummett Chapter, 1089,” October 1, 1907, Susan Bradford Eppes Papers, FSU. 70 Mildred Rutherford, “Monthly Programs, United Daughters of the Confederacy and Children of the Confederacy,” in pamphlet, Athens, GA, 1916, United Daughters of the Confederacy Collection, Mobile Public Library, Mobile, AL. In response, members would say, “He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. He that slandereth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his friend, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor. In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not. He that putteth not our his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent.” 71 Mrs. R.P. Holt, “Children of the Confederacy Pledge,” in pamphlet entitled “John Triplett Chapter, Children of the Confederacy, No. 24, Georgia Division, Organized 1906,” Hopkins Collection, THL. 72 “The Jefferson Davis Chapter, Children of the Confederacy,” Thronateeska Chapter, ed., History and Reminiscences of Dougherty County Georgia, 279. 73 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 74 “‘Lest we Forget’: Memorial Address delivered before Anna Dummett Chapter, 1089,” October 1, 1907, Susan Bradford Eppes Papers, FSU. 75 Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years, 41-42.

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Susan Bradford Eppes, “The Real Reason for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” manuscript sent to New York City World, March 17, 1927, Susan Bradford Eppes Papers, FSU. 77 David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 605. Donald cited, William E. Barton, The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln: Was He The Son of Thomas Lincoln? (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1920). Chapter Four 1

Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, “Introduction,” Jews in the South, eds. Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Louis E. Schmier, “Jews,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 161; Dennis C. Rousey, “Aliens in the WASP Nest: Ethnocultural Diversity in the Antebellum Urban South,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1992): 161; Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). “From colonial times to present, Jews have comprised less than 1 percent of the whole southern population” (Dinnerstein and Palsson 3). “Though Jews never comprised more than 1 percent of the South’s population, few places in the South escaped their influence” (Schmier 435). Ayers cited statistics from 1890 and wrote, “Over 8,000 members of Jewish Reformed congregations lived in the South, concentrated in the cities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and along the Mississippi River, while over 1,300 Orthodox Jews were scattered throughout every subregion of the South except the black Belt” (Ayers 161). Rousey used the 1890 census and showed the differences in the urban and rural settings. In urban settings, Jewish institutions represented 1.75 percent of the religious accommodations. In rural settings, this figure was .06 percent. “[The] South has never attracted a large number of Jewish immigrants. Jews have never constituted more than 1 percent of the region’s population” (Webb xiii-xiv). 2 “District Grand Lodge No. 7, I.O.B.B. Meets in its Thirty-Ninth Annual Convention in Galveston, Texas,” Jewish Ledger, May 17, 1912, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 3 The South was America’s cradle for Reform Judaism. In 1749, Temple Beth Elohim organized in Charleston, South Carolina. By 1800, it became the nation’s largest synagogue. The liturgy tended to follow a traditional Sephardic arrangement, and members organized numerous benevolent societies to include the Charleston Hebrew Orphan Society in 1801. Due in large part to Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski, the congregation began adopting a Reform format in the 1840s. Elsewhere, as German immigrants settled in the South, more Reform synagogues formed. See, Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Howard M. Schar, A History of Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992); Jacob Neusner, American Judaism: Adventure in Modernity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 4 Sarna, American Judaism: A History, 151, 195, 197. 5 Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 19, 20, 26. 6 Dinnerstein and Palsson, “Introduction,” 3-6; David Edwin Harrell, Jr., “Religious Pluralism: Catholics, Jews, and Sectarians,” Religion in the South, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); Solomon Breibart, “Beth Elohim,” Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill, Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 93; April Elaine Blackburn, “‘In the Midst of the Whirl’: Jewish and Catholic Responses to New South Industrialization, 1880-1914” (Doctoral Dissertation, Temple University, 2002), 4-6; Ralph Melnick, “Jews in the South,” Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill, Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 358-59; Sarna, American Judaism: A History, 214, 215. 7 See, Raymond Arsenault, “Charles Jacobson of Arkansas: A Jewish Politician in the Land of the Razorbacks, 1891-1915,” “Turn to the South”: Essays on Southern Jewry, eds. Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvil I. Urofsky (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 56. In addition, Arsenault scoured the American Jewish Yearbook, Volumes 1-17, and listed all of the Southern Jewish politicians serving from the years 1890-1915 (fn. 6, 179). 8 Louis Schmier, “Jewish Press,” Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill, Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997). 9 Louis Schmier, ed., Reflections of Southern Jewry: The Letters of Charles Wessolowsky, 1878-1879 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982), 3-26. 10 Ibid., 53, 52, 64, 32, 68. 11 Ibid., 31, 85, 53.

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Edward E. Grusd, B’nai B’rith: The Story of a Covenant (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966); Leon Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820-1870 (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1976). 13 See Chapter One. 14 “Lazarus Schwarz,” History of Alabama and Her People, ed. by Special Staff of Writers Alabama Biography (New York: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1927), 710. Born in 1846, the German immigrant first came to New Orleans, and as a teen lived in Mobile working as a merchant. In 1878, yellow fever struck Mobile and Schwarz was the president of the “Can’t Get Away Club” that assisted the sick and dying. After the fever passed, Schwarz returned to his mercantile business and later opened a men’s furnishing store in 1889. In 1912, he became Mobile’s Mayor. 15 “Corner Stone Laid With Impressive Ceremonies,” Mobile Register, c. December 11, 1911, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 16 Rabbi Alfred G. Moses (1878-1956) was born in Livingston, Alabama on September 23, 1878 and came from a family of rabbis. His father, Adolph, left Poland in 1870 and settled first in Montgomery and then in Mobile in 1871. Serving for ten years in Mobile, his father left in 1883 for Louisville. In 1885, Adolph participated in developing the Pittsburgh Platform. In 1901, Alfred finished his rabbinic degree at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and moved back to Mobile where he served until 1940, and remained emeritus until 1946. He oversaw the building of the Government Street Temple in 1910, presided over the Jewish Welfare Board since 1915, and was an active speaker on the Chautauqua circuit. In 1913, he was Mobile’s delegate to the Alabama Sociological Congress in Birmingham. Moses served as the chaplain for the Mobile Elks, Masons, Temple of the Mystic Shrine, and Knights of Pythias, and was a member of the Fidelia Club and Gulf Fishing and Hunting Club. “Rev. Alfred Geiger Moses,” History of Alabama and Her People, ed. by Special Staff of Writers Alabama Biography (New York: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1927), 736; Robert J. Zietz, The Gates of Heaven: Congregation Sha’arai Shomayim the First 150 Years Mobile, Alabama 1844-1994 (Mobile, AL: Congregation Sha’arai Shomayim, 1994), 77, 78; Ellen M. Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35-62. 17 “Corner Stone Laid With Impressive Ceremonies,” Mobile Register, c. December 11, 1911, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 18 Letter from Henry Hanaw, Chairman Committee of Arrangements, to the “Jewish Citizens of Mobile,” November 24, 1905, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 19 “250th Anniversary Jews in America,” Mobile Register, c. December 1, 1905, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 20 Alfred G. Moses, A Congregation in the Name of God (Mobile, AL: Brisk, 1905), 8, quoted in Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews, 38. 21 Quoted in, Erwin Craighead, From Mobile’s Past: Sketches of Memorable People and Events (Mobile, AL: The Powers Printing Company, 1925), 216, 217. 22 Byron L. Sherwin, “Portrait of a Romantic Rebel: Bernard C. Ehrenreich (1876-1955),” “Turn to the South”: Essays on Southern Jewry, eds. Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvin I. Urofsky (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 7, 2, 1. 23 Paul K. Conkin, American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 226-75; Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a LateTwentieth-Century Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 195-98. 24 Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews, 8, 23. 25 Quoted in, ibid., 16. 26 Ibid., 35-62; Alfred G. Moses, Jewish Science: Divine Healing in Judaism (Mobile, AL: self-published, 1916); Alfred G. Moses, Jewish Science: Psychology of Health, Joy and Success (New Orleans, LA: Searcy & Pfaff, Ltd., 1920). Moses could likely identify with the health concerns of those coreligionists attracted to Christian Science. Mental problems plagued the rabbi throughout his adult life and he lived his final years in a mental institution. According to Umansky, Moses made no serious attempt to institute Jewish Science in Mobile. He believed members of his synagogue had no desire to join Christian Science. Christian Science came to Mobile by 1897, but its membership was small and influence on Jews was minimal. Jewish Science saw its greatest growth in New York City through the efforts of Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein and his wife Tehilla. While the numbers never grew very high, the movement’s focus on health and well-being attracted many more Jews than the bare numbers indicated. 27 Moses, Jewish Science: Psychology of Health, Joy and Success, forward, 60. 28 Ibid., 60, 4, 16, 74, 79, 108. 29 Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review (June 1889); John Corrigan and Winthrop Hudson, Religion in America, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2004), 320-23.

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Moses, Jewish Science: Psychology of Health, Joy and Success, 108-09. See, Chapter Three. 32 Edmund A. Landau, “The Jew in Albany,” History and Reminiscences of Dougherty County Georgia, ed. Daughters of the American Revolution Thronateeska Chapter (Albany, GA: 1924), 203, 206, 205, 208, 209, 213. 33 Thomas D. Clark, “The Post-Civil War Economy in the South,” Jews in the South, eds. Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 163; Louis Schmier, “Jews and Gentiles in a South Georgia Town,” Jews of the South: Selected Essays from the Southern Jewish Historical Society, eds. Samuel Proctor, Louis Schmier, and Malcolm Stern (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984); Louis E. Schmier, “Hellooo! Peddlerman! Hellooo!,” Ethnic Minorities in the Gulf Coast Society, eds. Jerrell H. Shofner and Linda V. Ellsworth (Pensacola, FL: Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference, 1979). 34 South Georgia Times (Valdosta), April, 29 1868; Valdosta Times, June 25, 1887, quoted in, Schmier, “Jews and Gentiles in a South Georgia Town,” 3, 4. 35 George Franklin Thompson Diary, 1865-1866, December 6-7, 1865, UFL. 36 Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 176. 37 Arthur T. Abernethy, The Jew a Negro: Being a Study of the Jewish Ancestry from an Impartial Standpoint (Moravian Falls, NC: Dixie Publishing Company, 1910), 11, quoted in Leonard Rogoff, “Is the Jew White?: The Racial Place of the Southern Jew,” American Jewish History 85, no. 3 (1997): 196. 38 Leonard Rogoff, “Is the Jew White?: The Racial Place of the Southern Jew,” American Jewish History 85, no. 3 (1997): 228, 229, 230. 39 Joseph M. Proskauer, A Segment of My Times (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950), 12, 13; Louis M. Hacker and Mark D. Hirsch, Proskauer: His Life and Times (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978). 40 Robert Rockaway and Arnon Gutfeld, “Demonic Images of the Jew in the Nineteenth Century United States,” American Jewish History 89, no. 4 (2002). 41 Ibid.: 380. 42 Quoted in, Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 268. 43 Savannah Daily Republican, September 20, 1862, quoted in Schmier, ed., Reflections of Southern Jewry: The Letters of Charles Wessolowsky, 1878-1879, 5. 44 Ibid., 3-25; William Warren Rogers, Thomas County, 1865-1900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973), 176-77. 45 Jonathan D. Sarna, “Jewish-Christian Hostility in the United States: Perceptions from a Jewish Point of View,” Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, eds. Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn (Crossroads: New York, 1987), 6; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions,” The Journal of American History 1 (June, 1981). 46 Stephens Croom, “The Persecution of the Jews,” essay written while attending the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Velma and Stephens G. Croom Collection, c. 1856-59, USA. 47 Rev. Simon Peter Richardson, The Lights and Shadows of Itinerant Life: An Autobiography of Rev. Simon Peter Richardson, D.D., of the North Carolina Conference (Nashville, TN: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1900), 265-66, 252. 48 C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), 435-49; Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 49 Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 181, 184; Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case. 50 Steven Hertzberg, Strangers Within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845-1915 (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978). 51 Rupert B. Vance, “A Karl Marx for Hill Billies: Portrait of a Southern Leader,” Social Forces 9 (December 1930). 52 Arsenault, “Charles Jacobson of Arkansas: A Jewish Politician in the Land of the Razorbacks, 1891-1915,” 56, 57, 73. 53 Schmier, ed., Reflections of Southern Jewry: The Letters of Charles Wessolowsky, 1878-1879, 173. 54 “District Grand Lodge No. 7, I.O.O. B., Assembled in Mobile, Al.,” Jewish South April, 22, 1910, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 55 Craighead, From Mobile’s Past: Sketches of Memorable People and Events, 134. While not mentioning belonging to any specific denomination, Craighead did report having seen a series of revival preachers, to include Sam Jones, Sam Small, and Billy Sunday (150, 244). 56 “Julius Diamond,” short article, no author or place of publication, Ruby Diamond Collection, FSU. German born Julius Diamond came to America after the Civil War at the age of thirteen, and lived briefly in Pennsylvania before 31

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coming to Florida two years later. Diamond was a successful merchant in Tallahassee who, as a Democrat, became chair of the Board of Leon County Commissioners. 57 John L. Neeley, W.H. Markham, and W.H. Chancey, “In Memoriam” Tallahassee True Democrat, July 24, 1914, news clipping found in the Ruby Diamond Collection, FSU. 58 A.L. Woodward, “Recollections of Some Old Tallahasseeans, No. 7: Julius Diamond,” no date, Woodward Family Collection, FSA. 59 “Sidney H. Diamond for County Judge,” Weekly True Democrat, September 3, 1915. 60 Letter from Sidney Catts, Florida Governor, Tallahassee, FL, recommendation for Sydney Diamond for a position with the Judge Advocate General’s Department, September 13, 1918, Ruby Diamond Collection, FSU. 61 Letter from J.B. Christian, Florida’s Adjutant General, Tallahassee, FL, recommendation for Sydney Diamond for a position with the Judge Advocate General’s Department, September, 23, 1918, Ruby Diamond Collection, FSU. 62 Letter from H. Clay Crawford, Florida Secretary of State, Tallahassee, FL, recommendation for Sydney Diamond for a position with the Judge Advocate General’s Department, September 14, 1918, Ruby Diamond Collection, FSU. 63 Letter from Van C. Swearingen, Florida Attorney General, Tallahassee, FL, recommendation for Sydney Diamond for a position with the Judge Advocate General’s Department, September 13, 1918, Ruby Diamond Collection, FSU. 64 Letter from Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, to Thomas E. Watson, Thompson, GA, January 9, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF; quoted in, J. Wayne Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 132. See also, Chapter Five. 65 Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews. Umansky noted that Schwarz “prided himself on being a close friend of Alfred Moses and in fact was a member of Moses’ wedding party” (40). 66 Resolution of the Mobile Lodge No. 67, Knights of Pythias, March 23, 1909, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 67 Who’s Who in the South and Southwest, vol. I (Chicago: Larkin, Roosevelt, & Larkin, Ltd., 1947), 399-400; Zietz, The Gates of Heaven: Congregation Sha’arai Shomayim the First 150 Years Mobile, Alabama 1844-1994, 138-39. Born in Perry County near Marion on March 28, 1872, Schwarz finished his college degree at the University of Alabama. He married Addie Bloch Herzfeld of Wilcox, County, Alabama in December 15, 1909 and the couple had no children. In business, Leon Schwarz was a manufacturer, president of the Mobile Mattress Company, and worked in insurance. Schwarz enlisted in the Alabama State Troopers in 1890 and served in the Spanish-American War. By 1898, Schwarz earned the rank of lieutenant. When WWI started, he transferred to the U.S. Army and served as a captain. After the war, he became a member of the Paris conference assisted in founding the American Legion. He became the Sheriff of Mobile in 1924. In 1926, the city elected the Democrat Schwarz to the city commission. From 1929-32, he was Mobile’s Mayor. Also in 1932, Schwarz became president of Mobile’s Reform congregation. He died April 24, 1943 at 71. 68 “Leon Schwarz,” History of Alabama and Her People, ed. by Special Staff of Writers Alabama Biography (New York: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1927), 582. 69 For example, in 1892, Corporal Schwarz won an individual gold medal in a drill contest. The crowd applauded the choice and the medal’s presenter called him “the best drilled soldier” and commended his “preparedness.” Tuscaloosa Gazette, c. March 15, 1892, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 70 Letters of recommendation from Governor Charles Henderson, General Hubbard, and Mayor Pat J. Lyons, c. September 12, 1918, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 71 Rosen, The Jewish Confederates, 372. Rosen indicated that many second generation Jews were not as committed to the Lost Cause as their Southern white counterparts. 72 Leon Schwarz, “A Civil War Memorial Day,” Montgomery Advertiser, June 4, 1907, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 73 Charles Reagan Wilson, “Confederate Memorial Day,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Curiously, Schwarz used “Civil War.” The more “red-blooded Southrons” of the era insisted “War Between the States,” “War of Northern Aggression,” or “War for Southern Independence” were more accurate. See, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Minds of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ix. 74 “Flowers Placed on Confederate Graves Sunday,” Mobile Register, April 26, 1920, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 75 Mobile Register September 27, 1906, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA.

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76

Letter from William W. Brandon, Montgomery, AL, to Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, September 13, 1906, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. Brandon became governor of Alabama in 1922 after losing the race to Thomas Kilby in 1918. William Warren Rogers et al., Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 421-23. 77 Letter from William W. Brandon, Montgomery, AL, to Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, July 22, 1907, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 78 Letter from William W. Brandon, Montgomery, AL, to Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, c. 1925, quoted in, “Leon Schwarz,” 581-82. 79 “250th Anniversary Jews in America,” Mobile Register, c. December 1, 1905, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 80 “Corner Stone Laid With Impressive Ceremonies,” Mobile Register, c. December 11, 1911, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 81 Schwarz’s scrapbooks indicate that belonged to a series of civic organizations, to include: B’nai B’rith, Masons, Kiwanis Club, Red Cross, American Legion, Salvation Army, Community Chest, Knights of Pythias, Elks, Odd Fellows, Red Men, United Spanish War Veterans, Forty and Eight Society, Mobile Rifles Honorary Association, Mobile Association for the Blind. 82 A statement by Schwarz to the Pythian at a Booster Meeting on c. October 18, 1910, no location given, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. The speech is on an unidentified news clipping, probably the Jewish Ledger. 83 Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 78, 79, 13. Carnes explained that gender concerns contributed to a spike in fraternal organization membership by the turn of the century. Particularly in church life, Carnes affirmed, evangelical Protestant women had “feminized Christ the Redeemer.” Men used fraternal orders to help reclaim “the religious authority that formerly reposed in the hands of Biblical patriarchs.” Carnes argued the hyper-masculine rituals of these organizations came to represent a “response to transformations in the underlying structures of society.” 84 “Report of the Committee on Intellectual Culture at the Convention in Memphis,” drafted for the B’nai B’rith convention, Memphis, TN, April 24, 1907, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 85 Letter from Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, to “The Members of Beth Zur Lodge,” Mobile AL, December 1, 1907, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 86 “B’nai B’rith Day Observed,” Mobile Register, c. early December, 1907, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 87 “B’nai B’rith Day is Celebrated,” Mobile Register, c. December 11, 1907, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 88 “The Stage Jew,” Jewish Ledger (New Orleans, LA), October 23, 1908, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 89 Letter from Schwarz, to the officers and members of the B’nai B’rith, District Seven, Feb 1, 1913, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 90 “The B’nai B’rith,” Jewish Ledger, July 17, 1908, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 91 “Leon Schwarz,” 582. 92 “District Grand Lodge No. 7, I.O.B.B. Meets in its Thirty-Ninth Annual Convention in Galveston, Texas,” Jewish Ledger, May 17, 1912, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 93 Letter from Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, to the B’nai B’rith Lodge, Mobile, AL, September 7, 1912, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 94 Letter from Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, to Albert Herskowitz of the Oklahoma Jewish Review, June 1, 1912, published in the June edition (the Review was a monthly), Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 95 Letter from Leon Schwarz, Mobile, AL, to an unnamed Orthodox Mobile rabbi, Oct 1, 1912, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 96 “B’nai B’rith Convention,” Jewish Ledger, April 11, 1913, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 97 “The B’nai B’rith of District No. 7,” Jewish Monitor, April 30, 1920, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 98 Letter from Leon Schwarz, to officers and members of the B’nai B’rith, District Seven, March 1, 1913, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA 99 “Jewish Home Greets Fifty-Eighth Year,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), January 5, 1913, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 100 “Report of Committee on Intellectual Culture of District Grand Lodge No. 7, I.O.B.B,” drafted for the B’nai B’rith convention, April 1, 1908, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. 101 February 14, 1913, President Taft had vetoed a bill requiring a literacy test. Henry Pratt Fairchild, “The Literacy Test and its Making,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 31, no. 3 (May 1917); Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 235-79. 102 Leon Schwarz, “President’s Message . . . For the Term May 12, 1912 to April 13, 1913,” pamphlet, printed by J.E. Duval & Co., Mobile, delivered on April 13, 1913, Leon Schwarz Scrapbook, MMA. He claimed to have

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visited, Donaldson, LA; Nashville, TN; New Orleans, LA; Birmingham, AL; Magic City; Pensacola, FL; Memphis, TN; Hot Springs, AK; Jackson, MS; Laurel, MS; Selma, AL; Demopolis, MS; Meridian, MS; Chattanooga, TN; Huntsville, TN; Gadsden, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Tampa, FL. Chapter Five 1

R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 203. 2 Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), xvii, xix, xxv, xxviii, 198. See also, John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865-1925 (New York: Atheneum, [1955] 1970); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement (New York: Vintage Books, [1988] 1995); Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 3 William B. Gatewood, Jr., “Strangers and the Southern Eden: The South and Immigration, 1900-1920,” Ethnic Minorities in the Gulf Coast Society, eds. Jerrell H. Shofner and Linda V. Ellsworth (Pensacola, FL: Gulf Coast Historical and Humanities Conference, 1979). 4 Vicksburg (Mississippi) Herald, January 24, 1906, quoted in ibid., 4. 5 William F. Holmes, “Anti-Catholicism in Georgia During the Progressive Era: A Comment,” Ethnic Minorities in Gulf Coast Society, eds. Jerrell H. Shofner and Linda V. Ellsworth (Pensacola, FL: Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference, 1979). Holmes claimed that in the South, anti-Catholicism “fit into a larger pattern. Much of the South’s history has consisted of attempts to maintain its culture against what white southerners have viewed as outside threats to their way of life” (31). Abolitionists, emancipated blacks, Northern Republicans, and immigrant Catholics, wrote Homes, were all “threats” for Southern whites. See also, Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States. Knobel explained how nativism was a web “of interconnected ideas about American government and society” (xviii). 6 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 297-99. 7 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 119. 8 Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 30, 1906, quoted in Gatewood, “Strangers and the Southern Eden: The South and Immigration, 1900-1920,” 9. 9 New Orleans Picayune, December 23, 1913, quoted in Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “Strangers and the Southern Eden: The South and Immigration, 1900-1920,” Ethnic Minorities in the Gulf Coast Society, ed. Linda V. Ellsworth (Pensacola, FL: Gulf Coast Historical and Humanities Conference, 1979), 13-14. 10 Alfred L. Woodward, “How Shall We Boost Tallahassee and Leon,” Weekly True Democrat, August 20, 1915. 11 Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta, “From Migration to Multiculturalism: A History of Florida Immigration,” The New Florida History, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 39394. 12 Willard B. Gatewood, “Strangers and the Southern Eden: The South and Immigration, 1900-1920,” 17. State

1900

1910

1920

Florida Georgia Alabama

23,832 12,403 14,592

40,633 15,477 19,286

53,864 16,564 18,027

13

Percentage of total population in 1920 0.4 0.1 0.1

Stephen Kerber, “Park Trammell and the Florida Democratic Primary of 1916,” Florida Historical Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1980): 257. In 1916, there were 24,650 Roman Catholics in Florida, making them the fifth largest denomination in the state. There were 57,732 Baptists organized in 686 churches. 14 Pamphlet, “Knights of Columbus Oath, Extract 4th Degree,” c. February 1913, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 15 Florida Times-Union, February 9, 1915, quoted in, David P. Page, “Bishop Michael J. Curley and Anti-Catholic Nativism in Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 45, no. 2 (1966): 107-08. See also, Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, 51. Curley was something of a Southern “Americanist” much like his counterparts to

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the North, Archbishop John Ireland and Cardinal James Gibbons. Each confirmed that Catholics of all ethnicities could reconcile their American and religious identities. Essentially, the religious leaders carved a new identity for the “Catholic patriot.” 16 Page, “Bishop Michael J. Curley and Anti-Catholic Nativism in Florida,” 104. Ironically, in 1878, Bishop John Moore of Saint Augustine procured public funds for this very school. 17 Laws of Florida (1913), 311; Robert B. Rackleff, “Anti-Catholicism and the Florida Legislature, 1911-1919,” Florida Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1972): 358; Kerber, “Park Trammell and the Florida Democratic Primary of 1916.” 18 Undated news clipping, untitled Park Trammell speech, Tallahassee, FL, May 8, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 19 “Recent State Law is to be Tested in St. Augustine,” Florida Times-Union, April 25, 1916. 20 Letter from S.S. Dalzell (?), Ft. Lauderdale, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 25, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 21 Letter from H Whitaker, Muscogee, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 13, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 22 Letter from J.L. Crews, Okeechobee, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, April 22, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 23 Letter from George F. Ensey, Tropic Indian River, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 20, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 24 Letter from J.B. George, Morristo, FL, May 19, 1916, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 25 Letter from R.C. Hodges, Jennings, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 26, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 26 Letter from Y.J. Holder, Georgiana, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 24, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 27 Letter from A.C. Pierce, DeLand, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 19, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 28 Letter from William Collins, Okeechobee, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 15, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 29 Letter from H. P. Carpenter, Montverde, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 20, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 30 Letter from Dr. R.L. McMullen of Largo, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 20, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 31 Letter from D.A. Reid, Perry, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 21, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 32 Letter from R.L. Park, Crystal River, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 29, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 33 Letter from C.A. Stanford in Minneola, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 21, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 34 Letter from F.K. Demmo (?), Ocala, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 25, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. Education had become a major point of contention between Catholics and Protestants in the North and South after the Civil War. See, John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 113-21. “In the United States the relationship of religion to education was always charged, but a new wave of controversy swept the country after the Civil War. No other issue so quickly generated both anti-Catholicism and Catholic belligerence, and at the state and local levels debates over education blazed their way through electoral politics” (112). 35 Letter from L.M. Drake, Daytona, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 22, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 36 “Senator Bryan Scores Secret Political Societies in Opening Address of Campaign,” political pamphlet, c. spring 1916, N.P. Bryan Papers, UFL. The “separation of church and state” rhetoric developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a rallying call formed by nativists who tried to alienate and acculturate Catholics. See, Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 37 C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), 421; Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States, 191.

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38

Pensacola Journal, March 8, 1916, quoted in, Kerber, “Park Trammell and the Florida Democratic Primary of 1916,” 263. 39 Letter from Herbert Felkel, Tallahassee, FL, to Bradford Byrd, Atlanta, GA, c. March 1916; reply Byrd to Felkel, March 14, 1916; both forwarded along with note by Byrd to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 15, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. The Recorder’s editor, T.J. Appleyard, discovered the editor of a Guardian publication, the American Citizen, E.J. Long was black. Appleyard had been sympathetic to Knott. J. Wayne Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 5051. 40 “Negro Membership in Guardians of Liberty,” Florida Recorder, March 16, 1916. 41 See, Chapter Two. 42 Kerber, “Park Trammell and the Florida Democratic Primary of 1916,” 264. 43 Letter from Fred Taylor, DeLeon Springs, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 28, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 44 Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States, 198. Established in New Haven, Connecticut in 1881, the Knights of Columbus grew rapidly in an age when many other fraternal organizations developed. The “organizational” acumen of the group, Knobel remarked, irked nativists who believed the Knights were plotting “un-American” activities. 45 Letter from E.R. Ensey (?), Tropic Indian River, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, May 16, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 46 Florida Times-Union, June 9, 1916, quoted in, Kerber, “Park Trammell and the Florida Democratic Primary of 1916,” 269. 47 Letter from W.S. Moore, Hawthorn, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, June 7, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 48 Letter from Warren B. Rush, Lake City, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, June 10, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 49 Letter from T.J. Bunting, Milton, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, July 3, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 50 Letter from W.T. Brantley, Apalachicola, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, June 10, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 51 Letter from Frank E. Patten, Jacksonville, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, June 11, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 52 Letter from A.M. McMillan, Pensacola, FL, to Park Trammell, Tallahassee, FL, June 13, 1916, Park Trammell Papers, 1876-1936, UFL. 53 “In the State He Loved,” Daily Star (Pensacola, FL), c. October, 1897, Jones Family Papers, UWF. 54 Page, “Bishop Michael J. Curley and Anti-Catholic Nativism in Florida,” 104. In addition to Charles Jones mentioned in the first chapter, Stephen Mallory served as a United States senator for two terms, the first beginning in 1897. 55 Florida Times-Union, October 8, 1914. 56 Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 48. Catts moved from Alabama to DeFuniak Springs in 1911 and preached at a Baptist church. His first political venture came in 1904 when he ran for and lost a congressional seat in Alabama’s fifth district. 57 Catts reportedly avoided the anti-Catholic rhetoric in some settings. See, Patrick J. Bresnahan, Seeing Florida With a Priest (Zephyrhills, FL: Economy Print Shop, 1937), 73. Bresnahan remembered seeing Catts speak on a number of occasions. When Catts spoke to an “intelligent” audience, the priest asserted, the minister made “not one tirade” against Catholics. In rural locales, however, the anti-Catholic rhetoric was strong. “[Of] all the men I have heard speak in public,” Bresnahan wrote, “[Catts] was the best . . . to size up an audience.” 58 Letter from T.J. Morris, Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 24, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 59 Letter from J.P. Sevinstime (?), Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 16, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 60 Letter from Mrs. Irvin Kelsey, Griffin, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 61 Letter from Herbert M. Brockell (on Atlantic Coast Line Railroad letterhead), Tampa, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, November 2, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 62 Letter From O.N. Williams (owner of Racket Department Store), Dade City, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 27, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF.

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Letter from B.M. Phelps of The Menace, Aurora, Missouri, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, Florida, November 25, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 64 Letter from Springfield Court No. 1, Guardians of Liberty, Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 15, 1914. 65 Letter from A. F. Lovelace (?), Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, c. October 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 66 Letter from “A POWERFUL SECRET SOCIETY OPPOSED TO PERVERSION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS,” Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 17, 1914. 67 Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 47, 71-72. 68 Letter from Richard Hargrave, Jacksonville, FL. to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 23, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 69 Letter from R.G Kennan (?), Tampa, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, November 23, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 70 Letter from “A Catholic,” Lancaster, PA, to Sidney Catts in DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 15, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 71 Letter from P.H. Callahan, Chairman, Knights of Columbus, Commission on Religious Prejudices, Louisville, KY, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, December 7, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 72 Letter from Richard Hargrave, Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, January 16, 1915, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 73 Hearing notes from the Guardians of Liberty, Springfield Court No. 1, Jacksonville, FL, signed by E.B. Donnell, Ralph Roberts, and J.B. Burke, passed by unanimous vote, Jan 15, 1915, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 74 Letter from E. S. Morrison, Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 11, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 75 Letter from Richard Hargrave, Jacksonville, FL. to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, October 23, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 76 Letter from Richard Hargrave, Jacksonville, FL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, November 18, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 77 Letter from the Florida State Committee of Civil and Religious Liberty, Jacksonville, FL, to Mr. William Burbridge, (location illegible),November 2, 1914, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 78 Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 61. Most of Catts’s votes came from the rural panhandle and central Florida region. 79 “To the People of Florida,” independently published political advertisement by Sidney Catts, c. fall 1916, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 80 Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 63-93. 81 Florida Baptist Witness, June 29, 1916, quoted in ibid., 92. Like the primary election, Catts took the majority of his votes in rural counties. 82 Florida Times-Union, November 9, 1916, Ibid., 93. 83 Letter from Jefferson McClillun, Lisbon, FL, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 8 1917, reply, January 13, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 84 Letter from George R. Mauck, Orlando, FL, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 28, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 85 Birmingham Age-Herald, December 14, 1916, cited in, Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 50. 86 Letter from J.A. Minter, Tyler, AL, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 25, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 87 Letter from LeGrand W. Jones, Texarkana, AK/TX, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 7, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 88 Letter from G.W. Nance, Refugio, TX, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 13, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 89 Letter from J. P. Stephens, Tabor, NC, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 10, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 90 Letter from Virgil G. Hinshaw, Chicago, IL, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, December 4, 1916, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF.

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Letter from (name illegible), Prohibition Party Chairman, to Sidney Catts, DeFuniak Springs, FL, December 20, 1916, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 92 Letter from L.J.U. Smay, Laurel, IA, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 17, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 93 Letter from Pastor Carl V. Anderson, Prentice, WI, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 3, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 94 Letter from Nelson S. Parker, Asbury Park, NJ, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, December 31, 1916, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 95 Letter from O.F. Garner, Chicago, IL, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 13, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 96 Florida House Journal (1917), 22-28, Rackleff, “Anti-Catholicism and the Florida Legislature, 1911-1919.” 97 Florida Times-Union, April 26, 1917, quoted in ibid.: 364. 98 Letter from Thomas J. Conger, Statesville, NC, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 6, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 99 Letter from T.W. Morgan, San Francisco, CA, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 5, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 100 Letter from A.D. Bulman, Portland, OR, to Sidney Catts, Tallahassee, FL, January 13, 1917, Sidney J. Catts Papers, UWF. 101 Birmingham Age-Herald, December 14, 1916, quoted in Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 36. 102 Quoted in, Greg Garrison, “The Courage of Father Coyle,” Birmingham News, May 18, 2001. 103 Birmingham Age-Herald, December 15, 1916, quoted in Flynt, Cracker Messiah: Governor Sidney J. Catts of Florida, 92. 104 Letter from Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, to James Coyle, Birmingham, AL, March 26, 1915, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. Coyle served at Saint Paul’s since 1904. 105 Letter from James Coyle, Birmingham, AL to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, December 18, 1916, Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 106 Letter from James Coyle, Birmingham, AL to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, February 16, 1917, Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 107 Greg Garrison, “The Courage of Father Coyle,” Birmingham News, May 18, 2001. 108 Letter from James Coyle, Birmingham, AL to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, September 19, 1917, Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 109 Letter from James Coyle, Birmingham, AL to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, July 19, 1918, Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 110 Paul M. Pruitt, Jr., “The Killing of Father Coyle: Private Tragedy, Public Shame,” Alabama Heritage, no. 30 (Fall 1993). 111 Information on Coyle’s murder and the events surrounding it come from, Greg Garrison, “The Courage of Father Coyle,” Birmingham News, May 18, 2001; Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Hugo Black: The Alabama Years (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1972), 84-93; Pruitt, “The Killing of Father Coyle: Private Tragedy, Public Shame.” 112 Charles P. Sweeney, “Bigotry Turns to Murder,” Nation, CXIII (August 31, 1921), 232-33; quoted in, Hamilton, Hugo Black: The Alabama Years, 86. 113 See, Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Hodes argued that black lynching paranoia in the New South evolved largely through white fears of miscegenation. 114 Edward Allen, Eulogy for Father James Coyle, Birmingham, AL, c. August 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 115 Ibid. 116 “Martyr,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, eds. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1046. Derived from the Greek term meaning “witness,” the martyr general is one who welcomes persecution and death for a religious belief. 117 Letter from Philip Pullen, Saint Michael’s Rectory, Pensacola, FL, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, August 17, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA.

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Letter from [?] Kerrigan, Warren, RI, Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, August 15, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 119 Letter from Mother M. Aloysia, Sisters of Divine Providence, Pittsburgh, PA, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, August 15, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 120 Letter from Mother M. Praxedes[?], Superior General, Sisters of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross, Loretto, KY, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, August 20, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 121 Hamilton, Hugo Black: The Alabama Years, 84-93. 122 Birmingham Age-Herald, August 25, 1921; Birmingham News, October 17, 1921; New York Times, September 4, 1921. 123 Trial quotes and information from, “Transcript of Father Coyle’s Murder Trial,” transcribed by Chas F. Hill, Official Court Reporter, Tenth Judicial Circuit, Criminal Investigation, Birmingham, Alabama, CDA; Birmingham Age-Herald, October 20, 1921; Birmingham News, October 20, 1921; Birmingham Age-Herald, October 22, 1921; “Free Stephenson of Priest’s Murder,” New York Times, October 22, 1921; Hamilton, Hugo Black: The Alabama Years; Pruitt, “The Killing of Father Coyle: Private Tragedy, Public Shame.” 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Letter from Joseph M. Sheridan, Saint Anne’s Church, Albany, AL, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, September 17, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 127 Letter from Rev. M.E. Kitrick, Ensley, AL, to Edward Allen in Mobile, AL, August 20, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 128 Letter from [illegible], Saint Catherine’s Rectory, Pratt City, AL, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, August 23, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 129 Letter from Joseph A. Malone, Saint Catherine’s Rectory, Pratt City, AL, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, October 20, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 130 Birmingham Age-Herald, October 23, 1921, quoted in, Hamilton, Hugo Black: The Alabama Years, 91. 131 Letter from Bishop of Natchez [illegible], Natchez, MS, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL, Oct. 22, 1921, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. 132 Letter from W.H. Zinn, New York, NY, to Edward Allen, Mobile, AL October 25, 1921; Allen’s reply, October 28, Bishop Edward Patrick Allen Collection, CDA. Conclusion 1

Mark T. Gilderhus, History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2000), 126. The full quote reads, “History no longer sets forth common stories that presumably speak for the identity and experience of all readers. For many consumers of history, the narratives centering on the activities of white male elites no longer provide either satisfaction, stimulation, or a means to truth. We no longer possess a past commonly agreed upon. Indeed, to the contrary, we have a multiplicity of versions competing for attention and emphasizing alternatively elites or nonelites, men or women, whites or persons of color, and no good way of reconciling all the differences. Though the disparities and the incoherences create terrible predicaments for historians who prize orderliness in their stories, such conditions also aptly express the confusions of the world and the experiences of different people in it. If historians can agree on little else, at least they should rejoice in the realization that they have many true stories to tell about the human past.” 2 Phillip E. Hammond et al., “Forum: American Civil Religion Revisited,” Religion and American Culture 4, no. 1 (1994): 5. 3 Marcella Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 225, 242. 4 Phillip Hammond, “The Sociology of American Civil Religion: A Bibliographic Essay,” Sociological Analysis 37 (1976): 173. 5 Talcott Parsons, Religious Perspectives of College Teaching in Sociology and Social Psychology (1951), 2; Talcott Parsons, “Durkheim’s Contribution to the Theory of Integration of Social Systems,” Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 122. 6 Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 64. 7 Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). See the introductory chapter for an extended discussion of the Lost Cause debate.

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Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 18651913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); W. Scott Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 53. 9 Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 280; David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 153-69. Also, consider the key encyclopedias for this subject include discussions of civil religion and the Lost Cause. Charles Reagan Wilson, “The Lost Cause,” Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill, Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); Charles Reagan Wilson, “Confederate Memorial Day,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., “Lost Cause Myth,” The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, eds. Edward L. Queen, II, Stephen R. Prothero, and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996). 10 Ken Burns, “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War,” American Experience: PBS, 2004. 11 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ix. 12 Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Review of, The Promise of the New South,” The Journal of Southern History 59, no. 3 (August 1993): 510, 514. As the reviewer noted, Ayers provided a far more diverse view of the era than C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South did. Rabinowitz resolved, though, that Ayers’s emphasis on “discontinuity,” meant the book “adds to rather than supplants Origins.” 13 William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 18651900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Paul Harvey, “Religion in the American South Since the Civil War,” A Companion to the American South, ed. John B. Boles (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and African Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 14 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, [1912] 1995), 421, 44. 15 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, ed. Robert N. Bellah (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 183-86. Reprinted from, Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (1967). 16 Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics, 11, 242. 17 N.J. Demerath and Rhys Williams, “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society,” Annals of the American Academy 480 (July, 1985); Randi Jones Walker, “Liberators for Colonial Anahauc: A Rumination on North American Civil Religions,” Religion and American Culture 9, no. 2 (1999): 184, 199. Others employing the Demerath/Williams thesis include, Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Jo-Ann Harrison, “School Ceremonies for Yitzhak Rabin: Social Constructions of Civil Religion in Israeli Schools,” Israel Studies 6, no. 3 (2001); Rita Kirk Whillock, “Dream Believers: The Unifying Visions and Competing Values of Adherents to American Civil Religion,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1994); Cristi, From Civil Religion to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics. 18 See, Ronald C. Wimberly, “Testing the Civil Religion Hypothesis,” Sociological Analysis 37 (1976); Ronald C. Wimberly, “Continuity in the Measurement of Civil Religion,” Sociological Analysis 40 (1979). 19 George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001), 53. See also, Matthew Glass, “Peace Reform,” The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, eds. Edward L. Queen, II, Stephen R. Prothero, and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. (New York: Facts on File, 1996). Commenting on war and peace in the twentieth century, Glass claimed that America’s civil religion was “quite resistant to the concerns of peace activists” (497). 20 Kenneth R. Rossman, Thomas Mifflin and the Politics of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952); Terry Golway, Washington’s General: Nathaniel Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The AntiWar Classic by America’s Most Decorated General (Los Angeles: Feral House, [1935] 2003), 23. Both Mifflin and Greene left the Quakers when they entered military service. 21 James A. Mathisen, “Twenty Years After Bellah: Whatever Happened to American Civil Religion,” Sociological Analysis 50, no. 2 (1989).

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Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1984), 154-64, 220-21, 425-26 ; Matthew Glass, “Civil Religion,” The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, eds. Edward L. Queen, II , Stephen R. Prothero, and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. (New York: Facts on File, 1996), 133-35; Thomas A. Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 59, 69, 84; Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999), 17, 395, 432-62 ; R. Jonathan Moore, “Civil Religion,” Encyclopedia of Religious Freedom, ed. Catherine Cookson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 60-63; John Corrigan and Winthrop Hudson, Religion in America, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2004), 83, 132, 135-36. For a substantial listing of current works in civil religion, see the introductory chapter. 23 Published by the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public life, and edited by Mark Silk, Religion in the News frequently discusses civil religion in relation to current events. See, Mark Silk, “Our New Religious Politics,” Religion in the News, Winter 2005; David W. Machacek “Still Under God,” Religion in the News, Summer 2004; Mark Silk, “Under Whatever,” Religion in the News, Fall 2003; David W. Machacek, “The Religion of Country,” Religion in the News, Fall 2003; David W. Machacek, “The Case of Chaplain Yee,” Religion in the News, Fall 2003; Andrew Chase Baker, “The Irreverent Eagle,” Religion in the News, Summer 2003; Adam Rothstein, “Jihad for Journalists,” Religion in the News, Summer 2003; Michael Evans, “The Decalogue in Montgomery,” Religion in the News, Spring 2003; Gary Laderman, “9/11 On Our Mind,” Religion in the News, Fall 2002; Mark Silk, “The Civil Religion Goes to War,” Religion in the News, Fall 2001; Andrew Walsh, “Good for What Ails Us,” Religion in the News, Fall 2001; Michael E. Naparstek, “Falwell and Robertson Stumble,” Religion in the News, Fall 2001; Michael McGough, “Feeble Opinions on the House Chaplaincy,” Religion in the News, Summer 2000; Mark Silk, “A Civil Religious Affair,” Religion in the News, Spring 1999. Civil religion frequently appears in journalistic contexts. The following is a brief sampling of current articles employing the term. Bill Tammeus, “Attorney Renews Fight against ‘under God’ in Pledge,” Kansas City Star, April 3, 2006; Mohammed Zuberi, “Despite Extremists, Islam is a Civil Religion,” Weekly Retriever (Baltimore, MD), March 7, 2006; Andrew Silow-Carroll, “Sunnyside up,” Jewish News (Whippany, NJ), February 9, 2006; Wade Clark Roof, “Our National Theologian,” Beliefnet.com, January 18, 2004; John Tierney, “Inaugural Day,” New York Times, January 21, 2005; Michael Burleigh, “Can ‘Civil Religion’ Help us in Dangerous Times?,” Scotsman.com, October 21, 2005; Mark Joseph, “A Faith-Lite Johnny Cash,” Beliefnet.com, November 15, 2005; Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The American Civil Religion – Destructive, Useless, or Beneficial?,” Christian Century, November 16, 2004, 47-47; Donald Smothers, “Mending Fences With a New Meadowlands Plan,” New York Times, December 16, 2004; Robert Pyne, “The True Good Samaritan,” New York Times, April 19, 2003. Mentioned in this listing is Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbra. Other articles written by Roof for Beliefnet include: “Uncivil Religion?,” January 29, 2001; “The Deeper Florida Drama,” November 16, 2000.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Arthur Remillard took his undergraduate degree from Saint Francis University in 2000. He completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Florida State University in 2002 and 2006 respectively. Currently, he resides with his wife in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania and serves as an adjunct professor at Saint Francis University.

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