The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780-1925
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Historical Analysis and Interpretation: Comparing Views on Slavery and the Bible
People with different views interpret documents and events in very different ways. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the use of the Bible to both justify and condemn the institution of slavery. Read excerpts from Thornton Stringfellow’s Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery and contrast it with “Perversion of the Scriptures,” Chapter III of George Bourne’s A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument.
- How do the authors use the same scriptural passages to support their different viewpoints?
- What do these tracts reveal about the authors’ values, outlook, and motives?
- What insights about how people’s views affect their interpretation of documents or events did you gain from this exercise? Can you think of another document that is interpreted differently by people with divergent views? Why is it important in studying history to consider multiple perspectives?
Historical Analysis and Interpretation: Formulating Questions About the Church in the African American Community
Historians begin their work with questions for investigation. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois devotes Chapter X, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” to religion in the African American community. After describing a Southern revival meeting, Du Bois identified the questions about the religious life of African Americans that he found “attractive”:
These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up to the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar circumstances of the black man's environment they were the one expression of his higher life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both socially and psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of inquiry that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage? What was his attitude toward the World and Life? What seemed to him good and evil,--God and Devil? Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and disappointments? Answers to such questions can come only from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of Chicago.
From Chapter X, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” The Souls of Black Folk, page 192
Read Chapter X of The Souls of Black Folk. Did Du Bois answer the questions he laid out in the paragraph above? How does knowing at the beginning of a historical account what questions the writer is addressing help you in reading the account? What might be the implications for writers of history? For your own research and writing?
Historical Analysis and Interpretation: Examining Causes of Historical Actions
Read Benjamin Brawley’s article from The Journal of Negro History (July 1916) on Lorenzo Dow, a white itinerant Methodist minister who traveled south in the early nineteenth century, seeking converts and preaching against slavery. Dow caused such uproar that he was barred from the Methodist church. Brawley concluded the article remarking,
Here at least was a man with a mission--that mission to carry the gospel of Christ to the uttermost parts of the earth. He knew no standard but that of duty; he heeded no command but that of his own soul. Rude, and sharp of speech he was, and only half educated; but he was made of the stuff of heroes; and neither hunger, nor cold, nor powers, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, could daunt him in his task. After the lapse of a hundred years he looms larger, not smaller, in the history of our Southland; and as of old we seem to hear again “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”
- How did Lorenzo Dow put his beliefs into practice?
- What beliefs and experiences contributed to Dow’s opposition to slavery?
- How did Dow’s views differ from those of the established Methodist Church? To what extent would you say these differences were the cause of the Church’s banning of Dow? What other causes contributed to the Church’s decision?
- How successful was Dow in achieving his goals? Knowing the outcome, how do you regard his efforts?
- Think about other individuals who were moved to action by their beliefs. How important do you think such individuals are in history?