Antebellum African Missions and the Evangelical South

My latest at the Anxious Bench:

I recently read Erskine Clarke’s remarkable By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey, which tells the epic chronicle of John Leighton Wilson and Jane Wilson, antebellum southern missionaries to west Africa. Clarke is one of the most gifted historians of American religion, with particular mastery of the antebellum southern Christian mind. By the Rivers of Water is a natural sequel to his Bancroft Prize-winning Dwelling Place.

As I have written earlier, the nineteenth-century American missions movement was often driven by Calvinists (in this case, Presbyterian Calvinists) like the Wilsons. Clarke shows how Calvinism and the belief in God’s providence fit into the larger “coherent moral universe” of the Wilsons. He particularly considers how their slaveholding ethos was challenged, but not finally defeated, by evangelical faith and missionary work among west Africans.

The Wilsons freed their own slaves and fought for decades against the slave trade in Africa, yet when the crisis of slavery and secession came to America in 1860, John Leighton sided with the Confederacy and became a key player in the organization of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America – especially its missionary efforts.

Read the rest here.