History Of Savannah Methodism From John Wesley To Silas Johnson

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735-1738 considers the fascinating early history of a small group of men commissioned by trustees in England to spread Protestantism both to new settlers and indigenous people living in Georgia. Four minister-missionaries arrived in 1736, but after only two years these men detached themselves from the colonial enterprise, and the Mission effectively ended in 1738. Tracing the rise and fall of this endeavor, Scott’s study focuses on key figures in the history of the Mission including the layman, Charles Delamotte, and the ministers, John and Charles Wesley, Benjamin Ingham, and George Whitefield. In Scott’s innovative historical approach, neglected archival sources generate a detailed narrative account that reveals how these men’s personal experiences and personal networks had a significant impact on the inner-workings and trajectory of the Mission. The original group of missionaries who traveled to Georgia was composed of men already bound together by family relations, friendships, and shared lines of mentorship. Once in the colony, the missionaries’ prospects altered as they developed close ties with other missionaries (including a group of Moravians) and other settlers (John Wesley returned to England after his romantic relationship with Sophy Hopkey soured). Structures of imperialism, class, and race underlying colonial ideology informed the Anglican Mission in the era of trustee Georgia. The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia enriches this historical picture by illuminating how a different set of intricacies, rooted in personal dynamics, was also integral to the events of this period. In Scott’s study, the history of the expansive eighteenth-century Atlantic world emerges as a riveting account of life unfolding on a local and individual level.

Early Methodism was a despised and outcast movement that attracted the least powerful members of Southern societyslaves, white women, poor and struggling white men - and invested them with a sense of worth and agency. Methodists created a public sphere where secular rankings, patriarchal order, and racial hierarchies were temporarily suspended. Because its members challenged Southern secular mores on so many levels, Methodism evoked intense opposition, especially from elite white men. Methodism and the Southern Mind analyzes the public denunciations, domestic assaults on Methodist women and children, and mob violence against black Methodists.

Black Savannah focuses upon efforts of African Americans, free and slave, who worked together to establish and maintain a variety of religious, social, and cultural institutions, to carve out niches in the larger economy, and to form cohesive black families in a key city of the Old South.

This is the first book length study of John Wesley's period as a missionary in colonial Georgia. The mission was a laboratory for implementing his views of primitive Christianity. The ideal of restoring the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the early church in the Georgia wilderness was a prime motivation for Wesley's missionary activity.

In this masterful portrait of life in Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War, prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones transports readers to the balmy, raucous streets of that fabled Southern port city. Here is a subtle and rich social history that weaves together stories of the everyday lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor, men and women from all walks of life confronting the transformations that would alter their city forever. Deeply researched and vividly written, Saving Savannah is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Civil War years.

Attempting to restore subtlety and nuance to the study of southern religion, The Sacred Flame of Love ranges across the entire nineteenth century to chronicle the evolution of the institutions, theology, and social attitudes of Georgia Methodists in light of such phenomena, trends, and events as slavery, class prejudice, republicanism, population growth, economic development, sectional politics, war, emancipation, and urban growth. In connecting Methodist history with the larger social transformation of nineteenth-century Georgia, Christopher H. Owen uncovers a story of considerable complexity and variety. Because Georgia Methodists included people from every social class, few generalizations apply properly to all of them. For many years they were loosely united by common adherence to the ideals of Wesleyan evangelicalism, but economic and political developments would gradually accentuate Methodist social divisions and weaken even this bond. Indeed, deviating far from the conception of unchanging and asocial southern religion often held by scholars, Owen sees both church and society undergoing enormous change in the nineteenth century.

Essays by 30 authors attempt to reclaim and to create heightened awareness about individuals, contributions, and struggles that have made African American women's survival and progress possible.

Lines in the Sandis Timothy Lockley’s nuanced look at the interaction between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans in lowcountry Georgia from the introduction of slavery in the state to the beginning of the Civil War. The study focuses on poor whites living in a society where they were dominated politically and economically by a planter elite and outnumbered by slaves. Lockley argues that the division between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans was not fixed or insurmountable. Pulling evidence from travel accounts, slave narratives, newspapers, and court documents, he reveals that these groups formed myriad kinds of relationships, sometimes out of mutual affection, sometimes for mutual advantage, but always in spite of the disapproving authority of the planter class. Lockley has synthesized an impressive amount of material to create a rich social history that illuminates the lives of both blacks and whites. His abundant detail and clear narrative style make this first book-length examination of a complicated and overlooked topic both fascinating and accessible.