James Hervey Otey Papers

Papers concerning Otey's election as Bishop, 1833, fitness for the office, and affairs of the Diocese of Tennessee. Subjects include his interest in education, especially Columbia Female Institute, Ravenscroft College, and the University of the South; the need for greater clerical and lay discipline; the authority of bishops and their duty to suppress strange doctrines; proposals for improving organization of foreign and domestic missions; Otey's disapproval of the Protestant Episcopal Missionary Association for the West; the Church of England; ritualism; dealings with other bishops, especially George Upfold and Alexander V. Griswold; and personal matters. The collection also contains to tributes to Bishop Otey.

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The Civil War was trying, bloody and hard-fought combat for both sides. What was it, then, that sustained soldiers low on supplies and morale? For the Army of Tennessee, it was religion. Onward Southern Soldiers: Religion and the Army of Tennessee in the Civil War explores the significant impact of religion on every rank, from generals to chaplains to common soldiers. It took faith to endure overwhelming adversity. Religion united troops, informing both why and how they fought and providing the rationale for enduring great hardship for the Confederate cause. Using primary source material such as diaries, letters, journals and sermons of the Army of Tennessee, Traci Nichols-Belt, along with Gordon T. Belt, presents the history of the vital role of the armys religious practices.

Professor Holifield locates the southern theologians in their broader American setting and in the context of European debates about reason, revelation, science, and moral philosophy. He thus explores a wide range of topics that clarify the history of southern--and American--religion: the presuppositions of liberalism and the logic of conservatism; the influence of Scottish Common-Sense Philosophers, British theologians, and German Biblical critics; the foundations and functions of southern social ethics; the didactic uses of ritual; and the continuing effort of nineteenth-century theologians to demonstrate the reasonableness of both the Christian religion and the whole natural order.

As the owner of more than 200 slaves and a profitable sugar plantation, Bishop Polk commanded a unique platform from which he articulated a vision of the Old South that merged Episcopalian values and traditions with the region's more dominant evangelical religious culture. Polk displayed virtually no interest in his denomination's theological squabbles. Instead, his genius rested in his attempts to cultivate a religious solidarity among white Southerners of all classes and to broaden the social and cultural appeal of Episcopalianism in the South. Polk's mission for the University of the South illustrated his dedication to denominational purity, but it also embodied the fundamental tenets of a religious and culturally based Southern nationalism.

The centrality of religion in the life of the Old South, the strongly religious nature of the sectional controversy over slavery, and the close affinity between religion and antebellum American nationalism all point toward the need to explore the role of religion in the development of southern sectionalism. In Gospel of Disunion Mitchell Snay examines the various ways in which religion adapted to and influenced the development of a distinctive southern culture and politics before the Civil War, adding depth and form to the movement that culminated in secession. From the abolitionist crisis of 1835 through the formation of the Confederacy in 1861, Snay shows how religion worked as an active agent in translating the sectional conflict into a struggle of the highest moral significance. At the same time, the slavery controversy sectionalized southern religion, creating separate institutions and driving theology further toward orthodoxy. By establishing a biblical sanction for slavery, developing a slaveholding ethic for Christian masters, and demonstrating the viability of separation from the North through the denominational schisms of the 1830s and 1840s, religion reinforced central elements in southern political culture and contributed to a moral consensus that made secession possible.

Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Now, in God's Almost Chosen Peoples, Li