Southern Christian Advocate

By: Brent H. Holcomb, Pub. 1980, Reprinted 2019, 282 pages, Index, soft cover, ISBN #0-89308-154-X. The Southern Christian Advocate was the publication of the Methodist Confreence of both South and North Carolina, Georgia and Florida for the period 1837-1878. It also covered other states as well, such as: Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and occasionally containing notices from other states as well. Vol. #1 contains the names of approximately 70,000 indivuals and Vol. #2 which covers the Civil War period, contains the names of approximately 30,000 indiviuals. The marriage notices will often times have "son of" "daughter of" etc.. This is very important source for information when doing Methodist ancestry. Considering that the State of South Carolina did not officialy start keeping vital records until 1911, these notices take on an added importance. North Carlina requirment for marriage licenses (as opposed to bonds) did not come into effect until 1868. And some Georgia counties have lost their marriage records. Considering the time frame of these books makes these marriage notices important because many times couples will move away from where they were married and finding a marriage record can be very difficult to locate if the county and state of the marriage are not already known. The death notices within these books are mini-biographies of the deceased persons, often times giving places of birth and former residences. During the Civil War years, many persons could not afford tombstones or erected only wooden markers which have not survived and hence these books become even more impotant to the reacher.

Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity. Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters. Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.