Bruce's New Book: Baptists in Middle GA During the Civil War

[Bruce Gourley]

The actual title is Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the Civil War, and it is now available from and . Reader reviews are available at both links.

[Gene Scarborough]

My father and his family lived in Madison County near Athens. The closest small town is Danielsville and the church where they are buried is Moon's Grove. This is most interesting to me.

Can't get and read the book right now, but does it contain some Madison County things?

[Bruce Gourley]

[Ed Pettibone]

[Bruce Gourley]

[ET]

Bruce, why the so tightly focused topic -- middle Georgia? Just curious, as I understand the interest in Baptist history, but was there some personal interest in targeting just one section of one state?

Also, I've got the Basil Manly - Chaplain to the Confederacy on my Christmas list, thanks to your mentioning it in a thread some time back.

[Bruce Gourley]

[Gene Scarborough]

I know the Coastal Plain settled first with land grants / there was settlement in the mountains by Appalacian Trail approach and some river travel.

Was there a difference in the middle areas as far a slave ownership?

They were essential to plantation owners of the coastal areas. As far as I know, there was little abuse since the owner depended on his slaves to produce crops efficiently. That is the basic description I have gleaned in SC and NC, but have never been in coastal GA to live.

[Bruce Gourley]

[Stephen Fox]

You and Scott Walker ought to do a Breakout session at the next national CBF event, Walker as you know author of a book on his great great grandfather's experience in the Civil War

[Gene Scarborough]

Bruce--

I read the article and see some accuracy, but other things seriously left out.

My own grandmother was one of the few female graduates of Furman when it was a girl's school. Despite her education she told my mother, "Why, Creatia, you know negroes don't have souls!" My mother was flabbergasted at the brutality of her statement despite her education and personal commitement to living as a Christian. Mother had been to Winthrope and then to the Carver School of Missions and is an example of one not allowing her chidren or herself to use the "N" word!

What this description leaves out is crucial as well:

1) Slaves were captured and sold by their own people to white slave traders. Their society was hardly "ideal" either when it came to valuing human life outside their own tribe. In it all, was a life not that far removed from ignorant working people who never can quite get ahead despite being paid a wage about equal to a slave's pay of roof over head and food avilable enough to let them work each day.

2) Despite health and hardship isssues, many of them lived in a safer climate and under a roof when back home they were dying in greater numbers from their own tropical diseases. Such still exists today with over-population and tropical diseases not present here with modern medicine.

This, in no way dismisses the hardships and demeaning of being a slave, but it offers a wider picture than some idealists present.

I have pastored churches where, pre-Civil War, the slaves are listed as members. They usually had to sit in a separate place in the church. I have seen cemetaries where both black and white are buried in it--again in separate places and with stones as markers rather than carved head stones. It bespeaks a common humanity in the South when death levels us all.

This was a definite demeaning, but there was also hidden respect from being raised by a mammy and playing with one another on the farm. My grandaddy in SC had a totally sorry tenant and another much more dependable. In both cases, he talked southern prejudice, but when the sorry one shot and killed his wife in a drunken frenzy on a Saturday night, Grandaddy was the first one there on Monday with cigaretts and a lawyer to help him out.

When he got out of jail my Uncle had a trailer for him and a job on his farm = so much for looking down on him in the real world!

I'm not trying in any way to dismiss the abuse and demeaning, but within it was a deep respect when human spirits connected in the hard world of raising a crop.

[Haruo]

[David Flick]

[Gene Scarborough]

Momma was smart and alert, but taught to be the proper submissive southern daughter.

Here is one almost identical to Harou's spur-winning addition: My Great Grandmother could remember her father coming home from the Civil War. She lived to be almost 101 and was in her garden hoeing in a sunbonnet after her 100th. She was the oldest citizen in Easley, SC, known affectionately as "Aunt Melissa" Williams. Never a rich or pushy woman, but full of wisdom.

On day at Grandaddy's house she asked my father why women were treated so badly in Jesus' day.

Daddy slid over close to her and asked, "Do you really want me to tell you the truth?" "Yes," she replied.

"Well, Mrs. Williams, in Jesus' day women were just another piece of property for the Jewish man. If it came to a good donkey or a good woman, the man was just a likely to pick a donkey over a woman as not!"

Great Grandmomma gave him a shoulder slap as she declared, "Aw, Claude, that can't be true!" Daddy and Harou are both on target. Traditionalists had to have someone submissive to them to feel better about themselves---and that's not a good approach to human relationships when God made us all!

[Neil Heath]

[Ed Pettibone]

[Gene Scarborough]

My grandmother, Carrie Kay Williams, had her diploma from Greenville Women's College on her wall. Glad to know more details about the history of the school. It was a rare thing for women of Grandmomma's era to even get a high school degree, much less one from college.

[David Flick]

[Ed Pettibone]

[Neil Heath]

[Stephen Fox]

Proved two things, Women have souls and Black people have souls.

The question now did anybody at the Fox News Debate in Myrtle Beach other than Juan Williams have a soul?

That seems to be the question at NY Times today, in a dicussion that got locked at 390 comments.

Back to Pearl and why she should be important to Bruce Gourley.

Her Cotton field devotional was a memory of Central Georgia antebellum

[Rvaughn]

[Stephen Fox]

After Atlanta:

Beautiful conversation on NPR yesterday. Must reading for all captivated by the Civil War.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013- ... l-doctorow