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Book Review
Canada and the United States
A. James Fuller. Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South. (Southern Biography Series.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 343. $49.95.
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For years, Basil Manly has lived in the backwater of the literature on the Old South. As a leading Baptist minister who helped found several southern schoolsincluding the Southern Baptist Theological Seminaryand an active agent in the split that created the Southern Baptists, he has deserved more notice. In the first full biography of Manly, A. James Fuller performs this service well. Readers receive an appreciation of the effort of some Baptists to reconcile the worlds of the saint and citizen during a particularly troublesome portion of our history. |
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Manly symbolizes the end of a journey that Baptists made from outsiders with radical potential to insiders who embraced the power structure. Born in North Carolina in 1798, Manly was part of a well-connected, slaveowning family from which came a future governor of the state. Manly held an important position at the First Baptist Church in Charleston and spent eighteen years as president of the University of Alabama. He helped frame the resolutions that formed the backbone of the split with Northern Baptists in 1845 and was a State Rights Democrat who openly advocated secession. In 1861, he served a brief stint as chaplain for the provisional Confederate Congress. |
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