Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810. By Cynthia Lynn Lyerly. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. viii, 251 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-19-511429-9.)

In this sophisticated history of early Methodism, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly echoes Perry Miller's call for historians to consider theology and spars with W. J. Cash's notorious assertion that the South had no mind at all. Thinking about religion in the early national South did not mean mapping covenant theology along Ramist coordinates. Instead, the "marrow" of Methodism lay in a Wesleyan "revolution of consciousness," a remaking of the self. The doctrine that compelled this, Lyerly argues, shaped southerners as much as the camp meeting. 1

The main plot of Lyerly's story will be familiar to readers of recent books by Russell E. Richey, Christopher H. Owen, Christine Leigh Heyrman—whose Southern Cross (1997) appeared while Lyerly's book was in press—and John H. Wigger. Methodists multiplied at an astonishing rate in the upper South between 1780 and 1810, with the percentage of African American members climbing steadily. From its earliest days, the movement drew its energy and enthusiasm from the pew. Even during the bitter controversy over slavery—essentially over by 1800 in deed if not in word—power balanced precariously on the pulpit. . . .

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