| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South. By Janet Duitsman Cornelius. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xii, 305 pp. $34.95, isbn 1-57003-247-5.)

The New Orleans Methodist clergyman Holland McTyeire said of the antebellum slave mission effort, "the church is the only possible theatre for the slave's ambition." In this well-researched and even-handed survey of the effort by southern white Christians to extend the gospel to African Americans held as slaves, Janet Duitsman Cornelius, who teaches at Danville Area Community College in Danville, Illinois, traverses familiar ground but manages to do so with refreshing insight into the promise and the peril of the attempts to forge a Christian community among a people who were forced to serve two masters, their earthly one and their divine one. By exploring the contradictions in the formalized southern mission to the slaves, Cornelius teaches us something about the tension between the sacred and the secular, for, as she observes at many places in this welcome addition to the scholarship on plantation missions, African Americans were not passive in the cultural exchange and managed to extract notions of Christian liberty out of the constricted version of the evangelical message doled out to them by white preachers concerned about disrupting the racial status quo. . . .

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