| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord: The Beginnings of the AME Church in Florida, 1865–1895. By Larry Eugene Rivers and Canter Brown Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xx, 244 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8130-1890-0.)

Larry Eugene Rivers and Canter Brown Jr. offer a fascinating account of the emergence of the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in Florida. They examine the complex ways the early development of black Methodism implicated itself in the political and social setting of black communities throughout Florida. Figures such as Elder Charles H. Pearce and Robert Meacham appear as central characters in a story about the church's political role in Florida, and descriptions of the policies of various bishops such as Daniel Payne, Alexander Wayman, and John Mifflin Brown serve as points of entry into the denominational politics that characterized the early Florida AME Church. Rivers and Brown's account alternates then between providing what can be described as typical church history (they give specific attention to the internal fissures of the AME Church in Florida) and attending to the complex imbrications of that history with the political realities of Florida during Reconstruction and after. The authors suggest that denominational politics and electoral politics ought to be thought about together. With this focus, Rivers and Brown strain to escape the limitations of writing church history, but their efforts are constrained by the genre. . . .

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