“A Mob to Carry on the Peaceable Work”: Antebellum Disunion, Slavery, and the Religious Border

During the 1830’s and 40’s, conflicts over slavery, abolition, and politics prompted Southerners in America’s three largest evangelical Protestant denominations, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian, to organize separate branches. Once divided, these denominations struggled to decide where and how to demarcate the division between Northern and Southern churches. The evangelical border was not a line, but a broad region, containing the southern tier of free states and the Northern tier of slave states.  In the border, Christains with pro- and anti- slavery sentiments worshipped together in the same congregations, shared membership in regional associations, and administered church property. This vast area contained thousands of potential converts and carried a powerful symbolic weight.

This paper examines the border region during the period from the latter half of the 1840’s to the onset of the Civil War—a time when Northern evangelicals pushed South and Southerners pushed North in a flurry of lawsuits, violent confrontations, and underhanded maneuvers designed to assert control over the region.  Local ministers fought for control of churches, newspapers, seminaries, meetings, and missionary resources. While some border residents sided with the North and others with the South, some, troubled by the havoc sectionalization wrought, began to formulate a third position, angling to maintain local unity in the face of division. Thus, these intense struggles highlighted the border’s significance to the strength of sectional denominations as they contributed to an emerging border evangelical style defined by political neutrality and a theology of spirituality. 

I analyze sectional appeals to the border and how attempts to woo border loyalty shaped antebellum theological and political arguments, North and South.  Finally, I identify ways in which border identity grew stronger from within as border evangelicals began to formulate a theological style tailored to allow for a functional level of harmony in the fractured region.