A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865–1887. By H. Paul Thompson Jr. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. xv + 344 pp. $48.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887 . By H. Paul Thompson , Jr. DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press , 2013. xv + 344 pp. $48.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesPaul Thompson's work focuses on the prohibition elections held in the city of Atlanta, Georgia in the years 1885 and 1887, and makes a valuable contribution not just to our understanding of the religious and political dimensions of the prohibition movement in the American south, but to our appreciation for the role of race in this movement's growth. As Atlanta re-emerged from the ashes of the Civil War and Sherman's visit, voters enacted, then subsequently retracted, prohibition in the city. Historians of temperance and prohibition in the south have explored this two-year experiment before, but Thompson's study gives us something new and insightful: an examination of the role of Atlanta's booming black population in these two elections. He pays careful attention to the efforts of Atlanta African Americans themselves, as well as to the way that white pro- and anti-prohibitionists sought to attract black votes for their cause.In chapter 1, Thompson explores what he terms the evangelical reform that emerged out of a convergence of revivalism and Republican ideology in the era of the early republic. The theologians who championed evangelistic revivalism in the early 1800s (Dwight, Beecher, Finney, etc.) were also early advocates of temperance, and some of them even had direct bearing on the emergence of temperance sentiment amongst black residents of Atlanta. The founder of the city's first black temperance society was ordained by Finney, for example. Thompson highlights the way in which temperance was a central component of the active Christianity promoted by revivalism as well as an essential virtue of Christian Republicanism.Chapter 2 delves deeper into the influence of this reform nexus upon Atlanta African Americans by looking at the influx of missionaries into post-war Atlanta. The American Missionary Association was committed to the cultural uplift of African Americans in Atlanta and across the south, and temperance became a key part of that uplift. Thompson carefully documents the way in which textbooks, tracts, and missionary activity created significant black support for temperance in the 1860s and 1870s. Chapters 3 and 4 describe how leaders of the black community in Atlanta had, by the 1880s, come to embrace temperance as essential to the improvement of black social and economic conditions. Black-run mutual aid societies and benevolent societies emerged to offer African Americans in Atlanta greater independence from whites, and these societies embraced temperance as an essential virtue and often as a condition for membership.In chapter 5 Thompson examines Atlanta's 1885 prohibition election. He pays particular attention to the arguments used by both drys and wets to attract black support. Supporters of prohibition effectively used themes of racial uplift, improved race relations, and manhood to sway black men to their side. Anti-prohibitionists emphasized the potential economic costs of prohibition to blacks and reminded black voters of the sketchy racial attitudes of leading white prohibitionists. …