Elizabeth L. Jemison. Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South.

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized that citizenship was perhaps the most hotly contested concept in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. From Dred Scott v. Sandford to the Fourteenth Amendment to Plessy v. Ferguson, both the meaning of citizenship and its relationship to equality were unstable. As Elizabeth L. Jemison argues in Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, Christianity’s role in shaping the meaning of citizenship in postemancipation America has not been fully appreciated. Jemison’s main contention is that Christian identity was central to emerging conceptions of citizenship and thus is indispensable for understanding both African Americans’ aspirations for equality and white southerners’ attempts to maintain a racial hierarchy through violence and segregation. Jemison builds on the taxonomy of three competing religious visions for the postemancipation South—of Black southerners, of white southerners, and of white northern missionaries—that Daniel W. Stowell established in Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877. The first vision maintained that African Americans’ status as Christians meant they should be equal citizens. In contrast, white southern Christians adapted the paternalistic rhetoric of proslavery theology to defend a racially exclusivist understanding of citizenship. Lastly, white northern missionaries advanced their own form of paternalism that separated Black Christian identity from Black civil and political rights. Jemison’s book, which examines the lower Mississippi River valley of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and western Tennessee, mostly confirms Stowell’s earlier work on Georgia and eastern Tennessee.