Zeb Vance: Champion of Personal Freedom (review)

Abstract

272CIVIL WAR HISTORY was one of the greatest evils that a Christian should fight, a view that was written into the General Rules of 1743. Yet as early as 1785, idealism had come into sharp conflict with the economic realities of American life. By 1800, public opinion, at least in the South, had forced the Church into a face-saving compromise with slavery. Methodist laymen simply did not want to free slaves which they either already owned or some day hoped to buy. Methodism was a people's movement, and the people either wanted slavery or feared emancipation. Four years later, the Conference suspended the whole "Section on Slavery" south of Virginia. Gradually the Church's official position became one of meeting its religious obligation to the Negro through the evangelistic Mission to the Slaves and support of the American Colonization Society. This, they felt, allowed them to avoid alarming the slaveholders in their congregations, to accept the legal status quo, and yet fulfill their moral responsibilities. The rise of abolitionism in the 1830's, however, severely threatened this peace-keeping arrangement. Increasingly, northern conferences called for a return to the original principles of Methodism and would no longer accept the Mission and colonization as a moral compromise. Southerners, on the other hand, would not grant the premise that slavery was a sin and that they, therefore, were sinners. Feeling themselves to be devout as any in the Church, the southerners became hypersensitive to any imagined insult to their labor system or its supporters. Consequently, they demanded that their position and slavery be recognized by a share in the governing authority of the Church. When, in 1844, the General Conference supported the Baltimore Conference's refusal to ordain a slaveholder and called into question the right of Bishop James Andrew of Georgia to perform his ecclesiastical duties after acquiring slaves, the denomination split. This book should have a wide appeal. Anyone interested in the forces contributing to the Civil War will find much of interest here. Those concerned with church history can study in depth one of this nation's largest denominations during its formative period. And here is presented in intriguing detail a case study of a classic conflict between moral and economic issues. John S. Ezell University of Oklahoma Zeb Vance: Champion of Personal Freedom. By Glenn Tucker. (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966. Pp. viii, 564. $8.50.) If there is anything relating to Zeb Vance in the written records or in the folklore of the western North Carolina mountains which Glenn Tucker did not include in this book, it would be hard to find. Out of these more than five hundred pages of narrative he has made Vance a living person and has embroidered him with sketches of his principal associates and acquaintances and, indeed, of descriptions of inanimate backgrounds. Whether or not this is the definitive biography of Vance, there can never be one more inclusive; and the only place for another biography would be BOOK REVIEWS273 for this one to be boiled down by at least a third, for the reader is at times eager to push along with Vance and not be bothered too much with the bypaths which Tucker likes to explore. But be it said now, that this book has an easy flow of language, which never grows wearisome. And, also, be it said that the more than fifty pages of notes at the end (footnotes if they had been scattered at the bottom of the pages) provide interesting comments as well as citations of sources. Tucker was fortunate in having the voluminous Vance Papers, mostly in the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, as a source for much that makes up this book. To survey briefly Vance's life, he was bom in 1830 in the mountains of western North Carolina (where Glenn Tucker, bom a Hoosier, but now a good Tar Heel, lives); Vance spent a year at the University of North Carolina and left a reputation there which still lives. He was a Union man and, therefore, opposed to secession until Lincoln called for troops and included North Carolina in the call; then he and most other...