Chapter 4 - Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry

Summary

Eric Gardner’s “Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry” begins to consider how a group long crucial to Black print – ministers and church activists – adapted religious rhetoric after the Civil War and specifically reached into militaristic language in ways that allowed Black writers and readers to think about national and local citizenship, church engagement, the mission and meaning of the Civil War, the continuing violence surrounding many Black lives, and Black print within the larger arena of Black faith. Initially anchored in two key books published early in Reconstruction by major AME figures, Bishop Daniel Payne’s The Semi-Centenary and the Retrospection of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s An Apology for African Methodism, the essay broadens to consider how such rhetorics reached into texts such as Harper’s serialized Recorder novel Sowing and Reaping and Henry McNeal Turner’s eulogy to Charles Sumner.