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The Godly Insurrection in Limestone County: Social Gospel, Populism, and Southern Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Richard C. Goode
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Extract

An “enormous mob” marching, protesting, and burning the governor in effigy does not sound like a typical description of late nineteenth-century southern religion. It more than likely conjures images of campus and urban riots of recent times. Surprisingly, such an event occurred in traditionally staid north Alabama over 100 years ago. On February 25,1891, outraged Limestone County farmers marched on the town square in Athens and demonstrated in front of the county courthouse. Across the street from the courthouse stood Theophilus West-moreland's drugstore. Here an effigy of Governor Thomas Goode Jones, with a noose around its neck, was thrown from a second floor window and set aflame, much to the mob's delight. After the governor was taken care of, Westmoreland's brother-in-law and president of the Limestone County Farmers' Alliance, Hector D. Lane, addressed the mob, stoking the passions of the Alliance's “wool hat boys and sun bonnet girls.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 155 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1993

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References

Notes

1. Accounts of this incident were found in Thomas Owens's scrap-book, housed at the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

2. The Farmers’ Alliance was a protest organization of farmers in the South and West which formed in the 1880's. The Alliance's strength in the South was based on an effective network of local Alliances, charismatic leaders, and newspapers. By 1890, the Alliance had an estimated 2,500,000 members nationwide. At first, the Alliance tried to work within the political structure. Once those attempts failed, the Alliance formed a third political party known as the People's Party (Populists), running James B. Weaver as their first presidential candidate in 1892.

3. Cited in White, Ronald C. Jr., and Hopkins, C. Howard, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 151.Google Scholar

4. This explanation of the “Social Gospel” follows May's, Henry F. tripartite definition in his Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949).Google Scholar May noted that Christians of all stripes were “moved by a sense of social crisis, and all believed in the necessity and possibility of a Christian solution” (163). However, the responses varied from conservative social Christianity on the right to radical social Christianity on the left. Progressive social Christianity (the Social Gospel), though aggressive, was more moderate in its approach than radical socialism. Rather than being slaves to or completely dismantling the capitalist system, the progressive Social Gospel worked to recast the market in a Christian mold. See pt. 4 of May's work.

5. Abell, Aaron Ignatius, The Urban Impact on American Protestantism, 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943);Google Scholar May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America, 107 n. 72; Ahlstrom, Sydney, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 788;Google Scholar and Hopkins, C. Howard, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), chaps. 9 and 11.Google Scholar

6. Eighmy, John Lee, “Religious Liberalism in the South during the Progressive Era,” Church History 38 (September 1969): 359-72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar White and Hopkins, The Social Gospel, 80ff.; Flynt, J. Wayne, “ ‘Feeding the Hungry and Ministering to the Broken Hearted': The Presbyterian Church in the United States and the Social Gospel, 1900-1920,” in Religion in the South: Essays, ed. Wilson, Charles Reagan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 83–137;Google Scholar and Flynt, J. Wayne, “Southern Protestantism and Reform, 1890-1920,” in Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Hill, Samuel S. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 135-55, esp. 146-48.Google Scholar

7. Woodward, C. Vann, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 138;Google Scholar McMath, Robert C., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 136-37, 194;Google Scholar and Grantham, Dewey W., Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 14–25.Google Scholar See also McDowell, John P., The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886-1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

8. Bode, Frederick A., Protestantism and the New South: North Carolina Baptists and Methodists in Political Crisis, 1894-1903 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 42;Google Scholar Mitchell, Theodore, Political Education in the Southern Farmers'Alliance, 1887-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 86–91.Google Scholar

9. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of the Census, Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890: Population, Table 3, “Aggregate Population by Minor Civil Divisions,” 53-54.

10. Limestone Advertiser, April 8,1891; June 24,1891; and May 20,1891. See also Schwartz, Michael, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Limestone's tenancy rate was 10 percent above the state average. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890: Statistics of Agriculture, 120-21.

12. Manning, Joseph Columbus, Fadeout of Populism: Presenting, in Connection, the Political Combat between the Pot and the Kettle (New York: T. A. Hebbons, 1928), 5–7 Google Scholar and passim. In the 1894 congressional election, for example, precinct number 26 of Dallas County cast 767 votes, but when the ballots were counted, a remarkable 2,014 votes were returned for the Black Belf s candidate. See ibid., 48.

13. Hicks, John D., The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Peoples Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931);Google Scholar Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955);Google Scholar Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983);Google Scholar and Hyman, Michael R., The Anti-Redeemers: Hill-Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

14. Alliance Banner, May 10, 1888. The background of Rev. Walker is unknown.

15. Alliance Banner, March 1,1888.

16. Alliance Banner, January 27,1888. The editor later noted that the Alliance was “independent in all things and neutral in nothing. Non-partisan in both religion and politics, but aggressive, and everywhere, you see the rights of laboring classes, trampled upon” (March 8,1888). The Alliance papers throughout this period scarcely referred to denominations other than to recognize certain congregations for a good deed. The Banner, for example, did not offer the religious affiliation of Rev. W. E. Walker.

17. The author wishes to thank Ms. AUe McWhorter for her insights into the life of her grandfather, Hector D. Lane.

18. Alabama Farmer, July 4,1888. The Alabama Farmer came into existence when the Alliance Banner failed.

19. On the language of the Populists, see Palmer, Bruce, “Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 26 and 126-37;Google Scholar Alabama Farmer, July 18,1888; June 27,1888; June 12,1888; and June 20,1888. The Alabama Alliance vice-president, W.C. Davis, sent the poem to Lane.

20. Alabama Farmer, June 27,1888; August 1,1888; August 1,1888; Elk-mont Enterprise, June 23, 1891. Limestone newspapers circulated outside the county. Since the papers did not always list the address of the contributor, some letters to the editor may have come from outside of Limestone.

21. Universalist Herald, October 15, 1888; and Alabama Farmer, January 23,1889.

22. Elkmont Enterprise, September 1,1891.

23. Limestone Advertiser, June 3,1891.

24. Limestone Advertiser, March 13,1891.

25. Limestone Advertiser, July 22,1891.

26. From a personal correspondence of Wheeler to S. D. Herman of Brick, Alabama, dated July 28,1890. A copy of this letter is in the Wheeler family papers housed at the Alabama Department of Archives and History (box entitled “Political, 1890, July 26-31”).

27. Athens Courier, January 5,1888.

28. White, Ronald C., Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877-1925) (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), xi–xxiv.Google Scholar H. Richard Niebuhr suggested that theological conservatism did not necessarily preclude social concern. He noted that Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel was, in part, based on Rauschenbusch's conservative rearing. See Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Kingdom of God in America (Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1937;Google Scholar repr., New York: Harper, 1959), 162. Willard H. Smith also noted that social progressivism did not require theological liberalism. See Smith, William H., “William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel” Journal of American History 53 (June 1966): 41–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 450;Google Scholar Spain, Rufus B., At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865-1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 209;Google Scholar Bailey, Kenneth K., Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 18,43;Google Scholar and Hill, Samuel S., Jr., The South and the North in American Religion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 90,128,130.Google Scholar

30. Flynt, J. Wayne, “One in the Spirit, Many in the Flesh: Southern Evangelicals,” in Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism, ed. Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1981), 36.Google Scholar

31. Alabama Baptist, June 23,1892.

32. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of the Census, First Religious Census, 1906, Table 4, “Population in 1900 and Communicants or Members for Selected Denominations, for Each State and Territory, by Counties: 1906,” 294-95.

33. Bode, Protestantism and the New South, 5-6,39-43.