A Consuming Fire by Eugene D Genovese

A Consuming Fire by Eugene D Genovese

The fall of the Confederacy proved traumatic for a people who fought with the belief that God was on their side. Yet, as Eugene D. Genovese writes in A Consuming Fire, Southern Christians continued to trust in the Lord's will. The churches had long defended southern rights and insisted upon the divine sanction for slavery, but they also warned that God was testing His people, who must bring slavery up to biblical standards or face the wrath of an angry God.

In the eyes of proslavery theorists, clerical and lay, social relations and material conditions affected the extent and pace of the spread of the Gospel and men's preparation to receive it. For proslavery spokesmen, Christian slavery offered the South, indeed the world, the best hope for the vital work of preparation for the Kingdom, but they acknowledged that, from a Christian point of view, the slavery practiced in the South left much to be desired. For them, the struggle to reform, or rather transform, social relations was nothing less than a struggle to justify the trust God placed in them when He sanctioned slavery.

The reform campaign of prominent ministers and church laymen featured demands to secure slave marriages and family life, repeal the laws against slave literacy, and punish cruel masters. A Consuming Fire analyzes the strength, weakness, and failure of the struggle for reform and the nature and significance of southern Christian orthodoxy and its vision of a proper social order, class structure, and race relations.

EUGENE D. GENOVESE is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester. In 1987-88 he was on leave at the Humanities Research Center in Research Triangle park, North Carolina, and in 1988-89 he was visiting professor at William and Mary. GENOVESE is former president (1979) of the Organization of American Historians and winner of the Bancroft Prize in 1974 for Roll, Jordan, Roll. He has written, in addition to The Political Economy of Slavery and Roll, Jordan, Roll, The World the Slaveholders Made (Wesleyan 1988), In Red and Black, From Rebellion to Revolution, and, with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital. He is a graduate of Brooklyn College (B.A. 1953) and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1959). He has been visiting professor at Columbia, Yale, and Tulane and Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. His home is in Atlanta, Georgia.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780820333441
ISBN 10	0820333441
Title	A Consuming Fire
Author	Eugene D Genovese
Series	Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Year published	2009-03-30
Number of pages	200
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable