The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South
Richmond: John Early, 1846. Hardcover. 16mo, 5 x 3 inches, full old law calf, black spine label, very good, light rubbing and wear to binding, text lightly toned but clean and crisp. 206 pp. Rare antebellum imprint, this was the first Discipline geared specifically to the southern conference. From a Politico article from 2022: "In 1844 the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church convened in New York for its annual meeting. A year earlier, dozens of Northern congregations representing roughly 6,000 members broke with their parent church over its toleration of slavery, forming the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Recognizing the possibility of further defections, church officials hoped to gesture at their opposition to slavery without fully antagonizing white Southern coreligionists. The test came when the conference confronted the case of James O. Andrew, a bishop from Georgia who “became connected with slavery” when his first wife died, leaving him in possession of two enslaved people whom she’d owned. The matter was compounded when Andrew’s second wife inherited several enslaved people from her late husband. Bishop Andrew signed legal documents forswearing a property relationship to his second wife’s slaves, but his antislavery peers would have nothing of it, hoping to force the issue at the General Conference. By a vote of 110 to 68, the assembly deemed that Andrew’s “connection” with slavery would “greatly embarrass the exercise of his office … if not in some places entirely prevent it” and found that he should step aside “so long as this impediment remains.” In response, Southern Methodists withdrew from the church and formed their own denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. “The division of the Methodist Church will demonstrate … that Southern forbearance has its limits,” wrote a slave owner for the Southern Christian Advocate, “and that a vigorous and united resistance will be made at all costs, to the spread of the pseudo-religious phrenzy called abolitionism.”
Leaders on both sides negotiated an equitable distribution of assets and went their separate ways. Peter Cartwright, a Methodist minister and politician who would run unsuccessfully against Abraham Lincoln for Congress two years later, was present at the conference. “I knew, if the Southern preachers failed to carry the point they had fixed, namely, the tolerance of slaveholding in episcopacy, that they would fly the track, and set up for themselves,” he later recalled. “And I the more deeply regretted it because any abomination sanctioned by the priesthood, would take a firmer hold on the country, and that this very circumstance would the longer perpetuate the evil of slavery, and perhaps would be the entering wedge to the dissolution of our glorious Union; and perhaps the downfall of this great republic.”" Very good. Item #H33333
Price: $250.00