It includes the work of clergymen such as William Capers, Richard Fuller, Charles Colcock Jones, Stephen Elliott, and Basil Manly and the efforts of pious planters such as Thomas Clay, John Hartwell Cocke, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Because the study also explores the rise of the black church in the antebellum South, the work of black preachers such as Andrew Bryan, Andrew Marshall, and the lesser-known slave preachers of the Sunbury Baptist Association is investigated. The basic theme of the study is that a complex and often contradictory relationship existed between the white missionaries and their planter allies on the one hand and African-American slaves and their black preachers and praise houses on the other hand. Out of the dynamic interaction of whites and blacks, of slaves and pious planters and missionaries, of European traditions and African cultures, a distinct African-American church emerged. Although Cornelius does not probe to great depth the dynamics of the relationships or the questions of power in the relationships, she does provide an important description of the varying ways the religious life of blacks and whites influenced one another in the antebellum South.
Special attention is given to resulting patterns of prayer, preaching, music, and conversion.
The expansion of slave missions evoked vigorous opposition from southern whites who feared the missions as subversive and as a preparation for freedom. Planters who embraced the evangelical cause and the modest reforms of the slave system advocated by missionaries were ridiculed and sometimes threatened with violence. When in the mid-1830s, the distinguished Virginian John Hartwell Cocke built a schoolhouse on his Bremo plantation and hired a Princeton seminary graduate to teach and preach to his slaves, Cocke was physically attacked and badly beaten in a public confrontation. The planter-missionary Charles Colcock Jones, a friend of both Cocke and Clay, was denounced as an enemy of slavery, and slaveowners were urged to deny him access to their slaves. Such opposition no doubt accounted for the respect missionary-reformers often received, in spite of their paternalistic assumptions, from the leaders of the emerging black churches.