FIGHTING FOR REVIVAL - Clemson University

work will set out to show that Southern honor and evangelical revival not only exchanged
cultural mores and intensified each other through their opposition, but were part of the
same understanding of personal integrity and success in Edgefield. The balance
mentioned in the excerpt from Ted Ownby’s work Subduing Satan will be given a
particular location in which to be analyzed, and the nature of this balance will be
examined with special interest paid to the public nature of both the ethic of honor and
evangelical revival, as well as the public comprehension of these ethics. The public mind
and public mindedness of Edgefield will guide this study.
There have been several recent works which have initiated the process of a fuller
understanding of the relationship between Southern honor and evangelicalism. These
works have attempted to address the ambiguities of the earlier narrative, bringing
together those singular points made in many early historical works addressing the
apparent Southern contradiction. Most prominent among these works have been Ted
Ownby’s Subduing Satan, Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross, and A. James
Fuller’s Chaplain to the Confederacy. Each of these works took up questions and
ambiguities existing in the historical narrative with specific regard to the concepts of
honor and evangelical religion in the South. Heyrman’s work approached Southern
religious history from social perspective, her focus being on the cultural concessions that
occurred during the late 18 th and early 19 th century rise of the evangelical faiths in the
South. Her shifting of the focus of Southern religious history was in and of itself
monumental, but the important aspect of her work here is that she redefined many of the
4