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Reviews of Books
among both the black and the white communities,
brought an end to biracial worship, led to the segregation of religious life between black and white, and
solidified the church as the center of the black community. In the throes of military defeat, moreover, the
white clergy issued a clarion call for renewal of the
covenant and, in so doing, articulated the religion of
the Lost Cause.
Sparks provides not so much a revision of previous
scholarship as much as a careful, meticulous corroboration of earlier studies by Hatch, Rawlyk, Donald G.
Mathews, Albert J. Raboteau, Jean E. Friedman, John
B. Boles, and Charles Reagan Wilson. That in no way
diminishes the importance of this book. The author
has immersed himself in the sources, but he emerges
not with a narrow, tightly focused monograph, but
rather with an astute, nuanced, and highly readable
book.
RANDALL BALMER
Barnard College,
Columbia University
CHARLES C. COLE, JR.. Lion of the Forest: James B.
Finley, Frontier Reformer. (The Ohio River Valley
Series.) Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1994.
Pp. xv, 271. $32.95.
Charles C. Cole, Jr.'s book is the first published
biography of James B. Finley (1781-1857), Methodist
minister. Cole, who is also the author of The Social
Ideas of Northern Evangelists, 1826-1860 (1954), discusses Finley's role as circuit rider in the opening of
the Ohio Territory, as missionary to the Wyandot
Indians, and as proponent of temperance, prison, and
antislavery reform.
Between 1790 and 1850, the population of the Ohio
Territory grew from 3,000 to 1.9 million, the proportion of Methodists in that population reached 10
percent, and the number of Methodist ministers
climbed from eight to over 500. Finley was among the
earliest of those Methodist ministers, whose remarkable effectiveness, Cole argues, can be attributed to
their success in creating an organization well suited to
evangelizing an expanding frontier area; to their providing a doctrinal message that frontier settlers welcomed; and to their remarkable perseverance and
inspired activity. Cole emphasizes Finley's commitment to the frontier camp meeting, Which, although
controversial, he defended in typically utilitarian
terms. "For practical exhibition of religion, for unbounded hospitality to strangers, for unfeigned and
fervent spirituality," he wrote, nothing else worked
quite so well (p. 31).
Cole is expansive on Finley's work among the Wyandot Indians of northern Ohio. He was remarkably
successful, converting some 250 Wyandots to Methodism by 1826. Just as important, however, Finley established a school among the Wyandots and, although
insisting that they abandon their traditional culture for
that of the whites, he became their protector and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
defender against unscrupulous white agents, traders,
and speculators. Finley was particularly outspoken in
his opposition to the federal government's Indian
removal policy, but he lost that battle and the Wyandots were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi.
Finley was destined to achieve significant, albeit
fleeting, national notice only once, and that was unintended. At the Methodist General Conference of 1844,
radical antislavery delegates moved to expel Bishop
James Andrew of South Carolina for owning slaves.
Finley, a moderate opponent of slavery, substituted a
motion wherein Andrew would step down only until
the "impediment" of his owning slaves was removed.
Finley made it clear, Cole shows, that he hoped
Andrew would be encouraged by his resolution to "free
himself from the incubus of slavery" and return to
office (p. 142). But clearly there was more at stake than
the specific case of Bishop Andrew. Finley's motion
carried, yet Andrew and all of his southern brethren,
save one, stood opposed, and before adjourning the
conference was forced to vote a Plan of Separation.
Appropriate to its subject, Cole's book is "a solid
little book," well researched and written from the
rather extensive Finley papers on file at the United
Methodist Archives at Ohio Wesleyan University. It is
worthy to be the first book in the University Press of
Kentucky'S Ohio River Valley series. Despite Cole's
efforts, however, Finley is likely to be of interest only
to those with an already well-developed taste for the
history, especially religious, of the Ohio region.
BRYAN LE BEAU
Creighton University
ANDIE TUCHER. Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
1994. Pp. ix, 257. Cloth $34.95, paper $13.95.
This is a deceptively complex book. In what initially
resembles a routine "true crime" account of a pair of
sensationally sleazy murders, Andie Tucher presents a
solid social history of the early years of the American
"penny press" in the 1830s and 1840s: what she describes as "America's first mass medium." She then
proceeds to evaluate the changing concepts of truthfulness and objectivity in the emerging genre of popular journalism and easily discredits claims that the
penny papers truly aspired to objectivity, still less
achieved it. Editors and journalists often did seek a
form of truthfulness or "facticity" by means of the
ultimate five questions of what, who, where, why, and
when; hut not even a mountain of the "plain facts"
obtained by such means could ensure that the ensuing
coverage approached real objectivity, much less truth.
The two cases Tucher employs to illustrate this
argument are both loosely "ax murders." The first, in
1836, involved the murder of New York prostitute
Helen Jewett by a young drygoods clerk, while the
victim of the second attack was a respectable printer
killed in 1841 by John Colt, a teacher of bookkeeping
APRIL 1996