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THE USEFUL LIFE OF MANSFIELD FRENCH: A MODEL OF MULTIVOCATIONAL MINISTRY VOLUME I ATHESIS-PROJECT SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GORDON-CONWELLTHEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FORTHE DEGREE DOCTOR OF MINISTRY BY CORYHARTMAN MAY2015 Copyright ©2015 by Cory Hartman.All rights reserved. To Kathy LaCourse and MaureenAwad, worthy descendants ofMansfield French. CONTENTS VOLUME I LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vi PREFACE vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi LISTOFABBREVIATIONS xv ABSTRACT xvi INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER ONE: EVANGELICALEPISCOPALIAN EDUCATOR (1810-43) 16 Heritage: Religion, Land, and Culture 16 Upbringing: Evangelicalism, Episcopalianism, and Education .24 Revival at the Heath Select School 39 Ohio: Educationand the Mission to the West.. 50 Mariettaand Reports from Afar 66 Granville 76 Relocation to Circleville 84 CHAPTERTWO: METHODISTPREACHER-PUBLISHER (1843-61) 87 French's Revolution 87 Holiness from Wesley to Palmer. 92 Embracing Perfectionism and Joining Methodism 109 Northem Methodism, 1844 123 Frenchand the Old Testament: Spiritual Warfare for Sinners' Freedom 137 Methodist Preacher 147 French and the Old Testament: Spiritual Warfare for Slaves' Freedom 164 Wilberforce University and BeautyofHoliness 182 VOLUME II CHAPTERTHREE: ABOLITIONIST GOVERNMENT OFFICER(1862-68) 208 An Experiment Begins 208 Intercity Discord and Slave Christianity 227 Pulling Together 244 Marriage and the Contrabands 266 French and the OldTestament: Total Warfare for Slaves' Freedom 280 The 1st South CarolinaVolunteers 296 IV Confiscation and Sale: The FirstBattle for Land 317 French's Critics 324 Preemption: The Second Battle for Land 346 Strong Meat. 377 Resettlement: The Third Battle for Land 388 VOLUME III Georgia, 1865: TheAftermath ofWar 398 The Freedmen's Bureau and Defeat inthe Third Battle .426 Missions and Marriage Relations .443 Philanthropic Investment: The Fourth Battle for Land .455 The Impeachment ofAndrew Johnson .477 Campaign for Senate 492 French's Public Service: AnAppraisal 504 CHAPTERFOUR: FAILED TRANSITION (1868-76) 513 Austa Frenchand Beauty ofHoliness 513 Debt and Discord, Revolution and Revival 528 The Frenches' Children 556 The End ofa Ministry 568 CHAPTERFIVE: LEGACY 570 Remembering and Forgetting Mansfield French 570 HowHe Did What He Did 583 Toward anApplicable Theory ofFormation for Multivocational Ministry 594 APPENDIX: MULTIVOCATIONAL MINISTERS ENCOUNTER MANSFIELD FRENCH 598 BIBLIOGRAPHy 606 VITA 624 v ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1 Portrait ofMansfield French by Louise C. Carpenter. .l 2 Importantlocations in the life ofMansfield French 2 3 Richard S. Rust and Mansfield French 186 4 Front cover ofBeauty ofHoliness, in Heart andLife .202 Tables 1 Factors in French's Multivocational Career.. 601 VI PREFACE Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's doctorofministry track entitled Revival andReform: RenewingCongregational Life examines God's work ofspiritual revival and social reform inAmerican history in orderto discern principlesthat enable ministers to align themselves with his renewing work inthe present. Imagine my amazement when two sisters, dear friends ofmy family since my childhood, told me about theirgreat great-grandfather, Mansfield French, aclergyman who conducted revivals in Ohio that generated amazing conversions, who ministered to abandoned slaves in South Carolina, and who (they claimed) persuaded Lincolnto issue the Emancipation Proclamation. I could not believe my ears: Iwas about to study revival and reform, and here was a forgotten historical figure who did both at ahigh level in one lifetime. Iknew atthat momentthat Frenchwas to be the subject ofmy thesis-project. I began by reading the short biography ofFrench inthe genealogical history written by his grandson, Ancestors andDescendants ofSamuel French the Joiner of Stratford, Connecticut. My original plan was to mine French's life story for principles by which a single individual could engage in conversionistic evangelism and social action at the same time. French's life story proved uncooperative, however-as Idug into his surviving papers it seemed like he darted sharply from evangelismto abolitionism and back again. (It was not until much laterthat I discovered the period that the two pursuits coalesced from the early l850s to the early 1860s.) So Itook anew approach. Aftera year in French's papers, what I found most fascinating about him was the incredible diversity ofwhat he did. How could one man do so many, different, importantthings in VB one lifetime? What would ittake for me to have a career like that?The pursuit ofan answerto the former question (to generate hints toward the latter) determined the shape ofthis work. Along the way, a third angle on Mansfield French opened up. French was the living bridge between an amazing assemblage ofnineteenth-century personages and movements. The further I explored, the more two movements emerged above the rest: the Holiness Movement and abolitionism. Mansfield and his wifeAusta Frenchwere living proofthat those two movements overlapped. This alone was not breaking news. The overlap has beendescribed (to a point) by at leasttwo scholars from the Holinessl side, but it has never to my knowledge been fully explored from both sides by the same historian, especially as it extended-and disintegrated-during the Civil War. Although I do notclaim to do anything quite thatambitious in this work, I do suspectthat the story ofMansfield andAustaFrenchis a microcosm ofthe marriage and divorce ofHoliness and abolitionism in nineteenth-centuryAmerica. Ihope to repackage this thesis along those lines for publication. All scholarship builds on what came before, and in addition to this study's value for ministry, I hope that my work extends several trails blazed by otherhistorians. First, in the mid-twentieth century a pairoffriends and colleagues, Timothy L. Smith and Melvin Easterday Dieter, discovered their mutual wish to write the history of the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement for a scholarly audience. Smith went first in I In this study, Iwrite"holiness" in lowercaseto refertoaspiritualexperienceandstatedescribedby the Wesleyan doctrineofsanctificationand"Holiness"withacapital"H"toreferto areligious movement thatchampionedthatexperienceandteaching. MansfieldandAustaFrench often capitalized"Holiness"in eithersituation,andmodem historianstendtowrite itin lowercase. Vlll 1957 with his landmark Revivalism andSocial Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve ofthe Civil War (which inspired the name ofthis D.Min. track), and years later Dieterfollowed in 1980 with The Holiness Revivalofthe Nineteenth Century. Smith's work focused on the interrelationship betweenperfectionistic revivalism and progressive social causes in the 1840s and '50s while Dieter traced the rise and progression of perfectionistic revivalism until the breakaway ofHoliness churches from mainline denominations atthe end ofthe century. Bothbooks are perfecthomes for a discussion of Mansfield andAusta French, but although both authors used the Frenches' magazine Beauty ofHoliness in research, the Frenches themselves were virtually absent from their works, shrouded in obscurity.2 Second, in 1964 Willie Lee Rosepublishedher seminal Rehearsalfor Reconstruction: The PortRoyalExperiment, the fascinating story ofthe mission to "contraband" blacks onthe South CarolinaSeaIslands launched in 1862.The impactof Rose's work and how she portrayed Mansfield French is discussed in this study in chapter five.3 Suffice itto say that my study fills an important gap inthatwartime dramaofthe beginning ofemancipationby providing a deep, full, and complex portrait ofperhaps its mostcontroversial character. Third, in his afterword to a 1998 collaborative volume ofessays entitled Religion andthe American Civil War, James M. McPherson lauded the effortand challenged 2TimothyL. Smith, Revivalism andSocialReform:AmericanProtestantism ontheEve oftheCivil War (NewYork: HarperTorchbooks, 1965); Melvin EasterdayDieter, The Holiness Revivalofthe Nineteenth Century, Studies in Evangelicalism I, DonaldW. Dayton andKenneth E. Rowe, eds. (Metuchen, NJ: ScarecrowPress, 1980),seeesp. p. ix. 3WilIie Lee Rose, Rehearsalfor Reconstruction: The Port RoyalExperiment(NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1976). Seepp. 581-82 below. IX scholars to reexamine the war from the perspective ofthe religion ofits participants and the religious institutions engaged in it. Several importantworks followed along these lines in ensuing years, including George C. RabIe's God'sAlmost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History oftheAmerican Civil War in 2010. I hope that the presentwork continues this fruitful trajectory ofresearch.4 Fourth, one ofthe great problems inAmerican religious history is how and why the socially progressive evangelicalism that dominated Northern Protestantism inthe mid-nineteenth century evolved into the fundamentalist-modernist controversy ofthe early twentieth century. The careers ofMansfield andAusta French intriguingly suggest howthe division began during the Civil War, although ittook anothergeneration for it to become visible and the generation after that for itto result in schism. I intend to posit a hypothesis for further research along these lines in the published version ofthis work. 4Randall M. MilleretaI., eds., ReligionandtheAmericanCivil War (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1998);GeorgeC. RabIe, God'sAlmostChosen Peoples: AReligiousHistory oftheAmericanCivil War, Littlefield Historyofthe Civil War Era(Chapel Hill: TheUniversityofNorth CarolinaPress,2010). Cf. MarkNoll, TheCivil War as a TheologicalCrisis(ChapelHill: The UniversityofNorth CarolinaPress, 2006); HarryS. Stout, Upon theAltaroftheNation: A MoralHistory oftheCivil War(NewYork: Viking, 2006). x