The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 77, July 1973 - April, 1974 Page: 145

Book Reviews

Indians into it." Ellis argues that "accounts from that perspective rarely
exist for the nineteenth century," and that those which exist for the twen-
tieth century have not been sufficiently refined by systematic study to war-
rant exposure. In the reviewer's opinion, there are Indian views on the sub-
jects of several chapters available in oral history collections, and even in
printed works (such as the writings of Vine Deloria, Jr., and Alvin Josephy's
Red Power, which might have been used with telling affect.
This fault notwithstanding, The Western American Indian is a note-
worthy publication-perhaps the best anthology of its type on American
Indian history in print. Students of history, anthropology, and sociology
will glean from it valuable, detailed information about major developments
in Indian affairs over the past century. General readers will find it both
enjoyable and enlightening.
University of South Dakota HERBERT T. HOOVER
In His Image, But . :. Racism in Southern Religion, z780-z910. By H.
Shelton Smith. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972. Pp. x+318.
Notes, index. $8.50.)
Southern white protestants, while priding themselves on their biblical
literalism, have been curiously myopic in their reading of the scriptures.
Nowhere has this tendency been more pronounced than in the denial that
all men are equal before God. H. Shelton Smith (James B. Duke Professor
Emeritus of American Religious Thought at Duke University) traces the
role of clergymen in developing the white South's attitudes toward blacks
and finds that although theologically committed to an equalitarian anthro-
pology, southern churchmen in practice supported the region's prevailing
racial institutions.
By I8oo southern churchmen outside the Quaker enclaves had become
advocates of slavery. In the 183os and 184s they worked with northern
conservatives to delay even token antislavery action by national denomina-
tions. When that tactic failed, southerners withdrew from the national
bodies and turned to the positive defense of slavery and ultimately to the
support of the Confederacy. Challenging the view that after abolition the
whites were ready to include the freedmen in the region's denominational
structures, Smith demonstrates that white Baptists, Methodists, and others
were quick to draw the color line in I865. Subsequently, white clergymen
became leading apologists for the new racial orthodoxy, varying for the most
part only in the intensity with which they espoused the concept of Negro
inferiority.

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