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WHEN NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST MET HIS FUTURE WIFE ON A DIRT road outside Hernando, Mississippi, on a Sunday in April 1845, it was hardly clear they would make a good match. Forrest would go on to international fame as a Confederate cavalry commander leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but he was already a figure of local distinction. Less than a month before he met Mary Ann Montgomery, he had shot two men on the streets of Hernando in a fight that was less duel than brawl. The story that made the papers in nearby Memphis told how Forrest had pursued two other men from the scene with a bowie knife when he ran out of ammunition. When Forrest came upon Montgomery her mother that Sunday, their wagon had become stuck in the mud on their way to church. Forrest, it seems, was headed in a different direction. After a short courtship marked by plenty of persistence, Forrest convinced his intended bride that he would make a good husband. But her uncle legal guardian, the Reverend Samuel Montgomery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, had his doubts. Why, Bedford, couldn't consent, the Reverend Montgomery said, according to one witness; you cuss gamble, Mary Ann is a Christian girl. I know it, Forrest replied, and that's just why want her. Forrest Mary Ann Montgomery were soon married despite the groom's decided lack of religious credentials. (1) In one sense the Reverend Montgomery's unease seems to illustrate precisely the sharp conflict that historians have described between the principles of honor practiced by many southern white men the ethics of the evangelical religion to which Mary Ann Montgomery her uncle were devoted. But in another sense Forrest's reply warrants its own examination since it implies a much more complex view of the relationship between honor culture evangelicalism in the South. Historians have often portrayed a South under the sway of two competing moral communities, honor evangelicalism, which are assumed, especially in the period before 1830, to have been at odds. Furthermore, this contradiction is generally expressed in gendered terms, with a masculine honor ethic arrayed in opposition to a feminized evangelical morality. Thus one historian, speaking of the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century South, describes a gulf between pious Methodist women worldly men of honor. To the extent the two moral communities did eventually overlap, other historians have argued, it was to the detriment of women's freedom of expression the putative purity of the early evangelical movement, as churches enshrined male authority, constrained the roles of women slaves, made peace with the southern shibboleths of honor slavery. Nevertheless, most historians agree that honor evangelicalism never fully came to terms, their conflict continuing well into the last half of the nineteenth century. (2) Yet honor evangelicalism were never as separate in the South as historians sometimes have portrayed them, especially for women. This article reveals the connective threads that ran between the moral communities of honor evangelicalism for southern white women like Mary Ann Montgomery. The article also describes one of the central continuities of the evangelical experience running from the 1780s to the Civil War, qualifying a narrative in which evangelicals traded the early purity of their communities for popularity by accommodating a broad array of hierarchies in southern life. In portraying honor as a set of behaviors practiced by men opposed by evangelicals instead of as an ethical system in its own right, in describing evangelical churches as places where women found a measure of independence enlarged space for expression, historians have risked ignoring how the deep cultural roots of the honor ethic silently influenced women in the church, especially in the area of church discipline. Women, no less than men, were part of the moral world of honor in the South, though their role corresponded to different virtues expectations. …
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