TEA PARTY roots, Fundamentalists and Evangelicals

    Just as the founding fathers,Jefferson,Madison, and others, had feared, arguments over new states centered around electoral balance and slavery.  From the old South,1787 thru 1848 , a westward movement had populated Missouri, Arkansas, Texas with a southern leg in Florida.
     Yankees needed canals and railroads to begin their immigration toward Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Both North and South vied for admissions of new states.  Then the Mexican war ended leaving California as a new American state.  But California, admitted in 1850, was included as a free state tipping the balance over to the North.  The south then realized, to much chagrin, that there were no remaining territory for slave states.
     Senators  Jefferson Davis and Albert Brown ,of Mississippi, set their eyes on cuba as well as Mexican states of Yucatan  as well as two others in Mexico.  These alternatives though were given the nix in the late 1850's.  Now confrontation between North and south looked much more likely. 
     The North-South bitterness  underscored the political, religious as well as cultural preperation for open armed combat in 1861.  The long road of frustration, hopes, and dislike of one for the other was fueled by specific religious concerns, one of which was the different interpretations of what the bible said about slavery, and these subjects helped to begin the civil war. The light then was laid, and showed the conduct on both sides with an equality of righteousness.  These clashes of scriptural interpretation and denominations was as a 'Hidden Civil War.'

     Paul Harvey, historian of Southern religion, explained how "white southerners after the war created their own civil religion, with its own theology, myths, rituals as well as saints."  and through the first part of the twentieth century,even though the North gave a nod to the segragation in the south .. The southern writer, John Egerton wrote 'The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America'.  In it he described how southern culture, especially evangelical religion, gained influence in the rest of the country, and that is was BILLY GRAHAM that had "taken the old-time religion of his native South into the nation and the world.  Firmly establishing himself as THE single most influential figure in the Southernization of American religion."  Two decades later An Atlanta based Times correspondent wrote what was an extention of Egerton's thesis in his book' Dixie Rising' (1996) where he identifies the southern roots not just in country music, but of the nation's CONSERVATIVE tide, the rise of states' rights groups and the spread of Southern Baptists into the North.