The Three Souths Book Review by Eric Foner

Daniel W. Stowell. Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the Due south, 1863-1877. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 8 + 278 pp. $64.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-510194-2.

Reviewed past Beth Barton Schweiger (Richmond, Virginia)
Published on H-AmRel (Feb, 1999)

Reconstruction: The Unfinished Story of a Revolution

At the 1998 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, a distinguished console of historians considered Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution on the tenth anniversary of its publication. Responding to commentator Ivar Bernstein's charge that his book ignored faith, Foner replied that while religion was a disquisitional office of mid-nineteenth-century American life--Democrat and Republican, Yank and Reb--he did non recall that serious attending to the subject field would alter the story in his book.[1]

Daniel W. Stowell'due south Rebuilding Zion was 'Showroom A' in Bernstein's example against Foner. The first contemporary study devoted entirely to religion in this troubled period in the South, Stowell's careful institutional history of Protestant churches does not in the finish compel this reader to disagree with Foner. Just this book does suggest that a mature scholarship of religion for this period-i built of social, cultural, political, and theological history on Stowell's institutional foundation-tin can recast our agreement of this turbulent era.

"Religious reconstruction" Stowell writes, was "the procedure by which southern and northern, black and white Christians rebuilt the spiritual life of the Southward" after the war (p. seven). He tells a straightforward tale of three groups-white northern Christians, white southern Christians, and black Christians, north and south. Each of these groups (Stowell equates "Christian" with "evangelical") interpreted the state of war differently as God'southward providence, and it was the "competition amidst these three visions that determined the shape of religious reconstruction in the South" (p. 7).

Non surprisingly, white southerners viewed defeat as God'due south chastening of his beloved children, while white northerners viewed it every bit God's final judgment on slavery. Black people, northern and southern, agreed that the Southward'due south defeat marked God'due south judgment, only they understandably focused on it every bit a providential deliverance from slavery. The process of religious reconstruction thus entailed three different tasks: white southerners defiantly rebuilt denominations dedicated to sectionalism, while white northerners undertook "mission" work in the South in the quixotic hope that former Confederates would see the error of their ways. African-Americans, north and south, meanwhile achieved stunning success in edifice their own churches and denominations across the S.

Stowell has written a solid history of religious institutions from religious sources that can stand alone. But if religious history is to claiming the literature of American history, it must appoint it. The institutional story that Stowell pursues is most easily plotted against the "public" political and economical story that has dominated histories of Reconstruction until very recently. [2] In the end, Stowell finds that the contours of religious reconstruction conformed to those set out in post-revisionist studies. And as postal service-revisionists declared the failure of political and economic reform, Stowell declares that religious reconstruction failed. It did so, he argues, because "evangelicals did not forge bonds of gender, class, or denomination that transcended the cleavages of race and region" (p. 8).

This cess deserves careful assay. Stowell defines "religious reconstruction" equally a procedure of rebuilding southern "spiritual life." Yet he argues that its failure can be measured in institutional terms: the antebellum denominational schisms prevailed. But by whose standards did religious reconstruction neglect? Surely non by those of African-Americans, whose churches and denominations could hardly exist judged an inferior alternative to integrated ones. White southerners, meanwhile, disdained the very idea of reunion with their northern "brethren." Moreover, what would the country accept gained from united white Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists? Stowell implies that denominational unity could somehow take blunted sectionalism and mayhap even race prejudice. Yet even northern denominations were eager to segregate. Here Stowell runs square into the dilemma that all historians of Reconstruction--Dunning school, revisionists, and post-revisionists--take faced: how do we decide what these people were capable of? More crassly, what shall we blame them for? How does one read this era without retreating into some rough determinism that concedes that political, social, and religious equality beyond racial lines, on whatever terms, was doomed in 1865? Past terming religious reconstruction a failure, Stowell implies that there may accept been a moment of unfulfilled possibility in which northerners and southerners could have worked together in biracial churches, but that is not clear.

More troubling, however is the suspicion that religious reconstruction simply did not thing. Stowell asserts that "religious reconstruction greatly affected the lives of individual Christians," (p. 184), but information technology appeared to have near profoundly affected those who led the institutional churches. And why do all of these church building assemblies and associations matter, apart from their obvious relevance to an ambitious clergy partial to hierarchy? Stowell valiantly weaves several individuals into his story of these assemblies, but in the end, they get lost. By contrast, Foner'due south story is compelling because he made his readers care securely well-nigh his protagonists-old slaves and free blacks. Stowell's protagonists are denominational bureaucracies, and here he encounters the perennial problem of denominational history: the passionate and persistent people devoted to building religious institutions are oftentimes deadened, if not high-strung off completely, by the lifeless pens of recording secretaries.

Perhaps Foner was correct, then: Reconstruction was a secular event; politics was cause, religion was upshot. Even Stowell appears to grant this at one point, noting that exclusive fervor determined the failure of denominational reunions north and s (p. 161).

Elsewhere in his book, however, Stowell offers some pithy evidence to the contrary. Most compelling are the voices of people beyond the country who repeatedly declared that religion shaped politics. In the autumn of 1865, the New York Times impatiently awaited the Northern churches to declare their policy towards the Due south, "for its political as well as its religious" consequences. No "political scheme or policy for sectional concord tin can prosper" without peace between the churches, the Times explained. (pp. 53-four). "The Negro votes the Bible," AME minister and editor Benjamin Tanner declared in 1870 (p. 150). People on all sides seasoned their political speech with religious metaphors, most famously in southern conservatives' insistence that the end of Republican dominion be chosen "Redemption." And what of the starkly political intent of northern "missionaries" to a heavily Christian due south, whose "mission" was to catechumen baptized men and women to right denominational policy, which they declared to exist "pure religion"? All of this suggests that the tangled relation between antebellum religion and politics explored past Richard Carwardine continued through the Ceremonious State of war and beyond.[3]

Equally insistent were those who alleged that politics had no place in either pew or pulpit, that a pure religion refused to stain itself with partisanship. Many of these were white southerners, though not all: the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church building, for example, declared that religion should be free of any political motives and was blasted by other black clergymen for doing so. All iii of the groups Stowell examines repeatedly staked an exclusive claim to "pure religion," making it one of the most politically loaded terms of the day. A Unionist Methodist pastor and editor declared his allegiance to religious patriotism and his disdain for politics in the pulpit in the same breath (p. 158). Even more than intriguing were declarations from politicians themselves. As Frederick Bode has demonstrated in Northward Carolina, southern politicians often insisted that pure organized religion had no part in politics precisely because they did not want preachers telling them what to do. And silence--most famously the notorious silence, which Stowell reaffirms, of the public church building on racial violence--is apparently political. If historians take long recognized that southern denials and southern silences were overtly political, they have not fully investigated their meaning.[4]

In Rebuilding Zion, Daniel Stowell has written the get-go of what one hopes will be many fine studies on this subject. Scholars have long taken for granted the agency of faith in the 2nd Reconstruction; information technology is time that they carefully considered its identify in the start.

Notes:

[ane]. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988).

[two]. Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Defoliation: The Political Culture of Reconstruction, (Urbana: University of Illinois Printing, 1997); Peter West. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sexual practice, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century Due south (Chapel Loma: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

[3]. Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, (New Haven: Yale University Printing, 1993).

[four]. Frederick A. Bode, Protestantism and the New South: Due north Carolina Baptists and Methodists in Political Crunch (Charlottesville: Academy Press of Virginia, 1975).

Copyright (c) 1999 past H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for not-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, delight contact h-cyberspace@h-net.msu.edu.

If there is additional word of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-amrel.

Citation: Beth Barton Schweiger. Review of Stowell, Daniel W., Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877. H-AmRel, H-Net Reviews. February, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2820

Copyright © 1999 by H-Cyberspace, all rights reserved. H-Cyberspace permits the redistribution and reprinting of this piece of work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with total and accurate attribution to the writer, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-internet.org.

defalcohustack.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2820

Share this post