Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright

The War against Slavery, Reconsidered and Reframed Suzanne Cooper Guasco (bio) Andrew Delbanco et al. The Abolitionist Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. vii + 205 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. W. Caleb McDaniel. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 344 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $48.00. Scholars have long been interested in abolitionists and the history of the movement to end slavery. Historians have been particularly enamored with the radical immediatism of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers. Most discussions of these topics begin with the 1969 publication of Aileen S. Kraditor’s Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850. In this important work, Kraditor explored the efficacy of the strategies employed by Garrison as well as the nature of the internal divisions over tactics that plagued the movement. She represented Garrison and his fellow abolitionists as polemical but rejected the notion that they were radical fanatics who pursued an unattainable moral and societal perfectionism. Subsequent scholars—James Brewer Stewart, Ronald G. Walters, Henry Meyer, and Robert H. Azbug, to name a few—have expanded upon her conclusions by exploring the origins of the abolitionist mentality and the role abolitionism played in the eventual triumph of emancipation. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the roles black radicalism and the issues of race played in the movement to end slavery. Historians as varied as Benjamin Quarles, Merton Dillon, James Huston, Paul Goodman, John Stauffer, and Richard S. Newman have demonstrated convincingly that Northern free black activism and slave resistance radicalized white opponents of slavery, which led abolitionists to collaborate with black leaders as they abandoned the gradualist position predominant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and embraced an immediatist approach to ending slavery after 1830. Despite the scope and quality of this scholarship, however, historians continue to debate a wide variety of questions about abolitionism. What role did abolitionists play in the coming of the American Civil War? Was the [End Page 60] Garrisonian movement a fanatical product of a distinctly American reform impulse? How influential (and effective) was this embattled minority? Who among the warriors against slavery can be legitimately called an abolitionist and who deserves the more conservative label of antislavery activist? How inclusive was the movement to end slavery and what was the nature of the abolitionist commitment to racial equality? Andrew Delbanco and W. Caleb McDaniel offer the latest contributions to this scholarly conversation and engage several, though not all, of these questions. In his latest book, The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), Andrew Delbanco seeks to illuminate the abolitionist temperament and, in doing so, asks scholars to reconsider their celebration of a small group of radical idealists whose efforts to eradicate slavery resulted in the most violent and deadly war in American history. He argues that “the sacred rage of abolitionism—its moral urgency and uncompromising fervor, its vision of the world purified and perfected—has been at work in many holy wars since the war against slavery” (pp. 47–48). For him, the abolitionist temperament is “an ahistorical category of human will and sentiment” and nineteenth-century abolitionists were merely the first group among many to identify “a heinous evil” and demand “to eradicate it—not tomorrow, not next year, but now” (p. 23). By understanding abolitionism in this way, argues Delbanco, scholars might reassess their celebration of nineteenth-century radical abolitionists and expand their investigations to include antislavery moderates who questioned the cost of abolition, fearing that the price of enacting it would be too great (p. 54). Today’s scholars, cautions Delbanco, might soberly acknowledge the sacrifice that brought freedom, eagerly celebrate abolitionists for provoking that change, and, in hindsight, say that it was worth the price paid; but they do so at the risk of neglecting the broader story of the war against slavery and the lessons nineteenth-century abolitionism has to offer to all subsequent radical reform efforts. As Delbanco recounts, abolitionists, though small in number, were divided over strategy and often inconsistent and inconstant in their actions. They attracted...

Atlantic IdentitiesNew Views of Louisiana in Global Perspective Mark F. Fernandez (bio) Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World Edited by CÉCILE VIDAL Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 304pp. Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 DAVID NARRETT Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 381pp. The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory Edited by LAURA LYONS MCLEMORE Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016 232pp. Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the Eighteenth Century ANDREW SLUYTER, CASE WATKINS, JAMES P. CHANEY, and ANNIE M. GIBSON, foreword by DANIEL D. ARREOLA Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015 240pp. New Orleans is a global city. From its establishment in 1718 to its complicated and multicultural present the city has enjoyed deep connections to all parts of the Atlantic world. That global perspective, however, has not, until recently, played a major part in the historiography of the city. Nineteenth-century historians such as Charles E. A. Gayarré and Alcée Fortier dwelled mainly on the white Creole elite residents of the Crescent City. Until recently, [End Page 709] images of the slave community have been rather monochromatic. Within the African American community, historians have always done a good job of making distinctions between free people of color and slaves, but have generally lumped the free population into two main parts, the Louisiana-born residents of the city and the refugees of the Saint Domingue revolt. Native American influences also tended to receive only a passing nod in the traditional histories of this vitally important American city. In the last few decades, however, a number of historians—Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Kimberly S. Hanger, Daniel Usner, Laura Foner, and others—have begun to reveal the diversity of early Louisiana and suggest its influence on the growth and development of the city. These four wonderful books, each in its own unique way, contribute to that historiography and add depth, balance, and important corrections. Together, they present a much more subtle and nuanced view of the city’s past and, with hope, offer a much better context from which historians and residents alike can assess its present. Conceptions of that complex identity inform each of these works. Beginning with the seventeenth-century French Creole origins of the Louisiana colony and moving into the early nineteenth century, the authors in Cécile Vidal’s excellent anthology probe the parameters of some of the most intimate relationships between Louisiana’s peoples and uncover an even more diverse past. Dividing the essays into three related parts—“Empires,” “Circulations,” and “Intimacies”—the authors construct a richly nuanced view of the confluence of cultures that made Louisiana both a representation of and a contrast to the Atlantic world paradigm. When one sees the word empire in a work of early American history, one thinks of the “imperial school” reminiscent of early to mid-twentieth-century colonial historians such as Charles McLean Andrews, Charles Gibson, and Lawrence Henry Gipson. Guillaume Aubert, Alexandre Dubé, and Sylvia L. Hilton, however, offer a deeper glimpse into the relationships between colonies and empire than those earlier, muscular discussions. Often, they cast developments in both the imperial center and the colonial peripheries as reactions to developments within both the colonies and the empire, but also in response to wider engagements with empires and institutions across the Atlantic world. In doing so, they present an extremely complex view of how both international forces and the actual on-the-ground realities of settlement and development of the colony conspired [End Page 710] to create an even more diverse community than previous studies have fathomed. In the anthology’s opening essay, Guillame Aubert surveys the imperial origins of slavery regulations throughout the Atlantic world that ultimately informed the development of Louisiana’s Code Noir. Catholic priests, the Vatican, colonial officials, and slave owners all pursued their own conflicting interests and policies that ultimately led to both a regularization and local variation of slave codes throughout the French and Spanish Atlantic possessions. Viewing slavery as something beyond a mere relationship between metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries, Aubert situates the institution in a varied Atlantic context...

Loyal Souls Come HomeManifest Loyalty Shrines and the Decentering of War Commemoration in the Qing Empire (1724–1803)* James Bonk (bio) The Manifest Loyalty shrine (Zhaozhongci), a large complex holding spirit tablets of all Qing war dead (zhenwang guanbing), was established by the Yongzheng emperor in 1724 on a property north of Chongwen gate in Beijing (Figure 1). With the military campaigns of the Qianlong reign (1736–95), the number of tablets in the shrine grew steadily. By the mid-1790s, the shrine held more than fifty thousand tablets. The White Lotus War (1796–1804), a conflict involving tens of thousands of troops in central China, led to a surge in the number of tablets. In the first five years of the war, nearly sixty thousand more tablets crowded the shrine's already overburdened tables and shelves.1 In 1802, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820) responded to the overcrowding with an order to build Manifest Loyalty shrines in all prefectural seats (fucheng) of the empire. The new shrines, he directed, were to hold tablets of the war dead in their native places (yuanji). [End Page 61] The Beijing shrine would be restricted to the tablets of bannermen and high-ranking Han civil and military officials.2 By enshrining the dead in their native places, the emperor proclaimed, "not only would loyal souls return to their native lands (gu tu), fellow villagers and kinsmen [of the dead] would join together as an audience, gaining a greater understanding of the excellence of the dynasty's principles and clarity of its favor, and would therefore be even more inspired [to act with loyalty]."3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Manifest Loyalty shrine, Huacheng si, and Tangzi. From Qianlong Jingcheng quan tu vol. 10 (1750, rept. 1940). The Chongwen gate, not pictured on the map, is south on the main thoroughfare east of the temple and shrine. The Jiaqing emperor's decision raises a question—were these new shrines simply the product of a pragmatic decision to avoid overcrowding at the shrine in Beijing, or did they signal a broader change in the nature of war commemoration in the early nineteenth century? In her book The Culture of War in China, Joanna Waley-Cohen characterized the eighteenth century as a time of cultural "militarization."4 According [End Page 62] to Waley-Cohen, the Qianlong emperor oversaw the development of a spectacular, "multi-layered" culture of war that both celebrated the empire's westward expansion and promoted Manchu martial values.5 Unfortunately, Waley-Cohen's thorough survey of war-related ritual and cultural production under the Qianlong emperor left unanswered the question of how this culture of war evolved in the nineteenth century. The present study argues that the building of prefectural Manifest Loyalty shrines was part of a shift in the Qing culture of war in the early nineteenth century. As a conquest dynasty that staked its authority on military superiority, the Qing crafted war commemoration in the eighteenth century to enhance the martial image of the Eight Banners while downplaying the military role of the largely Han Green Standards (lüying). The most ostentatious honors for accomplishments on the battlefield, such as the portraits of eminent generals hung in the Pavilion of Purple Light (Ziguang ge), were rarely given to Green Standard officers.6 State efforts to promote an image of banner military power were accompanied by a suppression of Chinese writing on military topics. Matthew Mosca has noted that Qianlong's ban on "virtually all recent Chinese works on military strategy" had the effect of "warning the literati off the topic."7 The Manifest Loyalty shrine in Beijing was, as I discuss below, unusual in its mission to enshrine the dead of both the Green Standards and banners. However, in many ways it resembled other elements of the eighteenth-century culture of war. It was controlled by the central government and intentionally banner-centered. Though tablets of the Green Standard dead far outnumbered those of bannermen overall, the tablets of banner generals dominated the main halls of the shrine.8 [End Page 63] In the early nineteenth century central government control over the commemoration of war...

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: Evangelicals and the Military since World War II Paul Boyer (bio) Anne C. Loveland. American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942–1993. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xiv + 356 pp. Notes and index. $55.00. Until fairly recently, the profoundly important role of evangelical religious belief in contemporary American life—in shaping domestic policy, in the foreign-policy arena, and in the military realm—was largely unrecognized by most American historians as well as by the mainstream media. As a result, historians and journalists alike had trouble contextualizing those moments when evangelicalism’s centrality became unavoidably obvious. A case in point is President Reagan’s 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in Orlando, where, to fervent applause, he famously characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The media reported the address as simply another instance of Reagan’s hyperbole, and the textbooks and general histories of the Reagan era that are beginning to appear usually handle it in the same fashion. In fact, as readers of Anne C. Loveland’s important new book will quickly realize, the love feast in Orlando simply ratified what by the early 1980s had become a powerful and symbiotic link among evangelicals, the military services, and the aggressively militaristic foreign-policy approach that Reagan epitomized, at least during his first term. But at the time, this context went largely unremarked except by close observers of the hermetic world of American evangelicalism. In recent years, however, this situation has begun to change, as American religious history comes of age, and as more books and articles appear exploring many facets of American evangelicalism. 1 Included in this outpouring are numerous works focused on the post-World War II decades, and now Anne Loveland, T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University, has added another valuable book to this list. Loveland’s thoroughly researched monograph traces the growing role of evangelical and Pentecostal believers in the American military from World [End Page 686] War II through the early 1980s. In the 1940s, most Protestant military chaplains came from the mainstream liberal denominations, as did most military officers. (In 1950, 40 percent of all officers were Episcopalian.) The occasional officer or chaplain from an evangelical or Pentecostal background felt isolated and marginalized. Over the years, however, this situation changed radically. America’s religious profile evolved dramatically in the postwar era, as the mainstream denominations hemorrhaged members and evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic groups grew by leaps and bounds. Inevitably, the military services reflected this shift. Evangelical chaplains became more confident and aggressive. They formed associations and increasingly brought their fervent, evangelistic, dogmatic brand of religion to bear in the military, which they rightly viewed as a prime target of missionary activity. As the bulletin of one evangelical parachurch organization, the Overseas Christian Servicemen’s Centers, discreetly put it (p. 68), loneliness and “the possibility of premature death” rendered military personnel vulnerable to the temptations of alcohol, gambling, and sex—but also to evangelical proselytizing. This shift gained momentum from many organizational sources working toward a common goal. Evangelical denominations such as the giant Southern Baptist Convention and Pentecostal groups such as the burgeoning Assemblies of God Church actively recruited chaplains to serve the religious needs of their members in the military. By 1987, 163 military chaplains came from churches affiliated with the NAE, while the Assemblies of God Church alone boasted 88 military chaplains. Parachurch organizations such as the NAE, the Navigators, an evangelical organization dating from World War II, Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ; and the pentecostalist Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International (FGBFI) focused their energies on carrying the gospel to servicemen and women and on gaining increased influence in the military services. The rapproachement between the military and evangelical Protestantism was significantly advanced by a succession of top military leaders who translated their personal experience as “born again” or “spirit-filled” Christians into the policies they espoused from their positions of power and influence. Loveland devotes separate chapters to several of these individuals. General William K. Harrison, “the...

Reviewed by: Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827, and: Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion Sherri Goldstein Cash (bio) Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827. By David N. Gellman. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 297. Maps. Cloth, $45.00.) Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. By Eva Sheppard Wolf. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. xix, 284. Cloth, $45.00.) Slavery, freedom, race, and citizenship are the central themes in two recent works focusing on emancipation from the Revolutionary era to the antebellum period. These studies demonstrate that the histories of [End Page 491] the emancipation issue in New York and Virginia were alike in important ways, and together they illuminate the ways that emancipation was linked to a range of ideological positions on slavery and race. In Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827, David N. Gellman mines the New York press and legislative records to focus on the events, ideological debates, and discourse leading to and following the passage of that state’s 1799 gradual abolition law, a history that has eluded close examination. Gellman argues that emancipation in New York cannot be explained by Revolutionary ideology. Emancipation became a real possibility only when politics in the state legislature became amenable to this change. Through his exhaustive, careful work in combing the New York press, as well as legislative sources, Gellman demonstrates that slavery was a pervasive issue in New York that surfaced in discussion of the major national topics of the day. Gellman also draws attention to the critical role of “literary antislavery” in keeping the issue alive, particularly after the failure of gradual emancipation in 1785. Eva Sheppard Wolf in Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion challenges in important respects our understanding of emancipation ideology in post-Revolutionary Virginia. She argues that in Virginia “liberty” was a racial concept, and that the pockets of Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and antislavery radicals notwithstanding, the issue of emancipation became politicized in a way that was not akin to Revolutionary ideals. State politics are critical in both histories. In New York, the newer northern and western counties where slavery was weak shifted the composition and majority interest of the legislature enough to allow for the passage of the 1799 gradual emancipation law. In a similar situation, Wolf demonstrates that slavery as an issue was coupled with a struggle for power between the newer nonslaveholding counties in western Virginia and the state’s eastern counties where slavery had a strong presence. Slaveholding elites in Virginia prevented the reapportionment and wide access to the suffrage that threatened their political status and interest in maintaining slavery. While Wolf frames this struggle for power as one between elites and more ordinary men, however, the definition of “ordinary” is not entirely clear. Does “ordinary” mean nonslaveholding, or was there a grassroots movement against slavery in Virginia’s western region? In any case, matters of regional political interest and representation in each state were critical in determining the fate of emancipation. [End Page 492] One of Wolf ’s best contributions lies in her recasting of events that addressed various aspects of slavery. She argues that the prohibition on slave importation, the colonization movement, and manumission reform might look like avenues to abolition, but that the intent in these projects has been misinterpreted. As her work reveals, ending the importation of slaves to Virginia was a measure designed to benefit the state’s eastern slaveholders economically, while the aim of the colonization movement was to create an all-white society, and manumission laws were intended to discourage the very practice that they addressed. Moreover, Virginians disagreed about whether slavery upheld or harmed white liberty. Finally, the idea of emancipation in Virginia always clashed with whites’ fears of a growing free black population, and particularly so after the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, the event that opened and closed debate in the legislature...

Reviewed by: American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction by Stanley Harrold Craig Hollander (bio) American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction. By Stanley Harrold. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Cloth, $39.50.) There is no shortage of books about abolitionism. But we are short on short books about abolitionism. Stanley Harrold's latest book, American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction, appears to be a more concise option than some of the other recent works covering antislavery and abolitionism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (I'm glancing warily at Manisha Sinha's masterful, but near 800-page behemoth, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition [New Haven, CT, 2016], on my shelf.) Despite its lofty title, though, American Abolitionism is not a comprehensive overview of "American Abolitionism." Instead, the book's subtitle provides a far more accurate description of its contents. Indeed, Harrold focuses almost exclusively on how private citizens attempted to promote various antislavery initiatives through petitioning, lobbying, and correspondence with interested statesmen. Obviously, historians have long known that some abolitionists engaged directly in politics. However, historical studies have tended to concentrate on those who employed moral suasion, [End Page 600] publishing, and oratory more than, say, petitioning. Harrold's book is therefore a welcome addition to the scholarship of antislavery. Perhaps the most impressive attribute of American Abolitionism is its range. To wit, it seems as though Harrold managed to chronicle every interaction that abolitionists had with their representatives between the colonial period and Reconstruction. Scholars of the field will already be familiar with a few of those interactions, such as when the Pennsylvania Abolition Society famously presented a petition signed by Benjamin Franklin to Congress in 1790. That said, the book mostly details more obscure attempts that abolitionists made to sway legislative or executive action. In his chapters on the early national period, Harrold meticulously documents how abolitionists in the North effectively steered their elected representatives to take antislavery positions. Such work was pivotal in some cases. In particular, Harrold shows that "in Illinois, abolitionists played an important role in defeating a proslavery effort that, if successful, could have changed the sectional balance of power" (51). The book then moves on to the antebellum period. Throughout that section, Harrold stresses that the Civil War (along with the abolition of slavery) would never have happened if abolitionists had not participated directly in politics. To be sure, this book provides a lot of information, not to mention ample food for thought. Through repetition alone, Harrold makes it clear that only a handful of politicians were ever truly receptive to the abolitionist agenda. That handful includes a few recognizable names, such as John Quincy Adams, Joshua Giddings, and Abraham Lincoln. Yet Harrold wisely focuses on second-tier politicians who might be new to readers, such as Charles Miner, William Hiester, William Slade, and Thomas Morris. Similarly, he spotlights the work of those abolitionists who sought to pull the strings of government. Such abolitionists—John Whittier, Joshua Leavitt, and David Lee Child among them—usually receive much less attention from historians than the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, and Frederick Douglass, who often voiced their misgivings about working through political channels. As a result, American Abolitionism could serve as a very helpful resource for those who would like to know how abolitionists influenced (or sought to influence) politicians during sectional crises. Just be advised that Harrold rarely strays from his topic. He therefore centers his narrative on politicians and those who felt at liberty to correspond and interact with politicians on a relatively equal footing (meaning white men). Put another way, [End Page 601] Harrold rarely addresses abolitionist actions outside the realm of electoral politics. This book is not without its problems, though. I would not characterize it as a page-turner, for instance. Most scholars of the period will be quite familiar with the various sectional disputes, after all. In addition, Harrold seems so eager to get to the next controversy in his long chronology that he fails to incorporate enough anecdotes, context, and source material to adequately color his...

Reviewed by: True Women and Westward Expansion, and: Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 Kevin M. Brady (bio) True Women and Westward Expansion. By Adrienne Caughfield. (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 178. Cloth,$32.95.) Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850. By Andrés Reséndez. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 309. Illustrations. Paper, $23.99.) As Anglo-American settlers migrated to the area that encompasses present-day Texas and New Mexico during the early nineteenth century, they came into contact with Hispanics, Tejanos, and Native Americans. These encounters led many Americans, New Mexicans, Native Americans, and Tejanos to redefine their respective national or ethnic identities in an effort to serve their respective interests. In Andrés Reséndez's Changing National Identities at the Frontier, the author maintains that anticolonial movements, civil wars, intertribal alliances, and land ventures molded the national and ethnic character of the inhabitants of Mexico's northern territories over a fifty-year period prior to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War. By the early 1800s, Reséndez argues that frontier residents did not act merely as Mexicans, Indians, Americans, or Texans, but rather represented themselves as independent individuals who did not conform to a specific nation or ethnic group. Thus, Texas and New Mexico was a region of fluid identities during the nineteenth century. One of the main themes of Reséndez's work is how the pull of the American market economy conditioned the identity choices of Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians. During the early nineteenth century, the market economy not only provided for the establishment of frontier interethnic alliances in Mexico's northern territories but also made these ventures between the various groups highly desirable. By the 1820s, Hispanics, Americans, and Indians gravitated toward the United States in an effort to capitalize on its economic opportunities. The market revolution [End Page 483] in the United States not only changed how Anglo-Americans, Hispanics, and Indians procured items such as medicine and alcohol, it transformed gender, race, class, and ethnic relations in the Mexican borderlands, as frontier turned away from the stagnant Mexico economy to trade in the thriving American markets. Another interesting aspect of Reséndez's book is how land opportunities in Texas caused some Anglo-Americans to embrace Mexican citizenship. For example, Stephen F. Austin relinquished his American citizenship to become a Mexican national in order to validate a colonization contract that was awarded to his father, Moses Austin. As an empresario, Austin encouraged thousands of American settlers from Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana to emigrate to Texas, urging them to pledge allegiance to the Mexican constitution and accept the Catholic faith. A majority of American settlers, most of whom were Protestant, complied with this latter demand because Mexican law required that one had to be a member of the Catholic Church in order to purchase land or conduct other transactions. By redefining their national and religious identities, Anglo-American settlers were able to establish communities along the Texas coast and the Nacogdoches area during the late 1820s. While these foreign-born residents appeared loyal to the Mexican government, Reséndez notes that they were still inextricably connected to the United States. Intermarriages between Anglo-Americans and Mexicans also contributed to frontier residents remolding their national identities during the nineteenth century. Reséndez asserts that these intermarriages provided numerous advantages for both Anglo-American settlers and Mexican families in Texas and New Mexico. For instance, the marriages enabled foreign-born residents to bypass Mexican laws that restricted their economic activities, which included purchasing property and participating in the retail trade of the Santa Fe Trail. The unions with Mexican women also improved Anglo-Americans' social standings in the frontier environment by providing ready-made alliances through their in-laws. For their part, Mexican women and their families also stood to benefit from intermarriages as well. While Mexican women viewed foreign-born settlers as dependable providers and protectors, they also regarded their spouses as means to American goods, suppliers, credit, and markets, increasing the economic and political fortunes of their families...

Reviewed by: History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century Maureen Konkle (bio) History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. By Steven Conn. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 276. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.) Steven Conn's book serves as an overview of the disciplining of Native peoples in the nineteenth-century United States: he describes how, by the close of the century, knowledge about Native peoples had been confined to anthropology, and Native peoples themselves confined to realm [End Page 518] of culture and excluded from history. His narrative account of the movement of knowledge about Indians from the missionaries, travelers, and government officials who produced it in the late eighteenth century to the certified university-ensconced anthropologists who took hold of it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is especially useful. But his interpretation of the material falls flat, betraying his lack of expertise in Native history. It's common in literary studies for a scholar to write a book about Indians without sustained experience in the field, less so in history. Conn so scrupulously limits his analysis on the one hand, and rests his arguments on mistaken assumptions about Native history on the other, that the book becomes less than the sum of its parts. Conn freely admits that he is "no historian of Native America," and that his book is not about the representation of Indians. It is rather, he writes, an intellectual history of those who studied Indians that, he insists, can reveal how that study "shaped the American mind" and more particularly "[defined] American science and social science, and "shaped conceptions of the nation's history" (5). He makes three principal claims: that Native peoples "posed fundamental challenges to the way EuroAmericans understood the world"; that the emergence of natural science rather than the Bible as an explanation for the existence of Native peoples "shaped the transition from a sacred world view to a secular one"; and that the necessity of explaining the existence of Native peoples influenced the changing definitions of history itself (5). Thus, Conn is interested in history as a discipline rather than the history of Native peoples in the United States. He surmises that "intellectual encounters" with Native peoples caused EuroAmericans to separate history from myth and from culture and also "from the realm of the past" (6). Over the nineteenth century, Conn argues, EuroAmericans excluded Native peoples from history itself. The book includes an introductory chapter on images of Indians in nineteenth-century art as exemplifying the transformation of Native peoples from historical figures to representative manifestations of cultures; subsequent chapters on the study of Native languages, archaeology, and anthropology; and a concluding chapter on Native peoples and U.S. historiography in the era. The most fundamental problem with the book is Conn's insistence that history as a discipline and the history of Native-EuroAmerican relations can be separated such that those "intellectual encounters" have little or nothing to do with political relations. Historians in this book are sincere if ethnocentric people who try very hard to understand Indians; [End Page 519] the possibility that they might be part of a larger system of thinking about and managing Native peoples, justifying and maintaining white authority, receives little or no attention. This absence of attention to the politics of knowledge might explain—at least in part—Conn's simply wrong assertion that Native peoples are gradually removed from history over the course of the nineteenth century. Conn observes that in the early nineteenth century, EuroAmerican writers like James Fenimore Cooper "included" Indians in their historical accounts of America, but with the emergence of professional historians of the United States like George Bancroft in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Indians began to be shifted out of U.S. history into ethnology and then anthropology. Conn argues that this "inclusion" of Native peoples in the history of the United States is in itself evidence of the historicizing of Indians, and thus Cooper's last of the Mohicans can be said to be a historical Indian, since Cooper used John Heckewelder's work to describe his...

Reviewed by: A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm Nathaniel Wiewora (bio) A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era. By April E. Holm. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Cloth, $47.50.) How does a religious group remain in the world, but not of the world? This question drives April Holm's study of the ways that evangelicals in the Border States negotiated the crises of the Civil War era. Examining the three largest evangelical denominations—Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—she traces how these groups worked out the relationship between religion, morality, and politics in a contested region. Holm's main historical contribution is uncovering the way these Border evangelicals made it their business to avoid conflict by separating religion and politics. They fashioned a theology of spirituality and political neutrality that argued that politics had no place in the pulpit. This politics of spirituality, she argues, influenced actions before and during the war, and this desire to avoid conflict decisively shaped the evangelical landscape after the war. Evangelical Protestantism had exponential growth in the western part of the United States during the Second Great Awakening. Holm writes in a nuanced fashion about how the importance of the West in the evangelical imagination led to an intense period of institution building that left these three evangelical denominations strong but resulted in unexpected consequences. Border evangelicals began to conceive of themselves as [End Page 599] distinctive from eastern evangelicals, with different needs and separate institutions. The quick growth of evangelicalism in the west was also brittle, leaving evangelical churches vulnerable to fracture. As northern and southern churches increasingly associated with their region during the Secession Crisis, regional identification with the West broke down amongst Border evangelicals. These churches faced internal conflict over church property and ministerial selection. The discord in the years leading up to the Civil War primed evangelicals in the border region to create a theology of conflict avoidance in response to the ways that local disputes damaged congregations and disrupted worship. Holm finds that Border evangelicals blamed outsiders for these disputes. Border evangelicals believed the problem was that both of these groups tried to answer the question of what to do about slavery in theological terms, while they believed it was a fundamentally political question. Border evangelicals thus concluded debates over slavery were incompatible with preserving unity in the church. Border evangelicals conceived of their theology of spirituality and political neutrality as a morally superior choice, according to Holm. In one of the most fascinating parts of the book, she traces how Border evangelicals took this theology into the Civil War. Holm finds that many Border evangelicals rejected northern admonitions and requirements to show loyalty through patriotic sermons, displays of the U.S. flag in church buildings, and prayers for the victory of the Union Army. She sees their attempts to separate church from state as impossible. The choice to remain neutral was itself a political action that chose ecclesiastical unity over racial equality. Political neutrality also became untenable because of Union military victories and the pressure of these loyalty tests. Union officials transferred property from disloyal to loyal ministers, making it difficult to be a neutral worshipper. This theology of spirituality and political neutrality drove Border evangelicals away from the North in the postwar period as efforts to secure their loyalty broke down outside of the explicitly political realm. Northern evangelical churches sent missionaries to the South and to the Border States during and after the war to establish churches for both African Americans and white Americans. These missionaries preached that the Union victory was providential as they rebuilt churches, demanding a kind of spiritual loyalty. Holm underscores how Border [End Page 600] evangelicals found these efforts more infuriating than those imposed by secular authorities. Holm's final contribution is tracing the ways this theology of spirituality and political neutrality affected reunion and memory during the post-war period. Border evangelicals joined southern churches because they accused northern churches of mixing religion and politics through the promotion of abolition. Southern evangelical churches embraced Border evangelicals because they offered monetary and...

Reviewed by: Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866 Swithin Wilmot (bio) Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866. By Gale L. Kenny. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Pp. Xi, 257. $44.95 cloth; $24.95 paper) Protestant missionaries are an important ingredient of the history of Jamaica in the nineteenth century, both during enslavement and after emancipation in 1834. Yet the work of male and female white [End Page 477] American Congregationalists linked with the American Missionary Association (AMA) is neglected in the accounts of the period. Happily, Gale Kenny's Contentious Liberties fills this gap in the historiography. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, the work provides a window into the varied experiences of the AMA missionaries in Jamaica in the first thirty years after slavery. The well-considered work also underscores the value of studying antislavery movements within transnational contexts. Kenny deftly analyzes the American background which inspired Oberlin's first graduates of "farmers-turned-missionaries" to establish a "civilizing" mission in Jamaica after 1839. Much influenced by their experience and context, they came to the island with notions of black independence and self-governance, constructed on black landownership and undergirded by Christian families reinforced by the church and the school. However, like the white English Protestant missionaries who had come to the island during the late period of enslavement, the American Congregationalists' expansive expectations were gradually eroded as African cultural retentions in the Creole society of Jamaica undermined their strict and inflexible religious discipline. Neither did the blacks share the missionaries' restrictive notions of female domesticity, since black women's economic activity contributed significantly to the survival strategies of families after slavery. Furthermore, the AMA church stations had to confront the ever-present rivalry of the black Native Baptist churches whose practices accommodated the more relaxed attitudes towards informal sexual unions of the indigenous culture of the island, the use of alcoholic spirits, and other personal habits that were anathema to the "purist" AMA missionaries. Indeed, by the early 1860s, the American missionaries were at one with other white missionaries on the island who expressed great disappointment at the survival of what they described as "superstitious heathenism" that was manifest during the religious revival that swept Jamaica at the time. In contrast to the early Oberlin enthusiasts who wanted to demonstrate by way of the Jamaican experience that emancipation for the United States of America would be successful, [End Page 478] AMA missionaries in the later period no longer focused on "manly independence," and instead emphasized that the blacks were "passive people, eager for white oversight" (p. 195). It is, therefore, not surprising that the AMA missionaries condemned the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865 when the blacks in St. Thomas in the east rose up against injustice in the courts, the denial of their civil rights, and systematic obstacles to black landownership. The unsympathetic missionaries blamed the Native Baptists, their main religious rivals, for the outbreak, supported its ruthless suppression, and welcomed the introduction of crown-colony government that snuffed out embryonic black politics in Jamaica. The irony, of course, was that all this was at the precise time that Radical Reconstruction looked to black enfranchisement to consolidate emancipation in the South against a recalcitrant white majority. However, the AMA missionaries, despite republican sensibilities, were convinced by 1866 that the predominantly black population of Jamaica was incapable of self-government and therefore believed that British authoritarian rule was required for the success of the challenging task of "civilizing" Jamaican freedpeople and their descendants. Gale Kenny's balanced work provides fresh insights into how black Jamaicans engaged with white mission churches in the post-slavery period. It is clear that the promotion of self-reliance and independence in church matters in the early period of the AMA mission empowered black members and trustees who exerted influence over which persons received the call to become pastors, as well as which missionaries had possession of church property. The AMA mission structure then provided opportunities for freed blacks to assert leadership that was often denied them in the larger society. [End Page 479] Swithin Wilmot Swithin Wilmot, a senior lecturer in history at the...

Reviewed by: Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Origins of the Special Relationship William Anthony Hay (bio) Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Origins of the Special Relationship, by Duncan Andrew Campbell; pp. vii + 307. London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007, £30.00, $34.95. History involves not only understanding the past but also explaining how the present came to be. Duncan Andrew Campbell takes up that question in exploring Anglo-American relations over the century before a special relationship emerged between Britain and the United States. In the early nineteenth century, lingering resentments from the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were the primary special aspects of the Anglo-American [End Page 359] relationship. Campbell notes Alexis de Tocqueville's observation "that he could conceive of no hatred more poisonous than that which Americans felt for Britain" (108–09), and the recurring vituperation of England in Congressional debates underlines the point. The War of 1812 had created resentment among Britons who saw it as a betrayal. Those in Britain and the United States who resisted animosity nonetheless saw the other as just another nation among nations rather than one with special ties. So what changed the underlying dynamic? Campbell argues that the development of a wide network of connections ultimately bridged not only the differences but also the mutual distrust and incomprehension. By the late nineteenth century, leading figures in Britain and the United States had come to see fundamental commonalities that distinguished them from other countries. Tensions over Canada's position in North America gradually faded, and British views changed once America ceased to be a potential adversary. Similarly, a generation of Americans saw Britain in a more positive light. Campbell repeatedly acknowledges countervailing forces to the convergence he describes but argues for an overall pattern that made possible the special relationship. He "leans more toward a British perspective of the United States than an American view of Britain" (8–9), and the book strives to highlight dimensions overlooked in a focus on North America. Conflict between American determination to assert independence and British disdain for a society whose sole merits derived from an English heritage set the dynamic behind Anglo-American relations. "Who reads an American book?" the Whig author Sydney Smith asked sarcastically in an 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review. In a chapter titled after Smith's question, Campbell discusses Robert Southey, Smith's Tory counterpart, who discerned a national character of low and lying knavery that the Canadian writer Thomas Haliburton captured in the Yankee peddler Sam Slick. English travel writers, notably Frances Trollope, elaborated the theme with accounts of rough accommodations and uncouth manners. American writers in turn resented British condescension. James Fenimore Cooper, whose books were widely read in Britain, urged Americans to secure their "mental independence" (qtd. in Campbell 49). Determination to escape what later would be called the "cultural cringe" shaped American attitudes. Nathaniel Hawthorne's uneasy balancing of a romanticized view of Britain with resentment toward it marked a typical mid-century American perspective. Geopolitical factors also shaped relations by casting Britain and the United States as rivals. Pressures of competing interests generated antagonism. Menacing Canada threatened Britain itself. Lord Palmerston viewed Washington as always pushing for advantage and treating efforts at conciliation as signs of weakness to be exploited, while Andrew Jackson feared British efforts at encirclement, particularly when the Republic of Texas made overtures to London during the 1840s. Britain's global maritime empire brought interests that generated friction with the American continental empire built by westward expansion. The fact that confrontations were avoided or resolved did not remove the potential for confrontation until well after the American Civil War. Indeed, the great struggle between Union and Confederacy amplified resentments on both sides of the Atlantic. Campbell also notes trends that, from an early stage, brought Britain and the United States together. Independence had not fundamentally altered economic relations. Partnership within an Atlantic trading system backed by British investment became the foundation for expansion across the American continent. The British [End Page 360] writer John Wilson Croker described New York as "a suburb of Liverpool, or, if you will, Liverpool of New York" making the...

Reviewed by: Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Americaby Kristen Layne Anderson Ann L. Tucker Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America. By Kristen Layne Anderson. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. x, 278. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6196-8.) Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth Century Americaanalyzes Civil War–era German immigrants' thought about race and slavery. Focusing on the German immigrant community in St. Louis, Anderson makes a strong argument that the German response to slavery and race in Missouri was pragmatic rather than idealistic, with Germans primarily seeking their own self-interest in deciding how to respond to these contentious issues. [End Page 415] Abolitionizing Missouridescribes a border-state German community that, rather than being united in its ideological commitment to freedom and equality, was only partially committed to emancipation and equality for African Americans. Using primarily German-language newspapers, supplemented by English-language newspapers and census and election returns, Anderson argues that most Missouri Germans united behind the Union during the Civil War and embraced a free soil–style antislavery position throughout the late 1850s. But only the most radical of these Germans sought anything approaching equality for African Americans, and only did so during the war and the years immediately before and after the conflict. Driven more by self-interest than ideology, the German community of St. Louis was largely indifferent to the plight of enslaved Americans before the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) made slavery more threatening to the westward immigration of the free soil German community. This same community was largely dismissive of the ongoing oppression of freedpeople during Reconstruction due to fears that African Americans would vote against German interests. Furthermore, even during the wartime peak of German support for emancipation, an intensifying division between more radically egalitarian and antislavery Germans, who became targets of nativism, and their more conservative counterparts, who actively sought to distance themselves from the radical Germans, limited overall German support for racial freedom and equality. Rather than being committed to liberty, the St. Louis German population was influenced by and accepting of the racial prejudices of the general white population of the Civil War–era United States, largely because they acutely felt the necessity of finding their own precarious place as immigrants within a society founded on racial hierarchy. As such, Anderson argues, even as St. Louis Germans adopted a more antislavery position than that of their native-born neighbors, they did so out of a desire to advance their own opportunities within their new nation, to protect that new nation from the threat of division by slaveholders, and to insulate their community from nativism, rather than out of a commitment to liberal ideals. With Abolitionizing Missouri, Anderson succeeds in using one community to detail the diversity within immigrant German thought regarding race and slavery, and to show how that diversity was shaped within a local context and by the interactions of the German community with local and national events. This study also highlights the critical role of self-interest in influencing German thought and action, helping explain the internal division within the German community and the distinct shifts that German thought on race and slavery underwent during the middle of the nineteenth century. Although Anderson's focus is on German self-interest, given the well-known importance of transatlantic liberal ideology to German immigrants, a stronger contextualization of St. Louis Germans within the framework and ideologies of liberalism and the revolutions of 1848 would have strengthened Anderson's analysis. Even with the focus limited to St. Louis, however, Anderson makes a strong case for significant diversity among German immigrants and for the central role of self-interest in [End Page 416]motivating German immigrants' thoughts and actions regarding race and slavery. Ann L. Tucker University of Mississippi Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Reviewed by: The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History by Peter B. Dedek Joy M. Giguere The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History. By Peter B. Dedek. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 262. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6610-9.) While the scholarship on cemeteries, burial customs, and grave markers in America has grown dramatically over the last four decades, Peter B. Dedek, in The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History, offers a major comprehensive historical analysis of New Orleans's cemetery landscapes, examining "those who designed, built, visited, mourned, and worked in these burial grounds" (p. xi). Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Dedek traces the parallel development of New Orleans society and its landscapes for the dead. Beginning with the development of the city's first known public burial ground in 1724, six years after the initial settlement in the area by the French, Dedek reveals how, contrary to popular understanding, New Orleanians originally buried their dead belowground in soggy, watery graves. Not until the early nineteenth century, as the population and economic development began to dramatically expand, did residents begin to construct aboveground tombs for the dead in the city's first major Catholic burying ground, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 (established in 1789). Dedek examines the subsequent development of places of burial to meet periodic public health crises, such as yellow fever epidemics, and to accommodate the rapidly increasing population, exhibiting the ways in which the evolution of the cities of the dead paralleled that of the city of living. Interwoven throughout this history are the lives of those who were instrumental in the design of the cemeteries and of the tombs contained therein, including French architect Jacques Nicolas Bussière de Pouilly, Italian artist Pietro Gualdi, and black Creole tomb builder Florville Foy. In his examination of the pervasiveness of society tombs—tombs established for members of benevolent, fraternal, or labor societies—and emphasis on impermanent tomb or vault rentals, Dedek reveals the collectivist nature of New Orleans burials, which Anglo-Protestants from elsewhere in the country often found shocking and even disturbing. A particular strength of this text is Dedek's emphasis on how the multiethnic influences of the community—French, Spanish, English, Caribbean, African, and Creole—and Old World (stretching back to Roman antiquity) burial [End Page 706] practices determined the styles found in the sepulchral architecture and grave decorations. By providing side-by-side photographs for comparison—including photographs of tombs in Pompeii and nineteenth-century brick tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, of ancient Roman columbaria next to oven wall vaults from 1830, and of oven vaults in Madrid, Spain, beside oven tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1—Dedek aptly underscores both the geographical and the temporal influences on New Orleans burial practices and tomb architecture, which, when compared with the popularization of architectural revivals across the country during the nineteenth century, reflect the multiculturalism that helped define New Orleans society. Recognizing the long-standing status of New Orleans's cemeteries as tourist attractions, Dedek includes a revealing chapter on the interrelationship between Voodoo beliefs and practices, how they manifested within the cemeteries, and how those associated with the religion, especially famed Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau and her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, were at once wildly misunderstood by the general public and irresistible attractions for visitors to the city. His concluding chapter, "Slums of the Dead: Decay and Cemetery Preservation," brings the history of New Orleans's burial places to the present, both analyzing the current state of preservation of these historic sites and calling for greater attention to be paid to the particular problems of protecting these and other historic cemeteries from the vagaries of time, vandalism, and tourism. For those who are unfamiliar with sepulchral architecture and architectural revivalism, Appendix A provides examples of the prevailing types and styles of tombs found in New Orleans cemeteries. Appendix B includes a list with brief histories of more than twenty cemeteries in the city. Altogether, The Cemeteries of New Orleans represents a significant contribution to scholarship on cemeteries, grave marker studies, architectural history, and the social and...

Peddlers, Poems, and Local Culture:The Case of Jonathan Plummer, a "Balladmonger" in Nineteenth-Century New England Michael Cohen (bio) In "Yankee Gypsies," an essay first published in the 1840s, John Greenleaf Whittier describes a mode of itinerancy that characterized rural life during the first decades of the nineteenth century. According to his essay, life on the Whittier family's isolated farm in Haverhill, Massachusetts, was periodically enlivened by the appearance of a collection of types who interrupted farm routine by begging, preaching, peddling, singing, or sleeping in the barn. In an extended paragraph, Whittier details the visits of one particular character: Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler [sic] and poet, physician and parson,—a Yankee troubadour,—first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger branches of the family. No lovesick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the [End Page 9] moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer's verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our country seclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter's Tale, we listened with infinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new subject, his rhymes flowed freely, "as if he had eaten ballads and all men's ears grew to his tunes."1 Jonathan Plummer was a real poet with some notoriety in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century, and "Yankee Gypsies" offers oblique glimpses into the culture of poetry his work reflects. This essay will examine Plummer's career and culture, but it aims at something beyond a thick description of rural New England poetry circa 1800. By analyzing this peddler-poet and his milieu, I want also to question some critical assumptions often made about "poetry" in general and nineteenth-century American poetry in particular. Most twenty-first-century readers and critics are comfortable with the idea that "poetry" is "a" genre and that "poems" have an ultimate, textual existence that transcends the particular media, formats, or institutions in and through which they circulate at any given time. Such assumptions, I argue, make it difficult to grasp the social functions and meanings of poems—particularly broadside poems like Plummer's that took both oral and print forms—in pre-twentieth-century contexts. One critical value of Plummer's career is that it illuminates the extent to which "poetry" in the early nineteenth century was a conflicted literary domain rather than a single, coherent literary category. These questions arise: What happens to "poetry" if we think of poems as potentially cheap, disposable, timely, and local? What are the social uses and meanings of poems in such a culture? And how does an attention to genre, format, and medium [End Page 10] change our understanding of poetry in nineteenth-century culture? Plummer's career provides an opportunity, not to recover an earlier or more authentic origin for "American poetry," but instead to show how poems had surprising social and political uses in the early nineteenth century. Whittier's essay, despite its nostalgic sheen, portrays a rural culture defined by vagrancy, homelessness, and decentralization. This depiction of the New England hinterland is at odds with the styles of colonial nostalgia that emerged during the postbellum years, when Whittier's best-selling 1866 poem Snow-bound strongly impressed a domestic ideal of rusticity upon the public imagination.2 In Snow-bound Whittier characterizes the poetic culture of his youth as a scene of school texts, oral songs, and folklore, told and retold around the fireside by an intimate collective of...

Reviewed by: Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South by Brendan J. J. Payne Ian E. Van Dyke (bio) Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South. By Brendan J. J. Payne. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii, 273. $45.00 cloth; $11.05 ebook) The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century struggle over alcohol in the U.S. has been the subject of innumerable studies. Brendan J. J. Payne adds an important contribution with the lucidly written Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, a timely study examining both the racialized and religious dynamics of prohibition in the American South between the 1880s and the New Deal era. Highlighting overlooked voices in the historical record, Payne rethinks longstanding narratives of prohibition in the states of the former Confederacy. Payne sheds new light on the understudied world of anti-prohibitionist Christian "wets" across the South, paying close attention to the ways political alliance-building alternatively undermined and reinforced the region's contested hierarchies of race, religion, and gender. Payne begins with an exposition of the religious politics of alcohol in the pre-prohibition South. Black and white Christians alike, Payne notes, were generally guided by cultural practices and traditionalist Protestant theology that held moderate alcohol consumption acceptable. Swimming against this cultural tide were early "drys," who not [End Page 86] only worked (tentatively) across the color line, but also transgressed traditional gender roles and even appealed to ecumenical sensibilities to advocate for restrictions on the sale of intoxicating liquor in the 1880s. While early "dry" campaigners sought to outlaw alcohol through broad-based support, "drys" increasingly came to identify African Americans as an impediment to their agenda and worked systematically to dismantle non-white voting rights throughout the 1910s. In response, Black voters of various religious denominations pursued unlikely alliances with white brewers, distillers, and an ecumenical coalition of white "wets." Citing longstanding conceptions of "Christian liberty" (and even comparing the "dry" campaigners' religious rhetoric to "Islamic legalism," in a nod to Muslims' abstinence from alcohol), "wets" pushed back to forestall the implementation of policies aimed squarely at Black disenfranchisement (p. 123). In several southern states, they succeeded, at least temporarily. Despite some early victories, Payne notes that interracial and ecumenical opposition to prohibition eventually faltered. The Jim Crow regime of the post-Confederate South took its place alongside a "Gin Crow" system that elevated anti-Catholicism alongside anti-Black racism and increasingly relied on the support of newly enfranchised white women. White women, however, eventually proved key to Gin Crow's undoing. Payne argues that "political preaching" against demon rum, which reached a fever pitch in the first two decades of the twentieth century, dried up as a new generation of southern leaders, and particularly women, abandoned moral crusading for more pragmatic governance—albeit still firmly rooted in Jim Crow white supremacy. Payne shows, in other words, how Gin Crow gave way to Jim Crow once prohibition destroyed Black voting power in the South. Payne admits that "this book's main contribution … is not so much uncovering new sources as viewing widely available evidence through the twin lenses of religion and race" (pp. 3–4). Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow at times rehashes well-known developments and thoroughly studied aspects of prohibition, though always in service of providing [End Page 87] context to the larger story. As Payne illustrates, that story is far more complicated than traditional narratives of prohibition—whether of white evangelical unanimity, or African American political quiescence—might suggest. And to his credit, Payne's clear prose ensures the argument is never lost, even amid its complexity. Historians of politics, religion, race, and gender, both in the South and beyond, will find much to consider in Payne's recounting of America's greatest culture war. In this case, as Payne demonstrates, new wine can indeed be found in old wineskins. Ian E. Van Dyke IAN E. VAN DYKE is a visiting professor of history at Grand Valley State University. He is currently at work on a book manuscript on American evangelicals, radical politics, and global Christian...