Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America by Spencer W. McBride

Reviewed by: Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801by William Harrison Taylor Tammy K. Byron Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801. By William Harrison Taylor. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 186. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1945-8.) By 1758, American Christians were seeking a spiritual rationale for the French and Indian War that had been plaguing the colonies since 1756. American Presbyterians concluded that the war was a sign of God's displeasure with the church's recent schism; subsequently, the Presbyterians sought not only the reunification of their church but also the fostering of inter-denominational unity for the good of Christendom and the nation. In Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801, William Harrison Taylor examines their efforts, concluding that rather than achieving long-term church and national unity, the Presbyterians' late-eighteenth-century efforts actually increased religious division and national sectionalism by the turn of the century. Taylor begins by examining the Presbyterian reunion in 1758 and the Presbyterians' ensuing efforts to cultivate Christendom by encouraging cooperation among Christian denominations. However, in addition to facing continuous internal conflict, Presbyterians found that interdenominational and political enmities complicated Christian cooperation between the mid-1750s and mid-1760s. Despite this struggle, Christians increasingly came together to face Great Britain's threat to American political liberties by the Revolutionary period. As they did so, their focus naturally became more political than religious, and by the end of the war, Presbyterians struggled to shift inter-denominational cooperation back to the goal of uniting Christendom. Taylor shows that the success of these interdenominational efforts varied by region and were more successful in the North than in the South. In the North, Presbyterian churches found similarly minded denominations, such as the Congregationalists, who shared their desire to create the Plan of Union of 1801 for the good of Christendom and the nation. However, southern churches, Taylor argues, suffered from a deficiency of regular leadership and an emphasis on local concerns that weakened southern churches' connections not only to other churches but also to the Presbyterian Church's national body. As a result, more Presbyterians came to believe that their needs could be better met by separating from the national church. Thus, Taylor shows, while Presbyterians succeeded in achieving their goal of community with other Christian denominations, they also inadvertently fostered division and sectionalism, leading southern members to draw away from a church that they believed could not meet their needs. While much literature exists on the history of late-eighteenth-century Christianity, Taylor's work adds to this scholarship by specifically examining the Presbyterian effort to foster Christian unity during this era and demonstrates how that effort resulted in fracturing both the church and American national unity. Much of the research on American sectionalism focuses on political clashes and the slavery debate as exacerbating sectionalism; Taylor, however, adds a new dimension to this historiography by illustrating the implications of the Presbyterians' religious divisions on Presbyterians in the southern states. [End Page 424] A significant part of the author's success is rooted in his use of a multitude of relevant sources, including lectures, sermons, and personal correspondence of leading Presbyterians. Taylor also references hymnals, books of poetry, and official Presbyterian Church records, such as the minutes of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly and those of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia. Moreover, his book includes a strong survey of the secondary literature relating to late-eighteenth-century Presbyterian and political history. Taylor's work is also highly readable and understandable, due in large part to its clear and logical organization. Its five chapters are ordered chronologically, with the last two chapters organized by both period and region. The work is also peppered with interesting, relevant quotations from primary sources, which draw the reader into the period while supporting the thesis. Thus, both the layperson and the scholar will find Taylor's argument convincing and easy to follow. Tammy K. Byron Dalton State College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801. By William Harrison Taylor.

Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution James P. Byrd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.In Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, James P. Byrd of Vanderbilt University describes how the Bible was used to make the patriotic case for war (3). Although historians like Harry S. Stout and Gordon S. Wood have noted the connection between religion and the Revolution, Byrd's workmeticulously researched from primary sourcesis one of the first to explain which sections of Scripture were used, how often, why, and to what effect.Byrd also explores other themes that enhanced and framed the ways in which the Bible was used by patriotic preachers. The first theme, republicanism or firm belief in virtue, liberty, and a fear that liberty was always threatened by vice and tyranny, (9) informed the hermeneutics of the patriots time and time again. The second theme, martyrdom, under-girded republican virtue: Liberty came only when people of integrity sacrificed themselves for their nation. This was the essence of (11). The final frame for Byrd is the relationship between martial and spiritual warfare. He writes, Understandably, therefore, the ideas of sacrificial martyrdom and Christian republicanism gained coherence alongside a third conviction, the belief that biblical warfare integrated spirituality and violence, the spiritual struggles of the soul with military struggles on the battlefield (12). Through the interplay of these themes with the textual evidence, Byrd provides a new way of understanding the impact scripture had on the course of the Revolution.After addressing the emergent and framing themes, Byrd underscores how powerful sermons were in colonial and Revolutionary America. He notes, Sermons were published at four times the rate of political pamphlets and were more influential as well (16). Access, geography, and patriotism were also linked: It is no accident that New England was both the most sermonsaturated and the most militant region in colonial North America (20). Throughout this first chapter, Byrd connects martial sermons to specific historical events like the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party. Convincingly, Byrd shows that the mediators between events and their popular, patriotic meaning can be found in the scripturally-soaked rhetoric and minds of America's preachers.Having established the centrality of the sermon, Byrd connects the aforementioned themes and historic events with their oft-utilized, biblical counterparts. …

Reviewed by: The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America by Joshua Piker Julie Anne Sweet (bio) The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America. By Joshua Piker. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 310. $29.95 cloth) On April 1, 1752, some Creek Indians killed several Cherokee not too far from Charleston, South Carolina, and although Acorn Whistler did not participate in the incident, he was held responsible and executed to avenge those deaths. Those basic facts, however, did not prevent the fabrications of four different versions of these events by four different storytellers who had four different agendas. After all, “telling the right story was more important than getting the story right” (p.11). Joshua Piker scrutinizes these four tales and uses them not only to show the complexity of colonial America but also to understand the storytellers themselves. The result is a brilliantly organized, smartly analyzed, creatively written text that both educates and entertains its readers. [End Page 109] Acorn Whistler’s death overshadowed his life, and his contemporaries chose to sacrifice him to save themselves, each for their own reason. South Carolina governor James Glen was in danger of losing his job as a new administration took power in London and reconfigured the British Empire, so he presented himself as an exceptional diplomat who understood the inner workings of Indian politics and could use his expertise to maintain peace among rival Indian nations. He arranged for Acorn Whistler’s death to promote reconciliation between Creeks and Cherokee while asserting British authority over Indian affairs. Malatchi, the leading headman of the Lower Creeks from the town of Coweta, sought to strengthen and stabilize the Creek confederacy while solidifying his position as the unequivocal leader, so he ordered Acorn Whistler’s death as retribution for the attack on April 1 and thereby demonstrated his influence over Creek politics. Upper Creek headmen from Acorn Whistler’s (possible) town of Okfuskee wanted to prevent further troubles with the Cherokee and the British, so they accepted Acorn Whistler as a scapegoat but expressed outrage over his death as an attempt to advance the supremacy of their town over others. Thomas and March Bosomworth, agents hired by Glen to travel to Coweta and meet with Malatchi about this matter, played political games in Charleston and Coweta in an effort to secure their standing in both British and Creek realms, so they chose to become involved in the affair and suggested that Acorn Whistler be blamed for the April 1 attack. In the end, these four stories not only told different versions of Acorn Whistler’s death, but they also revealed much about the persons telling the tales and about the worlds that they inhabited. Piker plots his own story carefully and thoughtfully, taking his readers through every nuance of every perspective about this particular event, and readers should be prepared to read every word so that they do not miss a single detail. Piker’s prose is neither tedious nor boring, however; instead, his writing style makes this book a true pleasure to read. His meticulous analysis of imperial affairs, Creek politics, and colonial America exposes the intricacies of life in this place and [End Page 110] at this time, but his astute insights about individual characters and their personal motivations are equally impressive and compelling. His endnotes are exhaustive and reveal conscientious research that few authors can match yet all should strive to emulate. Piker has crafted a multifaceted text that transcends the bounds of one discipline and shows how they are all interrelated, and he reminds historians to think beyond their own agenda and to include all viewpoints. Piker’s search for meaning in Acorn Whistler’s death thus provides readers with a comprehensive examination of this one incident while revealing its broader implications for everyone involved and teaching readers to appreciate the complicated nature of early America. Julie Anne Sweet Julie Anne Sweet is an associate professor of history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she teaches colonial and revolutionary America as well as American Indian history. She is the author of Negotiating for Georgia: British–Creek Relations in the Trustee...

Reviewed by: Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson Philippe Girard (bio) Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance RONALD ANGELO JOHNSON Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014 241pp. US historians of the colonial and Revolutionary eras have realized the need to eschew parochial celebrations of American exceptionalism and to situate historical developments within a wider (the buzzword is “Atlantic”) context. More specifically, US debates on race and slavery in the 1790s were directly inspired by the events of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In his classic From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), Eugene Genovese used [End Page 793] that revolution as the pivotal moment when slave resistance in the Americas transitioned from narrowly focused uprisings aimed at escaping the plantation world to full-fledged revolts that challenged the very notion of human bondage. Early America may have been a “city upon a hill,” but it did not develop in isolation from neighboring towns. A field that lends itself particularly well to cross-national approaches is foreign policy, especially since the early US Republic was not yet a hegemon and it had to contend with the demands of its partners. Scholarly interest in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti (known before 1804 as French Saint-Domingue) goes back to the 1930s, following a nineteen-year US occupation of Haiti. Early works included Charles Tansill’s The United States and Santo Domingo (1938), Ludwell Montague’s Haiti and the United States, 1714–1938 (1940), Rayford W. Logan’s Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (1941), and Alexander De-Conde’s The Quasi-War (1966). These authors embraced the traditional approach dominant at the time, both in style and substance: readers were treated to a series of diplomatic dispatches written by great men eager to defend national security interests for the greater good of the country. The culture wars inherited from the 1960s did not leave the field untouched. As part of a larger reassessment of the Founding Fathers and their involvement in plantation slavery, revisionists denounced their policies toward the Haitian Revolution. According to Tim Matthewson’s A Pro-slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (2003) and Gary Wills’s “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), US policymakers were motivated at best by their financial interests and at worst by their racist impulses. Those two factors overlapped when it came to one key issue, slavery, and they underpinned the knee-jerk opposition of Virginian planters like Thomas Jefferson to the Haitian Revolution. As often with historiographical developments, the pendulum has now swung back. The most outspoken member of this postrevisionist school is Arthur Scherr, whose long and argumentative Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (2011) took no prisoners as it strove to rescue Jefferson’s unjustly maligned reputation. Gordon S. Brown embraced a more nuanced and convincing approach in his Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (2005), which took into account the legitimate questions raised by the revisionists while underlining the manifold priorities of US policymakers torn between their eagerness to [End Page 794] foster close relations with Haiti for commercial purposes and their desire to contain its slave revolt for national security and racial reasons. Into this crowded field steps Ronald Angelo Johnson, an associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos and the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. Like Brown, Johnson may be labeled a moderate postrevisionist. He champions President John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, whom he largely portrays as well-intentioned statesmen. Under their leadership, “the United States financed a fight for universal emancipation and independence for people of color” (4). Johnson is not blind to the inability of these men to fully escape the racism prevalent in their time, but he emphasizes their willingness to engage their Haitian partners almost as equals, which stood in sharp contrast with Jefferson’s later attitude. Johnson would not have added much to Brown’s own work if he...

William Harrison Taylor. Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801.

Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801

Unity in Christ and country. American Presbyterians in the revolutionary era, 1758–1801. By William Harrison Taylor. (Religion and American Culture.) Pp. xii + 186. Tuscaloosa, A<scp>l</scp>: University of Alabama Press, 2017. $49.95. 978 0 8173 1945 8

Reviewed by: God Wills It: Presidents and the Political Use of Religion by David O'Connell Randall Balmer God Wills It: Presidents and the Political Use of Religion. By David O'Connell. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 2015. Pp. xxxii, 319. $69.95. ISBN 978-1-4128-5486-3.) David O'Connell finds that American presidents in the postwar era, from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush, used religious rhetoric in two ways. [End Page 374] This first is communitarian, roughly the language and tropes of civil religion, which is intended to "help bring the American people closer together" (p. xiii). The second use of religious rhetoric is what the author calls coalitional, when a president aspires "to persuade just enough people with his words in order to achieve his political objective" (p. xiii). The first use unites; the second divides. O'Connell is more interested in the second use of presidential rhetoric: coalitional. He devises criteria to determine when a president employs coalitional rhetoric and even more elaborate criteria to ascertain the success of those efforts, including polling data and the editorial comments of four newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. At the outset, O'Connell telegraphs his conclusions: For all postwar presidents, from Eisenhower to the second Bush, coalitional religious rhetoric was ineffective as a political tool. Having dispatched with suspense, the author proceeds to analyze the policy aims and rhetorical strategies of postwar presidents, although he does so with some creative couplings. He opens by pairing Eisenhower's appeals for appropriations for foreign aid and Ronald Reagan's demands for increased defense spending. O'Con-nell characterizes Eisenhower's appeal as a jeremiad, and of Reagan he notes the paradox "that a man so concerned about the onset of Armageddon would at the same time be so committed to providing the supplies that might make it happen" (p. 54). Still, the author argues, all the talk about atheistic communism and the "evil empire" yielded no discernible results. As Marlin Fitzwater remarked, "Reagan would go out on the stump, draw huge throngs, and convert no one at all" (p. 78). The Bushes, father and son, fared no better in their respective efforts to rally support for wars in the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush shamelessly used Billy Graham as a prop (albeit a willing prop), and he did attempt to justify the invasion using the arguments of a just war, although the Society of Christian Ethics voted overwhelmingly that the invasion was not justified. O'Connell fails to point out that, although George W. Bush frequently used the phrase "war on evil," he made no attempt to invoke just-war arguments. Jimmy Carter, the most pious of postwar presidents, receives his own chapter, one that focuses on his "Crisis of Confidence" speech—often called the "malaise" speech, although the word appears nowhere in the text. "There is no other speech quite like this in the history of American politics," O'Connell writes (p. 148). Although initial response to the speech was positive, it did not wear well, especially when Carter soon thereafter demanded the resignations of cabinet officials, creating a sense of upheaval and chaos in his administration. Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson invoked religious language in their support for civil rights and racial equality, but that rhetoric, O'Connell argues, had no discernible effect. Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton employed the language of sin, confession, and redemption, but the author claims that "there is strong reason to believe their choice of words actually made matters worse for each man" (p. 205). [End Page 375] Absent in this survey is Richard Nixon. That is a defensible omission, perhaps, but Nixon used Graham as a prop far more than any other president, and H. Larry Ingle's book on Nixon's faith is conspicuously absent from the bibliography. O'Connell concludes that although presidents resort to religious rhetoric in times of political crisis, it provides precious little political benefit. Part of the reason, he suggests, is that "the force of religious rhetoric has become weaker over time as the religious foundations of American society have begun to crumble" (p...

The Holy Book in a Holy War Mark A. Noll (bio) James P. Byrd. Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii + 243 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $27.95. When Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church, New York, delivered a sermon in September 1777 before a troop of Americans who had shortly before enlisted to fight for the British, his biblical text came from Luke chapter 3, verse 14: “And the Soldiers likewise demanded of him—And what shall we do? And he said to them, Do violence to no Man, neither accuse any falsly [sic], but be content with your Wages.” Inglis used this account of the early ministry of John the Baptist to encourage the recruits who were mobilizing for the King, but he also closed his sermon with a prayer that God “would remove the Delusion of our misguided [patriot] Brethren . . . that they may see the Evil and Error of their Ways, and know the Things which belong to their Peace, before it is too late.”1 This sermon is one of the few such utterances that James Byrd does not analyze, or at least record, in his marvelously researched and historically compelling Sacred Scripture, Sacred War. If Inglis’ message to the Loyalists was atypical, Byrd demonstrates convincingly that his turn to Scripture was entirely representative of the age. Many other historians have noted the importance of biblical rhetoric during America’s Revolutionary period, most notably Donald Lutz, whose careful empirical studies were carried out a generation ago, and Ellis Sandoz with his superb collection of Revolutionary-era sermons.2 Yet no one before Byrd has done such exhaustive research with such impressive results. Using a data base that he constructed of over 17,000 biblical citations from 543 individual sources—mostly published, but some also in manuscript—Byrd provides an extraordinary array of valuable information concerning the biblical content that informed the mental worlds of a large and influential portion of the American populace during the decades of Revolutionary crisis. If some of what Byrd has documented remains under-interpreted, the book still represents an achievement of the first order. Four significant findings are most significant. [End Page 611] The first confirms the strongly Protestant ethos of the Revolutionary era. After the Boston Tea Party, a New England separatist, Israel Holly, joined the chorus defending this action, but with a difference. As someone who had broken from New England’s established Congregational church, Holly was campaigning for the expansion of religious liberty at home even as he supported efforts to secure political liberty from Parliament. His word of warning to New England reflected the deeply engrained anti-Catholic biblicism that had become standard in the British Empire over the course of previous decades. If New England did not repent of its own tyrannies, Holly warned, the expansion of British despotism could soon lead to more “arbitrary government” and even “popery.” If that dreadful result eventuated, “away must go our bibles” only to be replaced by “the superstitions and damnable heresies and idolatries of the church of Rome” (quoted on p. 38). Throughout the colonies, but especially in New England, the political crisis encouraged such hyperbolic outcries, including an instinctive defense of Scripture as a bedrock of the colonies’ Christian civilization. Byrd, second, is entirely convincing that the main effect of widespread Bible usage was “to forge militant patriotism” (p. 164). He does record efforts by Loyalists to defend the British connection with scriptural injunctions, as when Charles Inglis, in a different sermon from 1780, demanded fidelity to George III on the basis of I Peter 2:17 (“Fear God. Honor the king”) and Romans 13:1–7 (including “”Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”) (quotation on pp. 121–22). Byrd also discovered a few efforts by African Americans and their supporters to attack slavery as a violation of biblical norms. When, for example, in May 1775, a slave in Savannah preached that “God would send Deliverance to the Negroes, from the power of their Masters, as he freed the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage,” most of his white hearers were so incensed...

Reviewed by: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin Lauren Michalak Keywords Pursuit of happiness, Declaration of Independence, Blackstone, Thomas Jefferson The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History. By Carli N. Conklin. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019. Pp. 241. Cloth, $40.00.) We live in cynical political times. It's easy—common even—to ascribe base motives or rationales to people's actions, particularly in the realm of politics and law. This cynicism is not reserved to our contemporary political landscape; it filters into our view of historical actors. Carli Conklin brilliantly and persuasively compels us to buck this trend and to take seriously the words inscribed in one of the foundational documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence. Conklin does not ask us to abandon our critical assessment of the founders' intentions; rather she charges us to ground our understanding of these actors in their own times and conceptions of themselves. In a short but thorough examination of a key phrase in the Declaration—"the pursuit of happiness"—Conklin reminds us that context matters. Conklin argues that "the pursuit of happiness" had substantive and broadly understood meaning in the late eighteenth century. This meaning drew together four different elements: "English law and legal theory, the history and philosophy of classical antiquity, Christianity, and the Scottish Enlightenment's focus on Newtonian science" (8). Together, these elements reflect an understanding that the pursuit of happiness was [End Page 370] a process that sought to harmonize man and natural law, through which man strived toward a virtuous life. The result, Conklin asserts, would be eudaimonia, an ancient Greek term for "man's own real and substantial happiness" (8). The happiness that resulted from eudaimonia rested on a virtuous life that united public duty and private rights. Thus, Conklin argues, the phrase embodied "a private right to pursue a life lived in accordance with the laws of nature as they pertain to man and a public duty to govern in harmony with those laws" (134). Conklin pushes back against scholars who have dismissed the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" as either a substitution for Locke's "property" (to avoid raising the issue of slavery and property in people) or as an innocuous rhetorical flourish. In a historiographical essay in the book's appendix, Conklin challenges interpretations of the phrase set forth by William Scott (Locke's property), John Crowley (pursuit of comfort), Jan Lewis (quiet family life), and Garry Wills (Scottish Enlightenment's public virtue).1 For Conklin, these interpretations miss the complexity of the phrase by pigeonholing it to one particular meaning or strand of philosophy. Conklin's work builds on these authors, as well as studies of the process of crafting the Declaration written by Carl Becker and Pauline Maier, to give a fuller sense of how the founders understood "the pursuit of happiness" in a nuanced and uncontested way.2 To demonstrate that this understanding of "the pursuit of happiness" was substantive and broadly accepted, Conklin closely examines and compares Blackstone's use of the term in his Commentaries on the Laws of England and Jefferson's use in the Declaration drafts and its final version (approved by the Second Continental Congress). Conklin acknowledges that Jefferson rejected Blackstone's politics and found previous commentaries on English common law more accurate; yet despite [End Page 371] these differences, the common way that both Blackstone and Jefferson used "the pursuit of happiness" supports Conklin's interpretation of the phrase and her assertion of its broad and common acceptance. She breaks her analysis into three sections focusing on Blackstone and his Commentaries, the Declaration, and the commonalities in usage in both documents across their different contexts. Concise chapters make the book a quick read and potentially useful for undergraduates or graduate students as well as legal and intellectual scholars of the eighteenth century. Six appendices give readers insight into the historiographies of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Declaration as well as reproductions of key passages and drafts of each text. Conklin engages in an intensive textual analysis of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" and delves into the...

Reviewed by: Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era by Jennifer L. Goloboy Elizabeth White Nelson (bio) Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era. By Jennifer L. Goloboy. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. 197. Cloth, $54.95.) Jennifer Goloboy recounts an interesting and detailed history of merchants in Charleston, South Carolina, from the 1760s to the 1820s. By framing this period as the “Revolutionary Era,” she argues for important continuities in the commercial culture of Charleston before and after the Revolutionary War. The lives and habits of Charleston merchants, she argues, offer a new perspective on the important organizing factors in the history of middle-class culture in America. “Above all,” Goloboy writes, “I hope to dispel the idea that ‘middle-class’ inherently implied ‘nice’: economically and socially progressive, engaged in nurturing a close family life” (4). Charleston merchants were sharp dealers, whose main object was to survive the fickle nature of the market economy. Goloboy’s study of the habits and practices of trade favored by Charleston merchants underpins her most important point: “the cultural work of making the [End Page 380] middle class happened in the countinghouse as well as the parlor, and among men as well as women” (92). Goloboy defines the middle class as “a distinctive culture that belonged to independent trading households” (3). Yet for a book that purports to reshape our understanding of the middle class as both a category and a group, the discussion of the theoretical models of class identity and the broader historiography of middle-class culture is brief. Goloboy struggles with a key question in the history of the middle class: Were merchants, by definition, middle class? She conflates the economic role of merchant with the idea of middle-class status without exploring how merchants, shopkeepers, retail traders, auctioneers, attorneys, bankers, insurance agents, and, in some cases, artisans came to see each other as more than other actors who participated in the commercial life of Charleston. By her own description, the middle class was recognizable by the middle of the eighteenth century. As early as 1763, Goloboy argues, colonial North American merchants “expected to lead restricted middle-class lives and pass their status on to their children” (10). In addition, she defines artisans as middle class, but in jeopardy of losing their middle-class status by the end of the eighteenth century, noting, “most artisans found it increasingly difficult to earn enough to remain in the middle class” (3). She departs from the practice of using the term “middling sorts” to describe these men to argue for coherent middle-class identity in the late eighteenth century. Yet without a more detailed discussion of the transformation of Charleston social hierarchy in the transition from colonial port to independent city, it is not clear how the “middle class” was more than a group of men who fell within a general range of economic status. Goloboy does not make it clear how these men navigated the transformation from the traditional hierarchies of birth that underpinned class status in colonial Charleston to an understanding of class identity where prosperous men and their wives organized social status around ideas of refinement, gentility, and sentiment, mandating restraint to rein in the dangerous tendencies toward luxury that they feared unchecked prosperity might encourage. Market behavior might include sharp dealings that fell outside of “nice” behavior, but class identity was a way for merchants and prosperous artisans to create divisions within commercial culture that would distinguish those with “good motives” from those who skated the edges of both legality and propriety in commercial relationships. The links between behavior in the market and behavior in [End Page 381] the home were important to prosperous Americans, both northern and southern. The success and failure of commercial enterprises depended on the shrewd assessment of a man’s assets and his character, in public and in private. It seems unlikely, therefore, that merchants and shopkeepers in the turbulent economic world of the early republic would have been willing to see all men of business as members of the same class of people. Goloboy’s work joins a growing body of...

Editor’s Note Kate Masur (bio), Gregory P. Downs (bio), and Judith Giesberg, Editor One hundred and fifty years since Reconstruction, we believe now is a propitious time to take stock of the scholarly literature and public memory that shape our collective understanding of that crucial era. Almost thirty years after the publication of Eric Foner’s monumental Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, we are in the midst of a deep, searching exploration of how to define, analyze, and narrate the crucial period that began during the Civil War and extended, arguably, until the close of the century. Given the vibrancy of the field and growing attention to the public history of the era, it seems wise not to try to pin down exactly where we stand but to take stock, advance ideas, and generate conversation and debate. To assess past and present scholarship and open paths to future work, the Journal of the Civil War Era commissioned scholars to write on discrete topics within the broader world of Reconstruction history. The forum on the future of Reconstruction, introduced and edited by Luke E. Harlow, features brief introductory notes in these pages by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Gary Gerstle, Thomas C. Holt, Martha S. Jones, Mark A. Noll, Adrienne Petty, Lisa Tetrault, Elliott West, and Kidada E. Williams. Each short piece published here serves as an introduction to a longer, freely available essay available at the journal’s Web site, at http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies. Reconstruction historiography developed within a broader literary response to the end of the Civil War and to the ongoing transformations of the nation. In his provocative historiographical essay, law and literature scholar Brook Thomas challenges historians to revisit early Reconstruction historiography and to see it in the context of twentieth-century debates about the nature of evidence, narrative, and history itself. Beyond historical writing, the era of Reconstruction has been difficult to publicly commemorate. Page Putnam Miller and Jennifer Whitmer Taylor give us the first detailed study of an early twenty-first-century effort to create a National Park Service site devoted to the era. Beaufort, South Carolina, is at the heart of the piece, which explores the failure of a project that garnered support locally and at high levels of government. At issue here is how and where people learn about history and whom they trust to explain it. Reconstruction remains a crucial and sometimes confusing area to teach. In her essay, Hannah Rosen discusses the approaches she and others [End Page 1] bring to the subject in the classroom, focusing on using the period as an opportunity to teach about the history of race and racism. Finally, in a roundtable on Reconstruction and public memory, David M. Prior moderates a discussion among four professors who have been variously involved in public history projects—Beverly Bond, Thomas J. Brown, Eric Foner, and Salamishah Tillet—along with Nancy Bercaw of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Jennifer Taylor of the Equal Justice Initiative. Their theme is the challenges and possibilities of encouraging public engagement with the era of Reconstruction. While it is clear that certain themes will remain central to the study of the post–Civil War Era—emancipation and abolition, racial formation, labor, state building, constitutional change, and enfranchisement—the essays published here remind us of the protean nature of a period that, a century and a half later, remains open to new historical questions and dramatic reinterpretation. This special issue went into production immediately after the 2016 presidential election, which starkly revealed the significance of Reconstruction-era questions in our own moment. Our hope is that this special issue inspires further discussion and debate about where this era’s future might lie. Kate Masur kate masur is associate professor of History at Northwestern University and author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (2010). Gregory P. Downs gregory p. downs is associate professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and the author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015) and Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics...

Reviewed by: Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America François Furstenberg (bio) Keywords Slavery, Revolutionary War, Abolition Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America. By Peter Dorsey. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 276. Cloth, $43.95.) Eighteenth-century British North Americans, who benefited from some of the highest standards of living and greatest political and religious freedoms [End Page 708] in the Atlantic world, found themselves, in the 1770s, sitting in coffee houses, sipping tea infused with sugar, smoking pipes of tobacco, wearing indigo-dyed clothes—and denouncing “slavery.” By that term they did not mean the real slavery of some half-million people of African descent on the North American mainland, but rather a metaphoric slavery that, in their fevered imaginations, threatened the political liberties of people of European descent. The spectacle has long fascinated and repelled observers. From Samuel Johnson’s famous quip in the 1770s to the great scholarship in the late 1960s and 1970s by Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis, Winthrop Jordan, and others, these slave drivers yelping for liberty have generated penetrating commentary. The literary scholar Peter Dorsey now launches himself into the mix with a stimulating and frustrating study, the most detailed exploration to date of what he calls “the slavery metaphor” in British North America. Dorsey makes a strong case for a venerable historical interpretation: that the Revolution undermined slavery. The slavery metaphor—by its own internal logic—pulled down the barriers between political and chattel slavery, between slavery as figure of speech and slavery as coerced labor, and led, almost inevitably, to abolition in the North and a wave of emancipation in the South. Dorsey shows how this process worked, in part, through the operation of language itself. Drawing on theories of metaphor, he recruits an array of thinkers—from Hobbes and Locke in seventeenth century to Wayne Booth, Jacques Derrida, George Lakoff, Paul Ricoeur, Toni Morrison, Richard Rorty, and Hayden White (among others) in the twentieth—to argue that metaphor can “bring about a semantic change or a redescription of reality” (24). Which is precisely what the slavery metaphor accomplished: It “altered the reality of eighteenth-century white Americans,” provoking them “to imagine themselves as slaves” (25). It thus “merged revolutionary goals and antislavery activism,” and “altered the way patriots spoke about slavery” (28, 111). Anchored in the rhetoric of colonial resistance, the slavery metaphor made Whigs vulnerable to charges of “hypocrisy” (85, passim). Loyalists, pushing full-bore into the ideological breach, adopted an increasingly antislavery position to highlight their opponents’ liability. In response, Whigs had no choice but to embrace the cause. Abolitionists then jumped through this “rhetorical opening,” using the Whigs’ metaphoric language against the institution of slavery (156). “White abolitionists, African Americans, as well as Royalists, repeatedly and forcefully [End Page 709] challenged Whig writers to live up to their words” (108). It all resulted in “growing antislavery convictions” across the colonies (110). “Patriots,” Dorsey argues, “increasingly believed that eliminating slavery was the price they were going to have to pay for independence” (113). So far did antislavery sentiment go, it gave rise to the terrifying specter of total race war—a 180–degree turn of Fortune’s wheel—leading black writers like Phillis Wheatley to “assuage the widespread racial fears ignited by the Revolution” and its militant live-free-or-die language by emphasizing benevolent, Christian virtues that ultimately undermined the struggle for abolition itself (173). Despite this turn, however, “the patriots’ antislavery sentiments continued to shape the consciences of American,” and, in the long run, “would continue to remind white Americans that chattel slavery self-evidently conflicted with their founding ideals” (217–18). But Dorsey is not content with a simple linear account; his book pushes in many directions along the way. The slavery metaphor was, as Dorsey shows, “ever flexible,” employed by a variety of actors to a variety of ends (72). Even as it drove white Americans toward antislavery, it also promoted “contempt” for slaves and stimulated “great racial differentiation . . . [by] suggesting that those who have already submitted to slavery were unworthy of freedom” (30). The slavery metaphor also “altered the era’s understanding of gender” by opposing...

Religion in the Public Square: Interactions Between the Sacred and the Secular in Colonial and Revolutionary America Frank Lambert (bio) Mark Valeri. Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xiii + 337 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. Thomas S. Kidd. God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 298 pp. Notes and index. $26.95. Over the past three decades, books on religion in America have often overstated or understated religion’s role in the public square. So-called “evangelical” historians stress religion as one of the most powerful formative agents in shaping American politics and culture. More secular historians sometimes dismiss or ignore religion’s influence outside the private realm. Framing these widely different interpretations is secularization, which directs the narrative toward that of religious declension or religious persistence. The result is a historiographical debate in which one body of work depicts the steady march of secular forces in economics, politics, and culture pushing religion to the margins of American public life. An opposing body of work sees religion as ever-vital in all arenas of American life, including the marketplace and the statehouse, while its vitality has been largely undermined by liberal politicians and ignored by secular historians. One of the most daunting challenges for the historian wishing to explore religious influence in America is to measure that influence. If one gauges influence by rhetoric, then there is a strong case to be made that religion has, from the beginning of the republic, shaped public affairs. Sermons abound that speak to political issues of the day, couching them in biblical and moral language. Political addresses teem with references to divine guidance and providential favor for public undertakings. This is especially the interpretation of evangelicals, who, by their self-understanding, are called to proclaim the gospel to the world. Whether in the mid–eighteenth-century Great Awakening or in today’s culture wars, evangelicals make bold proclamations. They present [End Page 594] their case with great passion and certainty, and they excel in exploiting all forms of media to reach a mass audience. But does this rhetoric translate into a changed reality? Liberal and secular academic historians question the change that religion effects in the marketplace and the political arena. They point out that the greater change is that of America shaping religion rather than that of religion shaping America. While arguing that religion has had profound influence on American life, Mark Valeri and Thomas Kidd acknowledge that the influence between religion and American culture is bidirectional. Their arguments focus on interaction between the sacred and secular, and they view these interactions as dynamic. While writing about different eras and focusing on different arenas, Valeri and Kidd share a common approach to their treatments of religion in the public square. Both challenge the idea that secularization has pushed religion to the sidelines. Both refute the notion that religion is strictly private and has no public role in American life. Neither panders to those who wish to rewrite the story of religion in America in search of a usable past. Partisans in today’s culture war will no doubt be disappointed that neither of these books champions their respective positions. Accommodationists who wish to see a cozy relation between church and state from the creation of the republic will be troubled by the powerful influence of secular forces, while separationists who read a strict separation between church and state will fret over the prominence of religious language and symbols during the founding era. Mark Valeri examines the interaction between religion and commerce in Puritan New England. He rejects the secularization interpretation that explains an ever-widening distance between religion and commerce, with religion all but disappearing in the wake of expanding trade that hews only to laws of the marketplace. Instead, he argues that Puritan ministers developed views of commerce that changed over a very long period of time and that Puritan merchants continued to be influenced by new understandings of their place in God’s providential plan. Valeri identifies four distinctive theological interpretations that spanned the period from initial settlement in the early seventeenth...