The Hazard of the Die: Tolbert Fanning and the Restoration Movement (review)

Abstract

184CIVIL WAR history verticular problems of the war and Reconstruction. His political accomplishments were miniscule, yet his cacaphonous speeches did strengthen the radical chorus that clamored for drastic and immediate changes in war policy. It would seem, therefore, that even at the risk of making tenuous suggestions, any biographer of Chandler must probe beyond and beneath the political surface in order to effectively explain the man and his career. If Chandler is to have meaning and importance as a historical figure, the crucial question of why he behaved in his own particular way must be answered. In summary, this book gives us an outline of Chandler's political career, but it does not add anything new to our knowledge of the man; and it often compounds the difficulty involved in trying to evaluate the role of Radicals during the Civil War era. Richard J. Thomas Baldwin-Wallace College The Hazard of the Die: Tolbert Fanning and the Restoration Movement. By James R. Wilbum. (Austin: Sweet Publishing Co., 1969. Pp. x, 288. $4.95.) This curiously-titled book is a study of Tolbert Fanning and his connection with the "Restoration Movement" of the nineteenth century, which aimed at restoring Christianity to its unblemished primitive state and produced the groups known today as the Christian Church, the Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ The picture which emerges is of a strong-minded independent man whose early intellectual interests centered on the Bible and whose religious ideas were always limited to its teachings. Consequently, he was not only antisectarian and antidenominationaL but staunchly opposed to all religious organizations beyond the local congregation of true believers . Though he saw religion as central to life, his interests included agriculture, education, and religious journalism. In his lifetime he established two colleges and five periodicals. Farming's life, principally centered in Tennessee, in many ways exemplifies the individualism, energy and unselfish labor of the frontier teacher-preacher-farmer, but also reminds us of the energies these people occasionally dissipated in arguments over abstract theological points. Though not narrowly Puritan, Fanning was a classic exemplar of the stern Protestant ethic of hard work, sober living, and thrift. Unlike most frontiersmen, Fanning was repulsed by politics and believed that Christians could not become politically involved without endangering themselves spiritually. The author speculates, unconvincingly, that the crudities of the politicians of the Jacksonian era, contrasted with "the dignified and reasoned approach of the old Virginia aristocracy," help explain Fanning's rejection of politics. More likely, his views were largely scripturally based. Nonetheless, it seems that Fanning's pacificism in the Civil War was book reviews185 a by-product of his apolitical orientation as well as his religious beliefs. As an upper South man he was tied to both sections and dreaded the division between the Christian churches which would accompany war. Treatment of his war-time activities is disappointingly brief and this reviewer must take exception to the author's off-hand statement that Fanning "was convicted of treason" (219) after Union occupation of Nashville . True, he was classed as disloyal for refusing the oath of allegiance, but had there been a treason trial the author could not have avoided discussing it. Started as a Master's thesis at Abilene Christian College, this book reads better than that. Some historians will look askance at the author's adulatory tone which may be rooted in his conviction that, "Because one finds the Christ in history in the life of Fanning, though imperfectly, his life should be saved from obscurity" (viii). This book will be of more interest to members of the Christian churches than to general historians. Herbert J. Doherty, Jr. University of Florida Little Mack: Joseph B. McCulfogh of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. By Charles C. Clayton. (Carbondale and Edwardsvüle: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Pp. 266. $8.95.) There has long been a need for a biography of Joseph B. McCuIlagh— affectionately dubbed "Little Mack" by Eugene Field—the editor who made the St Louis Globe-Democrat one of the great newspapers of Middle America in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The present study goes partway towards filling the need. One of the...