BOOK REVIEWS87 The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches 1830-1865. By John R. McKivigan. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Pp. 327. $29.95.) Religion was one of the languages and institutional matrices within which Americans fought about slaveholding and through which they vindicated themselves in civil war. Modern abolitionism erupted from the moralintellectual cauldron of the 1820s and 1830s, given urgency, rhetorical range, and moral intensity by the Evangelical ethos that Ronald Walters so excellently explained in hisAntislaveryAppeal. Evangelicalism by itself did not, however, create and motivate abolitionism; Southern slaveholders were Evangelical, too; and most Northern Evangelicals resisted radical abolitionism with a tenacity that belied later pretentions of Northern "antislavery religion" during the war. In the course of time, however, McKivigan argues, historians have allowed certain misperceptions to impair their understanding of the interaction between abolitionists and the churches. These are 1) that Northern churches were more opposed to slavery than other institutions; 2) that the major denominations split because of antislavery militancy of leading churchmen; 3) that denominational abolitionists were relatively ineffectual after 1840; and 4) that Garrisonians had little impact on the churches after 1840. McKivigan sets the record straight on these matters in a meticulous examination of probably every antislavery society, convention, schism, and public event that engaged churchmen (there are few if any women here—which detracts from the success of the book) and abolitionists for thirty years. The focus of abolitionist controversy was whether or not Christians should have fellowship with slaveholders or with people who apologized for slaveholders. Although McKivigan does not probe the Evangelical ethos on this point quite so profoundly as he might have—e.g. , to discuss how far Evangelicalism limited or facilitated discussion of personal social responsibilities—he does show how the dilemma of living a perfect life in an imperfect world could be exploited by Garrisonians and denominational abolitionists. He moves through the many intricate schismatic events that fractured American Protestantism before the Civil War, making sense of the various institutional manifestations of religious abolitionism in a painstaking analysis of abolitionism in all denominations. Unfortunately he does not do as much with black abolitionists, missing the opportunity to contrast black and white Evangelicalism. Also missing is analysis of the fact that revivalism was not a sufficient cause of antislavery action. He mentions that the "temporary upsurge" of revivalism in the 1850s was of "surprisingly little help to Christian abolitionism " (162). This strikes at the heart of conventional interpretation and raises questions about the relations of revivalism to reform. He does follow the dialectical process through which antislavery moderates became activists rather than spectators. But the impact of the process seems primarily to have provided a moral patina to the "antislavery political 88CIVIL WAR HISTORY movement," to create a receptivity to emancipation if not to drive the government to it. By the end of the war, "northern religious bodies developed into active antislavery agencies," he writes; even if they had not led the way, they were willing to be led. They were not, however, so willing to be led into a fight with racism. McKivigan has written a solid institutional history; he has scoured the nooks and crannies of the ecclesiastical sources to show the continuing impact of radical abolitionism upon the northern churches. If he did not probe the cultural and intellectual contradictions of Evangelicalism in telling his story, he nonetheless has provided the framework for understanding how radical abolitionists carried on their "war against antislavery religion." Donald G. Mathews University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War. By James C. Hazlett, Edwin Olmstead, and M. Hume Parks. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983. Pp. 322. $35.00.) During the Civil War, field artillery no longer dominated battle fields as it had at Friedland and Palo Alto. Nor was it yet the long-range destroyer that it would become in the twentieth century. It was, nevertheless , an important combat arm, which historians can ignore no more than could Civil War generals themselves. For tactics and performance, personalities and personnel, command structure and unit histories of Civil War artillery, those historians will look elsewhere. As its title indicates, this book...