Download Timothy L. Wesley. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War.

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extent, the book also addresses larger cultural and political issues. Beginning with the years just prior to the
war, for example, Cohen documents the ways in which
student culture reflected regional context, with some
campuses calmly (Cornell of Iowa) or not so calmly
(Missouri) debating the impending conflict and others
actively inculcating ideological commitment to the
Confederate (South Carolina) or Union (Harvard)
cause. Eventually, Cohen argues, virtually every college
community enlisted in the war effort, whether through
conscription of students and faculty, occupation of college facilities, or more informal attempts to boost morale.
With respect to institutional change, Cohen’s overarching claim is that the Civil War promoted reform in
higher education and that it did so in part by forging a
new relationship between higher education and the federal government. Central to this argument is Cohen’s
assessment of the influence of the Morrill Land-Grant
College Act of 1862. As is commonly recognized, the
Morrill Act directed federal funds toward agricultural
and mechanical education at schools designated as
land-grant institutions by the respective states. Less
well known is that the Act also initiated a tradition of
federal support for military training at a range of institutions. In both these ways, then, the Morrill Act promoted change. It did so directly at institutions that received those funds, such as the University of Missouri
and the University of California, and indirectly at institutions such as Cornell College, which did not receive
Morrill funds but received other military training funds,
and at institutions influenced by the broader cultural
and political support the Act gave to scientific, vocational, and professional education.
This diversification of curricula in turn became the
model upon which southern institutions, which had
been the most devastated physically and financially by
the war, rebuilt themselves. In this way, Cohen argues,
the Civil War facilitated the emergence of what other
scholars have called “the comprehensive university”—an institution comprised of multiple applied and
professional schools—particularly in the South. In fact,
several of the most significant effects of the Civil War
identified by Cohen were pronounced in the South.
Whereas some northern institutions had experimented
with expanded curricula, coeducation, higher education
for blacks, and even racial integration before the war,
for southern institutions these forms of diversification
were almost entirely a postwar experience. (For a brief
period in the 1870s South Carolina College became a
racially integrated institution.) Even with respect to social class, according to Cohen, southern institutions focused on children of the planter elite before the war,
while many northern institutions enrolled middle-class
and poor students as well.
These findings illuminate the significance of Cohen’s
study and suggest that further research exploring the
differential impact of the Civil War on higher education
by region is warranted. Perhaps in the North the most
significant impact of the Civil War on higher education
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was the accumulation of capital by industrial philanthropists, while in the West the federal government was
more influential, and in the South changing student clientele was more important.
In some ways Cohen may overstate the impact of the
war. Academies, including military academies and
many co-ed and female institutions, were ubiquitous in
the South as well as the North before the war. They
typically offered applied as well as classical and modern
subjects and enrolled children of the middle and professional classes. By abstracting institutions currently
recognized as colleges and universities from this
broader institutional context, Cohen may overestimate
discontinuities between prewar and postwar higher education.
NANCY BEADIE
University of Washington
TIMOTHY L. WESLEY. The Politics of Faith during the Civil
War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
2013. Pp. xi, 273. $45.00.
Timothy L. Wesley’s splendid eight-chapter monograph joins a welter of impressive scholarship on religion and the Civil War. Recent scholars have examined
how soldiers’ faiths made them warriors while helping
them cope with the horrors of combat (Stephen Woodworth), how people in the Civil War struggled to reconcile the carnage of war with a deep belief in a loving
God (Drew Gilpin Faust), and how citizens steeped in
providential history sought to discern divine will amid
both the contingency of war and Union victory (George
C. Rable). At first glance, Wesley’s focus on clerics and
political preaching appears to resurrect an older approach to the writing of religious history, with its focus
on male leadership. In fact, featuring preachers accurately re-creates the Civil War era, when ministers were
both public intellectuals and spiritual shepherds. Ironically, one result of the Union’s victory was the diminishment of this status, save in the former Confederacy
and among African Americans.
Ministerial involvement in the antebellum debate
over slavery, especially its compatibility with Christianity, linked ministerial duty to the central public issue of
the day. Wesley’s examination of clerical engagement
with the U.S.-Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act illustrates both the
permeability of the church-state membrane and ongoing attempts by congregations and ministers to ascertain what was appropriate political sermonizing and improper meddling in purely secular affairs.
Clerical status in both the Confederacy and the
Union, but especially the latter, finds ample demonstration in the degree to which local communities, loyal
parsons, state officials, and the national government
attempted to monitor and to censor ministerial utterances that ran counter to local sentiment and to national interest during the Civil War. Although the correlation between secular partisanship and controversial
sacred utterances is high—as with Republican ministers
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and laypeople who accused Democrats of disloyal political preaching, for example—Wesley’s point remains
that the parties involved believed they were acting from
the highest of religious motives. The lower North and
upper South proved to be hotbeds of both congregational and governmental censure of improper political
preaching. Because Lincoln believed that most ministers in the United States were loyal to his cause, he cautioned his subordinates against exercising prior restraint over the churches in their jurisdictions, but he
did support the arrest of those ministers who resisted
the law or encouraged resistance by their parishioners.
Denominations also disciplined ministers for disloyalty,
with some 121 Methodist clergy facing such charges before their state conferences in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois during the war years. Most clergy and denominations, North and South, professed loyalty to their
respective sides, not out of fear of public or governmental censure but out of a deep conviction that the
side they supported was morally right.
Articulating moral rectitude in a fratricidal secular
world compelled intellectual gymnastics for ministers in
the United States, as they considered the foul line
separating political from religious duty. Ministers’
thoughts and orations concerning appropriate duty fell
into one of three categories: the sacred and secular arenas were entirely separate, so the minister was not concerned with secular happenings; the duties to Christ
and Caesar were separate, so the minister focused on
the former while counseling congregants to act individually as Christians in the secular world; the pulpit and
the public world were both proper places for ministerial
involvement, because ministers had a duty to provide
moral instruction on all areas of human life. This tripartite construction of ministerial duty cut across denominational lines.
In contrast, and with some noteworthy exceptions,
ministers in the Confederacy supported their new country, a nation their antebellum religious teachings
helped to bring into being. As the war progressed, they
provided ministerial counsel against sins that invited
Jehovah’s displeasure and clerical reminders that the
Confederate war was defensive in nature. When they
fell under the surveillance of the armies of the Union,
Confederate preachers found ways to continue their
pro-southern preaching, sometimes courting censure
from northern authorities for failing to pray for Union
victory or to swear oaths of loyalty. Along the border,
some clergy who supported the Union fell victim to
Confederate raiders, such as John B. Reed, allegedly
murdered by some of General John B. Mosby’s soldiers.
The nature of the Civil War ensured that Confederate,
not Union, preachers typically felt the wrath of the enemy.
The conclusion of the Civil War ended the primacy
of the clergy in public affairs. With growing secularization in the northern states, ministers actually lost
cultural authority, and became less influential in shaping politics. White southern ministers maintained their
cultural status as shepherds of both the Lost Cause and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
white supremacy. The largely southern African American clergy continued the formerly national tradition of
political preaching because the church was one area
southern whites could not suppress outright.
EDWARD R. CROWTHER
Adams State University
CAROLINE E. JANNEY. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (The Littlefield
History of the Civil War Era.) Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 451. $35.00.
White Americans reconciled after the Civil War
through their common belief in white supremacy. So
goes the prevailing narrative. Caroline E. Janney, however, demurs in convincing fashion from this view. She
argues that it was much more complicated than many
historians, most notably David W. Blight in Race and
Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001),
have heretofore allowed.
Janney’s contributions are threefold. First, she argues that the interaction of race and reconciliation was
complex and varied. Northerners willing to bury Civil
War animosities were often adamant in their condemnation of slavery, identifying the institution as the primary cause of the war. They also expressed pride in the
Union Army’s role in liberating four million slaves.
However, the majority of northern whites did not believe in racial, political, or social equality, either before
the war or afterward.
Second, Janney notes that reconciliation was conditional. Reconciliation and reunion were not the same.
War veterans from both sides may have clasped hands
at battlefield reunions, but they did not shrink from promoting the righteousness of their own side. In fact,
these joint ceremonial occasions often served to highlight stark differences in their interpretations of the
meaning of the war, particularly through their respective monuments, cemeteries, and veterans’ organizations. During election seasons, northern Republicans
often waved the “bloody shirt” to remind voters of
southern (read: Democratic) treason.
White southerners embraced the Lost Cause, hardly
a reconciliationist narrative. Southern women played a
significant role in advancing a distinctive regional perspective on both the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Through Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the founding of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in
1894, white southern women assumed a leadership role
in memorializing the Lost Cause. Their educational endeavors and commemorative activities emphasized a
separate past that disdained any accommodation with
northerners. Southern business leaders, eager for
northern investment (which was limited), may have
mouthed the rhetoric of reconciliation, but their embrace of former enemies was not deeply felt. Nor did
African Americans promote reconciliation, with the notable exception of Booker T. Washington. They tended
to focus less on the memorial aspects of war commem-
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