Book Review

Canada and the United States

Religion touched almost every facet of the American Civil War. The antebellum sectional controversy between North and South was largely a religious debate over the morality of slavery. Religion infused the war itself. Union and Confederate soldiers responded eagerly to evangelical revivals. Ministers North and South sanctified their respective causes with assurances of divine blessings. On northern and southern home fronts, women turned to prayer and devotion to cope with the fearful toll of death and the unraveling of familiar worlds. Yet the religious history of the Civil War remains relatively unstudied. The sixteen essays in this volume, the majority of which originated in a symposium on religion and the Civil War held in Louisville in October 1994, go a long way toward filling this historiographical void. Taken collectively, they also suggest promising directions for future studies of religion in the American Civil War.	1
The best of this new scholarship is illustrated in two particular essays. Mark Noll examines Civil War-era religion from the perspective of intellectual history. With an unusually supple command of theology too often lacking in historians of American religion, Noll offers an extremely learned and nuanced account of Biblical hermeneuties and the slavery controversy. The reigning approach to reading the Bible, he explains, was the Reformed Protestant hermeneutic that stressed an individual's personal interpretation. The democratization of American life in the early nineteenth century reinforced the cultural authority of this hermeneutic. On the vexing question of slavery, however, such an approach could not "reconcile the divergent interpretations it had produced" (p. 49). With an appropriate bow to the religious diversity of nineteenth-century America, Noll further explains how alternative hermenutical approaches offered by African Americans, Roman Catholics, German Lutherans, and conservative Presbyterians failed to replace this dominant paradigm so fateful to the slavery controversy. Moreover, the Protestant Reformed approach to the Bible foundered on the shoals of American racism, as cultural constructions of race were presented as sound Biblical exegesis.	2
Randall M. Miller's superb essay on Irish Catholics and the Civil War is an equally compelling inquiry into Civil War religion from the perspective of social history. Miller knowledgeably explains the ways in which the war helped Irish Catholics to define their ethnic identity. The Catholic chaplains who ministered to the soldiers of regiments like the famed Irish Brigade redefined working Catholicism by reinforcing the movement toward devotional piety among Irish soldiers. The Civil War also heightened Irish-American nationalism. Fenian activists sought to channel Irish military prowess on American battlefields into a struggle for Ireland's freedom from England. Although Irish contributions to the Union military effort did mollify some of the virulent anti-Catholicism that existed in the North, Irish support for the cause weakened after the Lincoln administration committed itself to emancipation. Miller effectively draws on wartime ethnic tensions to explain the role of Irish workers in the New York City draft riots of 1863. In identifying the ways Irish identity was shaped by the various experiences of the Civil War, Miller implicitly challenges the view of the war as a nationalizing process.	. . .