Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s. By Ward M. McAfee. (Albany: State University of New York, 1998. x, 317 pp. Cloth, $65.50, isbn 0-7914-3847-3. Paper, $21.95, isbn 0-7914-3848-1.)

In his Reconstruction (1988), Eric Foner focused attention on the experience of African Americans but ironically took little notice of religion, despite the centrality of religion to the lives of both freedpeople and white Americans. In the decade since the appearance of Foner's synthesis, several scholars have reasserted the importance of religion in the 1860s and 1870s. Ward M. McAfee insists that religion and public schools, in addition to race, are central to a proper understanding of the politics of the 1870s. 1

Beginning with the political repercussions of the Cincinnati Bible war of 1869 to 1873, McAfee argues that the role of the public school in producing a homogeneous American culture played a dramatic role in politics. Religion joined race as a critical component of Reconstruction: "Up until 1870, Reconstruction had been about race. After that date, it was about religion as well." As part of their redefinition in the wake of their triumph over the "slave power," Republicans championed public schools that would uplift the freedpeople and Americanize foreign immigrants, especially Irish Catholics. In response, white southerners and northerners closed racial ranks and Catholics mounted their own cultural offensive to obtain public funds for Catholic schools and to remove Protestant features from the public schools. . . .

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