| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward J. Blum. Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 356. $54.95.
In 1913 Dudley Miles, a professor of French literature at Columbia University, argued in his essay "The Civil War as Unifier" that "what makes our Civil War unique is this remarkable sequel ... an unexpected obliteration of sectional animosities." Explaining this obliteration has occupied a large number of historians, who have focused mainly on politics, economics, and the social construction of memory. Neither religious leaders nor religious ideologies play prominent roles in these narratives; historians quick to count black churches as part of the postwar southern political sphere have failed to appreciate the ways in which the postwar struggle over the politics of freedom was waged in white northern churches and articulated with religious inflections. Edward J. Blum's book proposes to remedy this situation by putting religion—more specifically, the catch-all category of northern Protestantism—at the center of the reunion narrative.	1
Before the nation debated the merits of postwar retribution and reconciliation during Reconstruction, the Protestant denominations—all of which were divided by secession—argued about whether and how to reunite. More was at stake than penance and forgiveness: northern Methodists, for example, continued to occupy southern churches taken during the war. (pp. 31–32). But there were spiritual and political differences of opinion as well, and by the end of 1865, Blum notes, ministers were as divided as the politicians of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, which gathered that December.	. . .

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