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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.1 | The History Cooperative
102.1  
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March, 2006
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Reviews

When Slavery Was Called Freedom
Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War

By John Patrick Daly
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Pp. ix, 207. Notes, selected bibliography, index. $45.00.)

In this concise monograph, John Patrick Daly presents a dramatically revisionist assessment of antebellum southern religion's role in the ideological debate over slavery. Drawing inspiration from such scholars as Eugene Genovese, Daly contends that the South never diverged from the nation's fundamental cultural unity, especially its faith in divinely guided material progress. Both northern and southern evangelical religion celebrated individualism and moral self-discipline and preached that economic reward was the providential reward for moral virtue. 1
      Evangelicalism began to assert its hold over the southern mind in the first third of the nineteenth century. It was not the rise of abolitionism, Daly contends, but the triumph of this theological outlook linking moral with material progress that fueled proslavery ideology. Evangelical religion conditioned southerners to personal independence and self-control. Ministers preached that individuals could master their passions and attain wealth and power. Economic prosperity was not a matter of luck or chance, because God ruled all human affairs. Southern prosperity generated through slavery was therefore viewed as proof of that institution's divine sanction. . . .
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