| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. By Edward J. Blum. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xii, 356 pp. $54.95, ISBN 0-8071-3052-4.)

In this study Edward J. Blum indicts northern Protestant leaders, ideologies, and movements for surrendering the post–Civil War ideal of racial justice and abandoning the southern freedpeople. To the sociopolitical factors that created sectional reunion of white Americans, he adds religion as an active force—the highest expression of social legitimacy. A short-lived faith-based egalitarianism, he argues, foundered during Reconstruction and was replaced by a contrary and dominating religious sanction for "the remaking of national whiteness ... so successful that it appeared as if it had never been ruptured" (p. 7). Blum makes superb use of popular culture sources, especially the oral tradition of the sermon. In print, photography, and painting, northern media elites articulated the need for national forgiveness to displace the crusade against "caste" (p. 46).

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