| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. Ed. by Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2005. xii, 265 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-86554-962-1. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-86554-987-7.)
Though often neglected in scholarship, religious factors figured prominently in American engagements in or resistance to the post–Civil War movement to implement the antebellum abolitionist vision of a biracial democracy. The writers in this volume mark a deepening interest among historians of the United States generally in the multiple ways that religion legitimates societal norms. The authors examine religion's interface "with politics, race, gender, reform, and violence" during Reconstruction (p. 3). Organized into five parts, the dozen essays probe how southern violence and segregation could be religiously sanctioned; analyze the religious dimensions of African American resistance to white supremacy; and examine the rhetoric of religion in politics and reform in both the North and South. The writers in the two final units concentrate on an unreconstructed American Catholicism and on "the cultures of Reconstruction" in funeral ritual and in fiction (p. 11).	1
The roots of white supremacist violence, Kimberly R. Kellison contends, encompassed a mix of issues—evangelical religion, race, gender, and sexuality—as upstate Carolina whites sought control over their patriarchal families, local politics, and the racial order. Challenging Orlando Patterson's link between religious sacrifice and blood rites in racist terrorism, W. Scott Poole asserts instead that an apocalyptic mindset grounded and sanctified the violent purgation of black and white Republicans. Episcopalians, like other southern denominations, segregated their African American members and priests into extra-diocesan structures, and Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr. shows how they justified that move as extending antebellum paternalism.	. . .

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