| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.2

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Faith-Based Racism and the Rise of the White-Supremacist Nation

BLUM, EDWARD J. Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. x + 356 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $54.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8071-3052-4.
In this Gilded Age study, Edward J. Blum, a fellow with the Du Bois Center for the Advanced Study of Religion and Race at the University of Notre Dame, argues persuasively that Protestantism played a crucial role in what he calls the "reforging of the white republic." Focusing on the causes of the malignant racial developments in this period, among them segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching, Blum boldly charges that scholars "have almost completely downplayed religious leaders and ideologies" and claims that no historian has "drawn direct connections between race, religion, American nationalism, and imperialism" (8). He chastises more than a dozen esteemed historians who have shaped the field, from Kenneth M. Stampp to David R. Roediger, for ignoring or trivializing the importance of religion. To fill this historical void, Blum promises "a completely new perspective on sectional relations and racial ideologies after the Civil War" (8).	1
In the first two chapters of Reforging the White Republic, Blum contends that the combination of northern Protestant leaders and thousands of missionaries who flocked to the South during and after the Civil War succeeded in creating a new "civic nationalism" that stood for loyalty to the federal Union and a belief in colorblind democracy. This new republic, Blum insists, seriously "fractured" the antebellum "ethnic nationalism," perhaps best represented by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney when he declared in the Dred Scott case of 1857 that blacks could not be citizens and had no rights that whites had to honor (4-6, 12).	2
After the first two chapters, in which Blum exalts the abolitionist reformers as true and heroic egalitarians, the rest of the book describes and analyzes the role of northern Protestants in the undoing of the new civic nationalism that he claims they helped conceive and construct. Three chapters are given over to the "Apostles of Forgiveness," Dwight L. Moody, and Frances Willard. The first one examines influential abolitionists such as Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Horace Greeley, all of whom astounded their northern brethren by calling for a quick national reconciliation after the war. Stowe even moved to Florida where she raved about her new home as an earthly heaven graced with harmonious race relations. Like the Reverend Beecher, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin more and more resorted to antiblack stereotypes to justify her plea for the abandonment of Reconstruction.	3
Moody and Willard, both former antislavery activists, also contributed mightily to overcoming sectional hostility, at the expense, of course, of African Americans. The fiery evangelist Moody led the third great religious awakening and significantly diverted religious fervor away from social and political concerns toward other-worldly objectives. His revival crusades in the South were highly popular, in no small part because he acquiesced in segregation and disfranchisement and preached that forgiveness of southern whites was divine.	4
Willard, who became president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1879, also traveled frequently in the South and enlisted thousands of white women in her war for sobriety and women's suffrage. She supported disfranchisement of black male voters and asserted that their ignorant ballots endangered temperance (and Prohibition). In addition to temperance and women's suffrage, she pleaded for "No North, No South, No Sectionalism in Politics" (194). Like Stowe, Willard endeared herself to Dixie by gushing about its harmonious race relations when they were actually at their worst.	. . .

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