| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America. By Wayne E. Fuller. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xiii + 264 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $39.95.)

Nineteenth-century Sabbatarian activists have fared better of late among historians. Recent reassessments of the conflict between Jacksonians and their opponents place greater emphasis on the issue of slavery and tend to be sympathetic to the evangelical reforms that frequently accompanied abolitionism. More specifically, the influential work of Richard R. John has focused attention on the post office as a significant target of protest during the early national era. Wayne Fuller follows John's call for "taking Sabbatarianism seriously" to new extremes, or more accurately to much older ones. An accomplished scholar of postal history, Fuller presents the Sabbath mails controversies of 1810–1816 and 1828–1838 as episodes in a longer, more general conflict over religion and morality in American life. The narrative covers much of the century and follows the activities of those who wished to defend a Christian nation against Sabbath-breakers, pornographers, abortionists, and gamblers. The post is important to Fuller's story because it provided a point of access for national reform and because the mails were used both to spread temptation across state lines and to accelerate the growth of urban culture in a traditionally rural society.

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