Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (review)

Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877. By Daniel W. Stowell (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 278 pp. $65.00.

Perhaps no sub-field of American history has been more recast by the assault on disciplinary barriers than the study of religion. During the last generation, denominational and institutional emphases have given way to the detection of spirituality enmeshed within the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the past. As Stowell reminds us, though, this methodological shift has proceeded unevenly, often producing more promise than insight. Recent highly acclaimed overviews of the Civil War era take little notice of religion, he tells us, and the recent outpouring of fine scholarship on religion in the postwar South has tended to focus narrowly on the experiences of particular ethnic, denominational, or regional groups. In Rebuilding Zion, Stowell moves a giant step closer to a broader understanding of the role that religious faith played in the wake of Union victory by defining "religious reconstruction" as the "process by which southern and northern, black and white Christians rebuilt the spiritual life of the South" (7).

Stowell identifies three primary categories of believers--emancipated slaves, northern whites, and southern whites. All shared an evangelical bent and a providential understanding of history; they even found a measure of common ground in their mutual disdain for President Andrew Johnson. But here the similarities ended. Informed by divergent interpretations of God's intentions for the defeated Confederacy, each group embarked on religious reconstruction in ways that soon brought them into conflict.

Freedmen immediately and persistently sought autonomy in church life, largely eschewing the paternalistic offers of guidance and protection from both their ex-masters and their liberators. Probably no other effort by ex-slaves paid such lasting benefits as this rapid exodus of freedmen from biracial churches to establish their own religious institutions. Northern evangelicals in the South (or "religious scalawags," as Stowell calls them) saw both black and white natives as an open mission field stretched before them. For more than a decade, they threw time and money into an effort to remake the spiritual landscape of the South in their image; yet, the freedmen's growing insistence on self-determination and the ex-Confederates' unyielding resistance to denominational reunion eventually caused this commitment to wane. Southern whites found far more immediate success than their northern counterparts. Repulsed by the prospect of close fellowship with assertive ex-slaves and haughty northern missionaries, they worked feverishly--and effectively--to rebuild their religious institutions on an explicitly white and southern basis. By 1877, Stowell concludes, none of these groups had successfully "forged bonds of gender, class, or denomination that transcended the cleavages of race and region" (8).

For all the subtlety and sensitivity to variation lost by Stowell's method (for example, the complete absence of Catholics and Campbellites), his threefold categorization yields a good tale. He carefully articulates the ongoing efforts by leaders of each group to discern a divine blueprint for the future of the South and then sets these divergent angles of vision in motion against each other. The greatest strength of Rebuilding Zion lies in the author's well-crafted narrative of the myriad conflicts that shaped the institutional forms and cultural commitments emerging by the middle of the 1870s within each of the three broad faith communities. In addition, Stowell builds this account on an impressive research model. Not content to synthesize the wide array of recent secondary scholarship on each group, he has supplemented existing studies with extensive work in manuscript sources from Georgia and Tennessee, states with vastly dissimilar reconstruction experiences. His use of personal papers and local church records is particularly effective and should provoke similar investigations of other states.

Stowell's detailed presentation of the events in Georgia and Tennessee reveals how sharply the contested nature of religious reconstruction increased the establishment of Sunday schools, colleges, publishing houses...