Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (review)

In Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898, Edward J. Blum brings even more pathos to an already tragic chapter in American History. He describes how white Northern Protestants during the late-nineteenth century betrayed not only the ideal of civic inclusion regardless of race or national origin, but also the beatific vision of authentic Christian community.

Even though the narrative arc of Blum’s account—from the promise of biracial democracy to the triumph of white supremacy—will be familiar to students of the period, the way that he gets there is innovative indeed. Previous accounts of Reconstruction and postwar reconciliation, including studies by Eric Foner, David Blight, and Nina Silber, have generally given religion short shrift. Reminding readers that “religion in late nineteenth-century America served as a primary matrix through which many Americans interpreted, evaluated, and articulated their experiences and ideas,” Blum instead places Protestant leaders, ideas, and images at the heart of his work (11). As a part of his effort to show the pervasiveness of Christian ideas and idioms, he eschews some of the traditional sources of religious history and finds God in the strangest places: political speeches, popular novels, and editorial cartoons, for example. Blum’s extensive use of images (a separate section contains fifteen well-selected black and white reproductions) is one indicator of his methodological creativity. It is also a marker of his conviction that the actions of everyday people mattered more than the published statements of elite divines. Blum privileges “evidence of men and women going to the South, being changed, and becoming new folk,” over formal theological treatises.¹

Blum’s sensitivity to religious belief and practice enables him to show the intellectual and emotional pathways that white Northerners followed to sectional harmony with new clarity. Previous scholars, while agreeing that white Northerners abandoned the hope of a biracial democracy, have offered different reasons for the postwar betrayal of black Americans, some citing economic interest, others war fatigue, still others the endless quest for partisan political advantage. Blum still does not explain exactly why so many white Northerners exchanged “civic nationalism,” in which race did not define citizenship, for a white supremacist “ethnic nationalism.” However, he does demonstrate very persuasively that white Protestant leaders in the North at least facilitated the process by preaching the moral imperative to forgive their Southern brethren. In other words, thanks to the efforts of these “Apostles of Forgiveness,” Northern whites did not frame their decision about Reconstruction as whether or not to give up on their high ideals, but which of two, competing sets of high ideals to follow: forgiveness or inclusivity.

The first two chapters provide the interpretive tension for the rest of the book. In the first, Blum argues that the harrowing experience of the Civil War shattered an antebellum sense of ethnic nationalism. Those Northern whites who survived the war only to see their commander-in-chief slain by an assassin’s bullet found it hard to feel real kinship with former Confederates. So profound was the sense of sectional alienation after John Wilkes Booth’s act that “a small group of ministers, journalists, and artists maintained that Southern whites were in fact not ‘white’ at all, but a ‘race’ separate from and inferior to Yankees” (22). According to Blum, there were important religious and political corollaries to this assertion of racial difference between Yankees and Confederates. “Like Lucifer,” he suggests, “Confederates had earned expulsion from the sacred community because of their rebellion and had been transformed in the process. They now belonged to a netherworld of spiritual, racial, and national otherness” (28). Moreover, and of critical importance for Blum’s argument, this “fracturing of the white republic provided an opportunity for the racial restructuring of the nation’s citizenry, as Northern Protestants repudiated the ethnic nationalism of the antebellum era and put their moral weight behind the full civic inclusion of those who had been most...