Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separation in the Antebellum South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS327 cope with division? Did most, as Hansen suggests happened with the original group's middle-class leaders, drift out of antislavery reform into less controversial organizations aiding women, children, and the poor? Without some comparison with later reform, one is left assuming that after division, both groups continued equally active, when in fact the petitioning and fairs organized by elite leaders continued to provide the largest public forum in city and region for raising antislavery funds and consciousness. In revealing the complexity withinjust one grass-roots organization, Hansen breaks new ground: this diverse group revises pictures of female abolitionists created by earlier historians who either lumped all antislavery women together or who distinguished between just two groups, the more conservative activists who continued to work through conventional church and political institutions and those who, like W. L. Garrison and Abby Kelly Foster, saw moral persuasion as the means to end slavery. Hansen shows us that this Boston organization included members who did not fit comfortably into either camp. Historians ofabolitionism will now have to pay closer attention to these internal divisions not just in national and regional organizations but in local female societies which, like the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, influenced regional reform efforts. Deborah Van Broekhaven Ohio Wesleyan University Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separation in the Antebellum South. By Mitchell Snay. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 276. $49-95) In the Gospel ofDisunion Snay seeks "to explore the relationship between religion and the origins of Southern separation" (5) and in so doing to highlight the role of religion in the coming of the Civil War. Within the limits of his approach he succeeds admirably. Focusing on the public statements of a small but influential group of Southern clergy characterized by E. Brooks Holifield as the "Gentlemen Theologians"—upwardly mobile, well-educated, and urban clergy with socially prominent pastorates—Snay clearly, if somewhat laboriously, establishes the centrality of religion in forging a distinctive Southern identity. The narrative begins with the reaction of the Southern clergy to the abolitionist offensive in 1 835 and concludes with the formation of the Confederacy. With the exception of two thematic chapters on the role of the clergy in erecting a biblical defense of slavery and creating a Christian ethic of slaveholding, the approach is loosely chronological. Special attention is paid to the schism that split the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists into sectional denominations by the mid-1840s and to the strongly prosecessionist stand of leading clergy during the crisis of 1 860-61 . Readers familiar with Eugene Genovese's The Slaveholders' Dilemma (1992) or, for that matter, with older literature on the religious dimension of 328CIVIL WAR HISTORY proslavery thought, will find no surprises here. Snay breaks no fresh ground but, to his credit, has systematically laid out the logic by which his group of clergy articulated a moral basis for slavery and championed the South against the "infidel" North. Here indeed is a reasoned argument in support of Thomas R. R. Cobb's assertion in the fateful spring of 1861 that 'This revolution has been accomplished mainly by the Churches." The role of many Southern churches in support of slavery and in fomenting secession is undeniable, but questions remain as to the larger claims made by Snay. When he speaks of the South, he most often is referring to the Lower South and, even here, to the more narrowly defined Carolina and Georgia lowcountry , the breeding ground of most of the clergy he examines. Thus, as evidenced by the clerical factionalism over slavery that David T. Bailey (Shadow on the Church [ 1 985]) documents for the Old Southwest in the 1 850s, one wonders just how solid clerical ranks were in defense of slavery across the South. As a result of a research design that deals exclusively with the public rhetoric of a small group of men with close ties to the planter elite, the pervasiveness of the proslavery gospel is asserted rather than proved. Did most slaveholders, to say nothing of common whites, defend human bondage in religious terms as a positive good? Though unlikely, perhaps they did, but in the absence of any probing oftheirprivate thoughts...