The Salmon P. Chase Papers. Volume 5: Correspondence, 1865-1873 (review)

342CIVIL WAR HISTORY Case ofRichmond" manages to map outthe wartime history ofthe Confederacy's capital in an imaginative (and surprisingly comprehensive) forty pages. Stout and Grasso reveal a new Southern culture emerging though fast days, jeremiads , and other religious forms. 'The Coming ofthe Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis," by George M. Fredrickson, connects the religious history of the war to the political culture of the North by highlighting the Northern clergy's "new exaltation of power and authority as antidotes to democracy" (121). Fredrickson returns to the themes of his first book, again complicating our sense of wartime politics and, at the same time, locating the origins of Gilded Age conservatism and the Social Gospel movement. After reading the seventeen contributions to this collection, one is struck by a certain absence of sustained attention to the relationship between race and religion in the era ofemancipation. Noll's essay, alert to the importance ofbiblical interpretation in the reconstruction of ideas about race, stands out in this regard. Other authors could benefit from a similar examination of the ways in which racial ideologies were articulated in a religious idiom throughout the 1 860s and beyond. From this book's opening paragraph, we are repeatedly informed that "surprisingly few scholars have undertaken extended, extensive studies" of the role of religion in the American Civil War (v). After numerous such reminders, the reader is perhaps better persuaded by Reid Mitchell's "Christian Soldiers?: Perfecting the Confederacy." This astute essay points to the ways in which postbellum Southern historians created a myth of a Christian Confederacy. Rather than lamenting religion's absence from the literature, Mitchell's study suggests that historians might better worry about the ideological uses of religion in building and rebuilding popular memories of the Civil War. David Quigley Boston College The Salmon P. Chase Papers. Volume 5: Correspondence, 1865-1873. Edited by John Niven. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State UniversityPress, 1998. Pp. Xxvi, 401 . $45.00.) This volume is the last in the «eries of Chase journals and correspondence edited by John Niven and covers Chase's years as Supreme Court chief justice. This was a critical period in the political life of the nation, and this sampling of documents clearly demonstrates the important role Chase played in the events of the day. In addition to participating in a number of crucial Supreme Court decisions governing both Reconstruction and monetary policy, Chase debated the basis of reunion, spoke out on the issue ofAfrican American rights, presided over the impeachment trial ofAndrew Johnson, and sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1868. All of these areas are covered extensively in the letters reprinted in this volume. The list of Chase's correspondents alone reveals the crucial value of this collection to an understanding of the issues and events of postwar America. Com- BOOK REVIEWS343 munications with John Sherman, Abraham Lincoln, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Edwin Stanton, Andrew Johnson, William Tecumseh Sherman, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, and numerous political associates fill the volume. Chase criticizes General Sherman for his "apparent harshness . . . towards the blacks" (3), congratulates Wendell Phillips for "so nobly" (io) supporting AfricanAmerican suffrage, describes the "night of horror" (30) that followed Lincoln's assassination , and, only a few days afterAndrew Johnson's ascension to the presidency, judged him to be lacking "not only in breadth of intellect, but in elevation of character" and asked, "does he really understand that there is no guarantee for personal civil liberty, but that of political liberty—universal suffrage" (28)? The tour through the controversies of the day that this volume provides continues as Chase explains that he will refuse to try Jefferson Davis in Virginia until "Martial Law is at an end" (105), worries that Congressional Reconstruction is overly broad and "will afford points of attack" (104), yet declares himself to be a "steady opponent" of Presidential Reconstruction and a "steady . . . friend" (192) of Congress's plans for reunion. Still Chase makes clear that he "has never thought it necessary to revile" (192) the president, admits privately that his "own judgment & feeling favors acquittal" (214) in the impeachment trial, and condemns efforts to remove the president for having "assumed very much the...