Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation: African American Slaves and Christianity, 1830–1870, and: Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (review)

Fountain’s elegant discussion of the changing significance of Christianity among African Americans before and after emancipation depends on a quantitative analysis of data drawn from 4,000 Work Projects Administration (wpa) interviews, slave narratives, and autobiographies. His findings are corroborated by commentary in white observers’ journals, letters, and publications. Attentive to differences in region, age, and gender, Fountain charts the demographics of African-American slave conversion to Christianity. He concludes that before emancipation fewer than 40 percent of these slaves identified themselves as Christians. Treating this finding as a surprise, he devotes a chapter to identifying barriers to conversion in slavery. Outlining religious alternatives to Christianity, the following chapter argues for the survival of African religions rather than the persistence of African practices in Afro-Christianity. Fountain cites evidence of the persistence of Islam as well as religious practices known as “conjure” and “voodou.” The final chapter charts a surge in conversions among former slaves during and after the Civil War. Fountain attributes this surge to the influence of a Christian core among slaves who had linked Christianity to the promise of freedom and predicted Confederate defeat. With emancipation, their views appeared justified. Free to organize separate black churches, former slaves created institutions that promoted a version of Christianity celebrating liberation and human equality.

Fountain’s explicit purpose is to challenge the prevailing scholarly view that syncretic Afro-Christianity displaced traditional African religions and functioned as the cultural center of slave communities. His conclusion that Christian converts were a minority among the antebellum slave population certainly undermines arguments that assume African religions were eradicated under slavery. Yet, it is striking that he found approximately the same percentage of Christians among slaves as in the population at large. Hence, the cautionary note that Fountain sounds pertains to all historians of antebellum culture when they encounter claims about nineteenth-century America as a Christian or Protestant nation. Estimating nineteenth-century church membership is notoriously difficult, but the most sophisticated analyses indicate that the “churched” percentage of the population increased throughout the century, from approximately 10 percent in 1800 to roughly 35 percent in 1850 and 45 percent by 1890; the country was not a majority Christian nation until the twentieth century.¹ Thus African-American levels of Christian adherence tracked, or perhaps slightly exceeded, that of the population as a whole. The triumph of rhetoric over reality, both at the time and in subsequent historical accounts, reveals the hegemonic power of those whose words were published.

In contrast to Fountain’s attention to slave attitudes and practices, Wallace’s study of antebellum evangelicalism in relation to slavery and Catholicism focuses on an elite stratum within society—religious leaders, intellectuals, and opinion makers. Wallace makes important contributions to our understanding of antebellum culture. He devotes unprecedented attention to American Catholic views on slavery. He also demonstrates that American intellectuals, including religious thinkers, displayed considerable interest in contemporary European politics and in Catholic history as they grappled with what an influx of Catholic immigrants would mean to their nation. Surveying anti-Catholic, nativist sentiments published by Northern intellectuals in books and religious newspapers, Wallace uncovers commentary about European affairs and about European medieval history routinely offered to an American audience that has been largely overlooked in histories of American religion. He also examines the less virulent anti-Catholicism voiced in the South, where immigration was a minor factor and political anti-Catholicism alienated many Southerners because the Northern Know-Nothing platform adopted an anti-slavery stance. Wallace’s major contribution, however, lies in his charting of the emergence of Northern evangelical political theology as a substitute for state religion.

Wallace’s overarching thesis—that Northern evangelicalism...