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  • Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era ed. by Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser
  • Colin Edward Woodward
Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era. Ed. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8071-5192-1, 296 pp., cloth, $38.25.

The eleven essays in this book began as a series of lectures at Rice University in 2010. The authors rightly claim that religion is still largely understudied in Civil War era historiography, but these thoughtful and well-researched essays help to correct that deficiency. The title, however, is inaccurate. Some essays scarcely address the apocalypse or millennialism. Yet, the book provides a varied look at the religious ideas of the period. It builds upon the work of Mark Noll and others who have shown how the Civil War presented a crisis for Americans: how could a society convinced of God’s justness come to terms with mass slaughter?

Jason Phillips provides a strong opening essay by discussing Fire-eater Edmund [End Page 184] Ruffin’s 1860 novel Anticipations of the Future. Ruffin’s book had the Civil War beginning in 1868, but his work was nonetheless prescient, including as it did a description of a wartime riot in New York City. In his novel, the South triumphed. When the South collapsed in 1865, the long-suicidal Ruffin killed himself rather than live in a post-Confederate world.

Robert K. Nelson’s essay on “spirit politics” studies abolitionists who saw spiritualism as an alternative to churches that were too conservative concerning slavery. Spiritualism, however, faced general skepticism among the public and suffered from disputes among adherents who could not reconcile faith (belief in spirits communicating with the living) and works (the moral imperative to strike at slavery).

Ryan Cordell looks at James Fenimore Cooper’s 1847 novel The Crater, an allegory for the American experiment. In The Crater, settlers on a remote island attempt to build a “City on a Hill.” But after the island’s settlers squabble over religion, a volcanic eruption destroys it. Continuing the theme of idealism versus harsh reality, Nina Reid-Maroney examines the Church of England’s efforts to aid fugitive slaves in Canada. However, British abolitionists, like those in the United States, found that bringing slaves to freedom was not an end in itself. Slaves faced racism in Canada, and abolitionists there were unsure how to advance the cause of newly freed people.

In one of the book’s many geographical shifts, Joseph Moore explores antislavery efforts in upcountry South Carolina, led by the racially integrated Associate Reformed Presbyterians, the only significant antislavery group in the antebellum South. The group, seeing abolitionism as unrealistic, advocated for colonization, which itself faced enormous political and logistical problems. Pursuing Presbyterianism further, Zachary Dresser examines the church in Virginia. Among his subjects is the ardent Confederate Robert Lewis Dabney, who, in the wake of defeat and emancipation, “almost went off his mental balance.” Nevertheless, Dresser shows that Dabney’s theological writings were based on reason, not emotion. Dabney became a model of conservative thought in Virginia.

Jennifer Graber’s essay on Native American religion during the Civil War focuses on the bloody Dakota uprising of 1862. The massacre led to white retribution and new focus on Indian religious leaders. Graber shows how Dakota defeat led to Indians’ conversion to Christianity and submission to white rule. Hers is a compelling essay, but she might have been more critical of conversions experienced under duress.

Matthew Harper explores competing notions of millennialism among free black North Carolinians. North Carolina did not suffer nearly as much wartime destruction as its neighboring states. But after the war, it remained contested [End Page 185] ground, culminating in the coup d’état at Wilmington in 1898. Two other essays also examine black religion. Scott Nesbit shows that along postwar coastal South Carolina, blacks were disappointed by the limited powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau and were shocked by Klan violence. Nesbit’s essay is one of the best in the volume, though its title, “A Sharecropper’s Millennium: Land and the Perils of Forgiveness in Post-Civil War...

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