Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union by William F. Quigley Jr (review)

William Quigley’s Pure Heart is a single book with two separate stories. The first is an examination of the intersection of religion and politics at Christ Church, an Episcopalian parish in Philadelphia, focusing especially on the sermons of its rector, Reverend Benjamin Dorr. The second is a tale of the 121st Pennsylvania Regiment, narrated chiefly through the letters of the minister’s son, William White Dorr, lieutenant and later captain. Both are thoroughly researched and beautifully told.

In his prologue, Quigley makes clear that the first story is his primary focus: “My purpose is to explore and explain how Benjamin Dorr managed to keep his church of mostly elite Philadelphia whites intact during and immediately after the war” (xxviii). Commonly known as the “Nation’s Church,” Christ Church was the place of worship and final resting place for many American founders, including Benjamin Franklin and six other signers of the Declaration of Independence. From 1837 to 1869, when Dorr served as the church’s rector, it was the spiritual home to a host of prominent players in Pennsylvania politics, on both sides of the partisan aisle. Some of the most fascinating sections of Quigley’s book are his forays into the lives of these church members, such as Charles Ingersoll, a Copperhead who served jail time for inciting disloyalty during the war, and Horace Binney, an antislavery Republican lawyer who helped establish the Union League.

Amid the clashing political personalities in his congregation, Quigley sees Dorr as a Lincolnian figure, firm in his unionist convictions but also displaying “an exceptionally temperate public faith apart from the civil religion with which most Americans crusaded against each other” (xx). Yet because the only extant primary documents by Dorr are his sermons and a few letters to his son, the Reverend makes for a somewhat problematic lead character. To compensate for the lack of available sources, Quigley often deduces oblique references to the war in Dorr’s sermons. After his son joined the Union army in 1862, Dorr preached a sermon lauding “those who . . . show they are Christians, not in name only, but in deed and in truth.” Quigley surmises that “everyone knew he meant the young men enlisting” (75). Following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Dorr preached against “amusements and pleasures, however lawful.” Quigley speculates: “Surely Dorr’s congregants equated their rector’s warning . . . with slavery” (195). An alternative reading of the minister’s sermons is that his assiduous avoidance of wartime issues exemplifies the conviction that many Civil War–era preachers held—that politics and the pulpit should remain in “separate spheres,” as Timothy Wesley’s The Politics of Faith during the Civil War shows.

Interspersed throughout the saga of Christ Church is a detailed narrative of William White Dorr’s military service. Quigley uses the officer’s letters home, as well as the diaries and letters of his comrades, to weave a captivating tale of a regiment that saw fierce action at Fredericksburg, at Gettysburg, and in the Wilderness. Yet this secondary story, which takes up about a third of the book, comes across as a bit of a sideshow. The book’s stated themes of faith and politics play almost no role in Quigley’s account of the 121st Pennsylvania. These sections instead deal mostly with the day-to-day life in the Union army and the horrors of battle. To be sure, Quigley’s storytelling ability as is on full display in these portions of the book—Captain Dorr’s death at Spotsylvania in particular is movingly rendered. The disconnectedness of the two tales, however, obscures the book’s larger argument.

Quigley is well acquainted with the main works of Civil War religious history. Yet his study would have been strengthened by engaging with a...