Vale of Tears. New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (review)

In a series of twelve essays, Edward Blum and Scott Poole have presented various aspects of social religion and belief in the American Southland following the dismantling of Reconstruction in 1877. The focus is on religion as institution, culture, and religious thought. The major themes are (1) the religious basis of violence and race, sexuality, and segregation; (2) the religious thought and racism in the oppression of American blacks both North and South; (3) religious rhetoric and moral reform in the political arena; (4) Post-reconstruction thought in the Catholic South; and (5) religion and religious cultures during Reconstruction and beyond.

The articles present the framework of violence like the mythological framework of the Ku Klux Klan. The religious sentiment is Protestant. Politics and political power are dominated by religion and religious rhetoric. The authors present many of the well-known and lesser-known demagogues who were clerical leaders in the late nineteenth century.

On the other hand, David Gleeson in his article on the Catholic Church, both South and North, looks at the emancipation of the slaves. Prior to the Civil War, the Catholic Church was in many cases Southern in sentiment. After the war, the Church was paternalistic and inept toward the freed slaves. Augustin Verot, bishop of Savannah and Vicar Apostolic of Florida and a passionate supporter of the South, had called for a new and sanitized slave system. With a complete reversal after the war, he called for the bishops to follow the lead of the Roman Curia and create a nationwide bishop or vicar to care for the spiritual needs and evangelization of four million freed slaves. In a handwritten document in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, never published or made public, the bishops in the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore laid aside the Roman proposal after an angry discussion in an extraordinary session in 1866. Verot, almost alone, called for its adoption and related his plans for education for the former slaves in his diocese.

Kent McConnell in his article "Betwixt and Between" uses the cemetery at Mount Saint Mary's College near Emmitsburg, Maryland, as a geographical marker of Catholic sentiment by the Union and Confederate troops buried there some thirty miles from Gettysburg. The cemetery can be seen as a text revealing the feelings and sentiments of the priests, seminarians, students, and sisters in this small enclave in Maryland.

Regrettably one section of the Catholic community in the South has been overlooked. Stephen Ochs has written in A Black Patriot and a White Priest (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), the story of the Louisiana Native Guards.

At the beginning of the Civil War, the Native Guards—free people of color successors of the black militia of the Spanish Regime—were mustered into the Confederate Forces. With the fall of New Orleans in 1862, the Confederate army withdrew; but the Native Guards remained and joined the Federal troops under General Benjamin Butler, forming three regiments of Louisiana Native Guards. These troops, French in language, Catholic in religion, mostly free people of color and a few slaves formed the first black troops in the Union Army. On May 27, 1863, André Cailloux, captain of a company in the first regiment, led his troops in the assault on the Confederate stronghold of Port Hudson, where he and the ranks of black troops were mowed down, and the remnants of the company were forced to withdraw. Unlike the white soldiers, the bodies of Captain André Cailloux and the other black soldiers were forcibly left on the field of battle for over thirty days. Despised and rejected by the white Catholics, including the priests in New Orleans, the black soldiers were buried without Catholic services. One priest in New Orleans, Claude Pascal Maistre, originally from France, an abolitionist, censured by Archbishop Jean-Marie Odin, officiated at the funeral. From this same black Catholic...