Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War (review)

This book offers a distinct perspective that can help bring the growing body of literature on religion and the U.S. Civil War into sharper relief. Mennonites and Amish, as small, dissenting groups, were far more concerned with building their own congregations and communities than, in any self-conscious way, with national affairs and nation-building. Their view of the political order derived not from one of the dominant religious traditions—Calvinist, Anglican, Wesleyan, or American Baptist—but from sixteenth-century Anabaptism. Moreover, as of 1860 they had scarcely imbibed that generic American religion, revival-inspired evangelicalism. And they were staunchly pacifist.

Readers will perceive that the authors’ first purpose was history of Mennonites and Amish themselves. During a career as head librarian at what is now Eastern Mennonite University, Lehman has furnished the two groups with a string of well-researched congregational and other local histories. Nolt has written extensively on the Amish, including what is now the definitive Amish history; teaches at Goshen College; and is general editor of the book series Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History; also, he is author of a fine dissertation, now a book, on Americanization of “church” (Lutheran and Reformed) Pennsylvania Germans. For full disclosure, I must say that both authors are warm friends of mine; indeed, earlier at Goshen Nolt was my student and assistant. Be that as it may, by bringing complementary skills to Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War, these authors produced a competent and scholarly, albeit quite conventional, book. Perhaps its main fault is that some of its sections may go on too long, probably because sources for them were especially ample—for instance, there is disproportionate attention to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the politics of Mennonite pacifism spawned extensive disputes in local newspapers, compared to Bucks and Montgomery Counties farther east, which had even older and similarly well-established and populous Mennonite communities.

Lehman and Nolt largely wrote anecdote and narrative; yet they also provide judicious amounts of both national context and analysis. Their main argument is that their groups’ experiences and responses to the Civil War varied among three discernible regions: eastern Pennsylvania, with its old and compact Mennonite and Amish communities; Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the one place where Mennonites found themselves in the Confederacy; and various scattered settlements, often of later immigrants, west of the Allegheny Mountains. Experiences in Virginia were the most distinct. There, Mennonites felt great pressure to support secession; the military drafts came earlier and pressed harder on conscientious objectors than in the North; and unlike in the North, armies moved, fought, pillaged, and burned right in the Mennonite communities, and on Mennonites’ farms. Other historians—especially Samuel Horst in his now-classic Mennonites in the Confederacy (1967)—have recounted the Virginians’ stories. Lehman and Nolt have amplified the stories, especially with more political context and more recognition that some Mennonites supported the Confederacy. Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War offers much more than its main argument: anecdotes and narratives interesting in themselves; good accounts of what was happening in various communities; and at least brief discussions of, for instance, how Mennonites and Amish differed from Quakers in how they defended conscientious objection or how the two groups stood strongly against owning slaves yet only weakly if at all for the abolitionist movement. Still, the comparison among those three regions gives the book its frame.

While the Virginia story is the most poignant, as Lehman and Nolt examined the underlying religious thought they seemed to find the differences between their two northern regions more subtle and interesting, especially in relation to a growing American nationalism. Wherever Mennonites and Amish lived, virtually all of them formed their political attitudes from a sharply “two-kingdom” theological view. Going beyond political ideas and mere church-state separation, their thinking derived from ecclesiology and eschatology. Basically, all of them, in...