God Prosper the Right: The First Coming of Evangelical Politics

Accounts of the American past have always benefited from the work of British historians. In the era of amateur history writing, Americans, whether flattered or put out, were not indifferent to how figures like the Loyalist minister Jonathan Boucher, rapier-witted litterateurs Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, or the peripatetic Lord Bryce described their history. So it has continued in the era of professional history writing. As examples, J. C. D. Clark’s effort to explain America with the interpretive categories he developed for Britain’s ancien regime has opened fresh lines for exploring relationships among law, religion, and political ideas, while John Ashworth’s careful Marxist approach has fueled discussions about the relative importance of economic, cultural, and intellectual factors in antebellum history. ¹ Few British scholars, however, have ever made a contribution to American history so well-grounded and so thoughtful as the University of Sheffield’s Richard Carwardine in his Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. This book not only fulfills the substantial promise of Carwardine’s earlier work, but has also become the backdrop for unusually helpful essays on related subjects. ²

The quotations that open the book’s last chapter recapitulate Carwardine’s major arguments. His story ends in 1861, with a chorus of eager evangelical churchmen, North and South, urging their respective regions into battle. The first voice is from the Roman Catholic Freeman’s Journal of New York: “This unholy and fratricidal war began with your hard-shell Reformed Presbyterians, and your soft-shell new-school Presbyterians, and with your Baptists, Methodists, and such like. You Protestant religionists were the very first to begin this game of disunion” (pp. 319–20). Then for the same conclusion but the opposite assessment, he cites the opinions of Granville Moody, a Cincinnati Methodist: “I believe it is true that we [Northern evangelicals] did bring it [the war] about . . . and I glory in it, for it is a wreath of glory around our brow” (p. 320).

The quotations are not only apt. They also suggest the attention to nuance that characterizes these pages and the breadth of research into western and southern, as well as northern, journals, correspondence, ecclesiastical and political records that Carwardine gathered to make his case in this truly impressive book. That case can be summarized in several particulars.

First, evangelical Protestants—Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and a few others of roughly similar background and convictions—were important in antebellum America. By 1855, formal membership in these churches had risen to more than four million, with at least two or three times that number identifiable as adherents (out of a population of about twenty-seven million and compared to a presidential vote of slightly over four million in 1856). Especially given the relative weakness of competing centers of cultural influence, the activism of these Protestant churches, along with the moral and religious voluntary societies that expanded the reach of that activism, made them “the primary religious force in the country” as well as “the principal subculture of American society” (p. 1). Carwardine’s greatest contribution as a religious demographer is to pay as much attention to Baptists and especially Methodists, who have long wandered in a historiographical wilderness, as to Presbyterians and Congregationalists, whose opinions have been more thoroughly treated by earlier historians.

Second, evangelical Protestants were considerably more involved in American politics than has been recognized. Carwardine’s largely chronological account moves carefully through presidential elections from 1836 to 1860, crises from the depression of 1837 to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and structural changes from the rise of the Liberty party to the victory of Lincoln and the Republicans. At every stage, through citations from a voluminous range of sources, he is able to show that evangelicals not only reacted to, but usually could be found in the thick of, the era’s decisive political events. In addition, evangelical innovations in printing, publicity, voluntary organization, and ad hoc...