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BOOK REVIEWS34? Civil War era, including Sam Houston's prewar gubernatorial triumph, in fact have little to do with loyalty to the national government. The use of demographic techniques in this work lends a fresh perspective to well-known issues. Careful study of county-level records by the author confirms previous assertions of vote fraud and intimidation, as well as suspicions that Texas Unionism was not a significant threat to the Confederacy or its adherents ' firm hold on postbellum politics. The many extensive tables in this book are not for the statistically faint-of-heart, but they reveal interesting patterns that bolster the evidence found in more traditional sources, an extensive bibliography of which is appended. Maps of election results are included as well and do a fine job of supplementing Baum's detailed discussions of tangled political contests on the state and local levels. Baum cautiously asserts that his analysis of Texas Unionism can be applied elsewhere in the South. Some might dispute this, but recent studies of localism and mobility during the nineteenth century, especially during the war, suggest that he may well be right. His Texas research is excellent, his statistical models are solid, and his conlcusions are sound. If more such work can be produced for other states of the Confederacy, then the riddle of Unionism may actually be solved. Unfortunately this will not only reveal the chicanery of wartime attempts to crush dissent in the South but also create a new problem for historians . Which is harder to define and explain: Unionism or localism? Richard B. McCaslin High Point University Religion and the American Civil War. Edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 434. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.) The 1990s tum out to have been the decade of the edited collection, at least in the world of Civil War studies. In the best tradition of Maris Vinokis's Toward a SocialHistory oftheAmerican Civil Warand Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber's Divided House, we now have Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson. This third seminal collection brings into conversation many of the best scholars of American religion and nineteenth-century society. The result is a series of essays that not only deepens our understanding of the war's religious dimensions but further enables a rather significant reimagining of the political, social, and cultural history of the American Civil War. Among the numerous trenchant essays, a few pieces stand out for this reader. Mark Noll's "The Bible and Slavery" brilliantly explores Americans' various uses ofthe Scripture, documenting "a theological crisis of the first order." (43) Harry S. Stout and Christopher Grasso's "Civil War, Religion, and Communications: The 342CIVIL WAR HISTORY Case ofRichmond" manages to map outthe wartime history ofthe Confederacy's capital in an imaginative (and surprisingly comprehensive) forty pages. Stout and Grasso reveal a new Southern culture emerging though fast days, jeremiads , and other religious forms. 'The Coming ofthe Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis," by George M. Fredrickson, connects the religious history of the war to the political culture of the North by highlighting the Northern clergy's "new exaltation of power and authority as antidotes to democracy" (121). Fredrickson returns to the themes of his first book, again complicating our sense of wartime politics and, at the same time, locating the origins of Gilded Age conservatism and the Social Gospel movement. After reading the seventeen contributions to this collection, one is struck by a certain absence of sustained attention to the relationship between race and religion in the era ofemancipation. Noll's essay, alert to the importance ofbiblical interpretation in the reconstruction of ideas about race, stands out in this regard. Other authors could benefit from a similar examination of the ways in which racial ideologies were articulated in a religious idiom throughout the 1 860s and beyond. From this book's opening paragraph, we are repeatedly informed that "surprisingly few scholars have undertaken extended, extensive studies" of the role of religion in the American Civil War (v). After numerous such...

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