When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (review)

In contrast to the historians who have emphasized the South's divergence from American national ideals, John Patrick Daly's When Slavery Was Called Freedom highlights the similarities between the two major sections of the United States during the three decades preceding the Civil War. Daly argues that, despite the serious political disagreements that eventually plunged the nation into war, the South and the North were culturally quite similar before 1861. One of the key factors uniting the country was evangelical Protestantism—a religious worldview that focused on the importance of conversion, individual autonomy, and moral accountability. Evangelicals optimistically imagined that they could not only comprehend the divine will but also pattern their lives and the life of their nation upon it.

In the eyes of nineteenth-century evangelicals, religious faith had many practical as well as spiritual consequences. Godliness, they believed, bestowed power on the converted and enabled them to reap material rewards. Confident, moreover, of the providential nature of their "peculiar institution," white evangelicals in the South maintained that anyone, even a slave, who accepted the Christian gospel had the potential to enjoy "true freedom . . . regardless of material conditions" (10). Although Daly concedes that this attempt to tout the advantages of slavery was fundamentally "delusive" (114), he also insists that pious white Southerners so blurred the theoretical distinctions between slave labor and free labor that they genuinely believed secession was necessary to defend the freedom of slaves and slaveholders alike. Only after the demise of their "evangelical success ethic" (131) on the battlefields of the Civil War did white Protestants begin to exhibit the "otherworldly, . . . backward-looking" (154) characteristics that epitomized religion in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As the author himself recognizes, his argument contradicts two significant trends in the historiography of the American South. First, Daly underscores the differences between such proslavery ideologues as George Fitzhugh and James Henry Hammond and the popular evangelical thinkers on whom he concentrates. Unlike the distinguished intellectuals who embraced romantic ideals of patriarchy and social hierarchy while disparaging bourgeois individualism, evangelicals continually stressed the value of capitalism and a free economy. Whereas historians have frequently been captivated by the literature produced by a handful of anti-modern theorists, Daly contends that the writings of evangelical clergy and theologians were far more representative of white Southerners' hopeful ideas about slavery. Second, Daly explicitly rejects the thesis advanced recently by historians of American religion that locates white evangelicals on the margins of antebellum Southern society. Although several prominent scholars (e.g., Christine Heyrman, Donald Mathews, and Anne Loveland) have pointed out the countercultural aspects of early evangelicalism, Daly chides these academics for taking evangelicals' occasional condemnations of materialism and their warnings against the abuses of slavery "at face value" (14). Most antebellum evangelicals, he declares, had no resemblance to the gloomy fatalists described by religious historians but sounded far more like "free market capitalists" and "Social Darwinists" (16) advocating laissez-faire economic policies.

This book is not without its faults. For example, Daly's writing style tends to be flat and repetitive, and his prose is all too often impenetrable. The focus on proslavery religious thought notwithstanding, Daly would have been wise also to include the voices of some African Americans in his narrative for, as he knows, not all evangelicals in the antebellum South were white slaveholders. Whatever the author's exact intentions, he does leave the impression that Southern evangelicalism was essentially monochromatic and unified rather than multiracial and diverse. Despite these criticisms, When Slavery Was Called Freedom still makes a significant contribution to scholarly understanding of the social implications of religious faith in nineteenth-century America.