Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

Those who study the Battle of Gettysburg are familiar with Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard, Nichols Codori’s barn, and Abraham Brien’s farmhouse because of the fighting that took place in those locations. Alternately, Steve Longenecker is interested in these folks because they offer a window into religion in the “Border North.” The Sherfys were Dunkers, the Codoris French Catholic, and the Briens, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Longenecker looks at themes of refinement, diversity, and race and concludes, “The great conflict only nudged faith” (6).

Longenecker opens with an early history of Gettysburg’s denominations contained—within the area encompassed by the modern-day park. Gettysburg’s Scots-Irish formed a Presbyterian congregation on Upper Marsh Creek in the 1740s, moving to Gettysburg in 1813, and becoming the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church. In 1782, two Scottish dissenter groups formed the Associated Reform congregation, while the Methodists formed a “class” in 1815. The town’s first AME Zion congregation formed in 1838 after a group of African Americans withdrew from the white congregation. The 1830s saw Christ Lutheran, St. Francis Xavier, and a Dunker meeting house all open.

Longenecker then turns to refinement in theory and in practice, contending that “early nineteenth-century Americans grew self-conscious about themselves and their surroundings” and that the religious sphere reflected burgeoning middle-class values (37). Thus, “when people went to church, they usually got refined rather than reformed” (38). The market revolution was critical, as “the house of refinement was built on a rock of economic growth” (53). With their books, libraries, and lectures, the Lutheran Theological Seminary and Pennsylvania College were some of the most visible signs of refinement. The Dunkers were one of the few congregations to resist refinement and the move toward formally trained preachers. Ultimately, the trappings of refinement—church steeples, bells, and organs—saddled many congregations with crippling debts.

Two chapters cover religious diversity in Gettysburg and the larger Border North, the first focusing on ethnicity and doctrine, the second on race. Longenecker shows the range of ethnic backgrounds present in Gettysburg and the evolution over time from worship in German to English. Overall, the author argues that Gettysburgians were religiously tolerant despite some evidence of anti-Catholicism during the Know-Nothing era. The Catholic Church counted two African Americans among its number, and one or two African Americans identified with the Dunkers. The Dunkers were an outlier for Gettysburg’s congregations, the rest of which were all-white, in that they both opposed slavery and “were distinctly more egalitarian than other white fellowships” (111). AME Zion counted forty-five members on the eve of the Civil War, nearly a quarter of Gettysburg’s black population. Longenecker summarizes, “Black religion, independent but barely, was especially characteristic of the Border North and would soon be the national pattern for a long time” (127).

During the Civil War, “the relationship between faith and the nation-state grew much closer. Religion, then, felt change, but modestly rather than fundamentally” (131). The first two years of the war brought little change to religion in Gettysburg. As a result of the battle there, many congregations closed for extended periods. St. Paul’s Lutheran had been in decline before the battle and did not reopen, while much of Gettysburg’s African American population never returned afterward, and AME Zion’s membership thus declined considerably. The other congregations suffered few long-term effects. Apart from a slight elevation in the stature of women, a consequence of their spear-heading relief and rebuilding efforts after the battle, “the great armed clash changed Gettysburg religion little” (159). Ultimately, “the most conspicuous religious change was the growth of civil religion, the blending of faith with nationalism and a turning point in church-state relations” (6). In this sense, “Gettysburg provides a foretaste of modernity” (178). Longenecker concludes...