Bishop McIlvaine, Slavery, Britain, and the Civil War by Richard W. Smith (review)

Few histories of nineteenth-century American religion include material on Episcopal bishop Charles P. McIlvaine. Yet, as Richard W. Smith makes clear in Bishop McIlvaine, Slavery, Britain, and the Civil War, the Ohioan occupied an important leadership position. Perhaps most significantly, his extensive British connections positioned him to promote English sympathy for the Union during the American Civil War when that loyalty remained very much up for grabs.

As an evangelical Episcopalian who came of age during the Second Great Awakening, McIlvaine rose quickly to positions of influence and prominence. He began his career auspiciously at age twenty-three, when the U.S. Senate selected him as chaplain. Subsequently considered for important and prestigious pulpits as well as the presidencies of leading universities, McIlvaine served as chaplain at West Point and pastor at St. Ann’s parish in Brooklyn before settling down to a long career as Ohio bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

McIlvaine lived in an America and led a church wracked by conflict over slavery. These conflagrations manifested acutely in Ohio, where mob attacks on abolitionists became almost routine in the 1830s and race riots brought deadly clashes in Dayton and Cincinnati in 1841. Disputes about how best to address slavery resulted famously in the 1834 dismissal of students, the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld among them, from Cincinnati’s Lane Seminary. Ohio Episcopalians, however, mostly ignored the issue, concerned that these disputes would split the church. Though Smith maintains that McIlvaine embraced an “aggressive, biblical abolitionist position,” this assertion seems overblown (29). Some of McIlvaine’s copious correspondence that might shed light on his position does not survive, and Smith can offer little to document such an opinion. If the bishop espoused this cause, he kept it close to the chest and did not work actively with Ohio’s cadre of abolitionists. In his abundant available writings, McIlvaine seems to have been far more concerned with doctrinal concerns than social ones, though he did support the ordination of black clergy.

Between 1830 and the outbreak of the Civil War, McIlvaine traveled four times to England. His work in transatlantic benevolent, Bible, ecumenical, and missionary societies introduced him to leading British figures, and he often addressed important gatherings, preached to large crowds, and rubbed elbows with dignitaries. The extent of his entrée into British society seemed confirmed when, in 1858, the Prince of Wales and his entourage accepted an invitation to call at McIlvaine’s Cincinnati home during a trip to the States.

The bishop’s thick nexus of relationships with important Britons in church, society, and government fitted him to promote English loyalty to the Union during the American Civil War. This moment constitutes the high point of Smith’s narrative. Recommended to Secretary of State Seward by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, McIlvaine spent the first four months of 1862 in England at U.S. government expense. In the midst of significant anti-federal sentiment further stoked by the recent Trent affair, McIlvaine worked his contacts among the middle and upper classes to promote support for the Union. The British displayed a wide variety of complicated concerns about the American Civil War. They feared a strong and united America but hesitated to support a new nation devoted to human bondage. Many regarded the Union cause as simply a war for empire, and they needed American cotton to supply the textile mills that fueled their own economy. Though the British government ultimately withheld recognition of the Confederacy, it is not at all clear that McIlvaine’s efforts figured importantly in this decision.

Smith demonstrates mastery of copious material and has conducted meticulous research in hundreds of documents, letters, and major newspapers of the day. Ultimately, however the book suffers for its organization and writing, which follow the bishop’s day-to-day affairs too closely. Page after page reads as one incident after another, without effective cues for the reader...