Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri by Lucas P. Volkman (review)

Lucas Volkman has produced a richly textured history of Missouri evangelicals—Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists—experiencing denominational division and exacerbating sectionalized conflict within the border state from the 1830s through Reconstruction. Appearing as the latest installment in Oxford's Religion in America series, the book is commendable in several respects. By treating the denominational schisms throughout the entire era, Volkman boldly—and truthfully—proclaims that he "breaks new ground" (xiii). Perhaps more notable is his portrayal of how the national disputes played out legally, politically, in churches, through the media, and sometimes violently in the lives of various people—male and female, white and black, rich and poor, clerical and lay, and rural and urban—across the Union's most turbulent state. It will likely surprise few that evangelicals were caught up in and contributed to Missouri's turmoil, but Volkman's research in local sources reveals the reality with impressive specificity and complexity. The book's virtue might be its vice, however, given the author's contention that Missouri's experience was "rife with implications for the larger crisis of the Union from 1837 to 1876" or, as he puts it slightly differently elsewhere, "for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States" (xii, xv, 225). The precise nature of those national implications is not always apparent, despite Volkman's admirable portrayal of Missouri evangelicals' local activities.

In a testament to how central evangelicalism has become to historians' understanding of Civil War–era America, thanks to work by Richard Carwardine, Mark Noll, and George Rable, among others, Volkman never defines the term and simply uses the well-known denominational ruptures as his point of departure in chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3 skillfully personalize denominational property disputes while foregrounding female and African American evangelicals enmeshed in them. Chapter 3 in particular, perhaps the book's best, recounts the story of an 1855 Missouri Supreme Court case, Farrar v. Finney; therein Volkman uniquely enfleshes the national Methodist split by narrating an African American congregation's tragically futile attempt to affiliate with Northern Methodists.

Volkman strains in chapters 4 and 5 to present evangelicals during the 1850s and the Civil War within the context of the burgeoning national print culture and the larger theological, moral-philosophical, and political debates over slavery. He concludes that "pro-Confederate and pro-Union evangelical fervor powerfully energized the guerrilla conflict and the vigilantism associated with it" (125). Although Volkman notes Michael Fellman's Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War, he overlooks Mark Neely's Civil War and the Limits of Destruction—which questions the national influence of Missouri's violence. In any event, Volkman predictably reveals that both sides assumed they had God's providential support, but, surprisingly, there is no discussion of larger themes related to millennialism, nationalism, or the importance of the Union that perhaps animated many pro-Northern evangelical Missourians. Absent as well is reference to William Harris's Lincoln and the Border States, which might have brought more nuance to Volkman's treatment while simultaneously underscoring his sense of Missouri's national significance. What emerges is a Missouri bifurcated simply over "the morality of slavery" (132).

Chapter 6 contains intriguing and disturbing accounts of pro-Northern evangelicals imperiously running roughshod over their pro-Confederate evangelical neighbors by seizing or occupying churches and homes, shutting down newspapers, and violating civil liberties during the war. Volkman adapts Harry Stout's questionable contention (in Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War [2007]) that evangelicals nationwide helped generate, as Volkman paraphrases it, "a new civil religion" committed "to civil and political equality for African Americans and loyalty to the Union" (158).

The latter aspect of that putative "new civil religion" receives most of Volkman's attention in chapter 7. In 1865 Missouri passed a...