Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares: The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict by John H. Matsui (review)

In the past twenty years, religion has become more central to the study of the U.S. Civil War. John H. Matsui, author of The First Republican Army: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2017) and, with Edward J. Blum, War is All Hell: The Nature of Evil and the Civil War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), offers close analysis of the relationship between religious ideas and war in Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares. "Protestants' wartime political ideology and racial views," Matsui argues, "were closely tied to their religious optimism or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and end-times (or eschatological) views" (2). The author focuses on twelve individuals—Anna E. Dickinson, Oliver O. Howard, Julia W. Howe, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Robert L. Dabney, Daniel H. Hill, Emma F. LeConte, George B. McClellan, Leonidas Polk, Margaret J. Preston, and Charles Hodge—who represented "American Protestant Christianity in its various forms and extremes" (7). He also analyzes two "peripheral men," John Brown and Edmund Ruffin, prophets who were "fated to ignite but not direct this war" (8). Although Matsui concentrates on these fourteen individuals, he weaves other people, both civilian and military, into the narrative as necessary.

The Protestants featured in this book agreed with each other on two points: first, that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent and, second, that Christ's return would inaugurate the arrival of heaven on earth. Here the similarities ended. Postmillenarians among them believed that one thousand years of peace and harmony should precede Christ's return. Premillenarians, in contrast, contended that paradise could only exist after Christ returned. Postmillenarians believed in the perfectibility of humankind. Premillenarians doubted that people could be improved through human efforts. Postmillenarians believed they had a duty to reform the world and attempted to do so through temperance campaigns, anti-prostitution efforts, and abolitionism, among other forms of activism. Premillenarians recoiled from this activism and defended hierarchy and racial mastery. Finally, differences in eschatology bled into politics. Postmillenarianism appealed to many Republicans and Africans Americans, whereas most Northern and Southern Democrats tended to gravitate toward premillenarianism.

When the war began, Northern Democrats found themselves in a difficult position. The Confederacy, Matsui contends, was a "consciously premillenarian revolution against politics" (48). That said, Northern Democrats, principally premillenarians, sought to distinguish themselves from Southern premillenarians and Republican postmillenarians. The year 1862 featured a conflict between George B. McClellan's "premillenarian Democratic ideology" and John Pope's "postmillenarian Republican ideology" (86). Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of tens of thousands of African American soldiers represented postmillenarian advances that gave premillenarians nightmares. In 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant grew disgusted about the "premillenarian pessimism that was McClellan's lasting legacy to the Army of the Potomac's general and staff officers" (141). Northern premillenarians attempted to win the White House in 1864 for George B. McClellan. Lincoln's victory gave postmillenarians four more years to wage war against the premillenarian Confederacy. The Freedmen's Bureau, led by postmillenarian Oliver O. Howard, sought to remake the South and help African Americans transition out of slavery. Ultimately, however, "the postmillenarians won the war, but the premillenarians won the peace" (193).

Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares draws on a wide array of sources and skillfully explores conflicts between premillenarianism and postmillenarianism from the late antebellum period through the end of the U.S. Civil War. This volume will work well in graduate seminars and will appeal to anyone interested in the U.S. Civil War, religious history, the impact of religion on war (and vice versa), and the history of slavery and race in the Americas.