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The Catholic Historical Review 88.3 (2002) 620-621



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Book Review

A Consuming Fire:
The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South


A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South. By Eugene D. Genovese. [Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, No. 41.] (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 180. $24.95.)

One relatively small point made by Eugene Genovese in his tome, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), takes center stage in this new little book, the substance of which first appeared in the forty-first Annual Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University. In the earlier publication Genovese noted that some Southern reformers aimed to strengthen rather than undermine the institution of slavery. In the newer text, Genovese investigates this aim by analyzing the nature and consequence of the South's insistence that "Christian slavery" not only was sanctioned by the Bible, but also could serve as the best hope for preparing for the Kingdom of God. While thus asserting the benefits of Christian slavery, many prominent Catholics, Protestants, and Jews also pointed out that the actual practice of slavery in the American South fell far short of biblical standards, and therefore called for significant reform. The voice of these reformers is the subject of Genovese's book.

Genovese credits other scholars, including Drew Gilpin Faust in The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1988), and Mitchell Snay in Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York, 1993), for furthering his and our understanding of Southern religion. Unlike these works, Genovese's own book does not rely as heavily on primary materials, but does offer complex analysis. For example, concerning the frequently debated question of whether Southerners felt guilty about owning slaves, Genovese slightly altered his long-held opposition suggesting that, in response to the challenges of the reformers, many slaveholders at least acknowledged their inability to live according to the standards of Christian slaveholding, even though at the same time they introduced little change to the management of their own slaves.

Genovese's most powerful insights emerge as he traces the slaveholders' insistence on the biblical sanction of slavery into the war and postwar period. In the Catholic Church, Bishop Augustine Verot of Saint Augustine consistently denounced [End Page 620] as a "grievous sin" not slavery itself but the disregard of a master's duty toward a slave, while Bishop John McGill of Richmond described the war as "a scourge of God" and a punishment for slaveholders' irresponsibility (pp. 54, 57). After the war, amidst a weakening of orthodoxy and while adopting some aspects of Northern imperialism, other Southern clerics still hoped for a milder form of personal servitude, but after the overwhelming forces of Northern capitalism crushed any hope for a continuance of Southern ways, a host of Southern leaders concluded that God had punished Southerners for their mistreatment of slaves (even though God never denied the right to own slaves). In the mind of the white Christian South, slavery had been the part of God's law that humans simply had abused.

Linking slavery in this fashion to its religious justification certainly adds depth and drama to the Southern saga, but may somewhat overstate the case. Genovese seems to suggest that all Southern clerics called for reform, blamed the war on poor exercise of Christian duty, and attributed the fall of the Confederacy to moral irresponsibility. Undoubtedly, the mind of the white Christian South was not that unified and/or pervasive. Despite this concern for context, which such a small book can hardly be blamed for lacking, Genovese definitely achieved his important aim of proclaiming the voice of the reformers. In so doing, he adds depth to the growing body of literature on the Christian South by offering particular insight into how the South viewed its own demise.

 



C. Walker Gollar
Xavier University

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