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Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4486148

1945-2314

William B. Gravely,

Race, History, and American Society

In this study Edward J. Blum indicts northern Protestant leaders, ideologies, and movements for surrendering the post-Civil War ideal of racial justice and abandoning the southern freedpeople. To the sociopolitical factors that created sectional reunion of white Americans, he adds religion as an active force—the highest expression of social legitimacy. A short-lived faith-based egalitarianism, he argues, foundered during Reconstruction and was replaced by a contrary and dominating religious sanction for “the remaking of national whiteness …so successful that it appeared as if it had never been ruptured” (p. 7). Blum makes superb use of popular culture sources, especially the oral tradition of the sermon. In print, photography, and painting, northern media elites articulated the need for national forgiveness to displace the crusade against “caste” (p. 46). The agenda of the civic nationalists whose religious motivations shaped “the Radicalism of Radical Reconstruction” (p. 51) failed tragically. Even as the victorious North poured money into freedmen's aid, a backlash against Radical Republicanism emerged. John H. Hopkins, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horace Greeley, Dwight L. Moody, and Frances Willard paid primary attention to the white wounds of the Civil War. Moody's Third Great Awakening revivalism rejected Reconstruction and spiritually reconciled North and South through a premillennial theology that discouraged challenges to the racial order. Like Moody, who conducted racially segregated meetings, the highly influential Woman's Christian Temperance Union (wctu) cultivated racially separate chapters. While her wctu protected women and children and promoted woman suffrage, Willard succumbed to racism, blaming blacks for their difficulties and contending that interracial sex caused lynching. By the 1870s the popular denominations conceded to racial separation as they formed white fraternal intrasectional relationships. Northern charity to the afflicted South during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 healed old wounds in both regions. This generation-long process culminated in the triumph of a white supremacy that linked race, religion, and nationalism in the war of 1898, when the United States became an “Imperial White Republic” (p. 209).