When Slavery Was Called Freedom Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War by John Patrick Daly (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002
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REVIEWS 53 of footnotes is particularly distress- AMANDAI. SELIGMANis associate pro- ing because Kings is clearly built on fessor of History at the University of prodigious research. As is, it is a work Wisconsin-Milwaukee,where she also that readers must use only with the teaches in the Urban Studies Pro- greatest of care. grams. She is the author of Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Poli- cy on Chicago5 West Side (2005). When Slavery Was Called Freedom Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War By John Patrick Daly (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Pp. ix, 207. Notes, selected bibliography, index. $45.00.) In this concise monograph, John sonal independence and self-control. Patrick Daly presents a dramatically Ministers preached that individuals revisionist assessment of antebellum could master their passions and attain southern religion’s role in the ideo- wealth and power. Economic pros- logical debate over slavery. Drawing perity was not a matter of luck or inspiration from such scholars as chance, because God ruled all human Eugene Genovese, Daly contends that affairs. Southern prosperity generat- the South never diverged from the ed through slavery was therefore nation’s fundamental cultural unity, viewed as proof of that institution’s especially its faith in divinely guided divine sanction. material progress. Both northern and Combing through the sermons, southern evangelical religion cele- correspondence, and published writ- brated individualism and moral self- ings of church leaders, Daly finds that discipline and preached that southern proslavery advocates rarely economic reward was the providen- claimed that slavery was an ideal tial reward for moral virtue. institution or that it would survive Evangelicalism began to assert its forever. He sees George Fitzhugh and hold over the southern mind in the James Henry Hammond as unrepre- first third of the nineteenth century. sentative of regional thinking-most It was not the rise of abolitionism, southern proslavery arguments were Daly contends, but the triumph of not in contradiction to the nation’s this theological outlook linlung moral free-labor ideology. Southern evan- with material progress that fueled gelicals, in contrast, argued that slaves proslavery ideology. Evangelical reli- were not involuntary laborers and gion conditioned southerners to per- that they had the same opportunities 54 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY open to them as any moral agents. ern church leaders to employ apoca- Southerners boasted that the slaves lyptic and prophetic rhetoric to rally freely accepted labor discipline as a their region behind the Confederacy. means to instill both moral self- Defeat in the Civil War did not end restraint and a superior work ethic. southern whites’ belief in their moral Slavery was viewed as a free labor sys- superiority, but it did cause them to tem and therefore would generate lose optimism and diverge from the great prosperity for all. national faith in progress. Postbellurn Racist assumptions underlay southern religion retreated into pes- evangelical proslaveqnsm. Advocates simism and otherworldliness, recov- argued that God had permitted the ering its love of progress and enslavement of the Africans on laissez-faire capitalism only when account of their moral debasement. regional prosperity returned in the Slavery would move slaves in moral last decades of the twentieth century. paths through the inculcation of By placing proslaveryism within a internal mechanisms of control. Slav- persistent ideological mainstream, ery therefore was part of a divine plan Daly challenges historians to for the redemption of the African acknowledge that for the past two race. Southern evangelicals looked centuries national elite groups have forward to the eventual end of slav- used religion to justify their own ery and the colonization of the blacks prosperity and to rationalize racial back to Africa on a divinely controlled and economic inequalities as conse- timetable. quence of the underclass’s character Debating the abolitionists con- failings. vinced southern evangelicals that they were the true orthodox Christians. JOHN R. MCKIVIGANis Mary O’Brien They charged abolitionists with Gibson Professor of History at Indi- doubting God’s moral ordering of the ana University-Purdue University at universe. Such faith allowed south- Indianapolis. The Spirits of America A Social History ofAlcohol By Eric Burns (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Pp. 336. Notes, select bibliography, index. $29.00.) Eric Burns has given us an enjoyable long and frequently controversial but rather enigmatic book. It is beau- experience with beverage alcohol. But tifully written and it purports to for all of the promise of its title, the address a serious subject-America’s book has a hard time defining itself. .