Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction.

Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. Edited by Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 265. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-86554-987-7; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-86554-962-1.)

Most published collections of scholarly essays are of mixed quality, and Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction is no exception. It contains a number of deeply researched, genuinely insightful pieces, several other solid contributions, and several less successful articles. Overall, it must be said that Vale of Tears is a disappointing book, whose essays the editors have failed to mold into a coherent whole. Most obviously, the book purports to be about Reconstruction, yet most of its contributors do not actually focus on the years just after the Civil War. Perhaps it is impossible to fit religious developments into a politically determined chronology, but the editors do little to acknowledge that limitation of their work.

Major conceptual problems appear in the introduction. Editors Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole inform readers that it "is a hopeful sign" that some contributors "would even cringe at being labeled 'religious historians.'" For that reason they relish tearing down "false barricades" between history and other academic disciplines (p. 3). The editors claim to have sought out essays that bring out the religious aspects of issues normally treated in economic and political frameworks. Their claims to be reinventing the discipline in this fashion are probably excessive, not giving adequate credit to the many historians who have already made similar connections. The introduction ends with an appeal to "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," which, although moving, appears anachronistic in a book about Reconstruction.

Yet there are scholarly diamonds in the book. Mark Wahlgren Summers provides the best essay in Vale of Tears, thoroughly documenting Republican appeals to biblical imagery and Protestant ideals. This imagery came more readily to them than to Democrats, and Republicans of all stripes appeared to believe the United States possessed a divine mission to promote freedom and righteousness. Yet such belief did not prevent the party, once in power, from immersion in massive corruption. Daniel Stowell's short essay about the word Redemption shows that white southerners used it precisely because of its religious implications. The word, argues Stowell, also implied "a new birth for the South," not merely "restoration of the status quo antebellum" (p. 146). David T. Gleeson convincingly demonstrates that southern Catholics retained their regional loyalties and prejudices during the war and Reconstruction.

Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr. and Joan Waugh have also produced fine essays, though neither actually focuses on Reconstruction itself. Looking at the Sewanee conference of 1883, Shattuck concludes that southern Episcopalians favored racial paternalism, maintaining the authority of (white) bishops over all believers, black and white, in their dioceses. This strategy meant eschewing the nearly complete formal separation of believers that most southern denominations practiced. Waugh demonstrates that the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant, at which both Union and Confederate generals served as pallbearers, was a watershed moment in sectional reconciliation. She shows that southern newspapers almost uniformly praised Grant, choosing to recall his magnanimity at Appomattox rather than his Radical Republican sympathies.

Other essays are less convincing. Kimberly R. Kellison cites Ku Klux Klan violence, detailing strict discipline enforced against female church members. Then, without any real evidence, she conflates the two, claiming that by promoting "white household purity," church leaders helped promote KKK "vigilantism" (p. 35). This claim appears doubtful and is certainly unproved. In any case, many anti-Klan church leaders would similarly have prized female purity. Citing only a handful of primary sources, Scott Poole's essay maintains that southern lynch mobs saw themselves as engaged in an apocalyptic, end-times drama. This thesis is a provocative one, but the rest of the essay undermines its credibility. Poole uses the term fundamentalism without any apparent knowledge of its nuances, confusing it with the significantly different ethos of Pentecostalism. Strangely, he uses Georgia Methodists Sam P. Jones and Atticus Haygood as the chief exemplars of this apocalyptic frenzy. The author seems unaware that Haygood dedicated much of his life to promoting black education and to opposing lynching or that he was the very prototype of a postmillennial, New South liberal.

Kent A. McConnell's essay is more tedious travelogue than scholarly analysis. Describing the burials of two unacclaimed Civil War soldiers, he finds, unsurprisingly, that devotion to the war dead has faded over the last 140 years. And, although Laura J. Veltman reminds readers of the power of Thomas Dixon's prose, her essay may mislead them about the actual nature of Reconstruction, given that Dixon wrote decades later and that his work was mostly mythological. For instance, Veltman cites two obscure theological advocates of polygenesis to boost her claim that Dixon also held this theory, but she fails to mention that no prominent southern theologian, let alone any major southern denomination, ever subscribed to polygenesis.

Given the somewhat spotty nature of Vale of Tears, scholars may want to spend their own money for other books. Although several of its essays are worthwhile, one might do better to get a copy from the nearest research library.

CHRISTOPHER H. OWEN

Northeastern State University