Our Country explores northern evangelical thought and sentiment in relation to the concept of Union during the Civil War era. The book complements our understanding of northern motivation during the Civil War and contributes to a fuller understanding of the eventual “failure” of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African Americans’ equal inclusion in American society. In short, the book contends that mainstream northern evangelicals consistently subordinated concern for racial justice to an overarching understanding of the Union as a specifically Christian nation that existed in a covenantal relationship to God under their proprietary care. The book joins recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, while it challenges interpretations that understand northern evangelicals primarily in terms of abolitionist millennialism. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather, they entered Reconstruction expecting to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogeneous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause. That restored Union was to be one in which evangelical religious and political assumptions would be even more culturally dominant than they had been during the antebellum years. Focused on much else besides racial justice, northern evangelicals acted as a brake on the abolitionist vision for a racially equitable and inclusive American Union throughout the entire Civil War era.
Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (review)
