North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837-1861 by Victor B.HowardReview by: Mary Kupiec CaytonThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (JULY 1991), p. 366Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23519514 .

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366 Book Reviews

Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837-1861. By

Victor B. Howard. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990. Acknowledgments,

introduction, notes, abbreviations, bibliography, index. Pp. xv, 263. $27.50.)

The title of this book is deceptive. Victor Howard goes beyond a narrative

describing the growth and eventual fragmentation of the Calvinist home

missionary movement in the West and South. Rather, through a study of

institutional tensions within the movement, he makes a case that the church

was implicated more greatly than historians have heretofore acknowledged in escalating the political tensions that led to the Civil War.

To the extent that historians have dealt at all with the connection between

religion and politics, Howard claims, they have tended to take uncritically the Garrisonian assessment of the institutional churches: that they tended to favor slavery, either through active attempts to keep sectional controversy out of denominations or through a studied indifference to the issue as a whole. Howard's study of the home missionary movement is grounded in church history rather than in the writings of abolitionists. He shows convincingly that among a significant segment of Calvinists, at least, the question of whether or not one owned slaves eventually became a litmus test for religious fellowship. To be a Christian was to oppose any contact with slavery or slaveholders at all— both in religious organizations and through an active involvement in secular

politics. The result, Howard believes, was a failure of moral leadership as much clerical as political. When the politics of antislavery became the central issue of Calvinist Christianity, the church lost its ability to mediate any kind of a moral solution to the controversy.

Conscience and Slavery makes a significant contribution to the field of church

history, but it is not without its difficulties. Howard offers only the Calvinists'

story, and their experience within the denominational spectrum of the time was an atypical one. How significant was the Calvinist influence, either in terms of numbers of adherents or disproportionate institutional influence, elsewhere in society? Howard never says. In addition, the book is noticeably difficult to read. The details and facts that the author provides often overshadow

any attention to their significance and implications. Moreover, the central characters of the narrative are nameless, faceless

acronyms (such as the AHMS, the AMA, the ABCFM, and the WHFMA). The narrative, potentially full of passion and tragedy, comes across as dry and devoid of human feeling. This is a story of how all conversation between

persons of goodwill broke down at a crucial moment in history. Its human dimensions are more significant and poignant than Howard is able to render them.

Miami University

Mary Kupiec Cayton

An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War. By Charles P. Roland. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Preface, illustrations, maps, sources, index.

Pp. xii, 289. $30.00.)

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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