A good book review is a historian’s best friend. In that spirit, The Life of a Historian offers our review of…

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Affiliate Disclosure

The Life of the Historian:
A Book Review of Mary L. Dudziak’s

Cold War Civil Rights:
Race and the Image of American Democracy

In Cold War Civil Rights, Mary L. Dudziak situates the American civil rights movement within the broader geopolitical context of the Cold War. In doing so, Dudziak joins an emerging field that includes Brenda Gayle Plummer and Gerald Horne, whose respective works Dudziak models her own after.[1] Together, their research highlights and emphasizes the interrelationship between race, civil rights, and international relations during the World War II and Cold War eras. Dudziak, in particular, examines the civil rights movement through an international lens. She argues that “civil rights reform was in part a product of the Cold War.”[2] In other words, Dudziak contends that the geopolitical challenges of the nascent Cold War engendered the federal government’s interest and eventual involvement in the civil rights movement. For the federal government, civil rights reform was an extension of its foreign policy. Her work, therefore, “traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy” from 1946 to the mid-1960s.[3] In the process, Dudziak offers new insights and a fresh perspective on the history of the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

As the United States emerged from World War II as a world power, foreign nations not only became more observant of “the expansion of U.S. influence and power in the world,” but also more knowledgeable about race relations within American democracy.[4] According to Dudziak, international criticisms and perceptions of American race relations raised concerns among government officials and, in turn, eventually led to their involvement in civil rights reform. As the United States sought “to reshape the postwar world in its own image,” newspapers worldwide regularly published stories exposing America’s race problem.[5] For example, in November 1947, Haiti’s secretary of agriculture, Francois Georges, planned to attend a conference hosted by the National Association of Commissioners, Secretaries and Directors of Agriculture in Biloxi, Mississippi. However, upon his arrival, the hotel housing the conference’s attendees denied Georges their service “for ‘reasons of color.’”[6] Newspapers around the world quickly detailed the event. Soon after, editorials critical of Georges’ reception in America appeared in the Haitian newspapers La Nation and Le Nouvelliste as well as the Jamaican newspaper, the Kingston Daily Cleaner. In response, the United States embassy in Haiti felt compelled to issue a public apology. Foreign newspapers, however, did not limit their coverage to the experiences of visiting foreign officials. Local acts of racial violence appeared on the front pages of foreign newspapers. The lynching of African Americans was a source of continued discussion within their editorial sections. In response, United States diplomats expressed their concerns to the State Department, arguing that racial inequality at home affected the image of America abroad, thus, limiting the United States government’s persuasive power in the ideological war between democratic capitalism and communism.

International reactions not only challenged the pristine image of American freedom and democracy that government officials looked to project globally but also provided the Soviet Union with a useful propaganda theme. According to Dudziak, concurrent with this development, the geopolitical implications of the nascent Cold War now framed the international discussions among world leaders. However, it was not until the NAACP filed a petition with the United Nations in 1947, however, that President Truman and State Department officials began formally addressing civil rights as a foreign policy issue. Although, as Dudziak notes, federal officials only did so in response to the international reception of the NAACP petition. While the NAACP petition received praise from foreign newspapers, it was the concerns the petition elicited from foreign governments that proved even more troubling for United States officials. Following a private meeting with a Dutch official, Robert Coe of the American Embassy, The Hague, filed a report to the State Department detailing their conversation. According to the Dutch official, American racial attitudes and domestic race relations have proven to be an effective propaganda theme for the Soviet Union in Asian, African, and European nations. Furthermore, in light of the NAACP petition, the Dutch official described the difficulty in defending America’s mistreatment of its black citizens. However, as Dudziak points out, there was a solution. According to the Dutch official, the American government needed to “‘devote a major portion of its facilities and energies to a campaign aimed at counteracting the impression so many people have of American racial suppression.’”[7] The State Department followed this suggestion vigorously and did so as a foreign policy initiative.

Relying on archival source material from the State Department—primarily, correspondence between American and foreign diplomats and American and foreign elected officials; and publications from the United States Information Agency and the United States Information Services, most notably The Negro in American Life (c. 1950)—Dudziak illuminates the herculean efforts of the federal government to control the international conversation on American race relations. State Department officials sponsored world speaker tours of African Americans like Walter White, Jay Saunders, and Dr. Max Yergan, who promoted a more racially progressive image of American freedom and democracy. Simultaneously, the federal government actively silenced other African Americans like W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and William Patterson by revoking their passports or limiting their access to a wider audience. The State Department believed their critiques of race, class, and colonialism would prove too damaging to American influence if heard on an international platform. In an ideological war against communism and the Soviet Union, the federal government actively promoted a “particular vision of racial justice” and “kept discussions of broad-based social change, or linking of race and class, off the agenda.”[8] For the United States, “class-based inequality…was a feature of capitalism, an economic system Americans were proud of.”[9] While the Cold War opened doors of opportunity for racial progress, Dudziak argues, it also closed the door on a host of other social and economic reforms.

As the State Department looked to reframe the race narrative, along with the Justice Department they also tried to influence the legal decisions of the Supreme Court via amici curiae laced with arguments about foreign policy concerns. For example, during Brown v. Board of Education State and Justice Department officials “stressed to Supreme Court the international implications of race discrimination and…the negative impact on U.S. foreign relations that a prosegregation decision might have.”[10] When the Supreme Court made its decision on Brown, the State Department issued an immediate radio broadcast through its station, Voice of America. Within hours of the decision, the world knew of America’s landmark case for civil rights reform.

According to Dudziak, international concern for American race relations peaked during the early 1960s. While the racial violence portrayed in the media coverage of Birmingham and the Freedom Rides proved problematic, the international reaction to these events seemed mild in comparison to the events of the 1950s, notably that of Little Rock. Dudziak attributes this to the effectiveness of the State Department as well as key Supreme Court civil rights decisions that included Brown v. Board of Education, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Henderson v. United States. Together, many worldwide began to accept the narrative of the racial progress that the State Department carefully crafted over the decade. For example, following the 1963 March on Washington, the Evening News in Ghana proclaimed the March on Washington as “one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of human history.”[11] Foreign newspapers worldwide, as Dudziak shows, shared this sentiment of the event. The passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 further cemented this belief among the international audience.

Throughout Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak’s two key interventions stand out. Firstly, that “domestic racism and civil rights protest led to international criticism of the U.S. government. International criticism led the federal government to respond, through placating foreign critics by reframing the narrative on race in America” and by enacting or advocating for specific types of civil rights reform.[12] Secondly, without the strategic or geopolitical concerns of the Cold War, the federal government—primarily the State and Justice Department of the executive branch, would have little incentive to address civil rights nor would civil rights reform become a vital foreign policy goal. Once “Vietnam had eclipsed civil rights as a defining issue affecting U.S. prestige abroad,” that incentive vanished.[13]

By examining the civil rights movement through an international lens, Dudziak illuminates the connections between foreign and domestic affairs. As Dudziak argues, “foreign developments help drive domestic politics and policy.”[14] In this case, the combination of international criticisms of American racism and the geopolitical implications of the Cold War facilitated opportunities, albeit limited in scope, for civil rights reform. An international approach to the civil rights movement seems to diminish the agency of grassroots activists and African Americans. However, as Dudziak stresses, without their activism an international reaction does not occur nor the series of civil rights reforms between 1946 and 1965. With Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak offers a new vantage point from which to gain new perspectives of the civil rights movement.

[1] See Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

[2] Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12.

[3] Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 17.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 12.

[6] Ibid., 40.

[7] Ibid., 46.

[8] Ibid., 13.

[9] Ibid., 252.

[10] Ibid., 90.

[11] Ibid., 197.

[12] Ibid., 13.

[13] Ibid., 248.

[14] Ibid., 17.

In this historiographical essay, The Life of a Historian surveys the current scholarship of the history of black banking. In particular, this review primarily focuses on the following historians and their respective books:

Garrett-Scott, Shennette. Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Henderson, Alexa Benson. “R. R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association: Early Organizing Efforts among Black Bankers, 1924-1942.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 117, mo. ½ (January 1993): 51-81.

Osthaus, Carl R. “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier.” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 1 (January 1973): 39–60.

Winford, Brandon. John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2020.

Affiliate Disclosure

Re-Conceptualizing US Capitalism through the Histories and Experiences of Black Financiers and Institutions:

A Review of the Scholarship and Historiography of Black Banking in American History

Introduction to Black Banking Historiography:

Connecting the Histories of US Capitalism, African Americans, and Civil Rights

Although the historiography of black banking is underexplored, a few historians have pressed upon us its importance and value to American history. This essay considers a selection of published works from four of those historians—Carl R. Osthaus, Alexa Benson Henderson, Shennette Garrett-Scott, and Brandon Winford—to survey the field of black banking.[1] Moving in chronological order from the date of their respective publications, this review will focus on the methodological approaches, analytical frameworks, and arguments of each to address their commonalities, differences, and contributions to the field. Although limited in quantity, the current scholarship on black banking is not short on quality nor needs convincing of its significance. The history of black banking intersects with other historiographical conversations including those of capitalism and the civil rights movement. It also broadens our understandings of race, gender, politics, and economics. Significantly, the history of black banking suggests a need to reevaluate and redefine capitalism, and what black banking has meant for both white and black Americans.

The History of Black Banking through Biographical Narratives:

How Telling the Story of One Life Illuminates a Broader History

With “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga,” Osthaus investigates the history of black banking through the lens of Chicago banker and real estate mogul, Jesse Binga. Although his article is biographical in its approach—detailing Binga’s life, specifically his time in Chicago from 1900-1930—it suggests a particular relationship existed between Binga, black financial enterprise, and the black community. Relying primarily on articles and editorials from African American newspapers, Osthaus traces the success and failure of Binga to highlight his intimate relationship with Chicago’s black community. He argues that the meteoritic rise and fall of Binga symbolized and paralleled the economic growth of Chicago’s South Side black community. According to Osthaus, “Chicago in the 1920s was the Mecca of Negro business” and “no person did more than Jesse Binga…to develop Chicago’s South Side.”[2] With the construction and opening of Binga State Bank (BSB) in 1921, Chicago’s black press hailed it “as the first real bank ever constructed” by an African American, and that it “symbolized the commencement of a new era in Chicago businesses.”[3] However, as Osthaus shows, Binga’s business relationship with the South Side was one of contradiction. On the one hand, he genuinely cared about the economic progress of African Americans as shown through his philanthropy and belief that the BSB “could eliminate those ubiquitous financial parasites of the Black Belt” that preyed on the black working-class.[4] On the other hand, as a real estate developer Binga “raised rents excessively and reaped handsome profits from the black community’s critical housing shortage.”[5]

Even still, Binga “became a legendary hero” among the black residents of South Side and was known as a community institution himself.[6] As Osthaus argues, to the South Side Binga “had triumphed over all the handicaps that black capitalists reputedly faced.”[7] The reactions and responses of the black community to Binga’s dramatic fall from financial and social prominence following the closing of the BSB and his eventual arrest, conviction, and imprisonment for embezzlement further imply this sentiment. Osthaus writes that “the public reaction on the South Side was…generally sympathetic” with most associating “his imprisonment with the collapse of his bank and not embezzlement.”[8] Although sentenced to ten years, friends, religious, and “even former foes” rallied to bring about his release from prison three years later in 1938.[9] According to Osthaus, Robert Blackmon of the Defender, “voiced accurately the significance of the former financial king” to South Side and the black community.[10] For Blackmon, “Binga had prospered and had become the symbol of the Negro’s bid for power via respectability. To the South Side he was not a criminal but a victim of the white man’s system.”[11] In many ways, the idea of Binga, the story of his rise to wealth and social prominence, his philanthropy—not necessarily the actual person—underscores the importance of black business and economic success in 1920s Chicago.

Henderson adopts a similar methodological approach as Osthaus both in terms of source material and her decision to study black banking through the lens of one individual. However, she shifts the focus to Philadelphia’s Richard R. Wright to explore the history of the National Negro Bankers Association (NNBA) between 1924-1947. But like Osthaus, Henderson suggests a particular relationship existed between black financial leaders and institutions and the black communities they served. In “Richard R Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association,” Henderson argues that Wright believed in cooperation over competition among black financial institutions and businesses to achieve economic empowerment and independence for African American communities. Furthermore, as the co-founder of the reorganized NNBA, his “ideas provided fodder for its formation” and his “leadership was central to its development.”[12]

Following his retirement from education as Head of Georgia State Industrial College at the age of 65, Wright moved to Philadelphia to start a career as a banker. In Philadelphia, along with his son, Wright founded the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company.[13] According to Henderson, Wright “viewed the necessity of acquiring and maintaining the confidence of the black community as paramount to a successful banking operation.”[14] Initially, for Wright, this meant proving the legitimacy of Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company within his community of Philadelphia. Through sound business decisions and professional and personal relationships with prominent local black leaders and organizations, Wright earned the trust of the black community. By the end of the first year, “deposits in the bank aggregated over $100,000 with more than 4,000 depositors.”[15] With this success, Wright continued to advocate for cooperation over competition and set about re-establishing the NNBA during the mid-1920s. In 1926, the NNBA officially recognized and elected Wright as its president. Under Wright’s leadership, the NNBA worked towards realizing his vision of black financial “cooperation and racial progress.”[16]

Through their respective surveys of Jesse Binga and Richard R. Wright, Osthaus and Henderson identify and address significant connections between black banking and larger historical processes and themes. However, and in addition to the imposed page limitations of a journal article, their interpretive framework and biographical approaches prove too restrictive, and prohibit a prolonged analysis. Furthermore, as Henderson acknowledges in her work, most black-owned banks were in the South. When the NNBA formed under Wright’s leadership, “it was reported that there were in existence seventy black banks” throughout the United States with fifty-seven of them in the South.[17]

A More Expansive and Malleable Biographical Approach and Interpretive Framework:

Exploring the South, Gender, US Capitalism, and the Civil Rights Movement

With their respective works, Winford and Garrett-Scott build on the scholarship of Osthaus and Henderson by expanding their interpretive framework and biographical approach to include new regions, voices, and themes. In John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, Winford “explores the black freedom struggle through the lens of John Wheeler.”[18] Like Osthaus and Henderson, Winford employs a biographical approach. However, Winford freely and deftly wanders away from his central actor to investigate the world around Wheeler. This allows Winford to thoroughly elaborate on his argument “that if we are to fully understand how central economics was to the civil rights movement, we must consider black business.”[19]

This interpretive technique proves most effective in Winford’s earlier chapters when he examines the generation of black business leaders in Durham and at the Mechanics and Farmers Bank before Wheeler. From these observations, Winford makes a significant contribution to the field with what he calls “black business activism.”[20] During the ‘Golden Age of Black Business,’ from 1900 to 1930, Durham became known as the ‘Capital of the Black Middle Class.’[21] For Winford, “black Durham became a training ground” for black business activism.[22] “Schooled in the racial etiquette” of “progressive southern race relations” and “community leadership,” Wheeler and his generation felt empowered to use “their ‘economic independence’ as a ‘launching pad into civil rights.’”[23] Winford argues that Wheeler’s brand of activism “in many ways rejected racial uplift.”[24] Winford calls Wheeler’s economic vision “New South prosperity.”[25] Working within an integrationist framework, Wheeler called for an end to Jim Crow segregation and “institutional forms of racism” to “give African Americans complete ‘freedom of movement’ in every area of American life.”[26] With racial equality and full citizenship secured, black economic power would follow leading to “widespread prosperity in the New South.”[27]

Additionally, by following Wheeler throughout his life, Winford’s study “considers the framework of the long civil rights movement.”[28]  This expansive timeframe helps Winford further illuminate the relationship between black financial leaders and institutions and the black community first expressed by Osthaus and Henderson. Winford highlights this relationship well through Wheeler’s involvement in each of the three phases of the civil rights movement: legal phase, direct-action phase, and implementation phase. Wheeler throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s wielded his influence as a black power broker and banker to ensure racial equality and black economic power. This included his legal battles for educational equality and his political interventions in “reform and policymaking at the local, state, and national levels.”[29] With a chapter on urban renewal, Winford also explores the more contentious aspect of this relationship. In doing so, he shows that “the goals of civil rights and black economic power did not always mesh with black capitalism.”[30] Wheeler, as a member of the Durham Redevelopment Commission and advocate for urban renewal, became a target of black Durham. For many displaced black residents, Wheeler sold “‘out the black community.’”[31]

Through his biographical approach and narrative of John Wheeler, Winford highlights important connections between black banking and business and the civil rights movement. Moreover, his work repositions the history of black banking in the South where it was most prevalent and influential. Before Winford’s intervention, John Wheeler eluded scholarly discussions on black banking and the civil rights movement. With John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, such omissions will no longer be possible as Winford clearly and persuasively illustrates the importance of Wheeler’s activism, one “grounded in economic black power,” to the civil rights movement.[32]

Even more than Winford, Garrett-Scott maximizes the utility of the interpretive framework and biographical approach set forth by Osthaus and Henderson. In Banking on Freedom, Garrett-Scott not only anchors her narrative to the life of Maggie Lena Walker but also focuses on the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL) and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond. By grounding herself primarily in the life of Walker and her contributions to the ISOL as Right Worthy Grand (RWG) Secretary and St. Luke Bank as founder and president, Garrett-Scott ably “considers the black women who created webs of formal and informal banking and savings institutions.”[33] In doing so, Garrett-Scott illustrates the significant financial roles of African American women not only within their households and families but also within their larger communities. Banking on Freedom, however, does more than simply “locating women” within the history of capitalism and US finance.[34] It demonstrates how “gender and race shaped and were shaped by finance capitalism.”[35] Black women formed and supported their own financial, political, and social networks and institutions within and in opposition to existing racial and gender power dynamics and norms. Thus, African American women “forged their own definitions of economic opportunities and citizenship.”[36]

With Banking on Freedom, Garrett-Scott intervenes and offers significant contributions to the field of black banking and the historiography of capitalism. By investigating the experiences of African American women well before Walker, the ISOL, and the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott reveals the myriad of ways black women overcame racial paternalism and gendered economics to exert their financial autonomy and participation within US capitalism of the postemancipation era. As Garrett-Scott shows, black women continued to redefine how race and gender norms and identities affected their financial opportunities and economic power into the twentieth century. As president of St. Luke Bank, Walker adopted non-industry strategies like a reliance on the politics of respectability to mitigate risks and financially serve black working-class women who, because of their gender and race, were marginalized by US capitalism and therefore, left financially vulnerable. Although, as Garrett-Scott notes, much has been written on US capitalism, historians have neglected the role of gender in the development and practice of capitalism. Banking on Freedom addresses that omission with Garrett-Scott effectively illustrating the need to include discussions of gender within all surveys of US capitalism. Furthermore, like Winford, Garrett-Scott highlights the value of investigating the impact of black financial institutions outside of economics. By recognizing St. Luke as “also a political institution for black communities,” Garrett-Scott shows how Walker and St. Luke helped mobilize black women as voters and political actors to challenge Jim Crow.[37]

Conclusion

Although the historiography of black banking is underdeveloped, these works underscore the value of black banking to broader fields of history and larger historiographical conversations. Black-owned banks not only represented financial opportunities and black economic power but also provided African Americans with a vehicle and means for political and social change. Furthermore, black banks illuminate the racial and gendered economic practices and values that characterized much of the history of US capitalism. Together, the scholarship on black banking suggests—and begins—a much-needed conversation on reevaluating and broadening our current historical definitions and conceptual frameworks for US capitalism and citizenship.

[1] Carl R. Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 1 (January 1973): 39–60; Alexa Benson Henderson, “R. R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association: Early Organizing Efforts among Black Bankers, 1924-1942,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 117, mo. ½ (January 1993): 51-81; Brandon Winford, John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2020); and Shennette Garrett-Scott, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

[2] See Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga, Black Financier,” 46 and 39.

[3] Osthaus, 43.

[4] Ibid., 44.

[5] Ibid., 53.

[6] Ibid., 39.

[7] Ibid., 49.

[8] Ibid., 59.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Henderson, “R. R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association,” 52.

[13] The bank, Citizens and Southern Bank, opened in 1920, and on January 19, 1926 “they formally organized the Citizens and Southern and Trust Company of Philadelphia. It became the first trust company organized by African Americans.” Henderson, 56.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 59.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Winford, John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, 1.

[19] Winford, 2.

[20] Ibid., 4.

[21] Ibid., 4.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 33.

[24] Ibid., 2.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 3.

[27] Ibid., 2.

[28] Ibid, 8.

[29] Ibid., 9.

[30] Ibid., 6.

[31] Ibid., 202.

[32] Ibid., 2.

[33] Garrett-Scott, Banking on Freedom, 4.

[34] Garrett-Scott, 8

[35] Ibid., 194.

[36] Ibid., 4.

[37] Ibid., 6.

A good book review is a historian’s best friend. In that spirit, The Life of a Historian offers our review of…

Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Oshatz, Molly. Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Affiliate Disclosure

The Life of the Historian:
A Book Review of Mark Noll’s and Molly Oshatz’s

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
&
Slavery and Sin:
The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism

The question of slavery pervaded all aspects of American society until its eventual dissolution with the ending of the Civil War. American slavery, arguably, affected religion more than most social institutions. Both pro- and antislavery religious leaders looked to the authority of the scriptures to develop arguments in defense of their views. The abolitionist movement and slavery debates during the decades preceding the war accentuated the conflicting biblical interpretations and the importance of scripture for public policy and social issues. The debates among religious leaders, particularly Protestants, over slavery and its moral standing according to the Bible, proved unable to engender a consensus. Ultimately, the Civil War ended a debate the Bible could not for religious leaders and theologians.

Historians Mark A. Noll and Molly Oshatz explore this history in their respective works, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis and Slavery and Sin. Both agree that the slavery debates created a theological crisis that ended not with a consensus biblical interpretation, but by the Civil War. However, each perceives the effect of this differently. For Noll, this crisis diminished the authority of religion on social issues; furthermore, “the religion with which theologians emerged from the war was essentially the same as that with which they entered the war.”[1] This left Protestant leaders unprepared against theological criticisms and diminished the importance of religion within the public sphere. Oshatz, on the other hand, argues that the slave debates prepared Protestants “to respond to postwar challenges to the faith,” and helped push forward the movement of American liberalism.[2]

In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Noll argues that before the Civil War “religion was…much more important than any other center of value at work in the country.”[3] Although the theological crisis centered on slavery and the Bible, as Noll illustrates, that was not the only issue at hand. Since the inception of the American republic, “theologians had been uniting historical Christian perspectives with specific aspects of American intellectual experience.”[4] By the time of the Civil War, “American churches promoting reasonably orthodox beliefs and reasonably traditional practices flourished precisely because they adapted so energetically to the republican freedoms won in the War of Independence, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and then expanded considerably with the opening of the new country.”[5] Christianity, namely Protestantism, was one of the strongest cultural forces in American society. As a result, and at the time of the theological crisis, religion wielded immense public influence and “had contributed so much to the construction of national culture.”[6] Without a consensus answer to the question of the Bible and slavery, Noll argues, religion’s importance within the public sphere diminished during the postwar years.

Noll comes to this conclusion through his examination of the debates on biblical authority and interpretation on slavery, and the conflicting understandings of providence and God’s participation in human history. Throughout his work, Noll shows how “evangelical Protestants, who believed that the Bible was true and who trusted their own interpretations of Scripture” led to a series of competing biblical interpretations.[7] Noll effectively demonstrates this by highlighting the oppositional interpretations of Henry Ward Beecher, James Henley Thornwell, Henry Van Dyke, and Rabbi Morris J. Raphall in chapter one and again with his analysis of the debate between Francis Wayland and Richard Fuller. Additionally, Noll adds another layer to the question of slavery and the theological crisis itself with chapters discussing biblical interpretations of race and providence.

The question of the Bible and slavery proved too dividing for the “intellectual vigor that evangelical Protestants had brought to bear on so many tasks between the Revolution and the Civil War.”[8] Noll argues that they did not have the theological resources to address postwar challenges.[9] Moreover, the Civil War “took the steam out of Protestants’ moral energy” as many remained divided along regional lines.[10] Consequently, any Americans moved away from scriptures as the defining authority on public policy. In short, the Civil War and a failure to develop a consensus on slavery left Protestants divided and intellectually unprepared to address postwar social issues and challenges to religion by way of biblical interpretations.

In Slavery and Sin, Oshatz disagrees with Noll’s approach and conclusion. According to Oshatz, Noll’s assertation amounts to “blaming the literal, flat-footed, and racist hermeneutics of the antebellum era for the Northern Protestant failure to arrive at an adequate biblical antislavery argument.”[11] As a result, he “obscures the depth of the challenges posed by the slavey debates.”[12] Rather than focusing on the competing biblical interpretations that separated pro- and anti-slavery advocates alike, Oshatz specifically examines moderate antislavery Protestants including Leonard Bacon, William Ellery Channing, E.P. Burrow, Horace Bushnell, and Samuel Harris. In doing so, she argues that they “came to rely on a new liberal understanding of Christian truth” that they believed reconciled the sin of slavery and the bible without the need to “surrender the scriptures or to declare every white Christian slaveholder an object sinner.”[13] For Oshatz, their challenge of slavery in the abstract laid the groundwork for the liberal Protestant theology of the late-nineteenth century.

This leads to another critique Oshatz has of Noll and other historians. Although Oshatz agrees that the Civil War marks an end of an era—namely the possibility “to base a national Protestant consensus on biblical literalism”—and that a new era of religious traditions begins, she contends the demarcation historians have created belies the strong connections between the two eras.[14] According to Oshatz, liberal Protestantism’s understanding that “God’s revelation unfolded progressively through human history, moral action had to be considered in its historical and social context and the ultimate source of Protestant truth was the shared experience of believers rather than the letter of the biblical text” derived from ideas and thoughts of moderate antislavery Protestants during the slave debates.

In sum, the biblical interpretations of the antislavery Protestants paved the way for the theology of liberal Protestantism during the late-nineteenth century. According to Oshatz, not only did moderate antislavery Protestants lay the foundation for liberal Protestantism but they also provided a template for liberal Protestants to address theological issues of the postwar era—specifically evolution and historical biblical criticisms. Although, as Oshatz notes, liberal Protestantism proved short-lived, it “served as a spiritual halfway house between orthodoxy and secular humanism.”[15] Thus, Oshatz effectively demonstrates how moderate antislavery Protestants shaped the American religious and intellectual life well after the conclusion of the slave debates.

Although Oshatz successfully challenges Noll’s argument and approach, both works offer value to the scholarship of nineteenth-century American religion. As Oshatz has shown, historians need to further examine the connections between pre- and post-war Protestant thought while possibly broadening this approach to include proslavery Protestant advocates. In defense of Noll, his argument develops not from the perspective of one particular group of Protestants but from the thoughts and words of a variety of opposing individuals. His examination of domestic—the North and the South—and foreign perspectives of biblical interpretations of American slavery deserves further exploration and comparison.

[1] Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 16.

[2] Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11.

[3] Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 11.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 28.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 159.

[9] Ibid, 160.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Oshatz, Slavery and Sin, 10.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 4.

[14] Ibid, 11.

[15] Ibid, 145.