On the eve of the Civil War, the Spiritualist firebrand James Martin Peebles decried the “solid, congealed orthodoxy” and “sectarian churchianity” infecting the nation's churches (James Martin Peebles, Signs of the Times, 8, 25). The greatest threat to Christianity, he concluded, was not infidelity but ecclesiastical rigidity and the tendency of churches to defend institutions over their message. “Christianity and churchianity,” Peebles insisted, “should no more be confounded than religion and theology, or chemistry and alchemy” (James Martin Peebles, The Christ Question Settled, 230). Such anticlericalism was hardly an aberration: it was echoed in the skepticism of Charles Knowlton and Abner Kneeland and in the writings of Free Thinkers and Garrisonian come-outers, all of whom sought to wrest the moral ground from beneath a Church they saw as elevating clerical authority and cultural power over the moral demands of the Christian message.
In Pure Heart, Scott Quigley speaks to the moral, social, and cultural impact of the American Civil War and to the struggle of the faithful to abide. Based on the fortuitous survival of a trove of documents in the archives of the Governor's Academy, Quigley has written what is in essence a double dual biography: a biography of a father and son coping with the war's divisions that doubles as a biography of a church and city divided. The father, Benjamin Dorr, was pastor to Philadelphia's Christ Church, the nation's most prominent Episcopal pulpit, whose moderate antislavery leanings lay in tension with his desire to uphold “unity” in a fraying parish. Dorr's son, William, acting on his unionist convictions, enlisted in the 121st Pennsylvania Infantry, distinguishing himself in a series of cataclysmic battles spanning Fredericksburg and Gettysburg to the Overland Campaign in May 1864, where tragically, he was killed in action.
Benjamin Dorr's evolution as he guided the First Church through crisis and his son's own martyrdom is the true heart of Pure Heart. There is much to admire in this study of a pastor grappling with loss amid a city rent by the politics of secession and the morality of slavery and Quigley's discussions of the stresses upon social, familial, and economic bonds can be insightful. It is a keen reminder that the war was not only brother versus brother but also neighbor versus neighbor. In Quigley's account, Dorr sought a middle ground that privileged church unity as he negotiated his mild antislavery conscience with the opinions of a flock that spanned the spectrum from the not-quite abolitionism of Horace Binney to the antiwar, positive-good Copperheads, who littered Philadelphia's upper classes. Not quite convincingly, Quigley suggests that Dorr edged incrementally toward a more full-throated unionism, particularly after William's death, but he succeeded nevertheless in limiting the loss of the church's most conservative members.
These important observations are held back, to a degree, by Quigley's failure to balance the two lives at the center of the narrative. When the focus shifts from Benjamin to William, the key themes of disunion and struggle recede into a fairly standard account of Civil War service. Though well written and well-paced, the narrative carries too little of Will's own voice to be fully satisfying and contributes too little to the larger theme.
More critically, Pure Heart maintains a curiously blinkered perspective on the city and war, making too little of the social and economic ties within the elite and even less of the impact of non-elites. The voices of radical resistance are scarcely heard, particularly those of African Americans and women who profoundly shaped political discourse in the city. William Still, Octavius Catto, Henry “Box” Brown, the Forten sisters, and the Grimkes, to name only a few, barely figure. Perhaps in consequence, the gradual evolution of a moderate pastor that Quigley admires seems indistinguishable from moral cowardice. Dorr “artfully devised” to preach on slavery (49), Quigley argues, but so artfully that subsequent historians have failed to see the effort at all. We are left with a scathing portrait of the dilemma of the moderate conservative: a person of privilege and power, vested with the authority of a prestigious pulpit, clinging to the hope of sectarian “unity” over what many in the city would have called Christian justice.
There is a telling moment in the book where Will Dorr encounters an elderly woman in Virginia, formerly enslaved, who was afraid to open her door to the white soldiers on her stoop (238–239). Quigley uses this vignette to illustrate the inevitable: that defeat of the south did not signal the defeat of racism. The reality, however, is that the defeat of Reconstruction came through a series of conscious choices on the part of individual white Americans, North and South, and institutions like the Episcopal Church, who chose appeasement and “reconciliation” over racial justice. In this context, Quigley's claim that the virulently pro-slavery Pierce Butler “arranged for [his former slaves] to work for him as share croppers” (291) comes across as a spectacular evasion of the racial politics of Reconstruction. Similarly, his evident admiration of Dorr's ability “to hold the church together” and “reunite Philadelphia's Christian in a spirit of charity, forgiveness, and atonement” seems myopic when that atonement came by the union of white America over an oppressed Black nation.
Although it is seldom fair in a review to criticize omission, Quigley has done too little to examine the fate of the Episcopal Church itself during the war and specifically the creation of the schismatic Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States. Unlike other sects that divided, the reunion of the Episcopal Church took place quickly and with relatively little rancor, led by the pro-slavery Bishop of Vermont, John Henry Hopkins, at a conference held in Dorr's own Philadelphia in October 1865. Pure Heart may be read as tragedy, as Quigley would have it, but not the tragedy of the loss of a young man's life in service to his country, but the tragedy of the churchianity that James Peebles saw coming.
