Historians have devoted considerable attention to ministers during the American Civil War. More than three decades ago James H. Moorhead (American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978]) analyzed the millennial overtones in sermons of New England ministers. More recently, Harry S. Stout (Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War [New York: Viking, 2006]) depicted the northern clergy as kneejerk supporters of a war that oftentimes was conducted in an immoral, unchristian manner. In this fine volume, social historian Timothy Wesley maps out much underexplored territory by examining the political impact of ministers’ words and deeds and the multifaceted responses to these utterances and actions by the laity, denominational leaders, military and civil authorities, and the secular press. He effectively shows how people inside and outside the church manipulated or inhibited the “political behavior” of clergymen (7), in the process revealing rifts between ministers and laypersons regarding the extent and appropriateness of the politicization of the church and confirming how religion and politics were thoroughly blended during the war.

One strength of Wesley's work is the geographic breadth of his ministerial coverage. Indeed, his careful attention to regional differences and unique local conditions illuminates the diversity and complexity of clerical experiences. For instance, he discusses northern clerics who unequivocally supported the Union; northern pastors who were accused of disloyalty for both sins of omission or commission; border state ministers who sometimes served divided congregations and oftentimes clashed with either coreligionists or secular figures; clergymen in the occupied South who were arrested or exiled by Union officers; southern divines who defended the war effort and promoted Confederate nationalism; and African American preachers who championed moral self-improvement and education as stepping stones along the path to freedom and political rights.

Wesley's discussion of treason during the war is also instructive. He explains how most Northerners went beyond the constitutional definition of treason and scrutinized a minister's words for signs of disloyalty. In fact, a clergyman need not commit an overt act against the government to be considered a traitor. Laypersons, newspaper editors, and military authorities branded numerous preachers as disloyal for failing to pray for Abraham Lincoln, for refusing to give vocal support to the Union cause, or even for holding personal opinions (the open-ended allegation of sympathizing with the South) that called into question their loyalty to the United States. Although he recognizes that in many cases Republicans targeted Democratic pastors for purely partisan reasons, at times Wesley makes unsubstantiated claims about the extent of disloyalty in the northern pulpit. For example, at the beginning of chapter 3 he asserts, “and still other clergymen, at least in sentiment if less often in deed, were openly disloyal to the Union” (43). At the chapter's end he concludes, “treacherous congregational pastors who sapped their congregants’ commitment to the war effort were threats to the Union” (58). Yet in the entire chapter he mentions merely eight preachers charged with disloyalty, and only Swedenborgian Sabin Hough committed a clearly treasonous act by participating in a plot to free Confederate prisoners from Ohio's Camp Chase. Five of the clerics Wesley names were “suspected” of disloyalty without his providing any specific evidence against them; one Episcopalian preached a sermon that some listeners considered favorable to the South; and an anonymous letter writer complained that Pennsylvania Presbyterian William S. Plumer should be arrested for “treachery” (58). Wesley could have made his case more convincing by digging deeper in the historical record in an attempt to verify the validity of the accusations of disloyalty against ministers such as Plumer, border state pastors Thomas A. Hoyt and James H. Brooks (arrested “for the vague charge of disloyalty” [66]), Pennsylvanian Alvah R. Rutan (arrested “for preaching pacifism” [70]) or Brooklyn's Henry Van Dyke (whom he calls “clearly . . . disloyal” [91]) instead of accepting at face value the charges made by Republican partisans against preachers who in some instances might have committed acts worthy of arrest or who just as easily might have been nothing more than Democrats opposed to the war in principle but thoroughly loyal to the U.S. government.

Wesley might have included an appendix that listed all the ministers arrested, exiled, or banned from preaching, recorded the specific charges against them, and, if possible, noted the length of their imprisonment or the outcomes of their encounter with military authorities (such as taking the oath of allegiance in order to resume preaching). Although compiling this data might have been tedious, it would have been very informative and provided quantitative backing for his claim that federal officials apprehended “hundreds” of southern clerics simply “for refusing to pray for Lincoln and the Union” (242n43). Even without this tabulation, he sufficiently demonstrates that during the Civil War the president, the War Department, the military, and state and local government officials intentionally conducted the most extensive “oversight of ministerial behavior” in the nation's history (72).

The complex question that remains, however, is whether or not the state's intervention in religious matters was necessary to win the war and preserve the Union or instead represented an unwarranted intrusion by temporal powers into the spiritual realm, even if the church was oftentimes politicized as this book illustrates. Wesley clearly believes the former, but incidents such as the arrests of St. Louis Presbyterian Samuel B. McPheeters and Natchez, Mississippi's Catholic bishop William Henry Elder, among others, indicate that the state's forays into the ecclesiastical sphere led down a slippery slope that sometimes tripped up unwitting or inept federal officials who were apt to abuse power in an attempt to enforce loyalty. Indeed, George C. Rable recently concluded, “military intervention in religious affairs hardly made anyone more loyal” (God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010], 322). Anyone interested in nineteenth-century American religion should read Wesley's work, and it should stimulate additional research into church-state relations during the Civil War.