For many nineteenth-century Americans the fiery terrain of hell was frighteningly real. But as Kathryn Gin Lum documents in her remarkable history, ideas about hell in the early republic and antebellum period varied widely, running from those whose vivid imaginings of eternal damnation drove them to insanity to those who denied the reality of hell altogether. The idea of hell was also incredibly versatile. It was not only a religious doctrine, it was an idea through which Americans worked out their visions of society and each other. As Lum writes, for Americans of this era, “Hell was never distant. It underlay conceptions of justice and equality. It haunted dreams and waking visions” (4). At both ends of Lum's chronology, experts and enlightened critics predicted the demise of hell as an idea, but, as Lum writes, “the concept of hell did not just survive in antebellum America: it thrived” (3).

Lum divides her book into three sections, covering the doctrine of hell in Revolutionary America and its transformation during the Second Great Awakening, the “Adaptation and Dissent” of laypeople to the ideas of hell promulgated by the clergy in the first half of the nineteenth century, and finally the use of hell in debates over slavery and during the Civil War. The book covers a vast array of characters and groups, including Mormons, Indians, spiritualists, Swedenborgians, African Americans, and a whole slew of evangelicals, but Lum has a knack for picking just the right examples to illustrate her arguments, as with her choice to begin the book with the fascinating case of two men both named John Murray during the Revolutionary era who took opposing views of hell (leading contemporaries to distinguish the Universalist Murray as “Salvation Murray” and the Calvinist Murray as “Damnation Murray”). As Lum shows, the idea of hell constantly became entangled with political and social debates. In the early republic, advocates of hell charged that universalism undermined republican virtue by removing the consequences of bad behavior. During antebellum debates over slavery, each side accused the other of callous indifference to the souls of enslaved people, leading to what Lum calls the “perishing souls” motif in the slavery debate. Fear of hell literally drove some people to insanity. In 1835 there were forty-one patients in the Massachusetts State Lunatic Hospital for “religious reasons,” including “Dread of Future Punishment” (119). Nevertheless, all through the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, there were dissenters from the doctrine of hell, including the physician Amariah Brigham, who in 1835 argued that “religious excitement,” including the fear of hell, was detrimental to the mind and body and should be discounted (120).

It is easy to discern from Lum's narrative how some past and present critics came to see the idea of hell as merely a mechanism of social control, and Lum herself documents how the idea had the lamentable tendency to map onto ethnic and national divisions, leading many nineteenth-century Americans to view the “other” as also the damned. But the most interesting aspect of her book is her careful documentation of the way that hell also allowed Americans of all kinds, including abolitionists, Native Americans, and enslaved people, to imagine justice. Some universalists rejected hell because they couldn't reconcile it to the idea of a just and loving God, but many of those who experienced real injustice had trouble imagining a just God without the idea of hell. Among these was the ex-slave Thomas James, who in his 1887 autobiography imagined a southern slaveholding preacher “who strove to please the tyrants, to prove that slavery is divine,” immersed in fiery torment (178). As Lum convincingly argues, for nineteenth-century Americans like Thomas James, the division between the saved and the damned was just as important, and deserves as much attention from historians, as the divisions of race, class, and gender that also shaped his world.