In this interesting account of the early years of the Free Church of Scotland, Iain Whyte examines the new institution's fundraising campaign in the United States, and the ethical wrangling generated by its acceptance of money from churches in the slave states of the American South. The Church's decision to avoid discussing slavery in theological terms as a heresy, in contrast, as Whyte points out in a neat concluding chapter, to the World Alliance of Reformed Church's 1982 resolution on apartheid, allowed the Church to continue to acknowledge the American churches, while condemning individual slaveholders as sinful. By drawing attention to this little-known episode Whyte undermines hagiographic depictions of the Free Church's struggles, pointing to the politicking which lay beneath the Church's avoidance of candid abolitionism. He dismisses Duncan Rice's assertion that the Church of Scotland and the dissenting Churches exploited the slavery issue in order to score points against the Free Church. There are some errors in the text (this was a mid nineteenth-century episode, not a mid eighteenth-century one, as stated in the first line) and I remain unconvinced by the book's concluding assertion. The Send back the money campaign failed; can this episode really be regarded then as evidence of deep-rooted sympathy in the Scottish psyche for the oppressed? Overall, however, this is a balanced and well-researched account which sheds new light on Scotland's complex relationship with slavery.