Houses Divided provides new insights into the significance of the nineteenth-century evangelical schisms that arose initially over the moral question of African American bondage. Volkman examines such fractures in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of the slaveholding border state of Missouri. He maintains that congregational and local denominational ruptures before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union in
that state from 1837 to 1876. The schisms were interlinked religious, legal, constitutional, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States from the late 1830s to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in
divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by the race, class, and gender dynamics that marked the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural church-goers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased
antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled post-war vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. The schisms produced the interrelated religious, legal and constitutional controversies
that shaped pro-and anti-slavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.
Focusing on the slaveholding border state of Missouri, Houses Divided shows that congregational and local denominational schisms, which arose initially over the moral question of African-American bondage, played a central role in sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction.
[T]his work represents a crucial local piece to the national puzzle of how religious conflict featured in the sectional conflict. It contains a trove of state-level church-state conundrums that Volkman deftly unpacks. And it closes with an intriguing claim that white evangelical Missourians rejected prohibition in the late-19th century due to the lingering abolitionist taint on moral politics. Altogether, Volkman shows that, for some Americans, lasting sectional
allegiances took shape within houses of worship-and they ventured out of them with a righteous vengeance.
