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American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton (review)

agricultural production, constitutional powers, and racial thinking. This seems a propitious time for a new synthesis, given Gary Gallagher’s strenuous efforts to define the Civil War as an effort to save the Union, not to end slavery, in The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). But Summers, to his credit, resists reductionist arguments. Even as he claims that most Northern whites cared much more deeply about restoring the Union than about creating a new society in the South, he also takes great pains to show why white Southerners’ behavior made it impossible for Northerners to separate reconciliation from their ongoing worries about national security that in turn led them to defend black civil rights. Rather than an argument about the primacy of Union, the book becomes a survey of the political history of Reconstruction, emphasizing the importance of national and state capitals rather than land and labor. Summers’ eyes are almost always on people with the power to make decisions that affect life on the ground. But his heart is—as it has long been—with the phrase makers, especially the ink-stained wretches of the newspaper trade. Although Summers may have a fine eye for lovely and outrageous quotations, he at times utilizes them as both analysis and evidence, especially when discussing his pet subject of corruption. For readers of this journal, the book does not particularly engage in interdisciplinary history, although Summers consults a wide range of sources, including literary ones. He masterfully describes economic and political conditions, but he does not particularly drawupon research in those fields. However, readers interested in Reconstruction will find Summers’ book to be a rollicking, deeply researched overview. It is unlikely, as Summers admits, that it will displace Foner’s massive Reconstruction, which remains a landmark in the field, but it offers a mostly clear and always colorful guide to the politics of the era.