Scholarship on race and religion in the South has yielded a rich and varied harvest over the past decade. Two recent publications contribute to this growing literature. A number of historians have examined American churches' views of slavery in the antebellum South, especially proslavery ideology among southern clergy. David B. Chesebrough re­searches new territory in focusing on the minority of southern white clergy who supported neither slavery nor secession. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild's collection of essays ex­amines southern African American religion's links to both evangelical Protestantism and African folk traditions.

By 1830, most southern clergymen held solidly proslavery beliefs and by the 1850s viewed secession as either necessary or as a last resort for preserving slavery. Reflecting the values of the southern elite, these churchmen preached righteousness, benevolence, and mercy but ignored the great injustice of slavery. Against these cultural norms, clergy­men who advocated even modest slavery reforms, gradual emancipation, and colonization were scorned, expelled from their churches, imprisoned, or even murdered. Nevertheless, before and during the Civil War, ministers occasionally dared to voice their disapproval of slavery and disunion. In discussing these individuals, Chesebrough, a historian and former Baptist minister, draws on a variety of primary and secondary material, skillfully blending narrative and analysis.

In his final chapter, the author examines how a "creative minority ... who spoke and wrote boldly in denouncing [slavery] as unjust, un-American, and ungodly" retained its leadership in both the church and the community. Their small number, he claims, indi­cates that most southern clergy reflected rather than molded society. He also briefly ex­plores how denominational organization and geography affected clergy dissent, topics that deserve further inquiry.

Chesebrough effectively utilizes nineteenth-century books, sermons, newspapers, and manuscripts as well as secondary sources. Further research on dissenting southern clergymen may yield important additional information on how individuals form and express beliefs antithetical to a prevailing orthodoxy.

David B. Chesebrough offers in this brief but extremely perspica­cious book an illuminating analysis of southern clergy who dissented from the overwhelming majority of Protestant ministers regarding slav­ery and secession before and during the Civil War. Religion as a major component of southern nationalism has long been a prevailing historio­graphical orthodoxy among scholars of the Old South. How most south­ern clergy after 1830 retreated from any earlier antislavery position to affirm the peculiar institution as primarily a civil rather than a religious concern is an old story ultimately ending in biblical justifications of sla­very as a positive good. But Chesebrough carefully demonstrates that among southern ministers the argument was always much more than pro-slavery v. antislavery. Southerners also saw the larger contest as "a struggle between true and false religion, between orthodoxy and heresy, and be­tween a biblically revealed religion and a man-made religion" (p. 12).

Yet despite enormous and steadily increasing pressures-social, eco­nomic, political, and even physical-there always remained a small "cre­ative minority," in a phrase borrowed from Arnold Toynbee, who opposed first slavery and, by 1861, secession. The South was never a monolithic society, and Chesebrough offers compelling portraits of dis­senters such as Richard Fuller, John Gregg Fee, Moncure Daniel Conway, William G. Brownlow, Charles Gillette, Melinda Rankin, John H. Aughey, and James A. Lyon to illuminate the fate, if not martyrdom, of such brave dissenters.

Interestingly, Presbyterians were overrepresented among these dis­senters because their church had not split between northern and south­ern branches as did the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845. A common thread for all these dissenters was some contact or exposure to the North. Yet not all dissenters were equally persecuted for their beliefs; a very few managed to hold on to their positions before and during the war. Most, however, were either banished from the South, dismissed from their churches, or driven to financial ruin, imprisonment, or even execu­tion. No clear answer exists to explain the fortunate exceptions, but so­cial class, personality, and good standing within the community offer logical explanations of why a very few dissenters escaped the harsh fate of their fellow dissenters.

The greatest value of Chesebrough's partial but representative ac­count of dissenting clergy in the Old South from 1830 through the Civil War lies in its rich invitation to scholars to conduct additional research to delineate the contour and depth of such dissent. By far the most in­triguing unanswered question is Chesebrough's speculation that an even larger number of clerics shared antislavery sentiments with these dissent­ers but remained silent in order to protect themselves or their families. Even to be suspected of such treason was extremely dangerous in most of the South, particularly during the war years.

Chesebrough finally argues that the fact that dissenting clergy were so few in number "supports the thesis that the clergy are more reflectors of society than molders" (p. 88). In this same vein, he also contends per­suasively that the many extant nineteenth-century sermons, contrary to earlier scholarly opinion, are a rich source for measuring the ebb and flow of relevant public opinion on outstanding political and economic is­sues of the day. One wonders if the hidden dissenters among the south­ern clergy ever revealed any trace of their true feelings, however cryptically, in these numerous sermons. If such sermons are indeed a rich source for analyzing political issues, Chesebrough's fine-study-points the way toward further exploration of an important key to our understand­ing of the mind of the Old South in all its diversity and complexity.