Consuming Fire

This book presents insight into religion and slavery from a leading southern scholar. ""A Consuming Fire"" focuses on the religious dimensions of the South's response to slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. Eugene D. Genovese looks at how southern proslavery theorists, both clergy and lay, struggled with the intellectual and theological quandaries posed by slavery. To many, defeat in the Civil War was God's punishment not for slavery itself but for the failure to reform it into a 'scripturally sanctioned' system. Although the reform spirit carried over into the postwar years, it was eventually overwhelmed by open racism and segregationist ideology.

Genovese makes a convincing, well-documented case that, although southern ministers supported the war for a slaveholding republic, they did not do so uncritically and repeatedly warned southerners that they had to conform to God's word on the treatment of their slaves if the Confederacy were to benefit from God's support and achieve victory.--Gaines M. Foster "Civil War History", A remarkable and important contribution to southern history during its most critical period . . . Written with intellectual rigor and impressive scholarship . . . [This] book belongs on the required reading list of all seriously interested in southern history.--Civil War Book Review, Always a superb essayist, [Genovese] develops a crisp and powerful argument about the religious strand in the pro-slavery argument, before, during, and after the war.--Times Literary Supplement, Genovese has again essayed important questions that scholars need to address in more depth as they probe the many effects of the Civil War upon the South.--Journal of Southern History, It should be viewed as a challenge to us all to try to understand the Old South in all its contradictory complexity, and especially to try to comprehend those southerners earnestly argued that slavery was a God-given trust.--Southern Cultures

EUGENE D. GENOVESE (1930-2012) was one of the most influential, and controversial, historians of his time. He was the author of several books, including Roll, Jordan, Roll, for which he won the Bancroft Prize; The Southern Tradition; and The Southern Front.