A Consuming Fire

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

Tests the rhetoric of slave-holding as stewardship against a fearful reality many argued to reform. Both challenging and complementary to works by Drew Gilpin Faust, Mitchell Snay, and Jack P. Maddex, this book is characteristic Genovese--informative, insightful, and provocative.

--Library Journal

Thoroughly researched and cogently argued . . . Gives historians of the pro- and antislavery causes much to think about.

--American Historical Review

What seems most laudatory about Genovese is his attempt to try to see the white antebellum South in all its complexity and richness and to reaffirm the importance of religion in the region during the nineteenth century.

--H-CivWar