Charles Pettit McIlvaine (1799–1873) led a remarkable life, becoming chaplain to the United States Senate at the age of twenty-three, bishop of Ohio at thirty-three, and emissary for Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. To date, however, only William Carus' memoirs (1882), Loren Dale Pugh's dissertation (1985), Diana Butler Bass's Standing against the whirlwind (1995), and a handful of articles have covered McIlvaine's life. In this first full-length biography, Richard Smith, professor emeritus at Ohio Wesleyan University, argues that the bishop was ‘the central figure in the Evangelical Anglican-Episcopal Atlantic community’ of the nineteenth century (p. xiv). As the title suggests, Smith's driving question is McIlvaine's attitude towards slavery. Following studies at the College of New Jersey and Princeton Seminary, McIlvaine's early career – as rector at churches in Washington, DC and Brooklyn, NY and as chaplain and professor of history and ethics at West Point – displayed few signs of antislavery sentiment. His years in the episcopate, Smith contends, reveal progression from a muted abolitionist position – unwilling to address the matter publicly at diocesan conventions to avoid fracturing the denomination and country – to a fully-committed, activist approach by the start of the Civil War, openly condemning the moral evil of slavery and the national sin of tolerating it. A second organising feature of the volume is McIlvaine's relationship with Britain. As Smith demonstrates, four lengthy trips to England between the 1830s and 1850s left the bishop well-connected with Anglican leaders, benevolent societies and, especially, Albert Edward, prince of Wales. Consequently, Lincoln selected him to advance the Union cause with ruling parties in the UK – notably Lord Shaftesbury and through him Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell.
Overall, Smith's most impressive feat is his use of sources; with thousands of McIlvaine's papers destroyed after his death, Smith has tediously triangulated accounts from the archives of family members, seminaries, the American Episcopal Church and numerous periodicals to distill the bishop's thought and activities. By capturing the affairs of McIlvaine's life with a wide lens, moreover, Smith illuminates the national and international community's opinions on chattel slavery and how overseas support for the Union hinged on the perceived centrality of emancipation to war aims. While Diana Bass argued previously for McIlvaine's status as the principal leader of the Evangelical wing of the Episcopal Church, Smith expands his analytical scope to the transnational level of ecclesiastics and politics. With British recognition of the Confederacy hanging in the balance in the wake of the Trent affair, Smith's findings spur readers to consider how different the resolution of the slavery issue may have been without McIlvaine's diplomacy – albeit Smith perhaps overstates the bishop's influence. Although the narrative's thick detail obscures the larger picture at times, this biography yields great insight into a paramount, oft-overlooked figure in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world that is sure to stimulate fresh lines of investigation in fields ranging from religious history to foreign policy.
