Book Review: Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront

Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront. By Rachel Williams. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2024. Softcover, 208 pp. $34.95.

Reviewed by Jon Tracey

With Tabernacles in the Wilderness, Dr. Rachel Williams explores the US Christian Commission (USCC) and its role during the Civil War. If you are not familiar with the organization, there’s no shame in it, as the USCC has not received much attention, scholarly or otherwise. Founded to provide both physical and spiritual assistance to fighting men in the field and in hospitals, the USCC furnished a significant amount of aid to soldiers and sailors. Many men found warmth through the clothing, as well as sustenance from the food, distributed by the group. The USCC also delivered spiritual comfort in the form of religious tracts, books, and ministry services by its delegates and brought peace in soldiers’ final moments through the volunteers who wore the USCC pin.

While Tabernacles in the Wilderness is mostly an organizational history of the USCC, it also doubles as a primer on period religious beliefs in the United States and provides important contextual information as it relates to the group’s principles and actions. Readers will appreciate these key aspects of the book.

The first two chapters focus on the USCC’s organizational structure and covers the delegate system, the various branches that funded representatives in the field, and the men and women who volunteered to perform the required responsibilities.

The middle four chapters concern the general work of the USCC. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the mission of religious conversion, exploring how that aim was furthered through the distribution of religious literature and presenting camp sermons. The chapter on the distribution of Bibles, pamphlets, and other spiritual texts will be particularly interesting to living historians and others who study the material culture that surrounded Civil War soldiers’ lives.

The next two chapters focus on the second half of the USCC’s goal and explore the organization’s support for soldiers’ physical well-being. These efforts often involved distributing clothing as well as providing wholesome food and drink to supplement monotonous and often nutrient-deficient military rations. Williams portrays the USCC’s attention to the soldiers’ physical care working hand-in-hand with their evangelical mission, as the USCC believed that providing for one’s body would help open soldiers’ hearts in order to receive religion. Again, this section on clothing donations and providing “housewife” sewing kits to soldiers is a rich resource for those with an interest in material culture.

While each chapter offers significant insights and scaffolds off those before it, the most significant chapter and likely the one most readers will find particularly interesting is Chapter 7: “Death, Salvation, and the Christian Commission.” Here, Williams makes a noteworthy addition to the growing literature around the Civil War and the period concept of the “good death” by looking at how the USCC sought to make sense of encounters with the dead and dying. She writes that the USCC sought to not only evangelize soldiers, but also to assist in their far-from-home deaths. In doing so. the USCC helped meet the good death standard by “acting as a proxy to observe and convey messages and descriptions from the deathbed to the distant family and to reassure them that the deaths of loved ones were ordained by divine Providence and were thus part of a larger plan.” (129) If actual loved ones could not be at the side of soldiers as they passed away, USCC delegates would be there to serve as surrogate family members.

As Williams herself notes, there has been a lack of scholarly exploration into the USCC. Part of the reason for this is that the larger and more secular United States Sanitary Commission has traditionally received the lion’s share of attention (both during the war and after) by media and scholars. This book ably fills that previous void with both general information and detailed accounts of the USCC’s work in hospitals and camps. It brings us closer to understanding the religious and physical worlds of the group’s volunteers and the soldiers who benefited from their efforts during the war. Filled with organizational details and touching stories of those on the front lines who witnessed and lived both the worst and better angels of our nature, this book is worthy of a place on any Civil War enthusiast’s bookshelf.