[Editor’s Note:  The following guest post comes to us from Mitchell Snay, who is professor of history at Denison University, where he teaches courses in American history from the colonial period through Reconstruction. He is the author of three books: Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), and Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). He is also the co-editor of Religion and the Antebellum Read more