Tabernacles in the Wilderness

Rachel Williams is a lecturer in American history at the University of Hull, England, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, American medicine, and women's history. She is coeditor of American Philanthropy at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the History of Giving and served as secretary of the British Association for American Studies between 2019 and 2023.

"Lucidly written and deeply researched, this book provides the fullest available account of the Christian Commission's role during the Civil War and the intellectual and spiritual world of the men and women who contributed to it. In doing so, Rachel Williams makes a major contribution to our understanding of the role of religion in the American Civil War. She shows that for evangelicals, the spiritual and physical health of soldiers were inseparable and that the blood sacrifice of Christian men would bring about a national spiritual rebirth."-Adam Smith, Oxford University, author of The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846-1865< "What Rachel Williams has achieved here is a beautifully written, impressively researched, and much-needed study of a Union religious relief organization too long overshadowed by the people and the politics of the United States Sanitary Commission. Through her moving account of how the USCC sought to save the bodies and secure the souls of Union troops, Williams has done nothing less than brought back to us out of the gore and terror of the Civil War battlefields a moving reflection on the power and ambition of the human spirit." -Susan-Mary Grant, author of The Cambridge Concise History of the United States of America and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Civil War Soldier, Supreme Court Justice