Religious Causes, Changes, And Comparisons In The American Civil War

By Kaley Middlebrooks Carpenter[1]

[Kaley Middlebrooks Carpenter is a Ph.D. student in American church history at Princeton Theological Seminary.]

In The Story of Religion in America, church historian William W. Sweet reflected upon one of the its saddest chapters—that of the Civil War—in this way: “There are good arguments to support the claim that the split in the churches was not only the first break between the sections, but the chief cause of the final break.”[2]

When Sweet penned these words in 1950, Perry Miller’s groundbreaking works on Puritan New England had already led a legion of scholars to study the Christian influences and character of the colonial period. In similar fashion, other historians began to turn their attention to the Civil War era and religion’s role in the sectional crisis. Sweet’s own The Methodist Episcopal Church and The Civil War, Joseph Blount Cheshire’s The Church in the Confederate States, Chester Forrester Dunham’s The Attitude of the Northern Clergy Toward the South, 1860–1865, and Benjamin J. Blied’s Catholics and the Civil War were some of the first books to examine the responses of religious leaders and their followers during the war.[3] Over the next four decades even more writings appeared on subjects as diverse as Civil War chaplains, churches, dioceses, missionaries, prayer books, Sanitary Commissions, synagogues, and even religiously motivated conscientious objectors.[4]

By the late 1980s, bibliographies documenting this growing collection of scholarship on religion during theWar Between the States began to appear. Yet they often referred to early classics that remained unsurpassed in setting the period’s historiographical standard. For instance, James W. Silver’s Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda (1957) was still considered “the best study of religion as a bulwark to the Confederacy” in 1987, a full thirty years after its publication.[5] And while the scholarship on religion and the Civil War was significant, it was neither sizable nor unassailable in its assumptions. In the words of Sydney Ahlstrom, “For [many] reasons the ‘tragic era’ is of maximum importance to the moral and religious history of the American people. Yet its treatment by historians has been apologetic and evasive. Like the political historiography on the period, the conventional church-historical accounts need revision.”[6]

This is precisely the gap that historians Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson have sought to close with the publication of Religion and the American Civil War. This volume, which brings together papers presented at a 1994 conference on Religion and the Civil War in Louisville, Kentucky,[7] models and identifies new directions for antebellum, war time, and postwar historiography.[8] It combines the methods of social, cultural, literary, and intellectual history, and it explores under-researched populations such as women, ethnic minorities, and conservative confessionalists. Most importantly, the essays in Religion and the American Civil War succeed in “bringing religion—too often merely a prop in a military or political drama—onto center stage” (p. 314).

The book is divided into three main sections treating “Ideas,” “People,” and “Places.” These divisions, however, fail to capture what is truly unique about the volume. A close reading of the book suggests that Religion and the American Civil War might more profitably be discussed through three different categories, beginning with the subject of Sweet’s profound quote above: (1) how religion functioned as a cause of the Civil War; (2) how aspects of American religion were vitally changed because of the Civil War; and (3) how dominant American religious ideas promoted during the war compare to those of other subcultures in the country at the time, or to those of other countries also torn by civil war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[9]

As Sweet’s quote attests, the idea that religion was at least one of many factors to cause the Civil War has existed in scholarship for well over fifty years (if not since the time of war itself). The contributions of Mark Noll, Eugene Genovese, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and George M. Frederickson detail in new ways precisely how religion constituted a cause to the war. They do so primarily by examining the power of the clergy and the country’s theological elite. Noll’s “The Bible and Slavery” presents a fascinating and thorough analysis of how the Bible, or, more precisely, how the unique American interpretation of the Bible, “helped start” the Civil War (p. 50). Noll supports his description of religion’s role by showing two things: (1) the ways in which the North’s and the South’s opposing positions on the Bible’s treatment of slavery shared a common hermeneutical history that was peculiar to America, and (2) how those contrary positions on slavery’s biblical warrant called into question nothing less than the authority of Scripture itself. According to Noll, the war was for both sides not only a military and moral battle, but a theological one as well—a battle that could have ended differently had other biblical interpretations been heard.

Noll reaches back into colonial and revolutionary history to show how the “dominant American hermeneutic” of interpreting the Bible literally (as opposed to more systematically and theologically) and according to the Reformed tradition (which considered “every direction contained in [Scripture’s] pages as applicable at all times to all men”) helped to forge the country’s identity as a “chosen nation.” This democratic and individualistic hermeneutic became employed in the service of American exceptionalism, or the set of republican beliefs that made the United States worth fighting for in the first place (pp. 43–50). The tragedy of religion’s role in the Civil War, Noll observes, was the inability of slavery’s critics to transcend this hermeneutic in order to make persuasive arguments against literalist, pro-slavery exegetes such as James Henley Thornwell and Robert L. Dabney. To mount such a challenge without compromising scriptural authority or jettisoning the Bible altogether was especially difficult (pp. 50–53). Black, Catholic, German Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and confessionally conservative Reformed intellectuals advanced other viable theological positions about Scripture’s bearing on the “slavery question.” However, obscured by American biblicism on one side, and by nativism and racism on the other, they never made a difference in the public domain (pp. 53–61). Most regrettably, even earnest opponents of slavery and faithful supporters of Scripture like Charles Hodge could not rise above culturally ingrained prejudices against African Americans to discern how much even their interpretations of the biblical accounts of slavery were, quite literally, colored within limited racial lines (pp. 61–66).

Eugene Genovese’s essay, “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union,” demonstrates how religious doctrine and sensibility “rent the Union” (p. 82) by focusing on the Old and New School split in the Presbyterian Church.[10] Like Noll, Genovese documents how the religious language used by both sides made the sectional crisis a “holy war.” He describes the seeming impregnability of pro-slavery biblical arguments and traces the ascent of Protestant liberalism to anti-slavery advocates’ separation of the letter from the spirit in God’s Word. Genovese uniquely argues that at the heart of this division was a southern Christian critique of northern free-market social-relations: slavery advocates criticized the industrial North’s exploitation of the working class, yet they failed to realize that such capitalistic oppression of a population was precisely what the two labor systems held in common. Southern free-labor advocates could not see this because they were blinded in part by a biblical ideal of slavery and its social relations that never materialized: a paternal and protective system in which cruel masters were punished, in which slave families were protected by law, and in which slavery met “the highest standards of the Abrahamic household and the teachings of Christ” (p. 81).

Describing a southern clergy more reticent than that which appears in Genovese’s essay, Bertram Wyatt-Brown fleshes out the cultural constraints upon pastors to justify slavery in “Church, Honor, and Secession.” Precisely because of the strength of denominational ties and a concern to retain their northern brethren’s support on theological battles, southern shepherds more readily understood slavery as a consequence of the Fall to be suffered (and in time, even ameliorated) along with the pains of disease and death. Wyatt-Brown shows how, until the point of secession, these preachers were also spared public involvement on the issue because of their commitment to the doctrine of the spirituality of the church. He subsequently traces their conflicted concession to pro-slavery and, later, secessionist arguments to sociological and cultural factors. These included physical threats from slave owners and a culture of male honor that abetted violent behavior. In addition to taming that culture with exhortations to godliness, Confederate clergy had to defend southern convictions when they were discredited and disgraced by northern constitutional interpretation. As soon as the “slavery issue” became political rather than spiritual, however, the clergy’s constraints disappeared. Their partisan preaching increased exponentially, furthering the division between northern and southern opinion (p. 101).

George M. Frederickson’s study, “The Coming of the Lord: Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” illustrates equally well how the Civil War presented this class of professionals a renewed opportunity to exert their influence on an increasingly secular and democratic society. As ethical and moral arbiters during the national crisis, Yankee pastors, like their southern counterparts, eagerly bridged the church and state divide. Their official involvement in the sectional crusade, however, only served to diminish their power once they became increasingly identified in service of the dominant, political culture. On the other hand, northern pastors continued to preach, and they eventually spread what became the Social Gospel. Ironically their criticisms of industrial capitalism echoed ante-bellum southern arguments. Frederickson calls this phenomenon “a conscious revival of political preaching and religious activism of the war period” (p. 125).

Similarly, the split of southern Baptists into their own convention on the eve of the Civil War, as described by Paul Harvey in his article “Yankee Faith and Southern Redemption,” enabled the ministry’s active support of the Confederacy and, later, Reconstruction’s dismantling. Harvey effectively contrasts the church’s glorification of “Redemption” and countenancing of KKK activities in the nineteenth century with resistance to Supreme Court enforcement of racial equality in the twentieth. The separate religious culture created by Southern Baptists, he provocatively argues, thus became “a cornerstone of white supremacy and theological conservatism” that dominated the region right up to the second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights era.[11] Daniel W. Stowell’s “Stonewall Jackson and the Providence of God” traces the unswerving southern assurance in God’s providential approval of such partisan positions—even in the face of Jackson’s death and the Confederates’ defeat—to the spiritual, psychological, and ideological foundation of the cult of the Lost Cause, which arguably continues to this day.

As these essays show, religious causes of the Civil War seem also to have produced lasting religious change—evidence of which still remains in contemporary America. Harry Stout and Christopher Grasso’s study of Richmond provides another example of religion’s lasting effects on post-bellum society. “Civil War, Religion, and Communications” illustrates how the Confederacy’s short-lived unity and history were singularly shaped through the introduction of jeremiads and feast-days. Such explicitly Christian sermons and repentant sacrificial discipline had served as a staple of New England piety since the seventeenth century. Yet these same rituals were completely novel to the South, a fact completely missed by modern historians, until the increasingly devout Jefferson Davis introduced them to Richmond’s inhabitants when the city suddenly became the capital of the “new Christian nation.” The secret of this essay’s success is one well known to Stout: he has again found an overlooked fact, assumption, or source and mined it for all its worth.[12] The result is an essay that reads like a drama, not only because of the elegant, exciting prose portraying Richmond’s gradual destruction, but also because of the way the authors analyze new primary sources to reveal how crucial religion was to the Confederacy and to the development of modern southern society after the war.

One could not fully understand Confederate society, as each of these preceding chapters clearly demonstrates, without a comparison of it with that of the North.[13] How much less would one understand American antebellum and post-war society as a whole without a trans-national and trans-cultural critique? Five chapters that offer such comparative analyses constitute Religion and the American Civil War’s greatest scholarly contribution.

Noll, for instance, highlights the uniqueness (and weakness) of American exegesis of biblical texts relating to slavery by comparing regional scholars’ conclusions with those of Scottish, English, and Canadian Protestant theological writings (p. 52). He also documents anti-slavery arguments from several (silenced) American sub-cultures, including German Lutheran, Catholic, and African American believers. Charles Reagan Wilson’s essay, “Religion and the American Civil War in Comparative Perspective,” more thoroughly still compares and contrasts America’s Civil War with the civil wars in England and Spain. Wilson’s chapter masterfully identifies several factors that each conflict had in common, such as contests over constitutional authority and power, the role of millennialism, moral crusade and reform, a corporate sense of special status under God, and the promoting of nationalism and civil religion. The unique struggles of African Americans, Irish-Catholic Americans, and American women (who in the antebellum and Victorian eras could certainly qualify as a distinct sub-culture) are highlighted by Noll, Phillip Shaw Paludan, Randall M. Miller, Elizabeth Fox Genovese, and Drew Gilpin Faust.

Genovese’s literary-historical “Days of Judgment, Days of Wrath” captures especially well the different ways in which northern and southern women writers understood their roles in both religious and secular society. Genovese reads modern individualism, religious feminization, and moral superiority in between the lines of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Louisa May Alcott. Their books, she argues, simultaneously reflected and inspired the lives of northern women who imbued their separate domestic sphere with moral authority and fought with religious conviction in abolition, temperance, and suffrage campaigns. Though southern women would also soon deal with the consequences of industrial capitalism through similar organizations, writers like Augusta Jane Evans turned women’s coming of age stories into “parables or allegories for the state of southern culture as a whole.” Her novels preached against northern individualism and seated moral authority not in women, but in God and his ministers (p. 244). On the other hand, Faust’s “Without Pilot or Compass” recounts the ways in which elite southern women were let down by the men, the government, and the God to whom they had been trained to submit.

She similarly concludes, however, that these women’s perseverance during the war continued on in their fight against Yankee control, even as their northern sisters fought for social reform and female suffrage. Again, these essays demonstrate how religion, having passed through the crucible of the war, became an agent for later and greater social change.

Taken together, these chapters themselves, and others not mentioned, should change the way historians of the Civil War research, analyze, and write about religion’s role in it. The volume contains few weaknesses, and it is difficult to determine whether these reside in its constituent parts or in the whole. One notable lacuna is the lack of any essay dedicated exclusively to religion in the African American experience. Works such as Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll and Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion have documented “the invisible institution” since American slavery’s inception, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent chronicles the strides made by women in the independent black Baptist church after the Civil War.[14] Yet much research still needs to be done on black religion during the Civil War, particularly how it changed and developed as slaves and freedmen followed the conflict’s progress. Over the last seventeen years, the Freedman and Southern Society Project has made available a wealth of documentary evidence in the four volumes of its series Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. This is an indispensable and perhaps underutilized source for further research into black religious experience and thought during the war years.[15] None of the authors in the Religion and the American Civil War seems to have mined the treasures of first-hand data in this series.

As for the volume’s parts, some chapters try to deliver more than their pages comfortably allow. For instance, one wonders if Eugene Genovese’s article on the collapse of the American union would have been aptly subtitled “Christian Community in Free Labor or Free Markets?” because its most forceful argument concerns religious rationales of the sections’ respective economic systems. Each side, Genovese claims, promoted what it believed to be a Christian ideal of human social relations. The North argued for the abolition of slavery upon God-given equality and individual rights. The South in turn predicted that any society, agrarian or otherwise, would dissolve on the basis of such radical individualism: only a hierarchical, Abrahamic family model, as opposed to a capitalistic one, could unite and care for all. These religious “roots” to which Genovese traces the collapse of the American union form the strongest part of his essay. Although the last pages examine which religious-economic system lays the more convincing claim to having natural law and the Constitution in its corner, they are not enough to do justice to the complicated theories that Genovese introduces. Had he been able to spend less time covering the same ground already trod by Noll and more time developing his unique points, the essay would have been stronger. Responsibility, however, may lie less with Genovese than with the editors and space limitations.

Other essays also seem to overlap. While introducing the new student of the Civil War to the significance of classic literary texts (such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Emily Dickinson’s poetry), Paludan’s “Overview” covers recent historiography on religion and the Civil War. His literary analysis is only one among many ways he tries to explore the role of religion during the Civil War. The chapter thus offers a not-so-satisfying foretaste of what Fox-Genovese later dishes up in abundance. Paludan also tries to cover many issues that are dealt with more fully in other essays, such as the rise of the Social Gospel and liberal Protestantism, the cult of the Lost Cause, southern guilt, and the myth of the martyred Lincoln. These same topics are treated by Samuel Hill. Both Paludan and Hill attempt to acquaint the reader with old and new subjects worthy of study, and though their essays could stand by themselves, together their discussion seems redundant. Again, one wonders why the choice was made to incorporate both of these essays since they cover such similar themes.

As a result, the reader wishes that more pages were left for Fox-Genovese and Faust to continue the story of how southern women’s religious convictions developed and functioned after the war. Despite hinting that southern women weren’t far behind their northern sisters in joining WTCU chapters and challenging their God-given “place” in society, Faust and Genovese also concede that “southern women had not shared the spiritual and social empowerment experienced by … their northern sisters during the prewar years” and that “the vast majority of southern women settled back into traditional gender roles” (p. 258; see also p. 244). Neither author sufficiently explores the links between these women’s faith and the Cult of the Lost Cause, the Ladies of the Klan, or the Christianized culture of the New South—all of which warrant more investigation for the light it will shed on civil religion’s development in both North and South. As James M. McPherson notes in the book’s afterward, “In God We Trust” was first printed on United States coins during the Civil War. At the same time Lincoln, a president who refused to associate himself officially with any particular denomination or creed, explicitly instituted Thanksgiving as a day of spiritual reflection and rejoicing (p. 409). While several of the aforementioned essays refer to the concept of civil religion as famously defined by Robert Bellah in the 1970s (and ably illustrated by him with examples like Lincoln), their passing references call attention to the need for continued examination of the Civil War’s legacy in this regard.[16]

Perhaps the lines between individual, sectional, and national faith are impossible to parse definitively. The essays in Religion and the American Civil War have begun to trace them nevertheless. It is no longer the case that “because the American Civil War was not a war of religion, historians [tend] to overlook the degree to which it was a religious war” (p. 409). A failing of the volume, then, may be its tendency to portray the sectional conflict more as the former than the latter. To be sure, the greater frequency with which competing sides are identified with and wrapped in God’s favor, the greater the difficulty there is in distinguishing between the two kinds of battle. Additional study of and reflection on the relationship between the Civil War and civil religion is thus needed, perhaps no more urgently than today. When Americans are being called to unite together across sectional, racial, and social differences to defend and possibly fight against a foreign enemy’s jihad, an understanding of what constitutes a war of religion and a religious war is crucial.

These are only minor shortcomings of an important volume that largely leaves students of the Civil War only wanting to read more. The influence of Religion and the American Civil War has, in fact, also paved the way for more writing in these areas. Since the book appeared in 1998, several significant monographs on the war’s religious aspects have subsequently been published and develop the original studies found in Miller, Stout, and Wilson’s edited work. Eugene Genovese expands his treatment on the concerns of southern citizens and the failings of their peculiar institution in A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South, which stems from a series of lectures delivered at Mercer University in 1997.[17] Warren B. Armstrong’s For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War, also published in 1998, is the first book-length work on American chaplaincy in nearly thirty years or more. Armstrong proposes to “explain what the government of the United States did to address the religious concerns of its soldiers through the chaplaincy during the division of [the] nation … to examine their attitudes toward the conflict in which the nation was then engaged; and … to assess the value of the service these men rendered to their nation in those years of social, political, and moral crisis.”[18] Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, by Allan C. Guelzo, is a fascinating intellectual history that re-examines the leader’s moral, religious, and philosophical thought in the context of nineteenth century.[19] Finally, Stephen J. Ochs’s A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maitre in Civil War New Orleans continues the much needed research on Catholics during the Civil War. The book intends to “contribute to a growing literature on lives of free persons of color in New Orleans, the black military experience, black Catholicism, and Afro-Creole radicalism” in particular. Ultimately, Ochs hopes to shed “more light on … the admixture of war, race, religion, and political activism” in general (p. xvi).[20] Alongside Religion and the American Civil War, which remains the most current and comprehensive look at the state of scholarship on religion during the era, these volumes indicate that a new chapter on the long neglected story of religion’s role in the Civil War is at last being written.

Notes

1. A review of Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Wilson Reagan, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 422 pp. $24.95, paper).
2. William W. Sweet, The Story of Religion in America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 312 (my emphasis).
3. William W. Sweet, The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Civil War (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Press, 1912); Joseph Blount Cheshire, The Church In the Confederate States (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912); Chester Forrester Dunham, The Attitude of the Northern Clergy Toward the South, 1860–1865 (Toledo, Ohio: The Grey Company, 1942); and Benjamin J. Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee: n.p., 1945).
4. See Charles Pitts’s Chaplains in Grey: The Confederate Chaplain’s Story (Nashville: Broadman, 1957); Roy J. Honeywell’s Chaplains in the United States Army (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Chaplains, Department of the Army, 1958); and the numerous articles by W. Harrison Daniel, Edgar Pennington Legare, Sidney J. Romeo, and Bell Irvin Wiley, among others. For two exhaustive bibliographies of religion and the Civil War, see Charles H. Lippy, Bibliography of Religion in the South (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985), especially the section on “The Civil War and The Confederacy”; and William F. Deverell, “Church-State Issues in the Period of the Civil War,” in Church and State In America: A Bibliographical Guide—The Civil War to the Present Day (ed. John F. Wilson; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987).
5. James W. Silver, Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Confederate Pub. Co., 1957). See Deverell, “Church-State Issues,” 8.
6. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 691. Notable exceptions to this criticism of the extant scholarship were several significant works, including James Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: the Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schism and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985); Richard E. Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., A Shield and Hiding Place: The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987).
7. The October symposium was co-sponsored by the Louisville Institute of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. It was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
8. Stout’s hand seems to continue to guide the profession in this regard; see his and D. G. Hart’s editorial efforts in New Directions in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
9. Note that “Comparison” is indeed the title of the book’s last section, but strangely contains only one essay.
10. Had it not been for the southern church’s influence in convincing its people—through superior, literal, biblical arguments made in pamphlets and pulpits—that God sanctioned the peculiar institution, the war could not have been waged; quoting Albert Barnes: “No influence out of the church could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it” (76).
11. Harvey also hints at the relationship between the (albeit inconsistent) southern mode of private and introspective religion and the later phenomenal exploits of revivalists like Dwight Moody.
12. This is precisely what Stout did so well in The New England Soul with sermons hitherto neglected by historians such as Perry Miller, author of the famous The New England Mind. In part by finding and analyzing forgotten texts, Stout’s path-breaking work significantly revised what had been considered forgone conclusions of the period’s historiography.
13. This is not to exclude the society of border states, which authors in this volume like Noll explore with great skill.
14. See Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Woman’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). James McPherson writes in his “Afterward” that the freedman’s education movement described by Higginbotham is one of the “missing links” between the clergy’s increased activism during the Civil War and “the emergence of the Social Gospel a generation later” (p. 411).
15. Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds., The Destruction of Slavery (Freedom I/1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); idem, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Freedom I/2; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); idem, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (Freedom I/3; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and idem, The Black Military Experience (Freedom II/1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also Ira Berlin et al., eds., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ira Berlin, ed., Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992); Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997); Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998).
16. The volume does offer Ronald C. White’s fresh reading of Lincoln’s second inaugural in the essay entitled, “Sermon on the Mount.” It insightfully illustrates Lincoln’s evolving religious thought by comparing the famous short text with other documentary evidence of how the war had affected Lincoln’s political and philosophical beliefs before his death.
17. Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
18. Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), x. Also noteworthy is William Furry, ed., The Preacher’s Tale: The Civil War Journal of Rev. Francis Springer, Chaplain, U.S. Army of the Frontier (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2001), a new primary source documenting the life of a Union Civil War chaplain.
19. Allan C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
20. Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maitre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), xvi. See also C. P. Weaver, ed., Thank God My Regiment an African One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1998). For an older primary source on another French Catholic Chaplain, but one serving on the Confederate side, see A Frenchman, A Chaplain, A Rebel: The War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippolyte Gache, S.J. (trans. Cornelius M. Buckley; Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1981).