He Hath Loosed the Fateful Lightning of His Terrible Swift Sword: Denominational Schisms, Religion, and the Coming of the American Civil War

He Hath Loosed the Fateful Lightning of His Terrible Swift

Sword:

Denominational Schisms, Religion, and the Coming of the

American Civil War

Jacob Polowin0582 4199HIST 429

Professor Jeff BrisonApril 23, 2012

By the outbreak of the Civil War, religion pervaded all

aspects of life in America. The Second Great Awakening,

begun in the mid-1820s, prompted an explosive growth in

Protestant church membership, religious activism and

evangelism, and by the 1830s, Church membership had grown

from one in fifteen people to one in seven.1 Yet, even this

number is deceptively low, as the vast majority of those not

affiliated with a particular church attended sermons on

Sundays and often during the week, certainly read their

bibles, and participated actively in prayer.2 Long

constituting a majority of the faithful, Protestant

1 Phillip Shaw Paludan, “ Religion and the American Civil War” in Religionand the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21.2 Eugene D. Genovese, “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 75-76.

2

denominations now came to truly dominate the American

religious landscape. Moreover, this newfound religiosity saw

the population increasingly united by a Protestant cultural

hegemony, in which shared Christian values and beliefs

formed the backbone of a national sense of unity and

identity. Religious newspapers provided Americans with

common reading and religious thought across across a vast

and disparate continent. Popular fiction, magazines and

advice books were imbued with religious themes and basic

reading in common schools purveyed overtly Protestant

morality.3 Founded as a “city on a hill,” America had become

God’s chosen nation, with Americans as the new Israelites.

In addition to helping build a superficial Protestant

unity, the Awakening also exposed religious divisions within

American society. Broadly speaking, Northerners tended to

embrace a theology of attainable Christian perfection that

focused on the eradication of social ills. Alcohol,

gambling, prostitution and, crucially, slavery were targeted

3 Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, “Introduction” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.

3

by Northern reformers as evils that needed to be cleansed.4

Southern congregations, on the other hand, tended to focus

on personal piety and literal reading of the Bible, and less

on social reform. In terms of slavery, this meant at best

indifference, if not outright support.5

Yet, as slavery increasingly dominated the national

discussion, the tensions that it engendered were not limited

to the political realm. Battles as bitter as those waged on

the floor of Congress were fought in seminary halls and

general assemblies, and in the pages of religious

newsletters. Just as in Congress, mutual animosity and

provocation caused Northern and Southern clergymen to become

increasingly entrenched in their mutually incompatible

positions. Yet, the churchmen were far less able to stave

off disunion than their secular counterparts. In 1837, the

Presbyterian Church of the United States broke into “New

School” and “Old School” factions. Though there were broader

theological issues at play, and the factions did not align

along explicitly North-South lines, the Old School was 4 Ibid, 6-7.5 Ibid, 7.

4

dominated by Southern Presbyterians, opposed to the

liberalism and feared abolitionism of the mostly Northern

New School. Indeed, the Cincinnati Journal and Luminary wrote

of the incident that, “the question is not between the old

and the new school – it is not in relation to doctrinal

errors; it is between slavery and anti-slavery.”6 While

there remains dissent,7 many modern scholars have argued

convincingly that slavery played the primary role in the

split.8

By the 1844 rupture of the Methodist Episcopal Church –

the governing body for Methodists – there was no such doubt.

Southern members seceded from the Church after the refusal

of the Northern majority to seat a slaveholding bishop. In

1845, Baptist congregations, though associated much more

6 Quoted in C.C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and theComing of the Civil War (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1985), 71.7Chris Padgett, “Evangelicals Divided: Abolition and the Plan of Union’sDemise in Ohio’s Western Reserve” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery, ed. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 249.8 Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Seperatism in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 116-117; Edward R. Crowther, “Religion Has Something… to Do with Politics” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery, ed. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 327-329; Genovese, 78; Goen, 71-72;

5

loosely and lacking true national, centralized governance,

split explicitly over slavery into separate congregational

groupings along North-South lines. While the breakup of any

prominent national institutions over the issue was itself

newsworthy, the significance of the rupturing of the

Methodist and Baptist churches, following that of the

Presbyterian Church, ran much deeper. Indeed, so prominent

in, and influential to, the American religio-cultural

landscape were these churches, that it is the purpose of

this essay to argue that their division into Northern and

Southern factions both foreshadowed and abetted the coming

of the Civil War.

Representing the two numerically and culturally

dominant denominations of Protestantism,9 their rupture

shattered the extant – if strained – façade of national

religious and cultural unity, provoking questions of how the

nation’s political institutions could possibly reconcile

their differences over slavery if even religious brothers

could not. In addition to destroying the shared religiosity

9 Goen, 57-60.

6

that was the foundation of the hegemonic culture, the

relatively smooth breakup of the Methodist and Baptist

churches provided a model for peaceful secession, bolstering

Southern hopes for a similarly peaceful political secession.

Furthermore, the breakup of the churches into explicitly pro

and anti-slavery camps meant that slavery was no longer a

taboo issue. Previously constrained by concerns of

diplomacy, religious leaders in both camps were now free to

overtly align themselves with one side of the issue, and to

preach the religious justifications for, and righteousness,

of that side. As Civil War seemed increasingly likely

throughout the 1850s, the hegemonic religions – and

subsequently the hegemonic cultures – of North and South

grew increasingly divergent, becoming foundational to

polarized and mutually hostile national identities.

It is difficult to overstate the national trauma caused

by the sundering of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist

churches. Proving that even the nation’s religious leaders

could not reconcile their positions over slavery, the

divisions shattered the religious foundations of Protestant

7

cultural unity, leaving many observers at the time to lament

what they saw as the inevitably dire consequences. Speaking

on the eve of the fateful conference that split the

Presbyterian Church, Charles Hodge, a member of the Old

School, warned that the New School’s denouncing of slavery

as a sin and a crime “must operate to produce the disunion

of the states, and the division of all ecclesiastical

societies… We shall become two nations in feeling, which

must soon render us two nations in fact.”10 On the opposite

end of the political spectrum, in late 1837 William Lloyd

Garrison wrote of the schism, “the mighty denomination is

severed in twain at a blow. The political dismemberment of

our union is sure to follow.”11

Though Presbyterians paled in numerical comparison to

the Methodists or Baptists, they exercised disproportionate

influence over an educational system still governed almost

entirely by various religious organizations.12 Thus, their

10 Quoted in Goen, 7411 Quoted in Ibid, 2.12 On the eve of the Civil War, the system of common schools in the South was run almost entirely by the clergy. It was only slightly more secularized in the North (Genovese, 76). In 1860, of approximately 400 institutions of higher learning in the country, all but handfuls were

8

rupture, in addition to sparking national fears of disunion,

had far-reaching ripple effects, as huge swaths of the

American populace were now educated in the principles of

either the Old School or the New School – including its

respective views on slavery – to the exclusion of the other.

With slavery playing an even more explicit and

exclusive role in the Methodist and Baptist schisms, the

fears sparked by the Presbyterian rupture were confirmed and

multiplied. While some Southern politicians argued that the

splitting of the denominations would remove a source of

tension,13 the majority of the Southern press and clergy

voiced a fear that, in the words of Tennessee Methodist

William C. Booth, religious discord “has, in truth, already

been hailed as a harbinger of disunion.”14 15 In the North,

the schisms were greeted with near-universal pessimism,

summarized by an editorial of the New York Journal of Commerce,

run by religious organizations. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 13. 13 Snay, 141-143.14 Snay provides an overview of the response of Southern secular and ecclesiastical press, as well as individual Southern clergymen, to the various denominational schisms on pages 138-140. A similar summary can be found in Goen, pages 98-102.15 Quoted in Snay, 140.

9

which lamented, “it is obvious that the bonds of our

national union are weakened.”16 With vastly divergent social

and economic structures, North and South had been united

primarily by common religion. With the major religious bonds

severed, and with political tensions over slavery ratcheting

up in the wake of the schisms, the Mason-Dixon line seemed

an ever-widening chasm.

Yet, initially the secession of the Southern churches

proceeded smoothly and largely without incident. Each

faction formed its own governing organization, and by the

early 1850s, the Northern and Southern branches of the

divided congregations had coexisted in peace and cordiality

– if not necessarily friendship – for a number of years,

seemingly better off for having separated. Heated bickering

over slavery no longer wracked national meetings, and

Southern Methodists and Baptists saw their ranks swell in

the years following their secession.17

In light of this apparent success, and in the face of

increasing national discord over slavery, religious and 16 Quoted in Goen, 103.17 Goen, 120-121.

10

secular leaders primarily in the South - but in not

insignificant numbers in the North – were quick to draw

parallels between the nation’s political institutions and

its religious institutions and to offer the division of the

latter as a remedy for the current impasse and disharmony of

the former. Despite the glaring dissimilarities between the

two forms of secession – the history of Protestantism is

rife with denominational secession, merger and reformation,

while political secession was unprecedented in American

history and of disputed legality – these arguments,

propagated by opinion shapers, gained widespread traction,

particularly in the South. Indeed, rather than staving off

disunion by eliminating sources of tension, the severing of

the churches merely served to mitigate Northern and Southern

fears regarding the potentially disastrous effects of

political secession. Augustus B. Longstreet, a prominent

Southern clergyman and President of several universities,

offered to stake his entire worth on the suggestion that the

South would secede peacefully, while Senator James Chesnut

11

of South Carolina offered to drink all the blood that might

result from secession.18

By 1849, the Sumter Banner was echoing the earlier

arguments of the religious press, and advocating secession

modeled on that of the Methodists and Baptists as the only

way to preserve Southern rights and freedoms. By 1854,

Francis Wayland, the President of Brown University and one

of the most prominent Baptists in the North, was advocating

letting the South secede in order to prevent slavery’s

spread throughout the rest of the continent. At the same

time, Southern secular and religious press and leaders had

coalesced around the call for secession modeled on that of

the churches.19 Southern churchgoers, having already crossed

the Rubicon of religious secession years earlier, were all

too willing to believe it could be accomplished politically

with similar ease.

This union of pulpit and politics, of church newsletter

and secular newspaper, formed perhaps the strongest force in

18 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848-1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 489-490.19 Goen 120-123; Potter, 96.

12

the drive to war. Throughout the years from the

denominational splits until the onset of Civil War,

preachers on either side of the issue became increasingly

overt in their political affiliations. Given the centrality

of religion to the lives and culture of both North and

South, clergy in both regions held tremendous sway over

public opinion. Thus, the lending of religious justification

and the invocation of divine will on both sides of the

slavery issue contributed tremendously to the polarization

and politicization of the general public. Yet, clerical

politicization on the scale that existed on the eve of war

was an entirely unprecedented phenomenon in American

history.20 An understanding of this politicization’s

precipitating factors is therefore crucial to an

understanding of its impact.

20 George F. Frederickson demonstrates that Northern clergy, were, for the most part, publicly silent on the issue of slavery before the late 1840s: George F. Frederickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115-116. Bertram Wyatt-Brown makes a similar assertion concerning the Southern clergy: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Church, Honour and Secession,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90.

13

In the North, the rupturing of the churches, and the

subsequent increased ecclesiastical involvement in political

issues, coincided temporally with a major shift in the

nature of clerical careers. In the 18th and early 19th

centuries, Northern preachers typically spent their entire

careers tied to a particular location and a particular

congregation. As a result, local ties would be strong, and a

pastor’s authority within a given parish would stem more

from his “office” than from personal popularity.

Congregational dismissal of its preacher was highly

uncommon, and his local stature leant him considerable

authority over religious and secular matters, as well as the

freedom to voice an opinion contradictory to that of his

congregation. However, by the mid 1840s, they tended to be

far more mobile, presiding over numerous congregations, in

numerous localities, over the course of a career. This new

arrangement meant that congregations found it easy to

dispose of an unpopular pastor, while charismatic clergymen

could change pulpits easily in pursuit of larger flocks and

14

higher salaries.21 Yet it also meant far less clerical

independence on controversial matters – in a sense, pastors

had become far more like politicians.22

As a result, many Northern clergymen – most of whom

were already avowed abolitionists – felt bound to take moral

stands on controversial issues that reflected the will of

their congregation. As slavery increasingly became the

dominant national controversy throughout the late 1840s and

early 1850s, ambitious clergymen sought to bolster their

followings with ever-more strident and eloquent

denunciations of slavery.23 This abolitionist sentiment

combined with Northern clerical polemics against the

prospect of disunion – denouncing as sinful the prospect of

rebellion against nation and constitution – to form an

ecclesiastical drumbeat of abolition and ardent support of

Union.24

21 Frederickson, 111-112.22 Interestingly, Frederickson highlights the contemporaneous nature of the shift in the clergy with the shift of political leadership from government by local elite to office holding by professional politicians,member of elaborate political parties (111).23 Ibid, 112-113.24 Ibid, 117.

15

Northern clerical attacks against the South and slavery

took several forms. From a biblical standpoint, abolitionist

Northern ministers argued that while there were perhaps

biblical verses that appeared to sanction slavery, the

institution of slavery as it existed in the United States

clearly violated the spirit of the Bible, which advocated

charity, humanitarianism and the uplifting of mankind.

Albert Barnes, one of the most prominent New School

Presbyterians, was a proponent of this view, arguing that a

clear distinction had to be drawn between the letter of

Scripture and the moral principles that underwrote it, with

only the latter being binding.25 This line of attack

extended the charges of apostasy beyond those who held

slaves, to include the entirety of a Southern society that

tolerated the institution.26 By sanctioning, indeed

defending an institution that was in clear violation with

God’s will, the South could no longer lay claim to being a

part of God’s chosen nation. Indeed, for righteousness to

25 Mark A. Noll, “The Bible and Slavery” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 44.26 Goen, 130-131.

16

once again be secured, the heinous sin would have to be

cleansed.

A final line of Northern clerical attack lay in

religious condemnation of Southern threats to secede.

Describing the Union in religious terms, Northern ministers

decried those who would so flippantly sunder God’s chosen

nation. The constitution was imbued with almost biblical

significance, and sin against Union and constitution was

equated with sin against God. 27 As the national debate over

slavery became increasingly more virulent throughout the

1850s, exploding after the 1854 passage of the Kansas-

Nebraska Act, so too did the rhetoric from the Northern

pulpit. By the middle of the decade, an ever-increasing

number of Northern clergymen were denouncing Southerners as

“degenerates and apostates, traitors, rebels, thieves,

plunderers, cowards.”28 Thus, inflamed by national tensions,

the attack of the Northern clergy had evolved from a call

for emancipation, to a denunciation of slaveholders, to an

27 George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 29-30.28 Goen, 131.

17

all-encompassing condemnation of Southern society as

fundamentally other and irreconcilably sinful.

In the South, the politicization of the clergy occurred

earlier, and took the form of a defensive reaction against

perceived abolitionist aggression, rather than an offensive

attack on a moral issue. In the 18th century, many Southern

churchmen were in fact vocally opposed to slavery,

reflecting the contemporary positions of the Methodist and

Baptists churches. Yet, as the institution became ever more

central to Southern society, in the early years of the 19th

century, Southern churches began to fall silent on the

issue, adopting the position that slavery was a secular,

rather than a religious matter. Yet, by the 1830s, they were

adamantly and vocally supportive of the “peculiar

institution.” David Chesebrough argues that two events in

particular scared the Southern religious establishment out

of its silence: in 1831, Nat Turner’s Rebellion resulted in

the slaughter of some sixty white Virginians, while in the

same year William Garrison published the first edition of

the Liberator, calling for the immediate emancipation of all

18

slaves. 29 The former event reinforced Southern fears of the

potential consequences of emancipation, while the latter,

with its attacks on Southern morality, deeply galled a

society in which honour was paramount.

It was the fundamentally moralistic nature of Northern

attacks that was instrumental in provoking a virulent and

fairly unified defense of slavery by the Southern clergy.

While matters of the secular realm were left to politicians,

in the pervasively religious society of antebellum America,

churchmen were regarded as the ultimate arbiters of morality

and decency. Despite the fact that at the time the majority

of the Northern population was indifferent to slavery –

though it is difficult to ascertain the precise leanings,

evidence suggests that abolitionists were in the minority

until well into the Civil War – initial Northern stirrings

of abolitionism were construed by the South as a wholesale

moral attack on its way of life.30 31 By framing abolitionist

29 David B. Chesebrough, Clergy Dissent in the Old South, 1830-1865 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press), 7-8.30 Goen, 184-185.31 Throughout the antebellum years, Southern religious and secular leaders persistently exaggerated the breadth of Northern abolitionism. In addition to its usefulness in providing a political scapegoat and

19

attacks as a moral issue, Southern leaders made it the role

of the clergy to respond.32

The response of Southern religious leaders was

multifaceted, and can be placed along a sort of continuum.

The most fire-breathing, ardent pro-slavery clerics

constructed a literalist scriptural defense of slavery,

pointing to the existence of slavery in the Old Testament as

divine sanction of the institution in its current form.33 To

a Southern population dominated by evangelical Christianity,

with its fundamentalist interpretation of scripture, this

was a compelling argument. If the Bible sanctioned slavery,

then any charges hurled by abolitionists were irrelevant and

heretical.

Yet, these literalists remained a relatively small – if

vocal – minority. Indeed, the majority of Southern clergymen

were uncomfortable with this literalist and perpetualist

punching bag, this phenomenon is attributable to the fact that Southern leaders tended to hail from the elite of society, and consequently had the most to lose from a potential abolition of slavery.32 James O. Farmer, Jr. The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1999), 231-232.33 John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 64-65; Chesebrough, 9-10; Goen, 128.

20

view of slavery, and recognized that the issue would have to

be dealt with in some form or another eventually.34 Thus, in

a slightly less extreme position, many Southern preachers

highlighted Biblical support for the doctrine of racial

inequality, arguing that by divine ordination blacks were

inferior to whites.35 As a corollary to this view, the

Southern religious establishment sought to portray slavery

as a humanitarian institution through which blacks,

otherwise lacking discipline and morality, were introduced

to God, Christian morality, and the Protestant work ethic.

Some even went so far as to portray slavery as “voluntary,”

and to equate it with the free labour movement so valued by

the North.36

Thus, to Southern preachers, it was Northern

abolitionists who were in clear contravention of God’s will.

By attacking a biblically sanctioned institution,

Northerners were attacking God, and therefore could not be

tolerated. Because abolitionism was motivated by apostasy,

34 Crowther, 328-329.35 Chesebrough, 10-11.36 Daly, 113-115.

21

the conflict over slavery was framed as part of a much

larger picture. Rather a contest between pro and anti-

slavery, it was “a struggle between true religion and false

religion, between orthodoxy and heresy, and between a

biblically revealed religion and a man-made religion.”37

In developing both biblical defenses and denunciations

of slavery, Northern and Southern clergy broke one of the

sole remaining religious bonds that bound the two regions.

Though the rupture of the Methodists, Baptists and

Presbyterians had strained the bonds of religious, cultural

and ultimately political unity, North and South remained

united by common scripture. Yet, as Northern and Southern

clergy evidenced that they could not agree even on the

meaning of the Bible, this last, powerful bond was torn

asunder. In using the Bible as the basis for acceptance or

rejection of slavery, the clergy framed the opposing side of

the issue as not merely immoral, but fundamentally sinful

and heretical. Furthermore, the epithet of apostasy was

extended to encompass not only those directly involved in

37 Chesebrough, 12.

22

the debate, but indeed to the entire society that tolerated

the existence of their viewpoint. Northerners condemned the

South as barbaric, sadistic and sinful, while Southerners

saw the North as an atheistic, immoral, tyrannical

wasteland. Heeding the words of the godly men, shorn of any

remaining religious bonds, Northerners and Southerners

increasingly saw each other as fundamentally other, each

adhering to a heretical vision of God.

Indeed, it was this sense of isolation and alienation

from each other, this growing sense of North and South as

two distinct, fundamentally irreconcilable and mutually

hostile nations, that truly ensured the coming of war.

Bombarded from pulpit, podium and printing press by violent

and destructive caricatures, by the eve of war the mental

and emotional gap between North and South as truly gaping.

Far more so than any fundamental material or economic

differences, it was this artificially created opposition

that was responsible for conflict.38 In the words of David

Potter,

38 Goen, 125-126.

23

“As they became isolated, instead of reacting to each other as they were in actuality, each [region] reacted to a distorted mental image of the other – the North to an image of a southern world of lascivious and sadistic slave drivers; the South to the image of a northern world of cunning Yankee traders and of rabid abolitionists plotting slave insurrections.”39

Just as shared religion was foundational to the

development of a unifying national culture and identity in

the wake of the Second Great Awakening, so too was religion

instrumental in shaping the hegemonic identities of the

North and the South, while simultaneously driving them

farther apart. In the North, the activist Protestantism and

notion of achievable Christian perfection that had spawned

the first abolitionists shaped the views of Northerners

towards the South, and potential Civil War. The Union was

viewed as the ultimate manifestation and instrument of

Christian good – an instrument that must be defended against

the sinners that would see it destroyed. Though the fierce

abolitionism of the Northern clergy had pushed their

Southern brethren to secession, it was this almost religious

39 Potter, 43.

24

conception of Union that now instilled a martial ferocity

among the Northern population.40

In the South, the personal, fundamentalist

Protestantism begat by the Awakening engendered a more

defensive, inward-focused hegemonic religion. Southern

religious and secular leaders constantly stressed that the

pious, honourable Southern way of life was under attack by

the godless North. Skirting the issue of slavery, the

Southern pulpit portrayed the North as an immoral and sinful

land, seeking to impose its modernity and tyranny on an

innocent and Christian South. In what would become the

Confederacy, the rallying cry was not abolition nor the

preservation of Union, nor even defense of slavery, but

rather the protection of home, family and God.41

Thus, as the churches went, so went the nation. With

the splitting of the Presbyterians in 1837, the Methodists

in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845, the foundations of a

hegemonic and unifying religio-cultural national order were

severed. Americans that had seen themselves as God’s chosen 40 Goen, 8-9.41 Crowther, 328.

25

people were forced to reconcile the fact that even their men

of God could not overcome the tensions that were straining

the fabric of nation. Yet, the peaceful and successful

division of the churches buoyed those who were considering

national division as a remedy for the contemporary impasse,

and caused the prospect to be considered by many with far

less gravity than was deserved and necessary. Furthermore,

the division of the churches over the issue of slavery

loosed a barrage of ecclesiastical virulence on both sides

of the issue, with pro and anti-slavery camps condemned as

sinful and heretical. As the Northern and Southern clergy

solidified in mutual opposition, the biblical justifications

employed for each position severed the last remaining

religious bond of national unity, and increasingly catalyzed

the Northern and Southern populations, each assured of

divine favour. As the societies and cultures of North and

South diverged, their respective religious values became

instrumental to the construction of new and mutually hostile

national identities. Such was the divergence that by the

26

late 1850s, the Mason-Dixon line did not delineate between

regions, but rather nations. War was inevitable.

Thus, the coming conflict would be cast in sufficiently

religious and apocalyptic terms, framed as a clash between

two mutually exclusive conceptions of divine will. In 1850,

James Henley Thornwell, a prominent South Carolinian

preacher, delivered a sermon entitled “The Rights and Duties

of Masters,” which remains one of the classic social,

political and religious justifications for slavery. In his

opening lines, he reached for the language of climactic

religious battle, preaching that the “parties in this

conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders –

they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans,

jacobins, on the one side, and friends of order and

regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is

the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants;

and progress of humanity at stake.”42 When the conflagration

finally arrived, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the de facto

Union anthem, used similarly evocative terms, proclaiming

42 Quoted in Chesebrough, 12-13.

27

that God “hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible

swift sword.” To both sides, God was indeed marching on.

28

Works Cited

Chesebrough, David B. Clergy Dissent in the Old South, 1830-1865. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Crowther, Edward R. “Religion Has Something… to Do with Politics” in Ohio’s Western Reserve” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985

Daly, John Patrick. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

Farmer, Jr., James O. The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1999.

Frederickon, George M. “The Coming of the Lord: The NorthernProtestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis” in Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, HarryS. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Genovese, Eugene D. “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union” in Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Goen, C.C. Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denomination Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War

Miller, Randall M., Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson. “Introduction” in Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

29

Noll, Mark A. “The Bible and Slavery” in Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Padgett, Chris. “Evangelicals Divided: Abolition and the Plan of Union’s Demise in Ohio’s Western Reserve” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery, edited by John R.McKivigan and Mitchell Snay. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. “Religion and the American Civil War”in Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harperand Row, 1976.

Rable, George C. God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010

Snay, Mitchell. Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “Church, Honor and Secession in Religionand the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, HarryS. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

30