colored race I do because I believe it helps to save the Union ... I shall d, less whenever I
believe that what I am doing hurts the c do more whenever I believe doing more helps the
cause.In seeking to keep the Union together, and at the same time do what was right by the slaves,
the innocent victims as well as the cause of the huge convulsive struggle, Lincoln was fully
aware that the Civil War was not merely, as he would argue, an essentially constitutional contest
with religious overtones but also a religious struggle with constitutional overtones. The
enthusiasts on both sides were empowered by primarily moral and religious motives, rather than
economic and political ones. In the South, there were standard and much quoted texts on negro
inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude, and of course St Paul on obedience to
masters. In the events which led up to the war, both North and South hurled texts at each other.
Revivalism and the evangelical movement generally played into the hands of extremists on both
sides. When the war actually came, the Presbyterians, from North and South, tried to hold
together by suppressing all discussion of the issue; but they split in the end. The
Congregrationalists, because of their atomized structure, remained theoretically united but in fact
were divided in exactly the same way as the others. Only the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and
the Catholics successfully avoided public debates and voting splits; but the evidence shows that
they too were fundamentally divided on a basic issue of Christian principle.
Moreover, having split, the Christian churches promptly went to battle on both sides. Leonidas
Polk, Bishop of Louisiana, entered the Confederate army as a major-general and announced: It is for constitutional liberty, which seems to have fled to us for refuge, for our hearthstones and our altars that we fight.' Thomas March, Bishop of Rhode Island, preached to the militia on the other side:It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist ... God is with us ... the Lord of
Hosts is on our side.' The Southern Presbyterian Church resolved in 1864: We hesitate not to affirm that it is the peculiar mission of the Southern Church to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.' It insisted that it was 'unscriptural and fanatical' to accept the dogma that slavery was inherently sinful: it wasone of the most
pernicious heresies of modern times.'
To judge by the hundreds of sermons and specially composed church prayers which have
survived on both sides, ministers were among the most fanatical of the combatants from
beginning to end. The churches played a major role in dividing the nation, and it may be that the
splits in the churches made a final split in the nation possible. In the North, such a charge was
often willingly accepted. Granville Moddy, a Northern Methodist, boasted in 1861: We are charged with having brought about the present contest. I believe it is true we did bring it about, and I glory in it, for it is a wreath of glory round our brow.' Southern clergymen did not make the same boast but of all the various elements in the South they did the most to make a secessionist state of mind possible. Southern clergymen were particularly responsible for prolonging the increasingly futile struggle. Both sides claimed vast numbers ofconversions' among their troops
and a tremendous increase in churchgoing and 'prayerfulness' as a result of the fighting.'
The clerical interpretation of the war's progress was equally dogmatic and contradictory. The
Southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney blamed what he called the calculated malice' of the Northern Presbyterians and called on God fora retributive providence' which
would demolish the North. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most ferocious of the Northern
clerical drum-beaters, predicted that the Southern leaders would be whirled aloft and plunged downward for ever and ever in an endless retribution.' The New Haven theologian Theodore Thornton Munger declared, during theMarch through Georgia,' that the Confederacy had been