William Porcher DuBose is a perhaps the “greatest theologian that the Episcopal Church in the United States of America has produced.” One of Dubose's contemporaries, W. H. Moberly, identified him as “the wisest Anglican writer . . . on both sides of the Atlantic” and as “one of the foremost philosophical theologians of our time.” A modern biographer, Robert Boak Slocum, has called him “the most original and creative theologian to appear in the more than 200-year history of the Episcopal Church” and, in fact, “the only important creative theologian that the Episcopal Church in the United States has produced.” Among his numerous books, the best known are The Soteriology of the New Testament, (1892)/(1906) The Gospel in the Gospels, and The Reason of Life (1911).

In 1861, however, “Willie” Dubose was an ardently pious young student at the South Carolina Diocesan Seminary in Camden, about to be pulled from the contemplative life of the seminary into the world of suffering and death. When his native state seceded from the Union in April 1861, DuBose initially took little interest in the conflict. “I surprise myself by my coolness on the subject” of the war, he wrote to his fiancée. So slight was his regard for the world outside of the seminar that “I sometimes reproach myself for feeling too little interest and excitement.” Indeed, he felt that no service to his state or country could be more vital than the work of the ministry. “One who has devoted his life to God,” he wrote, “can no longer call it his own” (17). Moreover, the bookish DuBose did not believe himself to be cut out for command. “The disposition, occupation and habits of a student are not the best preparation for such a position,” he believed. “I am too contemplative, too absent minded, and can never remember the points of the compass.” And perhaps most important, “having so long trained myself to regard myself as the ‘servant of men,’” he found it “hard to become their master” (61).

He soon realized, however, that officers would be required to organize and train the new companies being mustered into Confederate service, and by the end of the year DuBose was drilling recruits in Charleston. When he found the camp less godly than the seminary, his fiancée consoled him with the thought that “I do not think you will regret this unexpected lesson in the study of human nature. I feel that God is perhaps preparing you for great usefulness in the ministry.” On the other hand, she regretted that he had “hardly time or opportunity for influencing your men in religious things, except by example” (24).

Transferred to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, DuBose received his first wound at the Second Battle of Manassas. As the only officer of his regiment who was not killed or seriously wounded that day, he reorganized the shattered unit and commanded it during Lee's Maryland campaign where, at the battle of Turner's Gap, he was again wounded and was taken prisoner. Within a month he was exchanged, but no sooner had he rejoined his command than he received his third wound of the year in a skirmish at Kenston, North Carolina.

While recovering, DuBose was, in May 1864, promoted to captain and reassigned as chaplain in Joseph B. Kershaw's brigade. Despite what might have been a rear echelon posting, DuBose was often at the front in the 1864 battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor and in the deadly siege of Petersburg where, he observed, “there continues to be a good deal of religious interest manifested in the brigade. There's no doubt that battles and the prospect of battles do much to startle men into seriousness” (273).

After the disastrous battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864, DuBose felt as if “the end of the world was upon me as completely as upon the Romans when the barbarians had overrun them.” In his memoir, Turning Points in My Life (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), he confided that “never once before had dawned upon me the possibility of final defeat for the Confederate cause. That night it came over me like a shock of death that the Confederacy was beginning to break” (49). Six months later, DuBose was present at Appomattox, and returned home to find it in utter desolation, a victim of Sherman's march.

Speculating on the reason for the South's defeat—“imagine our great cause finally unsuccessful and our beloved country conquered and ruined”—DuBose concluded that God's purpose in allowing the Confederacy to perish was so that His people would “seek a better, even a heavenly” city. Never dreaming that the destruction of the evil of slavery might have entered into divine will, DuBose continued to believe in the righteousness of the South's cause and merely observed that God often used “wicked nations to accomplish his judgments upon those that were less so” (46).

William P. DuBose's Civil War correspondence—the majority of which was with his fiancée and later wife, Anne Barnwell Peronneau—have been skillfully edited by W. Eric Emerson, director of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia, and Karen Stokes, an archivist with the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston. The principal contribution of their annotations is in identifying the numerous kith and kin of the correspondents, to whom they frequently allude, thus enriching our knowledge of South Carolina's social world in the Victorian era. Unfortunately, DuBose, at his fiancée's request, destroyed most of her letters to him lest they inadvertently fall into enemy hands. But the 150 remaining letters—now housed at the South Carolina Historical Society—provide vivid accounts of a young officer's wartime experiences, ranging from observations on the life of the men in the ranks to informed commentary on military operations. Equally important, they also reveal DuBose's spiritual growth from seminary student to a fully mature philosopher of religion.

Although DuBose later wrote that “the stern and unsparing discipline of war” had interrupted his study for what was to become his life's work, yet the war did have a profound effect on the young theologian's “general as well as spiritual character.” Through his military experience, DuBose “acquired the habit of combining thought with life and experience,” and although during the war his “moments of real thought and study were rare, they were sometimes more intense and precious, and probably more fruitful, for being so difficult” (Turning Points in My Life, 42, 48–49).