In his Second Inaugural Address, in March 1865, with Union victory imminent, Abraham Lincoln assessed the meaning of the Civil War in providential terms. He observed that in bringing on and fighting the Civil War, both northerners and southerners had read the same Bible, prayed to the same God, and expected God to be on their side in the great struggle. He continued that, regarding slavery, the root cause of the war, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” And, Lincoln noted, “The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither, has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” Lincoln further mused that “this mighty scourge” might continue further if God so willed it to repay in blood all the suffering slavery had wrought over two hundred fifty years. Lincoln's framing of the war, and of America's place in history, in providential terms fit the order of the age. And it also forms the foundation of George C. Rable's sensitive and sensible “religious history” of the war.
Rable describes the Civil War as the “holiest war” in American history, and rightly insists that it is impossible to understand how and why men fought, and died, for their cause except in religious terms. Religion suffused American society and was the touchstone for creating community, defining peoplehood, and reading history, including the collective conceit that America had a special place in God's design for humankind—what Lincoln would describe as the world's “last best hope” for betterment and freedom. As Rable shows, southerners and northerners cast their differences over slavery's interest in moral terms, which fact limited the possibility for political compromises, and when the war came each side read the Bible and history in terms of a civil religion that anointed their cause as the true expression of God's will. Each side asserted that patriotism was both a Christian virtue and duty. Through religious symbols and language, fast days, public prayers, and the sanctifying of death, each side invested its cause with such moral and even cosmic purpose that it dare not fail, or even flag in devotion. Any such failure or lapse invited God's wrath. Thus, reversals in battle, suffering at home, or any problems related to the war were explained by ministers and others as God acting to punish the wayward flock and to return them to right ways. Increasingly, northern Protestant churches asserted that Union failures were due to Lincoln's refusal to make the war one against slavery, in effect to purge the land of its great sin. At the same time, southern Protestant churches asserted that Confederate misfortunes and miseries were due to public selfishness such as in hoarding goods and especially in failing as “good masters” in their stewardship of their slaves by not Christianizing them or respecting families. In the end, southern ministers even explained southern defeat as proof of God's support for their noble cause; God was chastening them, not abandoning them. Northern ministers trumpeted Union victory as validation of their claims to God's favor. Religion thus reinforced sectional identities. All this, Rable shows with ample evidence from sermons, petitions, pamphlets, and other sources.
But Rable's religious history is more than a recounting of what the ministers and public figures spoke and wrote. He goes further than any previous scholar to discover the popular thinking and actions grounded in faith. The war was a “people's contest,” as Lincoln once observed, and it is among them that Rable looks for the marrow of American identity and interest. Reading soldiers' diaries and letters home, the correspondence from the home folks, the daily press, religious periodicals, and other sources, Rable finds a strong and resilient providentialism coursing through Americans' thinking, even among non-Protestant groups. And Rable, more than anyone else, reaches across the religious landscape to include Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and non-evangelical Protestants in his assessments; in doing so, he also finds some points of convergence among them, especially regarding America, whether as Union or Confederacy, as having a special place in history and people of faith having an obligation to define and defend the state. Especially revealing are his discussions of the role(s) of chaplains, who worked to provide “organized” and regular religious services and pastoral care while also serving as important links to the home front. At the same time, as Rable reveals, the absence and irregular oversight of chaplains meant soldiers assumed many religious responsibilities themselves, such as building chapels, running Bible studies, praying for one another, and burying their dead. How the lay initiatives played out after the war Rable does not say, for his religious history ends with Appomattox—the only failing in his fine book. Interestingly, too, Rable notes that even as religious revivals swept across the armies and as combat intensified “the connection between civil religion and soldier faith” (159), many soldiers did not write about or demonstrate their religious feelings and faith. Other soldiers succumbed to the temptations of camp life, continued in their religious indifference, or mocked the religious pretensions of those claiming to fear God. Learning more about such men is a task Rable leaves to others.
No short review can do justice to the depth of research and the command of subject that distinguish Rable's book. To be sure, some readers will wish for a stronger interpretive hand because Rable emphasizes broad narrative over argument and he does not much engage historiographical concerns. But Rable realizes his purpose—to make religion a central consideration in explaining the war, as it was to Americans explaining the war to themselves during the “ordeal by fire,” and to make the war a central consideration in explaining American religion. Lincoln and his age understood this. Rable asks now that we do, too.
