The Politics of Faith during the Civil War

NOTES

Notes introduction 1. The terms “denominational Christianity” and “denomination” are used in this study to refer to both any recognized branch of Christianity (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, etc.) and any of the distinct subgroups of Protestantism that do not maintain a common and unifying theology or recognize a common earthly leader or hierarchy of authority. The main categories of consideration are Protestant groups of various organizational scopes and Catholic groups divided into organizational units (diocese, archdiocese, etc.). 2. E. Brooks Holifield, “The Penurious Preacher? Nineteenth–Century Clerical Wealth: North and South,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 17–36, 17. 3. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 28. 4. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Prepared Under the Direction of the Secretary of War, By Bvt. Lieut. Col. Robert N. Scott, Third U.S. Artillery and Pursuant to Act of Congress Approved June 16, 1880 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880). Abbreviated hereafter as Official Records. 5. Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); see also Paula Baker, “The Mid-Life Crisis of the New Political History,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 158–66, 158. It is important, however, to guard against the “new political” history’s tendency toward reductionism (that is, ignoring such forces as morality and nationalism in the behavior of individual actors and instead assigning too much determinative weight to ethnocultural concerns). On this matter, see Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 6. Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 7. Mitchell Snay, “Civil War Religion—Needs and Opportunities,” Civil War History 49, no. 4 (December 2003): 388–94, 387. More attention has been paid to the antebellum period and the role that religious leaders played in bringing on the war. See Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Dan McKanan, Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); John McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Edward R. Crowther, Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War (Lewistown, 204 notes to pages 6–9 NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985); Paul Conkin, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Bertram WyattBrown , Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 8. Most studies of wartime parsons have examined their interactions with soldiers. See for example Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of the Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); John Wesley Brinsfield et al., Faith in the Fight: Civil War Chaplains (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003); Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Phillip Thomas Tucker, The Confederacy’s Fighting Chaplain: Father John B. Bannon (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992). The role played by ministers in the formation and abandonment of Confederate ideology has been examined in detail as well. Leonard Allen and Richard Hughes reference a nationalistic orthodoxy that united denizens of the Confederacy and was rooted in a primitive religiousness that tied slavery to the southern way of life. Drew Gilpin Faust posits not only that religion was the linchpin of Confederate nationalism, but that religious leaders in the Confederacy were as powerful as political leaders and that southerners believed their effort was ordained by God. And Eugene Genovese argues that southerners, many of whom felt an unspoken guilt over slavery before the war, lost faith in...