The Spirit Divided: Memoirs of Civil War Chaplains—The Confederacy, and: The Spirit Divided: Memoirs of Civil War Chaplains—The Union (review)

As Benedict Maryniak and John Brinsfield observe in their preface to the second of these companion volumes, the religious faith of Civil War combatants, once a neglected topic in books about the conflict, has received increasing scrutiny by historians over the past two decades. A number of recent studies come readily to mind. For example, in While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (2001) the military historian Steven Woodworth analyzes the piety and beliefs of ordinary men who served in the Union and Confederate ranks, while in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006) the church historian Mark Noll examines how the struggle affected theologians’ ideas on subjects such as the authority of the Bible and divine providence. Indeed, Maryniak and Brinsfield have already made a contribution of their own to this emerging literature. In Faith in the Fight: Civil War Chaplains (2003) they (along with coauthors William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr.) offer a useful introduction to the activities of the nearly 3,700 ministers, priests, and rabbis who were commissioned as Union and Confederate chaplains. Now, in these two similarly titled and similarly organized books, Brinsfield and Maryniak continue their exploration of the military chaplaincy during the Civil War period.

Both volumes of The Spirit Divided present a variety of writings—letters, reports, diaries, and memoirs—in which the chaplains reflect on their wartime experiences. Since chaplains as a group were among the most literate and articulate participants in the conflict, these men not only preserved and published numerous firsthand accounts of the events they witnessed, but after the war many of them also wrote official histories of the regiments in which they served. The primary material from which the two editors have drawn is, therefore, an unusually rich source for information about every aspect of life in the Civil War armies. Each regiment was typically assigned a single chaplain. Although they had few official duties beyond the expectation of regularly leading worship in their units, these clergymen sought to minister pastorally to soldiers wherever they found them, whether at rest in camp, engaged in combat, recuperating in hospitals, or wounded and dying on the battlefield.

Reflecting the religious makeup of the United States as a whole in the mid-nineteenth century, the overwhelming number of Union and Confederate chaplains were Protestants, that is, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans. Despite the similarities of the chaplains’ theological views, however, there were distinct differences between the two armies, especially in the role that religion played in them and in the societies that supported them. Tacitly confirming the South’s image of itself as “the Bible Belt,” Brinsfield’s volume on the Confederate chaplains is noticeably longer than the one on the Union, though there were, in fact, far fewer chaplains commissioned in the southern forces. Brinsfield also stresses the importance of the evangelistic revivals that occurred among the southern troops in the winters of 1863 and 1864. Following Confederate defeat in the war, moreover, the religious enthusiasm inspired by the army revivals helped fill churches in the southern states as many former chaplains became leaders in their denominations in the 1870s and 1880s. In addition, ministers such as the Southern Baptist J. Williams Jones—chaplain of the 13th Virginia Infantry and author of Christ in the Camp; or, Religion in Lee’s Army (1887)—and the Presbyterian Robert L. Dabney—chaplain of the 18th Virginia Infantry and author of Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (1866)—achieved notoriety at the end of the century as clerical spokesmen for the Confederate “Lost Cause,” attributing...