Recent Historiography on Religion and the Civil War by Bruce Gourley
(section 3 of 9)
 

Northern Religion and the Civil War

Revivalist fervor swept the northern United States in the early 19^th century.  In North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (2002), Milton C. Sernett focuses on “The Burned Over District of New York” (so named because of repeated revivals that swept through the area in the 1820s and 1830s) as a significant contributor to northern religious and political activism which precipitated the Civil War.  Sernett credits the revivalist Charles G. Finney as providing the initial religious fervor against slavery in the region, and Beriah Green (1795-1874), a theologian and abolitionist educator who transformed Oneida Institute into a school for both whites and blacks, as spearheading the “comeouter” movement (Christian abolitionists who separated from the established churches and formed abolitionist-only congregations).  The comeouter movement transformed religious opposition to slavery into the realm of politics, and the creation of the Liberty Party.  From this movement Stephen Douglass rose as a spokesperson for African-Americans.  The contributions of upstate New York led to the battlefields of the Civil War and into Reconstruction.  Sernett’s contribution to the discussion of religion and the Civil War is found in his successful demonstration of how religious convictions on a local level contributed to the abolitionist movement and, ultimately, the framing of war rationale.[16]

In War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865 (1985), John R. McKivigan examines on a larger scale the efforts of American abolitionists to persuade northern churches to endorse immediate emancipation.  McKivigan concludes that the rise of the comeouter churches, which were few in number, signaled only limited success of abolitionists to recruit northern churches.  The overall failure of abolitionists to convince the churches is attributed to theological undertones (emphasis on personal responsibility and suspicion of abolitionist religious principles), organizational structures (the decentralization of Congregationalists, Baptists and Unitarians was a hindrance, while Roman Catholic and Episcopal hierarchies quelled debate), demographics (religious immigrants found abolitionism foreign to their heritage), and traditional attitudes towards social order.  Abolitionists failed to convince northern churches to discipline slave holders prior to the war, yet the presence of war and continued abolitionist agitation did finally lead all northern denominations, other than the hierarchical Catholics and Episcopalians, to embrace emancipation by war’s end.  Abolitionists in turn used church endorsements to further influence public officials.  McKivigan ultimately faults the northern churches, not abolitionists, for their own failure to embrace the abolitionist movement.[17]

                George M. Fredrickson, in “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis” (Religion and the American Civil War), broadly examines northern Protestant clergy, concluding that by the 1850s militant clerical opposition to slavery was significant.  Fredrickson argues that although northern society turned to the leadership of clergy in the antislavery campaign and in legitimizing the war, the rise in clerical prestige was at the expense of embracing politics and secular methodology.  Clerical popularity in the North after the Civil War waned as prophetic voices were indistinguishable from political, secular voices.[18]  James Moorhead, in American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War (1978), also examines northern clergy, revealing the divines’ invocation of heavenly imagery in the nationalistic crusade against slavery and the South.[19]

                 In “Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount: The Second Inaugural” (Religion and the American Civil War), Ronald C. White Jr., locates “the finest presentation of the relationship between religion and the Civil War.”[20]  White equates the address to a sermon, rather than a state speech.  In the wake of impending Union victory over the Confederacy, the public expected to hear victorious words, rather than words of reconciliation and Lincoln’s struggle to identify the hand of God in the darkest of times.[21]

Interestingly, White does not offer even a cursory glimpse of clergy reaction to Lincoln’s second inaugural.  However, in No Sorrow Like Our Sorrow: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (1994), David Chesebrough examines 340 northern Protestant sermons delivered in the seven weeks following Lincoln’s murder, concluding that the clergy, by this point, had embraced the northern political structure as their own.  Chesebrough notes that the sermons collectively immortalized Lincoln’s character[22] while blaming the South (not Booth) for his assassination, and angrily demanding that the South be harshly punished for Lincoln’s death.  Chesebrough hints that this may have signaled the height of the influence of northern clergy.  Yet, the angry cries of the clergy were oftentimes so extreme that even the Radical Republicans found them too offensive.[23]

                In short, a common theme found in many analyses of the Northern Church during the Civil War era is that of the Puritan and Calvinistic notion of Providence, i.e., the belief that God had a special plan for America, and that the United States, and the North in particular, was the crucible of that hope.  This understanding was not unique to white Protestants.  In Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989), David W. Blight shows that Douglass also echoed this belief.[24]  James H. Moorhead demonstrates in “Between Progress and Apocalypse,” that Postmillennial hope in the North, united with Republicanism, symbolized the marriage of the sacred and the secular in northern society.[25]