The study of African-American religion during the antebellum and Civil War eras has been a fertile field in recent decades.  Many such studies have focused on abolitionism and / or slave life in the antebellum era, with fewer works directly relating to the Civil War itself, despite the fact that African-American participation in and contributions to religious life of the Civil War era were substantial. 

In Major Themes in Northern Black Religious Thought, 1800-1860 (1975), Monroe Fordham identifies the essence of the social gospel of African-American religion in the North as it related to the coming Civil War:  the call to moral improvement in order to escape bondage; acts of charity and benevolence in order to help one another; focus on peace, hope and tranquility in order to deal with uncertainty and despair and to find strength and courage in the face of persecution; opposition to slavery and racism; and the universal equality of humankind.[61]  Eugene D. Genovese, in similar fashion, examines the role Afro-American religion in the South played in shaping an independent-minded slave community prior to and during the Civil War.[62]

Some authors have focused on individual African-American leaders, such as Frederick C. Douglass.  In Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989), David W. Blight shows that Douglass was certain of God’s divine favor for the abolitionist cause and acted with that certitude prior to and during the Civil War.[63]  In Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Americans and the Christian Mission from the Revolution to Reconstruction (1982), David W. Wills and Richard Newman offer biographical sketches of lesser known African-American leaders, including Samuel Harrison (a Congregationalist who served as a chaplain during the Civil War), Rebecca Cox Johnson (a woman who established a black Shaker Church immediately prior to the Civil War), and James Lynch (a missionary to the South during the Civil War and a civil rights advocate following the war).[64]

In Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists in the American Missionary Association, 1839-1861 (1994) and His Truth is Marching On: African Americans Who Taught the Freedmen for the American Missionary Association, 1861-1877 (1994), Clara Merritt DeBoer examines African-American leadership in the abolitionist American Missionary Association.  African-Americans played crucial roles in mission enterprises at home and abroad and in educating freedmen during and after the Civil War.[65]

             When the Civil War ended, African-Americans in the South established their own autonomous churches.  In Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1890 (1993), William E. Montgomery traces the story of the founding and growth of black churches in the South, starting with the efforts of northern missionaries to organize churches in the South immediately following the Civil War, to the point of the establishment and prospering of distinct black denominations in the decades after the war.[66]   Church and Community Among Black Southerners, 1865-1900 (1994), edited by Donald G. Nieman, is a collection of essays which explore the theme of the growth and development of black churches in the South in more localized detail.[67]

Samuel Hill, in “Religion and the Results of the Civil War” (Religion and the American Civil War), points to African-Americans’ religious experiences prior to the Civil War as contributing to the rapid rise and growth of African-American churches afterwards.  Hill concludes that, “the formation of independent black congregations and denominations … proved to be the most profound religious change brought on by the Civil War.”[68]  Janet Duitsman Cornelius reaches a similar conclusion in Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (1999), pointing to the significance of antebellum slave mission efforts in particular as preparing the way for the growth of independent African-American churches following the Civil War.[69]