5/:8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 29 March 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

5/:8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)

1863 GETTYSBURG

The first major account of the American Civil War to give full weight to the central role played by religion, reframing the conflict through Abraham Lincoln’s contentious appeals to faith-based nationalism

How did slavery figure in God’s plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a mission amount to “religious tyranny” and “pulpit politics,” in an effort to strip the southern states of their God-given rights? In 1861, in an already fracturing nation, the tensions surrounding this moral quandary cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, where anti slavery religious nationalists butted heads with conservative religious nationalists over their visions for America’s future.

At the center of this melee stood Abraham Lincoln, who would turn to his own faith for guidance, proclaiming more days of national fasting and thanksgiving than any other president before or since.These pauses for spiritual reflection provided the inspirational rhetoric and ideological fuel that sustained the war.

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0:24.9	forward slash business to speak to the team. This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John
0:34.1	Bachelor. Professor Richard Carverdine, the new book is Righteous Strife,
0:39.4	a warring religious nationalist forged Lincoln's Union.
0:43.6	We're continuing the story from 1861, a very quiet period in the war.
0:49.2	Battle Bull Run is seen as a Confederate victory.
0:53.1	There's not another major action that year, but in 1862,
0:57.6	the bloodletting begins in earnest. Lincoln has in mind that the emancipation of the African,
1:06.9	of the slave, of the freedmen who are held in slavery, that is now necessary or possible.
1:16.3	But he spends the year building up that case and waits for a victory or something like a victory on the battlefield.
1:24.6	What happens is the battles that are fought all that summer are inconclusive.
1:32.0	But at the end, in September, there is a battle that looks like a strategic success, looks
1:38.8	like it, although the bloodletting is ferocious on both sides.
1:43.3	And Lincoln decides that he's going to issue the Emancipation
1:46.7	Proclamation on the first day of 1863. That creates enormous what we call pushback in the 21st century.
1:56.0	And the professor now takes us to the conservative attacks and Lincoln's response following
2:02.9	the Emancipation Proclamation.
2:05.6	Professor Lincoln has done what the first three years, two years of conflict thought
2:11.6	was impossible to do.
	...

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