6/:8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)

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🗓️ 29 March 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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6/:8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)

1865 GEORE MEADE AND FIFTH CORPS STAFF

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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0:23.6	selectonline.com forward slash business to speak to the team. I'm Tom Batchewitts, Professor Richard
0:32.1	Cowardine. We're dealing with the war within the war, the war from the pulpits, Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of these
0:39.2	completely overwhelming language from the pulpits and from the press. And we're now dealing
0:46.9	with a man who was not a preacher because the Catholic Church and thought he was too extreme.
0:53.0	So it turned him into a publisher. and he was, and he published what you'd have to say is books that, I mean, pamphlets and newspapers that are completely upset.
1:03.9	Secretary of State Seward and everybody else in the cabinet, so they had him jailed.
1:08.6	His wife, Gertrude writes Lincoln again and again saying, let him go.
1:12.5	All he did was and fill in the blank, especially his vituperations.
1:19.4	So he took an oath of obedience and released him and he went right back to publishing.
1:23.3	He named another publishing.
1:25.5	I fell in love with McMaster.
1:28.1	I didn't know about him, Professor.
1:30.0	What do we need to know about him today?
1:32.8	Well, I understand why you fell in love with him
1:35.9	in the sense that he is just an extraordinary
1:38.2	polemicist and an extraordinarily intelligent man.
1:41.7	He's very well educated, very well read. It's in, it has to be said, he's a
1:47.3	Presbyterian originally before he converts to Catholicism. And for a period, Bishop Hughes,
	...

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