ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE PULPIT: 4/8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)

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🗓️ 28 June 2025

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE PULPIT:
4/8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)

1860

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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0:00.0	I'm John Batchew with Professor Richard Cowardy, and the book is Righteous
0:08.8	Strife, the Pulpit's Battle. Alexander Stevens is not a preacher. He does use a speech,
0:15.3	though, at Savannah Athenium in March of 61 to announce how brutal the Confederacy is towards the people they call slaves
0:28.6	and the people of the North say must be freed, abolition.
0:33.4	Alexander Stevens says he's the Confederate Vice President, that the cornerstone of his government,
0:42.7	in the first time in the history of the world is built upon, quote, the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man,
0:51.5	that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal
0:57.6	condition.
0:59.3	I stopped there because that's enough here in the 21st century to know who the villain is.
1:05.5	Did the abolitionists recognize that language is completely unacceptable?
1:10.5	Did they condemn it? Did they want to know what
1:12.5	Lincoln thought of it? They did condemn it, absolutely, of course. And not only the abolitionists,
1:20.6	I think the radical abolitionists, I think much of Northern opinion was deeply offended by that.
1:29.4	And indeed, Stephen's cornerstone speech becomes a kind of just if you look at the sermons of the not just of the fast days, but throughout the war, the term cornerstone is used as a means of
1:48.2	reminding their congregations of the position that Stevens and the Confederacy has taken at the
1:55.2	outset. Of course, it's important to note that Jefferson Davis was so appalled by this speech that he saw how damaging
2:04.5	it could be. It actually was a statement of the truth as the Confederate leadership saw it. Nonetheless,
2:11.8	Davis saw how damaging this could be and worked very hard to indicate that actually this would know
2:16.5	what was driving the
2:17.9	Confederacy was a need for independence. But when, and I'll just say also in passing, after the
2:26.4	war, of course, Stevens purports to be sort of blind to what he has said four years earlier when he says that the purpose of the war was actually to defend state's rights and not to erect a system of slavery.
2:42.9	However, that's that's that's that's in passing.
	...

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