The Bible and the American Civil War

The American Civil War is sometimes considered one of the most religious wars in modern history. The contending sides each drew from evangelical ideas of understanding the world and their cause; each experienced great revivals in their respective armies; each claimed the Bible for its own side. Abraham Lincoln perfectly captured these ironies in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865. Just a little over a month before his assassination, he reflected on how each side had “looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” Lincoln’s perception of the limits of human knowledge of divine purposes was rare. More commonly (though not universally), Americans expressed righteous certainty about how biblical passages applied to contemporary events. These might include the results of the latest battle, the “message” God might be sending in the outcome of this or that event, or the meaning of vast social transformations such as emancipation. Clergy, laypeople, and soldiers on both sides freely divined God’s purposes in history and suggested scriptures to back up their prognostications. On the key issue of slavery and the coming of emancipation, African Americans found in the Bible the clearest connection to the apocalyptic events they experienced. Verses about Ethiopia stretching out its arms to God came to have a special meaning in an age when the war produced the one thing that most whites had little intention of fighting over when the war came: the freeing of nearly four million slaves. In the spirituals, African American slaves had developed a profound theology of how contemporary lives and events fit into biblical passages and stories. The Bible served one other, more grim, function as well—to bolster two armies armed with increasingly lethal weaponry. As men learned to place their own actions within a biblical cosmological framework, they also came to understand how crucial their role was in realizing a narrative foretold or sanctioned in the biblical passages. Chaplains carried a similar message to the men in both armies. Soldiers on both sides, however, most often turned to the Bible for personal encouragement rather than national ideology, as they memorized verses, quoted Scripture in letters, and remembered Bible stories. Ultimately, the battle for the Bible during the slavery controversy and over the course of the Civil War helped to displace a world in which the Bible itself was the primary mode of interpreting contemporary events.