THE CIVIL WAR is the great paradox in the history of American for- eign relations, at once the nation’s least important foreign war and yet also one of its most consequential. Overall, the stakes involved were entirely national. Sectional interests battled for control of America’s destiny, not the world’s. Americans fought over slavery and their clashing views of republicanism, not the fate of nations. Foreign policy was largely peripheral to a conflict that lacked a significant international dimension; few other countries were directly affected, including America’s continental neighbors, and none intervened in the fighting. Yet the outcome of this peculiarly insular war deeply affected the nation’s ideology, especially Americans’ general worldview and sense of world mission, in ways that would shape both U.S. foreign policy and international politics for decades to come.
To be sure, the causes and course of the Civil War were shaped by wider currents in world history. The United States of the 1850s and ’60s was not simply an isolated outpost of the world system unaffected by global trends. And foreign policy was not unimportant during the Civil War. Both the Union and the Confederacy invested considerable amounts of time and energy in trying to persuade, or compel, other nations to aid their cause—or at the very least, not to aid the other side. Mostly this centered upon whether the European powers, especially Britain and France, would extend official diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy, which would give Southerners precious international legitimacy and access to vast amounts of capital and military aid. Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, spent most of their time on foreign affairs beating back Southern efforts to secure European recognition and mediation of the Civil War, real possibilities in 1861 and 1862 that would have given the Confederacy a much better chance of winning the war. The South had several advantages, including British and French economic reliance on Southern cotton and a European desire to see the United States weakened through division. But the possibility of recognition turned to implausibility after September 1862, when the North won a bloody victory at the Battle of Antietam, demonstrating to the Europeans two important facts: the South would probably not win, and the North would definitely not give up. Afterward, foreign policy crises continued to flare during the remainder of the war, but there was never any prospect of foreign military intervention and, compared to the scale of the war itself, diplomacy was confined mainly to the margins.1
Religion, however, did play a large role simply because Protestantism had infused nearly every aspect of antebellum life. Though Americans differed over religion, often vehemently and sometimes violently, most agreed that it was central to politics, culture, and society. The Second Great Awakening, the emergence of voluntary benevolent societies in the North, the growth of evangelicalism, and even the flourishing of Unitarianism signaled the breadth and depth of the Protestant influence in America. But the nineteenth century also witnessed the first real diversification of American faith, with the creation of Mormonism and the sharp rise in Catholicism due to Irish and German immigration. Statistics, imperfect measurements though they are, bring the religious presence in the United States into sharper relief. In 1860, there were perhaps as many as four times the number of churchgoers as there were voters in the presidential election; twice as many clergy as military personnel; and thirty-five churches for every bank. Most astonishingly, the income of the nation’s churches nearly equaled that of the federal government.2
Then came war. In some ways, such as theological innovation by elites, religion remained relatively unchanged; but in others, such as the intensification of faith at a popular level, the war deeply affected the course of American religion. But overall, the centrality of religion continued—in fact, deepened—during the Civil War years. Stemming from the schismatic fury and ideological purity of the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist divisions, American clergy on both sides of the Civil War sanctified their cause and demonized the other, in effect calling for their countrymen to wage total, holy war. Political rhetoric had always been replete with religious language and imagery, but under the compressive forces of war the religious component of political discourse increased and hardened. The Benevolent Empire of evangelical reformism shifted its focus to alleviate wartime suffering through a new agency, the Christian Commission. Expressions of faith among soldiers increased on both sides as well. The Civil War thus had a galvanizing effect on a people who were already overwhelmingly faithful.3
Nowhere was this more true than in the mind and morals of Abraham Lincoln. Before he became president, Lincoln had experienced life at both ends of the spectrum of faith: his parents (and later, stepmother) were hard-shell fundamentalist Baptists who harbored an extreme Calvinistic theology; yet in early adulthood, Lincoln himself exhibited a skepticism that at times bordered on atheism. His lack of orthodox faith in an era of widespread Christian orthodoxy and overwhelming evangelical hegemony hampered his early political ambitions, and he had to work hard to refute charges of deism and disbelief. There was something to this Christian critique; as the historian Richard Carwardine notes, Lincoln’s religious views often resembled deism, Unitarianism, possibly even Universalism, but never evangelicalism. Most of all, he accepted the existence of a Supreme Being but doubted the divinity of Jesus Christ. However, though Lincoln would never come to embrace the Protestant orthodoxy of his day, he did become increasingly—and more conventionally—spiritual. The one constant throughout his life was a devout conviction in God’s providence. During the Civil War, when he underwent not only the most profound moral traumas of the war itself but also the personal pain of losing his young son Willie to typhoid fever, Lincoln’s faith grew markedly; his references to God became much more noticeable and frequent, his attendance at Washington’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church more regular. He met with church leaders often, much to the consternation of his advisers and generals, and increasingly pitched his speeches and messages in biblical language and Christian values. In so doing, he helped solidify—even re-create—the link in the American mind between Christianity and republicanism. And throughout, he demonstrated a depth of religious understanding that surpassed that of any of the formally trained clergy. Generations later, Reinhold Niebuhr said it was Lincoln, and not a minister, priest, or bishop, who was America’s “greatest theologian of the war years.”4
Based partly on Lincoln’s rechristening of America’s civil religion and partly on the moral absolutism of preachers in the victorious North, Civil War faith helped form the ideological core of U.S. foreign policy into the twentieth century. Comprised of two key ideas, this ideology of universal redemption was not always exclusively religious in character, but religion provided its most important source. Nor were either of these ideas necessarily new, though their testing in the Civil War changed them significantly. The first of these ideas was humanitarian intervention, the second America’s role as God’s chosen nation. When blended with the culture of progressive benevolence, missionaries, and the dictates of the national interest, the ideology of universal redemption enabled American leaders to follow a more interventionist, activist, and ultimately globalist foreign policy.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN did not go to war in 1861 intending to end slavery in the South. His principal war aim—initially his only war aim—was simply to keep the United States intact. This was a worthy enough goal in itself, he believed, even more so than abolition, and most Northerners agreed. After all, while the Constitution did not recognize the legitimacy of secession, it did protect slavery. Like most of his fellow Republicans, Lincoln’s antislavery views were free soil rather than abolitionist—that is, he worried that slavery had made the South aristocratic and undemocratic, which in turn corrupted the rest of the nation as it expanded westward. Betraying the prevailing attitudes of his day and especially of his home state, Lincoln also considered blacks an inherently inferior race and believed that, as a result, Americans could never achieve racial equality and harmony in the event of complete emancipation. Unsurprisingly, his support for African and Latin American colonization continued into the Civil War. By the outbreak of war, then, Lincoln was concerned more by what slavery did to whites rather than the evil it inflicted upon blacks.5
But Lincoln also knew slavery was fundamentally immoral. Though he believed blacks were inherently inferior, he respected their humanity and recognized that involuntary bondage was the highest form of tyranny. And toward the end of his life, he came to embrace the notion of innate racial equality. Slavery was “a great & crying injustice [and] an enormous national crime,” a young Lincoln told his close friend Joseph Gillespie. Later, as a politician striving for success in a highly polarized atmosphere, from a free state that was deeply hostile to African Americans, Lincoln’s antislavery views could not outpace those of his constituents; had they done so, he would never have become president. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he wrote Albert Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor, in a letter intended for publication. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”6
Crucially, however, Lincoln’s antislavery views changed profoundly during the course of the war, from free soil to outright emancipation. By the summer of 1864, he was ready to confer equal importance upon “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery.”7 If Lincoln did not begin the war as an abolitionist, he certainly ended it as one. Thus as much as he had sought to avoid it, Lincoln presided as commander-in-chief over the nation’s first war of humanitarian intervention: by the North, against the South, to free the slaves. Emancipation, much less human rights, was not always a central objective for the North, but in time it became one.
Yet for some Northerners, destroying slavery had always been the primary war aim. As we have seen, abolitionists had been pressing for a total end to American slavery since at least the 1820s, and they did so out of concern for the equal rights of blacks and only secondarily for what it did to the rest of the nation. And as we have also seen, the vast majority of abolitionists were Protestant activists, ranging from emotional evangelicals to rationalist Unitarians. Without necessarily sympathizing with slavery but remaining loyal to the Democratic Party—which in general did not oppose slavery in the South or its spread to the territories—American Catholics and Jews were divided on the issue, and few were outright abolitionists. More than any other competing ideology, then, Protestant theology and ethics provided abolitionism’s moral center.8
The abolitionist clergy in the vanguard of the antislavery movement may not have been popular, but in the end it was their vision that triumphed. Throughout the North, even in New England, hostility to the South’s “slaveocracy” rarely made common cause with abolitionism. Still, abolitionist preachers pressed their case. And from the very beginning, far ahead of their fellow Republican Abraham Lincoln, it was they who framed the war as a case of humanitarian intervention. Reverend S. H. Tyng, one of the most prominent Episcopalians in antebellum America, branded the tyranny of slavery as the greatest threat to republican liberty. “There is a feeling,” he wrote in 1861, “that despotism, bloodshed, fraud, oppression and unbridled lust, have, in defiance of heaven, rioted long enough, and that a righteous God will soon rise in his wrath and make short work” of slavery. “Babylon is toppling to her fall,” proclaimed Tyng, and Union victory would bring the culmination of “human freedom.” Similarly, Hollis Read, a renowned historian, rejoiced that “Satan’s empire is to be broken up.” But Americans could not take down Satan through preaching alone. Slavery could “only be broken to pieces by the sledge-hammer of WAR”; in turn, war was the only way to bring about the “reorganization of society” and the “triumph of Christianity.” To such minds, it was obvious that a war for the Union also had to be a war for abolition. “Thank God, the word has at last been spoken,” exclaimed an evangelical soldier in the Union Army after receiving news of the Emancipation Proclamation. “Light begins to break through. Let the sons of the earth rejoice. Sing paeans to Liberty. Let tyranny die.” For Christian abolitionists, it was always a war for reformation, not restoration.9
This is not to say that the slaves themselves were passive in the process of emancipation. Even before Lincoln’s conversion, they took advantage of the upheaval of war to free themselves in what has been likened to the largest and most successful slave rebellion in history. And naturally, their fellow African Americans in the North, led by free black preachers, passionately supported the cause as a holy war of freedom. The Second Great Awakening had given birth to African American Christianity, at least on a large scale, and stimulated the creation of the first black churches. Blacks had seen, often at first hand, how entrenched was Southern slavery and how racist were most Northerners. They feared that emancipation would not come gradually, and they were certain it would never happen voluntarily. “Who has sent this great deliverance?” thundered Daniel Payne, the presiding bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, shortly after the outbreak of war in 1861. “The answer shall be, the Lord; the Lord God Almighty, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.” Only God alone “couldst have moved the heart of this Nation to have done so great a deed for this weak, despised and needy people!” Later in the war the Christian Recorder, an AME Church publication, portrayed slavery as sin and war as punishment. “God has a controversy with this nation. He is chastising us severely, by civil war.” In the Union armies, moreover, many black soldiers perceived the cause of emancipation as divinely inspired. In the eyes of African Americans, it was self-evident that God’s cause was a war for abolition.10
For both whites and blacks, Christian-inspired humanitarian intervention infused cultural expressions of the antislavery cause, both before and during the war. Thus even before most Northerners were willing to admit that theirs was a war for emancipation, they had absorbed the ideology and imagery of emancipation. Consider two wildly popular examples, a prewar novel and a wartime hymn. As early as 1852, before John Brown’s violent antislavery crusades and the South’s equally violent proslavery defense had begun to divorce pacifism from abolitionism, came Harriet Beecher Stowe’s incendiary novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Daughter and sister of two of America’s most famous preachers—Lyman Beecher and Henry Ward Beecher—Stowe combined a penchant for optimistic but apocalyptic millennialism with a passionate abolitionism to create the most effective antislavery propaganda ever written. Christ, she reminded her theologically informed readers, would return to earth to bring justice, and then peace, to the world—and with them the sin of slavery would be cleansed from the American soul, by righteous violence if need be.11
Stowe’s novel had prepared the ground, but it was a song, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” that spread Christian abolitionism beyond its usual hard core of believers. Howe and her husband had been members of Theodore Parker’s Unitarian congregation, and they had absorbed their minister’s morally absolutist abolitionism. Howe was a Unitarian, and therefore religious but not especially spiritual, much less millennial. Yet her stirring hymn, based as it was on the Book of Revelation, emphasized the apocalyptic significance of the Civil War and thus reflected the prevailing millennialism of the mid-nineteenth century. By setting it to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” another popular wartime song that celebrated the martyred abolitionist and his cause, Howe ensured her hymn would be an anthem for emancipation. She placed the cause of abolitionism at the war’s very heart, particularly in the hymn’s final stanzas:
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Written in 1862, a few months before Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” became by far the Union’s most popular wartime song. And with each rendition, Northerners announced their moral intentions.12
But emancipation was still unpopular in 1862; most Northerners thought it either unnecessary or unwarranted, and often both. Since the 1840s, the majority of Northern clergy had conceded that slavery was a sin, but most also thought it was too deep-rooted to be ended peacefully. In any event, if slavery was a sin, war was an even greater sin. But after the bloody battles of 1862 and 1863, especially at Antietam and Gettysburg, it became clear that the struggle for the Union had already let slip the dogs of war, and that adding emancipation as a war aim would allow the North to reform, even recast, the United States in a more charitable, Christian image. The redemptive blood of war would even, many came to believe, wash away the sin of slavery. Slowly but definitively, galvanized by war, the Northern clergy came round to supporting emancipation. And as they did, they embraced the idea of the Civil War as a war of liberation: for slaves from their masters, and for the nation from slave power. Not coincidentally, the adoption of emancipation occurred alongside the transformation of the conflict from limited war to total war, even holy war. “Was the Church established without blood and slaughter?” asked the Reverend William Carden in 1863. The answer, of course, was no, as shown by the bloody struggles of the very first Christians. “It was something to be a Christian then,” Carden exclaimed breathlessly. “It called for honesty, and manliness, and self-sacrifice—nay, death.” A war to free the slaves provided a similar calling to a new generation of Christians.13
When Lincoln adopted emancipation as a primary war aim in 1862, he also adopted its Christian core. For him no less than others, the war to preserve the Union became a war of liberation and humanitarian intervention. Abolition, however, contradicted his pledge, uttered in the First Inaugural Address, not to interfere with slavery where it already legally existed. Moreover, as a wartime president fighting not only to bring the South back into line but also to keep Unionist but wavering border states in the fold, he had to act cautiously. But he knew he had to act: by the summer of 1862, after so much blood spilled in a string of military defeats, most Northerners had decided it would be impossible to reintegrate the South and slavery into the Union. Lincoln’s first step was the Emancipation Proclamation, drafted in June and July of 1862; yet he could not announce it until the North claimed a significant battlefield victory. After yet more failure in August, the Battle of Antietam in September, the single bloodiest day of the war, offered a difficult, sanguinary victory—but victory nonetheless, which was certainly enough for Lincoln. As Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded in his diary after Antietam, Lincoln had “made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation …. God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”14
Five days after Antietam, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and announced it would take effect on January 1, 1863. Later, he confided to his friend Joshua Speed that it was his greatest achievement, “something,” Speed recalled, “that would resound to the interest of his fellow man.” And though the Proclamation itself was a cautious, officious, almost timid document, Lincoln spent the duration of the war affirming and reaffirming the principle of emancipation, both as a means to national reunion and as a worthy moral goal in itself. In this, he was not only reframing the terms of the war, but also the terms of American patriotism, even the nation. According to Lincoln, America was a sacred endeavor, an experiment in republican liberty, and a perfection of human governance that would one day save the world. But Americans would be worthy of carrying such a weighty torch only if they transcended the merely political. This at least was the idea behind Lincoln’s December 1862 Annual Message to Congress, which envisioned emancipation as America’s salvation and, in turn, America as the world’s. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.” But only the survival of America, whole and intact, could fulfill this potential. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth,” Lincoln said of the United States in his closing passage. “Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.” Among Northerners, Lincoln’s recasting of the Civil War from a struggle for the Union to a war of national liberation found strongest support among the clergy. With emancipation, declared a Pittsburgh Presbyterian, the purposes of God were now “inevitably interwoven with that of the Government.”15
Lincoln reinforced the centrality of emancipation time and again between 1862 and the end of the war. In the process, the war’s cause—indeed, its very nature—shifted in his mind from secession to slavery. As he told a group celebrating victory at Gettysburg, “we have a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal.” In 1864, when Congress turned to drafting what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery once and for all, Lincoln supported it enthusiastically and pressured wavering members of Congress to do the same. To Lincoln, the war was simply God’s plan to bring about justice on earth. “We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best and has ruled otherwise,” he told the Quaker activist Eliza Gurney a year later. “He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.” These were not idle words, and it is clear that this period also marked the time of Lincoln’s ever-increasing piety. His moral conversion on slavery was mirrored by a spiritual conversion on faith. Religion now formed the heart of both his moral vision and his wartime rhetoric.16
The apotheosis of Lincoln’s public faith came in one of his most famous speeches, the Second Inaugural Address of March 1865. The explicit religiosity of the Second Inaugural marked something of a departure for Lincoln, whose speeches were embedded in religious phrasing but did not normally appropriate religious doctrine for their content. Yet this departure was also a culmination, mainly of Lincoln’s own struggle to sort out the true meaning of the war. Frederick Douglass, among the audience who heard the speech, said that it was “a sacred effort” that “sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.” Philip Schaff, one of the nation’s leading theologians, pronounced that no “royal, princely, or republican state document of recent times can be compared to this inaugural address for genuine Christian wisdom and gentleness.” Observes the historian Mark Noll, “none of America’s respected religious leaders … mustered the theological power so economically expressed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.” Or, as another historian put it, the Second Inaugural was Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount.17
Mentioning God several times and quoting directly from scripture, the Second Inaugural called for Americans to end the war through an embrace of both justice and reconciliation. “All knew” that slavery, not secession, “was somehow the cause of the war.” While nobody could pretend to know the will of God—“The Almighty has His own purposes”—it was clear to Lincoln that whatever Americans’ past differences, God had used the Civil War as punishment for the sin of slavery and a means to bring it to an end:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
In the end, only emancipation, even more than Union, would cleanse the nation’s soul. “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln declared in one of the speech’s more memorable passages. “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ” Once a war for national unity, Lincoln had rechristened the Civil War as a struggle for liberation. Through presidential rhetoric and military victory, the moral radicalism of the abolitionists had been vindicated.18
LINCOLN’S ELEVATION of the United States as “the last best hope of earth” and his effort, in the Second Inaugural, to heal sectional scars with the salve of moral righteousness signaled the emergence of the second idea behind the new ideology of universal redemption. To the victors, the Civil War’s ultimate meaning transcended the struggle between union and secession. Restoring the Union was only an initial step, for a divided America could never be as effective as the United States. If it was the North’s duty to bring freedom to the South, it was also America’s duty to protect and promote freedom wherever it could. Victory over the South convinced Northerners that America’s purpose was not only heaven-sent, but also unlimited. God had spared the United States for a reason: to save the world.
This revision and significant expansion of manifest destiny was held widely in the North. Whereas John L. O’Sullivan’s manifest destiny envisioned territorial expansion, the new version of manifest destiny foretold the global expansion of American values because the United States, strengthened through its test of blood and will in the Civil War, was now destined to spread republican liberty and Christian virtue to all humanity. Americans were now beholden to a manifest destiny of limitless expanse. There was, of course, already a prevailing belief that the United States was God’s chosen nation and the world’s leader in freedom. “I feel sure that the hour has not come for this great nation to fall,” William Seward, soon to be Lincoln’s secretary of state, declared on the Senate floor in January 1861. “This Union has not yet accomplished what good for mankind was manifestly designed by Him who appoints the seasons.” Even as specific doctrines of Calvinism, especially predestination, came in for new scrutiny and criticism, belief in providence and in a special national mission, which were rooted in Calvinism, had never been stronger. Thus the fervent millennialism and providentialism of the Civil War reflected rather than created this aspect of American civil religion. Nonetheless, the sacrifices of war tremendously deepened Americans’ sense of mission, renewing it for generations to come.19
Once again, the Northern Protestant clergy made a significant contribution to the fusion of American patriotism and religious faith. The failure of politicians, who had lost control of the national agenda during the crises of the 1850s, created a predominant influence for Northern preachers in the political debates of the 1860s. Some were abolitionist, others were free soil, but all stressed the urgency of preserving the Union. In so doing, they sanctified, in the most explicitly religious terms, both the Northern cause and the United States itself. American civil religion had already pervaded public life, and the Northern clergy had praised America’s mission before the war. But by blending patriotism and faith in the most shrill terms, the Civil War transformed it into an overwhelming, almost suffocating presence.20
To the Northern clergy, as well as to many lay Northerners, secession was tantamount to sin—“an unholy rebellion,” in the words of one Pennsylvania soldier—because it aimed to destroy God’s chosen instrument for human perfection, the United States. In this interpretation, America was “the last best hope” not only of Americans, but of people everywhere. Reverend Horace Bushnell, whose preaching was famed throughout the United States, saw the sanctification of America’s mission as one of the main outcomes of the war. “In these rivers of blood we have now bathed our institutions, and they are henceforth to be hallowed in our sight,” he told the Yale graduating class in July 1865. “Government is now become Providential,—no more a mere creature of our human will, but a grandly moral affair.” Contrasting the United States to the monarchies of Europe, Bushnell promised that Americans “have not fought this dreadful war to a close, just to put our government upon a par with these oppressive dynasties!” God intended something altogether more glorious for America. Similarly, Daniel Payne of the AME Church spoke for many newly freed slaves as well as whites when he compared the United States to “the right arm of God—of God, who lifts up and casts down nations according as they obey, or disregard the principles of truth, justice, liberty.” If the Civil War had been a war of humanitarian intervention, in other words, it was to be the first of many. This was now America’s task.21
American patriotism, and with it the American sense of mission, had always possessed a defiantly Protestant soul, but the Civil War led to a more inclusive civil religion. When American Catholics and Jews fought in the war—which they did, on both sides, in large numbers—they shared in a collective sacrifice for the greater good of the nation. The Union and Confederate governments also used Catholic emissaries to plead their cases in European capitals and the Vatican. War was thus a powerful way of Americanizing non-Protestants, especially immigrant groups, like Irish Catholics, who had not lived in the United States for very long. The process was not an easy one for Catholics, especially in the North, where the war effort was dominated by Protestant Yankees. Just as awkward for the overwhelmingly Democratic Irish Catholics were the Republicans’ efforts to use the war to further party interests, especially through support for big business, internal improvement, and New England shipping. Moreover, the transformation of war aims from union to emancipation troubled laboring Irish Catholics: not only did they share the traditional Democratic tolerance of slavery, they feared competition for unskilled labor from freed slaves. Still, despite the 1863 draft riots, sparked by Irish Catholic outrage at emancipation, conscription, and Protestant prejudice, and despite widespread anti-Catholicism, American Catholics successfully used the Civil War as a fulcrum for Americanization and as a starting point for full participation in the rites of American civil religion. Indeed, by the 1880s the triumphal memory of the Civil War, rather than the more complicated reality, served as a powerful Americanizing force among American Catholics, including recent Catholic immigrants.22
The same was true for Jews, albeit on a smaller scale because mass Jewish immigration was still decades away. For them, the turning point came when Lincoln rescinded General Ulysses Grant’s notorious General Order No. 11, which blamed Jews, “as a class,” for profiting from the smuggling of Southern cotton. Grant punished Jews en masse by expelling them from areas under Union Army control, such as northern Mississippi and most of Tennessee. Confederates used Grant’s rank anti-Semitism as a way to attack the hypocrisy of Northerners who professed to fight a war for black liberty while violating the most basic of religious freedoms. As soon as he learned of it, Lincoln revoked Grant’s order for collective punishment. He then reassured Cesar Kaskel, a Jew forcibly removed from Paducah, Kentucky, that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.” Anti-Semitism did not disappear, and American Jews, no less than American Catholics, continued to endure discrimination. But a threshold had been crossed. Through Civil War, civil religion was becoming more ecumenical.23
Traditional notions of providence—of God protecting the United States and anointing it with a glorious destiny—rested heavily upon Americans’ sense of mission. As during previous conflicts, providential thinking intensified in wartime. Already a providential people, Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line became more trusting in God’s mysterious ways, more willing to accept their fate in his heavenly plans. This was no less true of America’s leaders, whose invocations of providence in victory and appeals to providence in defeat increased sharply during the war. General Stonewall Jackson, hero of the South, became something of a cult figure in both the South and North for his total belief in God’s providence. Yet at the time, the Civil War caused a crisis in providential thinking. For if America was God’s chosen nation, why was he punishing his chosen people through the uniquely terrible scourge of civil war? Ministers and leaders had several answers, ranging from the sin of slavery to the sin of secession to the sin of interfering in states’ rights—but nobody could know for sure, especially during the Union’s darkest days of 1861–62 and the Confederacy’s during 1864–65.24
As usual, it was Lincoln who provided the answer. Biographers have noted that Lincoln was unusually fatalistic, probably a vestige of his ultra-Calvinist Baptist parents and a product of his particularly brooding, depression-prone personality. Of all the religious tenets he believed in, his faith in providence was the firmest and most enduring. Unlike the nation’s preachers, Lincoln did not pretend to know the will of God. As he reminded Americans in the Second Inaugural, the “Almighty has His own purposes.” And as he argued several times during the war, both sides claimed that God was on their side, yet God could not possibly be acting on behalf of both sides in such a terrible conflict. Yet Lincoln firmly believed that God dictated the course of the war, even if mortals could not grasp his ultimate purpose. Most important, Lincoln believed that he was an instrument of providence, God’s agent on earth at a particularly significant moment in history. Lincoln’s providentialism—his fatalism—did not amount to passivity. Lincoln might not know the ultimate end, but he was certain he was acting as the Lord’s means, and he was not about to fail in his duty. In this fashion, Lincoln explained his actions, such as emancipation, not merely as wartime necessity but divine intention.25
In this light, the Civil War stands not only as a struggle for the nation but as a redemptive platform for America to save the world. In November 1863, Lincoln reinforced this idea of a larger purpose in the Gettysburg Address, where he dedicated the battlefield not to the dead—only God could do that—but to the living, whose task remained incomplete. Unlike the Second Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address was not overtly religious. But its evocation of supreme sacrifice touched upon increasingly popular religious notions of living soldiers as “angels,” dead soldiers as “martyrs,” and the Union cause as “holy.” Lincoln’s theme of birth and rebirth, moreover, was grounded in both the ideal of immaculate conception and the Christian conversion narrative, as if the United States itself had been born again. The “baptism of blood” at Gettysburg, the theologian Philip Schaff said at the time, enabled America “to hope for a glorious regeneration.” Lincoln’s speech was conceptually and emotionally similar to the Protestant clergy’s incessant appeals to a civil religion of the highest patriotism, such as Henry Ward Beecher’s characteristic claim that the “battle on the Potomac for our Constitution, as a document of liberty, is the world’s battle. We are fighting, not merely for our liberty, but for those ideals that are the seeds and strength of liberty throughout the earth.” And of course it was consistent with Lincoln’s own perception of the war as a divine test and his own role as an instrument of God.26
The United States was a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln declared at Gettysburg. Yet Americans were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” Lincoln then imbued the Civil War with a meaning that extended far beyond American shores. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” he said of the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg, “but it can never forget what they did here.” Instead, it remained for the living “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” As Lincoln made clear, this “new birth of freedom” belonged not only to America, but to the rest of the planet. Just as the Union and emancipation had been America’s salvation, a reformist America would be the world’s.27