Wartime Trials and Tribulations
Chapter 6 reveals that antislavery Unionists embraced the view that disloyalty to the United States and support of slavery were tantamount to sin. Northern evangelicals, Union troops, and Radical Republicans sought to impose these beliefs on southern evangelicals as a new civil religion via wartime ecclesiastical sanctions and loyalty oaths. Such sentiments also prompted Union authorities to muzzle the proslavery evangelical press, while spurring Unionist evangelicals to appropriate the church buildings of their proslavery counterparts. Challenged in the courts by dispossessed southern evangelicals, these were seizures that local tribunals under Radical control ratified. This variegated body of law, however, did not determine such outcomes as much as the religious, social, and political preferences of partisan judges. Their rulings, moreover, obscured the division between church and state, while powerfully generating popular understandings of evangelical faith and the armed struggle.