A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Other ◽  
Inaugural Address ◽  
The Bible ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
North And South

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said both North and South “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” Lincoln quoted several biblical texts in this address—which, according to Frederick Douglass, “sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.” The Bible, as Lincoln’s famous speech illustrated, saturated the Civil War. This book offers the most thorough analysis yet of how Americans enlisted scripture to fight the Civil War. As this insightful narrative reveals, no book was more important to the Civil War than the Bible. From Massachusetts to Mississippi and beyond, the Bible was the nation’s most read and most respected book. It brought to mind sacred history and sacrifice. It presented a drama of salvation and damnation, of providence and judgment. It was also a book of war. Americans cited the Bible in addressing many wartime issues, including slavery, secession, patriotism, federal versus state authority, white supremacy, and violence. In scripture, both Union and Confederate soldiers found inspiration for dying and killing like never before in the nation’s history. With approximately 750,000 fatalities, the Civil War was the deadliest of the nation’s wars. Americans fought the Civil War with Bibles in hand, with both sides calling the war just and sacred. This is a book about how Americans enlisted the Bible in the nation’s most bloody, and arguably most biblically saturated war.

Slavery and the Civil War

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Inaugural Address ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Republic

American religion flourished in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. In particular, evangelical Christianity rose to a position of unprecedented cultural authority. Although wide variations exist, evangelicals are generally defined by four attributes: an emphasis on individual conversion; a focus on the saving power of Jesus's death and Resurrection; an appeal to the Bible as the ultimate religious authority; and an enthusiasm for witnessing and activism. As evangelicalism expanded, political discourse increasingly adopted evangelical overtones. Nowhere was this more true than in the conflict over American slavery. This chapter presents the following documents: Frederick Douglass' “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country” (1847), George Armstrong's The Christian Doctrine of Slavery (1857), Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (1865).

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The Bible saturated the Civil War, and this book offers the most thorough analysis yet of how Americans enlisted scripture to fight the war. This introduction describes the major themes examined in the book, including Abraham Lincoln’s use of scripture (and Americans’ use of scripture to praise and to attack Lincoln), slavery and the Bible, patriotic views of scripture, and the Bible’s use to cope with the war’s death toll. The book concludes with an appendix on new data on the most-cited biblical texts in the war, ranked in three tables, labeled “The Confederate Bible,” “The Union Bible,” and “Biblical Citations in the American Civil War: Union and Confederacy.” Americans fought the Civil War with Bibles in hand, with both sides calling the war just and sacred. Supported by this groundbreaking new data, this book examines how Americans enlisted the Bible in the nation’s most bloody and, arguably, most biblically saturated war.

“His Terrible Swift Sword”

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Inaugural Address ◽  
Powerful Interest

The Civil War resulted from a division that existed since the nation’s founding. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, “slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” This division pitted those who believed slavery to be a biblical institution—and compatible with the ideals of the nation—against those who believed slavery violated both scripture and the nation’s founding ideals. This chapter narrates the Bible’s use to support and to attack slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War, focusing especially on uses of scripture to support violence.

The Problem of Failure in American History

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-264
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
The South ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
To Come ◽  
North And South

C. Vann Woodward’s lecture compares two commemorations of the Civil War fifty years apart, one in 1911 and the other in 1961. The first one reflected sectional reunification predicated on a shared understanding of the tragic nature of war but also a sense that the conflict had solved the problem of sectional animosity. In so doing Woodward notes that whites in the North and South could only accomplish this by excluding meaningful African-American participation. The lecture then outlines the cycles of Reconstruction historiography, and looks at the dual psychological traumas the North and South experienced in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Woodward maintains that after the North emerged victorious from the war it failed to live up to its ideals, leaving wracked guilt, self-criticism, and remorse. The South emerged with a predilection for extortion, indignation, and extreme bellicosity, consistently blaming its own weaknesses on Reconstruction. Woodward suggests that historians should act as therapists, enabling the nation to come to terms with the psychological traumas triggered by the past.

Arguing until Doomsday

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Charles Sumner ◽  
Civil War Era

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

The Bible in the Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Standard Mode ◽  
Civil War Era

Americans of the Civil War era expressed considerable certainty about how biblical passages applied to the dramatic contemporary events of 1861‒1865. Clergy, laypeople, and soldiers on both sides freely divined God’s purposes in history and suggested scriptures to back up their often apocalyptic prognostications. As with the battle for the Bible in the slavery controversy, however, the standard mode of biblical exegesis for mid-nineteenth-century Protestants, common-sense realism, provided such a plethora of answers about the meaning of contemporary events that there was no clear answer. The Bible did not speak plainly. More than just about any theologian or minister, Abraham Lincoln understood that and articulated it in 1865.

Frederick Douglass

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Black American ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Church

Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist, author, and statesman, was born into chattel slavery in the United States in 1818. Douglass’s antislavery activism inspired his sons to fight in the Civil War to end slavery in the nation (1861–1865). It also enabled him to meet other U.S. abolitionists such as James McCune Smith, the first Black American graduate in medicine (Glasgow University, 1837), as well as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass arrived in Scotland in 1846, where he gave many lectures on the evils of chattel slavery and was aware of the roles politicians and the church played in maintaining this institution. He argued that if the Free Church of Scotland refused to help to abolish slavery in the United States, it should “Send Back The Money” that it acquired from slaveholding investors. A commemorative plaque to Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2018. This article reflects on Frederick Douglass’s activism in Scotland and what it means for Scotland’s African diasporic residents. 

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Religious War

This epilogue examines the central themes of the Bible in the Civil War, including confidence in clear analogies between biblical texts and the war; faith in the war’s redemptive outcome, which, for many in the North, charged the United States with a divine mission in the world; and above all, reverence for the sacred sacrifice of the dead, whose blood had “consecrated” the nation. Through all the death and injury, endless debates over slavery, defenses of secession, and patriotism, the Bible was a constant reference. The American Civil War may not have been “a war of religion,” James McPherson wrote, but we should not forget “the degree to which it was a religious war.” In a similar way, the American Civil War was not primarily a war over the Bible, but it was a biblical war for many Americans.

Struggle is a Name for Hope: A Critical Feminist Interpretation for Liberation

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-248
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Religious Meaning ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Theological Authority ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site

The author attempts to find a way between defence of religion and the bible on the one hand and the exodus from religion and church on the other. In reclaiming the authority of wo/men as religious-theological subjects for interpreting biblical texts, the act of biblical interpretation emerges as a moment in the global struggle for liberation. This essay has four parts: Scripture as a site of struggle over theological authority; the bible as a site of struggle over religious meaning; wo/men's struggles as a site of biblical interpretation; and reclaiming a radical democratic feminist tradition.

Researching "The Scripture of the Other": Niqula Ghabriyal's Researches of the Mujtahids and Rashid Rida's Rejoinder

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 181-216
Author(s):  
Simon A. Wood
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
General Notion ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Rational Character ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Biblical Texts

This paper discusses a Christian-Muslim debate taking place in Egypt early last century. It examines its protagonists’ deployment of scripture as they evaluated “the religion of the other” and upheld their own. The Christian protagonist is Niqula Ghabriyal, author of Abhath al-Mujtahidin fi al-Khilaf bayn al-Nasara wa al-Muslimin (Researches of the Mujtahids on Christian-Muslim Disputation), published in 1901. Ghabriyal deploys the Quran to uphold the veracity of the Bible and hence the soundness of Christian doctrine. In addition, he rebuts Muslim readings of biblical texts. Upon these bases, he calls for Muslim conversion to Christianity. His approach finds analogs in various missionary publications dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Muslim protagonist is Rashid Rida, who publicly challenged Christian critics of Islam. Beginning in 1901, Rida published a series of articles in his journal al-Manar in response to works critical of Islam, including Ghabriyal’s book. In 1905, Rida published sixteen articles as a separate book, Shubuhat al-Nasara wa Hujaj al-Islam (The Criticisms of the Christians and the Proofs of Islam). This paper examines the arguments developed by Ghabriyal and Rida as they sought to persuade Muslims of the merits of their views. The specification of the Muslim audience is pertinent. The debate was framed by a general notion of Western progress relative to Muslim backwardness. From the perspective of colonial administrators, Western evangelists, and like-minded Arab Christians, Islam was a barrier to progress. This was to be overcome, amongst other means, by conversion to Christianity, the call to which was often accompanied by discussions of Islam’s defects. These frequently draw on the Bible and Quran and, in Ghabriyal’s case, classical and modern Islamic scholarship. From this angle, the debate may appear to be a case of Christian proselytization met by Muslim resistance. Yet in Rida’s view there was something further at play. He felt that evangelism disingenuously if not hypocritically packaged a different agenda. Rather than Muslim conversion to Christianity, he felt that the ultimate Christian goal was to alienate Muslims from a general religious disposition. In resisting that, Rida would establish Islam’s rational character and contrast it with what he found to be the inherent irrationality of traditional Christian doctrine.

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