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.

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.

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.

Agents of a Fuller Revelation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel McBride Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Spirit Photography ◽  
The One

Intense debates around spirit photography started immediately upon its discovery in late 1862. This chapter frames these debates around the career, trial, and demise of America’s first and most notorious spirit photographer, William Howard Mumler. In the context of the American Civil War, Mumler claimed to have discovered a gift for photographing spirits of departed souls and immediately became the subject of public interest and scrutiny. His uneasy affiliation with modern Spiritualism, his public ridicule by the photographic guild, and his brief celebrity in the 1860s provide a window into the at times intense uncertainty around the camera’s ability to reveal spiritual truth to modern beholders. His hearing before the New York Police Court in the spring of 1869, in particular, facilitated a very public debate around the authority of the Bible and the camera in newspaper accounts that were circulated throughout the country. In this chapter, spirit photographs emerge as a hinge between corporeal referents in studio portraiture, on the one hand, and practices of biblical beholding, on the other, that asked beholders to see what was really there.

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