<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt">Yes, Abraham Lincoln addressed this in the Second Inaugural:<br><br> One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not
distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part
of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All
knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government
claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement
of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the <i>cause</i>
of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself
should cease. Each 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. It may seem
strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in
wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us
judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be
answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His
own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs
be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."
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? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 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."<br><div> </div>Ron Force<br>Moscow Idaho USA<div><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><br><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Art Deco <deco@moscow.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> Vision 2020 <vision2020@moscow.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Mon, April 4, 2011 7:41:38 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> [Vision2020] Carnage<br></font><br>
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<div class="overline">Book Review</div>
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<h1>Politics, religion, and the Civil War</h1>
<div class="utility"><span id="byline">By <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?s.sm.query=Michael+Kenney&camp=localsearch:on:byline:art">Michael
Kenney</a> </span></div>
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<div class="utility"><span id="dateline">April 4, 2011 </span></div>
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<div class="utility"><span>After one of his lightning-strike victories in the
western Virginia valleys, Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall’’ Jackson
exulted to his officers, “He who does not see the hand of God in this is blind,
sir, blind!’’</span></div>
<div class="utility"><span>And in the early summer of 1862, as Jackson prepared to
head east toward Richmond, it was at the head of what he called “[his] army of
the living God.’’</span></div>
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<p>Jackson was arguably an extreme case, but in historian David Goldfield’s
“America Aflame’’ he stands as a mighty symbol of the competing religious fervor
that stoked the conflict and moved North and South inexorably into
war.</p></div>
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<p>“The political system,’’ writes Goldfield, a history professor at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “could not contain the passions
stoked by the infusion of evangelical Christianity into the political process.’’
The various political disputes of the time, “and above all slavery,’’ he writes,
“assumed moral dimensions that confounded political solutions.’’ And as “the
bonds of Union fell away,’’ violence and eventually war “became an acceptable
alternative because it worked’’ as perhaps the only way to resolve
irreconcilable differences.</p></div>
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<p>The notion of moral conflict implicit in the Civil War is not a novel concept
and has been a theme in the accounts of many historians, most recently another
Southern historian, George C. Rable in “God’s Almost Chosen Peoples.’’
Goldfield’s book differs, however, in embracing it as its central
element.</p></div>
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<p>“While New England pulpits resonated with the righteousness of anti-slavery
ministers,’’ Goldfield writes, “Southern divines mobilized their influence for
what they believed to be a holy cause.’’</p></div>
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<p>The first great clash came at Bull Run “on an idyllic early Sabbath morning’’
in July 1861, and their victory “confirmed for many Southerners the idea that
the Confederacy was God’s Chosen Nation’’ — the “crowning token’’ of God’s love,
as a Georgia preacher put it. As a practical matter, however, the battle exacted
significant losses on both sides and in the end “was a limited affair, with no
strategic advantage gained or lost.’’</p></div>
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<p>Amid the carnage, Goldfield offers images of the natural beauty that became
fields of blood. Antietam, in September 1862, was “like ‘a poem in blue and
gold,’ covered with patches of woods, sunlit fields, ripe orchards, and
mountains gently rolling on the near horizon.’’</p></div>
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<p>As the war continued with deadly battles that were never quite conclusive,
the early elation turned to bitterness as casualty counts mounted. And by 1864,
Goldfield writes, “the persistent flow of blood was giving soldiers and
civilians alike second thoughts about God’s role, if any, in the conflict.’’ The
evangelical religion that had fueled the dispute “did not prepare either side
for the carnage.’’</p></div>
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<p>The North moved on, creating the nation of Goldfield’s subtitle. “Exhibit A’’
would be the Centennial Exposition of 1876 presided over by President Grant, the
North’s victorious general.</p></div>
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<p>But as “Northerners moved away from a civil society informed and directed by
evangelical Protestantism,’’ Goldfield writes, “Southerners embraced it, and
embraced it so fiercely that it became a folk religion indistinguishable from
Southern culture.’’ To have a sense of how powerful a force evangelical
Protestantism would become in the South it’s instructive to note that the final
words uttered by the Confederate leader Jackson after being mortally wounded in
the Battle of Chancellorsville were “let us pass over the river and rest under
the shade of the trees,’’ the title of a new Methodist hymn.</p></div>
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<p><em>Michael Kenney, a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge, can be reached
at <a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:mkenney777@gmail.com" target="_blank" href="mailto:mkenney777@gmail.com">mkenney777@gmail.com</a>. </em><img class="storyend" alt="" src="http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/dingbat_story_end_icon.gif" border="0" height="8" width="6"></p><em>
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<p><strong>AMERICA AFLAME: How the Civil War Created a Nation </strong>By David
Goldfield</p>
<p>Bloomsbury, 632 pp., illustrated, $35 </p></div></em>
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<div>________________________________________________<br>Wayne A. Fox<br>1009
Karen Lane<br>PO Box 9421<br>Moscow, ID 83843</div>
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