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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
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>
<DIV class=utility><SPAN></SPAN> </DIV>
<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.’’</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 href="mailto:mkenney777@gmail.com">mkenney777@gmail.com</A>. </EM><IMG
class=storyend border=0 alt=""
src="http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/dingbat_story_end_icon.gif"
width=6 height=8></P><EM>
<DIV>
<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>
<P><EM></EM> </P></DIV></SPAN></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV>
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