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SCRIPTURE AND SLAUGHTER: THE CIVIL WAR AS A THEOLOGICAL AND MORAL CRISIS
Review products
NollMark A., The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
StoutHarry S., Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2006)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2009
Extract
In a well-known 1964 essay on the “recovery” of American religious history, Henry F. May observed that some scholars had “revived” religious interpretations of the nation's greatest political crises, including the Civil War. But there was more work to be done. “A religious, or partly religious explanation of the Civil War,” May suggested, would “rest on two assertions: that serious and intractable moral conflicts were important in causing the war and that in nineteenth-century America such conflicts were particularly difficult to avoid or compromise because of the dominance of evangelical Protestantism in both sections.” In fact, both the importance of the moral conflict over slavery and the role of evangelicalism in intensifying hostilities were already attracting attention as historians reexamined previous emphases on economic factors and political bungling as explanations of a tragically unnecessary war.
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References
1 May, Henry F., “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review 70 (Oct. 1964), 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Genovese, Eugene D., “Slavery Ordained of God”: The Southern Slaveholders' View of Biblical History and Modern Politics (24th Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture, Gettysburg College, 1985), esp. 7–9, 19–22Google Scholar.
3 Genovese, Eugene D., The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 155. See also 37Google Scholar.
4 Genovese, Eugene D. and Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 526–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Noll, Mark A., “The Bible and Slavery,” in Miller, Randall M., Stout, Harry S., and Wilson, Charles Reagan, eds., Religion and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 45, 49Google Scholar.
6 Noll, Mark A., “A Moral Case for the Social Relations of Slavery,” Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 497–500Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 50–59Google Scholar. For a Southern Baptist critique of “rigid literalism” in interpreting Scripture on slavery and in general see Wood, Ralph C., “Eugene Genovese and the Biblical Tragedy” (2001), Perspectives in Religious Studies 28/1, 12Google Scholar (available at http://www3.baylor.edu/~Ralph_Wood/misc/BiblicalTragedySouth.pdf).
8 Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” 51; idem, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 398.
9 Noll, America's God, 396.
10 Leaders like Charles Hodge and Robert Breckinridge were kept from asking how the words of the Bible should be understood and “what general principles should be sought in a polity controlled not by a Semitic tribe warring against other tribes nor dominated by Romans bent on ruling the world but in a state where both Constitution and legislation were influenced by eighteen centuries of Christian development and where some of the legislators were themselves Christians.” Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” 61.
11 On antislavery uses of Acts 17:26 see Goodman, Paul, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 36, 58Google Scholar; and Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 60–63Google Scholar.
12 In previous works Noll has given slightly different wordings for “the double burden of staggering dimensions” faced by abolitionist polemicists. In each case, their challenge was to perform a “high wire act” by seeking to advance antislavery conclusions without abandoning “the traditional authority of the Bible” or favoring a “romantic humanism” that would threaten widely accepted hermeneutic practices. See Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” 44; Noll, America's God, 392, 395.
13 On the complexities of slavery, the slave trade, the Bible, and “the ideal of interracial human community,” explored through the life of a black New Divinity minister, see Saillant, John, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 83–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Saillant criticizes (228) studies of the biblical proslavery argument for failing to note that “antebellum biblical arguments for and against slavery took place outside a tradition in which a strong biblically inspired antislavery had already been articulated.”
14 The term is taken from the work of Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Stout himself. Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
15 Compare the approach of Bess, Michael, Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (New York: Knopf, 2002)Google Scholar.
16 McPherson points to cumulative errors in Stout's military narrative. James M. McPherson, “Was It a Just War?,” New York Review of Books, 23 March 2006, 18.
17 Woodward, C. Vann, “The Irony of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 19/1 (Feb. 1953), 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980Google Scholar; first published 1957), 217; Holifield, American Theology, 504. Smith's claim that the arguments over slavery spread “a rational and historical approach to the interpretation of Scripture, long before German critical scholarship became a seminary fashion” (217), applies to Wesleyans, perfectionists, and others outside Noll's focus on Protestant orthodoxy.
19 Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Modern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)Google Scholar; Rose, Anne C., Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Menand, Louis, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001)Google Scholar; and Kazin, Alfred, God and the American Writer (New York: Knopf, 1997)Google Scholar.