Righteous Strife
How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union
The first major account of the American Civil War to give full weight to the central role played by religion, reframing the conflict through Abraham Lincoln’s contentious appeals to faith-based nationalism
How did slavery figure in God’s plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a mission amount to “religious tyranny” and “pulpit politics,” in an effort to strip the southern states of their God-given rights? In 1861, in an already fracturing nation, the tensions surrounding this moral quandary cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, where antislavery religious nationalists butted heads with conservative religious nationalists over their visions for America’s future.
At the…
RICHARD CARWARDINE is the author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, winner of the Lincoln Prize, the largest award for nineteenth-century American history, and Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. He is Emeritus Rhodes Professor of American History and Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.