Im a senior fellow at the manhattan use it institute. We are pleased to have allen guelzo here to talk about the civil war. When hundred 50 years ago this week Abraham Lincolns funeral was making its way across the United States. The civil war had ended two weeks previously with lee surrendered at appomattox. It was an eventful month. Some asserted that 1865 was the most eventful month and history of the United States. No one knows more about these events then allen guelzo. He is the professor of the civil war era and director of the civil war era studies at gettysburg college. Hes the author of many prizewinning books. Lincolns emancipation proclamation. The end of slavery in america. Lincoln and douglas, the debates that defined america. That one the Lincoln Institute prize. His most recent work is Abraham Lincoln as a man of ideas, a collection of essays. Lincoln, a volume at oxford in 2009. His book on the battle of gettysburg publish in 2013. He spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Possibly the best book written on the battle of gettysburg. His articles and essays have appeared in scholarly journals. Los angeles times, a very long list. Allen guelzo is our most distinguished biographer of Abraham Lincoln, historian of the civil war. We are delighted to welcome him here today. Hes going to talk about the subject of did religion make America Civil War worse . [applause] prof. Guelzo it is a pleasure to be able to speak to you once again, especially when i can come to a venue where the person who introduces me knows how to pronounce my name correctly. I have considered petitioning congress for some kind of recognition of special status protected status. My name in his in a vowel. No one seems to be able to pronounce it properly. I should receive some special recognition. You know when someone who is calling you really doesnt know who you are, because you will answer the phone, hello, they say hello, i am so glad to talk to you allen. They can handle that part but not the other. How nice it is that someone does pronounce it. Someone asked me at one point, this has been asked a number of times, is your name brazilian . I thought no, that is gaucho which is not brazilian. It is argentinian. These permutations you find prepeoples do these numbers and you work so hard, then you wonder, why did my parents do this to me . Why couldnt i have been named pearson . Life has all of these difficulties that we encounter and there should be an act of congress somewhere to help us deal with them. Im posing a question for you today. Did religion make the American Civil War worse . Americans at midpoint of the 19th century were probably as thoroughly christianized a people as they ever had been. Landscapes were dominated by church fires. Most common sound in public was the reigning of church bells. American churches jumped to exponential levels of growth between 1780 and 1820, denominations built 10,000 new churches. By 1860 they got quadrupled that number. Clergyman serving on the boards and faculties. Churches became outposts of refinement from gas lit interiors to pay choirs. Even a man of modest religious visibility as Abraham Lincoln who never belonged to a church, who never professed more than a ds stick d deistic idea of religion protesting that i have never denied the truth of the scriptures. I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general or of any denomination of christians in particular. I do not think i could be brought to support a man for office whom i knew to be an open enemy and scoffer at religion. And in jeffersons words the constitution had erected a wall of church and government, there was no corresponding wall between church and american culture. Closed off from making policy, the churches organized for double bible distribution, the observance of the sabbath, for suppression vice and immorality. They grew. The time the french liberal took his celebrated tour of the United States he was amazed to find while in the United States religion has no influence on the laws were on the details of political opinions, nevertheless it directs the mores, and through the mores it works to regulate the state. The question he did not ask was whether American Religion would always be content with cultural dominance, and might not seize an opportunity if it presented itself to assert a political role. If ever there was a mama where it seemed possible, the American Religion might assume a managing place in public politics, the civil war was it. It was a moment when delegations of concerned clergyman received highprofile interviews with the president. When the National Reform association moved amendment of the constitution to add formal recognition of christianity to the constitutions preamble. When the military chaplaincy was dramatically expanded to become a major component of the u. S. Armed forces. When fully one third of all soldiers in the field were praying men and members of some branch of the Christian Church and religious revivals in the armys converted between five and 10 of men in uniform. There was a moment when christianity allied itself in the most unambiguous and unconditional fashion to the actual waging of a war. The Southern States declared Henry Ward Beecher have organize society around a rotten core, slavery while the north has organize society around a vital heart, liberty. Across that divide, god is calling to the nation. He is telling the american nation in particular that compromise is a most pernicious sham. Southern preachers and southern theologians chimed in with as much fervor. Claiming that god was on their side. A writer for the southern quarterly insisted that since the institution of slavery accords with the injunctions and morality of the bible, then the confederate nation could expect a divine blessing in this great struggle. An episcopal bishop of virginia gave robert e lee his dying blessing. You are engaged in a holy cause. It is because of this intrusion of religious justification into the civil war that i number of commentators have begun to ask whether this interjection far from christianizing the war actually made the war more ferocious. The civil war was certainly ferocious enough on its own terms. Overall, one out of every 10 White American males in 1860 was dead by 1865 from some war related cause. The question is whether this bill which exceeded anything in terms of wartime losses, whether this butchers bill was made bloodier and made more protracted by being transformed into a religious crusade. In a war of nations, and national interests, the levels of involvement and destruction can be calibrated to the levels of those interests. A war that is waged on behalf of good cannot in satisfactorily with anything less than the complete triumph of good. Since the victory of anything short of complete good would allow these measures of evil to survive unpunished. If god has willed a war, no compromise short of total victory is possible. Was it not in this name that Abraham Lincoln advised his colleagues in congress entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do they have us under again, all our labors lost , and sooner or labor must sooner or later must be done. Was it not the same link in 1862 that god wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. And so rebuffed all considered offers to negotiate, unless they agreed to the restoration of the National Authority throughout all the states. Moralize the war, reasonable find no end of difficulty in restraining the war from shedding rivers of blood, or from always demanding unconditional surrender. As harry stowe argues, the civil war would require a war of troops and amended by moral and spiritual arguments that could steal millions of men to the bloody business of killing one another. By thus presenting the union in moral terms, northerners would give themselves permission to dictate a total war for unconditional surrender, and involuntary reconstruction. The only historian who has said this, charles royster, writing a biography of sherman and stonewall jackson, sees in the civil war a model for a peculiarly bloodthirsty instinct for violence deep in the american psyche. Drew faust in this republic of suffering turns her attention to the savage coulter will shock of the civil wars casualties, to the sensibilities of a nation to deeply committed to abstractions to put a stop to the killing. These arguments have a particular residence for our own generation. They make it easy to suggest that americans have bench will lead drink themselves into a stupor and moral americans take pay themselves into the corners of absolute right and absolute wrong. The problem posed by the civil war was not a condition, a collision of absolute. It was rather that the war exposed fissures in the absolutes of both sides and rendered absolutism less and less believable. Northern preachers sounded the trumpet of scripture against slavery. Few came to terms that the bible they preached actually contains no condemnation of slavery. At the same time southerners who wanted to play on that fact as proof that they were standing inside Biblical Authority were whipsawed by the recognition that the slavery spoken of in the bible was neither racebased nor absolute and reducing the slave to chattel property. It was White Supremacy they were defending more than slavery. It may be that moralizing and religion arising religionizing war may be in experience in our times, but there may be questions of the civil war, and whether stout and faust are simply creating a civil war shtick with which to beat our own times. The preachers might see church and state marching to war in 1861, but it did not look that way on the ground. That paragon of martial piety stonewall jackson, had a poor estimate of the influence of southern religion in time of war. Im afraid that our people are looking to the wrong sorts for help, and describing our successes to those for whom they are not do. If we fail to trust in god and give him all the glory, our cause is ruined. Give to our friends at home new warning on this subject. So little provision had been made for Chaplain Services in the army of Northern Virginia that half of the regiment in jacksons core were without one. In the union army, religion seem to have just as meager a grip. Despite those numbers of praying men. It is hard for one to retain his religious sentiments and feelings in the soldiers life admitted one new jersey surgeon. Everything seems to tend in a different direction. There seems to be no thought of god, of souls among the soldiers. One devout soldier who found himself in listed the company of german freethinkers was aghast to discover they are the worst men i ever saw, they never think of god or that they have a soul. Or if soldiers did have such thoughts, they rely it will they were blasphemous ones. One cavalryman discussed an old cuss of a preacher, relate the preacher claimed that god has fought our battles and one our victories. This calvary concluded the preacher must surely have lied like dixie since if god had talked their battles and one their victories, why is it not in the papers, and why has he not been promoted . [laughter] if anything, the raw contradiction between northern mines claiming gods favor for the union, and southern divines claiming gods favor for the confederacy created a popular perception that religion had nothing reliable or coherent to say about the greatest American Issue of the 19th century. The great presbyterian theologian had been shifting ground on slavery for 20 years. In the 1840s, any suggestion that slaveholding is a crime was an error fraught with evil consequences. 10 years later, he said that the slavery in the abstract might not be evil, but to practice slavery, in all cases, it leads to practice evil. On that logic, emancipation is not only a duty, but unavoidable. By 1864 he was endorsing a presbyterian General Assembly resolution which branded slavery as an evil and guilt. With so much attacking before the political wind, how were the churches to get any worthwhile bearings to the people . Abraham lincoln was another thinker who tax before those wins. Whatever confidence he felt about gods direction of the war he was much more uncertain about where the direction was pointing. In 1861 when his friend browning asserted mr. Lincoln, we cant hope for the blessing of god on the efforts of our armies until we strike a decisive blow at the institution of slavery, lincoln replied browning, suppose god is against us in our view on the subject of slavery in this country, and our method of dealing with it. The problem bothered lincoln enough that he took it as the central theme of his second inaugural address. Neither party expected for the war. The magnitude or the duration which it has already attained, he observed. What is more, both read the same bible and pray to the same god and each invokes his aid against the other. Lincoln could not easily declare his own side was all about the bible and god. He could not in similar fashion nerve himself morally to throw all the opprobrium on to the other balance. It may seem strange that any men would dare to ask a just gods assistance in bringing their bread from the sweat of other mens brows. He would not allow himself to do more than find the confederate position strange. In the end lincoln opted for a kind of divine agnosticism. Made all the easier for someone of calvinistic upbringing who was accustomed to seeing the will of god cloaked in mysterious ways. He said let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both cannot be answered that of neither has been answered fully. The almighty has his own purposes. He would take no ethical victory lap. Instead, lincoln and joined the nation to behave with malice toward none, with charity for all. Instead of American Religion, corrupting the civil war with absolutism, it is more possible to say the civil war corrupted American Religion with relativism. And iowa sergeant shocked at the carnage at shiloh wondered my god can there be anything the future that compensates for this slaughter . Religious discourse in america would become plagued more and more by questioning, by dk faith, by an increasing appeal to feeling and imagination as over against confessional reason or evangelical conversion. That did not provide much weaponry for an adventure into public forums. Perhaps people always think so in their own day, but it seems to me the there never was a time that all things have shaken loose from their foundations. So many are skeptical, doubtful, so many good people are cutting loose from creed and form. I am sometimes tempted ask whether prayer can make any difference. Far from feeling satisfied, that the north had pursued a righteous crusade to its fulfillment, finney was enraged after 10 years of war, and no public proclamation north or south, is our Great National sin recognized. For southerners, the war laid a heavier burden on religion. Edward Porter Alexander who ended the war as a general in lees army thought that religion had paralyzed the southern armies. More than energize them. I think it was a serious incubus upon us that during the whole war our president and many generals really and actually believed there was this mysterious providence always hovering over the field and ready to interfere on one side or the other, and prayer in piety might win its favor from day to day. By 1864, defeat was looking the confederacy in the eyes. The arms of the pious in the south dropped nervously to their sides. They concluded god was deserting them if not for his opposition to slavery then for his condemnation of southern unbelief. Can we believe in the justice of providence lamented the confederate chief award ands award in andsawardinance. I cannot see how i just god can allow people who have battled so heroically for their rights to be overthrown. However confident the features and the preachers had been at the beginning of the war that they could read gods righteousness, the war itself proved otherwise. Indeed, for most americans American Religion became one of the civil wars major cultural casualties. In the 1860s, americans went to war singing glory, glory hallelujah. They would never do so again. Contrary to stout the civil war was not prolonged or made more contract goal intractable by religion. Total war as james wintun has written, total war was the result of politics, particularly the movement of government in the 19th century away from monarchy and toward popular democracy. So long as government had been the private preserve of kings war had been the sport of monarchs. They were fought as if they were princely trials by comment combat. A class of people likely to suffer severely by them was the nobility. The scope of war was limited because war was understood to be the prerogative of kings. Once democratic governments began to shoulder the monarch once they became of the people, by the people, for the people, and involve the entire people and not just a handful of aristocrats, then war increasingly became the instrument of entire populations. No solitary monarch could now call them off. No gentlemans agreement could limit their scope. Wars became wars of entire nations against entire nations. Waged for abstract principles, enough to command everyone. Therefore impossible to win short of annihilation. Not just defeat, annihilation of an enemy. It was not religion, but democracy which made war on up usable by anything less than the unremitting destruction of an enemy. In the process, democracy would whittle away at cultural dominance of religion. Since theories about justice in war, and the proportionality with which war can be waged only stood in the path of unconditional victory. From the civil war on word, american protestantism would be locked deeper and deeper in a state of coldrolled imprisonment , and in many cases retreat into a world of private experience or christian