America Aflame Read Online Free

Soldiers maintained their personal piety as they grew increasingly skeptical of God’s role in the war.
    The outcome of the war was not inevitable, at least not until the last months. Regardless of the Union’s advantages in men, materiel, and organization, the war would be won or lost on the battlefields. Many of the key battles that preceded Sherman’s decisive march through Georgia, Sheridan’s depredations in the Valley of Virginia, and Grant’s relentless siege of Petersburg were narrow victories for Union troops. As late as the summer of 1864, northern public opinion was tilting decidedly toward a truce and peace with the Confederacy.
    By the time of Lincoln’s second inaugural in March 1865, the result of the war was not in doubt. His brief inaugural speech was a remarkable effort, a combination sermon and introspective rumination, not the triumphal declaration the assembled expected. The president talked about the limits of man, the inscrutability of God, and the nature of forgiveness—views that challenged prevailing evangelical Protestant beliefs nurtured by the Second Great Awakening.
    Northerners rapidly left the war behind. Their quick embrace of reconciliation reflected less a recognition of the moral equivalency of Union and Confederate causes than a desire to move on. Southern whites, on the other hand, may have talked of reconciliation, but beneath the veneer of accommodation lay resentment. They did not move on; they moved back.
    Wade Hampton III, a prominent South Carolina planter and Confederate general who lost both a son and a brother in the war, consistently counseled in favor of reconciliation. Yet his correspondence reveals that he was not reconciled to the verdict of the war. Hampton continued to believe secession was constitutionally legitimate, and he disputed the government’s right to abolish slavery. He was willing to accept federal authority but little else. And his was a moderate position.
    Reconstruction was doomed because white southerners had to account for their terrible loss, not only in lives but also in their patrimony. The acceptance of any Reconstruction policy short of none would have negated the cause for which they fought and for which many died. When Congress imposed a Reconstruction policy that included a modicum of black civil equality and black suffrage, most white southerners would not, could not accept the legitimacy of governments elected under such terms. The white South was never more solid than during the brief period of Congressional Reconstruction.
    It was not coincidental that the white southerners who took back their governments from black and white Republicans were called Redeemers, nor that the process through which it occurred was called Redemption. The term “redemption” was, of course, in widespread use in America prior to the Civil War, especially among evangelicals. It referred to the process by which Jesus sacrificed His life to rescue sinful mankind from God’s wrath. The term implied a new birth as those who come to Christ are cleansed of their sins and saved “unto a new life eternal.”
    Confederates talked of “redeeming” their states from Union control during the Civil War. After the war, the term usually implied a two-step process. Redemption would cleanse southern sins and therefore restore the Lord’s blessing on the South that He had withdrawn, as evidenced by defeat. It would also remove “the yoke of Yankee and negro rule.” Redemption, therefore, would secure for white southerners the victory denied to them in the Civil War. The process toward Redemption was clear. As an Alabama editor declared in 1871, “The road to redemption is under the white banner.” White southerners employed evangelical Protestantism to re-create an antebellum regime cleansed of sin. White religion in the South became the handmaiden of white supremacy.
    Northerners focused their attention on