Class project from HUM422 Christianity and American Culture. This covers a general overview and analysis of the nature of the interactions between Christianity and America across a given time period.

1. Christian Perspectives HUM422 – Professor Justin Harbin

2. And so was life…
General Overview of American life during the Civil War era…

3. Overall Mood / Mindset
The mood of the country during the Civil War era was one of fear, paranoia and
tension.
People from both sides, North and South, were afraid that war would break out
and whoever ‘won’ would impose their ideologies onto the other. This is a natural
fear of war and usually does result in the losing side having to submit to the
winning one.
Many slaveholders were paranoid that the slaves were conspiring against them
and thus they became more vigilant in their oppression.
Even though many black slaves were coming to the North for freedom, prejudice
was very prominent. White immigrants believed that the freed slaves were now
taking jobs. Riots and fighting against this kind of thought and behavior were
common.
All the fear and paranoia created a tension based on racial and social economic
differences. Between white and black. Between rich and poor. Between North and
South. Ultimately, it came to past and the Civil War began.

4. Abraham
Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the
United States of America. He was elected at a
time of great tension in the country. The more
industrialized and higher populated North
was becoming less tolerant of the ways of the
South. Lincoln was tasked with bringing a
compromise to the growing, yet still fledgling
country. In his inaugural address, Lincoln
warned the South: "In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in
mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The
government will not assail you.... You have no
oath registered in Heaven to destroy the
government, while I shall have the most
solemn one to preserve, protect and defend
it." President Lincoln was determined to keep
the country united and was willing to go to
war for the sake of unity. In a twist of irony,
Lincoln was assassinated days after the South
surrendered and was not able to see the
rebuilding of the nation he put his life into
keeping united.

5. Jefferson
Davis
Jefferson Davis was elected as the only
President of the Confederate States of
America. He had served in the U. S.
Senate after time serving in the military
and was considered the best candidate
for the job in spite of his lack of desire
for it. Davis was a good compromise for
the two opposite ideas concerning the
direction of the South after secession.
He was solid in his fight for the cause of
the Confederacy and it made him
popular amongst Southerners.
However, is inability to lead with clarity
and decisiveness caused a lot of division
as well as military failures. In April
1865, he had to flee his appointed capital
of Richmond as the Union Army moved
in and he was captured a month later.
He served time in prison before living
out the rest of his life writing books and
touring with speaking engagements.

6. Military Leadership
Ulysses S. Grant
Union General
Robert E. Lee
Confederate General

7. Entertainment
Entertainment during this time period was more focused on individual activities or
small group games. Reading was very popular. Newspapers, books (especially the
Bible) and letters from home kept soldiers distracted from the realities of wartime
battle. Music in such as informal singing or scheduled performances was a great
way to also lighten the mood. For those wanting a more group activity, board
games (like chess or checkers) and card games (like poker) were the choice. For a
more athletic twist, soldiers could try baseball (reformatted for the battlefield) or
new sports like ice-skating in the winter months. Other widespread and extremely
prevalent forms of ‘entertainment’ were gambling, fighting, drinking and
carousing with prostitutes for sex.

8. Social Trends
Due to the war, men left their homes and farms to fight which
changed the way society operated in a huge way. Women were
left to care not only for their children but also the farms and
property as well. They also became “medical personnel” by
making bandages while nursing sick and wounded soldiers.

9. Cultural Realities from War
There were large causalities
from the Civil war; however,
death during this era and before
was very common. Death
during childhood was a real
threat, around 10% of children
aged 1-21 years died of a variety
of causes. Infant mortality was
200 to every 1000 live births. In
rural areas, the death rate was
15 in 1000 and in urban areas it
was 20-40 in 1000. It was noted
that many people lived only
into their late thirties.

10. Medical Advancements
“Carleton Burgan of Maryland was in terrible shape. The 20-
year-old private had survived pneumonia, but the mercury pills
he took as a treatment led to gangrene, which quickly spread
from his mouth to his eye and led to the removal of his right
cheekbone. He was willing to try anything. In a pioneering
series of operations in 1862, a surgeon from City Hospital in
New York used dental and facial fixtures to fill in the missing
bone until Burgan’s face regained its shape. The doctor was
Gurdon Buck, now considered the father of modern plastic
surgery.” (Mental Floss)

11. Business / Commerce
“The American economy was caught in transition on the eve of the Civil
War. What had been an almost purely agricultural economy in 1800 was
in the first stages of an industrial revolution which would result in the
United States becoming one of the world's leading industrial powers by
1900. But the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the prewar years
was almost exclusively limited to the regions north of the Mason-Dixon
line, leaving much of the South far behind. New technologies showing
America's emerging industrial greatness was refined during the Civil War:
the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph and the steam-powered printing
press.” (History.com)

12. Inventions / Innovations
One of the major inventions of the Civil War era was the telegraph. This invention
was a huge advancement in the way people communicated. No longer did they
have to wait for a letter to arrive by mail or messenger, they could find out about a
situation and respond within a quicker amount of time. According to the Civil War
Trust, Abraham Lincoln was the first president who used the telegraph. He was
able to get reports from the front lines and strategize with his leadership while
making swift decisions. This put the Union Army at a great advantage over the
Confederate one and was a reason for many battle victories.

13. Sola Scriptura…
Christianity in America Overview during the Civil War era…

14. Church
Attendance
At the start of the Civil War, there
were more than 53,000 churches in the
United States. Although only about 40
percent of the nation’s almost 32
million people were formal members
of organized faith traditions, as many
as 80 percent of Americans visited
Catholic or denominationally
Protestant churches regularly.

15. Battlefield Religion
Away from the home front, men in both Union and Confederate
armies were resigned to divine but unalterable providence and
certain of a heavenly afterlife; both beliefs made them better
soldiers, as military commanders knew and played upon.

16. Religious Ideology
In one way or another, then, wartime Americans viewed the
Civil War through the lens of religion and saw it as a
prerequisite for a coming age of peace, prosperity and spiritual
harmony.

17. Wartime Religious Mindset
Perhaps most importantly, in
both the Union and the
Confederacy, religion provided
a way for men and women to
make sense of the unimaginable
suffering wrought by the war.
Millennialism, a belief in the
imminent earthly reign of
Christ, was the dominant theme
of mid-19th century
Christianity. Books have been
written about how popular the
idea was at the time.

18. Post-Millennialism
Most in the North were post-
millennialists and believed that
the gradual defeat of evil and
perfection of humanity would
facilitate Christ’s return (post-
millennialism helps explain the
emergence of so many northern
reform movements during the
age). These individuals thought
of the war as a means of
eradicating slavery and other
impediments to the
establishment of Christ’s new
order.

19. Pre-Millennialism
A minority of northerners and
southerners were pre-
millennialists who believed
apocalyptic destruction must
precede the new Christly
kingdom, a kind of purification
through fire. Because of its “New
England” origins, many southern
Christians eschewed
millennialism thought in all of its
forms but believed the southern
slave society was unequalled in
its Christian sublimity, and thus,
any sacrifice offered in its defense
was warranted.

20. Societal
Influence
In the last decades of the antebellum
age, religion played an increasingly
formative role in American society, so
much so that even avowed secularists
could not escape its cultural
influence.
Christianity was the dominant
religion of the society and with most
people having been raised with the
influence of the Bible, they sought
spiritual guidance in the most natural
way possible – at their local church.

21. Strength of Faith
When word of Fort Sumter’s fall spread throughout the divided
country, religion shaped the way in which most people received
and interpreted the news. When the war grew bloody beyond
all expectations, faith helped Americans make sense of it all.

22. Loss of Spiritual Zeal
at War’s End
By the war’s close, the spiritual zeal of the American people had
taken a considerable hit, and ethical scientism and societal
secularization further lessened the church’s role (though not its
size) in American society in the post-war decades. But during
the Civil War, religion shaped American life in a unique and
profound way.

23. Reconstruction Religion
“Many Americans interpreted great events in religious terms. Historian Wilson
Fallin contrasts the interpretation of Civil War and Reconstruction in white versus
black Baptist sermons in Alabama. White Baptists expressed the view that:
God had chastised them and given them a special mission – to maintain orthodoxy,
strict biblicism, personal piety, and traditional race relations. Slavery, they insisted,
had not been sinful. Rather, emancipation was a historical tragedy and the end of
Reconstruction was a clear sign of God's favor.
In sharp contrast, Black Baptists interpreted the Civil War, emancipation and
Reconstruction as:
God's gift of freedom. They appreciated opportunities to exercise their
independence, to worship in their own way, to affirm their worth and dignity, and
to proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Most of all, they
could form their own churches, associations, and conventions. These institutions
offered self-help and racial uplift, and provided places where the gospel of
liberation could be proclaimed. As a result, black preachers continued to insist that
God would protect and help him; God would be there rock in a stormy land.”
(Fallin)

24. IMHO…
Analysis of the Civil War era…

25. Wartime Revival
“Major revivals broke out in the Civil War armies. In the Union
Army, between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers were converted;
among Confederate forces, approximately 150,000 troops
converted to Christ. Perhaps 10 percent of all Civil War soldiers
experienced conversions during the conflict.” (Christianity
Today)

26. End of Slavery
The Civil War brought a lot of changes to this country. First,
was the end of slavery. During the Reconstruction, we tried to
give freed slaves rights and this didn’t go over too well with
Southern plantation owners.

27. Racism
Second, was the birth of
white supremacists groups
such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Many of the white
Southerners did not want
black people to have the
same rights as a white
people because they saw
them as an inferior race.

28. Death of a
President
Third, the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln allowed
Andrew Johnson to bring
about his own changes to
the rebuilding of the
nation during
Reconstruction instead of
the wishes or plans of his
predecessor.

29. Law… Jim
Crow Style
After the war ended and
Reconstruction was underway, many
white Southerners were not willing to
give up their ideologies so easy.
Slavery may have ceased, but racism
was alive and well. For those who did
not want to be too extreme about it,
they decided to segregate using the
rule of law. Integration was not going
to happen so easy.

30. Rise in Black Churches
The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction gave rise to many
predominantly black-led congregations. Under the old rule,
many slaves were limited in their ability to worship without
supervision. This ended with the war and churches with an all-
black membership were able to freely worship.

31. Migration to
the North
After the war, many former slaves
needed to work and support their
families. They could not do it in a
racist and segregated South. They
decided to go North to the places that
had jobs, freedom and more of an
attitude that might be friendlier after
such a hard fought war. Cities like
Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and
New York City were springing up
new neighborhoods that were
predominantly black.

32. America in Debt
The Civil War was extremely costly to the nation. Before the war
began, America was paying off it’s extremely low debt of
around $65 million. After the war, our nation’s debt stood at
over $2.7 billion! Yet, from 1866 to 1863, the government was
able to slash $1.7 billion from our national debt and bring it to
$961 million.

33. Post-War Economy
After the Civil War, the economy of the South was devastated. They
could only try to rebuild and get back to the agricultural-driven means
of living. The North on the other hand was going through an
industrial revolution and posed for a quick comeback. Flush with a
growing population and expansion mindset, the North faired much
better in the decades to follow then their Southern counterparts.

34. Lasting Impact
The lasting impact on the Civil War was enormous to this
country. It resulted in more deaths of American soldiers than
any other war in history. It divided our country in a way that
still lingers in Northern mentality versus Southern mentality. It
set the stage for us to deal with the ugly blight of racism that
was (and still is in some measure) deep-seated in the roots of
this nation. The church and Christianity as a whole was
politicized by both sides which has become the norm – no
longer is it simply the Biblical truth side. Finally, it exposed our
weakness to greed and financial gain at the cost of those who
are suppose to be our brothers, sisters and friends. It cost a man
who wanted to see a united nation of free men, women and
children his life which shows the sin nature is alive and well
and willing to kill even if it’s wrong.

35. Works Cited
(Title Page Image) A Battle Among Brothers. Digital image. Important
People from the Civil War Era. Mrkash.com, n.d. Web. 26 June 2015.
"Christianity and the Civil War." Christian History. Christianitytoday.com,
1 Jan. 1992. Web. 28 June 2015.
Fallin, Wilson, Jr. Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in
Alabama. N.p.: n.p., 2007. Print.
Folsom, Burton. "The Economic Costs of the Civil War." The Freeman.
Foundation for Economic Education, 23 Mar. 2011. Web. 28 June 2015.
Freidel, Frank, and Hugh Sidey. "Abraham Lincoln." Presidents of the
United States of America. Whitehouse.gov, 2006. Web. 27 June 2015.
History.com Staff. "Civil War Technology." History.com. A+E Networks,
2010. Web. 27 June 2015.

36. Works Cited
"Jefferson Davis." Civilwar.org. Civil War Trust, 2014. Web. 27 June
2015.
Leidner, Gordon. "Religious Revival in Civil War Armies." Great
American History. Greatamericanhistory.net, n.d. Web. 28 June 2015.
"Pastimes of the 1860's." Civilwar.org. Civil War Trust, 2014. Web. 27
June 2015.
Rowe, Chip. "5 Medical Innovations of the Civil War." Mental Floss.
N.p., 9 Jan. 2015. Web. 27 June 2015.
"The Pre-Civil War Era." SparkNotes. Sparksnotes.com, n.d. Web. 28
June 2015.
Wesley, Timothy. "Role of Religion." 150 Pennsylvania Civil War.
Pacivilwar150.com, 2010-2103. Web. 28 June 2015.

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