Each Side Enlisted God

Civil War history of this nation came in 1861-1865, when America was engaged in a Civil War. The major contributing factor for the Civil War was the issue of the legality of slavery, a disagreement that many thought would be settled in three months of fighting, but which instead filled four years and gained notoriety for the most Americans killed in a war.

America was not only divided on the battlefields, but in its churches as well. Both the North and the South heard the voice of support from their preachers, each side relentlessly accusing the other of being responsible. Henry Ward Beecher, the influ- ential pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church said, “I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting leaders of the South.” He also used the pulpit to raise funds to ship rifles to Union troops in Kansas.

In the South, the prominent Presbyterian spokesperson, Robert Lewis Dabney, claimed that the war was “caused deliberately” by evil abolitionists who persecuted the South “with calculated malice.”’”° He also stated very plainly that he would not forgive the North for its actions. Each side enlisted God in its cause and produced plenty of scriptural references to Justify its views.