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As God Gives Us to See the Right: War, Reconstruction, Reunion, and Religious Citizenship in the United States, 1861-1877

  • Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Abbr :
  • 2018, (59), pp.5-20
  • DOI : 10.17939/hushss.2018..59.001
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : May 2, 2018
  • Accepted : May 31, 2018
  • Published : May 31, 2018

Bellomy,Donald C. 1

1호남대학교 인문사회과학연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The analysis that follows examines how religious citizenship evolved during the twelve years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) in the United States that followed Lincoln's injunction to his fellow Americans to act in the years ahead with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. The essay begins by tracing some of the divergences between postwar religious assumptions in the North and South to attitudes honed during the conflict. It takes as symbols of the contrasting views two of the opposing generals at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1862, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, the early avatar of the religion of the lost cause in the South, and Oliver Otis Howard, the future head of the Freedmen's Bureau. It then deals with how Americans made peace with the dead at least 620,000 of them, or two percent of the nation's population in ways that included Horace Bushnell's theology of vicarious sacrifice, resurgent spiritualism, and the annihilation of pain and suffering in Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health (1875). It concludes with the religious impulse to make peace with the living through reuniting the national family. However, this compassionate religious citizenship too often offered only a blinkered definition of family, for reconciliation with the white prodigal sons of the South typically entailed abandoning the newly admitted African American members of the national family.

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