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Moral Man, Immoral War?: A Historiographical Study of Morality and Ethics in the American Civil War – Part III

Moral Man, Immoral War?: A Historiographical Study of Morality and Ethics in the American Civil War – Part III

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In the third installment of this multi-part post, contributing editor Joshua Ward Jeffery continues an examination and discussion of the historiography of morality and ethics in the American Civil War. You can find Part I here, and Part II here.

While I find Stout’s approach to the Civil War concerning Jus in Bello to be particularly refreshing, considering the amount of hagiography the American Civil War has produced, I find Stout’s unwillingness to judge the war on the merits of Jus ad Bellum to be troubling. I find his argument that the Civil War cannot properly be judged by this criteria because it was in fact a civil war, and not an international war to be completely unsatisfying. Similarly, I find his argument about judging whether or not the South had a right to secede to be particularly questionable; it echoes pre-modern Christian arguments that God’s providence would ensure that the side in the right would always win and that winning was therefore a sure barometer of justice. The reasons for the war, despite some rhetoric to the contrary, are well documented, and an objective evaluation of the actions of the North and the South that led to the war is entirely possible. Since it is possible to apply Jus ad Bellum criteria to the conflict, it is very disappointing that Stout fails to do so. While it can be argued that evaluating whether or not entering the war was just would undermine Stout’s purpose in evaluating the conduct of the war, I do not find this argument to be particularly reasonable. The Jus ad Bellum criteria are entirely separate from the Jus in Bello criteria. Just as a party can enter a war justly and then fight it unjustly, so can a party enter a war unjustly and then fight in a just, moral, and lawful manner. Stout would have done well by making, at the least, a tentative judgment on the morality of going to war in the first place.

But while Stout failed to judge the morality of engaging the war, he did in fact do well in judging the morality of how the war was fought. In two sections made up of twelve chapters on proportionality during the war and the discrimination of combatants from non-combatants, Stout rightfully decried the violation of Jus in Bello criteria. Stout critiqued the well known and problematic battlefield math of Grant versus his opponents, where Grant often sacrificed two, three, or four times the number of casualties of his opponents in order to win a tactical or strategic victory for the Union. The disproportionality that resulted from Grant’s reckless charges and other actions in order to eventually overwhelm enemy forces was so great after one campaign, that Stout remarked “In the aftermath of Spotsylvania, even Grant was stunned by the carnage… In little over twelve days, the Army of the Potomac had lost thirty-two thousand men. Northern reporters, and not a few Democrats, branded Grant a ‘butcher,” and some of his own soldiers agreed. Nothing before had equaled the sheer intensity of killing.”[40] In a chapter on the battle at Cold Harbor, where the U.S. Park Service estimated 13,000 U.S. casualties to a Confederate casualty number of 2,500, Stout was able to demonstrate that Grant’s sacrificing of his men had no purpose, strategic or otherwise.[41] Grant himself said of the battle, “At Cold Harbor no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained. Indeed, the advantages other than those of relative losses, were on the Confederate side.”[42] Stout believed that Grant’s statements about Cold Harbor demonstrated that even Grant “had a moral sense of the war and an understanding of when the moral brake linings sheared. But even Cold Harbor could be morally justified by his commander in chief, who kept closely to his awful arithmetic.”[43]


Stout assessed the reasoning for Lincoln’s “awful arithmetic” as well, in a commendable section of the justification for total war. Most northern historians, and a few Southern ones as well, have applauded Lincoln’s decision to engage in total war through his adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation. While Stout recognized the Proclamation as “unquestionably right and good,” he also recognized that it “becomes more problematic if it was employed by Lincoln and Northern Republicans generally as a “lever” (Lincoln’s term) for a total war on the Confederacy that deliberately targeted” Southern civilians.[44] Stout rightly took Lincoln to task for fighting a war to save the Union, while using the emancipation of slaves as a method to escalate and win the war, and not as an end in and of itself. Stout also, correctly, saw Lincoln’s racism for what is was, unlike Miller, stating that “he could not escape the culture of racism and white supremacy of which he was a product. Besides favoring colonization of slaves before emancipation, he expressed no abhorrence about the racist laws in his native Illinois.”[45] While flawed in some ways, Stout’s work delivers overall a nuanced and well balanced depiction of the morality of Lincoln and the Civil War.


Not all readers agreed, however, that Stout’s work was balanced or nuanced. James McPherson, the distinguished historian of the War Between the States and author of the Civil War volume of the Oxford History of the United States, was stunned that Stout would have the audacity to critique the war and Lincoln. While McPherson was critical of Stout’s unwillingness to engage in an analysis of the war from the vantage point of Jus ad Bellum, he saved his most bitter barbs for Stout’s discussion of how the conflict escalated to total war and the role that the emancipation proclamation played in that escalation. In his review, McPherson clearly saw slavery as a greater evil than the total war that the civil war became and the destruction that it wrought, and he criticized Stout for failing to declare which one he saw as the greater evil himself.[46] He thought that Stout was “uncomfortably aware that emancipation was an integral and essential part of the escalation to total war…As a practical matter, Stout acknowledges, ‘emancipation was necessary as a means to total war.’ But it also gave total war ‘an unprecedented moral stature, allowing the Northern public to fasten on the ‘good’ of emancipation without ever inquiring into the ‘bad’ of unjust conduct in a total war.’”[47] McPherson’s vitriol against Stout, it seems, was a question of ideology. To McPherson, no war that would ultimately end slavery—a gross evil—and free millions of slaves could be judged to be an evil in and of itself. Questions of Just Cause should have indeed been asked because the South was dead wrong. Returning to the question of Just Cause later in his review, McPherson attacked Stout for his view of African-American soldiers, stating:

By a twist of logic difficult to follow, Stout considers black soldiers fighting for freedom to have been engaged in a just war even if white soldiers fighting for the same cause were not. “If anyone had a ‘cause’ that could meet all the moral scruples of a just war, it was the slaves and freedmen,” he believes. “The willingness of black soldiers to fight and die helped to transform the moral meaning of the Civil War from a war for Union to a ‘crusade’ for freedom.”[48]

McPherson could not believe that white soldiers, fighting for the Union, and eventually, to destroy slavery, could be fighting an unjust war, while African-American soldiers could be fighting a Just War. In the moral calculus of the Just War Theory, McPherson is correct—soldiers following orders have no moral culpability as long as they fight according to the laws of war—but I suspect that Stout, in his differing assessments of the just cause of black and white soldiers, was appealing to a higher law than Just War Theory in that moment.
In addition, McPherson attacked Stout’s calculation of civilian casualties, stating that “Through carelessness or misrepresentation, Stout grossly inflates the number of civilian casualties directly caused by military action in the Civil War.”[49] I found this attack regarding numbers to be curious, since it is well known that the there has been disagreement and consternation regarding the number of casualties caused by the war since the very first battles were fought. The rest of McPherson’s review of Stout continued with an acidic tone that made clear that McPherson believed that Stout, “As a historian of American religion,” had no business engaging in the lofty academic debates that were the proper purview of seasoned Civil War historians. Judging Lincoln, then, was his job as an historian of the Civil War, not Stout’s, as an historian of American religion.

[43] Stout, 348.

[44] Ibid, xvi.

[45] Ibid, 185.

[46] James McPherson, review of Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War, by Harry S. Stout, New York Review of Books 53, no. 5 (March 23, 2006). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/mar/23/was-it-a-just-war/

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid.

This essay is continued here.

Moral Man, Immoral War?: A Historiographical Study of Morality and Ethics in the American Civil War

Moral Man, Immoral War?: A Historiographical Study of Morality and Ethics in the American Civil War

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In this multi-part post, contributing editor Joshua Ward Jeffery begins an examination and discussion of the historiography of morality and ethics in the American Civil War.

The American Civil War is arguably one of the most contentious events in U.S. History. Even now, over one hundred and fifty years after the conclusion of the war, questions regarding the causes of the war, whether the war was just, why the North won and the South lost, or whether President Lincoln was a hero or a tyrant, are continually asked and rehashed by both historians and the public alike. It is well known that the answers that people provide to many of these questions often depend upon the social and geographical location of the individual answering the question. This is amply demonstrated by the various names that are used to denote the war. In the North, the war is typically known as “the American Civil War,” or less often as “the War of the Rebellion.” In the South, the war is often titled “the War Between the States,” or more tellingly, “the War of Northern Aggression.”

While there is no way to eliminate geographical or social bias in attempts to answer these historical questions, a cadre of historians have attempted to find a more objective framework for the evaluation of these and other questions. A natural genre of history for the exploration of more objective frameworks for these critical questions is the field of religion and war. As this subfield has expanded from an almost ignored area of study to one with that is gaining more and more attention, it is unsurprising that historians interested in the interplay between religion and war would attempt to answer these questions through a moral framework.[1] Thus, some historians have turned to the use of religious and philosophical ethics, just war theory, and international law in order to provide a more balanced analysis of these questions. Specifically, most of these historians have focused their work on President Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. head of state and the Commander and Chief of the Union’s armed forces. Sifting through massive amounts of monographs and articles on Lincoln and the war as a whole, these scholars have created an interesting and notable contribution to the scholarly understanding of Lincoln and the war.

However, while the historians that have examined the war and Lincoln through this lens have done an excellent job in engaging the historiography of these two subjects as a whole, they have largely neglected to take notice of the fact that they have begun their own historiographical tradition. In this historiographical study, I will show that while the subject of Lincoln’s morality and ethics have begun to be covered fairly well for the small number of books which have been issued, more work remains to be done, especially with regards to the historiography of this new genre in Civil War studies.

In this essay, I will examine four monographs that have closely scrutinized Lincoln through the lens of ethics, morality, and law, and which have provided a more objective framework for the examination of critical questions in the historiography of the American Civil War. Additionally, I will examine a fifth text in juxtaposition to these works, due to an interesting scholarly dispute that began between two historians because of the questioning of Lincoln’s wartime ethics.

These five works include Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller[2], Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, by Harry S. Stout[3], Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James McPherson[4], Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War, by Burrus M. Carnahan[5], and Lincoln on Trial: Southern Civilians and the Law of War, also by Carnahan[6].

The first historian that examined Lincoln’s life and work specifically through the lens of ethics and morality was William Lee Miller. Miller, who at the time of publication was the White Burkett Miller Center Scholar in Residence at the University of Virginia, and had served previously as the Commonwealth Professor of Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia. Miller considered himself an ethicist, not a historian, and had earned his PhD from Yale Divinity School in Religious Social Ethics[7]. While Lincoln’s Virtues is a biography and history of the President from his early life until his inauguration, Miller’s training as an ethicist and philosopher easily shined through the text. Miller’s work was not simply a moralistic retelling of the Lincoln’s life; it was a serious socioethical analysis.

In that vein, Miller intended to demonstrate that Lincoln was “an unusually worthy human being,” and to reexamine Lincoln’s life story in order to demonstrate the “moral meaning” of “his rise to power.”[8] Miller believed this work badly needed to be done because he thought that the “mythic picture” of Lincoln as the great emancipator, savior of the federal union, and then martyr for those causes tended to have a “perversely damaging effect on our understanding of Lincoln as a real human being in a real world… his actual moral achievements are discounted.”[9]

One of the main ethical successes that Miller found in the life of Lincoln was his self-education. Miller spent much time and energy on Lincoln’s lack of a formal education, and then demonstrated that despite this deficit, Lincoln worked hard to acquire knowledge that would allow him to escape farming (a pursuit he detested) and provide him with access to a career that would permit him to exercise his mind over his muscles. Lincoln’s cousin Dennis Hanks reported that Lincoln “was always reading, scribbling, writing, ciphering, writing Poetry, etc.”[10] Lincoln learned law not by attending law school, but by borrowing a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and studying them thoroughly. Through his own self study he was able to gain enough knowledge and skill to be admitted to the bar, and then quickly became a partner in a law firm.[11] After being elected to Congress in 1847, Lincoln found lodging in a small house across the street from the Library of Congress, and spent almost all of his free time in the Library studying the issues that he had to confront in office. Among the topics that Lincoln studied were Euclid’s geometry, with Lincoln saying that he “nearly mastered” all six volumes.[12] He continued to use the Library when he was elected President. Miller was highly impressed by Lincoln’s personal scholarship, stating, “It is not every president who would get books on military science from the Library of Congress, studying the subject in order to deal with the generals. Lincoln would develop rare powers of concentration, and he would use them all of his life. He developed a confidence that he could dig into books for what he wanted, and would do so repeatedly in the years ahead.”[13]

Miller found that Lincoln was not just unique in going to the library to gain the knowledge he needed to get ahead in the world, but also that young Abraham’s moral sense appeared to be unique compared to those around him. Miller enumerated Lincoln’s moral distinctiveness by observing that:

In a society of hunters, Lincoln did not hunt; where many males shot rifles, Lincoln did not shoot; among fishermen, Lincoln did not fish; among many who were cruel to animals, Lincoln was kind… in a world in which men smoked and chewed, Lincoln never used tobacco; in a rough, profane world, Lincoln did not swear; in a social world in which fighting was regular male activity, Lincoln became a peacemaker; in a hard-drinking society, Lincoln did not drink; when a temperance movement condemned all drinking, Lincoln the nondrinker did not join it; in an environment soaked with hostility to Indians, Lincoln resisted it; in a time and a place which the great mass of common men in the West supported Andrew Jackson, Lincoln supported Henry Clay; surrounded by Democrats, Lincoln became a Whig; in a political party with a strong nativist undercurrent, Lincoln rejected that prejudice; in a southern-flavored setting soft on slavery, Lincoln always opposed it; in a white world with strong racial antipathies, Lincoln was generous to blacks.[14]

Miller challenged the notion that the President was “a ‘white supremacist’ and even… a racist.”[15] Miller spent a page of his short preface, as well as a full chapter in the main text, to defend Lincoln’s reputation from allegations of this type.[16] According to Eric Foner[17], Miller was writing in response to Lerone Bennett, who denigrated Lincoln as total racist with little to no true moral vision.[18] Miller referenced Bennett in a footnote in his chapter where he defended Lincoln, but only mentioned that Bennett’s selection of Alexander Trumbull as a heroic non-racist foil against Lincoln was both bizarre and incorrect.[19] In order to defend Lincoln from the charges of racist and white supremacist, Miller had to first attempt to explain Lincoln’s statements during his U.S. Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas where Lincoln unequivocally stated that he was not in favor of “social and political equality” for African-Americans.[20] Miller explained and defended Lincoln in three ways. First, Miller pointed out that Lincoln’s critics of today who accuse him of gross racism are engaging in “presentism,” that is, not recognizing that Lincoln was a “man of his time,” a time where most if not all white men were in fact racists.[21] Second, Miller pointed to the fact that Lincoln was not monolithic, but instead that his ethics and morals continued to grow as he experienced life and learned new lessons.[22] Finally, Miller emphasized that Lincoln was in fact a politician, and that as a politician, he was bound to agree with some racial generalization or else he would be made unelectable. However, Miller argued that by agreeing with some of the standard racial generalizations of his time during political debate, Lincoln was then was able to create space that allowed him to argue against other generalizations. For example, by arguing against political and social inequality for African-Americans, Miller saw that Lincoln was able to then create space to contend that blacks were at least entitled to the same natural rights as whites, as found in the Declaration of Independence. Arguments such as these served to set Lincoln apart as more morally advanced than his white male peers that surrounded him.[23] In this way, just as Lincoln the politician was ethically unique with regards to alcohol, tobacco, and cursing, so too was he in his actual attitudes toward black Americans.

Part II of this post can be found here.

Notes

[1] For more on how religion has been often ignored in American history, and specifically how the interplay of religion and war has been almost completely overlooked by scholars, see Harry S. Stout, “Religion, War, and the Meaning of America”, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 275-89.

[2] (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

[3] (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

[4] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

[5] (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007).

[6] (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2010).

[7] For Miller’s description of himself as an ethicist and not a historian, see William Lee Miller, interviewed by Brian Lamb, June 14, 1992, Booknotes, CSPAN, Washington, DC. For Miller’s educational background, see Margalit Fox, “William Lee Miller, Scholar on Abraham Lincoln, Is Dead at 86,” New York Times, June 5, 2012.

[8] Miller, xii.

[9] Ibid, xiii.

[10] Ibid, 31.

[11] Ibid, 130.

[12] Ibid, 52.

[13] Ibid, 53.

[14] Ibid, 43.

[15] Ibid, xiii-xiv.

[16] See Miller’s chapter, “Lincoln’s Defense of Our Common Humanity”, 340-374.

[17] Eric Foner, “The Education of Abraham Lincoln,” review of Lincoln’s Virtues, by William Lee Miller, New York Times, February 10, 2002, 1, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/10/books/review/10FONER.html.

[18] Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co., 2000), 1.

[19] Miller, 362-3n*.

[20] Ibid, 354.

[21] Ibid, 355.

[22] Ibid, xiv-xvi.

[23] Ibid, 353-363.

Peace Without Victory: Sectarian Christians and the First World War, Part I

Peace Without Victory: Sectarian Christians and the First World War, Part I

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For the inaugural post of the War and Society Blog, Joshua Ward Jeffery examines the historiography of religion and the First World War.

With the dawn of the 100th anniversary of the Great War, it is an exciting time to be a historian of Religion and the First World War. The last three years have seen a flurry of scholarship on the conflict, including several studies on the relationship between religion and the war.[1] Those studies that centered on religion and the conflict helped revive an important but somewhat forgotten discussion among scholars on the topic. However, while this conversation has been renewed, many of the conclusions have been less than fully sound. Therefore, in this paper, I will survey the dominant historiography on Religion and World War I—focused on the role of churches in the conflict—and will then argue that historians of religion and war have largely committed the same error that historians of religion have committed in American Religious History: over-focusing on mainline, traditional denominations such as Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.[2] This over-focus has led to the minimizing of the roles of sectarian groups such as Pentecostals, Restorationists, and other marginalized but vibrant religious groups in the United States. Furthermore, historians working on the role of churches in the conflict have largely undertheorized the relationship between religious groups in the United States, which has led historians to lump sectarian churches together with “conservative” or “fundamentalist” churches. This has led to a false dichotomy focused upon a divide between these conservative or fundamentalist religious groups with “modernist” or “liberal” groups. I will argue that applying the Church-Sect typology of Weber, Niebuhr, and others to the various religious groups in America in 1917 will help break this false dichotomy and will demonstrate that the majority of religious opposition to the First World War came from sectarian Christians.

Harold Gray (2nd row from the top, 1st person on the left), author of Character “Bad”: The Story a Conscientious Objector, with other COs imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth Army Disciplinary Barracks during the First World War.

Any survey of the historiography of religion and the Great War must begin with sociologist Ray Abrams’ monograph, Preachers Present Arms. Writing in 1933, Abram’s sought to fill a gap in the literature, because of the books written about the Great War up until that time, “few have been concerned with the integral relationship of the civilian population to the whole configuration of war.” To do so, Abrams chose as a sample group “the clergy and the churches of the United States.”[3] While the first part of Abram’s book focused mostly on the clergy, he carefully balanced this focus on them by showing how their actions impacted the common person in the United States, and he especially studied the effects felt by those marginalized by the nation’s war machine and propaganda.

What Abrams found and presented in his study was an unflattering picture of America’s clergy during the wartime years. Abrams found that much of the clergy was intimately involved in pushing the United States to enter the war on the side of Great Britain.[4] Abrams used the concept of social control, which are the means that a society uses to ensure conformity with societal norms, to analyze the actions of the clergy. Abrams concluded that the clergy, in collusion with the government, played an active role in extending federal hegemony over almost every facet of life in order to ensure full cooperation with the war effort.[5] In so doing, the clergy not only contributed to a rise of nationalism, but they also contributed to the general war-time hysteria and became part of the national propaganda machine.[6] Abram’s work, taken as a whole, showed generally that many of the churches put themselves squarely in the service of the government during the war.

A response to Abrams did not come until 1965, when John F. Piper wrote a dissertation to challenge Abrams’ findings. Piper argued that Abrams described the churches of the period as having whole heartedly “sold out” to the American propaganda machine during the Great War, and that most students of American religion had bought into this line of thinking. According to Piper, however, “The primary difficulty with the sell-out theory has been and continues to be that it has very little validity. In fact, there is no reason to give it any credence except as an artifact of historical interpretation.”[7] With one quick sweep in this short article that shares a name with that of his later published dissertation revised into monograph, Piper set up a caricature of Abrams’ argument and then just as quickly dismissed it as a mere historical construction.[8]

Piper, though, had more issues with Abrams’ text than just what he perceived to be its thesis. Objecting strongly to Abrams’ claim of being an objective social scientist, Piper claimed that:

he approached his subject with a strong pacifist bias and a determination to show that not only the war but all those who shared in it were morally wrong. The singlemindedness [sic] of his work helped him establish his point and also led him to misunderstand much of the churches’ ministry. The discovery of acculturation in the churches’ wartime work was like finding sand on a beach. … What Abrams missed was the work and testimony of those who accepted the war but who agonized over their roles, who sought a national wartime ministry that would lift up the Gospel, and who also gradually came to realize that the struggle had changed life for them and their institutions.[9]

While it is certainly obvious that Abrams wrote from a biased point of view, it is difficult to substantiate the claim that he “misunderstood much of the churches’ ministry.” Abrams’ interest in writing Preachers Present Arms had not been to discuss the church as a totality, but instead had been to highlight how the government was able to co-opt the clergy and the churches as instruments of social control, and also to demonstrate how the clergy had acted as a barometer for what was occurring in the culture at large. [10]

After accusing Abrams of bias and of having missed the larger ministry of the Federal Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church during the war, Piper entered into his larger project of chronicling those ministries. Piper’s focus upon war-time ministry, while filling a gap in the literature, left him with much less space to discuss the relation of the clergy to the politics and feelings of the era.

While Piper in many ways only outlined and caricatured the role of the clergy in the politics and feelings of the nation, Richard M. Gamble fully fleshed out this role in his book The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation.[11] In formulating his argument, Gamble critiqued Abram’s sociological approach to the war in one sentence and then continued on towards his thesis, stating that “The liberal clergy were not merely lackeys in the Wilson administration’s attempts at social control, nor were they caught unaware and unprepared by the outbreak of war; rather, these forward-looking clergy embraced the war as a chance to achieve their broadly defined social gospel objectives.”[12] Gamble saw the clergy as willing agents of the government, acting to secure their own agenda. Likewise, Gamble summed up Piper’s work in a single sentence as well, and used Piper’s argument to bolster his own, stating that “the Protestant denominations contributed to the war effort in some very practical and visible ways—through relief work and various ministries to the soldiers at home and abroad…”[13] Gamble would argue that this relief work and the various ministries aligned with the Social Gospel of the progressive clergy, which would allow them to baptize the conflict as a progressive war of Christian messianism to the nations.

Gamble’s agenda was to find an interventionist, crusading progressive clergy to hold responsible for the war, and this is exactly what he found. Gamble argued that without a progressive clergy that saw the Kingdom of God as synonymous with western culture, a total war in Europe could not have been waged. Gamble saw the intellectual arguments for “a war to end all wars” coming first and foremost from the clergy. Like Abrams, he saw the clergy as participating in the propaganda machine, enabling and pushing American interventionism. Gamble, however, has recently changed his mind. In a recent book chapter, Gamble argues against a liberal-conservative dichotomy, with progressives being the ones who largely supported the war effort. Instead, Gamble proposes an evangelical versus confessional dichotomy, with evangelicals all largely endorsing an American Civil Religion in the hopes that the American war effort would “be a global force for righteousness.”[14] As evidence that he was incorrect, Gamble points to an article titled “No False Peace,” which was an open letter originally published in the Outlook and which was subsequently republished in many different American religious journals. The article called on Woodrow Wilson to reject any peace that did not result from a decisive victory, and also to resist the efforts of pacifists to keep the United States out of the conflict.[15] The letter was signed by an amalgam of progressive and fundamentalist ministers and religious leaders, including the conservative itinerant preacher Billy Sunday, and progressives such as Lyman Abbot and Harry Emerson Fosdick.[16]

This essay will continue in Peace Without Victory: Sectarian Christians and the First World War, Part II.

Notes:
[1] For an excellent synthetic overview of the history of religion, war, and diplomacy in United States History, see Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012).

[2] The historiography focused upon the role of American Churches and the Great War includes three books: Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms (New York: Round Table Press, 1933), John F. Piper, The American Churches in World War I (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1985), and Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003).  Upon the advent of the centennial of the United States entering the conflict, a series of essays in edited volumes has appeared, challenging the historiography. Richard M. Gamble revises his own thesis in “Together for the Gospel of Americanism: Evangelicals and the First World War,” in American Churches in the First World War, Gordon L. Heath, ed. (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016), 15-31. Andrew Preston, who has written the only interpretative synthesis of religion and war that surveys all of American history, recently challenged Gamble’s work in “To Make the World Saved: American Religion and the Great War,” in Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War, Thomas W. Zeiler, et all, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 142-158.

[3] Abrams, xiii.

[4] Ibid, 41-48.

[5] Ibid, xiv-xvi.

[6] Ibid, 95-124.

[7] John F. Piper, “The American Churches in World War I”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 38, no. 2 (June 1970): 148.

[8] Since Abrams saw his work as sociological, based upon empirical evidence, I find it quite ironic that Piper dismisses his caricaturized understanding of Abram’s thesis as a mere “artifact of historical interpretation.”

[9] John F. Piper, The American Churches in World War I (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1985), 2-3.

[10] Clyde Penrose St. Amant, review of Preachers Present Arms, by Ray H. Abrams, Review and Expositor 68, no. 1 (Winter 1971): 144.

[11] Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003).

[12] Ibid, 3.

[13] Ibid, 155.

[14] Richard Gamble, “Together for the Gospel of Americanism, Evangelicals and the First World War,” in American Churches in the First World War, ed. Gordon L. Heath (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016), 17.

[15] Ibid, 15.

[16] Ibid, 18.

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