Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 9: Was God anti-slavery and pro-Union?

Another Civil War song today, Battle Hymn of the Republic, in a folky version from Elizabeth Knight:

Here are the lyrics from the liner notes from the Songs of the Civil War album (1960) depicted on the YouTube clip above:

BATLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC sung by Elizabeth Knight with Jerry Silverman and The Harvesters:

Words: Julia Ward Howe
Music "John Brown's Body"

This is the great inspirational hymn which came out of the darkest hours of our nation's history. Mrs. Howe, in later years an ardent leader of the woman's suffrage movement ... [c]omposed the song in November, 1861. lt first appeared in print in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly in February, 1862. Mrs. Howe was paid five dollars by the magazine for the right to print the sang. Of all the songs produced by the Civil war, this one undoubtedly has become a more permanent part of our national idiom than any other.

The song is a God-is-on-our-side anthem used by the Union side. There is always some ambiguity in that kind of song. In this case, it represents a continuation of the theological side of the slavery debate of the prewar years. Defenders of the Peculiar Institution argued that slavery was an institution endorsed by the Bible. Opponents argued that it was against God's will and violation of the Christian view of the worth of the human being founded on the Bible.

Hermeneutic questions aside, the God of Moses and the Exodus was an inspiration to American slaves themselves, as well as popular movements for centuries, in what we would today broadly call Christian liberation theology. The militant antislavery leader John Brown was a devout Calvinist who understood it to be his Christian duty to fight against slavery. Of all the commonly known white American leaders prior to the Civil War, John Brown, who also supported the vote and legal equality for women, is the one who most clearly reflected the left-liberal views of race and gender of 2020.

There is a famous part of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address that addressed the religious considerations at stake in the conflict, which he introduced this way (text from OurDocuments.gov):

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern half part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Slavery was the cause of the war, as Lincoln here emphasized. As in all wars, there were contributing factors of various kinds. But neither side pretended at the time that slavery was not the central cause of the war, much less the ludicrous neo-Confederate claim that slavery had nothing at all to do with precipitating the war.

He continued with the God part (may paragraph break):

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said f[our] three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether." [my emphasis]

I have no reason to doubt that Lincoln believed in the Christian religion. But he was speaking here as a national leader who had the task of finishing the Civil War and then taking on the task of reconstructing a new Union and a free-labor economy instead of slavery for the whole country.

At some point, I want to take a closer look at what Lincoln actually had in mind for Reconstruction. But here, he was invoking the widely shared religious tradition of the North and the South, and doing so in a way that, to my reading, leaves no doubt that Lincoln himself assumed that God was very much on the anti-slavery side. And that "if God wills that it continue" part is great rhetorical construction that defined slavery as a national sin, not simply one by the Confederate side.