A war that endures.

Gourley, Bruce T.

The American Civil War is the most written-about subject in American history, with more than 50,000 books and pamphlets thus far published.

By some estimates, the war between the North and the South-or between the slaveholding states and the non-slaveholding states, as statesmen, journalists, and religious leaders in the Confederacy framed the conflict--is second only to Jesus Christ in terms of published works. Perhaps the war's secondary status to Christ is appropriate, given that Christianity played a pivotal role in bringing about the war, sustaining the four-year conflict, and infusing the post-war American story with the lingering ethos of the war.

The past twenty-five years have witnessed greater historical attention to religion and the Civil War than perhaps the 125 years prior. The irony therein is that Civil War period writings clearly portray religion as among the most common underlying themes of the war itself. Religious faith moved northern sentiment down the road of abolitionism in the decades prior to the war, even as southern whites used the biblical text to vehemently buttress African slavery.

During the war, God was routinely appropriated by both North and South from the presidential level to the statehouse to the pulpit to the army camps to home-front hearths. Political and religious leaders alike identified the cause of the war as African slavery, each side claiming God as their ally. For the North in general as well as enslaved persons of the South, God-endowed freedom applied to all persons. Southern whites, meanwhile, insisted that God willed liberty for the Anglo-Saxon race and bondage for the black race. Unionists and Confederates alike typically defended their respective views of freedom from the perspective of God's will.

Yet only one definition of freedom--and one of the two Civil War concepts of God--could prevail. Or so many elected officials, officers, soldiers, clergy, and civilians during the war years thought.

The reality this side of the war is much more complex. The God of the North and the enslaved won the war on land and on paper, with Abraham Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, emerging as the modern Moses in the eyes of African Americans. Yet in many respects the southern white God, flanked by the twin Christ-figures of Generals Stonewall Jackson (martyr) and Robert E. Lee (holy in defeat), triumphed in the long run. Southern white Christians--sometimes aided by racism yet evident in the North--ensured the continuation of racial hatred, disparity, and separation in the post-war years, blanketing the entire nation with a simmering discontent stoked by the fires--vividly and frequently displayed in burning crosses--of freedom's inequality.

One hundred years after the end of the nation's most bloody war, the American nation--in the throes, finally, of desegregation--was only beginning to truly grapple with the black-and-white divide that pitted brother against brother. Today, even with the nation's first black president occupying the White House, America is yet divided along racially-tinged political fault lines expressed in a nearly all-white Republican Party with a strong southern and rural base, pitted against a multi-ethnic Democratic Party heavily supported by northeasterners and African Americans.

Throughout this narrative, Baptists have played pivotal roles on both sides of the ongoing contest. From antebellum days, through the Civil War and Emancipation and Reconstruction, during the long wilderness of Jim Crow and segregation, and to the current racial and ethnic tensions, Baptist voices have helped shape and re-shape the course of history.

This edition of the Journal is devoted to the Baptist voices of a divided people of faith that in turn are woven into the narrative of a broken nation. The voices are diverse, dynamic, and sometimes powerful. Often captive to culture and society, and sometimes clashing spectacularly with their faith's freedom heritage, some voices nonetheless occasionally rise to the level of the prophetic. Certainty, grandiosity, pettiness, delusion, piety, selfishness, hypocrisy, hatred, mercy, forgiveness, and many other themes are a part of this Baptist story that is black and white and baptized in blood.

This story, now 150 + years in the making, is far from over. In 2013, some 5,000 or more published works about the Civil War will likely be added to the 50,000 + that have come before, plus hundreds if not thousands of more focused on segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and current racial and ethnic difficulties. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these manuscripts will tap into the Baptist stream within the larger story, often bringing to light new or little-used source material that has previously sat quietly in archives across America.

As we thus move forward in unearthing Baptist voices from the past, we learn ever more about a war that endures and a people who have long struggled to be faithful to their own freedom heritage.

Bruce T. Gourley

Executive-Director