Our Country

“A welcome contribution to the growing literature on religion during the Civil War era.” —Civil War News

Northern evangelicals’ love of the Union arguably contributed to its preservation and the slaves’ emancipation—but in subsuming the ex-slaves to their vision for a Christian America, northern evangelicals contributed to a Reconstruction that failed to ensure the ex-slaves’ full freedom and equality as Americans.

By examining Civil War-era Protestantism in terms of the Union, Grant R. Brodrecht adds to the understanding of northern motivation and the history that followed the war. Our Country contends that non-radical Protestants consistently subordinated concern for racial justice for what they perceived to be the greater good. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather they expected to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogenous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause.

Brodrecht addresses this so-called “proprietary” regard for Christian America, within the context of crises surrounding the Union’s existence and its nature from the Civil War to the 1880s. Including sources from major Protestant denominations, the book rests on a selection of sermons, denominational newspapers and journals, autobiographies, archival personal papers of several individuals, and the published and unpublished papers of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. The author examines these sources as they address the period’s evangelical sense of responsibility for America, while keyed to issues of national and presidential politics.