Review
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Title: God’s Almost Chosen Peoples
Author: George C. Rable
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Genre: History
Year: 2010
No. of Pages: 586
Binding: Paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-8078-3426-8
Price: $32.50
Reviewed by Gary McCary for the Association for Mormon Letters
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . .The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.” These words from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address are familiar to every student of American Civil War history. What is not so familiar is the deep and profound impact of religion on the lives of literally everyone living in the United States between 1861-65. And so George C. Rable has written this exhaustive account. The subtitle of the book is “A Religious History of the American Civil War.” It is a new and much needed contribution to Civil War studies.
The American Civil War has been looked at, analyzed, prodded, poked, and scrutinized from every possible direction over the past 150 years. Former President Ulysses S. Grant gave us his magnificent “Memoirs.” This is perhaps the closest and most intimate analyzing of those terrible years. James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” is widely acclaimed as the best single-volume history of the war. Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War: a Narrative” displays the novelist’s eye for story and character. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” encapsulates the drama in The White House during the war years. Bruce Catton’s “A Stillness at Appomattox” may be the best book yet written on the Civil War’s final year.
Yet none of the great Civil War books as dealt with the powerful effect that religion had on the people of both the North and the South. What Rable has done in this book is truly groundbreaking and exhaustive (77 pages of endnotes and a 95-page bibliography). One is left with a provocative question: how does a religious history of the Civil War change our understanding of the Civil War itself? The answer becomes clear as one journeys through the book’s pages: religious conviction produced a providential narrative of the war for those on both sides. Most people living at that time in America believed in a providential God, who guided the fates of individuals AND nations. This is precisely the viewpoint that Abraham Lincoln articulated in his Second Inaugural address.
Rable leaves no stone (or Bible) unturned. He has done a massive amount of research in available archives. He has examined a wide range of published and unpublished documents. He highlights the prominent political and religious leaders in both the North and the South. He records thousands of quotations from hundreds of different characters. Northern Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison might have railed against the institution of slavery, but Southern clergymen such as Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer urged southerners to fight back because “the abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic.” In other words, if God is on our side, He CAN’T be on the other side! Many northerners believed that the clergy had helped push the Deep South states into rebellion and secession. They were probably right.
“God’s Almost Chosen Peoples” should certainly be required reading for every theological seminary student. When you are young, as most seminarians are, you tend to view history through mostly secular eyes. Rable’s book will open the eyes of most young dreamers to the immense power of religious certainty. That so many were willing to die for what most considered “God’s war” is a testimony to the over 500,000 soldiers slain on the Civil War fields of battle. As Rable so eloquently states: “The attributes most remarkable and most revealing about countless believers of the Civil War generation were their persistence and endurance in viewing their lives and the war itself as part of an unfolding providential story.”