A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln famously said in his second inaugural address, what has been called his “Sermon on the Mount,” that the two sides of the Civil War, the Union and Confederacy, “both read the same Bible.” This truth, and how much the Bible influenced the war and how it was interpreted, are explored in James P. Byrd's A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood. Byrd previously wrote on the Bible and the American Revolution and brings a strong background to the topic as a professor in Vanderbilt University's Divinity School. He has a deep knowledge of biblical texts and is steeped in the nuances of Scriptural allusions in sermons that lay readers may miss. As for Byrd's thesis, it is hard to deny the centrality of the King James Bible in American culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Many American letters echo the cadences of it. It was a language that...