From the days of the Civil War and after, Americans have wrestled with the
religious significance and effects of their "ordeal by fire." Many, in their Amer-
ican conceit, gave the war cosmic meaning, as Lincoln had done at Gettysburg.
However they might have disagreed on the sanctity of their own cause and
God's favor, countless preachers and politicians, among others, echoed the
belief that the war not only touched and tapped America's soul but also pointed
the way to the salvation of republican order and society everywhere. Historians,
too, have noted the pervasiveness of religious language and symbols among
soldiers and civilians and the ways Americans invoked religion to drum up
support for their side in the war and to justify their actions during and after
it. Yet, for all the recognition of religion's centrality in and to the war, sur-
prisingly few scholars have undertaken extended, extensive studies of the sub-
ject. The need for such work led John M. Mulder, president of the Louisville
Presbyterian Theological Seminary and a noted historian in his own right, for
one, to ask what might be said about religion and the Civil War. As it turned
out, plenty.

This book began with conversations among Mulder's colleagues at the
Seminary and in the historical profession over two years. Those conversations
soon bloomed into a major symposium on religion and the Civil War, co-
sponsored by the Louisville Institute of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological
Seminary and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University
of Mississippi, and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, thanks in large part
to Joel Carpenter, who had participated in the early discussions on the need
for such a symposium. The symposium was held at the Seminary in October
1994 and brought together many of the leading scholars of American religious
history and the Civil War era, all of them charged only with the call to provide
an original work on some aspect of the conference theme. The conversations
there proved to be open and wide-ranging. The success of the symposium in
turn spawned the book.

The Louisville site was fitting. The Seminary had played a pivotal role in
reunifying the northern and southern "branches" of the Presbyterian church in

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