Revival, Death and What the War Left Behind

Religion followed the armies into the field. Chaplains served on both sides, the United States Christian Commission distributed Bibles and tracts and staffed hospitals alongside the Sanitary Commission, and great camp revivals swept the winter quarters, the Confederate armies of 1863 and 1864 above all, where tens of thousands of soldiers professed conversion. George Rable's history reads these revivals less as a triumph of piety than as the response of frightened young men to a scale of death nobody had prepared them for, six hundred thousand or more in four years, dying far from home and often unidentified, which forced churches, families and the state to rebuild the practices of dying and burial around the war.

The peace redistributed religious authority. Freedpeople left the white congregations that had seated them in galleries and built their own, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the black Baptist associations expanded across the South within a decade, becoming the central institutions of black public life. In the defeated South the Lost Cause grew into a civil religion of its own, with Lee and Jackson as saints, monuments as shrines and the war remembered as a sacred and blameless cause.

In the North the war's dead were absorbed into a national liturgy of Decoration Day, the Gettysburg Address and a language of sacrifice and new birth that American public religion has drawn on ever since.