Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Now, in God's Almost Chosen Peoples, Lincoln Prize-winning historian George C. Rable offers a groundbreaking account of how Americans of all political and religious persuasions used faith to interpret the course of the war. Examining a wide...

"Lincoln's wartime spiritual journey from heretic son and cold skeptic to America's first evangelical Christian president, the role his conversion played in the Civil War, and the way it in turn transformed Protestantism. Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm's length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciatee the growing political...

"In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said both North and South "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." Lincoln quoted several biblical texts in this address - which, according to Frederick Douglass, "sounded more like a sermon than a state paper." The Bible, as Lincoln's famous speech illustrated, saturated the Civil War. In this book, James Byrd offers the most thorough analysis yet...