Stowell, D: Rebuilding Zion

Stowell, Daniel W. (Assitant Editor, The Lincoln Legal Papers, Assitant Editor, The Lincoln Legal Papers, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency)

ISBN 10: 0195149815 / ISBN 13: 9780195149814

Published by Oxford University Press Inc, 2001

About this Item

Dieser Artikel ist ein Print on Demand Artikel und wird nach Ihrer Bestellung fuer Sie gedruckt. Rebuilding Zion offers a pivotal new perspective on Reconstruction. Stowell carefully considers the religious interpretations of the Civil War by the main groups that defined Reconstruction-southern whites, northern whites, and freedmen - and shows how the .

Seller Inventory # 594393599

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Stowell, D: Rebuilding Zion
• Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195149815
• ISBN 13: 9780195149814
• Binding: Kartoniert / Broschiert
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity.

Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters.

Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.

About the Author

Daniel W. Stowell is an Assistant Editor with The Lincoln Legal Papers, a project of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, in Springfield, Illinois.