Righteous Armies, Holy Cause: Apocalyptic Imagery and the Civil War.

By Terrie Dopp Aamodt. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002. Pp. [xx], 236. $35.00, ISBN 0-86554-738-6.)

As Terrie Dopp Aamodt emphasizes in Righteous Armies, Holy Cause, apocalyptic beliefs, ideas, and images not only permeated the culture of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century but also offered a usable lens through which Americans could view and interpret the events of the Civil War. Theologians and artists, preachers and politicians, poets and generals all employed millennial themes to describe the new world they hoped was being created by the war. Of course, the exact appearance and dimensions of the approaching millennial age depended in large measure on the perspective of the observer. In the eyes of abolitionists and Unionists, the war was regenerating the soul of an otherwise righteous nation by eradicating the sin of slavery. According to slaveholders and Confederates, the conflict promised to overthrow the godless secularism that had been corrupting American society for several decades. And among African Americans the war was seen as a recapitulation of the Exodus event--God's miraculous intervention in history on behalf of a chosen people. Thanks to "the aesthetic power of apocalyptic imagery," Aamodt maintains, Americans were able "to tiptoe on the deliciously dangerous edge between the sublime and the terrible" (p. 5) as they contemplated the glorious future awaiting them just beyond the dreadful suffering of the battlefield.

Although Aamodt's thesis is hardly new--James H. Moorhead's American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (New Haven, 1978) and Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980) have already explored these themes in considerable detail--her book nevertheless makes a valuable contribution to scholarship about religious interpretations of the Civil War. First, unlike the works of Moorhead and Wilson, Aamodt's study blends both northern and southern expressions of millennialism into a single narrative. Second, her book reproduces a number of stunning visual representations of apocalyptic imagery, such as Frederic Edwin Church's painting Cotopaxi (1862) and the Currier and Ives print The Handwriting on the Wall, or The Modern Belshazzer (1862). Third, Aamodt supplies an appendix containing poems replete with eschatological concepts pertinent to the meaning of the war, including well-known pieces like Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and more obscure works like Harry Flash's "Zollicoffer." The scope and breadth of Aamodt's analysis, therefore, is impressive.

These useful features notwithstanding, there is one major aspect of the book that requires some adjustment and rethinking. Whereas Aamodt states that she is examining "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Civil War, a good deal of her subject matter might be categorized more accurately as simply "civil religion." Although the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century figures whom Aamodt cites was often dramatic and overwrought, those men and women focused as much on the everyday implications of religious faith as on its broad eschatological significance. Thus, when white southern writers compared Confederate soldiers and pious military leaders such as Stonewall Jackson to the Puritan Roundheads of the English Civil War, they clearly intended to evoke a spiritually invigorating image in the minds of their audience, but their use of this terminology hardly makes Jackson the "symbol of apocalypse" (p. 101) that Aamodt claims him to be. Yes, many people living at the time of the Civil War employed religious ideas when discussing the meaning of the conflict; not all of those religious interpretations, however, ought to be classified as apocalyptic references.

Despite this criticism, Aamodt effectively demonstrates the importance of religious beliefs to our understanding of how Americans regarded the events of the Civil War.

GARDINER H. SHATTUCK JR.

Andover Newton Theological School