Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Religion and the search for Southern distinctivenes
- PART ONE RELIGION AND SECTIONAL POLITICS
- PART TWO RELIGION AND SLAVERY
- PART THREE RELIGION AND SEPARATISM
- 4 Harbingers of disunion: The denominational schisms
- 5 The religious logic of secession
- 6 Religion and the formation of a Southern national ideology
- Conclusion: Religion, the origins of Southern nationalism, and the coming of the Civil War
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The religious logic of secession
from PART THREE - RELIGION AND SEPARATISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Religion and the search for Southern distinctivenes
- PART ONE RELIGION AND SECTIONAL POLITICS
- PART TWO RELIGION AND SLAVERY
- PART THREE RELIGION AND SEPARATISM
- 4 Harbingers of disunion: The denominational schisms
- 5 The religious logic of secession
- 6 Religion and the formation of a Southern national ideology
- Conclusion: Religion, the origins of Southern nationalism, and the coming of the Civil War
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“We regard the election of Lincoln,” wrote the Rev. Moses Drury Hoge of Richmond, “as the greatest calamity that ever befell this Union.” To the Mississippi Baptist, it was “the culmination of a series of aggressive acts which have been perpetuated against the South by the same party for years past.” The triumph of Abraham Lincoln in the presidential contest of 1860 made the fear of a Northern antislavery majority a reality. The victory of the Republican Party – with its undisguised threat to envelop the slave South with a cordon of free states – triggered the final transformation from Southern sectionalism to Southern nationalism. The Charleston Baptist Association stated that the North and the South were now “utterly at variance,” and the Savannah River Baptist Association, also of South Carolina, acknowledged that Lincoln's election had “made us a distinct and separate people.” Words turned quickly into political action. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first slave state to secede from the Union. By February 1861, six more states from the lower South had joined the Palmetto State in secession, and together they formed the new Confederate nation. The bombardment of Ft. Sumter on April 12, immediately followed by Lincoln's call for 70,000 troops to crush the rebellion, prompted four more slave states from the upper South to secede and enlist in the Confederacy. The sectional conflict over slavery that had begun decades before had finally erupted into war.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gospel of DisunionReligion and Separatism in the Antebellum South, pp. 151 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993