Campus Currents

On Their Side: God and the Civil War

Twenty years ago, while contemplating the lyrics of the song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Terrie Aamodt began studying a unique aspect of the Civil War. Her work, the topic of her doctoral dissertation, is the subject of a new book.

Mercer University Press in Macon, Ga., recently published Aamodt’s book Righteous Armies, Holy Cause: Apocalyptic Imagery and the Civil War. In a departure from the customary practice of authors submitting books for publication consideration, the Mercer University Press approached Aamodt in 1999 and invited her to submit her dissertation for revision suggestions and publication consideration. The book’s publication caps years of intense study of visual arts, literature, American history, and religion.

Aamodt’s passion for these subjects began as a young scholar absorbing the rich historical legacy that came with living in South Lancaster, Mass. After her family relocated to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in
her high school years, she became immersed in Virginia history, visiting colonial Williamsburg, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and several of the major battlefields of the American Civil War.

Having lived in the two cradles of American history, Aamodt became convinced that she wanted to major in English and history. She graduated from Columbia Union College in Tacoma Park, Md., in 1976.

Aamodt returned to Virginia to earn her master’s degree in English at the College of William and Mary, the alma mater of her high school hero, Thomas Jefferson.

Before she moved into doctoral studies, Aamodt began teaching at wwc in 1979. She found a home in the English Department, yet remained geared toward interdisciplinary study at Boston University. Aamodt considered studying colonial Puritan church history because of the parallels she saw between the Puritans and Seventh-day Adventists, but a chance reading of historian Gary Wills’s book on the Declaration of Independence changed the course of her studies. The book analyzed the classic Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

In that quiet moment Aamodt resolved to explore the “overall cultural impact” of the song by examining Civil War-era religious history, literature and poetry, and visual art. This broad approach helped Aamodt better assess the effect of apocalyptic imagery during the Civil War for her dissertation, the foundation of Righteous Armies, Holy Cause.

Aamodt’s work demonstrates that at the start of the Civil War, both sides believed God was on their side. In the book, Aamodt studies the literary and artistic production of people “who interpreted the Civil War as greater than politics. They interpreted the Civil War as part of the end of the world,” says Aamodt.

“Because of the immensity of the Civil War, everybody reacted to it. They had to have a way to make sense of it.” The common reference point for Americans in troubled times consisted of biblical concepts such as the Apocalypse. Conservative and liberal Protestant denominations as well as secular writers and artists used the imagery of the Apocalypse to criticize slavery. Yet Aamodt breaks new ground with her finding that the Southerners also used the Apocalypse and its imagery to bolster their view of the “South as having a special destiny. I was struck by the extensive use of Scripture to justify slavery,” Aamodt says. In an even more striking research finding, Aamodt found in studying the oral histories of former slaves that “African-American slaves, almost none of them literate, were aware of the Bible, and were fond of the apocalyptic message for obvious reasons.”

For the slaves, the Civil War melded “religion and revolution” and set the stage for their freedom. On the other hand, the long duration and terrible cost in casualties and physical destruction disillusioned partisans who interpreted the war as holy and represented the struggle in biblical apocalyptic imagery. W

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