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Like their Puritan ancestors, religious soldiers in the Civil War were acutely aware of the "shortness of life and certainty of death"; as one Union soldier reminded his loved ones, "This world is but a short period of our existence." And this encouraged many of them to live faithfully and always be prepared for their death—regularly reading God's Word, praying frequently, and observing a strict Sabbath Day rest. Religious soldiers also struggled to avoid the sins of public drunkenness, card playing, cursing, and sexual impropriety.
In the second part, Woodworth chronologically records the various religious currents that flowed through the armies over the course of the war. Regardless of which section they were fighting for, the volunteers of 1861 believed they were engaged in a just and holy war. They viewed their co-religionists on the opposing side as lawless radicals—misguided backsliders at best, or cursed reprobates. But as the war continued and the casualty lists grew longer, clergymen and religious soldiers on both sides were forced to reinterpret the spiritual meaning of their suffering. Perhaps a just God was also using the war to punish and purge the sins of a chosen people.
Much of what Woodworth has to say about this or that specific aspect of religion in the war is not really new. But always the masterful synthesizer, he has successfully integrated other historians' best bits and pieces about the armies' religious life into one narrative—and, more important, sifted through a huge body of primary materials to discover what the common soldiers themselves had to say. And Woodworth also introduces some provocative arguments of his own. For example, he contends that the South's pre-war pietism preconditioned Southern soldiers to blame their military defeats on individual sins of pride and selfishness rather than communal sins like slavery. He also suggests it is more accurate to describe the multiple, punctuated wartime revivals as one massive revival that began in the fall of 1862, spreading to all the armies and continuing until the end of the war.
Having spent the last four years working on a similar topic and examining many of the same sources, I do have a couple of minor disagreements with Woodworth's conclusions, but these do not seriously detract from his study. My most serious criticism is that at times, he seems to oversimplify or ignore the complexities of 19th-century America's highly diverse and rapidly evolving religious life. For example, while my own research suggests that religious soldiers often articulated beliefs remarkably similar to those held by the Puritans, I would not go so far as to say, as Woodworth does, that "In the religious world of the Civil War soldiers, and that of the families to which they had returned when the war was done, nothing fundamental had changed. With remarkable continuity, that world was still, at the most basic level, the world of Charles G. Finney, William McCreedy, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, John Winthrop, and William Bradford."
Woodworth should also clarify that his book focuses mainly on religious soldiers' experience in the army—not the typical Civil War soldier's religious world. In his preface he says that he did not go out of his way to find religious soldiers, but more than 90 percent of his quotations clearly come from deeply religious soldiers, or from men who aspired to find such faith. This leads to my last concern, that Woodworth may have painted a bit too rosy a picture. In my own research I discovered a number of religious soldiers whose wartime experiences caused them to question or abandon some of their religious beliefs. Why doesn't Woodworth include these soldiers' experiences in his study?
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