Duquesne speaker to discuss religious causes of Civil War

Strong belief in heaven likely was one of the factors that made the Civil War so long and so bloody, public historian Barbara Franco says.

“It made people more tolerant of death,” she explained in a recent telephone interview.

Dying in the 19th century was compared to passing through a curtain and reuniting with family members on the other side. That belief made soldiers and civilians more willing to accept the unprecedented number of casualties from disease and combat during the nation’s most catastrophic conflict, she said.

I would disagree that religion was the reason both sides accepted heavy casualties. I would argue that life itself during that time period and those time periods before it would have contributed to the attitude. We in our antiseptic safety first world cannot understand that death was all around for our ancestors, rich and poor alike. Everybody dealt with it on pretty constant basis. Myself and many others like me did not encounter death until our early adulthood when attending our first wake or funeral. In the same time period, some of the most bloody battles and wars were being waged around the world, such as Solferino, Taiping Rebellion, Konniggratz, Curtozza, and the Franco-Prussian War. With disease, bad nutrition, industrial accidents, war just was not as appreciably more dangerous than everyday life, as it is to us in the late 20th early 21st Century.
r

I think that you are correct to some extent. The prospect of early death was not as foreign to people in those days as it is to us now. Even with that however, the losses were so great that other things had to come into play including deeply felt patriotism, as well as what we see today from our military... the willingness to risk your life for the sake of the soldier who stands next to you.

I see the notion that men during the Civil War were somehow in a hurry to get to heaven like some jihadist as this article suggests is silly. They loved life just as much then as we do now.

Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist and a traitor.

If only there was a single shred of evidence of Lincoln having ever heard of Marx.

He appointed many of the German 48ers (fleeing Germany after a failed Marxist revolution) to his top Generals and Staff

The revolutions of 1848 were not Marxist. They were liberal-democratic against monarchies and aristocrats. The 48ers were, in the main, the educated middle class who wanted more representation in government and were crushed. They fled to the US where they became very successful, including as generals. Marx was another guy writing pamphlets at that point.

He himself had close ties to Karl Marx, and Marx himself was a supporter of the Union's cause in the war (because he understood that cause was to advance socialist ideals).

Okay, here's the full extent of the documented contact between Lincoln and Marx:

On January 28, 1865, a letter was delivered to Charles Francis Adams, the US ambassador to Great Britain. It was titled "Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America." In it, Marx and his committee congratulate Lincoln on being reelected and he hopes that ending slavery will improve the lot of working class.

On that same day Adams writes a thank you note which says, in effect, I sent your letter on and he says thanks. Vague political platitudes follow which don't really mean much. You can read both letters here. But unless you're going to believe that Adams immediately rushed to the telegraph and wired this letter to Lincoln, who was in the middle of organizing the first direct communication with Jefferson Davis to set up the Hampton Roads Conference (His envoy, Blair, returned from Richmond that day)and that Lincoln dropped everything to telegraph his secret pledge of allegiance to Marx, it's hard to believe that Adams didn't just dictate a standard thank you and put the letter on the stack of stuff to be transmitted when they get to it, or wait to go over in the next boat.

The amount of other evidence that Lincoln had ever even heard of Marx is zero.

Lincoln ripped to shreds the Constitution, suspending Habeas Corpus (a Right, not a privilege, as is suggested in the Constitution [another example of Federalist victory])

You do know that that the constitution says “The Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” right?

She may be making reference to the work of Drew Faust, the current Harvard President, who's book on death and the Civil War inspired the PBS documentary on the same subject.

If I remember her book correctly, the great losses of the war encouraged a rise of supernaturalist theories after the war.

There was also a best selling novel about the afterlife that appeared in the years after the war.

So in a way, causation went the other way, the war and its destruction produced a greater interest in the afterlife and belief in heaven.

The 19th century was more passionate and more ideologically committed than it looks like the 21st will be. There were a lot of reasons for that. Belief in heaven may be part of the mix.

But consider the still more murderous World Wars of the 20th century. I doubt belief in heaven was all that strong in 20th century Germany compared to other times and places.

So I can't go along with her theory. It's an interesting idea, though. In the developed world today (Europe, Canada, Japan), belief in an afterlife isn't so common, and neither is the willingness to go to war.

"Jason Coffman" (whoever that is) is an idiotarian.

Lincoln had no ties to Karl Marx. Marx praised Lincoln for ending slavery, but really who wouldn't? That doesn't mean Lincoln approved of Marx or was aware of his theories.

Whatever Lincoln's sins against civil liberties, they were shared by Davis and by other American governments at war. Temporary measures to save the union weren't continued after the war, nor was the income tax.

You idiotarian's spiel is based on an accident of history. If Marx had been born a hundred years earlier, he would probably have found good words for Washington and Jefferson, the revolutionaries of that era.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.