ABSTRACT
When South Carolina guns opened fire upon Fort Sumter in April 1861, commencing the most devastating war in American history, countless citizens looked to their churches for guidance in responding to the attack. Religious opinion throughout the North had been deeply divided during the months leading up to Fort Sumter, with many ministers and Christian reformers urging peaceful reconciliation or even acceptance of secession. Antislavery poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker and pacifist, expressed the views of many abolitionists when in the midst of the secession crisis he penned these lines (333):
They break the links of Union: shall we light
The fires of hell to weld anew the chain
On that red anvil where each blow is pain?
Draw we not now even a freer breath,
As from our shoulders falls a load of death.
