ABSTRACT
A clerical spokesman for the North on the eve of war, Henry Whitney Bellows (1814-1882), a Harvard-trained Unitarian minister prominent in New York social and intellectual life as editor and controversialist, saw the sectional conflict bluntly as between Christian civilization and the barbarism of slavery. Although, in theory, prepared to see a united South leave the Union peacefully in the expectation that a coming together again on better terms for liberty was virtually inevitable, Bellows shared the quite widespread Northern illusion that many prominent Southerners only awaited decisive federal action to show their loyalty.
