For God and liberty: Propaganda and ideology in Civil War America

For both the Union and the Confederacy, mobilizing for the Civil War meant more than outfitting troops, raising funds, and planning military strategies. It required that popular enthusiasm and unity be sustained through the inspirational power of propaganda. Although neither the Union nor the Confederate government contained an office to control the dissemination of public information, propaganda flowed abundantly from a variety of unofficial sources—from the newspaper and periodical press, tract societies, as well as the various private publishing companies which were in the business of mass producing inexpensive copies of sermons, political speeches, and other kinds of pamphlet literature. Over the course the conflict, editors, preachers, politicians, and intellectuals used the printed word to meet three wartime needs: to clarify the war aims of the Union and the Confederacy; delineate the civic duties of northern and southern citizens; and invigorate the popular will to fight.; In order to encourage unity and devotion to the war effort, northern and southern opinion leaders naturally spoke to the idealism of their fellow countrymen. Their writings defined the lofty values and high-minded objectives that the war was being fought for. For this reason, Civil War propaganda offers an excellent window for exploring the national ideologies of the Union and the Confederacy.; This study shows that Union and Confederate propaganda efforts centered on the same two themes that had always been the bedrock of American nationalism: God and liberty. In constantly invoking these traditional values, northern and southern propagandists wanted to exert a conservative influence over their society and help it emerge from the war with its devotion to freedom and Christianity intact. However, the actual experience of war belied such hopes. Civil War propaganda—and the public reaction to it—reveals that fighting a large-scale civil conflict was neither religiously uplifting nor favorable to popular freedoms. For one thing, the war required a degree of regimentation that was incompatible with the ideal of liberty. Moreover, the fighting elicited wrathful emotions, profane behavior, and feelings of despair which eroded the Christian temper of the North and South. Although Union and Confederate propagandists rallied their societies to fight in the name of God and liberty, the war that they helped to sustain actually challenged and even transformed the popular commitment to those core values.