Civil War 4

This is one of Mark Noll's summary paragraphs and puts clearly the damage done to theology by the war:

But the Civil War was won and slavery abolished not by theological orthodoxy but by military might and a hitherto unimaginable degree of industrial mobilisation. Although the war freed the slaves and gave African Americans an equal claim to citizenship, it did not provide the moral energy required for rooting equal rights in the subsoil of American society or for planting equal opportunity throughout the land... [the war] did not offer clear moral guidance as to how the mobilisation could be put to use for the good of all citizens. The evangelical Protestant traditions that had done so much to shape society before the war did possess theological resources to address both America's deeply ingrained racism and its burgeoning industrial revolution. But the Civil War took the steam out of Protestants' moral energy...The theology that had risen to pre-eminence in the early 19th century continued to work effectively for vast multitudes in private; but because of its public failing during the war, it had little to offer American society more generally in the decades that followed the war.

Noll, p.160