War Is All Hell

Reviewed by: War Is All Hell: The Nature of Evil and the Civil War by Edward J. Blum and John H. Matsui Kathleen Logothetis Thompson (bio) War Is All Hell: The Nature of Evil and the Civil War. By Edward J. Blum and John H. Matsui. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 256. Cloth, $45.00.) At mid-nineteenth century the United States was a Christian nation. God, Christianity, and religious practices were touchstones for Americans as they approached, fought through, and recovered from the Civil War. Previous scholarship has focused on American uses of Christianity, the growth of secular and civic religion in the nineteenth century, and how the Civil War altered the American concepts of God and heaven. In War Is All Hell, Edward J. Blum and John H. Matsui offer a complement, a missing piece, to the scholarship about religion in Civil War America. God was not the only spiritual entity on the minds of Americans in the 1860s, they argue; Satan and his demons were also front and center. As the concepts of heaven shifted, so too did the concepts of hell and the uses of its imagery. The forces of good were not the only ones working in the United States during the war, as Americans increasingly invoked the forces of evil to describe, understand, and even fight the bloody conflict. [End Page 575] The language and imagery of hell and devils became increasingly common in the decades preceding the Civil War, as Americans used religion in more secular ways, struggling to interpret slavery and the growing strife between North and South. While African Americans applied the concepts of hell and the devil directly to their owners and their experiences in bondage, white Americans instead thought that the devil and his minions were orchestrating national strife by directing the actions of the opposing side. As Blum and Matsui demonstrate through examining literature, speeches, and printed imagery, Americans presented the devil as manipulating events and people in chaotic and evil ways. At times the concept of the devil was directly applied to people, such as in southern conceptions of Black Republicans as more devilish than human. The Civil War saw a continuation of this trend as well as a change in the concept of hell. The authors note that previous American wars had not been described as “hell,” but the Civil War increasingly was. This was in part a result of the secularization of religion that allowed people to use religious terms to describe nonreligious things, but it was also a result of the degree of destruction and the total upending of normal life and society that soldiers witnessed during the conflict. Recent scholarship about the nineteenth-century American “culture of death,” such as Mark Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (2008) and Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), focuses on how concepts of God, religion, and the “good death” affected how Americans approached and coped with the Civil War. Blum and Matsui demonstrate that soldiers also turned to ideas and images of hell to describe the indescribable. When faced with battle, prison camps, the disruption of military life, and the loss of cultural stability known in civilian life, “hell” was often the term that soldiers fell back on when other words failed. War Is All Hell also demonstrates that as the war entered its final, most bloody years, combatants accepted the idea that to end the war they must act more like devils than angels. The idea that soldiers must “fight like the devil” to survive and win the war became more and more prominent, and more battles were conceived of as hell compared to the beginning of the war. Blum and Matsui show that soldiers used the metaphors of acting like devils or demons to help them cope with killing, just as they used ideas of the “good death” to cope with dying. Involving the actions of devils and scenes of hell explained the horrific realities of prison camps, of such massacres as Fort Pillow, and of such battles as Cold Harbor. This imagery was

Christianity · Heaven · Just war theory · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Theology · Classics · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices