“Can We Not Consider Ourselves Blessed in Enduring This Baptism of Blood?”: A Thanksgiving 1862 Civil War Sermon on Emancipation, Providence, and National Redemption.
N.p. November 27, 1862. 9 ¾ x 7 ¾ inches, 10 pp, stitched binding. Fine condition. Item #List3718
During the Civil War, Northern clergy used sermons, both on holidays and regular Sunday services, to interpret the conflict for their congregations. These included several notable Thanksgiving Day sermons.[1] Thanksgiving 1862 carried particular emotional and political weight, coming just weeks after Antietam and only months after Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Composed for services on that Thanksgiving Day, this powerful unpublished Civil War sermon manuscript interprets the war as a providential national purification.
Titled simply “Thanksgiving Nov. 27, 1862,” the lengthy manuscript is built around Psalm 100:
“Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him & bless his name. For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; & his truth endureth to all generations.”
From that text, the anonymous minister—almost certainly a Northern evangelical clergyman aligned with the antislavery wing of the Republican cause—constructs an extended meditation on divine providence amid national catastrophe. Augmented throughout with pasted-in newspaper clippings concerning emancipation and the war, the sermon repeatedly insists that even the horrors of civil war must be understood as manifestations of divine goodness operating through history: “All providences are charged with goodness […] at the moment of keenest anguish — at the hour of deepest darkness — something to be thankful to God for.”
The preacher then turns directly to the suffering already visible by late 1862:
“Great judgments have fallen upon the country; plagues have been let loose, rivers have been turned into blood, and there is a great cry throughout the land, for there is not a house in which there is not one dead […] Many a parent like Sisera's mother, looks out at the window, in vain for the coming of a beloved & noble son”.
The sermon insists that this suffering is not meaningless destruction, but the violent process through which God purifies both nation and church. The minister compares the Civil War to the great upheavals of European political and religious history:
“The French revolution liberated & dissipated the forces of infidelity & enabled the benighted & enslaved people of France to secure a fair start on the highway of liberty […] The convulsions which attended the Reformation, tho’ they drenched Europe in blood, were the crucible in which God purified his Church.”
From there, the sermon moves explicitly toward emancipation, presenting the destruction of slavery as the providential culmination of the conflict:
“And now by the present upheaval — by the flood of fire & blood that is sweeping over the fairest portions of our land, promises to give Xn [Christian] liberty, that liberty which breaks every yoke […] If such a result is obtained — can we not consider ourselves blessed in enduring this baptism of blood?”
The pasted-in newspaper extracts, incorporated directly into the manuscript, include lengthy discussions of the Emancipation Proclamation itself. The preacher praises Lincoln’s policy not merely because it frees enslaved people, but because it fundamentally transforms the moral position of the federal government, which “has arrayed itself on the side of freedom.” He then lists the evidence of this national “purification”: enslavement abolished in Washington, D.C.; enslavement excluded from federal territories; Haiti and Liberia recognized as independent republics; new anti-slave trade agreements with Great Britain; and finally the Emancipation Proclamation itself, which he celebrates as a decisive break with the nation’s long complicity in oppression.
The sermon repeatedly returns to the idea that the war is exposing and cleansing moral corruption at every level of society. Slavery is denounced as “a hotbed of robbery, murder & treason.” Northern merchants and politicians are condemned for sacrificing liberty and conscience “for the sake of gain,” while the immense economic destruction of the war is interpreted as divine punishment for years of compromise with slavery.
The closing pages are especially powerful. Having argued throughout that emancipation represents the fulfillment of long-awaited moral and religious hopes, the preacher urges his audience not to despair at the terrible cost of the war, but instead to recognize it as God’s chastening hand guiding the nation toward redemption:
“Let us not then be cast down — despairing — but thankful & hopeful. Why cast down? Why are our souls disquieted within us — have we not labored & prayed, that these results which are now promised might come in our day? […] Now when God is answering our prayers — now crowning our labors with success, should we not be thankful? Thank God for what our eyes see & our ears hear.”
The emotional climax of the sermon comes in a poetic abolitionist passage copied into the manuscript:
“For deeper than thunder of Summer’s loud shower, / On the dome of the sky, God is striking the hour! / Shall we falter before what we prayed for so long / When the wrong is so meek, and the Right is so strong.”
The sermon concludes with a vision of national suffering redeemed through emancipation and providence:
“May we then go forward from this day thankful that we are permitted to participate in a contest that promises to be so beneficent to man & glorious to God. We suffer, but our sufferings shall make the land blossom like the rose.”
Overall a wonderfully poignant Civil War Thanksgiving sermon manuscript, preserving in contemporary form the fusion of evangelical Protestantism, nationalism, and antislavery politics in the wartime North.
[1] Sean A. Scott, “‘Christian Patriotism’ in Flush: Political Preaching, Antiwar Dissent, and Summer Thanksgiving,” in A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2010):97–160.
Price: $3,750.00