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Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares - The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict (Hardcover)
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Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares - The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict (Hardcover)
Series: Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War
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In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues
that the political ideology and racial views of American
Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism
or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the
millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of
antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved
deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative
of the North versus the South. Moving beyond the traditional
optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants
of the Civil War era into ""premillenarian"" and
""postmillenarian"" camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian
Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the
arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing.
This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances.
Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to
actively perfect the world via moral reform-of self and society-and
free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or
racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally
comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding
human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans' utopian plans to
reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views
like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least
acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve
white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American
Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change
requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the
reconstruction of southern society. Millenarian Dreams and Racial
Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil
War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial
ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the
postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states
during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union
victory in 1865.
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