Was the Civil War an Evangelical Crusade?

Joan Walsh reviews David Goldfield's new Civil War book, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.", at Salon:

Whether or not you accept that premise – more on that later – Goldfield shows definitively that Northern evangelical Protestants were the moral force behind the war, and once they turned it into a religious question, a matter of good v. evil, political compromise was impossible. The Second Great Awakening set its sights on purging the country of the sins of slavery, drunkenness, impiety -- as well as Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic immigrants. Better than any history I've seen, Goldfield tracks the disturbing links between abolitionism and nativism. In fact, he starts his book with the torching of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834, a violent attack on Catholics which Goldfield shows was "incited" by Lyman Beecher, the father of the Beecher clan, most of whom turned out to be as anti-Irish Catholic as they were anti-slavery. To evangelical Protestant nativists, Catholicism was incompatible with democracy, because its adherents allegedly gave their loyalty to the Pope, not the president, and the religion's emphasis on obeying a hierarchy made them unfit for self-government. Also, rebellious Irish Catholics didn't show the proper discipline or deference to conform to emerging industrial America. The needs of Northern business were never far from some (though not all) abolitionists' minds.

Still, though nativism was widespread in the North, and within the Republican Party (which  absorbed some old Know-Nothing and nativist Whig party remnants), abolitionism remained at the party's fringe.

The history of anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States is an interesting tale.  I've never seen it linked with abolitionists specifically, but it was always present in the Whig and Republican parties, and was the only tenet of the Know-Nothing party.  The Prohibition/Temperance movement targeted these "foreign" elements, specifically focusing on the saloons which made up German culture, the German beer barons who provided the product and the stereotypical Irish drunk.  This movement was mainly a rural, native Protestant organization, which tried to outlaw the leisure activities of the largely urban, immigrant Catholic newcomers.  This was a major driver of the urban Democrat/ rural Republican divide which still exists today.  It is interesting to me that the strength of the Republican party since 1980 has been in combining Evangelical Protestants with the Catholics whom these Protestants often still do not trust, to unite as a family values party.  History suggests that it is a marriage of convenience.