Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Guest: Richard Carwardine)

Heartland’s Tim Benson is joined by Richard Carwardine, Emeritus Rhodes Professor of American History and Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, to discuss his new book, Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union. They chat about how the tensions surrounding the moral quandary of slavery cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, how Lincoln proclaimed more days of national fasting and thanksgiving than any other president before or since, and how these pauses for spiritual reflection provided the inspirational rhetoric and ideological fuel that sustained the war.