In 1862, a letter by John Marshman in the British Baptist missionary periodical Friend of India made quite a statement about the meaning of the American Civil War.
It may be said that the prosperity of the South has been based on the gigantic crime of holding three or four millions of human beings in a state of slavery, and it is difficult to divest the mind of the conviction that the day of reckoning from the throne of the Eternal has come.*
Slavery had been a source of some tension between British Baptists and slave-owning American Baptists for some time, and now to observers like Marshman, it seemed that the awful war was a means of providential judgment on the institution.
Marshman’s observation was not too distant from Abraham Lincoln’s in the Second Inaugural Address several years later. Lincoln said
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Christians should be cautious about casual providential readings of non-biblical history. But in light of the conjunction of the grotesque immorality of slavery (which as Lincoln noted, both the North and South profited from in many ways) and the terrible war, humble providential readings of God’s purpose in the Civil War seem warranted.
*The Marshman quote appears in Sven Beckert’s powerful Empire of Cotton: A Global History.
