Loyalty and Liturgy: Union Occupation and Religious Liberty in Wilmington,North Carolina, 1865

Examining the controversy surrounding the Union army's 1865 seizure of St James Episcopal Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, this article explores the role of churches as symbols of loyalty during the final days of the American Civil War. The Wilmington episode shows that Union commanders who targeted southern churches exposed themselves to complaints of violating shared principles of church–state separation. Commanders saw expressions of loyalty from the pulpit as essential to establishing Union authority, but the southern clergy vehemently opposed interference in church affairs. Perceiving an opportunity to reaffirm their claims to moral leadership, southern religious leaders tacitly defended the honor of the southern cause by associating it with the cause of religious liberty. In so doing, they laid the experiential and rhetorical groundwork for the discourse of southern “redemption” that played such an important role in the defeat of Reconstruction.