His Truth Marching On

James P. Byrd opens his A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War with Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address. The sixteenth president famously observed that Americans "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." This is a fitting opening for a book that sets out to explain how Northerners and Southerners used Christian scripture to sustain their cause in the public religious realm, motivate their respective peoples to continue fighting, and justify in the eyes of the Almighty a war that eventually cost 800,000 lives.