While war sometimes inspires deep theological reflection, it can also lead to conclusions that are shallow, nationalistic, and propagandistic in nature, with the Civil War producing abundant examples of the latter. Ministers on both sides of the conflict generally assumed that God was on their side and his purposes easily discerned. There are, however, notable exceptions, such as none other than Abraham Lincoln himself.

In his Second Inaugural Address, President Lincoln surmised that the Civil War was God’s judgment on both the North and the South for slavery. While the Union and the Confederacy had their aims in the war, Lincoln concluded, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” The enslaved blacksmith turned renowned Presbyterian minister James W.C. Pennington (1807-1870) expressed a similarly profound view. As a Presbyterian, Pennington’s doctrine of providence emphasized God’s absolute sovereignty and transcendence, but also his immanence amid suffering. He acknowledged God’s use of secondary means, offering an inbuilt pushback against passivity. Like many other African Americans, he supported the Union while also pushing its leaders to prioritize emancipation as the chief goal of the war.

Yet the Union’s shifting focus from not only reunifying the nation to also ending slavery provoked backlash, as in the July 1863 New York City draft riots, one of the worst outbreaks of racial and political violence in American history. Fueled by anger over the prolonged nature of the conflict, the injustice of wealthy American men buying their way out of the draft, and the resentment of poor Irish Catholic immigrants at being drafted to fight for the freedom of African Americans, a cause they did not identify with, all boiled over in Lower Manhattan.

Pennington expressed some of his most profound reflections on providence in the wake of the riots. Many of the rioters feared having to compete for jobs with newly freed Blacks and certainly wanted no part in their liberation. While initially military and government buildings were targeted, free African Americans, as symbols of what the war was about, were also attacked. Estimates vary, but more than 200 New Yorkers may have been killed and thousands made homeless, a disproportionate number of whom were Black. The New York lawyer George Templeton Strong poignantly wrote in his diary, “Jefferson Davis rules New York today.” Even as the Union made a great moral stride by abolishing slavery, its largest city was embroiled in horrible violence over much of the North’s refusal to have any part in it.  

Pennington traveled to Manhattan amid the chaos, attempting to find family members amid the wreckage, ultimately penning the first systematic indictment of how the authorities had failed to keep the peace. Pennington reflected upon divine providence a month later in a speech he delivered before an audience in Poughkeepsie, titled “The Position and Duties of the Colored People: Or the Great Lessons to Be Learned from the Late Riotous Attack upon Them in New York.” In his speech, Pennington recounted that Abraham Lincoln’s reported reason for issuing the proclamation earlier that year was strictly “as a military necessity.” But, for Pennington, Lincoln’s motivation was of little import. Even if done out of military necessity, Pennington argued that such a necessity was “imposed upon this government in the Providence of an alwise God. The President ha[d] no alternative but to fall into the powerful current of events which God had put in motion.” In other words, “The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Later in the same speech, Pennington made an argument of striking similarity to those in Lincoln’s second inaugural. “The [emancipation] proclamation is the word of God’s holy Providence, so to speak; but the great North is slow to repent of slavery. There is yet a great deal of wicked, angry, and unrighteous feeling in the heart of the Northern people.” Pennington observed that God’s use of the North to end slavery in the South did not leave the North guiltless. Even as the war raged on, New York rioters demonstrated just how many White northerners were indifferent about slavery. “It may be” Pennington speculated, “that God intends to use the sword as a lance to bleed the whole nation, until she begins to faint, for very loss of blood, and then to swathe up the opened vein, and apply restoratives.” Pennington surmised that both the length and severity of the war was a part of God’s plan, a conclusion to which few others could bring themselves. Just as Lincoln privately wrote in his “Meditation on the Divine Will” in 1862, “I am almost ready to say… that God wills this contest, and wills that it should not end yet.”

Pennington lived a life that both expressed confidence in God’s providence, as well as confidence that God would use him to accomplish his purposes, like ending slavery. Pennington admitted not only that the entire nation was culpable for the sin of slavery, but also that God willed the prolongation of the war as a national judgment and a mutual reckoning. Just as Lincoln opined two years later, “if God wills that [the war] 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.’” Rather than presuming to wield providence, Pennington, like Lincoln, understood what it meant to be an instrument of it.