Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880, by Luke E. Harlow and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, by David Brion Davis

During the tumultuous 1860s, N. G. Markham did his best to live a Christian life. Away from his Michigan home, he spent his days and nights in Tennessee as a soldier in the Union army. He wrote frequently to his wife, Eunice, of his camp experiences, battlefield struggles, and the faith he tried to maintain. “We have the funniest Sundays I ever saw,” he reported in September 1862. “Some are writing, some singing, some reading their testaments, some cleaning their guns, and some are asleep and some are cursing and swearing.”

More than a year later, both the war and Markham had changed. The Emancipation Proclamation had transformed the “war for the Union” into a war for universal abolition, and the fighting had become more ferocious on all sides. Markham was glad to have a wife who prayed for him. “I have faith to believe that your prayers will be answered,” he wrote. “Keep on praying for it is good to feel when we are in danger.”

When it came to the lives of African Americans and the end of slavery, however, he neither offered prayer nor encouraged anyone else to pray. “I am not half so much of an abolitionist as I was before I came here,” Markham explained in the same letter. “The free niggers here [are] the most lazy lot of fellows that I ever saw. I would not turn my hand over to see the whole of them free.”