Most of them before 1856, when Brown first made the news. And a citation of more than a few people worshipping Brown as the Messiah, even after Harper’s Ferry, which won’t be for three years.
216,000 soldiers in the Union Army to come were German born (mostly Catholic or Lutheran). 200,000 Irish (mostly Catholic), plus others from other countries where the people were Catholic or Lutheran. More laissez-faire than some here already, but willing to fight for the nationhood of their adopted country.
[del]Where do you dig up this shit?[/del] Cite? And one sermon by a crackpot won’t cut it. I’m looking for a proper movement to do what you said.
Perhaps initially, as the continent was “won” from the Indians by voluntary associations of mostly white people, but by 1856 the country east of the Mississippi was populated by people who were here voluntarily and were loyal to one arbitrary geographical area or another.
Lincoln’s religious faith was complex, changing, and is still the subject of considerable conjecture and scholarship. I don’t think you can, with complete accuracy, flatly state that he was an atheist.
He did, in his youth, write a book debunking Christianity – and then burned the manuscript when a friend pointed out how that would doom his political ambitions. You can read the story in What Lincoln Believed, by Michael Lind. His views might well have evolved over the decades – nevertheless, it’s very hard to believe nationalism had anything to do with religious impulses in his case.
It seems to me that like Thomas Paine (whom Lincoln admired), Lincoln was a Deist rather than an atheist-after all it was the deists who pioneered the modern criticisms of Christianity.
The point stands; deists were very rationalistic, and never the sort to conflate religious belief with mystic nationalism. WillFarnaby’s arguments on that point are bullshit WRT Lincoln, at least. Lincoln’s devotion to the Union was based on, among other things, an entirely rational fear that if the American states disunited (and the secession of the South might be only the beginning, there), European powers would start playing their alliance-games here and turn the states into their puppet-proxies, playing off the Union against the Confederacy and eventually playing off Louisiana against Texas, etc. A reasonable fear considering what France was doing in Mexico at the time.