One Example Of Religious Fanaticism During The Civil War

I always wonder what motivates people in a state of war, and am always surprised when the driving force turns out to be a women.

In most of our perceptions, women are more earthy and caring, due to their mothering instincts that carry over to all areas of life.

Looking at the Palestinian and Iraqi Mothers who rejoice in the death of their “Shahid” sons, I am always left flabbergasted for lack of understanding of how a woman can be glad of her childs demise - no matter what cause he supposedly died for.

I was reading about Eliza Fane, who married her step brother in 1832 and raised their 13 children on a two hundred Acre farm in Eastern Tennessee.

The couple had eight slaves, four of whom were under the age of 12 at the start of the Civil War. Eliza kept a diary from the age of 19 till nine days before here death at the age of 75.

This diary (which I haven’t read), gives an insight of how a fanatic religious belief, could make a mother a driving force in sending her sons and husband off to war just about happily. She connected the war, and the right to own slaves as a religious issue

“I am becoming more firmly fixed in my conviction concerning this war that religion will be more intimately interwoven in its history than any which had ever preceded it,”

she wrote on October 13, 1862.

“The men who have honored God are the men he has chosen to honor on almost every field.”

she also said:

“And I do feel the judgments of Almighty God will rest upon the heads of the Northern people for their unjust interference, thereby thwarting our plans for the elevation of our colored people in a moral point of view.”

She felt that being slaves, was the Black mans moral destiny and that by keeping slaves she was helping in their salvation.

Nothing swayed her from her conviction. She would Speak of her theories to the Union Soldiers passing through. So strong was her conviction in the Justice of the war, that when her slaves started leaving her to join the union forces, she lamented on their souls and on the hardship awaiting them.

“He leaves a home of plenty and I may say peace and happiness,” she wrote sadly. “He goes to them, they take the deluded victims and in most cases put them in squads of 20 or 30 with an overseer to work out a miserable existence … with a tenfold severer infliction of punishment than he has ever known in his Southern home.”

Even when her dear husband, who was ill informed her that he was going to resign his post she was not happy

“I do feel could he stand the service I do not want him to resign if he is useful to his country as I hope and believe he is,”

Maggie of civil war woman says:

Eliza Fain never abandoned the southern cause, but instead resigned all things to the will of God. Her submission allowed her to negotiate her way through war and defeat without sacrificing her deeply held beliefs on race, class, and gender.

You can read more about Eliza Fain at Civil War Women.

I must say, on a personal note that I’m quite sure I don’t like Eliza Fain or what she represented.

(and I am not talking about Christianity) Eliza was a religious fanatic, and those, it is plain to see if you look the course of history with the naked eye, are often the motivating forces behind wars.