Christian activists played key roles in every part of postwar reconstruction. In the South, Black ministers and White missionaries welcomed the formerly enslaved into the faith and worked with them to establish independent social and political lives. Defeated Southern Whites launched a multi-generation effort to defend their treason by reimagining the causes of the Civil War and God’s role in it. In the West, a series of Indian wars led to the US government’s creation of a comprehensive reservation system, where government-sponsored missionaries sought to Christianize tribes and “civilize” their children. In Utah Territory the US government cracked down on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its impressive theocracy, seeking to quell religious dissent.
Across the nation, Reconstruction policies provided new opportunities for church leaders in collaboration with the government to impose their ideas and values on the land and its peoples. Protestant activists believed that they alone had the tools and expertise to integrate Black and Native peoples, former Confederates, and religious dissenters into the body politic, while bringing healing and reconciliation to all Americans on their terms. Rocked by the split over slavery and then the war, they worked to build unity by identifying common threats and enemies and organizing Christians against them. Their actions demonstrated that after the conflict, just as before, the free exercise clause did not apply to all equally. But minority groups constantly challenged the power of mainstream Christian leaders.
Black Americans secured literal freedom in the 1860s and also discovered a new sense of spiritual independence. Black denominations in the North had rushed to send missionaries, ministers, and supplies into territories retaken by the US Army. Young African Methodist Episcopal preacher Theophilus Gould Steward traveled South from New Jersey to minister during the conflict. Black Americans, he noted in 1865, were “lying under an almost absolute physical and moral interdict. There was no one to baptize their children, to perform marriage, or to bury the dead. A ministry had to be created at once—and created out of the material at hand.” He and his colleagues leapt into the work, building up churches where liberated African Americans could find refuge, spiritual instruction, and discipleship.