War Is All Hell: The Nature of Evil and the Civil War

During his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln expressed hope that the "better angels of our nature" would prevail as war loomed.

He was wrong.

The better angels did not, but for many Americans, the evil ones did.

War Is All Hell peers into the world of devils, demons, Satan, and hell during the era of the American Civil War.

It charts how African Americans and abolitionists compared slavery to hell, how Unionists rendered Confederate secession illegal by linking it to Satan, and how many Civil War soldiers came to understand themselves as living in hellish circumstances.War Is All Hell also examines how many Americans used evil to advance their own agendas.