This is John Batchel, a conversation with Professor Richard Carwood in.

Righteous Strife is his new book, How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union.

The professor is the Emeritus Regis Professor of American History at Oxford University.

This book is about the pulpits warring with each other, supporting Lincoln, challenging Lincoln,

condemning Lincoln from the beginning of the war at the secession in December of 1860 by South Carolina

started the breakaway of the Union into the Confederacy and the Union.

And from the very first, the professor lists the challenge to Abraham Lincoln and the

cabinet about holding the nation together.

Was it about preserving the union?

Was it about abolition?

Was it about what the radicals of the North said? Was it

about the radicals of the South said? The conservatives? Here the professor describes Lincoln

at the beginning of the war, a conservative thinker, old school Presbyterian. Richard Carwoodon,

righteous strife, Abraham Lincoln at the start in the fall of 1861, and the transformation will be complete by the last days

of his life in the spring of 1865.

Much more of this later in the week.

So Lincoln did not regard himself as a radical. He believed that South Carolina and those states that had followed South Carolina, or the other six states, which had succeeded by the time he was inaugurated in early March of 1861. He believed that they were

engaged on a fool's errand. They had been misled by an elite, an unrepresentative elite,

that the majority of the South would eventually see the folly of their leadership and that the union would be restored.

It would require some show of force, but that show of force was not driven by radical purposes.

It was driven by conservative purposes to restore a broken union, to reconstruct a broken

union on the same principles on which the original constitution had been based. So in the summer

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