Well, maybe not as a military ally, but it would have given us a measure of prestige with much of the Catholic world. It may have opened the door to recognition by Austria or France.

But, one can only dream.

Thank you JK.Most illuminating.Tends to underscore the word CIVIL in Civil War.Just as I had suspected.

And thanks to you as well DM.Papal recognition would have been of no practical value in any event.

Clearly, religion was used on both sides, as has been common in virtually every war in history. Both Abolitionists and advocates of slavery cited Scripture for justification. Both made strong points based upon Scripture, and the debate began long before 1860, as many contributors know much better than I.

Also, consider Stephens' speech expresses only his opinion with respect to causes, which was very different from President Davis' and almost diametrically opposed to General Lee and many others prominent in the struggle for Southern Independence.

In addition, Stephens' speech did not have the prominence of a Lincoln's Second Inaugural and other similar speeches. The fact that when the deep south seceded the new Confederacy had 7 slave states while the Federal union had 8 is, in and of itself, a kind of contraction to Stephens' version of things. The three slave states that later seceded did not do so due to slavery. They did so due to Lincoln's reaction to South Carolina's secession, which was clearly unconstitutional.

Last but not least, note the Confederate constitution permitted any state to end slavery at any time; something the Federal Constitution did not. Many facts and events mitigate and even contradict Stephens' version of things in his Cornerstone speech.

As for white superiority, that sentiment was common everywhere, as I'm sure you know, and Lincoln was no exception as evinced by his many speeches.
And on and on, ad nauseum.

But none of this has to do with the point of my post.

It was, specifically:
The crusade-like fanaticism and "holier-than-thou," self-righteous arrogance of the Puritan mind-set-turned-skeptic was like a glove waiting for a hand, the hand being "honest" Abe's political savvy and opportunism.
The South, in contrast, was much more religiously pluralistic. They had high Church Anglicans, baptists, Calvanists of all stripes and not a small number of Catholics, like my negligible self, and so forth.

Many forget and most don't even know that Puritanism and its spirit had a profound hold upon the psyche of New Englanders, to the point that Massachusetts had a state church as late as the 1830s. I don't think an official state church existed in any southern state. But whether it did or not, of greater significance is that Southern religion retained its dogmatic content and its Christian roots up to the war–––and it has endured to this very day. (We are not still ubiquitously referred to as the Bible Belt for nothing.)

This homespun, Bible-based orthodoxy, combined with the Southern penchant for common sense and the tendency to eschew fanciful abstractions give Christians of all stripes in the South, black and white, a common bond in daily social intercourse, even if they may disagree on the meaning of certain specifics. Southerner's, in fact, still commonly debate theological points in daily conversation, while Yankees have largely lost all believe in truth. The National Football League seems to be their only common bond to reality.

In contrast to the remarkable phenomenon of sustained Southern Orthodoxy, the North was already being corrupted by sundry forms of skepticism well before the war. Nature abhors a vacuum as it is said. And the loss of the dogmatic content for those who remained temperamentally self-righteous and smitten with a sense of superiority, the call of destiny and a missionary zeal could mean only one thing; the vacuum created by the loss of dogmatic content would not last long, and it didn't. It was quickly replaced by––well, to be blunt, what seems to me to be little more than a dull materialism.

When all these Post-Puritan "virtues" combined with Yankee banking and industrialism it became the perfect "spiritual" fodder which zealously fueled the birth of Lincoln's American Empire.

The Southern sensibility was not as lofty, transcendent, grandiose or remote, nor could it have ever been. Most Southerner's, even today, are saner than that. They are also too independent minded. They got it right and kept it right in respect to skepticism and faith: believe the Faith, doubt the politicians.

The great mass of individual Southrons were not defending state rights, or the foundational principles behind our Republic, slavery or even the Constitution. They were defending hearth and home, plain and simple. Their land had been invaded by foreigners.

To them, home was home, politics was politics and religion was religion. The Puritan sensibility, having lost its original substance while retaining its sense of superiority and missionary zeal, simply substituted temporal and political goals for the transcendent and spiritual one's the cankerworm of skepticism had eaten.
Such a tragic conflation, analogous to that of the modern Muslim's, finds its quintessential expression in the phrase, "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."

Southrons, making the proper distinctions, could not honestly make such an analogous piece of blasphemy.

The hijacking of religious rhetoric by Federal politicians continues to this day, and it's just as stomach tuning now as it was then--maybe more so, since so many of the posturing politicians don't know the Scripture at all.

Yankee politicians are the same today as then: their interest in religion is only to use it to advance themselves and their agenda. Otherwise, they could care less about it. Their poison has infected the whole nation and virtually consumed all of politics.

A statesman, a statesman, my kingdom for a statesman!

Stephens is leaving open the possibility that the curse upon Canaan applies to blacks, which is a perversion of Scripture if there ever was one. This is not a defense of Lincoln. However, in evaluating the degree to which Lincoln's religious rhetoric is reprehensible, it is good to remember that he was not the only one abusing it. His faults in this department were not unique.