Abolitionists of course had long challenged acceptance of America’s special virtue, though it had been commonly assumed by other evangelicals. Now, many other Protestants challenged it, all the more remarkably in a war directed at a Catholic people. “Never have I so much feared the judgments of God on us as a nation,” warned James W. Alexander, an Old School Presbyterian minister and war critic.63 An erring Israel, the United States needed prophetic voices to recall the nation to its proper (rather than its “manifest”) destiny.
