Date

9-17-2026

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

Steven E. Woodworth

Keywords

Civil War chaplains, Union Army chaplaincy, military chaplaincy, American Civil War, religious history, memory studies, New England, chaplain efficacy, relational proximity, pastoral care, veterans' memory, regimental histories, courts-martial, hospital chaplains, myth and memory, nineteenth-century American religion

Disciplines

History

Abstract

Private William Kennedy of the Fifty-fifth Illinois Volunteer Infantry damned chaplains as “the most gigantic nuisance in the Army,” then praised his own. The distance between abstract condemnation and named, concrete appreciation has shaped the historiography of the Union chaplaincy, with historians largely accepting nameless class censure at face value and treating competence as the exception. This dissertation argues that no single standard of efficacy can be applied to Union chaplains, because they answered to seven competing horizons of expectation (governmental, military command, regimental, soldiery, denominational, civilian, and personal), leaving chaplains to fill undefined duties Congress never clarified or reconciled. Relational proximity bridged the gap; chaplains who were present with the soldiery, sharing in their suffering through real human connection, enabled genuine spiritual ministry. The study builds a framework to analyze the performance of 293 New England ministers who served as field or hospital chaplains, testing source-critical observations against 1,773 chaplain mentions across a wide body of period, veteran, and memory-era literature. Assessments are analyzed by horizon, sorted into primary evidence, memory, and myth, tiered by the number of independent third-party witnesses, and scored using a matrix that weights opportunity for evidence of relational proximity. The findings invert the negative historiography. Positive assessments among New England chaplains outnumber negative assessments by more than twenty to one. Documented chaplain failure was real but rare. Records of high performance were the rule, not the exception.

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