Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (76 page)

Military failure intruded in a more direct way on Southerners’ religious confidence. If the Confederate nation really, at its core, was built around the determination to “accept as true the faith of our fathers” and “believe in the authority of the Bible, attested by the voice of the civilized world for almost two thousand years,” then it was certainly entitled to expect the protection of Almighty God, especially over against the godless Yankee nation. “Those who defend free society must, for
this reason alone, if consistent, reject the Bible… because the institution of slavery accords with the injunctions and morality of the Bible.” Hence, “all free society must reject the Bible if it approve its own institutions and disapprove slavery.” Southerners should be free to add to whatever catalog of cultural distinctiveness they could assemble a distinctive “morals and religion,” and expect a divine blessing “in this great struggle” where (as Benjamin Palmer put it) “we defend the cause of God and religion. …” The burden of that cause, Palmer explained, is “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing… with the right, unchanged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.”
⁸²

In practice, however, the South’s self-image as a God-blessed people proved to be surprisingly shallow. In nine Southern states, clergymen were actually forbidden to hold public office; even James Henley Thornwell accepted the drawing of a bright line between religion and public life in the South, commenting, “The business of a preacher, as such, is to expound the Word of God” and not to “expound to senators the Constitution of the State, nor to interpret for judges the laws of the land.” As it was, many of slavery’s most vigorous defenders displayed little in the way of religiosity. James Henry Hammond scoffed privately at Christianity as the religion of “an infuriated Demon, seeking whom he may destroy. … The result of my experience of Life and Him is that I pant for
Annihilation
.” And “Stonewall” Jackson, that paragon of martial piety, had a very poor estimate of Southern religion. “I am afraid that our people are looking to the wrong source for help, and ascribing our successes to those whom they are not due,” Jackson complained. “If we fail to trust in God & to give him all the glory our cause is ruined. Give to our friends at home due warning on this subject.” However much the Southern Confederacy liked to speak of itself as a divine cause, so little provision had been made for chaplains’ services in the Army of Northern Virginia that fully half of the regiments in Jackson’s corps in the spring of 1863 were without one.
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When, by 1864, defeat was looking the Confederacy in the eyes, the arms of the pious dropped nervelessly to their sides, and they concluded that God was deserting them, if not because of his opposition to slavery, then as a consequence of Southern unbelief. “God’s dark providence enwraps me like a pall,” agonized Moses Drury Hoge, one of the most prominent Presbyterian divines in Virginia, “The idolized expectation of a separate nationality, of a social life and literature and civilization of
our own, together with a gospel guarded against the contamination of New England infidelity, all this has perished, and I feel like a shipwrecked mariner thrown up like a seaweed on a desert shore.” God had judged the Confederacy. He had taken from them the devout “Stonewall” Jackson as a warning, and when the warning went unheeded, he struck the Confederate cause into the dust. It was “their want of faith” that was the “crying sin of the people of God throughout our beleaguered, devastated, and bleeding country,” and now they had paid for it. “Can we believe in the justice of Providence,” lamented Josiah Gorgas, “or must we conclude we are after all wrong?”
⁸⁴

Southern theologians were not the only ones to find disappointment in trying to turn the war into an intellectual struggle. As the war lengthened, the meanings that Northern religious thinkers attached to the war also splintered in frustration. The Transcendentalists were secular thinkers; but they had their religious counterpart in Horace Bushnell, a Congregationalist minister in Hartford, Connecticut, who had carved out a reputation by horrifying more orthodox Congregationalists with his admiration for a Kantian religion of intuition and feelings. He also had a consistently Romantic disdain for the pushing and striving of democracy. Like George Templeton Strong but very much unlike Abraham Lincoln, Bushnell was convinced that the war had only shown how little popular government was to be trusted, and in 1864 he interpreted “the true meaning of the present awful chapter of our history” as proof that “popular governments, or such as draw their magistracies by election from among the people themselves,” were inferior to the national character to be found in historic communities based on race, religion, or tradition.
⁸⁵

It was among the evangelicals that the meaning of the Civil War took on its most dramatic and apocalyptic colorings. American evangelical Protestants had largely chosen the Whigs as their party of choice, and when the Whigs failed to adopt wholeheartedly the moral crusades of the evangelicals, the withdrawal of Northern evangelicals helped destroy the Whig Party and lay the basis for the rise of the Republicans. With the coming of the war, Northern evangelicals swung enthusiastically behind the causes of the Union and anti-slavery. The great Presbyterian preacher and commentator Albert Barnes (who had opened the 1856 Republican convention with prayer) declared two weeks after Fort Sumter that the war would “render the world the abode of industrious freedom, peace, domestic joy, and virtuous intelligence.”
⁸⁶
The American Tract Society’s agent Hollis Read went a step further and prophesied in
The Coming Crisis of the World, or the Great Battle and the Golden Age
(1861) that the Civil War would be the prelude to the return of Jesus and the onset of the millennium; it would be “one of the last mighty strides of Providence towards the goal of humanity’s final and high destiny.”

A few more such strides, a few more such terrific struggles and travail-pains among the nations; a few more such convulsions and revolutions, that shall break to pieces and destroy what remains of the inveterate and time-honored systems and confederations of sin and Satan, and the friends of freedom may then lift up their heads and rejoice, for their redemption draweth nigh. The Day Of Vengeance Has Always Preceded And Been preparatory to the Year of the Redeemed.
⁸⁷

Yet Northern evangelicals could not escape the uneasy sense that slavery—even if not exactly the Southern form of it—was indeed sanctioned by the Bible, and they found themselves driven to the unlikely expedient of arguing, not from the letter of the Bible but from its much more intangible spirit—a tactic that set them uncomfortably close to the Romantics.
⁸⁸

No matter what their interpretations of the war, religious as well as secular intellectuals of every stripe set out to institutionalize these meanings. Secular intellectuals, so far as they could be teased out of their studies, and Romantic Protestants banded together to create the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) in 1861, with the mission of raising and channeling private donations and large-scale giving to the support of the Union army. The USSC was, from the start, an exercise in benevolent elitism. Just as its leaders had no faith in the abstract rationalism of democracy, they had no practical use for unorganized charity, and they struggled throughout the war to redirect clothing, blankets, camp goods, food, and even pen and ink through their own intelligent and efficient hands. “Neither the blind masses, the swinish multitudes, that rule us under our accursed system of universal suffrage, nor the case of typhoid can be expected to exercise self-control,” growled George Templeton Strong, the USSC’s treasurer; if good was to be done for the soldier, better that it be done by the elite, who really knew how to organize their efforts. Thus, Strong and the USSC’s upper-class New York and Boston officers struggled to turn the USSC into the model of what a properly administered nation ought to look like.
⁸⁹

Beside the USSC, and often in conflict with it, the evangelicals organized the United States Christian Commission (USCC), which sent 5,000 volunteers into
the Union armies to distribute tracts, hold religious meetings and in general do for the Northern soldier’s soul what the USSC aimed to do for the Northern soldier’s body. Evangelical chaplains, with or without the cooperation of their fellow officers, sponsored revival meetings in both armies. As early as 1862, large-scale “conversion seasons” swept through both Union and Confederate troops: the Army of the Cumberland and the Army of Northern Virginia both experienced large-scale revivals of religion during the winter and spring of 1864. Not content with converting soldiers, Northern evangelicals organized the National Reform Association in 1863 to press for the passage of a “Bible Amendment” that would explicitly unite evangelical Protestantism and republicanism by rewriting the preamble to the Constitution to read: “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government. …”
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None of America’s religious leaders was prepared for the depth or the severity of the wounds that Civil War combat and the disruption of civil society inflicted on these attempts to give meaning to the war. Northern evangelicals who had so confidently expected the war to light up the path to the millennium were cruelly disappointed by profiteering and corruption. The uncertain notes on which the war ended looked like anything but a preparation for the return of Jesus Christ to earth. Charles Grandison Finney, who had been smiting slavery with great revivalistic blows for thirty years, warned his Oberlin College students in 1863 that although “the south
must be reformed
or
annihilated
,” still “the
north
are not
yet just
. … The
colored man
is still
denied
his
equal rights
” and “is
most intensely hated
&
persecuted
by a
majority
.” It saddened and angered Finney that after two years of war, “in no
publick proclamation either
north or
south
is
our great national sin recognized
.”
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No one, however, lost more confidence in religious interpretations of the war than the ordinary soldier. The general disappearance of moral restraint among Civil War soldiers mocked the efforts of chaplains and USCC volunteers, at all but the most exceptional moments, to force the war into Christian shape. “It is hard, very hard for one to retain his religious sentiments and feelings in this Soldier life,” admitted one New Jersey surgeon. “Every thing seems to tend in a different direction. There seems to be no thought of God of their souls, etc. among the soldiers.” Even more than ordinary camp immorality, it was the shock of Civil War combat
and the apparent randomness of death on the battlefield that wrecked peacetime faith in an all-knowing, all-loving God. An Illinois surgeon named John Hostetter remarked, “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, unchristian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.” The chaplains talked in vain to Edward King Wightman about divine purpose and meaning in the war: “A minister and a soldier are antipodes in sentiment. The one preaches ‘election’ and the other fatalism.” Even the lay preacher and future president James A. Garfield told William Dean Howells after the war that at the sight of “dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”
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Although American Protestants had been confident at the beginning of the war that they would be able to interpret the war in ways that their secular counterparts could not, the war itself proved otherwise, and American religion instead became one of the Civil War’s major cultural casualties. Never again would evangelical Christianity so dominate the public life of the nation or come so close to wedding its religious ethos to American democracy. From the 1860s onward, American Protestantism was increasingly marked by the quiet erosion of faith, and religious experience became plagued more and more by incessant questioning, by decaying faith, and an increasing appeal to feeling and imagination over against confessional reason or evangelical conversion. “Perhaps people always think so in their own day, but it seems to me there never was a time when all things have shaken loose from their foundations,” wrote one of Finney’s correspondents in 1864. “So many are sceptical, doubtful, so many good people are cutting loose from creeds & forms. … I am sometimes tempted to ask whether prayer can make any difference.” Evangelicals themselves would unwittingly aid this process by withdrawing in confusion from their public roles to concentrate on ever more personalized forms of religious conversion and exotic attempts to hook current events onto the promise of the coming millennium.
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The public discourse of American intellectuals would, by the 1890s, be taken over by the Romantic intellectuals who had risked so little in the war, and who had therefore lost so little in it. They would be immeasurably aided in this process by the postwar impact of Charles Darwin and his shocking but quintessentially Romantic theory of evolution. But the Civil War proved nearly as deadly to the credibility of American Protestant intellectuals as did any Darwinian apes. Taken
together, the Civil War baffled and horrified both secular and Protestant intellectuals, and only in later years, when suffering could be transmuted by memory into moral triumph, and racism effaced by memories of battlefield heroism, could they even begin again to mention the subject. For men of the mind, as well as for men of color and women of all descriptions, America during the Civil War was a world turned upside down.