America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, a fact not lost on a religious people. It was almost as if the president died for the nation’s sins, the final expiation. The parallels with Christ seemed obvious, not sacrilegious, though Lincoln himself rarely mentioned Jesus in his speeches or private conversations. James A. Garfield, who had served in the Union army, was now an Ohio congressman, and would become the nation’s second assassinated president, made that connection. “It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln’s death parallels that of the Son of God.”59

  Ministers were less hesitant in drawing the parallel, especially in their Sunday sermons that “Black Easter.” Referring to Lincoln’s visit to Richmond ten days earlier, a Methodist minister drew this comparison: “As Christ entered into Jerusalem, the city that above all others hated, rejected, and would soon slay Him, so did this, His servant, enter the city that above all others hated and rejected him, and would soon be the real if not intentional cause of his death.” The Rev. C. B. Crane of Hartford, Connecticut, intoned, “Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for his country.” Lincoln’s death provoked an ecumenical outpouring of grief that transcended Protestantism. The nation’s Jewish and Roman Catholic citizens emphasized Lincoln’s biblical qualities of mercy, forgiveness, and humility. “Father Abraham” belonged to all people of faith. “With malice toward none; with charity for all” became a recurring phrase in the banners, memorials, and obituaries.60

  “Young America Crushing Rebellion and Sedition.” By 1864 many northerners believed that a new nation was emerging from the war. This engraving by William Sartain (1843–1924) captures that spirit, as a baby, “Young America,” vanquishes the serpents “Rebellion” and “Sedition.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Some Radical Republicans came to view the president’s death as fortuitous. “His death,” a prominent Radical declared, “is a godsend to our cause.” Not only politicians but also evangelical ministers discerned God’s message in Lincoln’s death. A New York Baptist minister echoed the politicians: the president might have been removed because he was “too lenient,” and in his place was now “an avenger” to “execute wrath.”61

  These were the dogmas Lincoln had preached against in his Second Inaugural Address. The greatest tragedy of a tragic war was that it ended with Abraham Lincoln’s death. We will never know if the troubled decade that followed would have turned out differently if Lincoln had lived. America, though, would not wait to cast backward glances. The country would soon place its mourning clothes in storage and barrel forward. Almost ninety years after the noble experiment began, it was now secure. A new and stronger nation emerged from the fire of war. Walt Whitman placed the events of April 1865 in their proper perspective. “He [Lincoln] was assassinated—but the Union is not assassinated.… [T]he Nation is immortal.” One nation, indivisible.62

  CHAPTER 16

  THE AGE OF REASON

  HARRIET BEECHER STOWE became an Episcopalian. No need to be born again in Christ. One biological birth was enough. Surround yourself with liturgy, doctrine, and ritual and experience God through safe filters. Tired of wrestling with God and losing, she opted for a more sedate spiritual life. She moved to Florida. Stowe came to teach former slaves to read and write and stayed to promote Florida real estate. She coauthored a book with her sister Catharine, The American Woman’s Home (1869), which served as the middle-class bible for home design through World War I. Stowe’s kitchen resembled a medical operating theater with its bright lighting, extensive ventilation, and immaculate surfaces. Metal countertops and cement or tiled floors enabled housewives or servants to maintain a sanitary domain. If the Civil War had taught Stowe anything, it was that dirt was bad. Cleanliness was godliness. As much interested in domestic technology as in sanitation, Stowe promoted central heating for both its healthfulness and how it opened floor plans to encourage family interaction. While southern women decorated graves, northern women renovated their homes.1

  Stowe began the book during the last year of the war. She sensed correctly that the public was war-weary and would rather read about efficient homes and imaginative decorating ideas than the monotony of death. Her first essay on the subject, “Ravages of a Carpet,” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1864. The piece urged families to undertake a home makeover to create a modern dwelling. The nation was new, the home must follow suit. Gone were the clutter, the darkness, and the old furniture and carpets. In came the sun, lighter floor coverings, and more functional furniture. The home literally blossomed, opening up to air, light, and sleek furnishings.2

  Gone also was Stowe’s passion for the plight of the slave. She applauded William Lloyd Garrison’s decision to dissolve the Anti-Slavery Society. Now that the slave was free, God would take care of the rest. God would finish the “great work [of Liberty] he has begun among us,” she wrote to Garrison, for the task was clearly beyond her abilities. Attempting to educate the freedmen, Stowe concluded they were suitable only for manual labor. The bright side of the matter was that they would find considerable work in Florida, as whites found the tropical climate debilitating. Whites were fortunate to have “a docile race who both can and will bear [the climate] for them.”3

  Main floor plan from Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 1869. (Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hirsch Library)

  Florida’s exotic environment captivated Stowe. When she arrived on the banks of the St. Johns River in north Florida in February 1867, the orange blossoms were in bloom. She immediately “stripped off the woolen garments of my winter captivity, put on a thin dress white skirt …& sat down to enjoy the view of the river & the soft summer air.” She pulled her writing desk outdoors to face “the glorious blue river.” At this desk, Stowe wrote a breezy account of her early experiences in Florida, Palmetto Leaves (1873), describing her work with the freedmen, but mostly promoting Florida tourism and offering advice on growing citrus trees.4

  Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet’s famous preacher brother, did not move to Florida. He remained in Brooklyn. After praying that the “mighty miscreants” of the Confederacy be “whirled down to perdition” in February 1865, he softened his outlook once the war ended. Perhaps the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address had entered his heart, or maybe he realized that condemning one third of American citizens to hell was inconsistent with evangelical Christianity’s message of God’s everlasting love. And speaking of advertising, as the national spokesman for Waltham watches, Beecher did not wish to alienate millions of potential customers. More likely, his congregation tired of hearing about the war and preferred more current and uplifting fare. Beecher’s most notable contribution to the public realm in the decade after the Civil War was a sizzling adultery trial where he stood accused of seducing a young and married member of his congregation. Though a jury acquitted him, the trial’s testimony revealed serious lapses in the preacher’s memory and copious titillating details that the tabloids and the American public eagerly devoured.5

  Beecher had little faith in the press, except when it promoted his ministry or his watches. In the months following Appomattox, he advised fellow northerners to ignore newspaper reports of southern whites attacking former slaves. “You must not be disappointed or startled because you see in the newspapers accounts of shocking barbarities committed upon these people [freedmen].” Forbearance was a Christian virtue, and northerners should understand that southern whites required a period of adjustment to the sudden reality of freedom. “Above all,” northerners must have “patience with Southern men as they are, and patience with Southern opinion as they have been, until the great normal, industrial, and moral laws shall work such gradual changes as shall enable them to pass from the old to the new.” Like his sister, Beecher believed that southern problems were beyond mortal solution. Things would work out, whether through God or immutable “laws.”6

  Still, Beecher advocated some human intervention to facilitate
God’s work. He knew, of course, the precise policies God required. In 1866, Beecher lobbied for the restoration of all rights to former Rebels and the immediate return of the late Confederate states to the Union without preconditions. Only then, he argued, would relations between the races achieve stability. “The negro is part and parcel of Southern society,” he reasoned. “He cannot be prosperous while it is unprospered. Its evils will rebound upon him.… The restoration of the south … [will] rebound to the freedmen’s benefit.” Yet it was clear by this time that the restoration southern whites sought most was their dominance over the former slaves.7

  As he had made abolition the focus of his antebellum ministry, Beecher promoted reconciliation as the theme of his postwar sermonizing. Reconciliation was not a mutual exercise, however. White southerners did not reciprocate, and when they seemed to, it was often superficial. Northern reconciliation involved accepting the perspective of southern whites. Beecher carried this theme from the pulpit to a novel, Norwood (1868), where he portrayed the white protagonist, Tom Heywood, as a “brilliant young Southerner.” The black character in the book, Pete Sawmill, was a “great, black, clumsy-moving fellow.” Worse, Pete lacked the Yankee virtue of hard work. “He had no purpose in life, had no trade or calling. He was an idle fellow,” little more than “an overgrown child.”8

  William Dean Howells, one of the leading literary figures of the postwar era, reviewed Norwood in the Atlantic Monthly and commended Beecher for his realistic portrayal of Sawmill. “Unlike most negroes, as we find them in New-England novels, he is a genuine ‘nigger,’ not a saint in charcoal, nor a paragon of virtue. A faithful, warmly attached servant, he has his little human failings, and has a great weakness for whiskey. It is really pleasant to meet with a darkey in a New-England novel, who isn’t a living reproach to all white men.” It was a not-so-veiled swipe at Beecher’s sister and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The postwar era would not be a time for saints, white or black. The crusading spirit of the antebellum years rested with the bones of the dead young men.9

  Beecher backed off from crusades after the war, excepting his watches. He had always interspersed his sermons with secular humor, and some critics complained that he was Barnum in the pulpit. After the war, his sermons at Plymouth Church dwelt on topics such as civic duty, child rearing, and voting rights. It was nondenominational entertainment, punctuated by such aphorisms as “The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom” and “The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.” Fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman stated flatly, “It was only fair to say to Beecher that he was not a minister.” Showmanship and fortune-cookie advice overtook theology, and most northerners welcomed the transition.10

  Sentiment was out; reality was in. Charles Francis Adams Jr., a Union veteran, angrily attributed the war and its bloody train to Harriet Beecher Stowe and “that female and sentimentalist portrayal … that the only difference between the Ethiopian and the Caucasian is epidermal.” White Americans would not make the same mistake again. They would not allow a cloying, feminine Christianity, tugging at the heartstrings, to lure young men to their graves for a cause not grounded in reason. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. remarked that the war caused him to cross “the threshold of reality.” The businessman, not the philosopher, now received Holmes’s admiration. “Business,” he declared, “often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact—but it hardens the fibre and I think is more likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success.” Philosophy will only get you killed.11

  Acceding to the views of southern whites did not signal a belief among northerners in the moral equivalency of the combatants’ causes as much as a desire to put the war to rest. Victory, of course, nurtured magnanimity. Bitterness was backward looking; it inhibited citizens from acting in the present and planning for the future. It was better to live at peace with former enemies than at war with yourself.

  John T. Trowbridge, a Boston writer, set out for Gettysburg in the summer of 1865. He had published several anti-slavery novels and had vigorously supported the Union cause. His guide at the famous battlefield pointed out the field upon which Pickett made his fateful charge. The guide seemed unconcerned that so many young southern men perished on this ground and were buried in mass graves beneath their feet. Trowbridge, moved by the scene, beseeched the guide to “consider … though they were altogether in the wrong, and their cause was infernal, these, too, were brave men; and under different circumstances,… they might have been lying in honored graves … instead of being buried in heaps, like dead cattle, down here.” Trowbridge looked forward to the time “when we shall at least cease to hate them.”12

  The seeds of reconciliation lay in the war itself. Both sides fraternized during the long intermissions between battles. None of these fleeting encounters prevented either side from bashing out the other’s brains later, but there were numerous examples of restraint on the battlefield—the reluctance to shoot at pickets and the forbearance of generals to destroy the enemy’s army when pursuit or a timely artillery barrage would have done the work. Lee at Fredericksburg and Grant at Chattanooga pulled punches. Not all failures to pursue a beaten enemy could be attributed to exhaustion. Theodore Lyman, a Union soldier at Petersburg, wrote, “The great thing that troubles me is, that it is not a gain to kill off these people—now under a delusion that amounts to a national insanity. They are a valuable people, capable of heroism that is too rare to be lost.”13

  Both sides were American, after all, and despite what divided them, they had much in common. The real surprise after the war would have been an absence of reconciliation. Some have argued that reconciliation occurred at the expense of the freedmen; that whites, north and south, recognized the common racial bond and built a new nation on that ground. There is some truth in this interpretation, but the simple fact that both were Americans, that both, as Lincoln stated, prayed to the same God and read the same Bible, provided the initial impetus for a national rapprochement. After that, a desire to move on motivated northerners to forgive and forget.14

  The case of Jefferson Davis is an example of reconciliation over retribution. Lincoln hoped the Confederate president would abscond to some distant country so he would not need to deal with a man many in the North considered a traitor. A group of Union soldiers captured Davis in north Florida two months after the surrender, forcing the issue. Incarcerated for two years, Davis received his parole thanks to the efforts of Horace Greeley, the editor of the leading Republican newspaper, the New York Tribune, and the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher.

  Mark Twain, on one of his nocturnal perambulations about Manhattan that summer, spotted a hatless man with wispy gray hair standing on the sidewalk in front of the New York Hotel. It was midnight, and the gentleman seemed to be enjoying the air of a summer evening before retreating to his stuffy hotel room. On closer inspection, Twain realized that the man was Jefferson Davis. He had come to the city to have dinner and visit with Greeley and some friends. Here was a man who led a bloody civil war against his country but now “went about his business as unheralded as any country merchant visiting town.” What, Greeley and others asked, would be accomplished by Davis’s continued incarceration, or his execution? The war was over, slavery was dead, and the Union was secure. What else mattered?15

  General John Logan helped to organize the Grand Army of the Republic in 1866, an organization for Union veterans to lobby for pensions, employment, and financial aid. He understood that, in order to fulfill the group’s agenda, he would need to keep the issue of the war before the public, but in such a manner as to inspire support, not opposition. “To keep the scenes of war with all its horrors vivid before the [public] mind, without some still more important motive, would hardly meet with the approval of this intelligent age.” A sanitized war became part of the North’s collective memory.16

  Who can blame them? To dwell on a bloody war, the loss of comrade
s, the carnage of the battlefield, the stench of the hospital, and the hopelessness of the prison was to invite nightmares without end. Military doctors at the time reported soldiers who suffered from extreme “exhaustion” so severe that it was difficult to rouse them from sleep in the morning. They also noted “disordered actions of the heart,” a type of arrhythmia traumatized soldiers experienced after combat. When the soldiers returned home after the war, the symptoms persisted. The first professional paper diagnosing what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder appeared in 1876.17

  It was much healthier to engage in selective forgetting, to remember courage rather than carnage. Remembering the war in this manner eased the personal pain and facilitated reconciliation. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that personal happiness and the will to move on required selective forgetfulness: “Forgetting is essential to action of any kind. Thus, it is possible to live almost without memory … but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting.” Ambrose Bierce, a union veteran from Ohio, flailed against a romantic view of the war yet admitted his own failing in that regard. “Is it not strange,” he asked, “that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?—that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?” Not so strange, after all. This was not a question of mutually recognized white privilege. It was a matter of self-preservation.18

  The war nearly broke Walt Whitman’s heart. He had tended both Confederate and Union soldiers with equal care and love. He had wept over their deaths and rejoiced in their recoveries. He expressed the nation’s grief over its martyred president in “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.” It was time now for the nation to heal, time for “Reconciliation” (1865):