Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  It is clear that the Confederates, no less than Lincoln’s Republicans, were fighting for the same thing: the idea of freedom. But their idea of freedom was grounded in the self-evident truth that all men were not created equal and that therefore white men had a natural and God-given right to own and expand property in the form of slaves of color. Unlike the Northerners, moreover, they recognized their hierarchical conception of freedom in their constitution, whose protections and safeguards they valued over the cavalier abstractions of their own Thomas Jefferson.21 The Declaration of Independence was not their apple, nor the U.S. Constitution their frame. Their frame would be an entirely new republican but stratified society whose fruit depended on the “peculiar institution.”

  Religious and moral commentary in the secular press, though evident, was subordinated to war, honor, and “manliness.” One editor, writing from the aristocratic and honor-bound culture of the planter class, opined, “The South fights ... for honor, character, standing, and reputation. She must not only wipe off the stigma of effeminacy with which Abolition has branded her, but she must prove that she possesses that high-toned chivalry, that enduring and indomitable courage that is peculiar to a privileged caste.”22

  Richmond’s total newspaper circulation in 1860 was eighty-four thousand, but the reach and influence of Richmond papers expanded greatly during the war.23 Forty newspapers throughout the South suspended publication in the first year, and only twenty-two remained by 1865.24 Five of them would be in Richmond. The Richmond Dispatch’s prewar circulation of eight thousand grew to thirty thousand before the war’s end (equal to that of its rivals combined).25 The extra became a staple of journalism in the Confederacy no less than in the North. Often these extras were extracts from newspapers in enemy territory.26

  Like the Dispatch, the Richmond Enquirer had supported President Buchanan’s fast day in 1861. Significantly, it had also printed Governor John Letcher’s letter declining calls from clergymen to proclaim an additional day of prayer in Virginia. Reflecting prewar Southern sentiments against “political preaching,” it reminded its readers that the custom in Virginia was to avoid any interference in religious duties, and it repeated Letcher’s contention that civil magistrates should have nothing to say about religious matters—that rites of thanksgiving or humiliation were the sole province of ecclesiastical organizations, and not states.27 This was precisely what Letcher’s predecessor, Governor Henry A. Wise, had said in 1856 when he refused to proclaim a day of thanksgiving with this caustic observation: “This theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching ‘Christian politics’ instead of humbly letting the carnal kingdom alone and preaching singly Christ crucified.”28 In the blink of an eye all this would change, as war challenged ministers to privilege patriotism over spirituality. But not one word on behalf of peace.

  CHAPTER 4

  “THE DAY OF THE POPULACE”

  Leading intellectuals in the North and the South were obsessed by the war and wrote widely to one another and to the press on the subject. In the North, intellectuals and writers participated freely in the patriotic frenzy that raged after the surrender of Sumter. Instead of sober moral reflection, they, like everyone else, stood dazed at the sheer power of patriotism to transform their world overnight. Few literary classics resulted, but letters and speeches abounded.1

  There was a time when Ralph Waldo Emerson was willing to let the Union dissolve. Then came April 12 with the force of a revelation and an exaltation. In a lecture delivered shortly after Sumter, Emerson told his audience that his life had forever changed. Before the war, “we were very fine with our learning and culture, with our science that was of no country, and our religion of peace.” Then came Sumter: “And now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church. It is the day of the populace; they are wiser than their teachers.... I will never again speak lightly of a crowd.”2

  Perhaps no writer was more deeply affected by the war than the poet Walt Whitman. Like many other New Yorkers, Whitman first learned of the bombardment from the Tribune extra while walking home to Brooklyn. Whitman saw in Sumter a call to American destiny. Already he came closer to sharing Lincoln’s deeply moral and millennial view of America than any other intellectual. “I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands,” the poet had proclaimed in “Song of Myself” (1855). In the war he would discover his salvation.

  Like Lincoln, Whitman regarded the slavery question as secondary. War would be waged for the Union, not only for its own sake but also for the sake of the world. “What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,” he wrote in “To a Foiled European Revolutionary,” but for that to endure, the American Republic had to be preserved—and expanded. For Whitman as for Lincoln, the mission—and the stakes—transcended America to embrace the future of humanity: “Earth’s resume entire floats on thy keel O ship, is steadied by thy spars.” For the rest of the war he would serve in hospitals and devote himself to the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers.3

  Intellectuals were proud of their self-control and superiority. Yet they were, in fact, driven mad by Sumter, just the same as ordinary men and women. When word of Sumter reached her, Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary: “I’ve often longed to see a war, and now I have my wish. I long to be a man, but as I can’t fight, I will content myself with working for those who can.”4 Like Whitman, Louisa May Alcott served in a Union hospital until ill health forced her out.

  For elite male intellectuals, the call to war was met with unmitigated “war fever.” In a more aristocratic vein than Lincoln, they wondered if they could stand up to the manly challenges of war. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. welcomed the call to arms as a tonic to brace the character of his elite colleagues. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dropped out of Harvard and eagerly enlisted in the Massachusetts volunteers. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reaction was identical: “The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it is delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country—a consciousness which seemed to make me young again.”5

  A younger Charles Russell Lowell enlisted immediately. Fellow Brahmin Henry Lee Higgins also enlisted, observing later: “I always did long for some such war, and it came in the nick of time for me.”6 For Henry Brooks Adams—great-grandson and grandson of presidents, and stationed with his father in England—the impossibility of active service caused extreme frustrations. Even if he were home, a weak physical condition would not have allowed him to serve. In a letter to his brother Charles, he confided: “I feel ashamed and humiliated at leading this miserable life here, and . . . I haven’t even the hope of being of more use here than I should be in the army.”7

  Few intellectuals would go as far as the Unitarian abolitionist and soon-to-be commander of African American forces, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in identifying the war with the moral cause of immediate emancipation. In his essay, “The Ordeal by Battle,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1861, Higginson challenged his informed readers to see war as a crusade for abolition, not merely for Union: Either slavery is essential to a community, or it must be fatal to it,—there is no middle ground; and the Secessionists have taken one horn of the dilemma with so delightful a frankness as to leave us no possible escape from taking the other.... The watchword “Irrepressible Conflict” only gave the key, but War has flung the door wide open, and four million slaves stand ready to file through.... What the peace which the South has broken was not doing, the war which she has instituted must secure.8

  Northern clergy no less than Northern intellectuals fell victim to the sheer power of patriotism following Sumter. In a sermon preached in Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church during the siege of Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beeche
r declared that the only proper response was resistance and patriotism: “Seven States, however, in a manner revolutionary not only of government, but in violation of the rights and customs of their own people, have disowned their country and made war upon it! There has been a spirit of patriotism in the North; but never, within my memory, in the South. I never heard a man from the South speak of himself as an American. Men from the South always speak of themselves as Southerners.”9

  At Roxbury’s Universalist Church on April 21, J. G. Bartholomew offered heroic words: “Never before since the days of the Revolutionary memory and fame has there been a call to arms that has so thrilled the great heart of our people, swallowed up all party lines, and set the pulse of patriotic feeling beating in one quick response like this.... We stand to-day a band of brothers in a sense we never stood before.”10

  Universalists might have been liberal, but they certainly were not pacifistic. In another Universalist church in Watertown, Massachusetts, the Reverend A. Countryman raised a cry for war: “Already the war is baptized in blood, and from its crimson drops the historic pen has written the inaugural, pronounced on the memorable nineteenth, for the reconstruction of the American Temple, enlarged and improved, to freedom, to virtue, and to God!”11 The orthodox Presbyterian William H. Goodrich preached the same: “We find our hearts thrilled with strange emotion; at once beating with new impulses of patriotism, and glowing with indignation at those, once our brethren, who are now traitors and deadly foes.”12

  The most important moral authorities for fixing each section’s redemptive mission and sacred claims were the ministers with local connections in every community.13 Both the North and the South would enlist them for the task of the sacred legitimation necessary to mount a mutually “defensive” war. In the North before Sumter, sentiments had ranged from Unionist, to antislavery, to abolitionist. But once Sumter fell, strong Unionist sentiment prevailed in most pulpits and with it the necessity to go to war.

  The Sixty-Ninth New York State Militia, 1861. Religion supplied indispensable legitimacy to the war effort on both sides of the conflict. Here the “Fighting Irish” celebrate Mass in the field. Roman Catholics and Jews no less than Protestants proclaimed the holiness of their cause.

  In terms of national identity, the North had long adopted the rhetoric of the “New Israel” as its own. By 1861 it was deeply ingrained and as instinctual to elite opinion shapers as to ordinary men and women. The rituals of fast and thanksgiving days, begun in seventeenth-century New England, continued to serve as major occasions to preach righteousness and celebrate chosen peoplehood. They articulated what the intellectual historian Perry Miller dubbed an “American jeremiad” that spelled out America’s sacred identity as a “redeemer nation” engaged in a special “covenant” with God to save the world.14 The Puritan founders and their eighteenth-century Presbyterian cousins in the Middle Colonies had invented the jeremiad in a theocratic context that fused church and state on the model of ancient Israel. Their democratic stepchildren retrieved the rhetoric of most-favored-nation, but in place of theocracy attired it in democratic garb celebrating religious liberty and republican ideology.15 However they saw the role of slavery in perverting the South, most Northern moral arbiters in 1861 agreed that the ultimate goal of the war was the preservation of the Union.16 Because of the United States’ divine commission to be a redeemer nation, preserving the Union was a sufficient cause.

  While few Christian moralists in the North favored immediate and universal emancipation for slaves everywhere, many did, like Lincoln, see the system as morally reprehensible and contrary to the Christian gospels. In this vein of thinking, the moral cause—preserving the Union—could bring with it the happy by-product of emancipation, or at least limited emancipation. But emancipation could not justify the war. In 1861 slavery had not yet even risen to “a” cause for most white Americans. “The” cause was exclusively the Union. Anything else compromised the Constitution and threatened the national covenant. Before casualties soared, one just cause was enough. And to Union moralists, the guilt was obvious. “Defensive” wars are just and, in the case of the attack on Sumter, the South was undeniably the “original aggressor.” 17 As for the North, a just patriotism governed the war mania and gave it saving energy.

  The Northern religious press stood alongside sermons as a moral booster for just war. Once a vehicle for religious commentary with extremely limited secular content, the religious weekly was co-opted for political ends virtually overnight. The effects were prodigious and essential to Lincoln’s survival and ultimate success.

  Already by the mid-nineteenth century, the religious press had become a weekly news medium capable of competing with, and even surpassing in circulation, the secular press. Published in New York, the Congregational Independent boasted a circulation of 60,000 as of January 1, 1861. For eight Northern Methodist religious weeklies alone, aggregate circulation averaged 130,000.18 Where contemporary twenty-first-century religious publications tend to limit their material exclusively to matters religious and spiritual, the nineteenth-century religious press became a polymath production divided among “Religious News,” “General News” (politics and war), and commercial advertisements for everything from garden tools to topical application of cocaine for baldness.

  Nevertheless, before 1861, religious news dominated the press. Following Sumter, talk of war was irresistible. Beginning virtually to the day of April 12, the ratio of religious to general news shifted decisively to general or secular news and would retain that imbalance throughout the war.19 Unlike the secular press, moreover, the religious press was almost exclusively Republican and pro-Lincoln—a position that would sustain Lincoln throughout the war.

  In the upper Midwest, a Presbyterian newspaper serving the Western Reserve called the Christian Herald carried an account of the shelling of Sumter with the following commentary:War has begun. The North is thoroughly aroused. Millions are being enrolled and drilled for the home defense. We believe that these extensive and thorough preparations for resistance to treason and aggression are the best possible peace measures.

  Commentators were prepared to accept the idea of the Union as a just cause. But they understood that cause in the context of a war of limited extent: “We do not yet believe the North can be provoked to invade the South.”20

  In the wake of Sumter, war coverage grew even greater. After canvassing the New York City churches on April 18, the Independent reported that “in nearly all the churches in this city—and probably in a majority of churches throughout the country—the sermons of last Sunday were mainly in reference to the War.” And what kind of sermons were they? “Many congregations made the day an occasion for patriotic contributions for the outfit of volunteers, or for the support of their families.” “The gallant Major Anderson and his wife attended service at Trinity. At Dr. McLane’s Presbyterian church, Williamsburg, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ was sung. Dr. T D. Wells preached from the words: ‘He that hath no sword, let him buy one.’”21

  Like all nineteenth-century presses, secular and religious, the Christian Herald included skimmings from other presses on its mailing list. The Methodist of New York was quoted as saying: “We can sacrifice neither God nor Country even at the demand of a brother.”22 From the Independent, the Herald’s editors reprinted a justification for war centered on the preservation of the Union: “It is not like our last [Mexican War] a war of conquest and acquisition. It is a war to defend the life of our nationality, the sacredness of our Constitution, the permanence of our Union, and the being of our Government.”23

  In Philadelphia the radically antislavery “New School” Presbyterian minister and editor Albert Barnes wrote in his American Presbyterian on April 18: “War Begun ... Now, treason, hide your diminished head, and the God of our fathers be with the right!”24 Earlier, Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary, Barnes’s theological adversary, had issued a widely circulated pamphlet entitled The State of the Country in which he refused
to condemn slavery as, in all instances, a sin. The pamphlet was published in January 1861 and sold in the thousands. Hodge went on in the pamphlet to disapprove of slavery, but urged that, if secession became necessary, it be accomplished peacefully.25 After Sumter, that sentiment largely disappeared. In Monmouth, Illinois, the editor criticized Hodge for his pamphlet and summoned the readers to war.26 In time, Hodge would change his mind as well.

  No such ambivalence over slavery characterized the black religious press. Their ambivalence was over a “Union” that would not even allow Northern freedmen to fight. Perhaps the most influential African American religious weekly was the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, begun in Philadelphia in 1852 and disseminated widely throughout the African American community.27 On April 27, the paper carried an editorial on “The Star-Spangled Banner, and the Duty of Colored Americans to the Flag.” In it the writer complained of the refusal to enlist black volunteers, but then went on to declare that “if the nation, in its bloody conflict with armed treason, should be so pressed as to have its heart harmonized towards you, and then call upon you for martial aid, you may fly swifter than eagles, stronger than lions, to sustain the national flag.”28

  While Northern moralists uncoupled the campaign for emancipation from the justification for war, they did not hesitate routinely to condemn slavery as a sin. Only abolitionists sought to anchor the moral objectives of the Lincoln administration’s war policies and goals in emancipation. Profanity, intemperance, and Sabbath-breaking were also legitimate moral issues and sins, but they could not justify war.