Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Ecclesiastical reports invoked battlefield successes to proclaim the divine truth of the Southern jeremiad’s message. The Presbyterian Synod of Virginia’s annual report in 1862 would identify the public fast as the cause of victory at Manassas: “At first God did not seem to smile on our defensive operations.... Then God put it into the heart of [President] Davis to call for a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.... The united supplication of the whole people went up before the God of battles and was graciously accepted through the intercession of our great High Priest.... We were wonderfully delivered out of the hands of our enemies.”15

  The toll from Bull Run seemed incredible enough at the time, and to disbelieving eyes lined up at telegraph offices and reading newspapers probably had greater effect than later battlefield reports that would yield far larger numbers. Citizens on both sides were startled to learn that for the Federals 460 were killed, 1,124 wounded, and 1,312 missing, for a total of 2,896 casualties. Confederate casualties included 387 killed, 1,582 wounded, and 13 missing for a total of 1,982. The shock lay in the fact that almost as many Americans had been killed in the entire Mexican War.

  In a collective ritual that would repeat itself throughout the war, newspapers and telegraph offices recorded the names of the dead, wounded, and missing with updates that listed ever “more names of the killed and wounded.”16 In Worcester, Massachusetts, Martha LeBaron wrote to her friend Mary:This morning seems a week ago. I went down [the] street early, before I had seen a newspaper, and in the Post-office a young clerk with wet eyes, held out to me a list—of our dead officers. A few minutes after at the Station, the ticket master said to me, with tears raining down his face, “Ah, Miss LeBaron, I thought of you as soon as I heard this, and of how grieved you would be.” Wasn’t that strange in him? for he knows that no one near to me was in danger—and he felt only how my whole heart is in the war. Then I met other friends, and the hand-pressure was very close before a word could be spoken. People choked when they tried to talk, and attempted smiles ended in starting tears.17

  If Sumter prompted Northern moderates to support war rather than secession, the bloodshed at Bull Run prompted them to hate the enemy as malicious and effective killers who, without formal recognition as a nation, nevertheless fought as a nation—and savagely at that. No moral reflection on the rules of war surfaced, even in the religious press—only a demand for blood revenge:We are now opening our eyes to the unwelcome fact that they are enemies of the country, and must be dealt with as TRAITORS. This once settled, scruples fast vanish about the mode of conducting the war. We feel bound to use every means in our power to put down a rebellion which is striking at the very life of the nation.18

  At the same time that the New York Evangelist advocated using “every means in our power,” it issued a bold and prescient proposal, certain to support a total war:When hundreds and thousands of our brave young soldiers are brought home from the bloody field; when there is a cry in the land, like the wailing in Egypt, because in every house there is one dead, the question will be asked: why not make a speedy end of this dreadful business by at once proclaiming freedom to the slaves? ... Whatever rights they [Southerners] had before as loyal citizens, they have forfeited by their treason and rebellion.19

  The South, too, saw the prospect of total war in Bull Run. On September 26, a day that Northern churches spent in fasting, the Charleston Mercury carried an ominous report titled “Negro Slaves Contraband of War”:These virtuous Abolitionists of New England, when they can steal or get into possession of the negro slaves of Maryland and Virginia, no longer talk of emancipation. They take possession of them as property.... It is not enough that we arm and go forth to battle—we must do so with the desperate conviction that we fight along the edge of the precipice. We must hurl the enemy over; or he will hurl us. We must not suffer ourselves to be beaten. There must be, in every soul, a personal passion—an individual resolution—enforced by the most vindictive determination—to send our weapons home to the heart of the enemy. We must smite unsparingly, with sweeping vengeance, and not merely conquer, but destroy! It is our homes that are invaded by the robber and the outlaw—our firesides, our wives, women and children. Sons of the South, be men! Be men!20

  Of all the news reports, the one most eagerly awaited by Northern and Southern readers alike was that of William Howard Russell, correspondent to the Times (London). The Times was perhaps the most influential paper in the world and spoke widely for British sentiments. Confederates had long hoped that their profitable cotton trade with Britain would draw England into their camp, or at least force the great nation to recognize the Confederacy as legitimate belligerents. They had good reason to be hopeful. British papers, on the whole, evidenced scant appreciation for Lincoln or the Republican Party.21

  When Russell’s column finally reached American papers, weeks after the battle, Northern readers were devastated. Russell began by invoking the jovial scene where “[e]very carriage, gig, wagon, and hack has been engaged by people going out to see the fight. The price [of carriage] is enhanced by mysterious communications respecting the horrible slaughter in the skirmishes at Bull Run.”

  Russell then made clear that Northern civilian naivete was equaled by that of their military. At the very moment that he listened to Northern reporters crowing about victory, Russell was witnessing a wholesale panicked retreat of Yankee forces: “The drivers spurred and whipped and urged the horses to the utmost of their bent. I felt an inclination to laugh which was overcome by disgust and by that vague sense of something extraordinary taking place which is experienced when a man sees a number of people acting as if driven by some unknown terror.”22

  To Northern readers, hoping to leave Bull Run behind, Russell’s delayed account threw salt into still raw wounds and raised anew worries about England’s neutrality. Henry Brooks Adams raged at the defeat in a letter written to his soldier brother Charles Francis Adams from London, where Henry served as amanuensis to his father:After studying over the accounts of the battle and reading Russell’s letter to the [London] Times, I hardly know whether to laugh or cry. Of all the ridiculous battles there ever were fought, this seems to me the most so.... But the disgrace is frightful. The expose of the condition of our army is not calculated to do us anything but the unmixed harm here.... If this happens again, farewell to our country for many a day. Bull’s Run will be a by-word of ridicule for all time.23

  Military defeats require a scapegoat, and General McDowell easily fit that bill, both at the popular level and with the president. On the day following Bull Run, Lincoln removed his general from command and appointed the impressive thirty-five-year-old General George B. McClellan as commander of the newly dubbed “Army of the Potomac.”

  Through summer and autumn, “Little Mac” worked tirelessly to increase and organize his new army, bringing in ten thousand soldiers a week until the army swelled to more than one hundred thousand men. McClellan had graduated second in his class at West Point and served with distinction both in the war with Mexico and in the Ohio Valley-western Virginia campaign. All indications in the North were that he would conquer Richmond by December, and the war would be over in time to celebrate a proper Christmas.

  McClellan, however, was a Democrat and a firm advocate of the West Point Code. He evidenced a strong reticence to any plan resembling total war, especially if it involved noncombatant suffering.24 Such a strategy, in his view, would only render reunion more difficult. In time, McClellan’s reticence would prove his downfall, but for the time being Lincoln was pleased with McClellan’s formidable organizing skills and the respect he commanded from the soldiers.

  In the wake of Bull Run, Northern clergymen faced the difficult task of balancing a just cause with a disastrous defeat. Somehow the two had to be kept simultaneously in view if the right lessons were to be learned. God favored the North, but besetting sins obviously had led Him to chastise the North before He would grant them deliverance.

  What were these sins? Evangelic
al Sabbatarians immediately noted that Bull Run took place on the Sabbath. They saw in Bull Run “a timely warning against the tendency in the army to disregard the Sabbath.”25 Profanity was also cited as a cause. One chaplain present at Bull Run attributed the defeat to “officers swearing at the men and the men cursing each other.” Drinking was also a grave problem: “Let those who send us tracts, send us a large supply in the evils of profanity and intemperance, and they will do a good work.”26

  Other more sophisticated seers disregarded Sabbatarian explanations, intemperance, or profanity, and instead sought to divine deeper meanings. In Hartford, Connecticut, the Reverend Horace Bushnell, perhaps second only to Henry Ward Beecher as the voice of the white Protestant North, preached a sermon on the Sunday following Bull Run entitled Reverses Needed. The sermon was widely circulated and excerpted in the religious and secular press.27

  The reasons for the sermon’s importance are not hard to discover. From the start, it offered an apologia of suffering that would transcend trite appeals to Sabbath observance and address the very meaning of America. Bushnell’s question was not original to him and it would never disappear from American public discourse: was the nation merely a political republic or was it a Christian republic, conditioned by its Puritan legacy to be a self-consciously covenant people? For the Confederacy, as was already evident, this was not an issue. They cast themselves from the start as an indissoluble Christian republic. But for the North, an ambiguity existed that could, in Bushnell’s view, prove fatal to the Republic.

  Bushnell was angry, and not only at the slaveholding South. He was angry at the fact of defeat, and he was angry with his nation’s secular evolution, which, he believed, had prompted it. The Confederate cause was evil, but the rhetoric of being a Christian nation was correct. This was what God wanted to see for the righteous North. For Bushnell, this meant that Americans must recognize the mistakes and shortcomings of the Founding Fathers. And not only them, but also any present politicians who accepted the Fathers’ secular sentiments uncritically, including President Lincoln. The greatest transgression was neither petty sins nor poor leadership, but bad philosophy. Bushnell’s idea of freedom was not grounded in Lockean and Jeffersonian epistemology nor the naturalistic premises of the Declaration of Independence, but in the Puritans.

  Whose fault was the Civil War? Thomas Jefferson’s. “He had no conception of any difficulty in making a complete government for the political state by mere human composition.... Going never higher than man, or back of man, he supposed that man could somehow create authority over man; that a machine could be got up by the consent of the governed that would really oblige, or bind their consent.”28 Without ever mentioning Lincoln by name, Bushnell complained:Our statesmen, or politicians, not being generally religious men, take up with difficulty conceptions of government, or the foundations of government, that suppose the higher rule of God.... Our political theories never gave us a real nationality, but only a copartnership, and the armed treason is only the consummated result of our speculations. Where nothing exists but a consent, what can be needed to end it but a dissent?29

  Left only with Jeffersonian categories and Lincoln’s “political religion” of republicanism, no transcendent ground remained to oppose secession, for there was no higher cause superintended by a higher power. In this case, the success or failure of secession rested solely on coercion and superior firepower, not morality. Republicanism without God—and a non-Christian Constitution—was immoral. The perpetuation of a truly providential government, as distinct from an “abstract” government grounded in natural-law theories of contract, was its own moral imperative for a just war. To signify this, Bushnell added his voice to the clamor for a constitutional amendment invoking God, although he conceded that “this is no time to agitate or put on foot political reforms of any kind.”

  Bushnell’s sermon illustrates perfectly the different moral groundings that Northerners could bring to justify war. For some—including the early Lincoln—securing a Lockean and Jeffersonian republic, grounded in natural law and self-evident truths, was a sufficiently moral end to justify the war. For others, like Bushnell and most Protestant and Catholic clergy, mere natural law could not legitimize a nation or justify a war to suppress secession. Ultimately, the moral meaning of America had to be about something more than a simple experiment in republicanism; it had to be about the Puritan “errand into the wilderness.”30

  In Bushnell’s sermon, we see a tension between Christian republicanism and Jeffersonian republicanism. It lay at the heart of Northern Republican ideology, and had no real equivalent in the South. In fact, Republicans in the North encompassed three ideological groups, all opposed to the South and supporting the war, but grounded in very different presuppositions: Jeffersonian Republicans like Lincoln and his cabinet, Christian Republicans like Bushnell, and abolitionist Republicans like Garrison and Douglass. Ultimately, the tensions would only be resolved by a total war for abolition and the creation of a full-blown nondenominational civil religion, existing alongside of and equal in power to Christian and Jewish denominations. All three ideologies would become constituent strains that would find a way to coexist. In time, Lincoln would move increasingly to a transcendent understanding of the war and the nation, even as Bushnell and Unitarian abolitionists would move increasingly to a blood-sanctified American Republic existing as a model of freedom and equality.31 But before that could be fully incarnated, there would have to be a horrific baptism in blood.

  CHAPTER 8

  TRIUMPHALISM: “ADORNED BY THE NAME OF GOD”

  For the Boston Brahmin author/editor Charles Eliot Norton, Bull Run ensured a long campaign with death and glory enough for all. The nation, in Norton’s view, should not blanch at the prospect of a long war, even “if a million men should die on the battlefield.”1

  In contrast to the Unionists, Confederates had no bifurcated and conflicted take on the righteousness of their nation. At least publicly, skeptics were silenced, and Protestants and Catholics alike knelt at the feet of a suffering Savior and a Christian nation. Since God—not Christ—was invoked in the Constitution and national motto, Confederate Jews could also embrace their Confederate “New Israel.”

  As part of a self-confessed and constitutionally explicit covenanted nation, Confederates could expect special mercies. Manassas would be their indispensable evidence. In a letter to his wife, written two days after the victory at Bull Run, Stonewall Jackson described a wound to his finger that could have been to his heart. But it was not, prompting him to conclude: “My preservation was entirely due, as was the glorious victory, to our God, to whom be all the honor, praise and glory.... Whilst great credit is due to other parts of our gallant army, God made my brigade more instrumental than any other in repulsing the main attack.”2

  West Point graduates did not ordinarily speak this way, but Jackson was an exception. A Presbyterian elder and frequent Sunday school teacher, he brought a prophetic rage to the battlefield that was fearless in the face of death and sought not only to conquer his—and God’s—enemies, but to annihilate them. As God’s first warrior hero, Jackson’s embrace of wholesale violence and Christian faith embodied the civil religions of both nations’ leaders and commanders.

  In a thanksgiving sermon celebrating the victory at Bull Run, William C. Butler, Richmond’s Episcopal rector, declared that the Confederacy had received a divine commission—catting—when the people ratified the Confederate constitution with public prayers and national benedictions. But that commission did not come without its religious requirements. The constitution was a piece of paper, a mute document; only time would tell if it meant anything. Happily, God ratified the Confederacy by bestowing the remarkable victory at Manassas. That astounding victory proved that the South fought for principles that were congruent with God’s “Divine government”:God has given us of the South to-day a fresh and golden opportunity—and so a most solemn command—to realize that form of government in which the just, con
stitutional rights of each and all are guaranteed to each and all.... He has placed us in the front rank of the most marked epochs of the world’s history. He has placed in our hands a commission which we can faithfully execute only by holy, individual self-consecration to all of God’s plans.3

  On behalf of a chosen people, Confederate theologians and moralists had no need to justify the war—or its conduct—according to the secular “law of nations.” Ancient Israel provided a better model for righteous war. Nor were Confederate moralists willing to invoke Jefferson’s “spurious” claim that “all men are created equal.” They were Bushnellians all, grounding their identity and war around sacred texts and transcendent commissions.

  Confederate preachers and moralists continued to celebrate the inclusion of God in their constitution.4 In his thanksgiving sermon preached at Flat Rock, South Carolina, Edward Reed reiterated that the Federal Constitution was flawed:Whether through inadvertence, or, as is unfortunately more probable, from infidel practices imbibed in France by some members of the Convention ... it contained no recognition of God. Our present Constitution opens with a confession of the existence and providence of the Almighty.5

  This, Reed exulted, continued in the aftermath of Bull Run: “To see the supreme legislature of a people, in the first moment of decisive victory, turning its hall of legislation into a temple, returning solemn thanks to almighty God, and then adjourning for the day is a spectacle which fills the heart of the Christian patriot with the liveliest joy.”6