Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Confederate intellectuals echoed the clergy. John Esten Cooke was one of the South’s greatest novelists. He was a soldier as well. At Manassas, Sergeant Cooke served in the infantry and later became a first lieutenant with J. E. B. Stuart’s staff, living to witness Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Writing for the Southern Illustrated News, Cooke reflected on Manassas and the changes it wrought:What dreamer ever fancied its future—ever thought it possible that this summer land, all flowers and sunshine and peace, would become as Golgotha, “the place of skulls”—a Jehoshaphat full of dead men’s bones? ... The old era of tranquility was to pass away, and a hideous spirit of destruction to rush in. The war dogs, held in leash with difficulty at Washington, were to circle and trample and hunt for their prey—until they found the Southern wolf at Manassas and were torn by him!7

  Writing from Charleston to his New York writer friend James Lawson, William Gilmore Simms confided, “I am literally doing nothing in letters, I am so much excited in the present condition of things that the labour of the desk is irksome.” Simms had good reason to be distracted; things looked promising for the Confederacy. Although he had sought peace rather than war, as he reminded Lawson, once war came he knew the Confederacy would prevail:By this time your thinking men see the sort of game that is before them. Let them grow wise before it be too late. Every battle, thus far, has resulted in Southern Victory.—Sumter, Bethel, Bull Run, Manassas, Harper’s Ferry and Missouri,—all tell the same tale. Your Generals are cashiered. Your army demoralized. Your papers are at a loss where to cast the blame. They will be at no loss before long. They will see that their cause is bad.8

  On August 10 2,330 Union and Confederate troops lay dead or wounded in the bloody battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri. In response, President Lincoln proclaimed a national fast day for the last Thursday in September. In it, Lincoln employed providential language to urge all Americans to:pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved; that our arms may be blessed and made effectual for the reestablishment of law, order, and peace throughout the wide extent of our country; and that the inestimable boon of civil and religious liberty, earned under His guidance and blessing by the labors and sufferings of our fathers, may be restored in all its original excellence.9

  By September, much of the shame of Bull Run had passed, and Northern triumphalism was securely back in place. The Banner of the Covenant printed “A National Fast Day Hymn.” The poem closed with a note of global imperialism:Unsheathe the gleaming sword, and lead

  Our loyal armies on,

  And smite the rebel bands, until

  Of traitors there are none.

  And then to greater conquests led

  By thine exalted Son.

  May we march o’er earth’s bloodless fields,

  Till all the world is won.10

  Secular papers were as global in claiming international influence for America, but not always as pious. On September 23, the New York Tribune announced the fast day, though without the reverential tones of the religious press: “The National Fast Day ... The devoutly inclined will find the places of public worship open to-day almost without exception.” For the less devout: “In the afternoon, several boat and horse-races are announced to come off, and most of the places of amusement hold out extra attractions to the public in the evening.”

  By contrast, the Boston Telegraph proved as heavenly minded as the religious press when it proclaimed: “The National Fast Day will be observed tomorrow throughout New-England with utmost solemnity. In Boston business will be entirely suspended, even to the closing of the offices of the ferry and railroad corporations. The daily newspapers suspend publication from Thursday morning until Friday noon. Divine services will be held in all the churches.”11 New Englanders knew how to honor a fast.

  New York never did have Boston’s piety for the fast day, and other considerations prevailed there as churches proclaimed fasts. Money always mattered, and in the aftermath of Bull Run, it mattered more than ever. Happily, the Tribune reported:The stock market this morning was without any important features. It opened dull and rather heavy, excepting for Governments.... There was no disposition on the part of either bulls or bears to operate with any vigor.... These figures show an entire recovery from the panic which followed the disaster at Bull Run, and evince the confidence of capitalists in Government stocks.12

  Many Northern moralists and editors wished to put the debacle of Bull Run behind them, but fast-day preachers did not.13 The day provided an occasion to refight the battle, but this time on the moral battlefield of sins and punishments. By September 26 ministers had had ample time to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of defeat and draw appropriate lessons.

  With Confederate sanctimoniousness in mind, Northern evangelicals rehearsed the case for a constitutional amendment in the North that would invoke God. Echoing Bushnell, they argued that America should be a Christian and not a Jeffersonian republic. Ezra Adams condemned as “monstrous” the Confederates’ invocation of God in their currency and constitution, and urged that the real chosen people acknowledge Him: “We therefore intensely desire that God might be acknowledged in the Constitution of the United States. That the temple of national existence ... might be adorned by the name of God.”14

  Desperate to find something of God in the government, many ministers and religious newspapers saw, in the ritual of the fast, the equivalent of a constitutional invocation of God. When Lincoln proclaimed a fast day “to be observed by the people of the United States with religious solemnities and the offering of fervent supplications to Almighty God,” he was saying, in effect, that the United States was a Christian nation as much as if it had been written in the Constitution. Lincoln’s proclamation, they argued, “is part of our more recent national history. Its record will be found in the archives of our Republic in the form of a Congressional vote and an executive proclamation.”15 The North might not need the fast to create a new nation, but it did require it to sacralize a republic whose Constitution never mentioned God.

  Fast-day services were held in the army as well as local churches and synagogues. The Unitarian chaplain William Scandlin kept a diary throughout his time in the Union army and recorded the following entry for September 26: “Our service was to be at 11 and I was to preach extempore.” Scandlin’s evident satisfaction in preaching “extempore” reflects how unusual it was for a Unitarian to preach in such a way. Following the fast, Scandlin wrote to the Unitarian Autumnal Convention and expressed his sense of the justness of the cause and the shame of compromise:For enshrined within the civil and religious liberties of this nation, are the highest and brightest hopes of the world. Hence our duty is to preserve this Christian legacy in a Christian spirit to reveal our conscious appreciation of its value by a sacrifice commensurate with its worth. Less than this is treason to the country, humanity and God. The thought of peace and its accustomed prosperity fills us ... with a joy beyond description. But the demand for peace must come from those who have heaped injury upon insult.16

  Not all states were as comfortable as the insulated Northeast with the justness of the war. Missouri’s experience with a savage civil war waged indiscriminately on civilians dispelled all romantic and world-regenerative illusions. R. H. Weller’s fast-day sermon to Christ Church, in St. Joseph, Missouri, contained no patriotism, and is illustrative of what other ministers could have said, but seldom did.

  In the face of mounting terrorist attacks fought in the name of patriotism, Weller assigned equal guilt and culpability to the North and the South: “Is it not a repetition of the sad calamity that befell Israel of old,—a disrupted country, with rival capitals, and the hands of brethren embued in brethrens blood?” Though nominally Christian, “our practice has given the lie to our pretensions, and practically we are a nation of infidels.” Such words, he knew, would not endear him to those aching for a fight. Talk of peace was downright offensive “amidst the heat of passion, and the lynx-eyed gaze of partisanship.”
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  In contrast to Northern preachers who would declare that “law is vengeance,” Weller preached reconciliation. In place of patriotism, he proclaimed peace: “Let us strive to lay aside passion and prejudice—to hold fast to charity—to covet the good things of God’s blessing, the things which make for peace.”17 The paucity of sermons like Weller’s reveals the real object of fasts: to promote patriotism; but the effect was self-righteousness, not humility before God.

  Two other extremes provided exceptions to the main fare of the jeremiad. One was the abolitionist contingent. In preaching to the Church of the Puritans in New York, George B. Cheever, founder of the Church Anti-Slavery Society, invoked the revolutionary actions of the very John Brown whom Lincoln repudiated as the true paradigm of a just warrior:In this war, in the putting down of this rebellion, the conscientious Abolitionists are the truest, incorruptible, unchangeable patriots, because their fire of soul and body is not only the common love of country, but the fire of heaven against a rebellion that has in it more of the element of hell than any rebellion ever organized ... this eternal love of freedom for all, this irresistible sentiment of justice and hatred of all injustice, is the permanent, inexhaustible, incorruptible material on which the government and the country must rely.18

  Cheever’s just war was so just it effectively acknowledged no restraints. With Brown as his prototype, Cheever could claim that preemptive wars and assaults on civilians were righteous and just, as long as the end was abolition. In time, Cheever‘s—and not Lincoln’s—model would become policy on both sides of the conflict.

  The other exception to the standard jeremiad fare came out of the Unitarian camp. While it is true that the Civil War did not produce one theoretical advance in just-war theory, and indeed took it several steps back, one intriguing effort at originality appeared in a fast-day sermon delivered by the Unitarian minister Orville Dewey in the Church of the Messiah in New York.

  In an unusual turn, Dewey frankly examined the case for a just preemptive war on the South. Shedding the flimsy pretense of fighting a defensive war, Dewey contemplated offensive assault and occupation. If the notion of a “first shot” defensive war was a patent invention in a world where Northern cities lay virtually immune to invasion, how could the war be justified? Conventional Christian just-war theory allowed only wars of “self-defense.” Hence the desperate—and often ridiculous—efforts of moralists on both sides to appear pacifistic and defensive. But Dewey had other ideas:I doubt whether this limitation [of self-defense] can be defended.... I am struck at the outset with this potent fact,—that war seems to have been a part of the normal condition of nations.... It is computed that more than six thousand millions of the human race have perished in battle,—about seven times the present population of the earth.

  With so many wars, “[h]ow could it be so, if all war, or all but defensive war, is contrary to the will of God?” Citing “Mr. [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon, the French writer,” Dewey wondered if “there is a ‘right of war,’ founded on the ‘right of force’; that is to say, that any nation, deprived by another, or conceiving itself to be deprived, of what is lawfully its own,—a fishery or territory, a fort or arsenal,—has a perfect right to reclaim it by force.”

  In this amoral assertion, Dewey anticipated Realpolitik arguments for war based on self-interest:I believe that there is a conscience on both sides, always, at the bottom of every war; for war is not robbery or piracy, where the marauder knows that he has no right, but a solemn levying of the national force. I do not believe that nations fight but upon the ground that they have the right upon their side. The greatest mystery,—if I sought to find one,—in the system of Providence, is this difference of opinion, with all its consequences; and yet I see,

  that among imperfect beings, it is inevitable; that it was, in the nature of things, impossible to constitute a race of moral and imperfect beings, without this element of trouble.

  The American Patriot’s Dream. This early Currier & Ives lithograph praises the patriotism of Federal soldiers and explicitly links battlefront and home front in patriotic unity.

  Northern self-interest justified the North’s invasion of the South according to Dewey’s logic. His just war would not be defensive, but offensive, grounded in strategic and moral right: “To us this is a holy war. Religion—in the highest and widest view of it—commands us to do what we are doing.”19

  Good and bad, right and wrong; the terms flowed on all sides so easily and logically and self-righteously that one suspects they masked a deeper-seated animal lust for battle. The historian Michael Fellman has talked about this in the context of “blood sport.”20

  J. Glenn Gray, reflecting on his wartime experiences in World War II, speaks of war as “spectacle” and the “lust of the eye”—a “secret attraction.” To clarify his meaning, Gray invokes Robert E. Lee’s famous observation about war:If we think of beauty and ugliness without their usual moral overtones, there is often a weird but genuine beauty in the sight of massed men and weapons in combat. Reputedly, it was the sight of advancing columns of men under fire that impelled General Robert E. Lee to remark to one of his staff: “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”21

  Both of these writers are concentrating on soldiers at war “without their usual moral overtones” and the irrational transformations they experience in becoming warriors. Yet that soldier mentality of irrational obsession and demoralized “beauty” could and did infuse the whole society in this citizens’ war.

  Beneath all the rationalizations and moral affirmations, Manassas and its aftermath showed a deeper irrational strain impelled by the almost intoxicating sight of massed armies in the field and on parade. Any society at war finds itself in an unnatural and evil state. It may be a necessary evil, as most nonpacifists agree, but it is nevertheless evil. But in the crucible of war, that fact is easily lost sight of. After Manassas, “manliness,” “spectacle,” and “patriotism” were the only facts that mattered, from the highest executive to the lowliest soldier and the youngest child.

  CHAPTER 9

  “WILL NOT THE MARTYRS BE BLESSED ... ?”

  While the Northern secular press raged against incompetent generals and panicked soldiers, other moral critics took different meanings from the ongoing defeats. Some of the strongest responses to Federal defeats came from abolitionists who saw in reverses divine confirmation of the moral inadequacy of preserving the Union as a sufficient justification for war.

  Nonclerical abolitionists echoed clerical abolitionists like George B. Cheever. In Worcester, Massachusetts, Martha LeBaron Goddard wrote to her friend Mary that battlefield casualties could be accepted if the cause of abolition was embraced:Yet ... from men and women whom I have seen, has come the same thought over and over again—“It is terrible; but defeat and suffering will force us to do right: and the administration will be beaten into doing justice.” And so forever behind the clouds, is the heaven bright—and if we learn by the dead faces of our white brothers, to put joy and life and power into those of our black ones—will not the martyrs be blessed indeed?1

  The language of “martyrs” had been used by the abolitionists to label fallen comrades as far back as the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered in 1837, and John Brown. They were willing to transform death into martyrdom if it was grounded ethically in abolition. In time, as casualties mounted to unprecedented levels, all battlefield fatalities on both sides of the conflict were termed martyrs to their respective causes. What began as a political war was being transformed, in effect, into a moral crusade with religious foundations for which martyrs would willingly sacrifice themselves on their nations’ altars. Inevitably, such language absolutized the war on both sides and reinforced the demand for self-righteous blood revenge. In the North and the South, the clergy were more than willing to comply.

  In 1861 most Northerners were not prepared to see the war in abolitionist terms. Nor were they certain that the North was morally superior
in its treatment of blacks. In an editorial on the “Object of the War,” one clerical writer exposed racist hypocrisies in the North, observing that in 1850, “colored membership of the different churches, south, was one out of every twelve of the colored population. With us, it was one out of fifty-six.” These statistics, the writer concluded, were “not pro-slavery arguments,” but they did put into question the sincerity of Northerners claiming to have the souls of slaves uppermost in their thoughts. Concerned that Lincoln did too much to accommodate slaveholders, the Banner of the Covenant criticized his “excessive sensibility in regard to slavery, when it is considered that it has been the chief cause of the war.”2 Others assured their readers that “God will never give victory to our arms” until slavery was ended.

  Many Northern soldiers were also disillusioned, but not over the slavery issue. On November 9, as reports of the disaster at Ball’s Bluff circulated, Private Franklin Bullard wrote an embittered letter to his uncle, complaining of incompetent commanders. But of the cause itself, he still remained hopeful:I don’t want to come home before these Southern Rebels are whiped out of their hides although I am pretty well satisfied with the luck I had at Balls Bluff in having the satisfaction of knowing that I killed one rebel and did not receive even a scar the bullets came thick and fast all round the house Colonel Devins ... I heard him say never mind the bullets give it to them boys he is a lucky boy Captain Philbrick is a great and honest man and he is not afraid to die in this holy cause he is a man we will follow even unto death in this cause. To die in a good cause is an honor to die a traitor is a disgrace give me liberty or death is what patrick henry said and I say it and I will have liberty.3