As Rosecrans’s equally savaged army fell into Murfreesboro to recover, Lincoln confronted serious problems of his own, both within his cabinet and within his eastern army. A cabinet split between Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase threatened to undermine Lincoln’s authority and respect. Radical Republican senators, working with Chase, sought to remove Seward from office and push Lincoln into total emancipation alongside total war. After listening to the senators and to his cabinet, Lincoln determined to retain both cabinet members and refuse each of their resignations. Nor was he yet ready for total emancipation.
The military leadership crisis continued. In the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln’s generals were alternatingly hesitant and arrogant at the most inopportune times, thus squandering their numerical and material superiority. Burnside was clearly incompetent, but his most likely successor, Fighting Joe Hooker, evidenced an excess of ambition and a shortage of discretion. Nevertheless, Lincoln felt he had no choice, and, on January 25, 1863, he replaced Burnside with Hooker. Knowing the disaffection that Hooker’s fellow officers felt for him, Lincoln followed up his promotion with a blistering letter of “fatherly” advice to the arrogant general:You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm. But I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country.... I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying, that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.... Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.12
The soldiers were not happy with the turnover in generals. For John Emerson Anderson, recently released from a Confederate prison, the verdict remained uncertain: “You may think my patriotism is shaken but I tell you no, I think if we cannot find any leader to take command of us that will lead us on to victory, there [is] little use in continuing the war. However we cannot tell what Hooker will do.”13 Other soldiers extended their criticisms to the entire officer corps. In a letter to his wife, William Willoughby of New Haven complained:I have just been out for Regimental Inspection by our beautiful Colonel who was beautifully drunk and who had a beautiful fight last night with one Captain Quinn of Company “G” over three or 4W.—s [whores] who they got to quarter in their Barracks through the night.... In the fight “pistols” was cocked and swords drawn. Other officers had to interfere and separate before order could be restored. A good portion of the company and Regimental Officers are a poor drunken sett of fellows wholly unfit for the position they hold. And it is not very encouraging to go into battle with such men to lead us.14
Lincoln’s problems with the press would not go away either. Criticism of his generals and plans abounded, but often on the basis of rumor and unsubstantiated reports. The press of daily issues frequently led to incomplete and even misleading accounts of key battles. In an effort to harness irresponsible and sensationalist reporting, Hooker ordered all dispatches to be signed by their writers. But still the scurrilous reporting continued.
Because the religious press appeared weekly and was written by ministers rather than journalists, it promoted itself as superior in terms of sober reflection and accuracy. On January 8 the New York Evangelist carried an account of Murfreesboro under the “Course of Events” column. In the following week’s issue, three editors pointed out the advantages of a weekly print: “We think weekly papers have an advantage over the Daily. Conflicting rumors have time to be compared, and the truth to be sifted out from them all. Many of our readers have told us that they get a better idea of the General Progress of the War from the ‘Course of Events’ ... than from all the daily papers put together.”15 But whatever truth was sifted out by virtue of delay, the avoidance of moral commentary was as characteristic of the religious press as of the secular.
Late January and early February 1863 saw one of the worst winters on record, and left both Union and Confederate armies resting and nursing their wounds. In the East Hooker was preparing his Army of the Potomac for a major spring campaign, while in the West Grant was still indecisive around Vicksburg. Moral commentary was absent, but not the commerce of war. For some time, the secular and religious press had been filled with advertisements for caskets. By 1863 another item increasingly appeared in the press: mourning clothes. Philadelphia’s American Presbyterian advertised that “families about putting on Mourning will find it to their advantage to examine our stock before purchasing elsewhere.”16
On the home front, Confederate sermons continued to impress on listeners the consolation of God’s sovereignty and the demands of duty. In a thanksgiving sermon preached to the First Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, the pastor, W. Rees, spoke on the theme of divine Providence, enjoining all his hearers to depend on God rather than armies or foreign deliverers.17
In the North, sermons on Washington’s Birthday began, for the first time, to liken Lincoln to the Founding General-Father of the nation. In a Washington’s Birthday sermon on “Loyalty,” Horace C. Hovey conceded that at the moment Lincoln was no George Washington. But emancipation represented a noble moment:We cannot but wish that in all points there was a closer resemblance between him and the illustrious Washington. Yet coming generations may have as much occasion to bless Abraham Lincoln, as we have to bless George Washington; and the muse of History may record with equal pride his name who broke the yoke of Slavery, and whose strong arm struck off the chains of British tyranny.18
On a more ominous note, Northern citizens were beginning to learn about life in Confederate prisons. In another Washington’s Birthday sermon, the Reverend Samuel Spear reported on a returning prisoner of war who had been imprisoned in Richmond. The prison, he noted, was
about one hundred feet in length and thirty-five feet in width, and containing in a single room some two hundred and thirty men ... furnished with no beds or blankets, and [who] live on a pint of soup salted with saltpeter and a small piece of bread, supplied twice a day. The prison is literally alive with vermin.... Such facts stir my blood. They arouse my indignation against this wicked rebellion, and against the men who are its leaders.19
As bad as that sounded, it was nothing compared to what was coming in both Northern and Southern prisons.
While the battlefields returned a mixed verdict for the Confederacy, internal divisions caused increasing concern and represented a turning point in Confederate morale that only a military victory could offset. Davis, no less than Lincoln, desperately needed battlefield triumphs. The notion that a single party could transcend internal divisions and contentions was, by 1863, a bad joke in Southern circles. The conflicts were especially sharp in Richmond where the national government interacted with local government and Richmond’s citizenry. Everywhere there were divisions: rich and poor, pro-and anti-Davis factions, local versus Confederate governments, religious versus secular press. All began to fray under the pressure of relentless war and increasing shortages for the military and the home front.20
Class conflict grew especially intense as currency inflated at a staggering rate, driven by speculators who profited at the painful expense of ordinary men and women whose savings dwindled in value and soon disappeared. The historian William J. Kimball observes that “by the end of 1862 there were obviously two distinct classes of people in wartime Richmond ... the haves and the have nots.”21 These class tensions exacerbated tensions raised by military defeats and would only grow worse.
Dissent and contention did not signal an erosion of Confederate nationalism or capitulation to Unionist sentiment as some historians have claimed.22 But they did eliminate the myth that one party could preclude deep divisions or that the Con
federacy could transcend politics and stand as a model of unity. Just as the Davis administration could no longer speak for the people at large, or even the state and local governments, so neither magistrates nor ministers could any longer claim to speak for the poor in all their interests.23 As scarcity fell unevenly on the population, many laborers sank into a depression that questioned the Confederacy.
Economic tensions further strained Richmond society and prompted ethnic discrimination. Wages did not keep up with inflation, even while the salaries of city officials increased by a total of more than 200 percent. Despite their self-righteous criticisms of Grant’s anti-Semitism, the South was no better. Judah Benjamin was Davis’s most loyal cabinet member and a model of religious tolerance for Southern Christian apologists. But his appointment did not prevent Jew-baiting among the general populace.
With spring, an exasperated and wildly anti-Semitic war clerk, J. B. Jones, exclaimed: “Oh the extortioners! General Winder has issued an order fixing the maximum price of certain articles of marketing, which has only the effect of keeping a great many things out of market. The farmers have to pay the merchants and Jews their extortionate prices.... It does more harm than good.” Elsewhere Jones observed, “The president is thin and haggard; and it has been whispered on the street that he will immediately be baptized and confirmed. I hope so, because it may place a great gulf between him and the [Jewish] descendants of those who crucified the Saviour.”24 Clearly Jones wanted Jews to go away from Richmond as badly as Grant wanted Jews expelled from contact with the Northern armies.
Jones observed that after January 1863 Davis was “rarely seen in the streets now.” Instead Davis frequented St. Paul’s, leading Jones to conclude: “I am rather inclined to credit the rumor that he intends to join the church. All his messages and proclamations indicate that he is looking for a mightier power than England for assistance.”25 In fact, Davis did convert, and the conversion was a sincere search “for a mightier power.” Like many of his generals and his Northern counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, Davis found religion increasingly significant as the battles raged on. In all these cases, conversion was preparation for martyrdom and death, and it translated into terms of “no surrender.”
CHAPTER 22
“AS SAVAGE AS SAVAGES”
Nationalism endured in the Confederacy, but the optimism contained in the Confederate jeremiad could no longer hold the unquestioned loyalty of the secular press and politicians as the suffering continued. Although the ministry invented a rhetoric of sacred nationhood around the ritual conventions of the fast and the thanksgiving day, they could not fix its meanings nor shape a cohesive and consensual Confederate ideology that automatically absorbed alternative visions. Defeats and disappointments inevitably strained unanimity among the populace and challenged the unquestioned supremacy of the clergy as moral authorities.
At the beginning of the war, Southern pulpits and the secular press had been engaged in a common enterprise: banging the drum for a “Christian” and “manly” war effort. But the strains on the Confederate government in the midst of total war and the social stresses upon a rapidly transforming capital city could not smooth over ideological differences among various factions for long.
For some, “Christian” and “manly” became separated. The new political function for the church and religious role for the state, especially in times of military defeat or internal discord, did not ring true. Vicious political battles over Confederate policy, public discontent over the moral decline of the wartime Confederacy, economic profiteering, hoarding, social breakdown—all flagrantly contradicted the spiritual and national consensus called for on fast days.
In Richmond the jeremiad offered a prescription for success in the face of defeat. A cavalier ethic of masculine nobility and war for war’s sake could not easily keep company with public humiliation, moral reformation, and exaltation of God over the works of men. In place of consensus, conflicting strains between the secular and religious press, and even within the secular press itself, emerged. The new and immensely popular magazine Southern Illustrated News, published in Richmond and intended to displace Harper’s magazine, made virtually no reference to religion, instead highlighting (and canonizing) the Confederate generals.
Political attacks on Davis increased, and so did contention between the Confederate and state authorities in Richmond. Political adversaries confronted each other anew as they coalesced into pro- and anti-Davis factions. One especially contentious issue was Davis’s suspension of habeas corpus, received as coldly in the South as Lincoln’s act had been in the North. The normally moderate Richmond Daily Dispatch urged resistance in defense of “the great bulwark of freedom”: “If Congress would be so wanting in spirit—so derelict in duty—let Virginia Senators at least be committed to present uncompromising resistance to this surrender of all our liberties.”1
In a similar vein, the Richmond Examiner continued its attacks on Davis. “Our politics are now an unknown, because unexplored sea,” they lamented. “We have lost sight of all the ancient landmarks, and the old charts are known to be fallacious.”2 As in the North, the secular press was not one press but many and in its midwar divisions, multiple and contending themes appeared that distraught Confederates confronted amid the din of nearby battles. Still, a fearfully militant nationalism endured.
Discussions in the secular press that shifted from “Providence” to “fate” or “chance” were meanwhile denounced in the Confederate religious press and pulpit as disloyalty and creeping atheism. The Central Presbyterian was especially perturbed when the Daily Dispatch characterized Stonewall Jackson as “a fatalist.” Southern pulpits and religious publications also expressed outrage over the signs of defeatism they detected in some Confederate newspapers.
As bodies continued to be sacrificed on the altars of their nations, citizens on the home front absorbed the blows of sorrow and despair with unbowed faith. In Kentucky the Union Baptist preacher B. F. Hungerford kept a diary of events. On March 4,1863, he wrote:Have just received a communication from Bro. A Cook of Pigeon Fork requesting me to visit him on the morrow, as his son is about to die. He is a member of an Indiana Regiment but has come home to die. Oh! War! How insatiable thou art! And still it rages. God surely has forsaken this people. Given them over to destroy one another!3
In a lecture to the Richmond YMCA, John Randolph Tucker, attorney general of the state of Virginia, justified the Confederate cause and then proceeded to pillory the Yankees for their conduct in the war: No war in modem times, among Christian nations, has been marked by such ferocity—such disregard of private rights of persons and property—such assaults upon the liberty and conscience of private citizens—such atrocities towards non-combatants, men, women and children—and such wicked violations of all sanctions of our Holy religion. In the estimate of international law, our enemy must stand for condemnation in the Pillory of Nations.4
In this contentious atmosphere President Davis called for a fast day on March 27, 1863. A disillusioned war clerk, J. B. Jones, could not conceal his sense of irony: “This is the day appointed by the President for fasting and prayers. Fasting in the midst of Famine! May God save this people!”5 The reactions of the press were more supportive. The Richmond Daily Whig supported the fast and urged attendance: “The religious portion of the community and the Pharisees [Jews] too will attend the various places of public worship. We trust that the congregations will be large.”6
Among the clergy there was no ambivalence. The war was just, but only insofar as the Confederacy remained a Christian nation dependent on God. A writer for the Central Presbyterian was explicit on the necessity of a fast:One or two of our newspapers have at times not obscurely, hinted their approbation of a maxim Napoleon is reported to have sanctioned that God was always on the side of the strongest regiments and the heaviest artillery. The remark ... is an atheism our Christian nation will disdain to take upon its lips. Our people do believe that the Almighty God holds our destiny in the hol
low of his hand.... If he casts us down, our sins have deserved it; if he lifts us up, it is the hand of mercy that does it.
The essay closed: “We trust that the day appointed will be more generally and sacredly kept than any before it.”7
From the start the clergy had been among Davis’s most faithful and enthusiastic supporters and on March 27 they would not disappoint him. In Savannah, Georgia, the Reverend George G. N. MacDonell delivered an unpublished fast-day sermon on Matthew 22:21 (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”) and outlined “the respective claims of God and Caesar.” In the end, he concluded, the claims were separate as to sphere but united as to their common end: a “Christian Republic.”8
Following the March fast, the Richmond Christian Advocate added its own complaint against those “who have written in bitter terms of denunciation against various chief men—especially against the President.” Such criticism, the editorial continued, was traitorous: “Every man who contributes to depress the public heart helps the enemy.” The clergy may have been late-comers to the Confederate cause, but, like their Northern counterparts, they proved its most loyal supporters. With unbroken confidence in God’s cause and no comment on man’s conduct, they probably extended the war by a year—the bloodiest year, as it turned out.
Upon the Altar of the Nation Page 27