Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  In Philadelphia, extreme heat kept people off the streets, but flags flew everywhere and all the churches held services. In excerpting sermons preached in the area, the Philadelphia Inquirer fastened on the theme of history and bloodshed. Nobody rehearsed the numbers of casualties; only the baptism in blood.

  By 1863 political preaching in the North and South had virtually completed the apotheosis of “patriotism” into a full-blown civil religion. “Martyrdoms” became a major theme in 1863 fast sermons. Even as the North won, the costs mounted to staggering levels, and the only accolade that seemed to work for most were “martyrs” sacrificing themselves upon the “altar” of their country.

  At the Church of the Intercessor, the Reverend William Carden looked to the history of early Christian martyrs and asked, “Was the Church established without blood and slaughter?” The answer, he continued, was no: “Past history records too faithfully the terrible trials and privations of the first ambassadors for Christ.... It was something to be a Christian then. It called for honesty, and manliness, and self-sacrifice—nay, death.” It did not stop there. “After the Church had passed through her early baptism of blood ... did no more baptisms of blood await the people of God?” Again, the answer was no: sufferings continued to the present centuries. Then, in a rhetorical shift that had become commonplace, Carden substituted the American nation for the Christian church, and raised the same questions, with the same sacred stakes. Apparently, by Carden’s reckoning, the two were interchangeable.2

  Among the ranks of Northern patriotic clergy, none perceived the sacred dimensions of America more clearly than Horace Bushnell. From his opening salvo in 1861 on “Reverses Needed,” Bushnell revealed that he perceived in bloodshed something mystically religious and moral that was creating a nation where only inchoate states and loose confederations had previously existed. And the source of that mysticism was divine Providence—a force that superceded natural law and a mere consent of the governed, burnishing all into a holy communion. Neither slavery nor the “North” nor the “South” defined the war for Bushnell so much as the fruition of a providential Christian state, conceived by the Puritans, rearticulated in the Declaration of Independence, and actualized through civil war.

  Lincoln himself was moving toward Bushnell’s position through a fatalistic route of his own. Lincoln’s vision of the Last Best Hope of Earth, however, was not necessarily Christian. For Bushnell and many other American Protestants, only a Christian state would make America into God’s own nation—a Christian state whose convictions included democracy and religious liberty for all. Thankfully, the Civil War was moving America in that direction: a nation wrought in the fires of war upon the anvil of blood sacrifices under the hammer of a providential God.3

  Blood recurred as a theme in Bushnell’s meditations as the necessary and sufficient condition for nationalism. The shed blood of soldiers, North and South, white and black, would stand as the vicarious atonement for the newly realized, organic Christian nation-state. This was not simply a metaphorical atonement, but quite literally a blood sacrifice required by God for sinners North and South if they were to inherit their providential destiny. By late 1863 this war that was not self-consciously fought for the creation of an American civil religion was unintentionally becoming about the creation of an American civil religion that would grow as the killing endured.

  In an essay on “The Doctrine of Loyalty,” written shortly after Gettysburg, Bushnell identified the war with the ultimate loyalty usually reserved for faithful martyrs, sacrificing their lives for a larger cause: How far the loyal sentiment reaches and how much it carries with it, or after it, must also be noted. It yields up willingly husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, consenting to the fearful chance of a home always desolate. It offers body and blood, and life, on the altar of its devotion. It is a fact, a political worship, offering to seal itself by a martyrdom in the field. Wonderful, grandly honorable fact, that human nature can be lifted by an inspiration so high, even in the fallen state of wrong and evil!4

  Virginia Soldiers’ Cemetery in Alexandria. All across the country, granite and marble markers, wooden crosses, and national flags marked row upon endless row of the “martyrs” who died to save their nation’s life.

  In similar terms, the Swiss-born American theologian and church historian Philip Schaff located the mystical animus of the war not in slavery (for which he found some biblical precedent), nor in abstract claims to nationalism on European models he knew so well, nor even on freedom and democracy, but rather in providential destiny. The war, he concluded, was “a very baptism of blood [entitling] us also to hope for a glorious regeneration.”5

  Christian ministers—especially Protestant ministers—were predisposed to see transcendent signals in history and to claim to know their meaning. Others were less certain, but this did not eliminate the power of the war in shaping a religious national consciousness. In ways few could perceive, blood was becoming a sacrifice, if not for a demanding God, then certainly for a sanctified nation with a sacred destiny of its own.

  Confederates were slow to realize the enormity of the loss visited at Gettysburg and the defeat at Vicksburg. Newspapers, particularly outside of Richmond, often relied on Northern papers for news, especially from Democratic publications that could be skewed to place the South in the best possible light. On July 7, for example, Raleigh’s North Carolina Standard reported, “We think it clear, from the Northern account that the Confederates achieved a victory at Gettysburg.” From reading the New York Herald, the report concluded, as well, that “Vicksburg can never be taken by assault.” Two days later, Richmond’s Central Presbyterian reported, “Everything yet received [from Gettysburg] indicates an overwhelming defeat to our enemies.”6

  It would be two weeks before the full extent of Gettysburg and Vicksburg reached Southern newspapers, often with the embarrassed confession that earlier issues “gave an exaggerated account of General Lee’s success at Gettysburg” and bemoaning “the Fall of Vicksburg.”7 But even this news was often obscured by denial. On August 1, well after the battlefield defeat, the Southern Illustrated News simply glorified Pickett’s suicidal assault: “It is believed that a more gallant and heroic charge was never made on this continent.... The division went in from five to six thousand strong. Three days after the battle but fifteen hundred reported for duty. Well done, noble heroes, officers, and men.”8

  In its July 9 issue, obviously written earlier, Richmond’s Christian Observer described a “Great Battle at Gettysburg,” noting that “the Confederates Hold the Field,” even as the Confederate positions “furnished a play for artillery like that of Marye’s Hill.” Complementing this distorted account was a column on “Great News from the West” reporting “that Grant has been defeated by Johnston, and his army cut to pieces.”9

  The rhetoric of “gallantry,” like the rhetoric of the jeremiad, was impervious to defeat—and to the future. With discourses like these, the fighting could continue indefinitely until there were no more souls to slaughter on the altar of their nation. At the same time, the rhetoric of gallantry signaled an important transformation in Confederate morale as the Confederate soldiers embarked on their long, sullen descent into bloodshed, with only the dimmest prospects for victory. Increasingly “duty” would augment gallantry as the operative goal rather than triumph. Fighting on to keep deaths from being in vain is different from fighting to win. And in the denial of late 1863 we see a cause blinded to its failure but determined to honor duty and let the destruction go where it may.

  By July 10 reality set in throughout the South, as news of the double defeats arrived. The North Carolina Standard lamented, “Our worst fears are realized. The [Vicksburg] garrison has made a most heroic and glorious defense, but nothing could avail against the storm of shot and shell which poured into the city from all sides, and the constantly encroaching forces of Grant.” As for Gettysburg, “We fear this news [of victory] is unfounded. If General Lee is retreating towards Ha
gerstown, the inference is that the tide is against him.... The heart bleeds and the tear unbidden starts from the eye, when we think of the noble and gallant thousands of our countrymen who went down in the fiery vortex.”10

  Throughout the South, July was wrapped in gloom. Writing from Georgia to her son in the army, Mary Jones asked: “How long will this awful conflict last? It does appear that we are to be brought very low. May the Lord give us such repentance and humility before Him as shall turn away His wrath and restore His favor, through the merits and intercession of our Divine Redeemer!”

  In response, Colonel Charles Jones replied, “The heavens above us are indeed dark; but although for the present the clouds give no reviving showers, let us look and pray earnestly for His favor who can bring order out of chaos, victory out of apparent defeat, and light out of shadow.”11

  In opposition to secular editors and critics of Davis who rose up from the ashes of defeat, the Confederate religious press proved to be the truest believers—and perpetuators—of the sacred Confederacy and its civil religion. They almost unanimously praised the cause of the war, in defeat no less than victory, and honored its political and military leaders.

  After Gettysburg, the Christian Observer turned to reporting on the sorrow in England that greeted the news of Stonewall Jackson’s death. The account described Jackson’s international appeal as soldier and Christian and the grief God-fearing Christians experienced universally in England. The internationalization of Jackson was one more piece of his mythologization.

  Even as losses mounted and the memories of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg faded, the cult of Jackson grew steadily in the Southern secular and religious press. The Episcopal Southern Churchman had no real affinity with Jackson’s Calvinistic Presbyterianism but nevertheless continued to sing his praises in biographical sketches written by ministers such as Moses Hoge and Robert Lewis Dabney, and in accounts of impending honors.12 Other papers captured “a scene in the Life of General Jackson,” highlighting his piety and Christian manliness.13 Both secular and religious writers fused Jackson’s military prowess with his staunch Presbyterianism and implied that each was inextricably tied to the other.

  From his position in the field near Rome, Georgia, with the Texas Rangers, Chaplain Robert Bunting wrote an uplifting letter that effectively denied the enormity of July’s defeats and promised ongoing divine deliverance. Dated July 30, 1863, the letter insisted that defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg were “not so severe a blow as the evacuation of Bowling Green and Nashville ... or the loss of Fort Pillow and Memphis, or New Orleans and the lower forts.” Nor did they signal divine disfavor with the cause. In words also offered to the casualty-riddled soldiers in his brigade, Bunting affirmed:We may lose all of our sea-board, and control of the Mississippi and Richmond itself, and yet we are neither undone or conquered. It matters not, although the New York Herald may declare that “the rebellion is already crushed,” and propose terms for the reconstruction of the Union, yet that does not make it so ... No! this people are not yet conquered. And more—I have faith enough left to believe they never will be overrun and subjugated. Such people have never yet been enslaved. Search the pages of history, and you will fail to find a people recognized so clearly in their struggles for freedom—for the possession of their Canaan of earthly hopes, by the Court of Heaven, as this bleeding Confederacy. 14

  Words like these could easily lead to a moral case for guerrilla warfare.

  On July 27, 1863, a disheartened war clerk, J. B. Jones, contextualized the setting for another fast-day proclamation:Nothing but disasters to chronicle now. Natchez and Yazoo City all gone the way of Vicksburg, involving a heavy loss of boats, guns, and ordnance stores; besides the enemy have got some twenty locomotives in Mississippi. Lee has retreated as far as Culpepper Court House. The President publishes another proclamation, fixing a day for the people to unite in prayer. The weather is bad.15

  Two days later, bad weather led a despondent Jones to question his cause: “Still raining! The great fear is that the crops will be ruined, and famine, which we have long been verging upon, will be complete. Is providence upon us for our sins, or upon our cause?”16

  That Jones would ask such a question reveals how devastating Meade’s and Grant’s victories were. But few went so far as to question the morality of the South’s cause. Instead, the answer, as it emerged from virtually every pulpit and religious publication in Richmond, and then broadcast abroad, was that the Confederacy’s cause was just and God’s punishment a purification for sin.

  Pulpits and presses throughout the land cited instances of punishment and salvation from the Old Testament to assure their audiences of divine favor. The most often cited example was Nineveh, which was spared when the ancient inhabitants turned to God in fasting and repentance. In a column asking, “Is the Lord on Our Side?” the Southern Churchman responded in the affirmative and castigated those who “nor for the first time ... ask ‘can the Lord be on our Side?’ ”

  Equally certain was the culpability of the North. In his fast sermon to the Centenary Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, the Reverend Leroy Lee pointed toward the enemy’s intention to “exterminate the white population of these states.” But, he insisted, this would not come to pass because “we have strong grounds to trust that God will hear our prayers, and interpose for our deliverance.” 17

  With some exceptions, the secular press concurred. A writer for the Richmond Daily Whig pointed out: “No man or woman in the Confederacy who is familiar with the doctrines or commandments of the Inspired Word can be greatly surprised at the present state of affairs. Have not the people everywhere devoted themselves to the worship of Mammon? Have they not all practiced extortion?”18

  Fast-day preaching might be losing “its good effect through repetition” among many observers in the government and the secular press, yet a flood of religious print continued to drape the carnage with spiritual significance. Denominational newspapers trumpeted the “Christian heroism” of generals like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, effectively fusing patriotism with the same Christian legitimation that prevailed in the North. By August 1863 the war had created and consecrated two American civil religions, mortally opposed, but both Christian and both “American.”

  In a letter to the Houston Tri-Weehly Telegraph, written on August 23, 1863, Chaplain Bunting described the scene at a fast-day church service in Rome, Georgia, led by the Confederate firebrand Benjamin Palmer of New Orleans. Midway through the service, Union artillery began bombarding “hundreds of non-combatants [who] were in the different houses of God for worship.” For Bunting, this bombardment bore a dual significance. It underscored both the unjust tactics of the “fiendish” enemy in attacking innocents, and the bravery of the worshippers who refused to leave despite the bombardment:Yet the mass remained in their places, and the man of God continued in his prayer. There he stood, this noble Ambassador of Christ from the far South, with eyes and hands raised to Heaven, not a note altered, not a sign of confusion, excitement or alarm, naught but the calm, Christian face, uplifted and full of the unconsciousness to all save its devotions, which beam from the soul of true piety.19

  Eventually, as the shelling continued, services concluded and congregations dispersed, having learned the lesson that “[t]he enemy may burn our churches; he may exile our people, with his cannon pointed against the place of prayer ... but he cannot seal the lips of the believer, nor yet prevent the heart from sending forth its petitions to the ‘Father of Mercies.’ ”20

  To clergymen and religious publishers who recognized the power of the press to mold opinion, however, a more immediate danger than the bombardment appeared as the war continued. The shifting tone they detected in the mainstream secular press and the increasingly harsh criticism of the Davis administration in the opposition papers threatened a disillusionment that could very well erode the faith of the people in both their cause and their prospects for success. Here too an evolving civil war within a civil war a
ppeared, as journalists criticized leadership and clergy criticized journalists for bad faith. To counter what they perceived as a more secular nationalism promoted in some newspapers, religious editors identified patriotism without piety as the “defective patriotism” that was drawing God’s chastisement.21 In one soldier’s tract, a Virginia chaplain wondered why this patriotism seemed more motivating than the cause of Christ.22

  In fact, not all secular newspapers were critical of the war effort; some stood resolutely beside a virtually unanimous religious press. A few even succumbed to pure blood revenge. The Richmond Daily Dispatch recognized with a sort of helpless resignation that “the taste for blood grows with the indulgence, and men become every day more like wolves, as they give way to the growing appetite.... We are getting savage, with the rest of our countrymen, and we confess to a special delight in hearing of Yankee corpses.” In such a mentality, no contradiction existed between revenge and just war: “Adversity will bring out only in bolder relief the virtues of the people of the South—the virtues of courage, constancy, and faith in a Just Cause and a Just Providence.”23

  But the political and military leadership was another matter. Following the defeat at Gettysburg, the Richmond Daily Whig continued to invoke religion, but turned from Israel to place a far greater emphasis on secular history and antiquity:The glory of Athens and the strength of Sparta were acquired by making every man a soldier, and considering non-combatants as drones in the national hive.... No nobler principle, no dearer homes, no fairer land were ever fought for, bled for, died for than hang upon the issue of this conflict. Natal rights and native land, hereditary titles to property, the immunities of free citizenship, the sanctities of the hearthstone, the appealing voice of innocent and helpless womanhood—all that can touch the heart or nerve the arm, cry trumpet tongued to all brave and true men to fight this fight out to victory or death.24