Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  The point was clear. Religion might be enough to justify the war, but the bracing tonic of ancient warriors made victory sweeter.

  As pro-Davis “political preaching” escalated in the churches, secular criticism of the clergy’s preaching grew fierce in some corners. The Richmond Examiner gave very clear advice to the clergy that reflected a return to the antebellum doctrine of “the spirituality of the church.” It was time for the clergy to preach Christ and, by implication, get out of politics where they were doing no good: “[I]t is rather their duty to soften the passions aroused in the contests of the world, and withdraw our thoughts from their fevered excitement, than to stimulate them by passionate discourse.”25

  The North and South were now headed in opposite directions, the Examiner claimed: the North was rapidly becoming more radical, the South more conservative and more attached to its institutions.26 The South’s unique social organization made it special: “We are the only religious and conservative people in Christendom.... It is nothing but our social institutions and our domestic slavery that distinguishes us from the rest of the nations of Europe.” Because of slavery, the South escaped “the moral and political evils that afflict other countries.” Christian morality was natural to a slave society but impracticable in a free land, “where all men are equals, [and therefore] all must be competitors.”27 Clearly, if it was left to the South, slavery would not disappear anytime soon.

  On August 6, 1863, after the humiliations of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Richmond Examiner bitterly declared that defeat came in no small part because of the persistence of the “Southern Government” in fighting a just war: “There is neither Christianity nor religion of any kind in this war. We prosecute it in self-defense, for the preservation of our liberty, our homes and our Negroes.” This statement grew as much out of frustration with Davis’s policies and his outspoken clerical defenders as from philosophical commitment. If the conduct of Confederates at war was more just and humane (and Lee’s orders in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, reinforced that image), it was time to change and grow more savage, like the North.

  The Examiner never denied that Christianity was at the core of Southern society (hence its moral superiority), only that religion—and its gentle ethics—had no place in war. The paper’s editors had no further patience with religion being mixed up with politics, public occasions, or national policy. This, despite the blatant fact that Southern religious leaders were anything but gentle.

  The paper’s editor, John Moncure Daniel, mercilessly criticized Davis’s government for “what might be called the white-cravat policy; the practice, in a deadly struggle with the devil’s own brood, of the Christian precept of doing good for evil, of turning another cheek when smitten.”28 Politicians, in their public and political capacities, should stay away from religion, and clergymen, like women, should avoid politics. “That in times of high excitement the clergy should share the feelings of the community, is natural; and it may be difficult to prevent all confusion of earthly and heavenly considerations in pious discourse; yet the nature of our Government, widely adverse to the union of the secular and the sacred arm, forbids it.”29

  For the Examiner, separation of church and state also meant a more rigid separation of religion and politics than Davis, his generals, and many other journalists were willing to employ. While Confederate advocates of the jeremiad could not see the contradictions between their fast days and jeremiads and the antebellum tradition of the spirituality of the church, Daniel saw it all too clearly. The Confederate nation under Davis was becoming dangerously “Puritan,” thus subverting the very cause of separation:Fast days and Thanksgiving days strike the Southern ear with a puritanical sound, always disagreeable, and, now, pre-eminently hateful. They smack of Latter Day sanctity; savor of the nasal twang and recall disagreeable reminiscences of Praise-God-Barebones, the Pilgrim Fathers, and their Yankee descendants.

  Public trust in “Divine aid” was one thing, Daniels continued, but still,

  it is to be regretted that the phraseology we use should be unfortunately associated with all that is repugnant to our taste and our feelings.... This revolution should secure us social as well as political independence. We should get rid of Yankee manners as well as of Puritan laws; and one of the most obnoxious is the vice of political preaching. Let the Southern clergy, then, be assured that they will win more lasting respect, and exert more legitimate influence, in abstaining from a custom discordant to our manners.30

  For all of his fulmination against churches and fasts, Daniel never attacked the religious press nor did he criticize denominational statements supporting the Confederacy. Nor did he question the cause. He attacked fast-day preaching and the president who called for it. And he questioned a military ethic of just conduct that placed the unjust conduct of Northern troops at an advantage. Indeed, for a Christian republic, these were all good, pure traditions. His criticisms were reserved for political sermons and, in particular, fast-day sermons uttered from the ashes of defeat. These departures from the rigid separation of church and state, he believed, promoted a supernatural fatalism that placed the chief burden for victory on God rather than Confederate guns.

  In words bristling with bitter irony, Daniel observed that the North—the originator of fasts—had itself outgrown them, while the South foolishly picked them up: “They by the way do not seem now to rely on fasts and humiliation. They have recently indulged in thanksgiving for victory, but their panacea for defeat seems to be fresh levies of men, more ironclad and addi tional fifteen-inch guns.”31

  The implications of Daniel’s perspective were obvious. Only by duplicating the North’s civil religion, at the expense of traditional Christianity, could the Confederacy adopt a tough-minded, patriotic savagery capable of defeating the North on its own terms. But this would not happen. Confederate Christianity was simply too powerful a cultural system to discard. Instead, Confederate Christians would grow even tougher and embrace the savagery.

  CHAPTER 27

  “THE ROCK OF CHICKAMAUGA”

  Throughout the war, Jefferson Davis took the high moral ground regarding the conduct of soldiers in the field. Despite the heavy destruction wrought on Federal armies at Gettysburg, no widespread pillaging occurred, nor destruction of Pennsylvania towns. Neither were civilians harassed with a view toward destroying their morale. This, he asserted, was in sharp contrast to the hard-war policy condoned by the North.

  In a letter to President Lincoln, drafted on July 2, 1863, Davis addressed himself to the issue of just conduct: “I have to complain of the conduct of your officers and troops in many parts of the country, who violate all the rules of war by carrying on hostilities not only against armed foes but against noncombatants, aged men, women, and children.” Assaults on property were not solely to support armies in the field but also to destroy civilian life. Union soldiers “not only seize such property as is required for the use of your forces, but destroy all private property within their reach, even agricultural implements.” Furthermore, Northern armies sought “to subdue the population of the districts where they are operating by the starvation that must result from the destruction of standing crops and agricultural tools.”1

  Davis did not mention particulars (implying they were too universal to be itemized), but examples of unjust conduct multiplied. One, reported in a letter by Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the first Northern black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, described the actions of Colonel Montgomery in the abandoned town of Darien, Georgia, in June 1863. After bombarding the town with artillery, Montgomery landed boats and confiscated all the furniture and movable property. Then, “in a very low tone, and ... [with] a sweet smile,” he informed Shaw, “I shall burn this town.”

  Though “not a shot had been fired at us,” Montgomery ordered Shaw and other officers to burn the town. When Shaw asked for an explanation, “the reasons he gave me ... were, that the Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be
swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.” Personally, Shaw did not like “being made the instrument of the Lord’s vengeance,” but fearing that if he reported the destruction it would do more harm to the reputation of his black soldiers than to Montgomery, Shaw said nothing, while conceding “this makes me very much ashamed of myself.”2

  In accusing Lincoln’s troops of unjust conduct, Davis was especially concerned that Lincoln, as commander in chief, refused to “disclaim having authorized them,” thus raising the haunting specter that such actions were approved at the highest levels of Union government. If this was the case, Davis averred, a price would be exacted: “I have, notwithstanding, refrained from the exercise of such retaliation, because of its obvious tendency to lead to a war of indiscriminate massacre on both sides, which would be a spectacle so shocking to humanity and so disgraceful to the age in which we live and the religion we profess that I cannot contemplate it without a feeling of horror that I am disinclined to doubt you would share.”3

  Significantly, Lincoln did not reply.

  While correct that Lincoln had authored the hard-war policy on civilian populations, Davis could not substantiate the innocence he claimed; in fact, both armies were descending into an ethical gray zone. Davis did not raise the subject of “irregular” Confederate assaults on innocent civilians, nor the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862, and for good reason. By this act, the Confederate government, in effect, legitimated guerrilla organizations and produced local heroes such as John Mosby, the “Grey Ghost” who terrorized Union soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley or Nathan Bedford Forrest, “the Wizard of the Saddle,” or John Hunt Morgan. But at least these were under orders and paid by the Confederate government. In the language of Lieber’s Code, they were partisans.

  Meanwhile, an entirely different category of guerrillas arose: unsupervised “freebooters” and criminals who preyed on innocent populations at will. The most infamous was the former Ohio schoolteacher William Clarke Quantrill. Quantrill’s murderous band, bent on robbing and killing unarmed civilians, included Frank and Jesse James.4

  On the very day (August 21) that churches and armies fasted throughout the Confederacy, a dark event was playing itself out in “Bleeding Kansas.” Quantrill and his “rangers”—minus sixteen-year-old Jesse James, deemed too young by the gang—entered the “abolitionist” town of Lawrence, Kansas, with cold-blooded murder on their minds. As the rioters shouted, “Kill! Kill!” they rounded up the local population and killed 150 unarmed men and boys in a senseless display of wanton violence. They then torched the town, leaving it in ashes.

  Northerners and Southerners condemned the attacks. One Northern account informed readers:We learn from Leavenworth, Kansas, that a band of rebel guerrillas made a descent on Lawrence on the night of the 20th instant, murdered the inhabitants, and pillaged the town finally setting it on fire and destroying it.... The list of killed and wounded is said to number one hundred and eighty ... the loss at Lawrence, it is estimated, will amount to about two millions, which will fall heavily on New York as well as Lawrence merchants.5

  If anything, the Confederacy condemned the attack more than the Union. General Lee prevailed on President Davis to repeal the Ranger Act that gave “irregular” partisans liberty without discipline or order.

  Northern commanders used the massacre as a rationale to ratchet up the war on the South to a more total form of war directed against civilians—enemies all—as well as armies in the field. Key Union commanders, including Grant, Sherman, Halleck, and Sheridan, had all experienced guerrilla opposition of a less murderous variety than seen in Lawrence, and one directed at soldiers, not innocent civilians. But they nevertheless lost whatever qualms they felt about civilian suffering in the aftermath of Quantrill’s raid and parallel “irregular” attacks on Union forces. From the experience of rebel guerrilla action, now expanded to include civilians in general, the “strategy of exhaustion” that marked the campaigns of 1864 and 1865 emerged.

  In response to Lawrence, Federal forces now turned reciprocally vengeful in an escalating rain of horror on (mostly) innocent civilians. The turn to total war on civilians began with General Orders No. 11. These authorized Federal forces first to drive from their homes ten thousand Missouri citizens in suspected guerrilla territories that bordered Kansas, then commanded them to burn to the ground the homes of suspected abettors.6 The orders were followed to the letter, leaving as many dead civilians in their wake as Quantrill had murdered. The Civil War’s version of “war crimes” had now moved into high gear.

  Aware of public criticisms of total war, particularly emanating from the Democrats, Lincoln defended civilian suffering—short of massacre—as common to war. In a letter to James C. Conkling, his lawyer friend from early days, written on August 26, Lincoln summarized his view of a just war: “Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves, or hurt the enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished foes, and non-combatants, male and female.”7

  Besides taking the war more directly to civilians and the partisans hidden among them, Lincoln continued to defend his suspension of habeas corpus when dealing with disloyal and traitorous citizens. The decision was difficult, he conceded, and “I was slow to adopt the strong measures.” But military necessity required it:Civil courts are organized chiefly for trials of individuals, or, at most, a few individuals acting in concert—and this in quiet times, and on charges of crimes well defined in the law.... Habeas corpus does not discharge men who are proved to be guilty of defined crime; and its suspension is allowed by the Constitution on purpose that men may be arrested and held who cannot be proved to be guilty of defined crime, “when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” This is precisely our present case—case of rebellion wherein the public safety does require the suspension.8

  While the war escalated to new levels of civilian involvement, Confederate revivals soared and news of “the spirit of the Army” inspired civilians at home. As one writer observed, “The Southern army is in fact the Southern people. It contains the cream of chivalry, the patriotism, the physical stamina, and the moral worth of the land.”9

  As Lee’s badly mauled army licked its wounds, a recovered Confederate Army of Tennessee, under General Braxton Bragg, engaged General William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland (supported by Ambrose Burnside) for a rematch, this time across the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.

  Preliminary engagements on September 18, 1863, set the stage for a pitched battle the next day at Chickamauga, Tennessee, between Federal forces totaling sixty-two thousand and Confederate forces numbering sixty-five thousand.10 With Longstreet present on loan from Lee, and avoiding offensive charges wherever possible, Confederate generals improved their chances. Instead of open-field charges, they chose densely wooded areas and swamps that maximized the advantage of local knowledge and allowed for little tactical control of units in the field. In large part because of the thick woods, neither the Southern nor the Northern commander knew exactly where either the enemy or his own units were.

  For two hours, the Federal left commanded by General George Thomas held off heavy attacks with their unyielding defenses. But Longstreet was not to be denied. By exploiting a temporary gap in Federal lines, Longstreet’s trusted subordinate, General John Bell Hood, crashed through the lines, leaving the Union army dangerously divided.

  In a monumental miscalculation—or loss of nerve—Rosecrans assumed his entire army had been destroyed and fled to Chattanooga, leaving Thomas and what was left of the Army of the Cumberland alone in the field to block Longstreet’s advance. One unwitting participant in Rosecrans’s retreat—a runaway slave named Thomas Cole—was picked up by Northern troops just in time to join the battle. In his later account, he recalled his first moments in battle assigned to support a cannon: “Finally they ... puts me to work helping with the cannons. I feels ‘portant then, but I didn’t know what was in fro
nt of me, or I ’spects I’d run off ’gain.”

  Unable to run, Cole stayed for the first day’s fight, and afterward surveyed the horror of the dead and wounded, “blood running out them and the top or sides their heads gone, great big holes in them.” The next day was a rout: “The Rebels gins shooting and killing lots of our men, and General Woods ain’t come, so General Rosecrans orders us to ’treat and didn’t have to tell me what he said, neither. The Rebels comes after us, shooting, and we runs off and leaves that cannon what I was with setting on the hill, and I didn’t want that thing nohow. We kept hotfooting till we gits to Chattanooga, and there is where we stops.”11

  Abandoned by Rosecrans, Thomas, who never left a battlefield throughout the war and never lost a battle, held his position with scant ammunition and fixed bayonets until help arrived from the Army of the Kentucky. Thomas was not always the fastest commander in a fight, but his bulldog tenacity at Chickamauga earned him the moniker “The Rock of Chickamauga.”

  In what was becoming a numbing ritual, both sides suffered 28 percent casualties, including four thousand killed. In tactical terms, Bragg’s plan worked and gave him a decided victory. But with no reserves to exploit Longstreet’s success, the strategic objective was lost. The North’s superior numbers grew yet larger. This would mark the last Confederate victory in the western theater. Meanwhile Thomas’s unbowed troops heaped acclaim on their fearless general.