Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  In his earlier diary entries at the start of the war, the Texas Ranger chaplain Robert Bunting complained that soldiers seemed hardened to his conversionist preaching. But now, as lights faded on the battlefield, revivals proliferated in the camp: “The camp was filled with the presence of ‘the Lord of Hosts.’ It is a second pentacostal season upon the earth. Thousands are being born again.” By war’s end, two-thirds of Bunting’s regiment would be dead. For the third who survived, religion proved indispensable.

  Bunting’s own role in the revivals was considerable. Together with “an old friend and classmate,” J. H. Kaufman of Georgia, Bunting took over a church building and began holding meetings for the soldiers:For twenty days we have carried it on. We preach morning and night daily. We are assisted by the resident ministers of Rome occasionally. God was with us from the beginning. A deep solemnity pervaded the congregation and the work first began on the church membership. They were greatly revived and comforted. Some who have been very much backslidden tell me that they now live over again the joys of their first conversion. In the meantime the impenitent were being convicted, and first one came forward and said “Brethren pray for me.”14

  In the context of such sentiments throughout the winter of 1864, revivals proliferated to a far greater degree in the Confederate army than in the Union.15 More significantly, they became even more the subject of news in the demoralized daily papers. Unlike in the North, where army revivals were less widespread, churches went unharmed, and revivals tended to be reported only in the religious weeklies, in the South army revivals became secular news.

  Throughout the winter and spring of 1864, it was the rare newspaper that did not feature revivals in the Confederate army. What began as a wave in 1863 following Gettysburg and Vicksburg steadily swelled and showed no signs of abating. On January 29, the Richmond Daily Dispatch reported “From General Lee’s Army” that “the religious interest in the army is unchilled by the cold weather. Meetings are still held in every part of the army; and in many, if not all the brigades, meeting-houses have been constructed for their own use, and faithful chaplains nightly preach to large and deeply attentive congregations.”

  Following the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, nobody dwelt on the battle or on Lincoln’s subsequent commemoration at Gettysburg Cemetery. Instead the news ran: “Revival in Longstreet’s Army” or “religion in the army.” One writer from the Army of Tennessee described “revivals in nearly every brigade in Hood’s Corps.... The same great work is spreading through Hardee’s Corps.” A soldier wrote in the same paper that “during the [revival] meeting a number professed faith in Jesus.”16

  By April, as the spring campaigns drew ominously near, all eyes were on Virginia. There, Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia stood between Grant’s and Meade’s Army of the Potomac and the city of Richmond. A form of fatalism now prevailed and discouraged the earlier fascination with battles and wars. Death and suffering had become too random and unpredictable to savor. War coverage shrank as moral and religious uplift blossomed.

  Revivals depended chiefly on evangelical sermons delivered by chaplains or local clergy. In a revival sermon preached frequently to Confederate regiments in February and March 1864, Chaplain William Baker pointed to the dreaded coming season of war: “We are now approaching a crisis in public suffering. We are looking forward to a campaign which will probably be stirring and decisive.... Has not the church a work of preparation to do as well as Congress and the army?”

  Besides news of spiritual laxity in the churches, “we hear not of revivals or missionary enterprises” in occupied areas of the South. The implication was clear: the army must step into the moral and spiritual void to “save” the South and, in the process, “win” the battle with Satan. It might even win battles on the battlefield.17

  After intoning the standard Protestant orthodoxy that revivals were purely spiritual affairs that could not necessarily cause “temporal victories,” Baker made an immediate about-face. In the next breath, he promised the troops: “If we are zealous for his cause, he will be zealous for our cause. If we make his ordinances effective for spiritual victories, he will make our muskets and cannon effective for temporal victories.” While conceding that battles were about contingency—“the mysterious panic, the swollen river, the apparently accidental position”—contingency itself was ultimately providential. Cynics missed precisely that when they ascribed purely natural causes to battles. Likening Generals Lee and Johnston to the Old Testament warriors Gideon and Barak, Baker assured his hearers that as God gave these ancient warriors victory, so also would He reward Confederate Christian generals.

  Of course, casualties would inevitably mount in the spring, even as victory ensued from God’s ultimate will: “How appalling the thought that in a few months, thousands—the bravest and the strongest—who are now in the flush of health and in the glory of their manhood, will be struck down.” To vivify death for the soldiers in attendance, Baker evoked a scene that to modern sensibilities seems melodramatic but that spoke with power to the soldiers facing imminent battle:Alas many bitter tears will be shed before another summer brings in its harvest—Many who found it hard to say goodbye to him who was more than half their life, will find it harder to hear the tidings that he is never more to return. That parting scene, how can even the stranger ever forget it! How she stood under the car window and took the hand which he held out to her. How she lingered until the moving train tore him away. Every thoroughfare is full of such scenes.... God help the mourners who already mourn and help us all to attain such nearness to him—such conformity of desire and thought and will, that when our time comes, we may be able at once and without a moment’s bitter rebelliousness of heart to cry “thy will, my God, thy will be done, and let that will be mine.”

  Revival sermons were augmented by religious tracts and newspapers to promote revivals in the army. In one popular tract entitled The Soldier’s Aim by a Charleston Pastor, the anonymous preacher strove, in the most romantic terms, to assure Confederate soldiers that saving faith would quell all fears and quiet all anxiety: “The pious man has a mind freed from the passionate conflicts and terrors of the wicked. He is not distracted by the struggle between the Creator and the creature, between the conscience and the life.... To him the weary march is bright with visions of a heavenly home and cheerful with the sound of holy voices that come to him upon the winds.”18

  Soldiers in 1862 may have found sentiments like these a bit much to swallow. By 1864, they overlooked the hyperbole and embraced the message as virtually the only hope in a world rapidly closing in on them.

  For the South, the dark side of revivalism was Puritanism. Many writers justified the righteousness of their cause by contrasting the evangelical Christianity of the revivals with the “Puritan” spirituality of the North. In a column titled “Does God Favor the North,” a writer for the Richmond Religious Herald replied that the North had sacrificed its faith for a Puritan-based abolitionism: “Federal infamy will not be veiled by triumph.... They have bartered the true principles of Christianity for sectional conquest—and the prize they have coveted will elude them.” As for slavery: “Our enemies make slavery the central question of the war. But no one at the South doubts the Divine Sanction of slavery.”19

  Revival sermons were augmented among the soldiers by spontaneous prayer meetings. One letter, written by a chaplain to the Religious Herald predicted the future impact of Confederate army revivals:I know young men to whom this war has been a real blessing in this respect; and if they live to see it close, their churches at home will mark what I say. Sometimes in thinking over this matter, and seeing such striking examples of Christians improved by being soldiers, I have almost come to the conclusion that the war is not such an unmitigated evil, after all.... Men who have come out of this war Christian soldiers, will not be apt to desert the standard of Christ afterward.20

  The chaplain was right. These were the very men who, with the war’s en
d, would lead mighty evangelical revivals that would transform the postwar South from Episcopalian and “Spartan” to “converted” evangelicals.

  No one in 1861 could have predicted that ministers would claim war—and defeat—as a moral and religious good that made men Christians. Yet, by 1864, that was indeed their claim. Just as white Christian apologists in the antebellum South had praised slavery as a converting institution for the slaves from paganism to Christ, so these Civil War apologists now praised war as a converting institution for white soldiers and, in turn, white society.

  In this madness, we see the seeds of what would become the postwar “Religion of the Lost Cause” and the triumph of evangelical Protestantism. Where the antebellum evangelical was tarred with the label of “dissenter” and, worse, “effeminate” postwar evangelicals and itinerants would be reared in the armies and hardened in the battles. In the new South, to be evangelical and “born again” would come to signify the Confederate army as well as the Southern pulpit. It would mean pride and manliness, humility and submission. The “Lost Cause” of the white Christian South would constitute a self-contained region—and religion—isolated from the international community of believers that preserved the sacred memories of the war and the revivals its army produced.21

  PART VI PROPORTION

  THE SOLDIERS’ TOTAL WAR

  MAY 1864 TO AUGUST 1864

  CHAPTER 31

  “I CAN ONLY THINK OF HELL UPON EARTH”

  No moral category of the Civil War received more attention in 1864 than the treatment of prisoners of war. What began as a humane affair with adequate accommodations and generous exchanges degenerated with the war’s progress into a living hell. In all, approximately 194,743 Union soldiers languished in Confederate prisons, and 30,218 died. Northern prisons took in 214,865 Southern prisoners, and 25,976 died. 1 Newspapers regularly denigrated the sadism of the enemy with sensational headlines like this from The Liberator: “Brutal Treatment of Union Prisoners in Richmond: How They are Starved to Death.”2 Lithographs and drawings portrayed starving wretches under headings like Let Us Forgive, but Not Forget.

  Years later, soldiers could forgive many episodes of the war, but not the prisons. A wave of barbarous accounts written after the fact by former prisoners of war did not help. Both during the war and after, the central themes were sensationalist: thrilling escapes, heroic confrontations, and barbarous guards. Wholesale death by pestilence and malnutrition, though depressingly real, were generally avoided in the press because they offered neither heroism nor romance—only the banality of death.3

  Photographs of emaciated Union prisoners returning from the South shocked Northerners precisely because they had no analogue in the viewers’ experience. To twenty-first-century eyes, the men look eerily like the sunken, skeletal survivors of Nazi death camps. But in 1864, only one unseen analogy came to mind: hell.

  In May 1864 a delegation from the committee on the conduct of the war visited the camp at Annapolis and photographed eight prisoners who were emaciated and on the verge of death. The sight outraged Northern viewers, who assumed these prisoners were typical victims of deliberate Confederate sadism. Confederate accusations that photographers deliberately selected the worst cases to stoke hatreds, and that comparable cases could be discovered in Northern prisoner-of-war camps, held no sway. The committee concluded that a conspiracy existed on the part of Confederate commanders to murder Federal prisoners.4

  Federal prisoner seated, nude, facing front. Photographs were used to reinforce Northern beliefs that Confederates were seeking to exterminate Union prisoners, though in fact, conditions were also horrendous in Federal prisons.

  For generations to come, volumes of survivors’ recollections from both armies would appear in waves, stoking bad memories and renewing hatreds that would not go away. Predictably, citizens on both sides pilloried the evil of the “other’s” camps. Their prisons were as humane as possible. Their treatment of prisoners was as respectful as could be. It was the others who were monsters.

  But from a larger perspective, what moral conclusions can be drawn about the history of prisons in the Civil War? That prisoners suffered endlessly is beyond debate. Was “wrong” done? Mistreatment of prisoners was deliberate, so the soldiers claimed, and intended ultimately to “exterminate” prisoners in their control. Only in the twentieth century, thanks in large measure to the pioneering scholarship of the historian William Hesseltine, has the accusation of deliberate murder been put to rest.5

  Of the degrading and momentous loss of life among prisoners on both sides there can be no doubt. As prison populations began to mount, it became painfully clear that neither side had really thought about or prepared a plan for dealing with prisoners. Of the two, the North would respond more humanely, but less from superior motives than from superior resources. As a rule—both on principle and, as much as possible, in practice—neither side sought to be barbarians, as each was routinely accused by the enemy.

  In moral retrospect, what is most surprising is that “retaliations” and “atrocities” were relatively minimal. The worst abuses tended to come from noncombatants or home guards who had little martial discipline or restraint. No officers were bent on extermination and murder. All were subject to the gruesome givens of a war that no one planned with contingencies that no one anticipated. They faced the unforeseen consequences of a war whose larger moral limitations had blown dangerously out of control, which is to say that the war was to blame, and, by extension, those who purposefully escalated it. It was for this reason that the only Confederate officer executed for war crimes was the commander of the infamous prison at Andersonville, Georgia, Henry Wirz.

  At the start of the war, prisoners and the prisons to hold them were not a great issue. From careful study of government records and soldiers’ memoirs, Hesseltine showed how prisons in both the North and the South in the years 1861 and 1862 generally adhered to the accepted rules of war. Both allowed prisoners basic rights of dignity and provided the same rations to prisoners as were available to soldiers in the field.

  Even as battles grew larger, numbers of prisoners did not swell because both sides agreed to a cartel of prisoner “exchanges” based on a complex formula that relied on numbers of prisoners and their ranks. Captured officers would be “paroled” with the understanding that they would not rejoin their units until “exchanged” with a prisoner of comparable rank, at which point both would be free to reenter their units.

  The foundation of the exchange was honor.6 Paroled officers would pledge: “We and each of us for himself severally pledge our words of honor as officers and gentlemen that we will not again take up arms against the United States nor serve in any military capacity whatsoever against them until regularly discharged according to the usages of war from this obligation.”7 Here, as in other places, the Civil War appears as the last romantic war, where honor was a category worthy of recognition.

  But prisons changed dramatically in 1863 when Lincoln and Grant discontinued the exchange for moral and strategic reasons. On moral grounds, they canceled the exchange because Confederate authorities refused to recognize black prisoners as equal to whites and therefore equally eligible for parole. Although instances of Confederate authorities selling black prisoners into slavery are rare, they did prohibit black prisoners from the exchanges and allowed recaptured slaves to be returned to their masters.

  In a letter to Robert Ould, Confederate agent for exchange, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Ludlow protested the Confederacy’s planned discrimination against black troops in the strongest terms, arguing “you have not a foot of ground to stand upon in making the proposed discrimination among our captured officers and men.” If the discrimination were implemented, Ludlow continued, the cartel would be endangered and “the United States Government will throw its protection around all its officers and men without regard to color, and will promptly retaliate for all cases violating the cartel or the laws and usages of war.”8

  When the
Confederacy refused to alter their policy, the inevitable breakdown occurred. As it continued, families of prisoners on both sides pleaded for resumption of exchange, but the Confederacy would not yield on the subject of returning recaptured slaves to their owners. In a letter written to Robert Ould on August 27, 1864, General Benjamin Butler, Union commissioner for exchange, again engaged the subject of “colored” prisoners of war. Given that prisoners on both sides were in extremis, Butler assured Ould that he would do anything to resume the exchange—anything, that is, “except to barter away the honor and faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks.”

  With that as a given, Butler sought to find a way to encourage the Confederacy to revise its policies on their own terms to win the release of black prisoners. Even if one assumed that slaves were merely property—the Southern definition of slaves—they still deserved to be returned because they had become the property of the United States who, by its sovereign right, determined to free them: “All are free men, being made so in such manner as we have chosen to dispose of our property in them which we acquire by capture.”

  Then, with bitter irony, Butler continued: “Will you suffer your soldier, captured in fighting your battles, to be in confinement for months rather than release him by giving for him that which you call a piece of property, and which we are willing to accept as a man? You certainly appear to place less value upon your soldier than you do upon your negro.”9