Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Lincoln, together with William H. Seward, met with the three Confederate commissioners on board the River Queen in Hampton Roads outside of Fort Monroe, Virginia, and, as predicted, the two sides came to no agreement. Lincoln would settle for nothing less than the return of the Confederacy to a reunited Union without slavery. He assured the commissioners that he would be as lenient in reconstructing the South as possible, but passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by the Congress allowed no further compromise over slavery. With that, the conference broke up and Lincoln instructed Grant to continue the onslaught. Once again, Lincoln was confirmed in his sense that blood sacrifice would be the ultimate means of creating cohesion and national survival.

  Reactions in the South to the failed peace talks were predictably defiant. In almost caricatured words of arrogance (and denial), the Richmond Religious Herald gloated that the South is “in better condition to-day, and the North weaker than ever before, since the war began.” The failure of peace talks, moreover, and the smug Northern demand for unconditional surrender would stiffen resolve and “be worth more to us than a victory.” Right was still on the South’s side:Those of our people who have grown despondent under the reverses of the times should not think that, because disasters have befallen us, God is unfriendly to our cause. We must remember the terrible character of this war. Our enemy has all the material advantages. We are shut out from the world ... notwithstanding these things; we have borne the bloody strife, and remain yet unsubdued. Surely God has been the friend of the South and purposes our ultimate independence.

  Of course, the question of why the constant defeats continued grew louder, but there was a standard rejoinder: “The answer is found in the condition of his church.... We forgot the source of our strength. God in anger withdrew his support.... Our cause will be strengthened and our liberty secured as soon as we deserve it.”4 With that assurance, the sacrifices could continue in good faith.

  Southern clergymen not only persisted with the jeremiad as means of deliverance but also with the doctrine that slavery was humane. If there was sin connected to the institution of slavery, it was never slavery per se but the abuse of slaves. To stay right with God, ministers repeated their warnings to treat slaves well, albeit in deference to their owner’s “privileges.” Confederates were reminded to respect slave marriages “in such a form as shall not interfere with the legal rights of the slaveholder.”5

  Defeats were not cause for guilt. Rather, reverses in such a war were arguments “for more humble prayer, for greater sacrifices and united and determined efforts under the counsels of wise and able leaders, and not for gloomy forebodings of evil.” By 1865 many Confederate statesmen and journalists were even willing to enlist slaves in the army and give them their freedom in exchange for the preservation of their republic. The Richmond Daily Dispatch reversed its earlier opposition to slave enlistments and argued that the Confederacy “must fight negros with negros.”6

  While scholars later posited a Confederate “guilt” over slavery that dampened their war resolve and generated defeatism, contemporary Confederates evidenced no such sentiment. Other writers sympathetic to the Southern cause pointed out “a moral paradox.” Slavery was good for freedom, they claimed, and not in conflict with it. It had to do with the nature of societies; the Southern experiment in freedom was demonstrating “that slavery is essentially a feature in the conservatism of every free government.”7 Left unspoken and unquestioned was the qualifier every free white government.

  Archenemies of this viewpoint were the abolitionists, given the most hated epithet in the Confederate lexicon—Puritans. The mere mention of the word would routinely dispel defeatism or acquiescence. A writer for the Richmond Daily Dispatch drew his line in the sand: “The loyal sons of this heroic land would sooner see it upheaved from its foundations by some convulsion of nature, and buried in the Atlantic, than to behold its national characteristics submerged by a tide of Puritan manners, selfishness and fanaticism.”8 The same paper told the tale of a “professor of religion” who became an abolitionist and therefore “must needs insult the Christian world with a blasphemy equally as disgusting as any which ever proceeded from the lips of Tom Paine.”9 In 1865 no less than 1860, they believed that abolitionism was the ultimate sin such that “[a]ll who love the Lord Jesus Christ must and will oppose this monster heresy even unto death.”10

  Revivals continued apace in the Confederate armies, and the early winter months witnessed renewals in the hospitals as well. Religious newspapers were happy to report “an encouraging state of religious feeling among the soldiers in Richmond hospitals.”11 To sustain that interest evangelical denominations redoubled their efforts to publish and distribute tracts and religious newspapers through their vendors. Titles like the Soldier’s Closet (Baptist) or the Soldier’s Visitor (Presbyterian) or the Soldier’s Paper (Methodist) all promoted personal conversion and revival.

  The Army and Navy Messenger, published by the Evangelical Tract Society in Petersburg, Virginia, used the occasion of the siege of Petersburg to preach conversion: “Oh! For the spirit of earnest, agonizing, believing, trusting prayer to be poured upon us, now as we gird our armor, and enter anew upon the terrible conflict.” Here, anyway, the soldiers would not disappoint them. Chaplains routinely reported “many conversions in the army during the past year.”12 Religion would never become more central or affirming than in the final months of the Confederacy’s life. In fact, the clergy had no choice. Having already sacrificed a prophetic voice of their own to the sacred cause, their fortunes were linked inextricably with their government’s.

  On the home front, too, calls for conversion displaced calls for victory. Preaching to his Richmond Baptist audience, Jeremiah Bell Jeter opened a late December sermon with the observation: “We have heard much of late of the condition and sufferings of prisoners—their confinement—hard and scanty fare—bad water—sufferings from cold, diseases, the brutality of their keepers.... [But] I propose this morning to show you prisoners in a far more pitiable condition than that of those languishing in Yankee prisons.”

  Jeter then went on to talk about prisoners of sin. He followed this up with a sermon from 2 Timothy 2:3 on “a good soldier of Jesus Christ,” whom he went on to describe as “Captain Jesus Christ. Captain of Salvation.” If the sinner turned to Christ, then “in death he will triumph and gain an honorable discharge.”13

  Even as revivals in the army convinced Confederates that God was still truly on their side, they worried about demoralization, greed, and insufficient piety on the home front. This religious reversal grew steadily in 1865 as the army prayed for the churches and the nation rather than vice versa. Northern evangelicals might fret constantly over the missing reference to God in their Constitution, but Southern evangelicals, who had God in their constitution, wanted even more: a specific identification with Jesus Christ. The Richmond Christian Advocate called attention to the fact that while Congress proposed prayer to President Davis “in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” President Davis invoked God in his fast proclamation but not Jesus, thus risking divine desertion. It was divine desertion—not slavery or Northern superiority—that would prove truly devastating to the cause: “If Christ does not help the people, it will be trampled under foot by its enemies. Will He be our helper, if we persistently exclude His name from our national references to the religious duties of the crisis?”14

  While Northern clergy promoted Lincoln and the Republican Party, Confederate ministers were quick to promote their president and generals. On Sunday, January 1, 1865, in a sermon preached at St. Paul’s in Richmond with Jefferson Davis in attendance, the venerable Charles Minnigerode abandoned all pretext to preaching pure “spirituality.” Instead, he spoke as if it were a weekday fast:God forbid that I should speak as a mere man and not as the minister of Christ, that I should introduce politics where Religion alone should raise her voice, but the times are perilous and it is necessary to “uphold the cause and strengthen the hands of th
e faithful....” Oh! if we could stop every croaker and nerve every patriot; if we could allay every impatience and rouse all to bear what others have borne before, and drive away their unmanly fears by trust in God ... the threatening dangers with which the year opens upon us would in God’s mercy be changed into blessings, and this year witness the growth of our national strength and our training for the final victory!15

  The theme of “manliness” and piety recurred in Minnigerode’s discourse without a hint of defeatism. If there was a problem, it lay with those who complained or found fault with the administration. Instead of criticism, “the literature given to our people chiefly in the daily newspapers should be of an encouraging and inspiring, not a depressing and often demoralizing tendency.”16

  But outside of the leadership elite and Lee’s ever-loyal Army of Northern Virginia, voices of dissent grew steadily louder. Georgia remained a sore spot, and on February 15, Governor Joseph E. Brown excoriated President Davis in a speech to the legislature and recommended a constitutional amendment that would remove Davis as commander in chief. For all intents and purposes, Georgia was out of the war. Indeed, the only states really in it were North Carolina and Virginia. The Confederate Congress fought openly with Davis as he chided them on their inability to lead their people. Among the corps of generals, spats broke out between the “political generals” berating “West Point fools,” and the West Point generals aghast at “broken down politicians and drunkards” assuming high ranks in the military.17

  While Confederates prayed increasingly to God to deliver them, Northern clergy complained of the North’s lack of religiosity and a false faith in superior arms. As victory loomed, revivals waned, causing one leading journal to suggest that “[i]f only a sufficient number of evangelists—say five hundred—could be sent into the various divisions to cooperate with, or supply the destitution of chaplains, we have reason to believe that a wide-spread, wonderful and glorious revival would be the result.”18

  The “evangelists” never appeared. Volunteers for promoting revivals, it appeared, required fear—a sentiment largely missing among the North’s well insulated civilians. Apart from periodic notices in the religious press, revival was not invoked in the North in any way comparable to the event it had become in the South. Conversions in the camps and hospitals undoubtedly occurred at rates comparable to those of the Confederacy, where death remained imminent. But they lacked the broader cultural significance represented in the Southern secular press. As victory piled on top of victory Northern moral discourse diverted into celebrations of war and “manliness.” In a sermon entitled Manliness, preached to the Thirteenth Regiment in South Congregational Church of Brooklyn, the chaplain, Edward Taylor, opened with the declaration: “A robust, valorous soul can no more declare itself in soft and feminine words, than a knight of old could lay aside his two-handed sword and heavy coat of mail for a feathery wand and a robe of silk.”19

  Where Confederate “manliness” was moving toward a fusion of bravery and evangelical piety, Northern manliness was moving away, almost in the direction of the antebellum patrician South. Echoing the same theme of manliness in his 1865 Massachusetts election sermon, A. L. Stone offered the view that bloody war was essential to union: “The length of the war has been absolutely indispensable for the full sense of nationality—the unity and authority of the Federal Government, to enter and possess the hearts of the people.” Stone went on to revisit the word “Puritan” in a manner strikingly opposite that of his Confederate adversaries: “Oh! That our New England might be, late and forever, what she was at first—PURITAN! Once a word of reproach, veined with sneering irony, History has written it as our proudest eulogy. To keep it unbolted down the ages is our most sacred trust.” Then, with a note of bravado that Confederates (and not a few other Northerners) detested, he baldly asserted: “It runs in our [New England] blood to be pioneers of a spreading Christian civilization.”20

  As religious journals on both sides of the war wallowed in self-righteousness and patriotism, they routinely legitimated their own sentiments as pious and those of the enemy as diabolical. In a letter to Robert Dabney, Richmond’s Moses D. Hoge complained bitterly about the Northern press throughout the war:As for the Northern, so called, religious papers, it is my deliberate opinion that any decent secular journal is better Sunday reading than they. These pretended religious papers are not only secular for the most part as to matter, but satanic as to spirit, and after an article surcharged with falsehood and all uncharitableness the editors make it worse by following it with something very spiritual by way of giving sanctity to the rest of the page. They make a dead run at what McPheeters used to call the “big pious,” knowing that the public expect something of the sort in a religious paper, but their saintly talk is so much out of place in such connection that it shocks you as a mock sermon would in a barroom, or bawdy house.21

  Hoge was exactly right about the North and equally exactly wrong about himself. In fact, the Southern religious papers were no better. The Civil War, which had in many ways become a barroom brawl, extended to the churches on both sides with all trace of Christian forbearance the victim.

  CHAPTER 42

  “VENGEANCE UPON SOUTH CAROLINA”

  Bad weather delayed Sherman’s movements until February, and would continue to hound him throughout the Carolinas. But his tactical planning and determination overcame all. Wherever he went he terrorized. When Chaplain William Waring, an African American attached to a Michigan regiment stationed in Beaufort, South Carolina, observed Sherman’s army march through, his response was mixed. For sheer intimidation the western soldiers were without peer.

  Waring and his fellow soldiers had heard about Sherman’s legendary exploits and expected a clean and sparkling professional army. They had a rude awakening as unkempt and loosely disciplined troops walked in disarray before them. Beneath the outward casualness, however, lay a steely resolve that bespoke death to any who got in their way:Here comes one. His pantaloons leg is split half way up to the knee; his face is unshaven and his hair unshorn; the crown of his hat, too, is gone, but he is perfectly oblivious to the eyes that are upon him, or the remarks that are made about him, and with his gun swung carelessly over his shoulder, the whole appearance of the man says, “I can hold all the ground that I cover.”

  A little time later, Waring spotted some foragers bringing back a wagon loaded with hay and chickens and crowing like a rooster (the signal for chicken tonight). Waring evidenced no problem with the soldiers’ “addictions,” as long as it was directed at rebels. But then a more disturbing sight caught his attention:Up the street a little farther, the negro-hating element shows itself. One of them takes a colored woman’s pies and then slaps her over because she complained. Another one inflicts a wound on an already wounded colored soldier. Two more go up to the quarters of the Post Band, who are colored men, and raise a disturbance there.

  Instead of dwelling on the racism, however, Waring returned at the end of his account to where he began: the spectacle of the army itself. Why were they so powerful? His answer: “Armies are disciplined and drilled for the purpose of acquiring the greatest possible amount of destructive power, and whether Sherman’s army shows that it has been taken through the usual course of instruction or not, it possesses that power in a preeminent degree. It seems to have become part of their nature, and it is irksome to them to be restrained, as they are here, among loyal people.”1

  While American memory and Gone With the Wind preserve the Atlanta campaign as the most dramatic achievement of Sherman’s army, the march to the sea was logistically far more complex and a tribute to Sherman’s organizational genius. Moral genius was another matter. While in Savannah, Sherman authorized the seizure of private property with deliberate sanction for maximal discomfort: “I have adopted in Savannah rules concerning property—severe but just—founded upon the laws of nations and the practice of civilized governments, and am clearly of opinion that we should claim all the belligerent
rights over conquered countries, that the people may realize the truth that war is no child’s play.”2

  Opposing him was the restored General J. E. Johnston, who was pulled out of retirement by General Lee to direct operations in South Carolina. Serving under Johnston were General Beauregard and General Wade Hampton, who commanded all the cavalry in the state. Johnston was certainly an improvement over Hood, now a thoroughly beaten and bitter man with nothing more than a missing arm and leg to show for his bravery. Ultimately, who was in command mattered not at all; there simply were not enough horses or men to withstand Sherman’s juggernaut.

  Sherman retained his two-winged army commanded by his trusted generals, Howard and Slocum. To keep the Confederates off balance, he feinted toward Charleston and Augusta, with Columbia his true target all along. Throughout the complex movements, Sherman absorbed the intoxicating fact that no Confederate force in the Carolinas could challenge him in the field, or even slow him down. Sherman’s main military concern was whether Lee would remain in Virginia as his food supplies in the Carolinas were destroyed, or whether he would seek to break out from Grant’s investment and move south. Repeatedly, Grant assured Sherman that Lee could execute no such move.

  No other general in the Civil War duplicated Sherman’s experience in his march to the sea. It truly represented a new chapter in the history of war, at least as far as Americans were concerned. With his commanders ignorant of his whereabouts and the enemy in no position to stop him, he was effectively the reigning deity wherever he went, with no higher accountability to check his martial impulses. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s apt characterization of him as the “war prophet” was becoming literally true. Everything depended on Sherman. A sort of madness enveloped him and his soldiers as they marched into the heart of darkness, destroying without resistance.