Apotheosis by D. T. Wiest, modeled after John James Barralet’s Apotheosis of George Washington. Ascending to immortality, Abraham Lincoln is pictured surrounded by angels. At his feet are Columbia—the reunited nation—and a Native American, with heads bowed.
The Universalist pastor Adoniram J. Patterson, who held the opposite opinion of evangelicals on almost all issues save the nation, agreed with Boardman:The haters of liberty crucified the son of Mary. But he rose to life again, and his resurrection is celebrated by the Christian church throughout the world. By his death he acquired a power and influence which he could never have attained in life. So shall it be with our lamented dead [President]. Power shall be born of his ashes, even as a corn of wheat dying brings forth an hundred fold,—and the wrath of man be made to praise thee, O God.8
Abraham Lincoln, the single most photographed subject during the Civil War, could not escape the photographers’ selective display of images. With his assassination and apotheosis into America’s messiah, photographers, statesmen, and family refused to reproduce the most recent photographs of the living Lincoln, taken in 1865 by Alexander Gardner and Henry Warren. The reason? He looked too thin and emaciated:Most portraitists resolutely refused to record the physical consequences of the Lincoln presidency on its chief executive, for as a martyr, they probably reasoned, he should not appear wasted or even haggard. Part of the dying-god legend required that its heroes be struck down in their prime. So printmakers romanticized Lincoln’s features in their post-assassination portrayals, making his now-gaunt physique heroic rather than taking the commercial risk required to reveal the truth.9
As word spread throughout the South of the assassination, no celebrations ensued. Real enemies celebrate enemy deaths at the hands of insurgents as a call for guerrilla warfare. But in this war, they remained Americans all. Richmond’s Sallie Putnam, writing from her occupied city, conceded, “In the wonderful charity which buries all quarrels in the grave, Mr. Lincoln, dead, was no longer regarded in the character of an enemy.”10
On April 17 General Sherman met with a shocked General Johnston at the James Bennett house near Durham Station, North Carolina. Johnston feared the assassination would ruin negotiations for a generous peace and informed Sherman that it was a great “calamity” for the South no less than the North. The two then began negotiating not only the surrender of Johnston’s army but the surrender of all armies in the field. Neither president was consulted on these conversations, and even Grant remained in the dark. From these negotiations emerged a remarkably merciful “Memorandum on basis of agreements,” drawn up by Sherman, that called for an armistice by all armies in the field. Beyond that, the memorandum dictated terms of reconstruction, agreeing to obey Federal authority, and reestablish the Federal courts. The existing state governments would be recognized when their officials took oaths of allegiance to the United States. In return, the United States would guarantee rights of person and property and issue a general amnesty for Confederates. 11 In that memorandum, General William Tecumseh Sherman, the “scourge of the South,” stood incongruously as the Confederacy’s last best hope. No one would be more hated in Southern memory than Sherman, but no American showed more generosity of spirit at that moment than Sherman.
Sherman clearly went well beyond anything Grant had negotiated at Appomattox, though he always maintained that everything he did was in the spirit of Lincoln’s wishes as they were expressed on the River Queen. But clearly he had overstepped his bounds and usurped powers that were not his to exercise. An outraged Congress and cabinet immediately assailed the memorandum, and Grant was promptly dispatched to meet with Sherman and rein him in. On April 24, the two generals and friends met, and Grant gently reminded Sherman that he did not have the authority to impose terms of surrender and reconstruction. President Johnson, Sherman was informed, had rejected the memorandum. Sherman was to apprise General Johnston of the rejection and allow two days for unconditional surrender without terms, after which hostilities would resume.
Throughout the North, an outraged and still mourning nation learned of Sherman’s agreement, and Northern newspapers assailed the terms, crying instead for revenge. For his part, Sherman was equally outraged. He fumed against Secretary of War Stanton and the New York papers for printing a communique of March 3 from Lincoln to Grant stating that the generals should accept nothing but surrender and should not negotiate peace. Sherman claimed he had never received such a message and reiterated what Lincoln twice told him aboard the River Queen on March 27 and 28:[I]n his mind he was all ready for the civil reorganization of affairs at the South as soon as the war was over; and he distinctly authorized me to assure Governor Vance and the people of North Carolina that, as soon as the rebel armies laid down their arms, and resumed their civil pursuits, they would at once be guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country; and that to avoid anarchy the State governments then in existence, with their civil functionaries, would be recognized by him as the government de facto until Congress could provide others.12
Some people looked for plots and conspiracies. Certain that the South was behind the assassination, Northern papers railed against Sherman, complaining that “the favorable terms given to the rebel generalissimo in surrendering” encouraged bold moves. In the view of such critics, however, Southern conspirators had only managed to remove the South’s best hope. Ultimately, one religious writer declared, God allowed this to happen “in a way utterly unexpected and afflictive [so that] he has opened the eyes of the blind to the malignant and implacable character of the rebellion. He has removed the one most disposed to a policy of leniency.”13 Now was the time for revenge!
In like fashion, the New York Observer spread the rumor of Confederate machinations: “As yet there is no reason to believe that the leaders of the Rebellion had any part or lot in the crime; but the crime itself is nothing more and nothing less than the personification of the whole insurrection.... This department has information that the President’s murder was organized in Canada, and approved in Richmond.”14
On April 19 funeral services were held for President Lincoln. In thinking ahead to the ceremonies, Grant instructed his officers to send a black regiment to march in the procession with the Army of the Potomac. After a brief service, the funeral carriage carried the slain president past throngs of mourners to the rotunda of the Capitol.
Throughout the North and in “Union” pulpits in the South, the messianic praises of Lincoln rang like the peals of the mourning bells. Many lauded his Christlike character, averring that “malice seems to have had no place in his nature.” To complete the identification, Lincoln’s faith was also transformed into that of a converted evangelical. In a sermon preached in the Union Church of Memphis, Tennessee, T. E. Bliss began the mythmaking with the description of Lincoln as “[h]e who but a few months ago told the story of his love for Jesus, in tears, and with all the simplicity of a child.”15
For Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s assassination spurred apocalyptic sensibilities tied to the American nation and its new birth of freedom. As the news set in, Douglass sensed, “a hush fell upon the land as though each man in it heard a voice from heaven and paused to learn its meaning.” The meaning Douglass divined lodged in what his biographer, David Blight, terms a “millennial nationalism” in which[t]he United States was seen as God’s redemptive instrument in history, and with providential appointments went burdens of world significance. The notion of an elected nation included both promise and threat. How could the model republic, called to nationality by the Founding Fathers, endure its own tragic flaws? The Civil War became the crucible in which the nature and existence of that nationalism would be either preserved and redefined, or lost forever. 16
Alongside his purported lack of malice, Lincoln’s morality received significant attention. Lincoln had, one eulogist claimed, given the nation a “moral genius.” Another amplified on the theme, noting, “It was mainly his adherence to ethical principles in political discussions th
at gave such point and force to his reasonings; for no politician of this generation has applied Christian ethics to questions of public policy with more of honesty, of consistency, or of downright earnestness.”17
If Lincoln had a problem, most eulogists agreed, it was that very likeness to Christ, especially as it appeared in his lack of malice or revenge toward the South. Some went so far as to suggest that in God’s Providence, Lincoln had been taken up prematurely because he would not “have been equal” to the harsh penalties that divine justice required of the beaten South, but instead would “have been too lenient.”18
In an unpublished sermon on Lincoln’s death, Abijah Marvin likened Lincoln to Jonathan Edwards and Stephen Douglas. Death spared all three greats from later failures. For Edwards, his magisterial History of Redemption project, if completed, “would never satisfy the majesty of the vision.” Douglas “was taken from the evil he might do if his life were prolonged.” And “clouds seemed to be gathering over [Lincoln’s] head” in regard to reconstruction. But from all of that, he had been saved: “Fortunate in his death he has entered the pantheon of history as the great and good president—Lincoln.”19
Hard justice required a different president in peace than Lincoln would have been. Many Christian moralists in the North agreed that justice required revenge:If now we strip all who have knowingly, freely, and persistently upheld this rebellion, of their property and their citizenship, they will become beggared and infamous outcasts ... like Cain, with the brand upon their foreheads, and with a punishment greater than they can bear.... The Union people of the South ... would plant farms and villages upon the old slave plantations; and with our help in schools and churches, a new social order would arise upon the basis of freedom and loyalty.20
One of the more astute sermons to be preached about Lincoln’s assassination came from N. H. Chamberlain, who delivered it to his St. James parish in Birmingham, Connecticut. Chamberlain recognized that blood was needed for America’s religion to bloom. The Civil War, together with Lincoln’s assassination, provided what mere rhetoric could never achieve—a sacred compact. He began, as he must, with blood: “A nationality is a sublime, a solemn, a sacred thing. It has its history, its prophecy, its destiny. It is always built upon solemn sacrifices; it is a compact always sealed with blood.”
From blood he turned to the national totem for which the blood was shed: “Our flag ... is the symbol of our nationality, and is sacred with its history. As a nation changes or advances, so does its flag, which wraps in its folds its story.... The last four years have encircled it with a new halo of glory. It hath endured a new baptism, wherein the smoke of battle stained not and the fire consumed not.” From the flag in general, Chamberlain turned to its sacred component parts:Henceforth that flag is the legend which we bequeath to future generations, of that severe and solemn struggle for the nation’s life.... Henceforth the red on it is deeper, for the crimson with which the blood of countless martyrs has colored it; the white on it is purer, for the pure sacrifice and self-surrender of those who went to their graves upbearing it; the blue on it is heavenlier, for the great constancy of those dead heroes, whose memory becomes henceforth as the immutable upper skies that canopy our land, gleaming with stars wherein we read their glory and our duty.
Only after setting the sacramental context did he come to the martyred messiah:Yea, now behold a deeper crimson, a purer white, a heavenlier blue. A President’s blood is on it, who died because he dared to hold it in the forefront of the nation. The life of the President, who died in the nation’s Capitol, becomes, henceforth, an integral part of the life of the Republic. In Him the accidents of the visible flesh are changed to the permanence of an invisible and heroic spirit.21
Consciously or not, when Chamberlain capitalized “Him,” he spoke of divinity. Through his death, an innocent Lincoln became transformed from the prophet of America’s civil religion to its messiah.
Grant had no love for Stanton, or for his betrayal of Sherman in the press (“he was a man who never questioned his own authority”). But on the issue of Sherman’s unauthorized negotiations, Grant had to support the secretary of war and the new president. Although personally aghast at the prospect of a hard peace following on a hard war, Grant was a soldier and he followed his orders. Later, Grant would protect Sherman by insisting that the memorandum was “conditional” on political approval. Since approval was not forthcoming, Grant had instructed Sherman to rescind the agreement and negotiate another surrender with Johnston on the more limited terms that Grant had extended to Lee at Appomattox.22 At the same time, Grant refused to bow to radicals whose cries for vengeance threatened to upend his armistice with Lee. When some vowed to reverse those concessions, Grant countered that he would resign his command. With that, the movement to punish Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia passed. Even the most determined radical knew better than to take on America’s warrior high priest.
On April 26 Johnston surrendered his command to Sherman according to the same conditions specified by Grant at Appomattox. Grant quickly approved the terms, fearing that the vengeful mood in Washington might otherwise prevail. As he returned from Raleigh, Grant reflected on the Southern people and their desire for peace. In a letter to his wife, he commented, “The suffering that must exist in the South the next year, even with the war ending now, will be beyond conception. People who talk now of further retaliation and punishment, except of the political leaders, either do not conceive of the suffering endured already or they are heartless and unfeeling.”23
Grant was right to worry. The secular and, even more, the religious press led the assault on Sherman’s peace plan. A writer for the Christian Herald in Cincinnati was incredulous: “The news from General Sherman is startling. If he is not deranged, his course is traitorous. He pledges himself to obtain from his ‘principal’ terms of peace, giving up all that we have been contending for.”24
The American Presbyterian lashed out against Unitarian-inspired softness and condemned “any namby-pamby, anti-capital punishment, semi-universalist, semi-Pantheistic clique in New York or Boston.... Posterity will hold us accountable for a strict, a firm, and a righteous policy towards these engineers of the darkest plot against human happiness that the age has produced.” 25 Evangelical presses did not stop with their excoriations of Sherman and singled out Henry Ward Beecher as a turncoat—“In a word, Mr. Beecher, now that the enemy is conquered, may be said to have gone over to the enemy”—for recommending clemency toward Jefferson Davis.26
With Johnston surrendered, that left only General E. Kirby Smith’s Army of the Trans-Mississippi and General Richard Taylor in Alabama and Mississippi. Both were easily vanquished, and with their fall, the war ended. The last fight occurred on May 12 at Palmito Ranch, Texas. Ironically, it ended with a Confederate victory. On May 26 the Army of the Trans-Mississippi surrendered, and on May 29 President Johnson granted amnesty and pardon to most Confederates.
Victory parades of Federal troops followed in Washington, first by Grant, then by Sherman (who refused to shake Stanton’s outstretched hand). In a dark omen of what was to become of race relations in the reunited nation, no black military units were included in the parades as they had been at Lincoln’s funeral.
With news of the last armies’ surrender, the war disappeared from discourse as suddenly as it had appeared in the aftermath of the surrender of Sumter. After four horrendous years of bloodshed, God or the gods were propitiated and all that remained was the reconstruction of the Union. Never did a war end with more anticlimax. The costly conflict that had obsessed a nation for four years passed into silence. Religious and secular papers spent little time on peace, except to run brief headlines celebrating “End of war!”27 With that, they moved on to mundane events, as if the war had never taken place.
AFTERWORD
The Civil War may have ended with a whimper, but ongoing debates over its meaning and morality contain a good bit of bang. Throughout this book the focus has been on how th
e war was fought and how the home fronts responded. I set aside the question of why the war was fought (jus ad bellum) because, as I argued at the outset, secession is a moral issue with no moral criterion for a sure answer.
But secession was the catalyst of 1861. The war came. Now it’s 1865. All the battles have been fought. The issue of secession has been settled once and, to all appearances, for all. We have witnessed the wanton destruction and inhuman suffering Americans inflicted on one another. We have watched the death toll mount into the hundreds of thousands. We have seen the raw and cynical persecution of innocents enacted by many, from the lowliest soldiers to the greatest commanders, statesmen, and moralists. We have also observed great embodiments of courage, compassion, and nobility.
None of these, taken singly or together, however, resolves the question: was the Civil War just? Having lived vicariously within the spaces of the war, its battlefronts and its home fronts, it is appropriate in closing to reopen the why question. To paraphrase Lincoln at Gettysburg: did 620,000 men, and thousands more Confederate women, die in vain?
I have deliberately saved this question for last, because I don’t believe any single answer is possible. At the outset I found it more compelling to lay out the evidence. But an honest analysis perhaps requires one personal response. Despite many immoralities that went largely unchecked and were even applauded by both sides at the lowest and highest levels, I cannot bring myself to say that 620,000 men died in vain. Why? In part because, for the most part, they did not say it. By the close of the Vietnam War, soldiers aplenty condemned the war as unjust. But this did not happen after the Civil War. Winners and losers alike would concede almost anything, it seemed, except the idea that their internecine war was ultimately meaningless or unjust.
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