Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Axtell, “Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited,” in his After Columbus, 20.

  2 Of Christian just-war theorists, the most important were Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546), Francisco Suárez (1548—1617), Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1704), Christian Wolff (1679-1754), and Emmerich de Vattel (1714-1767).

  3 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars; Ramsey, Just War; Elshtain, Just War Theory; Best, Humanity in Warfare; Johnson, Just War Tradition; O‘Brien, Conduct of Just and Limited War.

  4 Unlike Realpolitik, just-war theory refuses to separate politics from ethics. See Elshtain, “Just War as Politics,” in Decosse, But Was It Just? 43-60.

  5 On civil wars, see Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 96.

  6 See the argument in Parish, “War for the Union as a Just War,” in Adams and van Minnen, Aspects of War in American History, 82.

  7 Allen, Constitution and the Union, 12—13. On the moral ambiguities of secession see Buchanan, Secession. Less persuasive—because it is more polemical—is Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events. For an incisive critique of Adams’s “neo-Confederate” reading of secession, see Feller, “Libertarians in the Attic,” 184-94.

  8 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War.

  9 In terms of total-war language, definitions are crucial. Two important works that challenge my sense of “total” war are Neely, “Was the Civil War a Total War?” 27, and Grimsley, Hard Hand of War. Both of these historians aptly employ technical definitions of total war originating in World War II to refer to the deliberate murder of civilians with unprecedented weapons of mass destruction. But, in my opinion, the mentality of total war existed in the Civil War and prepared Americans for greater destructions once the technology emerged. “Savage” wars (of which white Americans were superb practitioners) routinely blurred the distinctions between soldiers and civilians, but I would not necessarily term wars against Indians “total.” My definition, as will become clear through the text, is more historically relative and traces the seeds of twentieth-century “modern” wars of universal mobilization to the Civil War. For works that take up a total-war terminology see, for example, Johnson, Just War Tradition, 281—326; Janda, “Shutting the Gates of Mercy,” 7—26; and Winik, April 1865.

  10 This point is powerfully argued in William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, 436-40.

  11 The figure of civilian casualties is taken from McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 619. The subject of civilian casualties is astoundingly understudied. Professor McPherson’s estimate is the only estimate I have been able to locate.

  12 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 1—21, reprinted in Ritchey and Jones, American Civil Religion. For a sampling of recent scholarship on the subject of civil religion, see Cherry, God’s New Israel; Bellah and Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion; John Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture; Linder, “Civil Religion in Historical Perspective,” 399-421; and Henry, Intoxication of Power.

  13 See, for example, Alley, So Help Me God; Hutcheson, God in the White House; or Pierarad and Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency.

  14 See Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation.

  15 See, for example, Herberg’s classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew, or Jewett, Captain America Complex.

  16 See, for example, Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 33-35, or Mead, “Nation with the Soul of a Church,” 275-83.

  17 See Hutchison and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, and Hatch, Sacred Cause of Liberty.

  18 Ronald Reagan employed this metaphor as the defining image of his presidency.

  19 The classic summary of the jeremiad appeared in Perry Miller’s New England Mind. See also Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, and Stout, New England Soul.

  20 I describe not one but two civil religions during the war, each identical in theological terminology and morally opposed. With Confederate surrender, vestiges of a Confederate civil religion would endure in the “Religion of the Lost Cause.” But this would fade and, in time, the white North and South would reunite under one comprehensive and compelling American civil religion.

  21 Blight, Race and Reunion, 3.

  PROLOGUE

  1 For a particularly trenchant examination of Lincoln’s moral vision, see Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, especially 185—227.

  2 This theme is treated brilliantly in Eric Foner’s now classic Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. See also Sewall, Ballots for Freedom.

  3 Forman, West Point, 117.

  4 Schaff, Spirit of Old West Point, 146.

  5 Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 529, 531. For text and analysis, see Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union.

  6 Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 372.

  1. “THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH IS RISING”

  1 The number of fast-day sermons published is remarkable and itself an evidence of how strongly sentiments had moved in one short month. A brief sampling for the North would include Bellows, Crisis of Our National Disease; Beecher, Peace Be Still; Breckinridge, Union to Be Preserved; Francis Vinton, Irreligion and Corruption and Fanaticism Rebuked; Humphrey, Our Nation; Fisher, Sermon Preached in the Chapel of Yale College; Allen, Constitution and the Union; Abbott, Address upon Our National Affairs; and Roset, Sermon on the Preservation of the Union. For the South, see especially Cuthbert, Scriptural Grounds for Secession from the Union, and Dreher, Sermon. There were a handful of fast-day sermons calling for calm and moderation; see, for example, Guion, Sermon Preached, and William Adams, Prayers for Rulers.

  2 Quoted in Phillips, “Literary Movement for Secession,” in his Studies in Southern History and Politics, 33.

  3 Despite the efforts of Confederates and present-day neo-Confederates to decouple states’ rights from slavery, the connection between the two was symbiotic and reflected in the efforts of South Carolina-dominated secession commissioners sent throughout the slaveholding states to trumpet their gospel of disunion. See Dew, Apostles of Disunion.

  4 On the interconnections of states’ rights and race-based slavery, as well as the movement to reopen the African slave trade, see Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, especially 125-52. See also Freehling, Prelude to Civil War; Channing, Crisis of Fear; and Barnwell, Love of Order.

  5 McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds; see also Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class.

  6 The Confederate constitution was formally ratified on March 11, 1861. It is reprinted in DeRosa, Confederate Constitution of 1861, 135-51. On the election and inauguration of Jefferson Davis, see William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis, 303-10.

  7 Eddy, Secession—Shall It Be Peace or War? 17. In New York the Reverend Henry Bellows expressed similar sentiments in Crisis of Our National Disease: “Why not consent, then, to pacific and amicable and just terms of separation ... they ought to be permitted to go out of [the union] in peace.” Reprinted in Fast Day Sermons, 303.

  8 Fiske, Sermon on the Present National Troubles, 18—19.

  9 Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 579-88.

  10 See John L. Thomas, The Liberator, 304-37.

  11 Martha LeBaron Goddard to Mary W Johnson, February 11 and March 24, 1861, Civil War Papers, American Antiquarian Society (hereafter AAS). I am indebted to Joanne Chaison for calling these recently assembled letters to my attention.

  12 The literature on abolitionism is vast and, since the 1960s, almost exclusively sympathetic. For representative studies, see Nye, William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers; McPherson, Struggle for Equality; Sewart, Holy Warriors; Thomas, The Liberator; Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan; Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism; Perry, Radical Abolitionism; McInerney, Fortunate Heirs of Freedom; and Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina. On black abolitionists, see Quarles, Black Abolitionists; Pease and Pease, They Who Would be Free; and Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War.

  13 This willingness would not account for
the views of the vast majority of Northern blacks, who wished to fight a war for freedom. See Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 1—130.

  14 Charles Regan Wilson, “Robert Lewis Dabney,” 79-89.

  15 Robert Dabney to William Hoge, December 5, 1860, Manuscript Archives, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond.

  16 Moses Hoge to T. V. Moore, December 22, 1860, in ibid.

  17 Robert Dabney to Charles Hodge, January 23, 1861, in ibid.

  18 See Donald, Lincoln, 257-94.

  19 See Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics.

  20 The best description of Republican ideology remains Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.

  21 Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 531, 536.

  22 Ibid. In his provocative work On Hallowed Ground, 10, Diggins argues that with the advent of civil war, Lincoln “returned to the Declaration as the redeeming ethical ideal.” On Lincoln’s embrace of the Declaration of Independence as the foundational document for American identity and common meaning, and his intellectual affinity with Jefferson, see Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 84—89; Maier, American Scripture, 196-208; and Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution, 102—3.

  23 Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce, in Basler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 3:376; hereafter cited as CW.

  24 See William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis, 316-18.

  2. “LET THE STRIFE BEGIN”

  1 See Donald, Lincoln, 288-92. For a good account of how the Union retained the use of Fort Pickens even as Sumter fell, see Pearce, Pensacola during the Civil War, 48-69.

  2 The best account of the fall of Fort Sumter, on which these paragraphs depend significantly, is Current’s Lincoln and the First Shot. Also useful is Potter’s Lincoln and His Party.

  3 The issue of Lincoln’s motives in moving to supply Sumter has been hotly debated. From a Northern perspective, it was an innocent attempt to save a Federal property. From a Southern perspective, it was a ruse to force the South to act and, in so doing, cement Northern support for the looming war. A middle path that I find especially persuasive is discussed in Stampp, And the War Came, 280-86.

  4 For an analysis of the factors influencing Lincoln’s decision, see Donald, Lincoln, 288-92.

  5 Richmond Enquirer, March 9, 1861.

  6 For a thorough description of the Confederate government in the days immediately prior to the attack on Sumter, see Current, Lincoln and the First Shot, 126-53.

  7 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times, 324.

  8 Charleston Mercury, April 13, 1861.

  9 Quoted in William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis, 325.

  10 Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1868-70), II, 35.

  11 Donald, Lincoln, 296.

  12 Richardson, Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis, I, 60.

  13 Too often in the past accusations about who “started” the war merely reinforced sectional prejudices, with Lincoln or Davis entirely innocent and the other entirely guilty. Current offers a more balanced perspective Lincoln and the First Shot, 206—8: “In those early April days both Lincoln and Davis took chances which, in retrospect, seem awesome. The chances they took eventuated in the most terrible of all wars for the American people. Lincoln and Davis, as each made his irrevocable decision, could see clearly enough the cost of holding back. Neither could see so clearly the cost of going ahead. Both expected, or at least hoped, that the hostilities would be limited in space and time.... Viewed impartially, both sides were guilty of aggression, and neither was.”

  14 Quoted in Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country, 148.

  15 Given the engineering focus of antebellum West Point, formal instruction in tactics was minimal.

  16 Janda, “Shutting the Gates of Mercy,” 9-10.

  17 Eliot, West Point in the Confederacy, 8.

  18 J. G. Barnard to Editors, National Intelligencer, date February 6, 1859.

  19 Howard, Autobiography, I, 99.

  20 Crary, Dear Belle, 87.

  21 Forman, West Point, 120—21.

  22 Kirshner, Class of 1861, 9.

  23 Crary, Dear Belle, 92.

  24 Quoted in Kirshner, Class of 1861, 11.

  25 Burlingame, With Lincoln in the White House, 35. See also Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, 279-81.

  26 J. Stewart Brown to Alonzo Hill, May 1, 1861, Civil War Papers, AAS.

  27 Quoted in Current, Lincoln and the First Shot, 193.

  3. “OUR FLAG CARRIES ... AMERICAN HISTORY”

  1 J. B. Jones, Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, 19, 22-23. See also Emory Thomas, Confederate State of Richmond, 6.

  2 Andrews, “The Confederate Press and Public Morale,” 447.

  3 Other notable newspapers and periodicals include the Southern Literary Messenger, the Magnolia Weekly, the Record of News, History and Literature (first published June 18, 1863), and a humorous magazine, the Southern Punch (first published August 29, 1863). The Southern Illustrated News (fall 1862) became the most popular periodical in the wartime South.

  4 Quoted in Current, Lincoln and the First Shot, 159-60.

  5 Burlingame, At Lincoln’s Side, 120.

  6 See O’Leary, To Die For, 20-25.

  7 Beecher, National Flag, in his Patriotic Addresses, 291. Beecher’s address was originally delivered in May 1861. The flag over Fort Sumter was the Palmetto state flag of South Carolina. The Confederate flag, sometimes called the “Stars and Bars,” went through two iterations and was not formally settled until the Confederate Congress passed an act in 1863. Even in the border state of Kentucky, strong Unionist sentiment was expressed by flag-waving. In Louisville: “The city was ablaze with Union sentiment. Public meetings were held and the most emphatic expressions in favor of the Union were applauded. ‘Flag raisings’ became popular. Every day’s issue of the papers contained notices of these ‘flag raisings.’ So common did they become that the Louisville Democrat said that the city had become known as ‘the city of flags.’” Quoted in McDowell, City of Conflict, 2-3. On flag culture in the South and in the nation, see Bonner, “Flag Culture and the Consolidation of Confederate Nationalism,” 293-332, and Bonner, Colors and Blood.

  8 On the American flag as a “totem” of American civil religion, see Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation.

  9 See Andrews’s two classics: The North Reports the Civil War and The South Reports the Civil War.

  10 On the rise of the penny press, see Mott’s classic American Journalisrn. See also Henkin, City Reading, and Leonard, News for All.

  11 New York Herald, March 27 and March 21, 1861.

  12 Ibid., April 14, 1861.

  13 New York Tribune, April 15, 1861.

  14 Ibid., April 13, 1861. On the cultural phenomenon of “making” the news, see Schudson, Discovering the News.

  15 New York Tribune, April 15 and 19, 1861.

  16 Samuel S. Cox, Eight Years in Congress, 193.

  17 Northern confidence in their superiority was a commonplace. One typical sentiment, expressed by the Reverend John S. C. Abbott, was unabashedly confident: “Should the Cotton states secede, they will make but a feeble nation.... Should the South provoke war, it is ruined beyond redemption.... Dreadful, beyond imagining, to the South, will be that hour when civil war shall be seriously introduced. May God, in mercy, save them from the awful doom.” In An Address upon Our National Affairs, 13.

  18 The Age, May 4, 1861. The only known surviving copy of The Age is housed at the American Antiquarian Society. I am indebted to Professor Patricia Cohen for calling this source to my attention.

  19 Charleston Mercury, April 18, 1861.

  20 Ibid., April 20, 1861.

  21 On Confederate ideology, see DeRosa, Confederate Constitution of 1861, 12-13.

  22 Richmond Examiner, July 16, 1861. From newspaper circulation rates it is clear that most newspaper-reading inhabitants subscribed to both a religious and a secular paper. It is, therefore, as important to examine the secu
lar press as well as denominational papers in reconstructing religious meanings in Richmond. The secular papers contained some but not much religious material in their columns, and taken by themselves would give a very different picture of the power and pervasiveness of religion in Richmond public discourse and Confederate ideology than that which appears in the religious press. Interestingly, Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War, derive much of their evidence for religion’s supposed abandonment of the Confederacy from the secular press.

  23 Emory Thomas, Confederate State of Richmond, 30.

  24 Andrews, “The Confederate Press,” 464, n78.

  25 Ibid., 463, n77.

  26 For one account of this borrowing see Jones, Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, 161.

  27 Richmond Enquirer, December 18, 1860.

  28 Wise is quoted in W.M.E.R., “The Thanksgiving Day Contention,” 9-11.

  4. “THE DAY OF THE POPULACE”

  1 On the lack of (fictional) literary classics emerging from the Civil War, see Wilson, Patriotic Gore, and Aaron, Unwritten War. On writers and intellectuals in the Civil War, see Masur, “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” and Fredrickson’s classic Inner Civil War.

  2 Quoted in Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 66.

  3 See Morris, Better Angel.

  4 Masur, “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” 21. 1.

  5 Ibid., 163.

  6 Quoted in Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 72-73.

  7 Masur, “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” 7.

  8 Higginson, “Ordeal by Battle,” 8, reprinted in Masur, “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” 184, 186.

  9 Beecher, Battle Set in Array in his Patriotic Addresses, 276, 287.

  10 Bartholomew, Hour of Peril, 3-4, 14.

  11 Countryman, Spirit and Purpose of the Conflict, 14.