Upon the Altar of the Nation (10 page)

The Sixty-Ninth New York State Militia, 1861. Religion supplied indispensable legitimacy to the war effort on both sides of the conflict. Here the “Fighting Irish” celebrate Mass in the field. Roman Catholics and Jews no less than Protestants proclaimed the holiness of their cause.

In terms of national identity, the North had long adopted the rhetoric of the “New Israel” as its own. By 1861 it was deeply ingrained and as instinctual to elite opinion shapers as to ordinary men and women. The rituals of fast and thanksgiving days, begun in seventeenth-century New England, continued to serve as major occasions to preach righteousness and celebrate chosen peoplehood. They articulated what the intellectual historian Perry Miller dubbed an “American jeremiad” that spelled out America’s sacred identity as a “redeemer nation” engaged in a special “covenant” with God to save the world.
¹⁴
The Puritan founders and their eighteenth-century Presbyterian cousins in the Middle Colonies had invented the jeremiad in a theocratic context that fused church and state on the model of ancient Israel. Their democratic stepchildren retrieved the rhetoric of most-favored-nation, but in place of theocracy attired it in democratic garb celebrating religious liberty and republican ideology.
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However they saw the role of slavery in perverting the South, most Northern moral arbiters in 1861 agreed that the ultimate goal of the war was the preservation of the Union.
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Because of the United States’ divine commission to be a redeemer nation, preserving the Union was a sufficient cause.

While few Christian moralists in the North favored immediate and universal emancipation for slaves everywhere, many did, like Lincoln, see the system as morally reprehensible and contrary to the Christian gospels. In this vein of thinking,
the
moral cause—preserving the Union—could bring with it the happy by-product of emancipation, or at least limited emancipation. But emancipation could not justify the war. In 1861 slavery had not yet even risen to “a” cause for most white Americans. “The” cause was exclusively the Union. Anything else compromised the Constitution and threatened the national covenant. Before casualties soared, one just cause was enough. And to Union moralists, the guilt was obvious. “Defensive” wars are just and, in the case of the attack on Sumter, the South was undeniably the “original aggressor.”
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As for the North, a just patriotism governed the war mania and gave it saving energy.

The Northern religious press stood alongside sermons as a moral booster for just war. Once a vehicle for religious commentary with extremely limited secular content, the religious weekly was co-opted for political ends virtually overnight. The effects were prodigious and essential to Lincoln’s survival and ultimate success.

Already by the mid-nineteenth century, the religious press had become a weekly news medium capable of competing with, and even surpassing in circulation, the secular press. Published in New York, the Congregational
Independent
boasted a circulation of 60,000 as of January 1, 1861. For eight Northern Methodist religious weeklies alone, aggregate circulation averaged 130,000.
¹⁸
Where contemporary twenty-first-century religious publications tend to limit their material exclusively to matters religious and spiritual, the nineteenth-century religious press became a polymath production divided among “Religious News,” “General News” (politics and war), and commercial advertisements for everything from garden tools to topical application of cocaine for baldness.

Nevertheless, before 1861, religious news dominated the press. Following Sumter, talk of war was irresistible. Beginning virtually to the day of April 12, the ratio of religious to general news shifted decisively to general or secular news and would retain that imbalance throughout the war.
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Unlike the secular press, moreover, the religious press was almost exclusively Republican and pro-Lincoln—a position that would sustain Lincoln throughout the war.

In the upper Midwest, a Presbyterian newspaper serving the Western Reserve called the
Christian Herald
carried an account of the shelling of Sumter with the following commentary:
Commentators were prepared to accept the idea of the Union as a just cause. But they understood that cause in the context of a war of limited extent: “We do not yet believe the North can be provoked to invade the South.”
²⁰

In the wake of Sumter, war coverage grew even greater. After canvassing the New York City churches on April 18, the
Independent
reported that “in nearly all the churches in this city—and probably in a majority of churches throughout the country—the sermons of last Sunday were mainly in reference to the War.” And what kind of sermons were they? “Many congregations made the day an occasion for patriotic contributions for the outfit of volunteers, or for the support of their families.” “The gallant Major Anderson and his wife attended service at Trinity. At Dr. McLane’s Presbyterian church, Williamsburg, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ was sung. Dr. T D. Wells preached from the words: ‘He that hath no sword, let him buy one.’”
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Like all nineteenth-century presses, secular and religious, the
Christian Herald
included skimmings from other presses on its mailing list. The
Methodist of New York
was quoted as saying: “We can sacrifice neither God nor Country even at the demand of a brother.”
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From the
Independent,
the
Herald’s
editors reprinted a justification for war centered on the preservation of the Union: “It is not like our last [Mexican War] a war of conquest and acquisition. It is a war to defend the life of our nationality, the sacredness of our Constitution, the permanence of our Union, and the being of our Government.”
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In Philadelphia the radically antislavery “New School” Presbyterian minister and editor Albert Barnes wrote in his
American Presbyterian
on April 18: “War Begun ... Now, treason, hide your diminished head, and the God of our fathers be with the right!”
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Earlier, Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary, Barnes’s theological adversary, had issued a widely circulated pamphlet entitled
The State of the Country
in which he refused to condemn slavery as, in all instances, a sin. The pamphlet was published in January 1861 and sold in the thousands. Hodge went on in the pamphlet to disapprove of slavery, but urged that, if secession became necessary, it be accomplished peacefully.
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After Sumter, that sentiment largely disappeared. In Monmouth, Illinois, the editor criticized Hodge for his pamphlet and summoned the readers to war.
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In time, Hodge would change his mind as well.

No such ambivalence over slavery characterized the black religious press. Their ambivalence was over a “Union” that would not even allow Northern freedmen to fight. Perhaps the most influential African American religious weekly was the African Methodist Episcopal
Christian Recorder,
begun in Philadelphia in 1852 and disseminated widely throughout the African American community.
²⁷
On April 27, the paper carried an editorial on “The Star-Spangled Banner, and the Duty of Colored Americans to the Flag.” In it the writer complained of the refusal to enlist black volunteers, but then went on to declare that “if the nation, in its bloody conflict with armed treason, should be so pressed as to have its heart harmonized towards you, and then call upon you for martial aid, you may fly swifter than eagles, stronger than lions, to sustain the national flag.”
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While Northern moralists uncoupled the campaign for emancipation from the justification for war, they did not hesitate routinely to condemn slavery as a sin. Only abolitionists sought to anchor the moral objectives of the Lincoln administration’s war policies and goals in emancipation. Profanity, intemperance, and Sabbath-breaking were also legitimate moral issues and sins, but they could not justify war.

Still, there was also a profound distinction that made slavery different from other sins. In the first place, unlike profanity, it was limited to the border states and the South. Second, despite Southern protests in the name of states’ rights, it dictated secession. Moral commentators employed a rhetorical sleight of hand whereby they insisted slavery was
not
the cause of the war. Rather it
was
the cause of
secession,
which
was
the cause of war. This argument, while complex, was not without its own logic. In fact, the issue of secession was
both
about patriotic nation-worship of the Union
and
about the sanctity of a democratically derived commitment to containing the spread of slavery. And in this equation, the moral upper hand was with the containment of slavery (with an eye to ultimate abolition) and not with its growth and infinite perpetuation.

The double-edged argument for Union and the containment of slavery allowed supporters of the war to maintain their stand that the military action was justified. They readily conceded that the slavery issue, more than any other one, fueled sectional animosities and in that indirect sense “caused” hostilities. It was imperative, though, that they cast the issue in a language other than universal abolition, however much they sought it. Otherwise a just war to protect the Constitution and the Union would become an unjust war of aggression and occupation in defiance of constitutional guarantees. For the killing to be just, the Constitution had to be honored. Whatever role slavery may have played in exacerbating tensions and “causing” sectionalism, the cause of war was Southern treason.

In the North and the South, the nation’s most respected moral arbiters evidenced little attention to the ethics of looming war. There was no shortage of justifications for war, but virtually no thought was given to how it should be waged or what, if any, limitations ought to be imposed for the sake of a justly fought war. In place of deep moral reflection, each side labeled the other the aggressor and succumbed immediately to the thrill of a “just” war fought, on both sides, for legitimate defensive purposes.

A Northern writer for the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. had no doubt as to who was at fault: “It is not an
aggressive
war on our part.... War is offensive, on the part of the power that commits the first act of violence; it is defensive, on the part of him who receives and resists the first act of violence.”
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Immediately upon defending the war as just, the writer proceeded to pillory the enemy with biblical examples of unjust wars:

A Protestant editor in Illinois argued that even if Northern armies entered the South, “[i]nstead of invading the South, they are really repelling an invasion from the South.” In these terms, the paper explained, the war’s “cause is as righteous as ever summoned a people to arms.”
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With rhetoric like this, offensive could easily become defensive, so that the whole question of just war could be assumed. Armies could invade the South and claim they were fighting a defensive war. In an argument not picked up by most commentators early in the war but common in the North later, Philadelphia’s
Banner of the Covenant
concluded that because of slavery, the South is “the original aggressor” and therefore the “offender” who sets in motion “the lawfulness of defensive war.”
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In other words, slavery itself was the aggressor.

Though unwilling to engage in a moral exploration of just-war theory, or dictate the conduct of a just war, many religious presses were willing to pronounce the war “religious.” If the coming war was not a sacred crusade, it nevertheless had religious justifications. In Cincinnati, the writers for
Presbyter
asked the question: “Is this a religious war?” They looked for a moral answer from a most unusual—and arguably secular—source: fund-raising. Many churches were employing Sundays or days of special sermons as an occasion for purchasing equipment for the local militias represented in their congregations: “This movement of churches as such is something quite new, this raising of funds and providing of material equipment on the Sabbath for the war is significant and must certainly be taken as indicating their feeling, that this is a religious war.”
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In mid-nineteenth-century discourse, “religious war” meant a just war.