Upon the Altar of the Nation (11 page)

 

In the Confederacy, the task of sacralizing a new nation fell with particular weight on the shoulders of the churches and synagogues in the new nation’s capital. Without the clergy’s active endorsement of secession and war alongside that of the statesmen and generals, there could not have been a Confederate nation. By the 1840s and 1850s, Christianity represented the most powerful cultural system in the Old South. Generations of missionaries and revivalists succeeded in converting the South from a largely unchurched region to a region where evangelicalism triumphed.
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To be sure, the Southern culture of “honor” weighed heavily on the master planters, many of whom never bothered to join a church. This culture was constrained, however, by its own aristocratic sensibilities. It could never win popular approval, either among the foot soldiers or on the home front. Independence was painful to contemplate and wrenching to execute, and only the highest ideals could justify it. Those ideals were religious. For men, women, and children, Christianity offered the only terms out of which a national identity could be constructed and a violent war pursued.

In Charleston, the Reverend Thomas Smyth preached a three-part sermon, “After the Fall of Ft. Sumter, 1861.” For background, he recalled how, as recently as the advent of the New Year, “this state and city were wholly unprepared to undertake a war. Our forts, our arms, our arsenals were in possession of federal troops. We had no fortification, no organization, no military commander of experience, and but little ammunition.” Yet Southern resolve and righteousness ran strong.

In an earlier fast-day sermon, Smyth had made plain that the abolitionists were the root evil behind Northern aggression, and that they dictated Lincoln’s politics and pursuit of war. “Black Republicans” were blind to the fact that slavery was a sacred trust imposed on the South by British and Northern slave traders and commissioned by God. Abolitionists forgot that God “ordained” slavery as “a penal infliction upon a guilty race.” That was why, in contrast to Northern labor, slaves “have multiplied in a ratio far greater than their masters; that they are healthier and happier than any other laboring class on the face of the earth.”
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For support, Smyth turned to Augusta’s Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson. Wilson went so far as to argue that slavery was so central to God’s designs that it would persist into the millennium, albeit “freed from its stupid servility on the one side and its excesses of neglect and severity on the other.”
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With looming hostilities and secession, Smyth continued, the state was transformed. Forces were gathered, siege guns set in place, and the liberation of Charleston accomplished: “The fall of Sumter, and of Sumter’s flag, was a signal gun from the battlements of heaven, announcing from God to every Southern State this cause is mine—come ye up, come to the house of the Lord against the mighty, and saying to the North, Thou shalt not go up nor fight against your brethren.”
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How did this deliverance take place? Here Smyth invoked “the recognition of providence”:

At St. Michael’s Church (Episcopal) in Charleston, James H. Elliott preached a sermon on
The Bloodless Victory.
The sheer fact of conquest was one thing, but to humble Fort Sumter with no loss of Confederate lives was nearly miraculous. Clearly, Elliott concluded, such a compelling victory could only be ascribed to “the hand of God.”
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The Confederate religious press, like the Northern religious press, stuck to constitutional arguments, identifying war as a just cause for states’ rights. But then, like their Northern counterparts, they went on to address the moral issue of slavery from the opposite side. Southern editors promoted the good of slavery in a “Christian Republic,” while denouncing abolitionists as the real enemy manipulating Northern public opinion and riling citizens. By controlling the Republican Party and its president, abolitionists were promoting a war of Northern aggression on innocents.

As in the North, the religious press in the South accompanied the preachers into the fray. Throughout the South, circulation levels were high and destined to grow far higher with the onset of hostilities. Nashville’s
Christian Advocate
was the largest, with weekly sales of thirteen thousand already by the 1850s.
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War would only enhance the news-reading public’s appetite for more. Both Northeners and Southerners augmented the reading of their own side’s papers with “outside” reading from the New York penny press and Northern denominational papers, although they would have to be smuggled into the South.
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So effective would the press become that generals on both sides would rely on it for intelligence.

Subject matter aside, Confederate (and Northern) religious newspapers differed in one important respect from the secular penny press: their editors were not professionals. They were not caught up in the journalistic penchant for political infighting and the expose, nor were they willing to attack the secular press or competing denominational publishers. The religious press had no formal political affiliations and tended to condemn any and all criticisms of duly constituted civil authority. This would prove a godsend to President Davis.

The religious press also differed from the secular press by its explicitly Christian and devotional frame of reference. As summarized by the Episcopal
Southern Churchman:
“It surveys the world not with the eye of the politician, or the merchant, but condenses, arranges, and reports the events of the day, as connected with the religion of Christ.”
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The
Southern Churchman,
like other religious weeklies, was true to its word. An examination of its contents reveals materials suited for all ages, including children. In many ways, the secular press, with its emphasis on politics, remained a largely male medium. The religious press, on the other hand, appealed equally to men, women, and children, to pious soldiers and politically apathetic civilians. In this sense, it brought the war’s ideals and mission to the widest possible audience. When viewed collectively, it is striking how little religious newspapers varied from one to the next. Together they reinforced the rhetoric of the jeremiad and beat the drum for a righteous war.

The circulation of the South’s denominational newspapers and religious tracts underwent a phenomenal expansion during the war; the growth of Richmond’s secular press was modest by comparison. The Baptists acted first, and their Virginia Sunday School and Publication Board would publish over thirty million pages. The Soldiers’ Tract Association of the Methodist Church was established in 1862 and published forty thousand copies of two semimonthly papers (one entitled
The Soldier’s Paper)
and various missionary publications. The Evangelical Tract Society, based in Petersburg, Virginia, published more than one hundred tracts and the
Army and Navy Messenger.
In 1864, the
Central Presbyterian
claimed that Richmond alone was sending out ten thousand copies of religious journals each week to the Confederate soldiers, and that religious newspapers had a total circulation of ninety thousand per month in the armies.
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With the advent of secession, nationhood, and war, the religious press turned to the preaching of politics. A clerical writer for the
Central Presbyterian
explained that while party politics was best left to others, “there are times when none can be silent.” The Methodist
Richmond Christian Advocate
championed the Confederacy’s moral patriotism and insisted that it was grounded in “evangelical and vital religion.”
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Unlike the secular press, religious weeklies explained the doctrinal underpinnings of the Confederacy. In an early editorial, the
Advocate
pointed out the distinction between national covenants and the individual covenant of grace, and the necessity to incorporate the entire “political community” into the national fast. Non-Christians, or those “who make no pretensions to experimental religion,” who participated in the sacrament of Communion would be blasphemers, but they
should
participate in the ritual of the national fast and tend to moral reformation.
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Just as Northern clergy shouted loudest denouncing slavery, so Southern clergy remained staunchly, perhaps uniquely, loyal to the cause of the Confederacy and the Davis administration.

T
he Confederacy responded in kind to the Northern jeremiad and its historical claims to providential chosenness. But the moral and spiritual creation of a national identity in the South would not be accomplished so readily as in the North. They had no rhetorical heritage that remained solely
theirs.
Instead, a new Confederate jeremiad would have to be invented, or more properly appropriated, from the “heretical” North. The Confederate capital, unlike the Union capital, not only had to invent a nation with a constitution all its own but also invest that new creation with the highest spiritual and moral legitimacy. How else could avowedly Christian citizens be persuaded to kill and be killed?

The Southern clergy’s new burden of political preaching was made immensely easier by the new Confederate constitution, adopted on February 8 and ratified on March II, 1861. Unlike its Federal counterpart, it explicitly declared its Christian identity, “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” The national motto, Doe
Vindice
(“With God as our defender”), added weight to the South’s claim to be a uniquely Christian nation.
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Now was the time, President Davis proclaimed, to consecrate the new nation and “to recognize our dependence upon God ... [and] supplicate his merciful protection.” This meant that the South was now in a position more analogous to that of ancient Israel with its theocratic constitution or to Puritan New England than to that of the North. The republican Constitution of the Union, after all, failed to invoke—or even mention—God.
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The Confederacy was going on record as a Christian nation in a unique covenant with God. Even as the North’s claim to political sovereignty was declared null and void, so also were its claims to a covenant with God annulled. The North’s Constitution, drafted as it was by “deists and atheists,” failed to invoke God’s name. Any Northern claims to a special relationship were therefore spurious. In contrast, God smiled on a Confederacy happy to recognize Him and claim Him as her own.

When Confederate lawmakers introduced God explicitly into their national constitution, they had no idea of the significance this act would later assume. It would not only solidify the South’s identity as a Christian republic but also supply a surprisingly powerful critique of a “godless” Northern Constitution. It would inspire
Northern
campaigns to get God into their own Constitution and correct the oversight of the Founding Fathers. In the process it would set off a debate that continues to the present over the meaning of America. With separation of church and state, and in the culture of religious freedom, could America still be a “Christian nation”? For the South, and most Republicans in the North, the answer was an unequivocal yes.

The premier occasions for articulating the Confederate jeremiad would be the same as those observed in the North: public fast days and thanksgiving days. The mission was to articulate the terms of God’s national covenant with the Confederacy and to interpret the meaning of current events within those terms. The special days were proclaimed by nonclerical public officials, chiefly the president, and observed by civil law throughout the land. Although the frequency of fasts ebbed or flowed depending on the state of public affairs, fast days never disappeared. Instead, they stood as ritual markers to proclaim a “peculiar peoplehood” modeled on ancient Israel.
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The ascendance of the public fast in the Confederacy, and particularly in Richmond, is truly remarkable. Through all of American history up to 1860, public fasts had been quintessentially Northern and “Puritan.”
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Yet, when secession came to war, the Confederacy would employ the public fast
more
frequently than the North. In all, Abraham Lincoln would proclaim three national fasts throughout the war while, in the same period, Jefferson Davis would proclaim ten.
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In addition, multiple state and local fasts were proclaimed in the Confederacy, as well as fasts in the army.

The novelty and power of these events in the evolving life of the Confederacy was large.
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Lodged within the sense of legitimacy and the yearning for a Confederate identity was a simple notion: the idea of a covenanted—and Christian—nation.

But the realization of this idea required a ritual action—a civil sacrament that conferred legitimacy and sacred meaning upon the evolving nation. In other words, it required an act of collective worship, which the public fast and thanksgiving days became. In town after town throughout the upper and lower South, the ritual of a public fast and the incantation of the jeremiad created a Confederate identity grounded in fundamentally religious values.

For the Confederacy to adopt the public fast day as its own national ritual of self-affirmation, a profound revolution had to take place in a compressed period. Where the Puritans took two generations to invent a rhetoric of nationhood and war around the ritual convention of the fast and thanksgiving days, the Confederacy achieved it in a year, and it grew thereafter until the very last battles were lost—and beyond. The public fast enlisted Christianity for ritual and ideological service to the Confederacy, even though churches for decades had reflexively affirmed the apolitical “spirituality” of the church. While ministers would continue to celebrate the historical spirituality of the Southern pulpit, they would at the same time ring the charges of tyranny against the North and preach political liberty for the South with a ferocity—and frequency—unmatched in the North.