Upon the Altar of the Nation (12 page)

 

President Davis proclaimed the first Confederate fast for June 13, 1861. Davis’s proclamation implored the people to call on God “to guide and direct our policy in the paths of right, duty, justice and mercy; to unite our hearts and our efforts for the defense of our dearest rights; to strengthen our weakness, crown our arms with success, and enable us to secure a speedy, just, and honorable peace.”
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Clergymen throughout the Confederacy rallied to make the religious grounds of political union explicit. O. S. Barten’s fast-day sermon for June 13, 1861, preached at St. James Church in Warrenton, Virginia, and published in Richmond, noted that the new Confederacy promoted a close relation between religion and government. The biblical grounding and constitutional circumstances of the Confederacy’s founding pointed to a glorious future and announced the birth of a unique Christian nation. Great nations, Barten argued, display a distinctive character: Judea exemplified divine unity; Rome, political power; England, constitutional liberty; the United States, human rights. The Confederate States could become the greatest of all as the embodiment of the Christian rights and liberties derived from God and confirmed in Jesus Christ. The North had some Christians, and was once part of a divine commission that issued in independence. But it was now run by infidels and fanatics under a godless government. The South had Christian men in a Christian government presiding over a Christian people. Therefore, Barten concluded, as the South struggled “to
become
a truly Christian confederacy, even then God’s purposes are bound up with us as a nation!”
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For the Southern clergy, as for the Northern clergy, the war proved to be irretrievably costly. As clergy rushed headlong to promote the war effort and the president who conducted it, they found themselves simultaneously liberated and co-opted. They would be freed to expand their pulpit commentary and religious press from “spirituality” to politics and support for the war.
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But in that very liberation, they would be captured by the state and its political agenda. Once set, it was a trap they never escaped for the duration of the war.

To appreciate the novelty and power of Barten’s words, we must hear them as his Confederate audience heard them, almost for the first time. And we must hear them in a Southern setting deeply religious but previously alien to national fasts and thanksgivings. Whether they could articulate it or not, Southern audiences were experiencing a new ritual of social order. Through words like Barten’s, repeated in similar settings throughout the Confederacy, a nation was being born.

Perhaps in South Carolina clerics like James Henley Thornwell had glimpsed the new birth months earlier, even before the old nation had been dissolved. But in Richmond and other Southern locales, where many had resisted secession and had been wary of war, the sheer fact of the victory at Sumter validated all the hopes for the emergence of a righteous Christian nation in the South.
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Now the Confederate nation had a “history”—however brief—of her own, as a newly constituted, divinely ratified, and victorious covenant nation. Preachers could now freely adopt the language of the Hebrew prophets for their own without it being the “political preaching” they had condemned for so many years. It would be God speaking. If the language they used sounded remarkably like that of the Puritans of old, that fact was never announced. Confederate clergymen spoke as if theirs were the first truly legitimate, God-honoring political fasts and thanksgiving days observed in America since the Revolution. This was not merely a rhetorical move of convenience, but a new affirmation of national identity that vaulted the Confederacy into the sublime status of a New Israel.

 

With military mobilization moving rapidly forward, and young men rushing to arms, most of those listening to sermons delivered in local churches were female, who found in them a powerful source of their fierce and self-righteous involvement in the war and their growing sense of political involvement in the struggle.
Their
morality and
their
covenant-keeping, no less than the men’s, would hold the key to success or failure in the looming conflict. Card-playing, profanity, usury, and drinking were standard male sins cited in fast-day sermons. But covetousness, pride, excessive attachment to worldly apparel, gossip, and “loose-talking” were clearly directed at females. These themes loomed large in Confederate jeremiads.

For many women religion “opened an avenue into the male world of politics and public action.” Certainly, the new politicized fast and thanksgiving sermons—recorded in print and repeated to female-centered congregations throughout the land—accelerated that transformation.
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The language of the covenant was hardly limited to the clergy. Indeed, the power of the jeremiad lay in its flexibility and its inclusivity. Statesmen and generals, intellectuals and journalists, housewives and children could invoke it no less than pastors. For the jeremiad to work as a ritual of social order, all had to be true believers. This is precisely what happened as the language took on the status of deep national myth.

O. S. Barten explained that God recognized the collective nation as a “moral person” and rewarded or punished it in this world because—like all nations—it would have no existence in the afterlife: “Nations are but aggregates of individuals who compose them, and what God requires of one in his individual capacity, he demands of the whole in their associated character.”
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Battlefield defeats were God’s punishments for the sins of the Southern people, while victories were signs of God’s pleasure.

The rhetoric of the Confederate jeremiad, like that of its Northern counterpart, was as amenable to print as to speech. Literacy rates were no higher in the nineteenth-century Confederacy than they were in colonial New England, where the jeremiad was first voiced. The volume of printed addresses, however, was much higher, extending the influence of the form and, in some ways, making it more powerful than its Puritan predecessor. Protestants had always been pioneers in the utilization of mass media, and Confederate Protestants were no exception.
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Throughout the lifetime of the Confederacy, nearly three-quarters of all printed sermons would be public fast or thanksgiving sermons or similar political and war-related sermons preached on other days. Once a rarity in Southern print, these sermons became a staple religious product of the Confederate press. Religious publications as a whole, excluding periodicals, would amount to more than 40 percent of the unofficial imprints appearing in the Confederacy.
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Of course, printed sermons represented only a small fraction of the total fast and thanksgiving sermons preached in the Confederacy during the Civil War. But they remain a useful index to what was heard publicly throughout the Confederacy in churches and synagogues of all faiths and denominations—and to what was preached to soldiers in the army.

By June, the triumph of the Confederate jeremiad was complete, and Southern secular editors and magistrates, no less than their Northern counterparts, preached “Christian politics” alongside Christ crucified. The
Richmond Daily Dispatch
hailed the Confederacy’s first fast-day proclamation for June 13, 1861, as an outgrowth of the sentiments of the people, and spent nearly two columns reporting the activities at St. John’s Episcopal Church and summarizing other local sermons.
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Once the Confederacy was educated in the moral logic of the jeremiad through sermons, newspaper comments, and presidential proclamations, Southerners truly internalized the message. Each victory would be interpreted as God’s work, a gracious favor just short of the miraculous that signified a triumph of divine justice. A defeat, however, was never a sign that the cause was not righteous, or that God had deserted His chosen people, but rather that God was purifying His people through the fires of adversity so that they would come to depend only on Him. At that point, victory would be granted.
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A
s armies massed and generals plotted, politicians, editors, and clergymen on both sides stoked the fires of self-righteous hatred and resolve by denigrating the other and promoting the virtues of their “just cause.” In what would soon prove to be a very nasty surprise, both sides found that the citizens were even more bloodthirsty than their military counterparts. Hardly anyone thought out loud about rules of engagement or codes of behavior, for which all would pay dearly as this first “modern” war evolved. Just as neither side’s moral arbiters could even conceive of the modern war that they would do so much to incite, neither could they credit the other as anything but evil. Guilt and innocence were absolute and mutually exclusive. One side must be entirely just, the other entirely unjust.

In defending the righteousness of their causes, both Northern and Southern commentators transformed their nations from political compacts into moral imperatives. President Lincoln set the tone. The United States, he argued, was not derived from rational expediency, but rather stood as a sacred trust—a “political religion”—whose sacred text was the Declaration of Independence and whose eternal flame was its dictum that “all men are created equal.”
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In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln had made plain his empathy with the Southerners’ plight: “I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation.... When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we; I acknowledge the fact.” Even after Sumter, Lincoln’s view had not changed. The moral issue at hand was Union and not slavery.

In addressing Congress on July 4, Lincoln reaffirmed the South’s constitutional right to its slave property and insisted that constitutional protections, including the Fugitive Slave Act, would not be abrogated once the states returned to the Union. But then he repeated what he had steadfastly insisted: the Union would not be compromised, nor would the spread of slavery into federal territories be allowed. The Union was not simply one more political union or imagined community, but its own self-evident moral cause. As such it embodied a sacred mandate of
chosenness
to save the world for freedom and democracy, no matter what the cost. Referring to himself in an almost messianic third-person voice, Lincoln concluded prophetically, “He had no moral right to shrink; nor even to count the chances of his own life, in what might follow.”
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Southern commentators saw in Lincoln’s Union-worship rank idolatry. Stephen Elliott, an outspoken secessionist bishop from Georgia, preached adamantly in
God’s Presence with the Confederate States
that God was on the side of the Confederacy. But the central goals of Confederate nationalism, according to Elliott, did not include either global influence or the civil religion of patriotism. Rather, the South fought

For their part, Northern Christian moral arbiters were certain that secession was not only politically untenable but also ultimately a sin against God. By thus presenting the Union in absolutist moral terms, Northern voices imputed the same moral urgency—and global redemption—to political union and “democracy” that abolitionists had injected into universal emancipation.
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It was this very absolutism for Union among Republicans, and emancipation among abolitionists that made it difficult for either to support the other’s moral platform. Moral certitude and patriotism blocked all reflection and ethical analysis on moral issues of just conduct in the looming war. Confederate moral critics, in contrast, perceived from the outset how Unionism and abolitionism could be fused into one moral absolute with devastating consequences—consequences that would dictate a total war for unconditional surrender and involuntary reconstruction. Indeed, by overestimating the strength and numbers of Northern abolitionists, Confederates assumed such a fusion from the start, so that when emancipation was eventually proclaimed by Lincoln, no Southerner was surprised or aroused in any way as were many Northerners.

Most Northern secular newspapers, and virtually all religious weeklies, reflected the prevalent absolutist Unionist sentiments of the Union majority. Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
stated the moral issue in terms identical to Lincoln’s:

In one prophetic respect, Greeley differed from Lincoln: “The Southern press really speaks the truth (an accident for which it is not blamably responsible) when it declares that there are very few men in the South who would now, even if it were safe, advocate the restoration of the Union.”
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The antislavery religious press, meanwhile, backed off its identification of the war with abolition in the immediate aftermath of Sumter. It joined the Northern consensus to portray the war as one for the Union with a moral amplitude of its own. The
Christian Instructor
commented simply: “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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In similar terms, the
Independent
boldly proclaimed the “moral uses of the war,” assuring its readers “that blood is not worth the having which is not worth the spending.”
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