Upon the Altar of the Nation (16 page)

Confederate intellectuals echoed the clergy. John Esten Cooke was one of the South’s greatest novelists. He was a soldier as well. At Manassas, Sergeant Cooke served in the infantry and later became a first lieutenant with J. E. B. Stuart’s staff, living to witness Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Writing for the
Southern Illustrated News,
Cooke reflected on Manassas and the changes it wrought:

Writing from Charleston to his New York writer friend James Lawson, William Gilmore Simms confided, “I am literally doing nothing in letters, I am so much excited in the present condition of things that the labour of the desk is irksome.” Simms had good reason to be distracted; things looked promising for the Confederacy. Although he had sought peace rather than war, as he reminded Lawson, once war came he knew the Confederacy would prevail:

On August 10 2,330 Union and Confederate troops lay dead or wounded in the bloody battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri. In response, President Lincoln proclaimed a national fast day for the last Thursday in September. In it, Lincoln employed providential language to urge all Americans to:

By September, much of the shame of Bull Run had passed, and Northern triumphalism was securely back in place. The Banner of the Covenant printed “A National Fast Day Hymn.” The poem closed with a note of global imperialism:

Secular papers were as global in claiming international influence for America, but not always as pious. On September 23, the
New York Tribune
announced the fast day, though without the reverential tones of the religious press: “The National Fast Day ... The devoutly inclined will find the places of public worship open to-day almost without exception.” For the less devout: “In the afternoon, several boat and horse-races are announced to come off, and most of the places of amusement hold out extra attractions to the public in the evening.”

By contrast, the
Boston Telegraph
proved as heavenly minded as the religious press when it proclaimed: “The National Fast Day will be observed tomorrow throughout New-England with utmost solemnity. In Boston business will be entirely suspended, even to the closing of the offices of the ferry and railroad corporations. The daily newspapers suspend publication from Thursday morning until Friday noon. Divine services will be held in all the churches.”
¹¹
New Englanders knew how to honor a fast.

New York never did have Boston’s piety for the fast day, and other considerations prevailed there as churches proclaimed fasts. Money always mattered, and in the aftermath of Bull Run, it mattered more than ever. Happily, the
Tribune
reported:

Many Northern moralists and editors wished to put the debacle of Bull Run behind them, but fast-day preachers did not.
¹³
The day provided an occasion to refight the battle, but this time on the moral battlefield of sins and punishments. By September 26 ministers had had ample time to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of defeat and draw appropriate lessons.

With Confederate sanctimoniousness in mind, Northern evangelicals rehearsed the case for a constitutional amendment in the North that would invoke God. Echoing Bushnell, they argued that America should be a Christian and not a Jeffersonian republic. Ezra Adams condemned as “monstrous” the Confederates’ invocation of God in their currency and constitution, and urged that the
real
chosen people acknowledge Him: “We therefore intensely desire that God might be acknowledged in the Constitution of the United States. That the temple of national existence ... might be adorned by the name of God.”
¹⁴

Desperate to find something of God in the government, many ministers and religious newspapers saw, in the ritual of the fast, the equivalent of a constitutional invocation of God. When Lincoln proclaimed a fast day “to be observed by the people of the United States with religious solemnities and the offering of fervent supplications to Almighty God,” he was saying, in effect, that the United States was a Christian nation as much as if it had been written in the Constitution. Lincoln’s proclamation, they argued, “is part of our more recent national history. Its record will be found in the archives of our Republic in the form of a Congressional vote and an executive proclamation.”
¹⁵
The North might not need the fast to create a new nation, but it did require it to sacralize a republic whose Constitution never mentioned God.

Fast-day services were held in the army as well as local churches and synagogues. The Unitarian chaplain William Scandlin kept a diary throughout his time in the Union army and recorded the following entry for September 26: “Our service was to be at 11 and I was to preach extempore.” Scandlin’s evident satisfaction in preaching “extempore” reflects how unusual it was for a Unitarian to preach in such a way. Following the fast, Scandlin wrote to the Unitarian Autumnal Convention and expressed his sense of the justness of the cause and the shame of compromise:

Not all states were as comfortable as the insulated Northeast with the justness of the war. Missouri’s experience with a savage civil war waged indiscriminately on civilians dispelled all romantic and world-regenerative illusions. R. H. Weller’s fast-day sermon to Christ Church, in St. Joseph, Missouri, contained no patriotism, and is illustrative of what other ministers
could
have said, but seldom did.

In the face of mounting terrorist attacks fought in the name of patriotism, Weller assigned equal guilt and culpability to the North and the South: “Is it not a repetition of the sad calamity that befell Israel of old,—a disrupted country, with rival capitals, and the hands of brethren embued in brethrens blood?” Though nominally Christian, “our practice has given the lie to our pretensions, and practically we are a nation of infidels.” Such words, he knew, would not endear him to those aching for a fight. Talk of peace was downright offensive “amidst the heat of passion, and the lynx-eyed gaze of partisanship.”

In contrast to Northern preachers who would declare that “law is vengeance,” Weller preached reconciliation. In place of patriotism, he proclaimed peace: “Let us strive to lay aside passion and prejudice—to hold fast to charity—to covet the good things of God’s blessing, the things which make for peace.”
¹⁷
The paucity of sermons like Weller’s reveals the real object of fasts: to promote patriotism; but the effect was self-righteousness, not humility before God.

Two other extremes provided exceptions to the main fare of the jeremiad. One was the abolitionist contingent. In preaching to the Church of the Puritans in New York, George B. Cheever, founder of the Church Anti-Slavery Society, invoked the revolutionary actions of the very John Brown whom Lincoln repudiated as the true paradigm of a just warrior:

Cheever’s just war was so just it effectively acknowledged no restraints. With Brown as his prototype, Cheever could claim that preemptive wars and assaults on civilians were righteous and just, as long as the end was abolition. In time, Cheever‘s—and not Lincoln’s—model would become policy on both sides of the conflict.

The other exception to the standard jeremiad fare came out of the Unitarian camp. While it is true that the Civil War did not produce one theoretical advance in just-war theory, and indeed took it several steps back, one intriguing effort at originality appeared in a fast-day sermon delivered by the Unitarian minister Orville Dewey in the Church of the Messiah in New York.

In an unusual turn, Dewey frankly examined the case for a just preemptive war on the South. Shedding the flimsy pretense of fighting a defensive war, Dewey contemplated offensive assault and occupation. If the notion of a “first shot” defensive war was a patent invention in a world where Northern cities lay virtually immune to invasion, how
could
the war be justified? Conventional Christian just-war theory allowed only wars of “self-defense.” Hence the desperate—and often ridiculous—efforts of moralists on both sides to appear pacifistic and defensive. But Dewey had other ideas:

With so many wars, “[h]ow could it be so, if all war, or all but defensive war, is contrary to the will of God?” Citing “Mr. [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon, the French writer,” Dewey wondered if “there is a ‘right of war,’ founded on the ‘right of force’; that is to say, that any nation, deprived by another, or conceiving itself to be deprived, of what is lawfully its own,—a fishery or territory, a fort or arsenal,—has a perfect right to reclaim it by force.”

In this amoral assertion, Dewey anticipated Realpolitik arguments for war based on self-interest:
that among imperfect beings, it is inevitable; that it was, in the nature of things, impossible to constitute a race of moral and imperfect beings, without this element of trouble.