Upon the Altar of the Nation (19 page)

In one of the greater ironies of wartime rhetoric and morality, the very universality and inclusiveness of the jeremiad undermined itself and effectively removed all restraints from the war’s brutality. As a widely held Christian doctrine that dated back to Augustine and the apostles, the providential worldview was intended to personalize theology to inculcate a sense that God was present in the saints’ lives overseeing their eternal destiny.

But as it emerged in the Civil War, providentialism did the opposite, generating a de facto fatalism. When Providence explains everything in absolute categories, it explains nothing at all in particular. If victories and defeats, life and death, good times and bad times are all caused equally and decisively by divine Providence, then nothing can explain particular events or experiences. Fate takes the place of a biased deity—
my
survival or
my
destruction happens independent of
my
prayers or my failure to pray. Whether I live or die is “in the cards.”

Even worse, on a commonsense level, fatalism became ingrained so that nothing was unacceptable; it just
was.
No destruction could be too great because God, not man, was orchestrating affairs. All one could do was mouth the proper rituals, beat the drum of patriotism, and keep on fighting, confident in the right and ultimate vindication.

 

Unlike the earlier fast-day rhetoric of the Seven Years’ War or the American Revolution, that of the Civil War generated relatively little millennial speculation about living in the “end times.”
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The reason is to be found in the language that Northerners and Southerners used to describe their ultimate enemy. In the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, the ultimate enemy was clear: the Antichrist foretold in biblical prophecy. But in the Civil War, both sides appeared curiously reluctant to label their war a war against the Antichrist. Nor was the Antichrist identified with Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis the way he had been with George III. Instead, less ultimate name-calling labeled the foe as “tyrants,” “traitors,” “blasphemers,” “Black Republicans,” or “slave drivers.”

In both sides’ refusal to paint the other with the apocalyptic degradation of Antichrist, we gain important clues into the unique nature of the Civil War. Two reasons stand out for the curious silence. First, and more obviously, every American Protestant knew the Antichrist was the pope. Yet with Catholics fighting on both sides for their separate causes, the pope could hardly be blamed, thus providing no Antichrist. With Catholics no less loyal to their sides than Protestants and Jews, satanic plots were harder to discern.

When accused of persecuting fellow Catholics in the South and permitting the slaughter of Irish Catholic troops in his own army, a combative Archbishop John Hughes of New York wrote to his counterpart, P. N. Lynch of Charleston, South Carolina. In a blistering response, he denied any possibility of peace without surrender: “Since violence, battle and bloodshed have occurred, I dare not hope for peace unless you can show me a foundation of rock or solid ground (but not quicksand basis) on which peace can be reestablished.” As for the accusation he was abetting the slaughter of Irish troops, Hughes replied curtly, “If this end were a deliberate policy of the North, I should scout and despise it.” But as things stood, Hughes’s loyalties remained with the North rather than with fellow Catholics in rebellion.
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A second explanation for the rhetorical restraint is more apparent in retrospect. Protestants, Catholics, Jews—temporarily divided into two “Americas” and eventually reunited—were Americans all. America’s incarnating civil religion would appropriate Christian and Jewish rhetoric and make it American, so that Christianity and Judaism would never become an enemy or a false god (hence the efforts to put God into the Federal Constitution). Rather, the language of “liberty,” “martyrdom,” “baptism,” and “redemption,” when added to the sheer military might consecrated by America’s armies, blocked the all-out demonizaton of the enemy. At the same time, as we will see, it pointed the way to ultimate reconciliation of “Americans” and “Confederates” under a common American faith. As explained by one religious editor, a “national religion” was reasonable, and not inconsistent with the separation of church and state: “National church establishments are very different things from national religion; which is simply the profession and practice of obedience to the law of Christ in their public policy, by the representatives of the nation.”
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D
espite strategic breakthroughs in Kentucky and on the coast, Lincoln’s winter was no happier than Davis’s. The navy might be indomitable, but the soldiers were not. Frustrated with the lack of movement in his armies, especially in the East, Lincoln took the unprecedented step of issuing Presidential Order No. 1 on January 27, 1862, commanding all of his generals to move immediately “against the insurgent forces.” Lincoln was particularly frustrated with the reticent General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and, on January 31, issued a separate Special War Order No. 1 ordering McClellan to seize Confederate territory south of Manassas Junction. But McClellan, by now implacably opposed to Lincoln’s aggressive war policies, simply dug in his heels.

In the West Lincoln’s orders bore more fruit. In early February, fifteen thousand troops under a then relatively unknown General Ulysses S. Grant marched on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River with a view toward attacking them the following day. If Fort Donelson could be taken together with Fort Henry, major invasion routes along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers could be organized in ways that would “turn” General Albert Sidney Johnston’s army from its position south of the forts near the Tennessee border. To carry the forts, Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Foote planned a coordinated land and sea attack for February 6. Foote’s specially designed ironclad riverboats, with their large siege guns, would cover Grant’s soldiers for an overland assault.

When faced with a costly siege, Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner proposed a negotiated surrender to Grant, from one West Point gentleman soldier to another. When asked for terms of surrender, Grant replied in curt terms that would soon be broadcast in every Northern newspaper:
“No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” With that, the North had control of two strategic rivers and a new hero general in U. S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

News of the capitulation of Fort Donelson reached Richmond just as the recently elected president of the Confederacy prepared his inaugural address. In a separate message to Congress on February 25, Davis joined the public outcry over Donelson, expressing amazement that a Confederate army would surrender without a real fight. Like many of his listeners, he openly feared that this was more an issue of character than command.

Lacking confidence in his commanders’ character, Davis turned to Providence. In his inaugural address he reiterated the rightness of the Confederate cause, which he likened to the “patriots of the Revolution,” and confidently called on God for deliverance:

In the midst of growing dismay, the Confederate Congress anticipated the possibility of domestic unrest and granted President Davis the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. According to war clerk J. B. Jones, the measure was principally aimed at Richmond, and—more ominously—“at some few other places.”
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By 1862 the time for serious weighing of options seemed to have passed for good. Moral “reflection” abounded, to be sure, but only in ways that reinforced the “right” side. Despite unprecedented losses, hard questions of cause and conduct were seldom raised. Moral arbiters on both sides fell back on stock rhetorical affirmations coming dangerously close to clichés. From the start this had been a political war that proceeded not from moral cause to military consequence, but rather from military offensives to unquestioned moral validation on both sides. Once the sequence was established, it did not matter how horrendous the slaughters might rise; like forward-moving troops and John Brown’s soul, the rhetoric marched on.

On February 22, the day of his formal inauguration, one of Davis’s first proclamations was for a public day of fasting. The secular press printed his call dutifully, while the religious press eagerly promoted it. The cause, they repeated with drumlike regularity, was just. War came, the Southern Baptist
Richmond
Religious Herald argued, “from infidel humanitarians who ... have labored to pervert the Union into an instrument of abolition.” God, who had ordained or at least permitted slavery, would never bless the Christ-denying, humanistic North. Therefore, the only thing preventing success had to be domestic sin: “If we truly renounce iniquity, the days of this distress will be shortened.”
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Once again the Confederacy used the occasion of Davis’s inauguration and the formal establishment of government to underscore their superiority as the only truly Christian nation. In a letter to his father, Lieutenant Charles C. Jones Jr. described how the fast was observed in his company and then went on to drum the familiar refrain:
The Confederacy changed all of that. It would be Christian.

Confederates continued to hold up the inclusion of God in their constitution and national motto as a sort of talisman because they knew Northern Republican Christians felt vulnerable. Throughout the first year of war, the Northern religious papers continued to complain about the absence of God in their Constitution and called for a constitutional amendment invoking God. Failing, they also moved for the inclusion of “Jesus Christ” alongside “God” in official fast and thanksgiving proclamations: “All Christian men are grieved to observe how universally and industriously the name of Christ, through whom alone our prayers are accepted, has been omitted from these proclamations.”
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Surely this would equal the score with the Confederacy, which, like the Union, mentioned only God in its proclamations.

Not to be outdone, evangelical Confederate moralists pressed for the same language—also without success. What they could not see taking shape was a Christian-like civil religion that could not officially mention Christ lest it lose inclusiveness, even though it identified the cause—and its patriotism—with “Him.”

In Montgomery, Alabama, Basil Manly, the venerable Baptist pastor and former University of Alabama president, delivered a fast-day sermon explaining how evil reverses were not signs of divine desertion. By the time of his sermon, Manly had served as a chaplain and buried scores of Montgomery soldiers killed in the recent battles.
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But, employing the logic of the jeremiad, Manly demonstrated how even defeats were a divine test to see if God’s people would remain loyal.

 

On paper, the prospects for the North never looked brighter than in the spring of 1862. But beneath the serene military surface, strong undercurrents of dissent pulled the North in conflicting directions. Unlike the Confederacy, which, in i862 anyway, had one party and one mind, the North was bitterly divided, with Lincoln trying to hold the center. On one extreme were “peace” Democrats who had seen enough bloodshed and wanted a negotiated treaty that would allow the South to go and the war to end. These were held in tension by “war” Democrats who rejected secession but favored a negotiated peace based on the shared ideology of white supremacy.
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On the other extreme were antislavery and abolitionist radicals who wanted to broaden the war’s goals to include universal emancipation. Such a move would inevitably strengthen Confederate resolve and transform the war into a “total war” aimed at the social and political reconstruction of the South.