Upon the Altar of the Nation (38 page)

In Richmond the jeremiad offered a prescription for success in the face of defeat. A cavalier ethic of masculine nobility and war for war’s sake could not easily keep company with public humiliation, moral reformation, and exaltation of God over the works of men. In place of consensus, conflicting strains between the secular and religious press, and even within the secular press itself, emerged. The new and immensely popular magazine Southern
Illustrated News,
published in Richmond and intended to displace Harper’s magazine, made virtually no reference to religion, instead highlighting (and canonizing) the Confederate generals.
Political attacks on Davis increased, and so did contention between the Confederate and state authorities in Richmond. Political adversaries confronted each other anew as they coalesced into pro- and anti-Davis factions. One especially contentious issue was Davis’s suspension of habeas corpus, received as coldly in the South as Lincoln’s act had been in the North. The normally moderate
Richmond Daily Dispatch
urged resistance in defense of “the great bulwark of freedom”: “If Congress would be so wanting in spirit—so derelict in duty—let Virginia Senators at least be committed to present uncompromising resistance to this surrender of all our liberties.”
1
In a similar vein, the
Richmond Examiner
continued its attacks on Davis. “Our politics are now an unknown, because unexplored sea,” they lamented. “We have lost sight of all the ancient landmarks, and the old charts are known to be fallacious.”
2
As in the North, the secular press was not one press but many and in its midwar divisions, multiple and contending themes appeared that distraught Confederates confronted amid the din of nearby battles. Still, a fearfully militant nationalism endured.
Discussions in the secular press that shifted from “Providence” to “fate” or “chance” were meanwhile denounced in the Confederate religious press and pulpit as disloyalty and creeping atheism. The
Central Presbyterian
was especially perturbed when the
Daily Dispatch
characterized Stonewall Jackson as “a fatalist.” Southern pulpits and religious publications also expressed outrage over the signs of defeatism they detected in some Confederate newspapers.
As bodies continued to be sacrificed on the altars of their nations, citizens on the home front absorbed the blows of sorrow and despair with unbowed faith. In Kentucky the Union Baptist preacher B. F. Hungerford kept a diary of events. On March 4,1863, he wrote:
Have just received a communication from Bro. A Cook of Pigeon Fork requesting me to visit him on the morrow, as his son is about to die. He is a member of an Indiana Regiment but has come home to die. Oh! War! How insatiable thou art! And still it rages. God surely has forsaken this people. Given them over to destroy one another!
3
In a lecture to the Richmond YMCA, John Randolph Tucker, attorney general of the state of Virginia, justified the Confederate cause and then proceeded to pillory the Yankees for their conduct in the war:
No war in modem times, among Christian nations, has been marked by such ferocity—such disregard of private rights of persons and property—such assaults upon the liberty and conscience of private citizens—such atrocities towards non-combatants, men, women and children—and such wicked violations of all sanctions of our Holy religion. In the estimate of international law, our enemy must stand for condemnation in the Pillory of Nations.
4
In this contentious atmosphere President Davis called for a fast day on March 27, 1863. A disillusioned war clerk, J. B. Jones, could not conceal his sense of irony: “This is the day appointed by the President for fasting and prayers. Fasting in the midst of Famine! May God save this people!”
5
The reactions of the press were more supportive. The
Richmond Daily Whig
supported the fast and urged attendance: “The religious portion of the community and the Pharisees [Jews] too will attend the various places of public worship. We trust that the congregations will be large.”
6
Among the clergy there was no ambivalence. The war was just, but only insofar as the Confederacy remained a Christian nation dependent on God. A writer for the
Central Presbyterian
was explicit on the necessity of a fast:
One or two of our newspapers have at times not obscurely, hinted their approbation of a maxim Napoleon is reported to have sanctioned that God was always on the side of the strongest regiments and the heaviest artillery. The remark ... is an atheism our Christian nation will disdain to take upon its lips. Our people do believe that the Almighty God holds our destiny in the hollow of his hand.... If he casts us down, our sins have deserved it; if he lifts us up, it is the hand of mercy that does it.
The essay closed: “We trust that the day appointed will be more generally and sacredly kept than any before it.”
7
From the start the clergy had been among Davis’s most faithful and enthusiastic supporters and on March 27 they would not disappoint him. In Savannah, Georgia, the Reverend George G. N. MacDonell delivered an unpublished fast-day sermon on Matthew 22:21 (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”) and outlined “the respective claims of God and Caesar.” In the end, he concluded, the claims were separate as to sphere but united as to their common end: a “Christian Republic.”
8
Following the March fast, the
Richmond Christian Advocate
added its own complaint against those “who have written in bitter terms of denunciation against various chief men—especially against the President.” Such criticism, the editorial continued, was traitorous: “Every man who contributes to depress the public heart helps the enemy.” The clergy may have been late-comers to the Confederate cause, but, like their Northern counterparts, they proved its most loyal supporters. With unbroken confidence in God’s cause and no comment on man’s conduct, they probably extended the war by a year—the bloodiest year, as it turned out.
Printed sermons also appeared. In Savannah’s Christ Church, Stephen Elliott, a bishop of Georgia, published a sermon,
Sampson’s Riddle,
that confirmed that a people’s strength came from God.
9
On the same day, Bishop George Foster Pierce and Benjamin Palmer delivered addresses to the General Assembly at Milledgeville on God’s blessing of the Confederate cause.
10
Similar assertions were put forward wherever people gathered, whether at schools, in army camps, or in hospitals throughout the Confederacy.
11
In Richmond, Maximilian J. Michelbacher preached at the German Hebrew synagogue, Bayth Ahabah. At St. John’s Church in Richmond the Reverend William Norwood spoke from Psalm 103:19 on the subject of “God and Our Country.”
12
While happy to complain about Davis, the secular press was unwilling to take on the clergy and their large popular following. Instead the press praised the fast and the wide participation it attracted. A writer for the
Southern Illustrated News
reported that “[t]he day of fasting and prayer was generally observed throughout the Confederacy, and we trust that the Almighty will answer the contrition and prayers of the people.”
13
In Charleston, the
Daily Courier
recognized that
[w]e are at last awake to the fact that we have to depend upon the means and instruments which Heaven has conferred upon us for the achievement of our independence. In the course of this conflict it has been demonstrated that, with the blessing of God, we are equal to the work in which we are engaged.
Central to that “work” was the preservation of slavery. Thus on the very day set aside for fasting, the
Daily Courier
followed a call for a “Union Prayer Meeting” with the announcement: “James Grant sold at auction on Thursday, a field hand, about 17 years old, for $2320.”
14
After pleading for a sincere fast-day observance, the
Central Presbyterian
was pleased to report that “[t]here is reason to believe that this day was observed with uncommon solemnity over our entire country. Blessed be God whose spirit prepared the hearts of the people!” Besides “the people,” the generals and their armies increasingly embraced the fasts. In the same editorial, the paper went on to observe that alongside the fast observances of churches throughout the nation had been a fast day in Lee’s army: “The order of General Lee, suspending all duties in the Army of Northern Virginia, save those of necessity, concludes with a stirring address to the soldiers.”
15
Lee no less than Davis was getting religion. He sounded ever more evangelical as time passed, locating his—and his army’s—fate in God’s hand, not his own. In a letter to his ailing wife he reflected on marriage and Providence:
I will not let pass the day devoted to thanksgiving to Almighty God for His mercies without holding communion with you.... I know that in Him is our only salvation. He alone can give us peace and freedom and I humbly submit to His holy will.
16
One striking example of fast-day observances in the Confederate army survives in the sermon book and diary of Robert Bunting, chaplain to the Eighth Texas Cavalry, which was known as Terry’s Texas Rangers in honor of plantation owner and commander Benjamin Terry.
17
Though born in Pennsylvania and educated at Princeton Theological Seminary, Bunting considered himself a “Southern by conviction.” Against the wishes of his Northern abolitionist father-in-law, Bunting worked actively at the Presbyterian assembly in Augusta, Georgia, to form the Southern Presbyterian Church, and then enlisted in the Rangers in November 1861. His diary reflects a daily routine of prayer meetings, mail delivery, extensive letter writing on behalf of soldiers, Bible study, and attendance on the sick.
Readers in his hometown of San Antonio received regular reports from Bunting in their newspapers. Bunting tracked Terry’s Rangers as they fought at First Manassas and then returned to Texas, eventually to join fellow Texan General Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Later Bunting would participate in battles at Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga, Georgia.
Bunting was a rigorously Calvinist Presbyterian who made no concessions to ecumenism among his troops or to bland patriotism as a substitute for religion. Repeatedly he insisted that patriotism and religion were essential sentiments for the Confederacy, but clearly separate. One involved earth and history, the other heaven and eternity. In a sermon series on “Tekel” from the prophet Daniel’s vision of the “handwriting on the wall” (Daniel 5:25), Bunting brought home the haunting theme that “thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.” This text, directed to the “fools” in Babylon who turned their backs on the true God, was delivered with modern “fools” in view. Chief of these were Northern “atheists” and “infidels” who “disbelieve the inspiration [of scriptures], and teach that Hell is a fable.” These very people would suffer in hell “irrespective of virtue or morality or character or social position.” His words, he was pleased to observe, inspired a “very strict attention” from the brigade numbering one thousand men. Indeed, he was pleased to observe that “all attend save about a dozen who are busily engaged gambling near by—this is being now a crying sin in the Regiment.”
 
In the meantime, spring brought a new intensity to the suffering in Richmond. The capital city simply could not accommodate the vastly expanded populations of government workers, soldiers, and, increasingly with the breakdown of exchanges, prisoners of war. The winter of 1863 had been severe and set in motion real deprivations. While balls continued to sparkle for the wealthy, the poor only grew poorer.
18
Richmond’s
Central Presbyterian
ran a series of essays on extortion throughout the winter and spring, strongly hinting that greedy fellow Confederates were as threatening as the enemy outside the gates. Capitalist greed could not supersede Christian charity: “The undue stress laid by Adam Smith upon the cost of production, as the controlling regulator of prices, has been the means of misleading the public mind until the present.”
19
Only by controlling prices and eliminating extortion could the public will be maintained.
A beleaguered Jefferson Davis seldom appeared in public and remained badly out of touch with the people. On April 2 a crowd of more than a thousand angry men, women, and children, led by Mary Jackson, a housepainter’s wife, and Minerva Meredith, brandishing a pistol, massed in Capitol Square to cry hunger. Soon the crowd grew from hundreds to thousands. By mid-morning a “mob” marched down Ninth Street and across Main Street looking for “something to eat.” According to war clerk J. B. Jones, “They impressed all the carts and drays in the street, which were speedily laden with meal, flour, shoes etc.”
20
The mayor appeared and called out troops, who read the Riot Act and threatened to fire into the crowd. Only the appearance of President Davis prevented carnage upon the Confederacy’s once proud own. Davis himself was unmoved by the citizens’ plight and later addressed the Confederate nation with blatantly unrealistic censure:
Is it not a bitter and humiliating reflection that those who remain at home, secure from hardship and protected from danger, should be in the enjoyment of abundance, and that their slaves also should have a full supply of food, while their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers are stinted?
21
Sallie Putnam, one of the “haves,” reflected her own distant and aristocratic biases as she witnessed the “disgraceful riot.” The “rioters,” she noted, were “a heterogeneous crowd of Dutch, Irish, and free negroes” who soon went beyond bread for dry goods and clothing. As the women sought food, “men carried immense loads of cotton cloth, woolen goods, and other articles, but few were seen to attack the stores where flour, groceries, and other provisions were kept,” thus calling into question the starvation motive. While conceding that the “want of bread” was “too fatally true,” she noted that most of the rioters were not among the sufferers. All their actions succeeded in doing, she complained, was to add propaganda grist to Northern papers who promptly printed “highly colored accounts of the starving situation of the inhabitants of Richmond.”
22

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