Upon the Altar of the Nation (51 page)

Following the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, nobody dwelt on the battle or on Lincoln’s subsequent commemoration at Gettysburg Cemetery. Instead the news ran: “Revival in Longstreet’s Army” or “religion in the army.” One writer from the Army of Tennessee described “revivals in nearly every brigade in Hood’s Corps.... The same great work is spreading through Hardee’s Corps.” A soldier wrote in the same paper that “during the [revival] meeting a number professed faith in Jesus.”
¹⁶

 

By April, as the spring campaigns drew ominously near, all eyes were on Virginia. There, Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia stood between Grant’s and Meade’s Army of the Potomac and the city of Richmond. A form of fatalism now prevailed and discouraged the earlier fascination with battles and wars. Death and suffering had become too random and unpredictable to savor. War coverage shrank as moral and religious uplift blossomed.

Revivals depended chiefly on evangelical sermons delivered by chaplains or local clergy. In a revival sermon preached frequently to Confederate regiments in February and March 1864, Chaplain William Baker pointed to the dreaded coming season of war: “We are now approaching a crisis in public suffering. We are looking forward to a campaign which will probably be stirring and decisive.... Has not the church a work of preparation to do as well as Congress and the army?”

Besides news of spiritual laxity in the churches, “we hear not of revivals or missionary enterprises” in occupied areas of the South. The implication was clear: the army must step into the moral and spiritual void to “save” the South and, in the process, “win” the battle with Satan. It
might
even win battles on the battlefield.
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After intoning the standard Protestant orthodoxy that revivals were purely spiritual affairs that could not necessarily cause “temporal victories,” Baker made an immediate about-face. In the next breath, he promised the troops: “If we are zealous for his cause, he will be zealous for our cause. If we make his ordinances effective for spiritual victories, he will make our muskets and cannon effective for temporal victories.” While conceding that battles were about contingency—“the mysterious panic, the swollen river, the apparently accidental position”—contingency itself was ultimately providential. Cynics missed precisely that when they ascribed purely natural causes to battles. Likening Generals Lee and Johnston to the Old Testament warriors Gideon and Barak, Baker assured his hearers that as God gave these ancient warriors victory, so also would He reward Confederate Christian generals.

Of course, casualties would inevitably mount in the spring, even as victory ensued from God’s ultimate will: “How appalling the thought that in a few months, thousands—the bravest and the strongest—who are now in the flush of health and in the glory of their manhood, will be struck down.” To vivify death for the soldiers in attendance, Baker evoked a scene that to modern sensibilities seems melodramatic but that spoke with power to the soldiers facing imminent battle:

Revival sermons were augmented by religious tracts and newspapers to promote revivals in the army. In one popular tract entitled
The Soldier’s Aim by a Charleston Pastor,
the anonymous preacher strove, in the most romantic terms, to assure Confederate soldiers that saving faith would quell all fears and quiet all anxiety: “The pious man has a mind freed from the passionate conflicts and terrors of the wicked. He is not distracted by the struggle between the Creator and the creature, between the conscience and the life.... To him the weary march is bright with visions of a heavenly home and cheerful with the sound of holy voices that come to him upon the winds.”
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Soldiers in 1862 may have found sentiments like these a bit much to swallow. By 1864, they overlooked the hyperbole and embraced the message as virtually the only hope in a world rapidly closing in on them.

For the South, the dark side of revivalism was Puritanism. Many writers justified the righteousness of their cause by contrasting the evangelical Christianity of the revivals with the “Puritan” spirituality of the North. In a column titled “Does God Favor the North,” a writer for the
Richmond Religious Herald
replied that the North had sacrificed its faith for a Puritan-based abolitionism: “Federal infamy will not be veiled by triumph.... They have bartered the true principles of Christianity for sectional conquest—and the prize they have coveted will elude them.” As for slavery: “Our enemies make slavery the central question of the war. But no one at the South doubts the Divine Sanction of slavery.”
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Revival sermons were augmented among the soldiers by spontaneous prayer meetings. One letter, written by a chaplain to the
Religious Herald
predicted the future impact of Confederate army revivals:

The chaplain was right. These were the very men who, with the war’s end, would lead mighty evangelical revivals that would transform the postwar South from Episcopalian and “Spartan” to “converted” evangelicals.

 

No one in 1861 could have predicted that ministers would claim war—and defeat—as a moral and religious good that made men Christians. Yet, by 1864, that was indeed their claim. Just as white Christian apologists in the antebellum South had praised slavery as a converting institution for the slaves from paganism to Christ, so these Civil War apologists now praised war as a converting institution for white soldiers and, in turn, white society.

In this madness, we see the seeds of what would become the postwar “Religion of the Lost Cause” and the triumph of evangelical Protestantism. Where the antebellum evangelical was tarred with the label of “dissenter” and, worse, “effeminate” postwar evangelicals and itinerants would be reared in the armies and hardened in the battles. In the new South, to be evangelical and “born again” would come to signify the Confederate army as well as the Southern pulpit. It would mean pride and manliness, humility and submission. The “Lost Cause” of the white Christian South would constitute a self-contained region—and religion—isolated from the international community of believers that preserved the sacred memories of the war and the revivals its army produced.
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N
o moral category of the Civil War received more attention in 1864 than the treatment of prisoners of war. What began as a humane affair with adequate accommodations and generous exchanges degenerated with the war’s progress into a living hell. In all, approximately 194,743 Union soldiers languished in Confederate prisons, and 30,218 died. Northern prisons took in 214,865 Southern prisoners, and 25,976 died.
¹
Newspapers regularly denigrated the sadism of the enemy with sensational headlines like this from
The Liberator:
“Brutal Treatment of Union Prisoners in Richmond: How They are Starved to Death.”
²
Lithographs and drawings portrayed starving wretches under headings like
Let Us Forgive, but Not Forget.

Years later, soldiers could forgive many episodes of the war, but not the prisons. A wave of barbarous accounts written after the fact by former prisoners of war did not help. Both during the war and after, the central themes were sensationalist: thrilling escapes, heroic confrontations, and barbarous guards. Wholesale death by pestilence and malnutrition, though depressingly real, were generally avoided in the press because they offered neither heroism nor romance—only the banality of death.
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Photographs of emaciated Union prisoners returning from the South shocked Northerners precisely because they had no analogue in the viewers’ experience. To twenty-first-century eyes, the men look eerily like the sunken, skeletal survivors of Nazi death camps. But in 1864, only one unseen analogy came to mind: hell.

In May 1864 a delegation from the committee on the conduct of the war visited the camp at Annapolis and photographed eight prisoners who were emaciated and on the verge of death. The sight outraged Northern viewers, who assumed these prisoners were typical victims of deliberate Confederate sadism. Confederate accusations that photographers deliberately selected the worst cases to stoke hatreds, and that comparable cases could be discovered in Northern prisoner-of-war camps, held no sway. The committee concluded that a conspiracy existed on the part of Confederate commanders to murder Federal prisoners.
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Federal prisoner seated, nude, facing front. Photographs were used to reinforce Northern beliefs that Confederates were seeking to exterminate Union prisoners, though in fact, conditions were also horrendous in Federal prisons.

For generations to come, volumes of survivors’ recollections from both armies would appear in waves, stoking bad memories and renewing hatreds that would not go away. Predictably, citizens on both sides pilloried the evil of the “other’s” camps.
Their
prisons were as humane as possible. Their treatment of prisoners was as respectful as could be. It was the others who were monsters.

But from a larger perspective, what moral conclusions can be drawn about the history of prisons in the Civil War? That prisoners suffered endlessly is beyond debate. Was “wrong” done? Mistreatment of prisoners was deliberate, so the soldiers claimed, and intended ultimately to “exterminate” prisoners in their control. Only in the twentieth century, thanks in large measure to the pioneering scholarship of the historian William Hesseltine, has the accusation of deliberate murder been put to rest.
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Of the degrading and momentous loss of life among prisoners on both sides there can be no doubt. As prison populations began to mount, it became painfully clear that neither side had really thought about or prepared a plan for dealing with prisoners. Of the two, the North would respond more humanely, but less from superior motives than from superior resources. As a rule—both on principle and, as much as possible, in practice—neither side sought to be barbarians, as each was routinely accused by the enemy.

In moral retrospect, what is most surprising is that “retaliations” and “atrocities” were relatively minimal. The worst abuses tended to come from noncombatants or home guards who had little martial discipline or restraint. No officers were bent on extermination and murder. All were subject to the gruesome givens of a war that no one planned with contingencies that no one anticipated. They faced the unforeseen consequences of a war whose larger moral limitations had blown dangerously out of control, which is to say that the war was to blame, and, by extension, those who purposefully escalated it. It was for this reason that the only Confederate officer executed for war crimes was the commander of the infamous prison at Andersonville, Georgia, Henry Wirz.

 

At the start of the war, prisoners and the prisons to hold them were not a great issue. From careful study of government records and soldiers’ memoirs, Hesseltine showed how prisons in both the North and the South in the years 1861 and 1862 generally adhered to the accepted rules of war. Both allowed prisoners basic rights of dignity and provided the same rations to prisoners as were available to soldiers in the field.

Even as battles grew larger, numbers of prisoners did not swell because both sides agreed to a cartel of prisoner “exchanges” based on a complex formula that relied on numbers of prisoners and their ranks. Captured officers would be “paroled” with the understanding that they would not rejoin their units until “exchanged” with a prisoner of comparable rank, at which point both would be free to reenter their units.