Upon the Altar of the Nation (64 page)

While Southerners were horrified to read Sherman’s callous words, Northerners thrilled to the rhetoric and cried for more. It has often been said by scholars and writers who wish to absolve Sherman of moral culpability that he talked tougher than he behaved. But that is irresponsibly evasive. Sherman did have a cadet’s sense of honor and integrity, and his word was his bond. Take Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg at face value, then take Sherman’s words at Atlanta—and Sweetwater, and Roswell Mill, and numerous stops to come.
In response to Sherman’s claim that citizens were used as human shields, Hood pointed out what everyone who knew Union armies understood:
There are a hundred thousand witnesses that you fired into the habitations of women and children for weeks, firing far above and miles beyond my line of defense. I have too good an opinion, founded both upon observation and experience, of the skill of your artillerists, to credit the insinuation that they for several weeks unintentionally fired too high for my modest field-works, and slaughtered women and children by accident and want of skill.
26
Whether shields or innocent targets, it did not matter to Sherman. There were no innocents anymore, and everyone got what they deserved.
Both generals had legitimate moral complaints to make, but they came far too late and too little to matter. Halleck, Grant, and Lincoln all signed off on Sherman’s proposal and heaped praise on him. Civilians were not innocents in this citizens’ war and their nerves had to be shattered if their will was to be broken. But this did not include deliberate “slaughter” of women and children, as Hood accused. Even Sherman had his strict limitations. By adhering to the letter of the law and avoiding, for the most part, violent crimes of rape and murder, Sherman could defend his actions as just.
In fact, both generals were disingenuous, preferring a massive destructive war, no matter what the consequences. And both generals were right. By holing up in the city and exposing civilians to the risk of artillery assaults, Hood was, in effect, using them as human shields. And in pursuing his “hard” war, Sherman was right that there were no “innocents” in this citizens’ war. Even old people and children must feel its hard edge.
In Washington Lincoln was far less concerned with Sherman’s conduct of the war (which he approved) than with the implications of the Atlanta victory for the coming national election. Before Atlanta, Lincoln had been certain he would lose. He drew up contingency plans for a massive escalation in the time he had left before the inauguration of his rival. But, like Grant, he now imagined that victory would be his, as did ordinary citizens. In a letter from John M. Howe to his brother, Howe wrote: “Our glorious old ship Constitution and Union must and will be preserved by electing Abe for the presidency.... I well know and so do you that there is a party composed of bloodlessness and ignorance with a few traitors at the head that are bound to break up the Union. But the God on high has flanked them in giving the union army the victory at Atlanta.”
27
Confederate critics of Northern fasts and religiosity had a point when they accused Northerners of trusting in guns more than God. As citizens of Virginia and Georgia reeled from the massive destruction unleashed by Grant and Sherman and sought the face of God, Northerners thought ahead to summer vacations in August. On the day of the Northern fast, the
American Presbyterian
issued an editorial, complaining, “It is to be regretted that the very general scattering of church-going people, with their pastors, in pursuit of health and recreation, will interfere with the public celebration of this day.”
28
In Branford, Connecticut, the Episcopal rector Frederick Lewin complained that as the South starved, the “sins of the north” multiplied in extravagance and materialism. People were getting wealthy! Women were dressing up! Reform must begin with the individual: “The Sabbath-breaker and the profane swearer, the drunkard and the profligate, the skeptic and the infidel, and all who forget God and break his laws ... are real enemies to this country—strong obstacles in the way of lasting peace and prosperity.”
29
 
On the same fast day that the
American Presbyterian
decried the lack of public following for a fast in summer vacation months, it again gnawed at the bone of God in the Constitution. In contrast to the inclusivity of America’s civil religion, premised on the separation of church and state, these clergy wanted something explicitly Christian. In an editorial titled, “Shall we be a Christian nation,” the editors argued for a constitutional amendment whose preamble would explicitly mention God, Jesus Christ, and the scriptures as “supreme authority.” This they posed in opposition to “this senseless clamor about church and State. It is an old stager—a fogy of the fogiest kind.”
30
Although unwilling to proclaim America a Christian nation on the grounds of the separation of church and state, and aware of the Confederacy’s boasted Christianity, Lincoln agreed to a compromise that would strengthen the links between Christianity and America’s civil religion, while keeping each distinct. Without seeking to amend the Constitution to create a Christian republic, he would create a national motto invoking trust in God and have it struck on the nation’s coinage. On April 22, the first coins were struck with the new Federal motto, “In God We Trust,” a calculated response to clerical and evangelical demands for a Christian Constitution. Given the materialism condemned in Northern pulpits, Lincoln could not possibly have picked a more ironic symbol to represent Christianity than the nation’s cash.
Where Lincoln thought he was Christianizing the Republic, one fast-day preacher argued the reverse. Though he lacked the contemporary terminology of “civil religion,” Worcester’s James Cruickshanks did perceive that the war was elevating America as its own religion. In words that captured the transformations wrought by the war, he asked: “If indeed God be a God of peace, and he is Almighty, we ask, why is war, with its untold evils, permitted to brood over this fair land?” The answer—instead of trusting in God, the people placed their faith in armies, scanning newspapers daily, looking at little else but the movement of armies: “In a word, the army is the people’s God. They idolize it—they worship it.” Besides armies, they worshipped “some military leaders.” Too much “hero-worship” of generals prevailed:
The American people are given in a peculiar manner to the indulgence of this spirit. The General—whoever he may be—who is on the crest of popularity is, for the time being, the demigod of the nation. If his reputation has been established as a military leader, he becomes the idol of the nation. The people accord to him every attribute except that of deity, and even this—blasphemous as it appears—seems not to be withheld when the people are glutted with the successes of their deified hero.
Faced with such powerful nation worship, Cruickshanks could draw only one conclusion: “We are then as a people a nation of idolaters. We are at once, the most religious, and the most idolatrous people on the globe.”
31
Significantly, Cruickshanks did not move from condemnations of nation worship to moral questions about the war itself.
CHAPTER 38
“RED OCTOBER”: “THE WORK OF DESTRUCTION”
O
n May 15, 1864, at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the Reverend F. W. Conrad of the English Lutheran Church delivered a Thanksgiving sermon blasting the Confederate army for unjust conduct: “They have shot down our pickets, fired into our hospitals, bayoneted our wounded, and dispatched our soldiers without quarter.... They have seized noncombatants and imprisoned them ... they have neglected our wounded, amputated their limbs unnecessarily, and maltreated our sick.” The conclusion was obvious: “The pages of history are examined in vain, to find examples of meanness and infamy, of cruelty and barbarity, comparable with those inflicted by the rebels.”
1
Little could Conrad have realized how prescient he was. Even as he preached, Jubal Early contemplated a direct retaliatory attack on innocent civilians—Chambersburg’s civilians.
On July 30 Confederate forces under General John McCausland approached the defenseless town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In retaliation for General David Hunter’s tactics in the Shenandoah Valley, McCausland (under Early’s orders) imposed an impossible demand on the citizens of Chambersburg: come up with a cash payout of $500,000 specie in compensation for Hunter’s destruction of VMI and the governor’s mansion, or see their town burned to the ground. Unable to raise the money, and disbelieving the threat as too callous even for men at war, the citizens waited. A reluctant McCausland, on orders from Early, then put the inner city to the torch, leaving only the home of a respected veteran and the Masonic Temple standing. Before the fires subsided, 278 houses, factories, and businesses lay in rubble.
Though later uneasy with his actions, McCausland claimed the work as “fair retaliation” for Hunter’s destruction of VMI (his alma mater). An outraged President Lincoln—who had no qualms about destroying Confederate property—ordered Grant to move on Early, which he did by sending his most trusted general, Philip Sheridan, into the valley with orders to “follow Early to the death.”
As the generals held sway in their relentless grip, the conflict rapidly degenerated into a war of raids on civilian properties in both the North and the South. Years later, Early remained unrepentant. The act was “just” because “retaliation” was part of the “laws of war.” Writing in 1887, Early recalled that it “afforded me no pleasure to subject non-combatants to the rigors of war, but I felt that I had a duty to perform to the people for whose homes I was fighting and I endeavored to perform it, however disagreeable it might be.”
2
Based on this form of just-war theory, fully articulated as well in the North, the way was clear for Southern citizens to celebrate the destruction as just and estimable. In an editorial from the
Charleston Courier,
reprinted by an equally vengeful
New York Times,
the writer asserted: “If our Government is unable to protect their property and the persons of those most dear to them, it should permit them and their comrades to strike avengeful blows, to burn, devastate and destroy.”
3
President Davis also approved of the raid and endorsed subsequent assaults on civilian property, even as this citizens’ war careened increasingly out of control.
Predictably, Northern generals responded to Early in kind, continuing the spiral of attacks on civilian property. On August 1 Sheridan assumed command of the newly commissioned forty-three-thousand-man Army of the Shenandoah with Grant’s orders to hunt down Early’s sixteen-thousand-man army: “Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”
4
Grant commanded Sheridan to take all able-bodied men under fifty as “prisoners of war” and to “take all provisions, forages and stock wanted for the use of your command. Such as cannot be consumed, destroy.” Grant’s orders specifically exempted buildings from the swath of destruction, but with no food, the buildings meant little. Still, in Sheridan’s view, this was a sound strategy, both in retaliation for Chambersburg and for civilian demoralization. “Reduction to poverty,” he later claimed “brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.”
5
Here, in a nutshell, was the essence of the new Northern strategy of hard war—a strategy that encompassed soldier and civilian alike and that treated all as the “enemy.” For John Emerson Anderson, attached to General Banks’s corps in Tennessee protecting railroad lines, it was appropriate to deal summarily with the “bushwhackers or guerrillas” who attacked innocent civilians in Tennessee: “As they have shown no mercy to their victims they are quietly turned over to the guard with the remark from the presiding officer of the court to take them away to the mountains and not bring them back again.”
6
Generals on both sides liked to talk about the army as the people. When President Davis was considering reinstituting the patrician and socially divisive Society of the Cincinnati, Lee warned him not to: “I think it important to unite as closely as possible the interests of the army with the interests of the citizens. They are one in reality and all for the Country.”
7
But when the people were treated as the army, moral issues arose that none were prepared to recognize.
Critics of retaliatory war were relatively rare when speaking of acts done by their own soldiers, as distinct from acts done to their own by the enemy. With absolute moral right on each side, both possessed a blank check for just retaliation. The prominent exceptions, of course, were Northern Democrats who questioned whether General Hunter had done the things he was accused of and blamed Northern Republicans for pursuing a war in which they got in kind what they deserved. In Chambersburg the Democratic organ, Valley Spirit, blamed Republicans and specifically Horace Greeley (who had criticized the people of Chambersburg for cowardice) for the burning:
The conduct of Mr. Greeley is the more inexcusable for the reason that the burning of Chambersburg was the indirect result of his barbarous teachings. From the very beginning of this war a certain class of fanatical men in the north, of whom Mr. Greeley is chief, have urged a system of warfare against the South totally inconsistent with the civilization of the age. To burn and destroy, lay waste and make desolate the Southern territory was their theory of war. They never seemed to dream of [Confederate] retaliation.
8
When General McClellan received the nomination at the August convention in Chicago, hopes ran high. Democrats no less than Republicans revered generals, and in “Little Mac” they believed they had found the winning formula. But when Peace Democrats demanded a plank for armistice inserted into their platform, they were only one Union victory away from disaster.

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