Upon the Altar of the Nation (9 page)

A unified South, Nichols continued, would encompass 560,000 square miles, a territory larger than France, Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, and Scotland combined. All of this raised ominous questions about the future of America in Nichols’s mind. Who was to conquer such a territory? And what would “victory” mean?

The Charleston press, which had done so much to arouse a war spirit in both the North and the South, was temporarily uncertain how to respond to Fort Sumter. Despite enthusiasm and self-righteous vindication, journalists did not really see the next step. Both the
Charleston Daily Courier
and the tri-weekly
Charleston Mercury
carried extensive coverage of the attack and surrender. They openly doubted Lincoln’s willingness to engage in an offensive war on Southern territory. Yet if war came, they assured their readers, the Confederacy would prevail. The
Mercury,
which for years had served as a clipping service for incendiary editorials against the North, continued the onslaught:

The next week the
Mercury
restated the Confederate case for independence. To the question “For What Are We Contending?” the answer was unequivocal:

It is clear that the Confederates, no less than Lincoln’s Republicans, were fighting for the same thing: the idea of freedom. But their idea of freedom was grounded in the self-evident truth that all men were not created equal and that therefore white men had a natural and God-given right to own and expand property in the form of slaves of color. Unlike the Northerners, moreover, they recognized their hierarchical conception of freedom in their constitution, whose protections and safeguards they valued over the cavalier abstractions of their own Thomas Jefferson.
²¹
The Declaration of Independence was not their apple, nor the U.S. Constitution their frame. Their frame would be an entirely new republican but stratified society whose fruit depended on the “peculiar institution.”

Religious and moral commentary in the secular press, though evident, was subordinated to war, honor, and “manliness.” One editor, writing from the aristocratic and honor-bound culture of the planter class, opined, “The South fights ... for honor, character, standing, and reputation. She must not only wipe off the stigma of effeminacy with which Abolition has branded her, but she must prove that she possesses that high-toned chivalry, that enduring and indomitable courage that is peculiar to a privileged caste.”
²²

Richmond’s total newspaper circulation in 1860 was eighty-four thousand, but the reach and influence of Richmond papers expanded greatly during the war.
²³
Forty newspapers throughout the South suspended publication in the first year, and only twenty-two remained by 1865.
²⁴
Five of them would be in Richmond. The
Richmond Dispatch’s
prewar circulation of eight thousand grew to thirty thousand before the war’s end (equal to that of its rivals combined).
²⁵
The extra became a staple of journalism in the Confederacy no less than in the North. Often these extras were extracts from newspapers in enemy territory.
²⁶

Like the
Dispatch,
the
Richmond Enquirer
had supported President Buchanan’s fast day in 1861. Significantly, it had also printed Governor John Letcher’s letter declining calls from clergymen to proclaim an additional day of prayer in Virginia. Reflecting prewar Southern sentiments against “political preaching,” it reminded its readers that the custom in Virginia was to avoid any interference in religious duties, and it repeated Letcher’s contention that civil magistrates should have nothing to say about religious matters—that rites of thanksgiving or humiliation were the sole province of ecclesiastical organizations, and not states.
²⁷
This was precisely what Letcher’s predecessor, Governor Henry A. Wise, had said in 1856 when he refused to proclaim a day of thanksgiving with this caustic observation: “This theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching
‘Christian politics’
instead of humbly letting the carnal kingdom alone and preaching singly Christ crucified.”
²⁸
In the blink of an eye all this would change, as war challenged ministers to privilege patriotism over spirituality. But not one word on behalf of peace.

L
eading intellectuals in the North and the South were obsessed by the war and wrote widely to one another and to the press on the subject. In the North, intellectuals and writers participated freely in the patriotic frenzy that raged after the surrender of Sumter. Instead of sober moral reflection, they, like everyone else, stood dazed at the sheer power of patriotism to transform their world overnight. Few literary classics resulted, but letters and speeches abounded.
¹

There was a time when Ralph Waldo Emerson was willing to let the Union dissolve. Then came April 12 with the force of a revelation and an exaltation. In a lecture delivered shortly after Sumter, Emerson told his audience that his life had forever changed. Before the war, “we were very fine with our learning and culture, with our science that was of no country, and our religion of peace.” Then came Sumter: “And now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church. It is the day of the populace; they are wiser than their teachers.... I will never again speak lightly of a crowd.”
²

Perhaps no writer was more deeply affected by the war than the poet Walt Whitman. Like many other New Yorkers, Whitman first learned of the bombardment from the
Tribune
extra while walking home to Brooklyn. Whitman saw in Sumter a call to American destiny. Already he came closer to sharing Lincoln’s deeply moral and millennial view of America than any other intellectual. “I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands,” the poet had proclaimed in “Song of Myself” (1855). In the war he would discover his salvation.

Like Lincoln, Whitman regarded the slavery question as secondary. War would be waged for the Union, not only for its own sake but also for the sake of the world. “What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,” he wrote in “To a Foiled European Revolutionary,” but for that to endure, the American Republic had to be preserved—and expanded. For Whitman as for Lincoln, the mission—and the stakes—transcended America to embrace the future of humanity: “Earth’s resume entire floats on thy keel O ship, is steadied by thy spars.” For the rest of the war he would serve in hospitals and devote himself to the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers.
³

Intellectuals were proud of their self-control and superiority. Yet they were, in fact, driven mad by Sumter, just the same as ordinary men and women. When word of Sumter reached her, Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary: “I’ve often longed to see a war, and now I have my wish. I long to be a man, but as I can’t fight, I will content myself with working for those who can.”
⁴
Like Whitman, Louisa May Alcott served in a Union hospital until ill health forced her out.

For elite male intellectuals, the call to war was met with unmitigated “war fever.” In a more aristocratic vein than Lincoln, they wondered if they could stand up to the manly challenges of war. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. welcomed the call to arms as a tonic to brace the character of his elite colleagues. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dropped out of Harvard and eagerly enlisted in the Massachusetts volunteers. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reaction was identical: “The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it is delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country—a consciousness which seemed to make me young again.”
⁵

A younger Charles Russell Lowell enlisted immediately. Fellow Brahmin Henry Lee Higgins also enlisted, observing later: “I always did long for some such war, and it came in the nick of time for me.”
⁶
For Henry Brooks Adams—great-grandson and grandson of presidents, and stationed with his father in England—the impossibility of active service caused extreme frustrations. Even if he were home, a weak physical condition would not have allowed him to serve. In a letter to his brother Charles, he confided: “I feel ashamed and humiliated at leading this miserable life here, and . . . I haven’t even the hope of being of more use here than I should be in the army.”
⁷

Few intellectuals would go as far as the Unitarian abolitionist and soon-to-be commander of African American forces, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in identifying the war with the moral cause of immediate emancipation. In his essay, “The Ordeal by Battle,” published in the
Atlantic Monthly
in July 1861, Higginson challenged his informed readers to see war as a crusade for abolition, not merely for Union:

Northern clergy no less than Northern intellectuals fell victim to the sheer power of patriotism following Sumter. In a sermon preached in Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church during the siege of Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher declared that the only proper response was resistance and patriotism: “Seven States, however, in a manner revolutionary not only of government, but in violation of the rights and customs of their own people, have disowned their country and made war upon it! There has been a spirit of patriotism in the North; but never, within my memory, in the South. I never heard a man from the South speak of himself as an American. Men from the South always speak of themselves as Southerners.”
⁹

At Roxbury’s Universalist Church on April 21, J. G. Bartholomew offered heroic words: “Never before since the days of the Revolutionary memory and fame has there been a call to arms that has so thrilled the great heart of our people, swallowed up all party lines, and set the pulse of patriotic feeling beating in one quick response like this.... We stand to-day a band of brothers in a sense we never stood before.”
¹⁰

Universalists might have been liberal, but they certainly were not pacifistic. In another Universalist church in Watertown, Massachusetts, the Reverend A. Countryman raised a cry for war: “Already the war is baptized in blood, and from its crimson drops the historic pen has written the inaugural, pronounced on the memorable nineteenth, for the reconstruction of the American Temple, enlarged and improved, to freedom, to virtue, and to God!”
¹¹
The orthodox Presbyterian William H. Goodrich preached the same: “We find our hearts thrilled with strange emotion; at once beating with new impulses of patriotism, and glowing with indignation at those, once our brethren, who are now traitors and deadly foes.”
¹²

The most important moral authorities for fixing each section’s redemptive mission and sacred claims were the ministers with local connections in every community.
¹³
Both the North and the South would enlist them for the task of the sacred legitimation necessary to mount a mutually “defensive” war. In the North before Sumter, sentiments had ranged from Unionist, to antislavery, to abolitionist. But once Sumter fell, strong Unionist sentiment prevailed in most pulpits and with it the necessity to go to war.