America Aflame (2 page)

The Compromise of 1850 represented a last heroic attempt by the first post-Revolutionary generation to save the Union for the second generation. Despite the best efforts of Kentucky's Henry Clay and Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, the compromise quieted controversy only momentarily. The Fugitive Slave Law provision of the compromise drove a wider wedge between North and South. The law motivated Harriet Beecher Stowe to write
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
awakened northerners to the possibility of a Slave Power conspiracy to restrict the rights not only of slaves but also of white men, and left many southerners wondering whether mere laws could protect them and their property.

Defending his opposition to the fugitive slave provision of the compromise, Senator William H. Seward of New York declared, “There is a higher law than the Constitution.” In a nation of laws, when political leaders advocate working outside those boundaries, especially invoking the deity as an authority, trouble can only follow. Abraham Lincoln urged, “Let every American, every lover of liberty … swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others.… Reverence for the laws [should be] the
political religion
of the nation.” He said that in 1838.

While disputes over laws inevitably arise in a republic, the Constitution has designated the judicial branch of government to adjudicate those conflicts. As for interpreting God, according to evangelical doctrine that is the individual's right and responsibility. The danger is that such a religious standard applied to politics makes each person a law unto himself.

Moderates still controlled the political apparatus in the early 1850s. The second generation was then more aware of the fragility of their experiment than at any other previous time in their memory. The European revolutions of 1848, greeted with great rejoicing in America, collapsed. The restored regimes were, in some cases, worse than those that provoked the rebellions in the first place. Americans interpreted the failed revolutions in three ways. First, the excess of the democratic forces contributed to their downfall. Second, despotism, not democracy, inevitably emerges from chaos. Finally, democratic institutions are fragile plants. They require constant nurturing, and even then their survival is not certain. America was a lonely outpost in an undemocratic world.

The survival of that outpost became more tenuous by the mid-1850s. A cascade of events increasingly polarized the nation. Rather than viewing these events as discrete episodes, both northerners and southerners perceived them as parts of a greater conspiracy to undermine the freedoms of the other. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, an Illinois Democrat and a fervent nationalist, hoped that his transcontinental railroad bill submitted in January 1854 would be just the thing to bind the nation together, literally and ideologically. It did not turn out that way. The resulting Kansas-Nebraska Act touched off a civil war in Kansas, led to an assault on a U.S. senator, and damaged the credibility of a presidential administration dedicated to removing slavery from public debate. A Supreme Court decision delivered with a similar objective in mind also had the opposite effect. The harder political leaders tried to render the slavery issue invisible, the more prominent it grew. And the larger its presence in the political arena, the greater the moral stake. Political parties disintegrated and new organizations formed, including an anti-Catholic party and a sectional anti-slavery party. The Democrats, the remaining national party, became increasingly dysfunctional between its northern and southern wings. The political center eroded, and the extremists on both sides captured the debate.

Reality fled. Northerners perceived Slave Power conspiracies infesting every issue, where none in fact existed. Southerners perceived northerners as intent on subjugating them while simultaneously instigating a race war, though few in the North had any such designs. A religious revival during a serious economic downturn over the winter of 1857–58 among middle-class urban men only added a sense of foreboding that something cataclysmic was afoot.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates during the late summer and early fall of 1858 in Illinois not only highlighted the differences between Republican and Democrat, but they also reflected a growing messianic sentiment in Lincoln's views. When he accepted the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in June 1858, Lincoln took his text from Matthew 12:25: “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” The “House Divided” speech, as it is known, implied an irreconcilable divide between North and South. Lincoln elaborated on the theme during his debates with Douglas. The slavery issue, Lincoln contended, was not merely a political question but a test of America's democratic and religious ideals: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.” In this context, compromise would be difficult.

The 1860 presidential contest occurred in a politically poisonous atmosphere. By this time, southern evangelicals had assumed a millennial view similar to the North's. The shift had more to do with the anti-slavery evangelical assault on the slaveholder and his society than on a heartfelt doctrinal transformation, but it further polarized North and South at a critical time. The Democrats broke apart, opening the way for Lincoln's victory in the fall. By the time he took office in March 1861, seven southern states had left the Union to form the Confederate States of America. To evangelical Christians in the South, the Confederacy represented a rebirth, just as they had been reborn in Christ.

The seceded states sent emissaries to the slaveholding states still in the Union to convince them that remaining in a government led by Republicans was suicidal. The outcome would be a bloody race war and the ultimate subjugation of white southerners, they argued. There was no doubt in the minds of southern contemporaries that the Confederacy rested on the “cornerstone” of slavery.

Lincoln entered office assuring the South he meant no harm to slavery where it existed. He also vowed to uphold the Constitution and defend federal property. Secession, from Lincoln's perspective, presaged anarchy and therefore threatened democratic government and individual freedom. When he maneuvered Confederate president Jefferson Davis into foolishly firing the first shot at Fort Sumter, Lincoln noted, “They attacked Sumter. It fell and thus did more service than it otherwise would.” The “service” was uniting a northern population heretofore skeptical of Lincoln's ability to lead and divided over policies to deal with secession. When he called for northern volunteers to put down the rebellion, four additional southern states seceded, and the war began.

The war lasted far longer and was far bloodier than almost anyone expected. Given the Union's significant advantages in men and materiel, it was not surprising that most predicted a short war. After the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, a narrow Union victory along the Tennessee-Mississippi border, the illusion of a quick, glorious end to the fighting fled. The carnage shocked even Union General William T. Sherman: “Who but a living witness can adequately portray those scenes on Shiloh's field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery?”

The slaughter spurred Lincoln to emancipate the slaves. He had always harbored a deep animus against slavery, for both moral and practical reasons. However, he loved the Union more than he hated slavery. As the war dragged on and with the outcome uncertain, he deployed the proclamation. It was a calculated risk. While a majority of white northerners supported banning slavery from the territories, abolishing the institution where it existed was another matter. Lincoln's concerns reflected the limited reservoir of goodwill in the North toward African Americans even in the midst of a civil war.

Lincoln also understood that he had raised the stakes of the war. The proclamation would only stiffen the Confederates' resolve to fight to the bitter end. When Lincoln dedicated the Union cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863 he made it clear, however, that the war was not only about freedom for the unfree. Saving the Union meant securing freedom for everyone: “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

America would be born again. But it would not be cleansed of sin. Victory in the Civil War did not make northerners chaste, though it chastened them. As it did white southerners, with the notable difference that the former Rebels believed Redemption—retaking control of their government and their former slaves—would deliver them to grace. Science and reason governed the North after the war along with an insatiable desire for progress. Neither the press nor Horatio Alger fabricated a land of opportunity: it was real. The national rebirth would be measured in economic and political terms, not as a moral absolution.

The South not only lost the war but also forfeited its place as a participant in forging the nation's future. While the rest of the nation hurtled toward the future, southerners created a past. For nearly a century after the war and until the rest of the nation could no longer ignore the anomaly of poverty, ignorance, segregation, and disfranchisement on its border, the South remained a regional outlier to the story of national success.

The new nation taking shape after the Civil War only included the South as a gauzy intermezzo to a dazzling show of economic development, ethnic diversity, alabaster cities, and technological innovation. As P. T. Barnum cranked up his Wild West shows to provide easterners with a stylized version of the West, so minstrel shows and early film portrayed a magnolia-scented South that sealed racial stereotypes and preserved the region as “Old” in an America obsessed with the New, a feminized counterpoint to a masculine colossus.

Some of these changes were already evident during the war. When Walt Whitman took leave of his grueling hospital work in Washington, D.C., in November 1863 to recuperate in his Brooklyn home, the train trip northward was a revelation. It was scarcely possible to see that a war was going on. Passing through Baltimore, then Philadelphia, and alighting in Manhattan, he marveled, “It looks anything else but war, everybody well dressed, plenty of money, markets boundless & the best, factories all busy.” The North was a hive of activity and innovation as the South was collapsing under spiraling inflation, severe manpower shortages, and the scarcity of basic necessities. Whitman was witnessing the birth of the modern state and of modern America.

The Republican Congress, free of the southern Democratic albatross, passed an array of economic and educational legislation that helped to establish the federal government as an important catalyst in creating a national economy. The small town and family farm still characterized the nation, but northern cities absorbed thousands of newcomers and large orders for war materiel.

A transformation was also occurring among the soldiers in the field. Although periodic religious revivals visited both camps, especially the Confederates during the last year of the war, the messianic tenor of correspondence from both sides subsided. The randomness of death regardless of piety and the general horror of the war transformed the soldiers' faith. They still believed, of course, but often without the certitude and self-righteousness that marked evangelical Christian perceptions on the eve of the war. The advancing perception was that, rather than the personal, interventionist God of evangelical Christianity, the war confirmed a Supreme Being who was more detached and more inscrutable. Soldiers maintained their personal piety as they grew increasingly skeptical of God's role in the war.

The outcome of the war was not inevitable, at least not until the last months. Regardless of the Union's advantages in men, materiel, and organization, the war would be won or lost on the battlefields. Many of the key battles that preceded Sherman's decisive march through Georgia, Sheridan's depredations in the Valley of Virginia, and Grant's relentless siege of Petersburg were narrow victories for Union troops. As late as the summer of 1864, northern public opinion was tilting decidedly toward a truce and peace with the Confederacy.

By the time of Lincoln's second inaugural in March 1865, the result of the war was not in doubt. His brief inaugural speech was a remarkable effort, a combination sermon and introspective rumination, not the triumphal declaration the assembled expected. The president talked about the limits of man, the inscrutability of God, and the nature of forgiveness—views that challenged prevailing evangelical Protestant beliefs nurtured by the Second Great Awakening.

Northerners rapidly left the war behind. Their quick embrace of reconciliation reflected less a recognition of the moral equivalency of Union and Confederate causes than a desire to move on. Southern whites, on the other hand, may have talked of reconciliation, but beneath the veneer of accommodation lay resentment. They did not move on; they moved back.

Wade Hampton III, a prominent South Carolina planter and Confederate general who lost both a son and a brother in the war, consistently counseled in favor of reconciliation. Yet his correspondence reveals that he was not reconciled to the verdict of the war. Hampton continued to believe secession was constitutionally legitimate, and he disputed the government's right to abolish slavery. He was willing to accept federal authority but little else. And his was a moderate position.

Reconstruction was doomed because white southerners had to account for their terrible loss, not only in lives but also in their patrimony. The acceptance of any Reconstruction policy short of none would have negated the cause for which they fought and for which many died. When Congress imposed a Reconstruction policy that included a modicum of black civil equality and black suffrage, most white southerners would not, could not accept the legitimacy of governments elected under such terms. The white South was never more solid than during the brief period of Congressional Reconstruction.