The Book of Books (30 page)

That was translated into the spiritual:

The effect today even on white Anglo-Saxon Englishmen can be to release that surge of emotion which somehow detonates both hope and joy the way that only music and lyrics can do when they send a depth charge into feelings.

Many of the songs talked of home: heading home to ‘Sweet Canaan, the Promised Land' or ‘Bound for Canaan Land'.

It is to be marvelled at that people who had known very little but inhumanity were singing songs not only of home but also of a morality so far above that of their slave holders. To combat the brutality they endured they turned to the Ten Commandments. In other songs, it was the words of Jesus which inspired them.

There were political songs, referring to the ‘Underground Railway' – the route taken by those slaves who made a break for freedom and struck north, moving from ‘station' to ‘station' as helpers, at great risk to themselves, harboured them for a while before seeing them on to the next stage of that epic journey. There's ‘The Gospel Train' and ‘Wade in the Water', referring to the dangerous Ohio River, the boundary seen as the final passage to the North and to freedom. ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot', refers to a specific place where fugitive slaves were welcomed.

The fashion for spirituals has waxed and waned but they are always there, the foundation music. This music was grafted on to the biblically inspired lyrics from the King James Version. Together they made a rallying cry and a soundtrack for those who
fought their way out of slavery. The Black Renaissance in the twentieth century saw the spirituals bloom again.

Paul Robeson gave hugely popular public performances as did Mahalia Jackson. Choirs and choruses took the gospel songs on tours across the United States. In the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s they reappeared at full volume to play their part with ‘We Shall Overcome' and ‘Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho' where the words were changed to ‘Marching Round Selma'. You could argue that when Elvis Presley changed popular music through his version of rock 'n' roll one reason for the transforming power of it was that Presley, the southern choral boy, had grown up on the gospel music and spirituals which are still vibrant in hundreds of choirs today.

It was a form that occurred only in the United States and empowered enslaved millions who, generation after generation, regrouped and regained their poise.

Through their character, history and intelligence, the slaves who were seen as ‘objects' had found in Protestant evangelical religion based on its Bible a way to rebuild tribal and family identities which had been cynically smashed, fragmented and, wherever possible, aborted. But to make the big leap, to be freed, to be emancipated, that would take a civil war.

SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA (2)

A
braham Lincoln, who had declared that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free', was elected President of the United States on 6 November 1860. In December they became disunited when South Carolina seceded from the Union. Within two months, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had followed suit. In February 1861, the Confederate States of America was formed with Jefferson Davis as President. On 12 April 1861 the Confederates under General Pierre Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The American Civil War had begun.

It led to more than 1 million casualties. About 620,000 soldiers died, two-thirds of them from disease. The southern states which became the battleground were devastated. Their churches were desecrated. Slavery was legally abolished. After the war the circumstances under which former slaves lived were often worse than before. Racism was to take a century to uproot. But slavery was history.

There were many factors which led to the Civil War: economic, political, social. The imbalances of forces were clear from the outset. The Union would have twenty-one states, a population of over 20 million and the growing industrial strength of North
America on its side. The Confederacy, agrarian, with eleven states, had less than half that – 9 million, which included 4 million slaves. Firepower, technology and numbers grew in importance as the war dragged through four years. It was and remains a source of pride to southerners that they put up such a fight for so long. That pride became key to their regrouping in their wasted lands after their inevitable surrender when the odds were simply too great. The residual conviction remained among many that their long continuing view about slavery had been defeated by bullets but not by the Bible and their cause had been just.

The issue of slavery was central to the war. And the Bible was central to the issue of slavery. It bound together all the other causes. It was part of the American striving for liberty and equality which could be tracked back to the first English settlers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was also allied to America's notion of its historical ‘exceptionalism': again in direct descent from the Presbyterians who had crossed from England and increasingly the rest of Britain in the seventeenth century and whose core members considered themselves to be the Chosen People. For all the humanitarian impulses, the essential debate over slavery and the war between the states was over how the Bible was to be interpreted.

In their introduction to
Religion and the American Civil War
, the editors write: ‘Religion . . . was found everywhere the war was found – in the armies and the hospitals; on the farms and plantations and in the households; in the minds and souls of men and women, white and black . . . God was truly alive and very much at the centre of this nation's defining moment.'

It was asserted that ‘the United States was the world's most Christian Nation in 1861 and became even more so by the end of the war . . . Organised religion provided the spine of an otherwise “invertebrate America”.'

Politicians on both sides invoked God and used the King James Version to justify their actions. There were prayer meetings in the soldiers' camps and in their homes. Millions of Bibles and Prayer Books were printed and distributed. The language of the King James Bible was the language that the politicians and soldiers and writers and civilians on both sides had in common.

While by no means a re-run of the British Civil Wars more than two centuries earlier, it had strong similarities and little wonder: many of those involved on the battlefields of England and Scotland and Ireland were the direct ancestors of those taking to war in the southern states. Their adhesion to biblical authority had been unchanged by 3,000 miles of sea, a War of Independence and 200 years of exposure to a continent so unlike the West European islands they had abandoned.

The Great Awakenings in the eighteenth century swelled Church membership which surged again in the lead-up to the Civil War. Bible classes, Sunday schools, religious newspapers, popular fiction: wherever eyes strayed to print or the ears listened to teaching or preaching, the Bible would be the heart of the matter. This was bolstered by the American ‘exceptionalism'. This was the conviction that they lived in what their Puritan founders had called the ‘city on a hill', that they were a ‘redeemer nation', that they were appointed by God and by their very devotion anointed to carry out a ‘manifest destiny'.

When the Puritan John Cotton had set sail from England with other early Puritans, he had preached on a sentence from Samuel: ‘Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more.' More than two and a half centuries later, when the Civil War was about to begin, Francis Vitton spoke in Trinity Church, New York: ‘The people of the United States, under the Federal Constitution, are ONE NATION, organic, corporate, divinely
established, subject to government and bound in conscience to obedience. Disloyalty to the constitution is therefore impiety towards God.'

The war, which could be defended politically as a defence of the elected government against the unconstitutional breakaway rebels in the South, was also a war of the Bible. The constitution was built on the Bible, the Bible was in the sinews of the constitution. It was not a theocratic state: it was more complex and unusual than that. America had taken the Word of God to safety in New England and since then, despite an increasing number of religious people of other religious persuasions and of no religious persuasions, that original King James Version had been the stubborn root and a fertilising cause of the astonishing growing of America.

To many Americans, the Bible was historically accurate. It was the Word of God and though it had to be interpreted, its fundamental authority and supremacy should not be questioned. It is not easy to enter into the minds of previous historical periods even one as near as mid-nineteenth-century America. But without that act of empathy and imagination, the study of history is pointless.

To dismiss the Bible today without much of an inward glance is one thing: to dismiss the tenaciously and profoundly thoughtthrough beliefs and opinions of those every bit as intelligent as we are but alive some time ago and in a different context is, as I have mentioned, to miss the developments and changings in the laboratory and the library of the human mind. Abraham Lincoln read and lived by the Bible. So did labourers and slaves. One riveting aspect of the American Civil War is that the opposing sides, as Lincoln pointed out, ‘read the same bible'. And according to Mark A. Noll, they read it ‘in the same way'.

That is, they read it, Noll writes, as ‘God's revealed word to humanity'. He goes on: ‘it was the duty of Christians to heed carefully every aspect of that revelation. If the Bible tolerated, or
actually sanctioned, slavery, then it was incumbent on believers to hear and obey.'

Noll's essay on ‘The Bible and Slavery' illustrates the awesome problems that led to. The crisis was in the interpretation: the variance in the interpretations provoked the crisis. Preachers and their congregations in the South (though some in the North, too; lines were broadly drawn but not wholly exclusive) concluded that the Bible sanctioned slavery in passages such as Genesis xiv, 14, Leviticus xxv, 44 and Corinthians vii, 21. Therefore true Christians should accept this. The Bible was the supreme and the Divine Authority.

These passages had been strongly challenged by the abolitionists who also argued that the presence of slavery in the Bible was not a justification for its existence in the United States. This was reinforced by those who claimed a distinction between the letter of the Bible and the spirit of the Bible. Hair-splitting as this might now seem, this was at the core of the rationale for the war. Underlying everything was the deferential attitude that believed that any attack on the Bible was unacceptable to God. Noll summarises it as ‘a forced dichotomy – either orthodoxy and slavery, or heresy and anti-slavery'. This was the theological battle line on the eve of the war.

The unprecedented numbers of literate people in America at that time, often those whose learning was reinforced by regular, lengthy and demanding sermons, meant that the minds of millions were engaged, daily and with serious purpose, on these questions. The battle was an extension of their arguments. The King James Version provided the intellectual and emotional structure for the politics of the Civil War. It was widely believed that ‘every direction contained in its pages was applicable at all times to all men.' The God-given common-sense reading by Americans of the Holy Scriptures had led to that conclusion and also to the rapid burgeoning of a civilisation staked out in a hostile continent.

Noll points out the intensive similarities in the background of the preachers: ‘In 1863 a convention of southern ministers appealed to their fellow Christians in the world . . . 94 of the 96 signatures came from Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Disciples churches, all branches of English-speaking reformed Protestantism. A study of northern sermons during the war [showed that] well over 90 per cent came from the same ecclesiastical family.' It was not always Cain versus Abel but Abel versus Abel or Cain versus Cain.

It would be overly simplistic to conclude that the Bible alone ‘caused' the Civil War. The Bible was the gate through which the thoughts and passions of the majority were marshalled. Had the Bible not been there . . . ? Well, that is a question without an answer, or a question with too many answers. Had the Bible not been there America as it was in 1861 would not have been there: slavery as it was in 1865 would not have been abolished. It was a time and a place of faith and however much we mock it or feel indifferent to it nowadays, it altered for the better what was already a vital and dynamic new force in the world.

The Bible was America's national book. It spoke directly to the individual reader and he or she could take up the sentences to try for themselves. It could and did provoke deep thought and study. And it led to moral crusades of which that concerning slavery was the most mighty to date.

When the black preachers spoke of the Bible, they too championed its literalism as sincerely as their white contemporaries. Their own readings were different in some aspects – a greater emphasis on prophecy, on dreams, on magic, on liberation – but the absolute belief was no less. And they found political and social ammunition there. For example, Psalm 68 verse 31 was often quoted: ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.' And equally popular, from Acts,
God ‘made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth'.