The Book of Books (31 page)

But slavery proved no less intransigent than race. ‘In the United States,' the scholar David Davis wrote ‘. . . the problem of slavery . . . had become fatally intertwined with the problem of race.' The economic system in the South depended on slavery: slavery was perceived to be a racial issue. To be black was to be marked out from birth as a slave. Race was as deep a biblicalpolitical problem as slavery. There was the curse of Noah; there were the children of Canaan. There was the mark of Cain. There was rich profit from free labour on the labour-intensive plantations.

And through long habit and need and a sort of implacable wish-fulfilment, it was, after so many years, ingrained in the attitudes of many whites, in the South, that the blacks were just plain inferior. They looked around, they saw chained largely illiterate bondsmen and women and children and over centuries it had mainlined into their perception that they were a lesser breed: ‘common sense' was all you needed to see that. A chasmic contradiction appeared: slavery could be admitted to be wrong and unjust: but blacks could not be trusted to be part of a civilised society. In this regard, prejudice spoke louder than the Word of God.

After the war, Presbyterians in the South proposed to ordain African Americans as clergymen. This was strongly opposed by speeches in the Synod of Virginia in 1867. ‘The righteous rational . . . of pious minds,' one advocate said, ‘would deny ordination of black preachers in a white church.' There was an attempt to justify the ‘convention that among the peoples of the earth, only Africans were set aside for chattel bondage'. There is no biblical authority for that view.

But the Bible has often been used by the cruel, the vicious, the unscrupulous, the vengeful, the power-besotted. For many it was and remains a sacred text. For others it was no more than a useful instrument to be employed as the occasion demanded. Although, of course, there were those for whom it was both these. We know of dictators who swore by the Bible. We also know of many other dictators who came from a different religion or none and were just as dictatorial. What dictators have in common is never a book: it is lust, opportunity, violence, infinite cruelty, charisma and organisational genius.

The King James Version for some people was no more than an excuse, a supplier of acceptable cover stories, a convenient lie, a dummy to keep the people quiet, a useful diverter of energy which enabled those without faith to go about their business of persecution and oppression more comfortably. The slave-masters included all of these.

What transpired after the Civil War was not unlike a phenomenon that some practitioners in psychoanalysis observe: that the removal of a neurosis may leave exposed a psychosis. Slavery was abolished: racism remained dug in. The next century would be devoted to the successful assault on this visceral bigotry.

 

In the long journey of the history of slavery, it is a relief to celebrate what had been achieved by the end of the Civil War. To note how integral the Bible was, how positive a part it played, in an achievement which would have seemed impossible even four years before it happened. The arguments between North and South, based on or, sceptics might claim, simply using biblical texts, had become virulent. Slave owners compared themselves to God in their benevolence to the slaves. To anti-slavery voices, slavery was to treat people as commodities, an affront to the very meaning of a Christian view of life. Whether it was because of a sincere
embrace of the Christian faith or the use of the Christian faith as a means to an end, both sides saw the Bible as their ally and their salvation.

This can best be illustrated by reports on the widespread and often passionate interest that the soldiers took in Bible studies, especially in the camps on the battlefields. One report reads: ‘Wilber Fisk, from Vermont, serving with the Army of the Potomac in March 1864, described meetings every night of two hundred men at a time, which was all the tent could hold, and that many had to leave because no seats were available.'

A military press grew up which regularly published several papers and thousands of tracts. ‘Wholesome reading purifies and elevates the man,' said the
Record
. Journalists were everywhere in the battle of words. John Leyland wrote of the Bible: ‘it inspires him with better thoughts and impulses, it encourages him to that which is good, it restrains him from evil.' The longer the war went on, the more Christian military publications came out. These included, in the South alone,
The Soldier's Friend
(Baptist, Atlanta),
Army and Navy Messenger
(evangelical, Virginia),
The Soldier's Visitor
(Presbyterian, Virginia),
Army and Navy Herald
(Methodist, Georgia). These publications were united in glorifying the heroic and Christian Confederate soldier. Conversions – 140,000 estimated in the Confederate army after three years of war – were celebrated, as was the big increase in ‘praying men' in the field. The Reverend Stiles summed it up: ‘the simplest way to convert a nation is to convert its army.'

There was the
Soldiers' Pocket Bible
published in 1862 (again an echo from the Civil Wars in the British Isles). This was a selection of prayers and then ‘Scripture Selections' from the King James Bible. These were chosen for their inspirational qualities. The soldiers would fight on their beliefs. ‘We have might against this great company that cometh against us,' from the Book of
Chronicles, ‘neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon Thee.' More encouragement from Isaiah: ‘no weapon that is found against thee shall prosper.' And Deuteronomy: ‘Be strong and of good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee: he will not fail thee nor forsake thee.'

The Young Men's Christian Association and the United States Christian Commission, unarmed, went on to the battlefields and brought supplies, distributed Bibles, offered aid, worked in hospitals. There were 4,859 volunteers, Walt Whitman and Louisa M. Alcott among them. Louisa May Alcott later based her novel
Little Women
on her Civil War experience and also produced
Hospital Sketches
, a lightly fictionalised publication of her letters home. Alcott was the first Civil War nurse to publish an account of her time in service and her work contains many references to the spiritual experience of those at war. From
Hospital Sketches
:

With regard to Whitman, the following extract comes from
Treasures of the Library of Congress
: ‘Walt Whitman made dozens of small notebooks from paper and ribbon to carry with him as he visited wounded Civil War soldiers in Washington area hospitals between 1863 and 1865. In them he comments on the food provided at the Armory Hospital. Other notebooks describe the
horrors of war. As a volunteer delegate under the Christian Commission, he consoled the sick and dying and often wrote letters to their families.'

Abraham Lincoln wrote to the Christian Commission congratulating it on the work it did: ‘Your Christian and benevolent undertaking for the benefit of the soldiers is too obviously praiseworthy to admit any difference of opinion. I sincerely hope that your plan may be as successful in execution as it is just and generous in conception.'

Abraham Lincoln, President of what would be the victorious North, had a strong commitment to constitutional democracy. The relationship between the King James Version and democracy is close and Lincoln is a good example of one aspect of it. Lincoln thought that democracy was the system ‘through which God's plan for the nation could be worked out'. The Bible had given access to God's word to all men (as Lincoln would have phrased it: women's suffrage was just creeping into the argument but still way out of contact with power). The Bible had no explicit instructions for America but through debate in a democracy that purpose would, the President thought, be arrived at. The secession of the South was not just a rebellion in Lincoln's eyes. It threatened the very process through which Americans would come to play out their divine destiny.

Ronald C. White Jr. who has written extensively on Lincoln states that ‘Lincoln's religion, in fact, laid a foundation for his political thinking . . . and the culmination of his religion was his attempt to discern the meaning of the Civil War.' His own struggle with faith seems to be resolved in the short but Bible-pegged Second Inaugural Address. Within that brief speech, he mentions God fourteen times, refers to prayer three times and quotes passages from the Bible four times. It was here that he said: ‘both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes
His aid against the other . . . it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of the other man's face. But let us judge not that we be not judged.' Later he says: ‘the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' Lincoln also said: ‘with malice toward none; with charity for all . . . let us strive on to finish the work we are in . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.'

In this, Lincoln, very conscious that he was President for the second time but presiding over a country at war with itself, sought a path which might offer a chance of reconciliation. The terms ‘moral evil' and ‘original sin' had entered the debate. Hatred of the one for the other's position was ratcheted higher every day by reports of new losses. Lincoln wanted an end, an end which came quite soon after that Second Inaugural Address when the bled and battered South, fought to a standstill, surrendered in April 1865.

In January 1865, the US Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to abolish slavery. In April 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and fully ratified on 6 December 1865 and slavery was abolished. The Bible, the victors – the abolitionists – claimed, had
proved
that God was on their side.

More than 4 million slaves were freed. The majority came out of shackles into a freedom for which they were wholly unprepared and to which many of them were abandoned. But they had come through! As the stories of the Israelites and the lessons in the New Testament had promised, they had found freedom. They could throw off those chains.

Although there was a constitutional end to the practice of slavery, equality was another matter. That would take another century and even in present-day America with a black President, there are still pockets of hard prejudice. Segregation replaced slavery but
the triumph of abolition must not be denied. It was a magnificent achievement: it was world-changing. And the King James Version had played the key role.

There were some who claimed that the lack of support for freed slaves after the Civil War, and the continued disparagement of the ‘Negro' left black people worse off. Segregation, they argued, was slavery by another name. The braver ones did not think that. They got on with the new, often disturbed life and, largely through the Churches and a belief in the Word of God and in the mercy and love of God, began the slow build of a civilisation within America which has gradually broken into the mainstream. This was never more dramatically demonstrated than with Martin Luther King with his King James Version-led marches in the 1960s which finally sealed the victory won in 1865.

The number of Christians in the former slave sector grew. In the 1790s, there were 12,000 black Methodists and 13,000 black Baptists. In 1860 this number had gone up to about 400,000. By 1900 there were 2.7 million black Church members out of a black population of 8.3 million. The 2.7 million figure does not include the unaffiliated members. The Words of God in the Churches became the education and the ever-strengthening political muscle in the long, bitter but tenacious struggle for full equality.

Bi-racial Churches all but disappeared. The white Methodist intervention had been a stepping stone. The black preachers now took up their own Methodism, as did other Churches. They took it into the new struggle to construct from the post-slavery debris entirely new communities. This was a very tough and complex task following centuries of chains and objectification and disbarment from any but the most rudimentary social organisation. Even family had been destroyed. Fellowship was found in the Churches after the war just as much as worship; singing, praying,
planning, organising and caring for each other began in the Methodist and Baptist Churches.