This Republic of Suffering (27 page)

A little more than three months after Appomattox, northern clergyman and theologian Horace Bushnell celebrated northern victory by placing the dead and their sacrifice at the center of war's accomplishment. The slain, he declared, were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph.” You get what you pay for, his oration implied; only war's cost had ensured its transformative impact. Bleeding, he asserted, was necessary to God's expansive—and expensive—purposes for America, and “in this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified.” The Christian narrative of redemption through suffering and sacrifice framed Bushnell's rendering of the war and its meaning. Death was not loss, but both the instrument and the substance of victory.
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Early in the conflict, on the Sunday after the Union defeat at First Bull Run in 1861, Bushnell had delivered a sermon entitled “Reverses Needed,” calling for the nation's resolve and devotion to be tested. Four years later he could affirm that America had passed its trial. The war's suffering had guaranteed that “we are not the same people that we were, and never can be again.” A new understanding of nationhood as the incarnation of God's design had been purchased by “our acres of dead.” Because, like Christianity, history “must feed itself on blood,” the United States now “may be said to have gotten a history.” The nation was “no more a mere creature of our human will, but a grandly moral affair.” Its purposes were now God's purposes. “Hallowed” by “rivers of blood,” the United States claimed its place as the redeemer nation. “Government is now become Providential.” The “mournful offering” of war's deaths had “bought a really stupendous chapter of history.” And the blood that had been shed to achieve God's design of freedom, emancipation, and inspired nationhood, he explicitly recognized, was black as well as white, sacrificed at Fort Pillow and Fort Wagner as well as at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Shiloh.
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Bushnell closed his oration by invoking a manifest destiny of national expansion, impelled in no small part by the need to compensate for war's cost. There was a need, Bushnell emphasized, “to wind up and settle this great tragedy in a way to exactly justify every drop of blood that has been shed in it.” Like Confederate bishop Stephen Elliott, he too sought still “higher aims” to balance the flow of “such blood.” War's destructiveness called for broadened purposes. “Ours be it also, in God's own time,” he concluded, “to champion…the right of this whole continent to be an American world, and to have its own American laws, liberties, and institutions.”
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Bushnell spoke as a victor. One also suspects that he could talk so enthusiastically about blood because he had spent the war in Connecticut, distant from the battlefields “black with dead” that he described. But Providence had favored him, and he could thus claim its purposes as his own. His dead, the northern dead, could be explained as part of a larger purpose and grander plan. But for the defeated South, war's terrible losses could only seem meaningless.
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As Confederate fortunes faltered, some white southerners “plainly indicated,” one woman reported, “that if our cause failed, they would lose all faith in a prayer answering God.” Confederate poet Henry Timrod had in fact suggested in “Ethnogenesis,” his 1861 celebration of the southern nation's birth, that “to doubt the end were want of trust in God.” What then did it mean actually to see the end and to face defeat? What then of God's trustworthiness? Surrender made war's sacrifices seem purposeless; losses would remain unredeemed; southern fathers, brothers, and sons had not died that a nation might live.
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Even the most devout struggled to reconcile themselves to defeat and to find meaning for the slaughter. The Presbytery of South Carolina observed in the fall of 1865 that “the faith of many a Christian is shaken by the mysterious and unlooked-for course of divine Providence.” Baptist leader Samuel Ford recognized that “‘Where is God' seemed to be the anxious questioning of each heart…Is there a God? many
many
asked.” Virginian Mary Lee felt herself “like a ship without a pilot or compass.” She could see no God at the helm.
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Some believers, like the Presbyterian editor John Adger, reminded their fellow southerners, as clergy had indeed reiterated throughout the trials of four years of war, that God chastened those he loved. Defeat was simply another burden to be borne with the unwavering patience that Job had exhibited in the face of divine affliction. “Yes! The hand of God, gracious though heavy, is upon the South for her discipline.” In Richmond, Reverend Moses Drury Hoge confessed that defeat “enwraps me like a pall.” But he determined not to “murmur” at God and instead would “await the development of his providence.”
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Many felt they had endured enough. After Appomattox Grace Elmore of South Carolina wrote in despair, “I know not how to bear it. I cannot be resigned.” She acknowledged that “hard thoughts against my God will arise.” She had lost two cousins to the war, had dealt with Yankee invaders in her own house, and had lived through the burning of Columbia with “flames before, behind and around us.” She struggled to fit her experience into Christian narratives of suffering and redemption, but with the resurrection of the Confederate state all but impossible, she saw little hope of salvation. “Night and day in every moment of quiet,” she wrote, “I am trying to work out the meaning of this horrible fact, to find truth at the bottom of this impenetrable darkness…Has God forsaken us?” Widowed, homeless, and destitute, Cornelia McDonald of Virginia shared Elmore's feelings of abandonment. She described lying immobile on a sofa through “dreadful hours of unbelief and hopelessness.” But gradually memories of God's mercies crept over her, and she resolved once again to trust in him despite her afflictions.
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Like McDonald, most former Confederates would suppress their doubts and return to religious belief and observance. Churches grew dramatically in the South in the years after the Civil War, setting the stage for the region's emergence as the Bible Belt in the twentieth century. But many white southerners remained bewildered, as Mary Lee put it, by God's mysterious ways in subjecting them to the anguishing losses of war. The cult of the Lost Cause and the celebration of Confederate memory that emerged in the ensuing decades were in no small part an effort to affirm that the hundreds of thousands of young southern lives had not, in fact, been given in vain.

The victors' providential view of the conflict and of Union and emancipation offered white northerners and African Americans throughout the nation a consoling narrative of divine purpose and sacrifice. But not all Americans were satisfied with such a justification of war's cost. The horrors of battle and the magnitude of the carnage were difficult to put aside. The force of loss left even many believers unable to abandon lingering uncertainties about God's benevolence. Doubters confronted profound questions not just about God but about life's meaning and the very foundations of both belief and knowledge.

In his study of a group of prominent mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals clustered around Harvard, Louis Menand has argued that the Civil War not only “discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it” it destroyed “almost the whole intellectual culture of the North.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose father had rushed to find him after he was wounded at Antietam, was one of these men, and Menand believes he never recovered from the mental impact of his experiences. The younger Holmes had volunteered to fight, Menand explains, because of certain moral principles, but “the war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs.” This was more than just a loss of faith; it was an issue of both epistemology and sensibility, of how we know the world and how we envision our relationship to it.
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One product of the horror of the Civil War was the proliferation of irony, of a posture of distance and doubt in relation to experience. Literary scholar Paul Fussell has written that wars always beget irony because intentions are so often overturned by circumstance; war's outcomes are so much more terrible than we can ever anticipate. Certainly this was true of the American Civil War, which began with statesmen assuring one another of all but bloodless victory. But the predominant response to the unexpected carnage was in fact a resolute sentimentality that verged at times on pathos. Songs abounded in which soldiers entreated their mothers to “come, Your Boy is Dying,” to “bless me…ere I die,” or “kiss me once before I go,” or “make me a child again just for tonight.” Novels and stories shared the enthusiastic earnestness of
The Gates Ajar.
But another, contrasting sensibility emerged in the course of the war as well, often appearing in direct reaction to the gap between the conventions of Victorian sentimentality and the reality of modern industrialized warfare.
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Parody was one mode for this response. In the realm of popular song, “Mother Would Comfort Me” was countered by “Mother Would Wallop Me,” a quite different take on the nature of domesticity. One lyricist mocked the countless ballads on motherhood by linking more than a dozen titles together to create the words to “Mother on the Brain,” to be sung to the tune of “The Bonnie Blue Flag.”

“It was my Mother's customs,” “My gentle Mother dear”

“I was my Mother's darling,” for, I loved my lager beer.

“Kiss me good-night, Mother,” and bring me a Bourbon plain—

“Mother dear, I feel I'm dying,” with Mother on the brain.
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“The Dying Soldier.” Song sheet. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Mark Twain took on
The Gates Ajar
in a “burlesque” entitled “Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.” Although he showed a version of it to William Dean Howells in the early 1870s, he dared not publish it until after the turn of the century and the death of his disapproving wife. Twain complained that Phelps's novel “had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island—a heaven large enough to accommodate about a tenth of one percent of the Christian billions who had died in the past nineteen centuries.” Twain's hero had trouble managing his angel wings and flew so badly that he regularly collided with others. Stormfield was also startled to discover that the overwhelming proportion of American angels were in fact Indians, not white men, for Indians had been dying in the New World and accumulating in the American section of heaven for centuries. The combination of his poor aeronautic abilities and his minority status rendered Stormfield less than entirely comfortable in paradise. Twain reduced Phelps's lugubrious earnestness to comic absurdity.
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Ambrose Bierce styled himself a wit, not a humorist, emphasizing the sardonic and cutting intent of his newspaper columns and stories. “Humor is tolerant, tender…its ridicule caresses. Wit stabs, begs pardon—and turns the weapon in the wound.” Raised on a midwestern farm where, as he later described it, “we had to grub out a very difficult living,” Bierce was the tenth of thirteen children—all given names beginning with A—born to parents he seems to have despised. He enlisted in the Union army when he was only eighteen. The most significant and prolific American writer actually to fight in the Civil War, Bierce saw nearly four years of combat and won multiple commendations for bravery before receiving a serious head wound at Kennesaw Mountain in 1864. After the war he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a journalist. Haunted all his life by what he described as persisting “visions of the dead and dying,” Bierce began in the 1880s to publish both fiction and nonfiction based on his military experiences. His writings about the war are often cited as the beginnings of modern war literature and as a major influence upon both Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. Bierce crafted unromanticized depictions of battle that reflected his fundamental approach to both writing and to life: “Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And…most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
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The yawning discrepancy between the hopes that inaugurated the war and the experience of its horrors deeply affected Bierce's subsequent view of the world. Surviving the war left him tormented by the “phantoms of that blood-stained period” and by a bitterness that derived not just from his own loss of innocence in war but from his sense that he was among the few truly to admit war's terror and its price. He felt both isolated and angered by the denial and repression of loss that characterized the postwar world. Organized religion, which he believed to be filled with hypocrisy and self-delusion, was his particular bugbear; he defined it in his
Devil's Dictionary
as “a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”
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