Upon the Altar of the Nation (2 page)

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, just-war theory has undergone a rebirth in response both to the invention and deployment of nuclear weaponry and other weapons of mass destruction and to wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Perhaps the single most important study has been Michael Walzer’s
Just and Unjust Wars,
but other major scholarship appears in the work of Paul Ramsey, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Geoffrey Best, James Turner Johnson, and William V O’Brien.
³

In opposition to both pacifism on the one hand and amoral realism (Realpolitik) on the other, just-war theory offers a series of ethical principles that articulate a plausible moral framework.
⁴
Whether one is dealing with wars in the distant past or contemporary wars, two sets of principles are especially important. The first set of principles offers guidelines for when a war might justly be declared. The second set of principles offers guidelines for governing just and fair conduct in the actual fighting of the war.

With regard to the first set of principles governing just war
(jus ad bellum),
most theorists agree that initiating acts of aggression for selfish purposes is always wrong. The only rationale for a just declaration of war is self-defense, and this must be determined at the highest levels of state. In situations where imminent attack looms, a preventive or preemptive attack is justified—but real and present danger must be virtually beyond doubt. In other words, just wars are always
defensive
wars.

One corollary principle growing out of a just war for self-defense is that the war have a reasonable probability of success. The net balance of the war’s costs and benefits, as well as its cause, must be calculated by a nation’s leaders. Just-war theory argues against expending (that is, wasting) precious human and economic resources in an obviously uneven fight, though even here theorists concede that a nation must sometimes stand up to a bully in the hope that others will join the cause.

Jus ad bellum
arguments are ideally suited to addressing wars of nation against nation, and, in particular, nations who share some common culture and expect at war’s conclusion to live in some sort of measured peace. In civil wars, however, where significant numbers of belligerent citizens align themselves under warring banners, with substantial territories and competent leadership on both sides, it often becomes difficult to discern with finality who is the unjust aggressor and who the just defender.
⁵
Such was the case with the American Civil War, in which each of two considerable populations came to the conclusion that war was their last best option. With this conviction, each side joined the battle convinced that its cause was just and that God was on its side.
⁶

As they moved relentlessly toward war, both sides focused on the issue of secession and discovered an ethical problem without a formula for a definitive moral response. There is no “just” or “unjust” behavior a priori. On the eve of civil war, Benjamin Russell Allen, the Congregational minister of Marblehead, Massachusetts, pointed to the ethical conundrum of secession. Recalling the American Revolution, he recognized that “[o]pposition to the Government, secession even, is a
revolutionary
right in certain circumstances, a right
above
all constitutions, the right of all people—everywhere; but not a right which any government provides for [emphasis added].”
⁷

Did Norway have a right to secede from Sweden? Does modern-day Chechnya have a right to secede from Russia? It is a moral issue that recurs through the years, with no definitive answers. Did the South have a right to secede from the North? Yes. And no. Only a civil war would determine the answer.

The second category of just-war theory, and the one most central to this moral history, addresses the conduct of war (
jus
in
bello).
In asking how a just war should be fought, theorists isolate two primary principles: proportionality and discrimination. The former bridges the gap between declarations of war and methods of war by requiring that goals be proportional to the means employed. Even granting that all soldiers at some level give up their right to life by enlisting in armed forces, principles of proportionality still invoke limits to the carnage. This is precisely the issue that Evander Law raised when he said of Cold Harbor, “It was not war, but murder.” In like manner, orders of “no quarter” (i.e., that all wounded and prisoners be killed) in the Seven Years’ War violated the principle of proportionality—the battle had already been won when the orders were given.
⁸

The principle of discrimination addresses the question of who should be considered legitimate targets in war. Noncombatants are deemed to stand outside the field of war proper; thus it is unjust to attack them. Just-war theory unanimously upholds the protection of civilians—no element of judgment or prudential weighing of costs and benefits is acceptable in deciding whether or not to target civilians or take them hostage; it is always wrong.

Of course, warfare sometimes unavoidably involves civilians who get caught up in the fighting. Today we use the term “collateral damage” to describe these tragic situations. Just-war theorists address the topic of collateral damage in terms of “double effect.” The doctrine of double effect justifies killing civilians in war only if their deaths are not intended but accidental. So, for example, targeting an undefended city is not permissible but targeting a military establishment in the middle of a city is. The target is the military unit and not the civilians inadvertently caught up in the struggle.

Issues of proportionality of losses to strategic ends and discrimination of legitimate and illegitimate targets will recur in this book. While the theory remains clear in the abstract (i.e., without actual numbers in play), its application in the Civil War—the determination of right or wrong—is far from clear or unanimous, from the vantage point of both the participants and the later observers. This becomes especially true in the later years of the war, as it escalated from a limited war fought by armies in the field, far from cities and civilians, to a “total” war in which civilians and their property were deliberately targeted. As limited war transmogrified into a total war for unconditional surrender, the moral dimensions changed dramatically.

The phrase “total war,” like “just war” or “immoral behavior,” is vigorously contested but, I believe, necessary. The term “total war” did not exist during the Civil War, but I employ it anyway, taking into account its historical relativity Why? Because I simply cannot come up with a better term. Words like “hard” or “destructive” are often used to distinguish the Civil War from the even greater tragedies of the twentieth century, but they do not penetrate the moral center of the Civil War, which I take to be a war waged deliberately on civilian populations with the full knowledge and compliance of commanders running all the way to the top. In this sense, the
spirit
of total war emerged quite clearly by 1864 and prepared Americans for the even more devastating total wars they would pursue in the twentieth century. In terms of the civilian victims, North and South, the Civil War differed so profoundly in scale from earlier American conflicts that participants could only understand and experience it as something
totally
new and unprecedented. Of course, total war in nineteenth-century America describes something very different—and less severe—than total wars in the twentieth or twenty-first century. There exists no equivalent of Dresden, or Coventry, or Tokyo, or Rwanda in the Civil War. But nineteenth-century participants
experienced
their war as total. If, God forbid, a total war in the twenty-first century were to claim hundreds of millions of casualties that dwarfed losses in World Wars I and II, it would not mean that the twentieth-century wars were no longer “total.” The same is true of the Civil War, and attempts to minimize its destruction—military and civilian—reflect the historian’s cardinal sin of anachronism, literally judging the past by the standards of the present rather than on its own terms.
⁹

At the same time that the Civil War developed from a limited war into a total war, the moral justification changed in the North from a limited war for “Union” to a moral crusade for “freedom” and abolition. Unlike secession, slavery is not morally ambiguous. At first a background topic as the (initially unacknowledged) cause of the war, slavery would grow ever more powerful in its foreground role throughout the war. With emancipation, it would represent Lincoln’s inner accelerator for mounting a total war on the Confederacy, soldier and civilian alike. And with abolition, it would provide an unambiguous moral triumph.

The justness of abolition and the freedom of four million dictates that any moral history of slavery unconditionally conclude that the right side won, no matter what the casualties and sacrifices. Lincoln was right when he said in his Second Inaugural Address that if God willed that the war “continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword ... so still it must be said ‘The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ”
¹⁰

But this book is not a moral history of slavery. It is a moral history of a war, where questions of proportionality and discrimination continue to remain in play In any moral history of slavery, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would be unquestionably “right” and good. But in a moral history of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation becomes more problematic if it was employed by Lincoln and Northern Republicans generally as a “lever” (Lincoln’s term) for a total war on the Confederacy that deliberately targeted civilian farms, cities, and—in at least fifty thousand instances—civilian lives.“
¹¹
In a moral history of the Civil War, it is not enough merely to say that the end of human bondage in the United States was worth a million white lives, true as that may be. The separate question of war remains: was it just? Here it is possible, and, I believe, reasonable, to conclude that the right side won
in spite of itself.
Instead of declaring the Civil War a just war dictated by prudent considerations of proportionality and protection of noncombatants, I argue that in too many instances both sides descended into moral misconduct.

 

Any moral history of America’s Civil War is as much a history of ideas and passions as of actions. The United States was first and foremost an idea built on a foundation of ideology and theology. So, when America was put to its ultimate internal test, it would require not only a war of troops and armaments—the stuff of geopolitics—but also a war of ideas. This war would require each side, especially the South, to establish a legitimate identity as a moral “nation.” It would also demand a moral campaign to establish the justness of a resort to arms. Abstract political arguments would not suffice. They would have to be augmented by moral and spiritual arguments that could steel millions of men to the bloody business of killing one another. Above all, it is crucial to understand how both sides needed to enlist God in their cause as both justifier and absolute guarantor of their deliverance. Here the voices of clergymen in thousands of churches North and South would become especially meaningful as critics or cheerleaders of the war’s conduct.

Tragically, no less than everyone else, the clergy were virtually cheerleaders all. Throughout this book I have paid particular attention to the voices of clergymen on both sides of the struggle, because they were the sources where moral arguments
should
have prevailed. One more easily forgives generals, journalists, and soldiers for their moral silence. But clergy—especially the majority Protestant clergy—had traditionally opposed reflexive patriotic rhetoric from the pulpit. They supposedly answered to a higher authority. True, the rare critical voices sounded among the clergy, as evidence that they
could
have established a prophetic distance from their side. But these voices are precious few, and for one simple reason—nationalism.

In exploring the Civil War through moral lenses, one sees just how unprepared Americans were for such a cataclysm in the moral sense no less than the military or political. And unlike politics and military arsenals, which geared up to meet the challenge, the ability to fix a moral stance never progressed. Rather, it regressed. On all sides—clerical, political, journalistic, military, artistic, and intellectual—the historian searches in vain for moral criticism directed at one’s own cause. Talk of war certainly bristled from the pages of the secular press and civic assemblies, and statesmen, clergy, and intellectuals raged against the unjust conduct of the enemy. Yet few directly addressed the question of what constitutes a just war, and what limitations ought to be observed in the unpleasant event of war. In this avoidance and unpreparedness appears an important clue to the savage ferocity of fighting that would follow. As well, we discern important clues to the evolving meaning of America, and who (we) Americans are as a nation.

While few judged or questioned the recourse to total war, many saw in the unprecedented destruction of lives and property something mystical taking place, what we today might call the birthing of a fully functioning, truly national,
American
civil religion. It was a meaning difficult for anyone to articulate at the time; yet some—including soldiers, clergy and, most notably, Abraham Lincoln—began to posit a moral high ground in the creation of a powerful national or “civil” religion. As the Civil War progressed onto increasingly eroded moral ground, something transformative simultaneously took place that would render the war the defining phenomenon in American history. Patriotism itself became sacralized to the point that it enjoyed coequal or even superior status to conventional denominational faiths.