Upon the Altar of the Nation (25 page)

Whether he knew the terminology or not, Hill was raising the moral issue of “proportionality” or acceptable losses among the soldiers.
⁹
In all wars, it is not enough merely to spare noncombatants. Strategic planners should have to weigh their own probable casualties against the gains against the enemy. But in this war, considerations of proportionality were fast becoming subordinated to blood revenge.

 

Meanwhile, Richmond’s citizens “soldiered” on with the constant sound of cannons in their ears and accepted whatever devastations Providence exacted. As forces in the field groaned, so appetites at home grew insatiable for the shedding of more blood. The secular press in Richmond did not back down from the threat of imminent battle and local bloodshed. In an essay on “War and Peace,” printed on June 26, the
Richmond Daily Dispatch
observed: “War, then, has within it seeds of good, seeds which must be fertilized by blood to bring forth a harvest of blessings. And if there ever was a war that demanded at once the energies of the patriot and the benediction of the Christian, it is a war in defense of homes and altars, of civil liberty, of social virtue, of life itself, and of all that makes life worth having.”
¹⁰

Unaware of McClellan’s near paranoia, the Northern religious press continued as well to support the war effort—and McClellan’s handling of it. Apparently many agreed with McClellan that he was vastly outnumbered. The
American Presbyterian
reported: “Events of a most important character have transpired during the past week in the vicinity of Richmond. A series of desperate and bloody contests, all of them of the proportions of great battles, has been fought between our forces and vastly superior numbers of the Rebels.”
¹¹

The Seven Days’ Battles settled nothing, except to set a new standard in casualties. Lee’s army succeeded in temporarily driving the Federals away from Richmond at a combined cost of twenty thousand casualties to the Federals’ sixteen thousand. But Lee failed to defeat McClellan. In all, the Seven Days’ casualties exceeded all the battles in the western campaign, including Shiloh. From this point on, the greatest slaughters would take place under Lincoln’s and Davis’s noses between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Northeast-fed Army of the Potomac.

Proportionality meant nothing to the civilian audience. As with Shiloh in the West, citizens on both sides of the conflict were appalled at the level of destruction, even as they approved the destruction’s moral legitimacy. Richmond’s Mary Williams Taylor, daughter of the prominent Baptist minister James Barnett Taylor, kept a diary. On June 27, she recorded the anguish “this cruel war causes.” Two days later she brooded: “While I am seated here in this quiet country home on this holy day, what scenes of bloodshed are being enacted near my own loved home. I shudder to think of it.... For three days the battle has raged.... O that it may be the means of driving our enemies far from us. O God spare us and save our beloved city”
¹²

In the end, nothing strategic was achieved by the destructive campaign, but few were willing to speak out or question the “proportionality” of the losses and instead sat back in numbed silence. Southern cheerleaders screamed “Victory!” and Lee and Jackson began their rise to mythic glory.
¹³
The real lesson in these battles should have been tactical. Frontal assaults should never be undertaken when it is possible to turn the enemy’s position. Strategic offensives in the face of entrenched positions and modern weaponry amount to virtual suicide. When green troops and inexperienced commanders were thrown into the mix, the futility grew exponentially. Still, nothing changed. Sadly, the adrenalized “charge” of a frontal assault was simply too intoxicating to abandon any time soon.

Suicidal or not, the military action also captured the imagination of non-combatants who were remarkably well informed about the battles. Foreign wars were often fought in a fog of home front ignorance, but Americans on both sides of this civil war knew what was happening, and often in sensationalist terms. “Yellow journalism” may have been the creation of the Gilded Age, but its roots reach back to the Civil War. Writing of the Richmond campaign, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
screamed its headline: “Scene of the Present Terrible Conflict in Front of Richmond.” Then followed a series of “bullets”: “Latest War News!” “Great Battle on Friday.” “Evacuation of White House.” “Onward to Richmond!”

On the next page, readers were provided with lists of the names of Pennsylvania soldiers killed or wounded, together with the plaintive note, “There are two here who are unable to give their names or any information respecting themselves. They will both die and remain unknown!”
¹⁴
Four days later the news continued, with “slaughter” being the favorite adjective: “The Terrific Battles in the Peninsula Great Slaughter of Rebel Soldiers!” “Arrival of Wounded and Sick Soldiers. Gloomy Day in Fredericksburg, Va.”
¹⁵

 

News of McClellan’s retreat was greeted in Richmond with the sort of joy that comes to a people literally under siege. Confederate nationalism would come to reside in Lee’s army, and, by extension, Lee himself embodied the savior, both to his own men and to the Confederacy as a whole.
¹⁶

In an address to the Army of Northern Virginia, President Davis invoked manliness and Providence:

Like so many proclamations on both sides of the conflict, references to death and suffering were absent. Instead, all was “death-defying valor.” Davis left unsaid the matter of thousands who defied death—and lost.

Victory might be glorious, but the civilians in Richmond tasted battle to an unsettling degree. It should be no surprise then that they were among the first to become true believers. The themes of the jeremiad dominated local unpublished oratory as well as printed sermons and official pronouncements. Few unpublished sermons remain from the midst of war, but one remarkably complete selection survives from Richmond’s Jeremiah Bell Jeter, who was pastor of the Third Baptist Church, a cofounder of the Southern Baptist Convention, a teacher at Richmond College, and a “reluctant” slave owner.

Throughout the war, Jeter preached weekly in Richmond at the Grace Street Baptist Church. At the front of his sermon booklet he wrote: “This volume of notes was prepared during the war. Many sermons I prepared during that trying period with the roar of battle in my ears.”
¹⁸

When word reached Richmond that Lee had attacked on the Peninsula and pushed McClellan’s powerful army away from the city, Jeter promptly penned a thanksgiving sermon “on the occasion of the national victories.” The coincidence of victory with fast was to Jeter’s eye clearly causal. At first, “it was a dark day for the Confederacy.” But then the Confederacy knelt in national humiliation, and in response God smiled upon His people. Apart from some naval defeats, victory occurred on almost every front. “The siege of Richmond has been raised”; the enemy was on the defensive. What meaning should be taken from this? Victories “are not to be ascribed to the number or skill of our troops—not to the superiority of our generals—but to the divine hand.”
¹⁹
Like virtually all of his Northern and Southern peers, Jeter had no moral commentary on the scale of carnage. Throughout the war, this subject would remain taboo.

With commentary such as this, it is not surprising that the fast was rapidly becoming a martial totem. Through their prayers, ministers and people could share in the glory for “their” victory. Theologically, ministers agreed that fasts or thanksgivings could not magically ensure earthly triumphs. But when victories came, they simply could not resist the assumption that their piety had commended—or at least cajoled—God’s orchestration of events in the field. Had a defeat followed the fast, ministers would either say nothing or complain that the people were not sufficiently sincere. In the inclusive world of the jeremiad, “incompetence” in the field was not a sufficient explanation for defeat. In this sense the home front could also share in the shame of “their” common defeat.

 

In the Confederacy, criticisms of Davis focused both on his strategy and initiative and on his appeals to heaven. The secular press, traditionally less than pious, openly wondered whether Davis’s newfound religiosity might represent a feminizing agency that weakened his army’s manhood. Already in February 1862, following the loss of Fort Donelson, the
Richmond Daily Whig
had openly questioned whether “more energetic men might not have effected far more important results.”
²⁰
War clerk John B. Jones observed, “Our army has fallen back to within four miles of Richmond. Much anxiety is felt for the fate of the city.”
²¹
Faced with this threat and mindful of Davis’s recent baptism and private confirmation at St. Paul’s, the secular press questioned policies founded on piety and fasting.

President Davis knew that he depended on the churches for support. On May 3, he once again proclaimed a fast day for May 16. The tone was as somber as anything he ever wrote:

Davis understood the sacred language of “martyrs” and was nothing if not persistent. Barely three months earlier, the Confederacy had observed a national day of fasting for deliverance. Then came Pea Ridge, Shiloh, and Corinth. Clearly, one fast was not enough.

But this time a growing divide existed between Davis critics in some secular papers and the religious press. Where religious presses continued to endorse observance of the day and praised Davis’s leadership without qualification, others demurred. The
Richmond Examiner
was especially harsh as news of one more fast reached their offices. John Moncure Daniel had had enough:

Not content to blister the fast day, Daniel went on to pillory the president: “When we find our President standing in a corner telling his beads, and relying on a miracle to save the country, instead of mounting his horse and putting forth every power of the Government to defeat the enemy, the effect is depressing in the extreme.”
²³

The editorial was more than another of the
Examiner’s
political attacks upon the Davis administration. It was an expression of grave misgivings about the state of the Confederacy’s civil religion, and about the effect of its central ritual, the fast day, upon Southern morale. The editorial signaled the first explicit break between Richmond’s pulpits and secular press over the religious meaning of the Civil War. As internal strains, mounting casualties, and battlefield defeats tore apart the superficial unity shaped by the flush of early success, the secular presses of Richmond, the news hub of the South, increasingly avoided what the
Examiner
would call the pulpit’s “sanctimonious terminology” when discussing the deeper meanings of the war. Newspaper pundits attacked even the Confederacy’s ritual bows to God as another failed policy of an ostentatiously religious Davis administration.

There was no question that the war was taking its toll on Confederate unanimity, which depended on victories for its united front. In time the divide between the religious and some secular newspapers (though by no means all) widened as ministers remained ever loyal to the cause and administration, while secular editors throughout the Confederacy questioned Davis and his war policy. These divisions were never strong enough utterly to defeat morale or to create a surrender mentality on a popular level, but they did signal strains in the fabric. Even as faith in fasts was challenged, and the press criticized the Davis administration, public faith in the army and its generals remained high.
²⁴
Only time would tell how they would respond to even greater escalations of war and civilian suffering.

While no other writers assumed as caustic a stand as Daniel, a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for prayer prevailed in the secular press in 1862. In this dynamic war, attitudes would be transformed yet again in the war’s last and bloodiest year. But in 1862, Southern “manliness” was preferred among some secular writers to piety. This stood in sharp contrast to the belief of the pulpit and religious press and Christian generals like Stonewall Jackson who argued just the opposite, that pious Christians made the best soldiers. Earthly confidence in armies and generals without true piety, they maintained, was a formula for disaster, and the recent defeats confirmed it. In Richmond, ministers preached to filled congregations.

The Confederate press, though willing to endorse fast days, was not as certain as pastors, presidents, and generals that fasts won battles. In a “Lay Sermon” printed in early 1862, the
Examiner
mentioned Providence, but then proceeded to dwell on the lessons of “natural philosophy.” The “philosopher learns that the world is like a great mart of commerce, where Fortune exposes various commodities, some good and some bad.”
²⁵
In a portent of what was to come, the
Examiner
began to complain that after a defeat too many people imagined that “the only course left is to grovel in the dust and beg, like whipped curs, for mercy.”
²⁶
Seven months later, as yet another fast approached and ministers were trying to read the will of God in the signs of the times, the paper declared that “[w]ar is a game of chance; and in all games of chance there are unaccountable runs of good and bad luck.”
²⁷
Even more than the clergy and religious press, secular presses were miles from expecting or accepting moral accountability in any recognizable form. By their telling, blood and luck would run their course until both ran out.