Upon the Altar of the Nation (27 page)

The Union chaplain William Scandlin made known his objections to the new war. Scandlin would be captured at Gettysburg and spend several months in Richmond’s Libby Prison, where he would condemn Confederate mistreatment of prisoners of war. But in 1862, he concerned himself with his own soldiers’ conduct.

In an unpublished sermon delivered in the field at Camp Charlestown, Virginia, Scandlin used John 21:22 to confirm the moral call of a higher law than military orders and condemn what he termed the “apparent sanction” of Pope’s general order to plunder and destroy civilian property: Even if other soldiers “trample upon human rights and... the sacred sanctity of other homes, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.” The present behavior of Union troops was unjust:

Such words undoubtedly did not endear Scandlin to officers and soldiers bent on destruction, but they do confirm that moral conscience was not wholly absent. That confirmation condemns the conduct of the majority who celebrated the new policy. For most, no moral restraints remained short of murder. The midwestern
Christian Instructor and Western United Presbyterian
recognized that “the people are becoming somewhat restive, thoroughly roused, and in certain quarters a little desperate, and are demanding of the Administration to do what it has to do quickly.”
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The Northern press greeted the general orders with glee and headlines celebrating, “The Kid Glove Policy Abandoned.”
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Pope issued the orders, but it is clear that he himself was under orders. Lincoln willingly sacrificed traditional moral restraints to strike fear in the heart of the enemy and to protect his soldiers from hostile civilians and guerrillas. General Halleck disagreed with the severity of Pope’s new policy, but he did not protest because he knew it had the president’s approval. In fact, Lincoln followed up Pope’s orders with an executive order of his own permitting commanders to seize or destroy civilian property as long as such activity was not wanton or malicious. Lincoln issued the executive order the same day in July that he read his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation draft to his cabinet. The coupling of orders on the same day perfectly symbolized the conjunction of emancipation and total war in Lincoln’s mind.
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However necessary the removal of McClellan to achieve Lincoln’s war objectives, the appointment of Pope proved to be a disastrous miscalculation. Lincoln liked the confident and aggressive swagger of Pope’s language in the West and in his testimony before the Committee on the Conduct of the War. There, Pope openly disparaged the West Point Code and bragged that he would win if granted the license to promote a total war. But Lincoln knew nothing of Pope’s tactical skills or his capacity to command and coordinate a large and complex army in the field—particularly when that army faced the strategy of Lee and the tactics of Jackson.

To his dismay Lincoln soon learned that tough rhetoric alone could not produce victories. In a remarkably short period, Pope revealed his rank incompetence. Lee and Jackson had no more respect for Pope than they had had for McClellan. Indeed, Pope’s insistence that Southern civilians would feel the cold hand of war so infuriated Lee that he referred to Pope in uncharacteristically demeaning terms as “that miscreant.”

Operating in familiar terrain around Richmond, Lee and Jackson imaginatively employed risky flanking movements to achieve complete surprise and victory over Pope’s numerically superior Union forces. Every time Pope moved to shift his armies, Lee and Jackson anticipated him and confidently divided their army, allowing Jackson the advantage of surprise behind enemy lines. With the intelligence support of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, Jackson knew Pope’s every move and was able to rejoin forces with Lee before a punch-drunk Pope could recover and smash Lee’s undermanned and divided positions.

Despite glaring weaknesses in Northern command, the Yankee soldiers continued to remain confident in their superiority. On August 27 a cocky Private Dickinson wrote to his brother: “I do not believe any danger is to be apprehended from the Rebs being [that we are] in superior numbers.” But just in case, “this letter will be put in the hands of one of our band who are going home. Give my love to all, your affectionate brother, Fred.”
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Two days later, Dickinson was killed in yet another Union fiasco in the battle of Second Bull Run, fought on August 29 and 30. With McClellan rushing reinforcements to Pope, and with Pope’s army already outnumbering Lee seventy-five thousand to fifty-five thousand, Lee launched the bold (and highly risky) tactic of dividing his smaller army between Longstreet’s thirty thousand soldiers west of the Bull Run Mountains and Jackson’s twenty-four thousand soldiers at Manassas. Between these contingents stood Pope’s massive army. Had Pope known of Lee’s strategy, he could easily have smashed each wing of Lee’s army in succession, leaving Lee utterly destroyed and Richmond within Pope’s grasp. But Lee appropriately counted on Pope’s indecision and made up in speed and effective command what he lacked in concentrated forces to achieve victory.

In all, Pope suffered 16,000 casualties to 9,100 for the South. He lost as well two of his best commanders—Isaac Stevens (in line to become the next commander of the Army of the Potomac) and Philip Kearny.
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The reversal of fortunes had an electric effect on the Confederacy. For President Davis, the victory confirmed his confidence in Lee, even at the risk of leaving Richmond temporarily unprotected. Instead of standing at the gates of Richmond, the Army of the Potomac lay in rout, and Lee stood poised to invade Maryland and even the capital.

 

Despite the victory, many in Richmond mourned the heavy casualties the city’s defense exacted. Churches witnessed countless rituals of funeral sermons, celebrating the heroism of fallen members and hoping their destination was heaven.

In a funeral sermon for Roswell Lindsey, recorded in his private sermon notebook, Jeremiah Bell Jeter grieved with the parents and then praised the son’s patriotism: “[He] was a brave soldier beloved by his comrades... and his body sleeps on the gory field. He died at the post of duty—offered his life on the altar of his Country—and there is hope concerning his future estatc.”
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In Savannah the Methodist pastor George G. N. MacDonell memorialized two members of his congregation who fell in battle “near Richmond.” One eulogy, for Captain Jonathan Ethridge, delivered on June 8, took for its text Revelation 21:3-4 and developed the doctrine that “[m]an [is] subject to the laws of suffering and death.” A month later, in a sermon for the Reverend Robert Jones, MacDonell delivered a gentler sermon on the same text, this time with the doctrine “no death in heaven.”
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In New York the religious press issued a rare denigration of Lincoln following Second Bull Run when “the sun seems to rise and set in blood.” In the end, they would counsel loyalty, but not veneration:

The secular press paid less attention to Lincoln and more to sensational headlines. On August 18, 1862, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
front page included: “News of the Repulse of Breckinridge at Baton Rouge,” “Gen. Williams’ Head Shot Off by a Cannon Ball,” “The Recent Demonstrations of the Negroes,” and “Outrages of the Guerrillas along the Mississippi.” In contrast to the religious press, the
Inquirer
had far less sympathy with the plight of the slaves and instead denigrated the “poor deluded creatures” who thought that invading Yankees would bring them their freedom.
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A deeply frustrated Lincoln questioned himself and turned for direction to his God. Like Davis, Lincoln was becoming steadily more spiritual, although without compromising his unshaken resolve. Along with spirituality came a sort of mystical fatalism. Increasingly he sensed that something more than a mere civil war was going on in this conflict, and that it transcended the rightness or wrongness of either side. Northern clergy and opinion shapers might be certain that God was on their side, but Lincoln, almost alone, was not convinced. He too had a growing sense of Providence, but without the self-righteous evangelical piety that went along with so much patriotism in the North and the South.

In a moment of disturbed meditation, he reflected on just whose side God was really on:

Here we see the first premonitions of a sense of destiny that would lift Lincoln above the rank partisanship of virtually everyone else. It could allow him to glimpse a divine purpose to the war that transcended section and ultimately helped him escape the rhetorical cage of the jeremiad. In life, this provided for Lincoln a Christlike compassion for his foes; in death, it would render him a Christlike messiah for the reconstituted American nation.

Lincoln was unusual in questioning the ironclad logic of the jeremiad that promised success, but he was not alone. Princeton’s Charles Hodge came to a similar conclusion, and called into question the entire moral logic of the jeremiad: “The distribution of good and evil in this world to individuals, churches, or nations is not determined by the principles of justice, but according to the wise and benevolent sovereignty of God... the orderings of his providence are not determined by justice, but by mysterious wisdom for the accomplishment of higher ends than mere punishment or reward.”
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But the Lincolns and Hodges were lone wolves. Most clergy embraced the contractual logic of the jeremiad and sought in it formulae for victories. In casting about for explanations of why victories were not forthcoming, abolitionist clergy saw in slavery the hidden cause of defeat. In a sermon delivered to the First Congregational Church of Leavenworth, Kansas, James D. Liggett used the case of the ten tribes of Israel to underscore the point that defeat did not mean that God’s “favor is even temporarily with his enemies, and against his own people.” What then did God intend? In a word, Liggett asserted, God wanted the Civil War to become an abolition war, and only then would victory be granted to the North:

Other less abolitionist preachers explained defeats with reference to the traditional jeremiad sins of pride, materialism, profanity, and Sabbath-breaking. Added to these universal sins were others peculiar to the North. Again the question of God in the Constitution was raised as a sort of mantra. For Philadelphia’s Henry Boardman:

As if the constitutional oversight were not enough, Boardman also divined that God was angry because He was missing from the coinage of the nation. This absence, Boardman insisted, “is not a trivial matter... [for] the entire absence of all such emblems and legends from the coins of a nominally Christian nation, must be taken to indicate as much a want of reverence for the Deity, as a want of respect for the common religious sentiment of mankind.”
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