Upon the Altar of the Nation (48 page)

That themes of union could prevail amid the most bitter of hostilities confirmed to many spectators that divisions would end with the war’s end. In preaching a thanksgiving discourse to St. Paul’s parish in Brookline, Francis Wharton looked to war’s end and restoration on two fronts. First, and most obviously, was restoration between the two sections—one “community” after all. But second, and hardly self-evident, was reconciliation between emancipated slaves and their white brothers and sisters. Political freedom was not enough. There must also be a moral shift that removed “that prejudice which in the North, and particularly at the North-West, refuses to receive the negro as part of the industrial energies of the land.”

If, Wharton continued, “in view of the liberty we are giving to so large a part of the negro race, and the military debt we are accumulating to them, we do not remove this prejudice ... we shall, I think, be eternally branded as a nation dead to generous impulses, and unfaithful to the most sacred trusts.”
¹⁶
Since the elimination of racial prejudice was never a war theme or a political goal, racial prejudice would arguably grow stronger rather than weaker as a consequence of the war. There in a nutshell lay the moral critique that would dim emancipation, however noble it was, and “eternally brand” the nation.

Another issue that never went away in the aftermath of reconciliation had to do with the essential nature of the nation itself. Would the reconstructed nation be a Christian republic or would it take the form of a Lockean-Jeffersonian secular state? Again, the issue of a godless Constitution came into play, as clergy and evangelical moralists promoted an explicitly Christian America. With victory on the horizon, the time for resolution and remembrance was at hand. For the Reverend A. Cleveland Coxe, this meant: “When peace shall come, let us not forget what was so fatally forgotten by our fathers, to inscribe the Constitution of our regenerated country with the name of Him without whom we are nothing.”
¹⁷

Union thanksgiving sermons were as notable for what they did not address as for what they did. Conspicuous by its absence was any commentary on the war itself. Generals could be praised, victories savored, and “the cause” affirmed, but of the conduct of the war, there was only silence. In a time when censorship away from the battlefields was virtually unknown, and mass media prevailed as the most widely published and read in the world, the silence had to have been self-imposed. Forgiveness of the South and emancipation of the slave were laudable goals, but questioning the means to reach them remained off limits.

Some speakers went so far as to praise the means. In Freeport, Illinois, home to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Reverend Isaac Carey established the principle that “God is on our side,” and, therefore, destruction was a “power” working on God’s side. Because Union power resided “on the side of freedom,” and the South wielded “a power on the side of wrong and oppression,” Carey could say:

In contrast to most moral commentators who saw in war a bracing moral tonic uplifting the soldiers and citizenry, Baltimore’s border-state pastor N. H. Schenck saw this war bringing out the worst in American society. The voice is rare, but needs to be heard as an evidence of what
might
have been said. In a near perfect reversal of the vast majority of moral commentary in the North and South, Schenck concentrated on just war conduct and resolutely ignored patriotism—and emancipation. The war, he observed, represented a great “unmasking” of base motives and the “masquerade” of virtue on both contending sides. Nations did not deserve to be worshipped, and war did not produce martyrdom, only slaughter and immorality: “When victories mean nothing but wholesale slaughter and no great or permanent advantage secured, the victory mainly ascertained by measurement of blood and calculation of corpses, I fail to see in it the occasion of thanksgiving to God.”

Far from perceiving a cause for thanksgiving, Schenck witnessed a “tragical era”—human life itself devalued in the mindless pursuit of war. But in the grip of patriotism, he declared, the truth became almost impossible to glimpse:

There would be no civil religion in Emmanuel Church, Baltimore.

 

The last nationwide fast day in the Confederacy in 1863 took place on August 21. After the debacles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the
Richmond Daily Whig
eagerly complied with Davis’s proclamation. Rejecting the notion that God rained defeat on them for their cause, the
Whig
instead singled out sins. These were not the sins of pride or profanity or Sabbath-breaking—the stock-in-trade general sins applicable to all peoples at all times—but the sins of materialism and hoarding, particularly acute in Richmond. “No man or woman in the Confederacy,” wrote one commentator, “who is familiar with the doctrines or commandments of the inspired Word can be greatly surprised at the present state of affairs. Have not the people everywhere devoted themselves to the worship of Mammon? Have they not all practiced extortion?”
²⁰

In South Carolina Benjamin Palmer preached a state fast sermon on December 10 that was later printed and widely circulated. The sermon outlined the Confederacy’s civil religion. All hint of separation of church and state disappeared. As Palmer observed from the start, because the state called the fast, “it is the nearest approach which can be made to an act of worship by the State, as such ... the state is, in some clear sense, a sort of person before God.”

Having justified the holy stature of the Confederacy, it remained only for Palmer to worship. Like countless of his Northern counterparts, Palmer plunged into nation worship. Even as loyal soldiers were martyring themselves, “undergoing the fearful baptism of blood,” so must all Confederates realize the sacred stakes at issue: “The offering which patriotism renders to country, a sovereign state, on bended knee, with sacramental fervor, dedicates to God. Lift up the right hand to Heaven, as the grand oath rolls up above the stars, that you are prepared for death, but not for infamy.”
²¹

 

New Year’s opened in Richmond with optimism. Likening the South to David battling a Northern Goliath, the
Richmond Daily Dispatch
promised deliverance : “The little South, not one fourth her [the Union’s] size, has been chosen the instrument of puncturing the colossal gas bag of Unshaken self-conceit of the enemy.”
²²
Providence had a “beneficent design” in protracting the war, and for that reason the people should not despair. Citing one of the most favored texts in the American Revolution (“A Nation Born in a Day”), the paper went on to comment: “The American Revolution was mere child’s play compared to the gigantic struggle which is being waged on this continent.... A nation has been born in a day, and at the instant of its birth, it has been called upon to do the work of a giant.”
²³
Nevertheless, as long as God was trusted and President Davis supported with love and respect, victory would be sure.

But not everyone in Virginia supported the Davis administration, and even fewer outside of Virginia did. The criticisms of the ambitious governor of Georgia, Joe Brown, were deemed especially dangerous by advocates of the Confederate government. The “peace editors” of the Georgia press pushed for a peace that Davis was unwilling to pursue on any terms other than Confederate independence.
²⁴
The
Atlanta Daily Register,
in a particularly offensive editorial, recommended a return to the independence states had enjoyed before 1772 and secession from the Confederacy.
²⁵

Richmond’s newspapers responded defensively with a shift of editorial direction. In 1862, the
Examiner
had opined that “the Confederate Ship of State is drifting toward the rock of consolidation, the same rock on which the Union split and went to wreck.” But by April 1864, in a column significantly titled “The Principles of 1776,” the paper criticized Brown and narrow Confederate claims to states’ rights over and against the centralizing needs of the nation: “It is an effort to defeat the object for which we are fighting:

Richmond could more easily remain hopeful because they had been in war for three and a half years and had grown accustomed to its hardships. Other Confederates lacked their perspective—and their optimism, as war encroached directly upon their borders. In Charleston the bombardment of Fort Sumter was by this time only a memory. As the tables turned under constant Federal bombardments, however, sentiments shifted decisively toward despair, albeit still short of defeatism.

Charleston’s
Daily Courier
saw the full consequences of war: >

I
n the North Lincoln was winning bloody battles but under fire from angry Democrats warming up for the national elections in November 1864. Some “Peace Democrats,” most notably the Ohio congressman and gubernatorial candidate Clement Vallandigham, urged peace immediately no matter what the cost. When Vallandigham cleverly arranged his own arrest for “disloyalty,” Lincoln commuted his sentence from imprisonment to banishment. While in exile, Vallandigham ran in absentia on the Ohio Democratic ticket, where he was soundly defeated by the Republican candidate, John Brough.
¹
Vallandigham was marginalized by the taint of disloyalty, especially in the context of stunning victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The “War Democrats,” on the other hand, posed a more serious threat.

American memory, as the historian Joel Silbey demonstrates, has viewed the war years through what he describes as a “Republican prism,” effectively sidelining the Democratic Party.
²
But in reality, the Democrats remained a potent political force substantially represented in the legislature and governors’ mansions. Since the midterm elections of 1862, the party had grown increasingly powerful. By the summer of 1863 their opposition had intensified as emancipation became law, battlefield deaths mounted, and President Lincoln acted to limit disloyalty and run a war through the draft, income tax, and military tribunals. Though challenged in regard to their “loyalty” because of their criticism of Lincoln’s handling of the war, most Democrats remained loyal to the Union. They also served in the armed forces and, for the most part, supported a war fought to reestablish the Union. That did not prevent them, however, from differing profoundly over presidential acts and the conduct of the war.

On the surface, the Democratic opposition to total war rested on a moral critique grounded in just-war theory. For Democratic leaders such as Congressman Samuel C. Cox of Ohio, the only just cause for war was the preservation of the white Union and a lenient peace that left “the Union as it was.” That single end, in turn, required a limited war seeking neither social revolution, total extermination, nor widespread civilian suffering.

When faced with the prospect of emancipation and the seizure of Confederate “property,” Cox demurred, citing Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel and the “laws of [civil] war as between nations.” In an address to Congress, he argued from Vattel’s classic just-war treatise that civil war must be a civilized war, which meant a limited war:

In praising General McClellan’s principled opposition to Lincoln’s total war, Cox again cited Vattell: “I affirm on the best human and divine authority, that all objects of human effort, even war, should contribute to human happiness and peace. If this war have any other object, then it is abhorred of God and man; and every dollar and life sacrificed would be a criminal waste.” If rules of clemency and protection of innocents were not rigidly observed, there would be no effective limits: