Upon the Altar of the Nation (50 page)

Most Republican suppression of civil liberties was justified in a war emergency and fell within acceptable limits. Federal arrest records confirm that the arrests had less to do with mere dissent or loyal opposition and more to do with actual treason. Outside of government, however, other more extragovernmental avenues of suppression were blatantly political and designed to intimidate Democratic voices. These were especially egregious in the powerful Northern Protestant denominations.
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It is difficult to ascertain the number of clerical Democrats, in part because so many feared reprisals and a loss of their living. Furthermore, their strictures against “political preaching” discouraged any public statements from the pulpit (though not in their opinions as private citizens). In any case, civil liberties did not extend to them any more than freedom of speech extended to loyalists in the American Revolution. When New York’s Democratic minister Henry J. Van Dyke attacked abolitionists in print for their moral arrogance and suprascriptural appeals to “higher law,” a Republican mob threatened him with physical attack. Other Protestant ministers—notably Charles Hodge—also hedged on the sin of slavery, but their civil liberties were protected because they were Republican.

Methodists and Presbyterians, especially conspicuous as articulate Democratic proponents of peace, paid stiff penalties for their beliefs. Many Democratic Methodist clergymen were suppressed by their congregations and, more significantly, by their denominational boards and agencies.
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Methodist Episcopal Church officials insisted that Northern clergy subscribe to the proposition that slavery was the “cause” of the war; those who demurred risked losing their pulpits and livelihoods. When the Reverend William C. Howard of the Moawequa Circuit (Shelby County, Illinois) failed to pray for Abraham Lincoln and stated his preference for Clement Vallandigham in the Ohio gubernatorial election, he was hauled before the conference assembly, “tried” outside of a formal church trial, and dismissed.

 

Even as Christian Democrats accused fellow churchmen of being politically partisan, clerical Republicans did more than live up to the accusation—indeed they carried it as a point of pride. The Republican religious press, like the denominations that sponsored it, continued to be proudly partisan and supportive of the president and the cause. In their view, the war had been transformed with the Emancipation Proclamation into an antislavery war, and therefore an unremitting good that required no hard ethical questions, only victory.

The idea that God would not grant the North victory until slavery was reduced occurred to evangelical clergy far earlier than to political or military leaders. Already in 1862 radicals had prepared for midterm elections by persuading their churches to vote only for antislavery candidates, i.e., Republicans. The Methodists carried a column in the
Ladies’ Repository
urging Christian women to spy on neighbors and weed out opposers to war: “Detect and expose the covert traitors in your neighborhood.... Hunt them out.”
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When Democrats announced a platform calling for negotiated peace with compromise, evangelical denominations, led by seven Methodist annual conferences and eleven Baptist associations, condemned the proposal and urged their congregants to vote Republican. They were soon followed by Congregational associations and Presbyterian synods.
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Throughout the Union the cause of abolition was praised as the real cause of the war, while the topic of just conduct in the field toward soldiers and noncombatants never came up.

In a perverse jumble of conflicting agendas, the nation was convulsed by war between a white, slaveholding Confederacy and a Northern Republican administration promoting emancipation to justify total war. For the administration, total war was the regrettable end and emancipation the means, while Democrats promoted conciliation with slavery and white supremacy as the end and peace the means. In a profound sense, white America was getting what it deserved.

R
eligious life in the Confederacy closely resembled that of the Union at the start of the war. But by 1864, material destruction and crushing defeats were taking their toll on the local churches and the denominations that integrated them. Even before the war, membership rates had fallen lower in the South than in the North, and “unchurched” constituted the largest category of membership.
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With the war, matters only worsened. Many church buildings were destroyed, others deprived of members and money. In its annual report to the denomination, the Lexington, Virginia, presbytery stated, “That religion is generally reported to be on the decline is a fact which some of us are beginning to accept as indubitable.”
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Elsewhere news was also grim. After reporting on the sixty-seventh commencement at the University of North Carolina, the
North Carolina Standard
noted that enrollments had shrunk from eighty graduates to seven, with the remainder all in the army. One in five faculty members had been killed; it remained the only university running continuously. As for the general mood: “How to escape present troubles ... both temporal and spiritual, are the main questions before the public now. Hence politicians and preachers are the only speakers who can find hearers.”
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In this barren spiritual environment, faith continued to burn bright in the Confederate armies and hospitals. Abstract warnings of death became chillingly immediate in the aftermath of Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and the battles to come in the spring of 1864. Throughout the winter, an increasingly desperate President Davis urged his soldiers on, placing confidence in Providence even as might of arms and tactics suffered. In an address to the armies he cited revivals to press the point: “Soldiers! Assured success awaits us in our holy struggle for liberty and independence.... When that success shall be reached, to you, your country’s hope and pride, under Divine Providence, will be its due.”
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Already by 1863, the Southern pulpit and religious press increasingly addressed the public heart rather than the public mind. Reasoned arguments could articulate issues and generate debate and conflict, but they could not sustain courage in the face of the bloodbaths of this war.

Reason could not motivate suicide, but faith could.
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Nor could reason cross the divide from public, civil religion to private, experiential “saving faith.” Sentiments of the heart would take over and push the drumbeat harder. Justifications for the cause shifted from a legalistic list of “principles” (which, after all, had changed as the war progressed) to an assessment of the “sentiments” motivating each side.

While some angry editors dissembled, Davis and his universal phalanx of clerical supporters and generals asserted that God was precisely the point of the war. The tendency of some secular presses (though by no means all) to denigrate the fast days and their sacralized rhetoric amounted to rank disloyalty and blasphemy. As the church was sacred, so also was the Confederacy; neither could be worshipped without invoking the other.

The Confederate shift in rhetorical strategy from head to heart can be seen in two sermons preached and published by D. S. Doggett, then pastor of Richmond’s Broad Street Methodist Church. The first, delivered in September 1862, reasoned from a list of “facts” revealing that God was interested in the struggle. Doggett went on to define the war as a defense of “the rights asserted by our forefathers, in the immortal Declaration of Independence; the rights of self-government, self-protection, and of conscience.”

In his second sermon, preached in the spring of 1864 and published by the Soldier’s Tract Association in Richmond, Doggett argued that the war received its moral character by the passions and fundamental convictions of each side. It was a war of Southern truth and justice against Northern lust and prejudice—a war of Bible believers against heretics and infidels.
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If rationalizations became tangled and confused as the war progressed, a Christian’s heart could still be in the right place. If God’s designs for the South seemed less clear in 1864 than in 1862, then trust in Him became all the greater an act of faith.

Meanwhile, alongside the religious press’s relentless support of Davis and the war came a significant shift in rhetorical focus of the fasts that exemplified the advent of increasing rather than decreasing religiosity. Where the object of earlier fasts was social reform, the focus of new fasts shifted to revival and preparation for eternity. The locus of these revivals also shifted decisively away from the churches to the army. Things looked bleak under the harsh light of the secular press, and churches steadily surrendered their property and members to destruction and spiritual depression, but the army revived.
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The
Christian Observer
asked, “Is Religion Declining?” in response to the assertion “that religion in the church is in a low and sickly condition.” The answer was yes. In response the paper turned to the army for hope.
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Accounts of “Revival among the Texas Rangers” or “Revival in the Army of Northern Virginia” filled newspaper columns with space freed by the lack of victories in the field. From the “army in the west,” the “news” shifted from battles to revivals: “There is a mighty work of the Spirit going on now in the camps of this regiment and brigade.”
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Like crusaders of old, Confederate soldiers could find an antidote to fear in saving faith and garner a “triumph” over sins that military triumphs were not providing.

For many in the Confederacy unwilling to embrace journalistic cynicism, the army now became
the
spiritual hope of the land, displacing a dispirited and demoralized populace as vehicles of saving grace. Church societies directed thousands of conversionist pamphlets and tracts toward every Southern town, hospital, and Confederate army tent. In Richmond colporteurs worked feverishly with the armies and in the greatly expanded hospitals to urge the soldiers on to revival.

Mary Jones reported eagerly the happy news that “revivals in our army are certainly the highest proofs we can possibly desire or receive of the divine favor.”
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A revitalized Southern spirituality, concentrated on individual salvation, along with the logic of the Confederate jeremiad, which sanctified the entire South, would shape the perceptions of white Southerners long after the fall of Richmond and the surrender at Appomattox.

It would be hard to exaggerate how totally news of revivals began to fill the pages of religious and secular presses following Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The
Richmond ReLigious Herald
devoted space in virtually every issue to revival. From army missionary A. Broaddus, readers learned of a “regimental revival” where “the chapel has been well filled and frequently crowded.” Soon other reports detailed “Revival in Wilcox Brigade” and “Revival in Mahone’s Brigade.”
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From Tennessee, readers of the
Southern Churchman
learned of “immense congregations assembled to hear the word ... and many sinners led to cry for mercy; a chaplain informed me that 1,000 men in his division had professed the faith.”
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Emphasis on the heart did not mean that the “Christian manliness” of Stonewall Jackson declined, only that it became romanticized. Calls for blood revenge continued to sound in the religious no less than the secular press. In a column on “The Voice of Southern Blood,” one writer for the Religious Herald assured his hearers that “in good season, He will speak for [the innocent dead].... When He speaks, He will avenge it.... [Let us] wait remembering that ‘the righteousness of God’ has said, ‘Vengeance is
mine—I
will repay!’”
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Of course, the “I” in this affirmation was also the army, sacralized to the task of a redeemer nation.

In his earlier diary entries at the start of the war, the Texas Ranger chaplain Robert Bunting complained that soldiers seemed hardened to his conversionist preaching. But now, as lights faded on the battlefield, revivals proliferated in the camp: “The camp was filled with the presence of ‘the Lord of Hosts.’ It is a second pentacostal season upon the earth. Thousands are being born again.” By war’s end, two-thirds of Bunting’s regiment would be dead. For the third who survived, religion proved indispensable.

Bunting’s own role in the revivals was considerable. Together with “an old friend and classmate,” J. H. Kaufman of Georgia, Bunting took over a church building and began holding meetings for the soldiers:

In the context of such sentiments throughout the winter of 1864, revivals proliferated to a far greater degree in the Confederate army than in the Union.
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More significantly, they became even more the subject of news in the demoralized daily papers. Unlike in the North, where army revivals were less widespread, churches went unharmed, and revivals tended to be reported only in the religious weeklies, in the South army revivals became secular news.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1864, it was the rare newspaper that did not feature revivals in the Confederate army. What began as a wave in 1863 following Gettysburg and Vicksburg steadily swelled and showed no signs of abating. On January 29, the
Richmond Daily Dispatch
reported “From General Lee’s Army” that “the religious interest in the army is unchilled by the cold weather. Meetings are still held in every part of the army; and in many, if not all the brigades, meeting-houses have been constructed for their own use, and faithful chaplains nightly preach to large and deeply attentive congregations.”