Upon the Altar of the Nation (66 page)

One act struck him as especially damnable: “At Mount Jackson, our boys did an act which must be condemned by every lover of humanity. They burned a hospital in which there were a few sick men. Of course the sick were removed, but the act of destruction of their hospital building ought to be punished by death. None but heathen will thus mar the beauty of civilization. Stonewall Jackson had endeared himself to his people, and won our respect by erecting five comfortable structures like the one destroyed, and in burying the dead in well laid out ground.” Significantly, no Federal soldiers, let alone officers, were ever called to account.

As the devastation peaked throughout the valley, Holt entered the final entries in his journal before his medical discharge for diphtheria: “You can form no idea of the gloom, which overspreads the whole region. One heavy, black cloud of smoke hangs over the Valley like the pall of death. Lurid streaks of flame dart up through the pitchy blackness relieving for a second or two the stately building which is being devoured by hungry flames.” Later he wrote:

Yet even in the midst of dissolution, saving acts of kindness appeared: “The hardest feature in this universal conflagration is, that many real innocent and Union-loving people suffer. These, as everywhere, are poor—less able to stand the pressure than the more opulent. Hundreds of such are leaving their homes in groups of a dozen or twenty. Some in better circumstances than others, pick up their little all, and placing it in an old rickety wagon, drawn by an animal pitiful to behold, while the greater part come straggling on Gipsey like, fed by our boys from provisions in their haversacks.”

For most of the families, Holt remembered old and young alike “sleeping out as none others can, with scanty covering, either of bedding or clothing.” Some of the “poor white trash” were “trading with and consorting with slaves who look upon them as inferiors, such as they
really
are.” On October 7 he recorded: “The whole Valley in a blaze. Heavy dark clouds of smoke hang over it like a funeral pall. Cannot [help] but [feel] compassionate [for] the case of the poor deluded people.”
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Although by Sheridan’s own self-serving calculations, Early had been destroyed in one of the greatest military displays of the war, he was not yet gone. There were yet more battles to be fought in October. While visiting President Lincoln in Washington on October 17, Sheridan learned that Longstreet was detached from Petersburg to join up with Early in the valley. Sheridan rushed back to Mill Creek and Winchester the following day, and there witnessed the horrifying reality of his army in pell-mell retreat from their camp behind Cedar Creek. It was an “appalling spectacle of a panic-stricken army—hundreds of slightly wounded men, throngs of others unhurt but utterly demoralized ... telling only too plainly that a disaster had occurred at the front.” Sheridan stormed ahead, enraged, knowing he had the confidence of his soldiers and cursing at them to regroup, shoulder their weapons, and turn on the attacker.

With alacrity the troops rallied and marched toward the enemy, “changing in a moment from the depths of depression to the extreme of enthusiasm.” Like a secular revivalist dependent on “enthusiasm” to win a battle, Sheridan took a valuable lesson on leadership: “I already knew that even in the ordinary condition of mind enthusiasm is a potent element with soldiers, but what I saw that day convinced me that if it can be excited from a state of despondency its power is almost irresistible.”
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This was the same lesson that Lee had learned in the Wilderness, again confirming the sheer power of the right generals to snatch victories from the jaws of defeat. It was also a reality to which Republicans thrilled as news of Sheridan’s heroic charge spread, adding as much luster to the political campaign as to the military.

In the North, few evidenced regrets at the destruction; even as it escalated, the moral rhetoric remained rote and unchanged. In a September 11, 1864, thanksgiving sermon, preached in recognition of Sheridan’s work in the valley, Joseph P. Thompson discoursed on “The Bible Doctrine Concerning War”: “We are upon Biblical ground, therefore, when we invoke God in doing battle for a just cause, and we are following Biblical precedent when we ascribe to him the victory.” As for the South: “The war which they are waging upon the Government of the United States is an unholy war, a monstrous conspiracy of crime.”
²³

The martyred dead remained committed to their altars. In a column titled “How a Soldier Died,” the writer described a deathbed scene and then added, “May their memory never be dishonored ... they are martyrs whose lives have been a free-will offering on our country’s altar.”
²⁴

For New Haven’s Congregational pastor Elisha Cleaveland, Union victories mandated a partisan Republican endorsement from the pulpit. The Union’s duty was clear: “We must crush their armies,” and to do that, no equivocating or suing for armistice as the Democrats advocated could be considered. Destruction was the order of the day, and that meant a Republican administration pursuing total war:

By 1864 the pulpit had become, in effect, a political platform for Republican rule. Clearly, nothing short of devastation would do. The enabling words “God” and “Providence” no longer needed to be invoked. “Manhood,” “patriotism,” and “common sense” could do it all, and they required “strangulation.”

G
rant, Sherman, and Sheridan did what no Republican editor, orator, or even president could do. With their crushing military campaigns and remorseless destruction of civilian property, they brought the end in sight. With victory the gods would be propitiated, and the nation would be sanctified and made whole. Whatever moral lines were crossed, the political consequences were inevitable. Lincoln would be reelected and Republicans would govern the Republic as they saw fit.

At a thanksgiving service “for recent military successes,” conducted at New Haven’s Third Congregational Church on September II, 1864, the Reverend Elisha Cleaveland celebrated the recent victories of Admiral David Farragut at Mobile Bay and Grant at Weldon Railroad, but was especially effusive about Sherman’s capture of Atlanta: “It is reasonable to expect that a general so sagacious, energetic and untiring, so patriotic and determined, with so splendid an army at his command, will not be slow to follow up this brilliant success with movements which will soon reduce the rebellion to its last extremity.”

In a nation that mythologized its “Puritan” origins, it was no sacrilege to transform the election of Christian leaders into dutiful priests for America’s God. By 1864 the pulpit and religious press were so caught up in the holy cause that they supported not only the war but also the Republican Party in explicitly partisan ways. The “spirituality of the church” had long since disappeared, but a new chapter emerged as pulpits and presses endorsed candidates. On the eve of the election, the
American Presbyterian
told its readers in no uncertain terms of their “simple and solemn duty” to vote, and for whom to vote: “Every vote cast for Mr. Lincoln is a declaration for liberty, for law, for humanity.”
¹
For their part, readers and congregations demanded such endorsements from the church, and any minister who dared quibble suffered the consequences of rebuke and/or termination.

Northern sermons were shamelessly partisan, implying to their listeners that it would be sinful to vote Democratic. Joseph P. Thompson proclaimed it base “to pervert this holy aspiration for peace, into a partisan cry, that means not peace but place; not peace for the nation but place for a candidate.” Democrats, he continued, were “partisan” while Republicans were “just.” Recognition of the Confederacy meant sectional war for generations, “but if we secure a just peace then will the nation hold the place given to its continent in Mercator’s projection of the globe—the central figure of the civilized world; the seas kissing its feet upon either side; the isles and continents bowing their obeisance from afar. That is the recognition that we shall win for the Union itself by a decisive victory.”
²

Denominational reactions to the Democratic convention were swift and, in the main, partisan Republican. Seven Methodist Episcopal annual conferences condemned all talk of “armistice” or “compromise” as “unchristian and sinful.” Eleven Baptist associations were outspoken in their opposition to the Democratic platform on religious grounds. Similarly Old and New School Presbyterians instructed their members to support the Lincoln government. At the local level, clergymen participated actively at ward meetings and Republican rallies. At the same time that they urged all to vote for Lincoln, they did not hesitate to brand their Democratic opponents with the ominous label of “disloyalty.”
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Some clerical voices, few and far between, dared to question the orthodoxy of their denomination and its political preaching. If Republican clergy accused Democrats of tolerating and even promoting sin in their refusal to condemn slavery, Democrats pointed to the hypocrisy of their moralistic critics. If the war was so just, they asked, why were ministers only too eager to allow their congregations to pay the $300 commutation fee to get them out of the draft? And whatever happened to love as “the greatest” Christian virtue, when they preached not only a just war for a just cause, but just “revenge” and “vengeance”? As for national fast and thanksgiving days proclaimed by the state, these were a perversion of the original Puritan holy days and occasions to promote the war and the Republican Party that fomented it.

A writer for the
Chicago Times
complained that Lincoln’s thanksgiving proclamations were blasphemous for implying that “the Almighty has indorsed the political policies of the [Lincoln] administration.”
⁴
And when Republicans continued their campaign to put God and Jesus Christ as the “Lord and Savior of all” into the Constitution, Democrats roundly denounced the intrusion of religion into government.

The most sensational cases occurred in Missouri, where partisan loyalties verged on violence and Democratic clergy hounded from their pulpits. One especially famous—or infamous—incident surrounded the Presbyterian minister Samuel B. McPheeters, who refused to speak out against slavery or for the Republican Party. For his silence, he was branded “disloyal,” arrested by Major General F. A. Dick, and ordered to leave the state in ten days.

Dick’s orders were remanded by Lincoln, but McPheeters’s congregation would not leave him alone. At a church trial in St. Louis, congregants ordered that the minister “shall cease all connection with that Church.” Charles Hodge, who by this point had come around to see slavery as a sin, and who personally disagreed with the extreme position McPheeters took, nevertheless regarded the punishment as “an injustice which has few, if any, parallels in the history of our church.” As later summarized by the denominational historian Lewis G. Vander Velde:

Long a thorn in clerical Republicans’ sides, Henry J. Van Dyke, a Democratic Presbyterian of New York, was even more adamant in attacking his denomination. In a sermon preached to the synod of New York on October 18, and with the McPheeters case in mind, Van Dyke launched into a broad-range attack on the wholesale political sellout of the Northern Protestant Church—and Presbyterians in particular. From the lowest to the highest levels, he complained, denominational officials compromised the doctrine of the spirituality and independence of the church from politics—perhaps fatally.

For Van Dyke, it was an open question of whether the church could ever recover a prophetic, spiritual voice. Asking whether the apostles “entered into the political and military contests of the countries through which the saints were scattered abroad,” he vented his spleen. Emancipation became the badge of lost innocence, a tool that was shamelessly employed to gain political advantage under the cloak of righteousness: “What I assert and propose to prove, is, that in connection with this subject of slavery, and under the cover of it, the Assembly has handled and determined a question which is purely political, and entirely beyond its appropriate province ... and invaded the liberty wherewith, according to our standards, Christ has made his people free.” The general assembly, he continued,