Upon the Altar of the Nation (67 page)

Van Dyke was probably right. Rarely, if ever, has a major denomination officially endorsed one party over another since the Civil War. But in 1864, when passions ran high, “the whole moral influence” of the church had become captive of the state and its Republican orthodoxy. Lincoln’s wager paid handsome dividends as participants redefined the “cause” of the war to mean emancipation, thereby justifying not only total war for unconditional surrender but also Republican hegemony.

It is doubtful that the political issue of “the Union” could have sustained campaigns of such unmitigated violence, slaughter, and civilian suffering. But when transformed from just war to a Republican-led religious crusade, limitations disappeared, “conduct” was subordinated to victory, and victory apotheosized into one divine right against wrong. God now depended on a righteous American empire as much as the empire depended on Him. Indeed, as explained from most Northern pulpits, the two were one in the same.

With strong support from the churches and the soldiers, Lincoln easily won reelection. McClellan’s strongest support in the 1864 presidential election came from Catholics and immigrants, especially Irish, and from rural areas where foreign elements predominated. Lincoln’s bedrock were the evangelical Protestant denominations and clergy, native-born citizens, skilled urban workers, and professional classes.
⁷
In all, Northern Democrats won 45 percent of the popular vote and were especially strong in the border districts and the immigrant wards of large cities. In the congressional elections, most of the Republican losses of the 1862 midterm election were recovered. In the House, Republicans won 145 of the 185 seats, and in the Senate, increased their majority to 42 of 52 seats. The electoral vote was equally definitive, with General McClellan trailing far behind, 212 to 21.

As Sergeant Ransom lay recovering from his stay at Andersonville, he noted that on November 6 the soldiers in the hospital held a mock election that Lincoln won handily. But then he added: “Had this election occurred while we were at Andersonville, four-fifths would have voted for McClellan.”
⁸

Following the news of Lincoln’s resounding reelection, Northern ministers continued to endorse the vote and the Republican Party. In a sermon preached in Harvard Yard, George E. Ellis touted the choice as simple. One party maintained “the one sole purpose of crushing rebellion,” while the other was “a party composed of heterogeneous and discordant elements ... compound, confusing, not definable, except by many distinctions and qualifications.”
⁹

Confederate presses were equally outspoken in the opposite direction. With word of Lincoln’s reelection, the
Richmond Daily Whig
glumly concluded, “There is no middle ground for us to occupy, even if we were so disposed. It is fight, be enslaved, or die; and we feel no hesitation in deciding what to do.”
¹⁰

On Thursday, November 25, 1864, Confederate agents did their best to follow Northern examples of civilian intimidation by setting fires in ten or more New York hotels and in Barnum’s American Museum. This action followed an earlier raid on October 19 in which Confederate raiders robbed three Vermont banks, making off with more than $200,000 in cash. None did serious damage, but the actions do illustrate a Confederate retaliatory willingness to destroy civilian property and terrorize civilians, insofar as they had the means.

 

On that same day, Lincoln’s national Thanksgiving Day was widely observed by Republican clergy, marking the start of what would become an unbroken chain. The purpose, Lincoln declared, was to observe “a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to Almighty God.” Happily, the first observance took place two weeks after his convincing victory at the polls. Again, Republican politics dominated most Northern pulpit oratory. In seeking out a “cause for thanksgiving,” Alexander H. Vinton, rector of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowerie, did not have far to look: “The huge vote which decided that the war shall go on at whatever cost, was a vote for principle, for conscience, for Christ, and for the blessing of the race whom Christ died to liberate and to save.”
¹¹

By November 1864 Northern clergymen had virtually forgotten their duty to avoid politicking or to care for the oppressed. Since the oppressed—Southern men, women, and children—were the enemy, their plight could be simply noted without judgment. In his address in Paxton, Massachusetts, the Reverend William Phipps urged thanksgiving while others suffered: “Multitudes of families in the land, have been driven from their homes and from all the privileges of a happy household ... but we have occasion to be thankful, to-day, that such destructions have not reached us.”
¹²

New England ministers were especially apt to link America’s present to their Puritan past and to interpret the national Thanksgiving Day as their gift to the nation. At a “Union Service” in New Britain, Connecticut, the Reverend Lavalette Perrin blatantly ignored the facts of the past and sounded the new orthodoxy that Puritans were not really about the construction of a biblical theocracy and religious intolerance, but about the creation of a democratic redeemer nation, governed by “we the people.” Reading back from the Declaration of Independence to New England’s Puritan past, Perrin came to the astounding conclusion that “[a]ll men are created equal [was] the pearl of great price for which these spiritual merchantmen of old England, the Puritans, came hither searching.”

This patently false but stirring conclusion contained, in embryo, what would become the founding myth of America’s civil religion, linking Republican present to Puritan past in one seamless divine destiny where God is “using us ... in the world’s bloody and prolonged struggle for redemption from the grasp and curse of oppression.” Having summarized how the Puritans won the Revolution, Perrin went on to show how the Republican Party loyalists were their heirs and constituted the only true party in America: “This was a victory, not of party as against party—not of candidate as against candidate, merely ... but a victory of principles over prejudice; a victory of patriotism over partisanship; a victory of right and justice over covetousness and selfish ease.” Despite being “underdogs” in the struggle, Northern forces had right on their side, and “while the magnificent armies of liberty around Richmond and Atlanta tighten their hold upon the lungs of this writhing monster, let us lift up our hearts with our voices, and sing in grand chorus this one hundredth Psalm.”
¹³

While Lincoln was singled out for special praise, the generals were not ignored. In a sermon preached on
The Sacrifice of Continual Praise,
Long Island’s Cornelius L. Wells singled out the generals for adoration: Grant, “the indomitable hero of Vicksburg ... and shall I speak of Sherman, the gallant commander of the Army of the South West? ... From Missionary Ridge to Dalton, from Dalton to Resaca, and Dallas, and Altoon Pass, and Lost Mountain, and on to Marietta; yet on until our victorious hosts enter Atlanta, with banners flying and shouts of victory bursting forth from every heart.” Grant and Sherman did not stand alone: “Need I stop to speak of Sheridan; young, bold, intrepid? The victories of the Shenandoah Valley are not eclipsed by any of the whole war.”
¹⁴

America’s first national Thanksgiving also became the occasion for widespread charitable appeals, in particular for the Christian Commission which, in distinction to the “Unitarian” Sanitary Commission, kept Christ in its charitable activity. In conjunction with Thanksgiving Day, writers for the
American Presbyterian
emphasized the need for one million dollars in donations for the Christian Commission, “the only national organization which proposes as its object the salvation of the bodies and souls of our soldiers and sailors.” The paper went on in the following week’s issue to urge “the best men in the country” to volunteer to visit the army occasionally as members of the commission.

Most writers did not trust the Sanitary Commission and the Unitarians who supported it. One tract, entitled
False Comfort to the Dying Soldier,
told of a Unitarian pamphlet in which was “not a word of a Saviour, not a word of repentance, nor of a day of judgment, but blank, stark universalism.” Despite opposing causes, Northern Presbyterians were one with Southern Presbyterians in judging Unitarianism to be “unmitigated heathenism.”
¹⁵

W
hile the North did their “simple and solemn duty” by reelecting their war president, Confederates waited anxiously to discover what Sherman would do next. In an attempt to rally the people, President Davis assured the South that Sherman was vulnerable to an attack in his rear. Conventional logic connected armies to their supplies. If you could get in their rear, destroy their supplies, and harass their troops, there would be nowhere to run, “and retreat, sooner or later, he must.”

But Sherman had other plans—audacious plans, as it turned out, that took even Grant and Lincoln by surprise. But first he had to attend to Atlanta and Hood’s army. With thirty-four thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, Hood remained a formidable but evasive foe who constantly harassed Sherman’s superior army without engaging a fixed battle.

After two months of sparring and maneuvering, the two armies remained unchecked, and Sherman was getting edgy. Unwilling to launch a potentially devastating frontal assault on Hood, and knowing he could not protect his rail supplies all the way from Tennessee to Georgia, Sherman came to a radical conclusion. He could eliminate the supply vulnerability by breaking out from his entire army four corps, one cavalry, one artillery—sixty thousand in all—and live off the people of the South, pursuing a course of destruction yet to be determined. The solution to the supply line was brilliantly simple: get rid of the Union supply line altogether, and in the process absolutely demoralize the citizenry whose armies could do nothing to protect them.

On October 9 Sherman telegraphed Grant at City Point:

Sherman had already made the moral leap to justify destroying everything in his path, by redefining citizens as no different from combatants. Again, civilians would not be directly murdered (though many would no doubt starve or die of malnutrition), but they would be considered the enemy. To protect his rear from Hood, Sherman would send a strong holding detachment under General George Thomas back to Tennessee, where Hood was heading. Though disappointed, Thomas had an essential role to play: he would hold Hood’s leg while Sherman skinned Georgia alive. Hood could do nothing about it. Hood would no longer be feared—or even respected; he would be rendered irrelevant.

Sherman’s plan—to head for the Atlantic, out of communication with his commanders and live off the land and its people as he went along—was unprecedented in scale. Others had done so on a smaller scale: Grant at Vicksburg and Winfield Scott in the Mexican War. But this far outstripped the earlier occasions. Grant and Lincoln would have to trust Sherman’s judgment to accomplish the plan without their knowing from day to day where he was or what was emerging.

In time, they trusted him. But not right away. Shortly after proposing his audacious scheme, Sherman followed up with another, more urgent letter noting that the rail and communications lines could never remain functioning as long as he was pinned down in Atlanta and Hood’s army was free to destroy his lines. But if the offense was taken he could move “with my effective army ... through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.... Instead of guessing at what [Hood] means to do, he will have to guess at my plans.... I can make Savannah, Charleston, or the mouth of the Chattahoochee. Answer quick, as I know we will not have the telegraph long.”
²

 

As Sherman and Grant contemplated the lethal march through the heartland of the South, Confederates around Virginia were desperately trying to rally the people to whatever form of fight the war required. The times were bleak. A writer for the Richmond’s
Central Presbyterian
lamented the fact that even religion was suffering: “There have been many hindrances to the regular and efficient use of the means upon which the church depends for success.”
³
Some were even considering enlisting slaves in return for their freedom, though in 1864 that was premature and generally rejected both officially and privately.
⁴
Orators rushed to recount the great “historic significance” of “The Southern Revolution,” but they saw few signs of success.

Inevitably, Confederates began to question whether their leaders had the ear of God, in particular their president. Although a consummate bureaucrat, courageous warrior, and loyal friend, Davis nevertheless lacked rhetorical charisma. He remained unable to harness a moral vision to his cause with sufficient power and clarity to overcome mounting trials and disappointments. When Northern Republicans turned to Lincoln for moral vision, the Confederacy seemed only to turn to their generals, especially Robert E. Lee.

In a desperate message sent to the Confederate Congress on November 7 and timed to influence the North’s presidential election the following day, Jefferson Davis signaled a willingness to fight any kind of war that victory over the hated North required. In words that belied the original presumption of fixed armies protecting citizens and cities, he fell back on a different, grimmer rhetoric: