Upon the Altar of the Nation (78 page)

Only after setting the sacramental context did he come to the martyred messiah:

Consciously or not, when Chamberlain capitalized “Him,” he spoke of divinity. Through his death, an innocent Lincoln became transformed from the prophet of America’s civil religion to its messiah.

 

Grant had no love for Stanton, or for his betrayal of Sherman in the press (“he was a man who never questioned his own authority”). But on the issue of Sherman’s unauthorized negotiations, Grant had to support the secretary of war and the new president. Although personally aghast at the prospect of a hard peace following on a hard war, Grant was a soldier and he followed his orders. Later, Grant would protect Sherman by insisting that the memorandum was “conditional” on political approval. Since approval was not forthcoming, Grant had instructed Sherman to rescind the agreement and negotiate another surrender with Johnston on the more limited terms that Grant had extended to Lee at Appomattox.
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At the same time, Grant refused to bow to radicals whose cries for vengeance threatened to upend his armistice with Lee. When some vowed to reverse those concessions, Grant countered that he would resign his command. With that, the movement to punish Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia passed. Even the most determined radical knew better than to take on America’s warrior high priest.

On April 26 Johnston surrendered his command to Sherman according to the same conditions specified by Grant at Appomattox. Grant quickly approved the terms, fearing that the vengeful mood in Washington might otherwise prevail. As he returned from Raleigh, Grant reflected on the Southern people and their desire for peace. In a letter to his wife, he commented, “The suffering that must exist in the South the next year, even with the war ending now, will be beyond conception. People who talk now of further retaliation and punishment, except of the political leaders, either do not conceive of the suffering endured already or they are heartless and unfeeling.”
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Grant was right to worry. The secular and, even more, the religious press led the assault on Sherman’s peace plan. A writer for the
Christian Herald
in Cincinnati was incredulous: “The news from General Sherman is startling. If he is not deranged, his course is traitorous. He pledges himself to obtain from his ‘principal’ terms of peace, giving up all that we have been contending for.”
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The
American Presbyterian
lashed out against Unitarian-inspired softness and condemned “any namby-pamby, anti-capital punishment, semi-universalist, semi-Pantheistic clique in New York or Boston.... Posterity will hold us accountable for a strict, a firm, and a righteous policy towards these engineers of the darkest plot against human happiness that the age has produced.”
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Evangelical presses did not stop with their excoriations of Sherman and singled out Henry Ward Beecher as a turncoat—“In a word, Mr. Beecher, now that the enemy is conquered, may be said to have gone over to the enemy”—for recommending clemency toward Jefferson Davis.
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With Johnston surrendered, that left only General E. Kirby Smith’s Army of the Trans-Mississippi and General Richard Taylor in Alabama and Mississippi. Both were easily vanquished, and with their fall, the war ended. The last fight occurred on May 12 at Palmito Ranch, Texas. Ironically, it ended with a Confederate victory. On May 26 the Army of the Trans-Mississippi surrendered, and on May 29 President Johnson granted amnesty and pardon to most Confederates.

Victory parades of Federal troops followed in Washington, first by Grant, then by Sherman (who refused to shake Stanton’s outstretched hand). In a dark omen of what was to become of race relations in the reunited nation, no black military units were included in the parades as they had been at Lincoln’s funeral.

With news of the last armies’ surrender, the war disappeared from discourse as suddenly as it had appeared in the aftermath of the surrender of Sumter. After four horrendous years of bloodshed, God or the gods were propitiated and all that remained was the reconstruction of the Union. Never did a war end with more anticlimax. The costly conflict that had obsessed a nation for four years passed into silence. Religious and secular papers spent little time on peace, except to run brief headlines celebrating “End of war!”
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With that, they moved on to mundane events, as if the war had never taken place.

The Civil War may have ended with a whimper, but ongoing debates over its meaning and morality contain a good bit of bang. Throughout this book the focus has been on
how
the war was fought and
how
the home fronts responded. I set aside the question of
why
the war was fought
(jus ad bellum)
because, as I argued at the outset, secession is a moral issue with no moral criterion for a sure answer.

But secession was the catalyst of 1861. The war came. Now it’s 1865. All the battles have been fought. The issue of secession has been settled once and, to all appearances, for all. We have witnessed the wanton destruction and inhuman suffering Americans inflicted on one another. We have watched the death toll mount into the hundreds of thousands. We have seen the raw and cynical persecution of innocents enacted by many, from the lowliest soldiers to the greatest commanders, statesmen, and moralists. We have also observed great embodiments of courage, compassion, and nobility.

None of these, taken singly or together, however, resolves the question: was the Civil War just? Having lived vicariously within the spaces of the war, its battlefronts and its home fronts, it is appropriate in closing to reopen the
why
question. To paraphrase Lincoln at Gettysburg: did 620,000 men, and thousands more Confederate women, die in vain?

I have deliberately saved this question for last, because I don’t believe any single answer is possible. At the outset I found it more compelling to lay out the evidence. But an honest analysis perhaps requires one personal response. Despite many immoralities that went largely unchecked and were even applauded by both sides at the lowest and highest levels, I cannot bring myself to say that 620,000 men died in vain. Why? In part because, for the most part,
they
did not say it. By the close of the Vietnam War, soldiers aplenty condemned the war as unjust. But this did not happen after the Civil War. Winners and losers alike would concede almost anything, it seemed, except the idea that their internecine war was ultimately meaningless or unjust.

Why did they hold on to its justness? I can only conclude that they supported the rightness of the war because at some profound level they believed in Lincoln’s characterization of America as the world’s last best hope. And, further, I can only conclude that for reasons Americans don’t deserve or understand, we are.

The greatest guarantor of America’s claim to global hope as it emerged in the Civil War was surely abolition. Throughout this book I have counterweighted abolition with the tragic perpetuation of racism in American society. But that in no measure diminishes the enormity of the achievement. Indeed, abolition represented the indispensable prelude to equal civil rights, however long that might take to achieve.

In claiming America as the world’s last best hope, I certainly do not have in mind particular battles or wars fought in the name of patriotism. There is no lack of such conflicts that were (and are) demonstrably unjust and immoral. Many American wars of conquest and imperialism merely confirm the impalpable truth that because we are the world’s last best hope, we are for the same reason the world’s greatest threat.
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Nor do I have in mind some sort of divine Providence that made America the world’s last best hope by divine fiat—and, by extension, made America a “Christian nation.” Finally, I do not claim that America is the world’s last best hope because of emancipation, noble as that end was. While the end of sanctioned slavery was undoubtedly the greatest good to come from the war, it did not mean that the North was all right and the South was all wrong, as Lincoln so eloquently proclaimed in his Second Inaugural Address. There was plenty of guilt to go around on both sides, reflected both in the North’s slave-trade profiteering in the past and in the ongoing tragedy of racism and the politics of white supremacy in the present.

People make nations. And the American people, for reasons of culture and environment, created a unique experiment. In the end, they just could not stay apart. Bernard Bailyn correctly argued for the ideological origins of the Revolution.
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Underlying the Civil War, no less than the American Revolution, was a people’s idea: the idea of popular sovereignty. This idea found its resolution, for the most part, in the Civil War, as the North and the South contested to see whose interpretation would prevail. We are and were and forever will be a people of ideas and a nation where people’s ideas count. The outcome of the Civil War ensured that America would remain an idea, first and foremost, and lying at the heart of that idea would be “We the people.”

From the start, the meaning of “We the people” was contested. The Constitution itself was a compromise reflecting that contest, and slavery was public exhibit number one. In the Civil War, soldiers on both sides self-consciously fought for freedom, even as they differed morally on the definitions and applications of that “freedom.” Ideas. Ideas to die for. Ideas to kill for. This was the innermost meaning of the Civil War, no less than of the American Revolution.

As an idea, America was uniquely situated to assume a sacred identity as a chosen nation. An American civil religion incarnated in the war has continued to sacralize for its citizens the idea of American freedom. In fact, for many it enjoys more powerful sway over their lives than the sometimes competing, sometimes conflicting ideas of supernatural religion contained in our nation’s many denominations.

For the Civil War to achieve its messianic destiny and inculcate an ongoing civil religion, it required a blood sacrifice that appeared total. While the term “baptism in blood” did not originate in the Civil War, it enjoyed a prominence in the war rhetoric of both the Union and the Confederacy that had no precedent. Speakers and readers came to accept the term literally as the lists of war dead continued to lengthen and civilians watched their lives and properties being destroyed by invading armies. The Civil War was indeed the crimson baptism of our nationalism, and so it continues to enjoy a mythic transcendence not unlike the significance of the Eucharist for Christian believers. For the unbeliever, both blood sacrifices seem irrational. But for the true believer, blood saved. Just as Christians believe that “without the shedding of blood there can be no remission for sins,” so Americans in the North and the South came to believe that their bloodletting contained a profound religious meaning for their collective life as nations.

The incarnation of a national American civil religion may have been the final great legacy of the Civil War. How could a people of such diversity, who had more than adequately demonstrated their capacity to live at war, possibly come together in peace without some functioning civil religion? And how does any real religion come into being without the shedding of blood?

Having said all this, I must add that in the process of writing this book it has become irrefutably clear to me that some moral judgments need to be made, judgments that most Americans have been reluctant to make. We have preferred a violent but glamorized and romantic Civil War.
³
Military histories have focused on strategies and tactics and the sheer drama of battles in action. Political histories have focused—especially in the present—on slavery and emancipation, accounting the evil so complete and pervasive as to justify even murder. In this sense, Lincoln’s war strategy was and remains genius. That does not make it right.

All too often the moral calculus perfected in the Civil War has been applied to other wars, often in cases involving nothing as noble as abolition. By condoning the logic of total war in the name of abolition—and victory—Americans effectively guaranteed that other atrocities in other wars could likewise be excused in the name of “military necessity.” While Lincoln passed tragically from the American scene, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan remained to carry the new moral logic forward. When Grant became president and commander in chief, his general of the army was William Tecumseh Sherman, and the commander of the Department of the Missouri was Philip Sheridan, supported by George Custer. Together they would pursue wars of extermination in the Indian campaigns of 1868 to 1883, employing the same calculus their commander in chief, Lincoln, had approved in the Civil War.
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Just as Sheridan wreaked vengeance in the Shenandoah Valley, so he would wreak vengeance on American Indians—and with the same moral justification.

Knowing that the western Indians could roam and attack freely over the warm-weather months, when separated from their wives and children, Sheridan began attacking the Indians in their winter camps. The braves would have to remain to protect the women and children or see them killed before their eyes. Another tactic Sheridan used, one already tried and proved in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of the Civil War, was starvation. By destroying winter foodstuffs (and later exterminating buffalo), Sheridan forced the Indians to flee through the brutal winter cold and snow, where most died of starvation or froze to death.