America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Reality fled. Northerners perceived Slave Power conspiracies infesting every issue, where none in fact existed. Southerners perceived northerners as intent on subjugating them while simultaneously instigating a race war, though few in the North had any such designs. A religious revival during a serious economic downturn over the winter of 1857–58 among middle-class urban men only added a sense of foreboding that something cataclysmic was afoot.

  The Lincoln-Douglas debates during the late summer and early fall of 1858 in Illinois not only highlighted the differences between Republican and Democrat, but they also reflected a growing messianic sentiment in Lincoln’s views. When he accepted the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in June 1858, Lincoln took his text from Matthew 12:25: “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” The “House Divided” speech, as it is known, implied an irreconcilable divide between North and South. Lincoln elaborated on the theme during his debates with Douglas. The slavery issue, Lincoln contended, was not merely a political question but a test of America’s democratic and religious ideals: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.” In this context, compromise would be difficult.

  The 1860 presidential contest occurred in a politically poisonous atmosphere. By this time, southern evangelicals had assumed a millennial view similar to the North’s. The shift had more to do with the anti-slavery evangelical assault on the slaveholder and his society than on a heartfelt doctrinal transformation, but it further polarized North and South at a critical time. The Democrats broke apart, opening the way for Lincoln’s victory in the fall. By the time he took office in March 1861, seven southern states had left the Union to form the Confederate States of America. To evangelical Christians in the South, the Confederacy represented a rebirth, just as they had been reborn in Christ.

  The seceded states sent emissaries to the slaveholding states still in the Union to convince them that remaining in a government led by Republicans was suicidal. The outcome would be a bloody race war and the ultimate subjugation of white southerners, they argued. There was no doubt in the minds of southern contemporaries that the Confederacy rested on the “cornerstone” of slavery.

  Lincoln entered office assuring the South he meant no harm to slavery where it existed. He also vowed to uphold the Constitution and defend federal property. Secession, from Lincoln’s perspective, presaged anarchy and therefore threatened democratic government and individual freedom. When he maneuvered Confederate president Jefferson Davis into foolishly firing the first shot at Fort Sumter, Lincoln noted, “They attacked Sumter. It fell and thus did more service than it otherwise would.” The “service” was uniting a northern population heretofore skeptical of Lincoln’s ability to lead and divided over policies to deal with secession. When he called for northern volunteers to put down the rebellion, four additional southern states seceded, and the war began.

  The war lasted far longer and was far bloodier than almost anyone expected. Given the Union’s significant advantages in men and materiel, it was not surprising that most predicted a short war. After the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, a narrow Union victory along the Tennessee-Mississippi border, the illusion of a quick, glorious end to the fighting fled. The carnage shocked even Union General William T. Sherman: “Who but a living witness can adequately portray those scenes on Shiloh’s field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery?”

  The slaughter spurred Lincoln to emancipate the slaves. He had always harbored a deep animus against slavery, for both moral and practical reasons. However, he loved the Union more than he hated slavery. As the war dragged on and with the outcome uncertain, he deployed the proclamation. It was a calculated risk. While a majority of white northerners supported banning slavery from the territories, abolishing the institution where it existed was another matter. Lincoln’s concerns reflected the limited reservoir of goodwill in the North toward African Americans even in the midst of a civil war.

  Lincoln also understood that he had raised the stakes of the war. The proclamation would only stiffen the Confederates’ resolve to fight to the bitter end. When Lincoln dedicated the Union cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863 he made it clear, however, that the war was not only about freedom for the unfree. Saving the Union meant securing freedom for everyone: “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  America would be born again. But it would not be cleansed of sin. Victory in the Civil War did not make northerners chaste, though it chastened them. As it did white southerners, with the notable difference that the former Rebels believed Redemption—retaking control of their government and their former slaves—would deliver them to grace. Science and reason governed the North after the war along with an insatiable desire for progress. Neither the press nor Horatio Alger fabricated a land of opportunity: it was real. The national rebirth would be measured in economic and political terms, not as a moral absolution.

  The South not only lost the war but also forfeited its place as a participant in forging the nation’s future. While the rest of the nation hurtled toward the future, southerners created a past. For nearly a century after the war and until the rest of the nation could no longer ignore the anomaly of poverty, ignorance, segregation, and disfranchisement on its border, the South remained a regional outlier to the story of national success.

  The new nation taking shape after the Civil War only included the South as a gauzy intermezzo to a dazzling show of economic development, ethnic diversity, alabaster cities, and technological innovation. As P. T. Barnum cranked up his Wild West shows to provide easterners with a stylized version of the West, so minstrel shows and early film portrayed a magnolia-scented South that sealed racial stereotypes and preserved the region as “Old” in an America obsessed with the New, a feminized counterpoint to a masculine colossus.

  Some of these changes were already evident during the war. When Walt Whitman took leave of his grueling hospital work in Washington, D.C., in November 1863 to recuperate in his Brooklyn home, the train trip northward was a revelation. It was scarcely possible to see that a war was going on. Passing through Baltimore, then Philadelphia, and alighting in Manhattan, he marveled, “It looks anything else but war, everybody well dressed, plenty of money, markets boundless & the best, factories all busy.” The North was a hive of activity and innovation as the South was collapsing under spiraling inflation, severe manpower shortages, and the scarcity of basic necessities. Whitman was witnessing the birth of the modern state and of modern America.

  The Republican Congress, free of the southern Democratic albatross, passed an array of economic and educational legislation that helped to establish the federal government as an important catalyst in creating a national economy. The small town and family farm still characterized the nation, but northern cities absorbed thousands of newcomers and large orders for war materiel.

  A transformation was also occurring among the soldiers in the field. Although periodic religious revivals visited both camps, especially the Confederates during the last year of the war, the messianic tenor of correspondence from both sides subsided. The randomness of death regardless of piety and the general horror of the war transformed the soldiers’ faith. They still believed, of course, but often without the certitude and self-righteousness that marked evangelical Christian perceptions on the eve of the war. The advancing perception was that, rather than the personal, interventionist God of evangelical Christianity, the war confirmed a Supreme Being who was more detached and more inscrutable. Soldiers maintained their personal piety as they grew increasingly skeptical of God’s role in the war.

  The outcome of the war wa
s not inevitable, at least not until the last months. Regardless of the Union’s advantages in men, materiel, and organization, the war would be won or lost on the battlefields. Many of the key battles that preceded Sherman’s decisive march through Georgia, Sheridan’s depredations in the Valley of Virginia, and Grant’s relentless siege of Petersburg were narrow victories for Union troops. As late as the summer of 1864, northern public opinion was tilting decidedly toward a truce and peace with the Confederacy.

  By the time of Lincoln’s second inaugural in March 1865, the result of the war was not in doubt. His brief inaugural speech was a remarkable effort, a combination sermon and introspective rumination, not the triumphal declaration the assembled expected. The president talked about the limits of man, the inscrutability of God, and the nature of forgiveness—views that challenged prevailing evangelical Protestant beliefs nurtured by the Second Great Awakening.

  Northerners rapidly left the war behind. Their quick embrace of reconciliation reflected less a recognition of the moral equivalency of Union and Confederate causes than a desire to move on. Southern whites, on the other hand, may have talked of reconciliation, but beneath the veneer of accommodation lay resentment. They did not move on; they moved back.

  Wade Hampton III, a prominent South Carolina planter and Confederate general who lost both a son and a brother in the war, consistently counseled in favor of reconciliation. Yet his correspondence reveals that he was not reconciled to the verdict of the war. Hampton continued to believe secession was constitutionally legitimate, and he disputed the government’s right to abolish slavery. He was willing to accept federal authority but little else. And his was a moderate position.

  Reconstruction was doomed because white southerners had to account for their terrible loss, not only in lives but also in their patrimony. The acceptance of any Reconstruction policy short of none would have negated the cause for which they fought and for which many died. When Congress imposed a Reconstruction policy that included a modicum of black civil equality and black suffrage, most white southerners would not, could not accept the legitimacy of governments elected under such terms. The white South was never more solid than during the brief period of Congressional Reconstruction.

  It was not coincidental that the white southerners who took back their governments from black and white Republicans were called Redeemers, nor that the process through which it occurred was called Redemption. The term “redemption” was, of course, in widespread use in America prior to the Civil War, especially among evangelicals. It referred to the process by which Jesus sacrificed His life to rescue sinful mankind from God’s wrath. The term implied a new birth as those who come to Christ are cleansed of their sins and saved “unto a new life eternal.”

  Confederates talked of “redeeming” their states from Union control during the Civil War. After the war, the term usually implied a two-step process. Redemption would cleanse southern sins and therefore restore the Lord’s blessing on the South that He had withdrawn, as evidenced by defeat. It would also remove “the yoke of Yankee and negro rule.” Redemption, therefore, would secure for white southerners the victory denied to them in the Civil War. The process toward Redemption was clear. As an Alabama editor declared in 1871, “The road to redemption is under the white banner.” White southerners employed evangelical Protestantism to re-create an antebellum regime cleansed of sin. White religion in the South became the handmaiden of white supremacy.

  Northerners focused their attention on the cornucopia of opportunity opened up by innovation, invention, and industrialization. The South was only a peripheral concern. And then it was not a concern at all. In fact, many northerners felt they understood the concerns of white southerners, with their allegedly incompetent and corrupt Republican governments. White northerners felt similarly burdened by incompetence and corruption, though in their case the culprits were immigrants and venal local politicians rather than blacks and white outsiders. The mutual empathy caused the northern press and citizens to underplay or even excuse the mounting violence against Republicans in the South. Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 gave many Americans pause concerning the potential for democratic movements to spin out of control and result in a greater despotism, so the news of the Paris Commune in 1871 affirmed the evils of too much democracy. Given the racial attitudes of most white northerners, such empathy was not difficult to come by. Also, the scientific wisdom of the period mandated a more cautious role for government in the affairs of men.

  Science assumed the reputation of religion after the Civil War: infallible and ignored at one’s own peril. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) became enormously popular in the United States, not only for its value in explaining the process of evolution but also because it seemed to offer a blueprint for ordering society—and order was a perennial concern of Americans. The popularization of scientific theories is not always a good thing, however. Subtleties become lost in translation. “Survival of the fittest,” a term Darwin never used, became shorthand for natural selection.

  Society, like the animal world, worked on immutable natural laws, Darwin’s social interpreters claimed. Uninformed intervention in these natural processes was not only unwise but also potentially destructive. While it was appropriate for government to complement these processes by assisting lesser races in attaining their fullest potential, paternalism could only go so far. Legislatures and other policy-making institutions, public and private, must devise actions based on scientific data and facts. Research must displace intuition in the public sphere.

  Americans also interpreted Darwin as positing a natural hierarchy. Darwin himself wrote of inferior races. These ideas circulated at a time when Americans were making major decisions on Indians and African Americans. For both the red and the black, the consensus was that sedentary farm work or simple mechanical labor in environments controlled by whites provided the best opportunities for these lesser races to reach their full, though limited, potentials.

  Science replaced evangelical Protestantism as the nation’s primary faith and policy arbiter. Science did not posit an end to government, but rather a public policy carefully calibrated to incorporate scientific evidence as the basis for legislation. In that respect, the advocates of a political science were more measured than their evangelical Christian predecessors, who wanted to use the government as an arm of the Lord. They wanted a Protestant constitution and a Protestant public policy to speed the millennial advent. Political scientists looked less to the millennium than to professional stewardship as their ultimate goal.

  Evangelical Christianity did not disappear after the war. Rather, it was increasingly secular, a function of the prevailing postwar culture rather than the other way around. Dwight L. Moody packed his revivals with the simple message of eternal salvation and banned politics from his pulpit. He offered little in the way of theological exegesis. Most of his “sermons” took the form of secular stories sprinkled with treacly aphorisms much more than biblical texts. As the Wild West and minstrel shows made caricatures of Indians and blacks, Moody succeeded in making religion a spectacle. Many of his middle- and upper-class congregants came to see a show and to be part of an event. It was comfort religion, part of the culture of affluence and prosperity, a turn taken to its ultimate by Russell Conwell, whose sermon “Acres of Diamonds” unabashedly preached the Gospel of Money. The sermon stayed in print for over a century. When evangelicals ventured to influence public policy, such as the periodic attempts to impose a Christian amendment on the Constitution or to legislate against Catholic influence in the public schools, their efforts fell flat. Their great crusade became alcohol. Personal behavior rather than national sin became their focus.

  Evangelical Protestantism became culture-bound in the South as well, though in a quite different form. “Redemption” retained its born-again connotation, but in the South after the Civil War, it was indelibly connected to the restoration of white supremacy. Religion became a prop of the Lost Cause for white
s. For blacks, evangelical Christianity became their community. The focus was less on the hereafter than on the here-and-now.

  Science suited the new era well. It was rational. America’s Romantic Age had produced a civil war. The Age of Reason would offer up the telephone, the incandescent bulb, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Public policy would be rational, too. Cities were inefficient because experts and professionals were not in charge. States in the South were ill governed because unqualified electorates ruled. Just as the second generation of Americans thought they could discern the will of God, so their postbellum offspring believed they could divine the secrets of science and apply them to their society. Both were wrong.

  The North settled into prosperity. The Gospel of Money was apolitical, and it soothed the conscience by validating financial success as a calling unto itself. Entrepreneurs were the heroes. Industries blossomed that did not exist before the war, such as steel and oil, feeding the railroads, stoking home and commercial construction, and generating new white-collar jobs in accounting, insurance, finance, and managerial positions. Affluence and new technologies enabled families to move from congested inner cities to tranquil suburbs. Thomas Edison’s successful experiments with electric lighting and the phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone were merely a few of the innovations that eased the lives of middle-class families, especially of women. Many of those women now had an array of employment opportunities open to them as well, including office work, education, and retail.