America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Wade Hampton III would never forget or forgive. Scion of a prominent South Carolina family, owner of large tracts of land and slaves before the war, he never allowed himself to succumb to the fury of some of his comrades in the years following the surrender. His outward civility did not imply accommodation, however. Appomattox was a way station, not the destination. Together with his fellow white men of South Carolina, he would help steer the state back home.

  Hampton was a moderate. He had opposed secession, and fire-eaters repulsed him. When Lincoln called for troops, however, the forty-three-year-old planter knew his duty. The Hampton Legion was born. He fought ably and rose to the Confederate high command. He hated the war. As early as October 1862, he wrote home, “My heart has grown sick of the war, & I long for peace.” Two years later, Hampton’s cavalry confronted three Union infantry corps outside of Petersburg. A Yankee bullet found one of his sons, Preston. Hampton raced over, cradled the dying boy in his arms, and cried, “My son, my son!”6

  Six months later, the war was over. Hampton returned to his home outside Columbia and discovered there was no home. His property destroyed, many of his slaves gone, and deep in debt from which he would never recover, Hampton faced the future with $1.75 in his pocket. Yet he was not the worst off by far. He had only lost his brother, his son, and his livelihood. He wanted desperately to get back to the past. And he wanted vindication.

  As the desperation grew, some took the law into their own hands and looted shops or stole from farmers. “A spirit of lawlessness seems to pervade the town,” the Montgomery Advertiser complained. The general disorder bred other crimes as well. The Atlanta New Era chronicled a crime wave of “rape, murder, suicide, theft, burglary, garroting, pocket picking, embezzlement, elopements, bigamy, [and] adultery.” With few police officers and dark streets—most towns and cities lacked gas to light their streetlamps—law enforcement was negligible. A northern journalist visiting Atlanta warned, “Passing about the dark, crooked streets of Atlanta after night, unaccompanied and unarmed, was worse than attempting a similar exploration of the Five Points in New York.”7

  The world had not merely changed for southerners; it had turned upside down, as if, suddenly, they had happened upon a mirror universe of whence they had come. In Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, gaiety ruled the streets in April 1861, like “Paris in the Revolution.” On the fourth anniversary of this merriment, Charleston’s streets were still crowded, only this time with armed black soldiers. The restaurants were shuttered or destroyed; and their patrons were dead, in prison, or destitute. The taverns were rollicking, but the patrons all wore blue uniforms. Occasionally, a soldier in a Confederate uniform wandered by, not to tweak his former enemy but because he had no other clothes to wear.8

  The elevation of African Americans grated most on white southerners. Watching a contingent of black soldiers marching through the streets of Mobile, a white resident exclaimed, “There’s my Tom. How I’d like to cut the throat of the dirty, impudent good-for-nothing!” The slaves were now masters, and the masters felt like slaves. “Change, change, indelibly stamped upon everything I meet, even upon the faces of the people!” former vice president Alexander Stephens remarked sadly.9

  The blame for this terrible state of affairs clearly lay with the Yankees. Mary Chesnut expressed the sentiment of many in similarly reduced circumstances: “I … wish they were all dead—all Yankees.” While northerners hurried to forget, southerners wrapped themselves in resentment. What they saw on a daily basis, and the hunger and deprivation they felt, had a great deal to do with it. They had lost the war, to be sure, but to many it was not a fair fight. “You had three things too many for us,” a Georgia planter told northern journalist Whitelaw Reid, “the Irish, the niggers, and Jesus Christ.” Many southerners accepted as fact that northern armies consisted almost entirely of immigrants conscripted as they landed. It would not be the last myth about the war to prevail in the South.10

  Resentful southerners were not anxious to take up arms again, at least not against Yankee armies. They would express and act upon their bitterness in safer venues. However cordial they might be to northern visitors and soldiers, and however accepting they seemed of the war’s outcome, they were still pursuing the rebellion. Whitelaw Reid reported that he met many professed Unionists in the South, but “to talk of any genuine Union sentiment … any intention to go one step further out of the old paths that led to the rebellion … is preposterous.” Time and again, Reid encountered congenial hosts who informed him that the North forced the South into the war, that the South had no choice but to defend encroachments on its liberty. Reid never heard anyone suggest that, somehow, southerners might have contributed to the conflict. Without accountability, there could be no contrition.11

  Without contrition, white southerners were likely to respond with hostility to restrictions or conditions imposed by federal authority. Wade Hampton fired off a letter to Andrew Johnson, who favored mild terms for southern reentry into the Union. Hampton informed the president that the federal government could not demand more of the South than simple loyalty. “You have no right to ask or to expect that she will at once profess unbounded love for the Union.” While southerners accepted defeat, Hampton warned Johnson that “the brave men … fought to the last in a cause which they believe, and still believe.” If Johnson contemplated a form of apprenticeship for southern states, southerners would perceive that as an insult: “She [the South] will never … tarnish her name by inscribing on her escutcheon … that she has been guilty.” Hampton acknowledged the end of both slavery and southern independence, but he did not recognize the rightness of these outcomes. With such attitudes, any conditions imposed on the South would have been perceived as unjust.12

  White southerners would register their defiance privately for the time being. Careful to maintain an outer demeanor of loyalty for fear of losing their property, their political rights, or worse, they accepted the verdict of the war, but not that it was over. As a Virginian told New England journalist John T. Trowbridge, “The war feeling here is like a burning bush with a wet blanket wrapped around it. Looked at from the outside, the fire seems quenched. But just peep under the blanket and there it is, all alive, and eating, eating in.” Georgia humorist Bill Arp put the feelings of fellow white southerners in more earthy terms: “Who’s sorry? Who’s repentin? Who ain’t proud of our people? Who loves our enemies? Nobody but a durned sneak.”13

  Whites in the South sometimes demonstrated their feelings in more public ways, especially in the cities, though subtly. Women refused to walk under the American flag or crossed the street when approaching a northern man. Federal authorities banned the display of Confederate symbols. Veterans covered their buttons with mourning cloth and left them on their coats. The resistance had its song:

  Oh, I’m a good old Rebel,

  Now that’s just what I am;

  For the “fair land of Freedom”

  I do not care a dam.

  I’m glad I fit against it—

  I only wish we’d won.

  And I don’t want no pardon,

  For anything I done.

  Three hundred thousand Yankees

  Lie still in Southern dust

  We got three hundred thousand

  Before they conquered us.

  They died of Southern fever

  And Southern steel and shot.

  I wish we’d killed three million

  Instead of what we got.14

  Many northerners suspected southern professions of loyalty to the Union. Their prewar history of placing state above national interests and their vigorous defense of slavery did not evaporate at Appomattox. Those advocating a strong hand toward the South after the war reminded their colleagues, “Cannon conquer, but they do not necessarily convert.” Southerners believed their loss in the war represented a failure of numbers, not of ideas. Harper’s printed numerous dispatches from the South in the months after the surrender to demonstrate the persistent reb
elliousness of the southern white population. A correspondent from Memphis wrote to Harper’s, “The rebellious spirit of the people here is as bitter and strong as it has been at any time during the last five years.”15

  Outward acquiescence and inward resistance toward those who have brought down calumny upon your family is a good strategy for survival in the short run. White southerners, however, wanted more than survival. Like Hampton, they wanted vindication. Most of all they wanted to reconstruct their lives, their communities, and their civilization. Loathing the present, fearing the future, they looked to the past.

  White southerners groped for meaning in defeat. If, as their ministers and leaders had told them, they were fighting a holy war, then they must have sinned against God. Yet the Old Testament is replete with examples of God’s Chosen People receiving severe punishment for serious transgressions against His laws. God held out the possibility of redemption if His people repented. “He loveth whom he chasteneth,” from Hebrews 12:6, became the scriptural foundation of a new southern faith. It enabled white southerners to rationalize their loss and move forward in their lives with the belief in their ultimate redemption. As northerners moved away from a civil society informed and directed by evangelical Protestantism, southerners embraced it, and embraced it so fiercely that it became a folk religion indistinguishable from southern culture. Thomas Markham, a Presbyterian minister, took this theme in a sermon he delivered in New Orleans shortly after the end of the war: the “present afflictions which are but for a moment, shall work out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” Defeat was not an adverse judgment on the South so much as a motivation to create a perfect society. “Defeat,” the Rev. Moses Drury Hoge of Richmond declared, “is the discipline which trains the truly heroic soul to further and better endeavors.” For southerners, “it is better to be chastened, than to be let alone.”16

  The religious transformation served two purposes in the South. First, it shored up a shaken faith. Second, the South’s status as a Chosen Nation elevated the cause for which it fought. The impurity was in the southerner, not in the cause. Robert Lewis Dabney, the South’s leading Presbyterian theologian, wrote in 1867, “Because we believe that God intends to vindicate his Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it … we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders.” It was not happenstance that white southerners called the men who led the restoration Redeemers.17

  White southerners had to perceive the North as evil incarnate in order to sustain the belief in their section’s ultimate redemption. For God would not allow evil to triumph. At a memorial service in Charleston in 1870, Wade Hampton reminded his listeners that might did not mean right. Just as the sword had “turned over Spain and Portugal to the tender mercies of the Saracens,” it was now “directed by unscrupulous power against prostrate States, reeking with fratricidal blood, [enforcing] the laws which it alone has made.”18

  The theme that the South’s suffering was temporary and only awaiting redemption became the prevailing arc of southern expression after Appomattox. The lost war was not a heavenly judgment on southern ideals. It was a call for rededication to those ideals. In 1865, the Rev. Dr. A. W. Miller, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, responded to comments of northern ministers that the South should accept the results of the war as a divine remonstrance against its institutions. Miller replied that “accepting the situation” did not mean that southerners “abandoned their former distinctive views and principles.” He cited Old Testament accounts of neighboring nations defeating the Jewish people. “Providence, for wise ends, may permit an ungodly nation to prosper for a time.” If southerners had maintained a proper relationship with God, “Southern principles would have been crowned with speedy victory.” A purified South would arise from the ashes to serve as God’s “last and only hope.”19

  The resurrected South would look a great deal like the Old South, a restored regime of white supremacy, patriarchy, and states’ rights. These political and cultural principles became holy tenets, dissent from which threatened redemption. Politics and theology became indistinguishable. A Baptist minister declared, “As a Democrat, I love all Democrats. All Baptists are Democrats.… It is THE political faith of the great majority of the members of the church.” Politics became a faith, and the vote was an offering to both God and the South.20

  The Lord would not allow white southerners to suffer long. Benjamin M. Palmer, the Presbyterian minister who had delivered the stirring Thanksgiving Day sermon in November 1860 on the Christian roots of secession, consoled the members of his church that “the next generation would see the South free and independent.” If the South must wander in the desert, it would eventually reach the Promised Land. Redemption would come. Recall: “It was when Isaac lay upon the altar of sacrifice that Abraham’s faith was made perfect by works; it was when the Hebrew children walked in the midst of the fiery furnace that the glory of the Lord was revealed before the eyes of His enemies.”21

  Remain steadfast to the truths of the Old South and southerners would triumph. Robert Lewis Dabney, in a commencement address at Davidson College in 1868, urged the graduates to maintain antebellum ideals: “Resolve to abate nothing, to concede nothing of righteous conviction.” Dabney warned the students of the evils of urbanization and technology and the enfranchisement of blacks. He prayed that these future leaders of the South would adopt “scriptural politics.” These ideals would not only ensure that the South would prevail, but they would also serve as a “bulwark against the flood of Yankee innovations in religion and morals.” The great danger for the South, Dabney concluded, would be to allow the North to “Yankeeize the South,” making southerners “become like the conquerors.”22

  Such ideas coalesced into a creed called the Lost Cause. The creed idealized the Old South, elevated the Civil War to a passion play of courage and martyrdom, and depicted the Reconstruction era as a time of unmerited suffering, the time before Redemption. The Confederacy died and the South was reborn, more pure, more chaste, and more obedient to the old values. While northerners looked forward, filed the war away, and relegated religion to a subordinate role, white southerners embraced and sanctified the past. “The present is a very little part of life, sir,” a character in an Ellen Glasgow novel informs us. “It’s the past in which we store our treasures.” Southerners walked backward into the future.23

  Southern religion merged with southern culture. Churches altered their hymnals to incorporate the Lost Cause creed. Ministers retitled “That Old-Time Religion” to “We Are Old-Time Confederates.” The Methodist church adopted a new hymn, “Let Us Pass Over the River, and Rest Under the Shade of the Trees,” the final words of Stonewall Jackson.24

  Southern history imbued the South’s religion. Virginia writer James Branch Cabell asserted, “No history is a matter of record; it is a matter of faith.” In the chaotic and uncertain months after the end of the war, religion was much more than a solace; it was an explanation and a reason to hope. The home would be rebuilt; the town would prosper; the farm would yield its bounty; and whites would regain their patrimony. It was God’s promise. And any means white southerners employed to accomplish the South’s redemption were justified. Redemption meant the independence of white southerners to order their lives and their society as ordained by Scripture. God had given white southerners the “great mission of political independence,” a writer in De Bow’s Review asserted in 1868. Now they must fulfill His wish. The war and its aftermath crucified the South; soon would come the resurrection of a great people.25

  Church became both the cultural and religious center of southern life. The southern white church boomed in the 1860s. Evangelical denominations had 31,000 more church seats and 450 more congregations in 1870 than in 1860. While property values fell throughout the South during this decade, the church property of these denominations rose in value by nearly $1 million.

  Southern women played significant r
oles in the expanded church polity. They had always been more churchgoing than the men. Women kept the family Bible and saw to it that names and traditions were carried down from generation to generation. They were the guardians of memory for their families. As history blended into faith, and as the boundaries between public and private spheres in the South became indistinct, women become the attendants of sacred southern memory. Their work expanded from the family to encompass the community. The cemetery became an extension of the home.

  Southerners constructed their lives around their fallen. The women of Richmond painstakingly carried stones to erect a precarious pyramid at Hollywood Cemetery commemorating the late martyrs. Many of these women were never able to bury their loved ones. Their sons and husbands and fathers lay in common graves in Gettysburg or Antietam, or were missing altogether. The graves they tended were surrogates for the loss of a farewell. They followed Jefferson Davis’s admonition to “keep the memories of our heroes green.” Statues went up and wreaths were placed at the tombs of Jackson, Stuart, then Lee. On May 10, 1866, the women organized the first Confederate Memorial Day, drawing the white community together to commemorate the martyrs. They had not departed; they had merely changed their address. If the boundary between religion and culture had disappeared, so had the distinction between life and death. The women placed a banner at the tomb of J. E. B. Stuart in Hollywood Cemetery: “Stuart: Dead, yet alive. Mortal, yet immortal.” By the late 1870s, orators were referring to the Confederacy in the present tense. In the moment of its death, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.”26