The reassurances of spiritualism reached their broadest audience through popular fiction. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar. If Stowe’s novel, as Lincoln reportedly remarked to its author, helped to cause the war, Phelps’s work dealt with the war’s consequences. Within twenty years of its 1868 publication, The Gates Ajar had been reprinted fifty-five times. Enterprising marketers even devised Gates Ajar funeral wreaths, cigars, and patent medicines.
Phelps began to write the book in 1864, when she was just twenty years old, at a time, she said, when the “country was dark with sorrowing women.” A soldier with whom she was in love had been killed at Antietam, but she recognized that her own personal grief was simply part of an inescapable “material miasma” of loss and pain. Phelps wrote in order to “say something that would comfort some few…of the women whose misery crowded the land.” Looking back thirty years later, Phelps remembered that she had not “thought so much about the suffering of men—the fathers, the brother, the sons.” The mourners she sought to console were the women, “the helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted women; they whom war trampled down, without a choice or protest.” Men had fought and died, but now they were beyond help. It was the victimization and sacrifice of the women who continued to suffer that attracted her concern. After her book appeared, these women wrote her by the thousands. “For many years,” Phelps reported, “I was snowed under by those mourners’ letters…signs of human misery and hope.”32
The Gates Ajar is structured as the journal of Mary Cabot, a young woman who has just learned that her brother Roy has been “shot dead.” Unable to reconcile herself to his loss or resign herself to God’s will, she is near despair when her aunt Winifred arrives for an unexpected visit. A widow with a young child, fittingly named Faith, Winifred offers Mary a new understanding of heaven, together with the assurance that she will be reunited with Roy, “not only to look at standing up among the singers,” as an angel with a harp, but “close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here—really mine again.”33
Mary’s pastor has provided her only an unsatisfactory vision of a place dedicated to “harping and praying” and to endless glorifying of God, a place that would “crowd out all individuality and human joy,” a place beyond any special personal human attachments. “He gave me glittering generalities, cold commonplace, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future at which I sat and shivered.” Mary is clear-sighted about what she needs to believe. “I wanted something actual, something pleasant, about this place into which Roy has gone.”34
Winifred readily offers it. Harps, choirs, white robes, pearl gates, she explains, are all just symbols, not the reality of heaven at all. Instead the future life is very like Earth at its most ideal, with trees and mountains, with houses filled with books, pianos, and pictures, and with individuals preserved as themselves, looking as they did in life, maintaining their own bodies and identities. Roy is, Winifred assures Mary, “only, out of sight…not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated,” but continuing to love those from whom he has departed.35
Phelps, speaking through Winifred, stumbles a bit on the question of the body and its fate after death. “A little complication there!” Winifred admits. Deferring to the realities of science, she acknowledges that “popular notions of resurrection are simply physiological impossibilities,” and she cites as an example the problem of the material destiny of “two Hottentots, one of whom has happened to make a dinner of the other one fine day.” But without resolving these intractable complexities, which were all too relevant in a war in which amputation was so widespread, Phelps simply affirms that a real body that can be heard and touched and kissed will be preserved. To try to “speculate” exactly how, she concludes, is “a waste of time.”36
The authority on which Winifred and Phelps rest their claims for the afterlife is not that of Scripture or science but of distress and desire. What humans most need is what a benevolent God would want to provide for them. Most important in Phelps’s vision of the future is the continuation of the self, of an identity that is defined by a body and by a set of relationships that seem to include both people and domestic objects. These are the essence of what the heaven of The Gates Ajar promises to restore to the bereaved. Heaven is reconceived as a more perfect Earth: Victorian family and domesticity are immortalized, and death all but disappears.
But many bereaved sufferers could not duplicate Mary Cabot’s escape from despair to certainty. The “rebellious state of mind” in which Mary found herself at the outset of the novel, the firm declaration “I am not resigned,” echoed the diaries and letters of real-life mourners who found themselves unable to understand why a benevolent God would afflict them—and indeed the world—with such suffering. As Confederate poet and novelist Sidney Lanier wondered, “How does God have the heart to allow it?” The venerable problem of theodicy—of how and why God permits evil—presented itself forcefully to those witnessing the devastation of civil war. One solution to the dilemma was to discount or dismiss evil, and that indeed was the strategy of those who denied death’s horrors and focused on the attractions of a highly Earth-like heaven. If death was to be not dreaded but welcomed, it need not challenge God’s fundamental goodness.37
But many were unable to console themselves with a vision of heaven that transcended war’s afflictions, and they instead confronted doubts about the very foundations of their faith. In the Confederacy, where one in five white men of military age would die in the war, mounting death tolls brought widespread and all but unbearable suffering. Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina understood the meaning of the summer of Gettysburg and Vicksburg firsthand, when in September 1863 she called at the houses of eight neighbors and found each one in mourning for a lost husband, brother, or son. Accepting such loss began to seem impossible, especially to women for whom the imperatives of family conventionally took precedence over those of politics. It was increasingly hard to simply murmur, “God’s will be done.” Susan Caldwell of Warrenton, Virginia, a town located at the very seat of war, anguished over the “loss of our brave and gallant men” on the battlefields all around her and found herself unable “to gain power over my own rebellious heart…Oh! how hard to be submissive.” War-weary Americans invoked the trials and patience of Job, reminded themselves that the Lord “doeth all things well,” and dutifully and almost ritually affirmed, “Thou he slay me, yet I will trust in him.” But like Susan Caldwell, many feared they could not “stand a great deal more.”38
For some, consolation derived not just from assurances of a close and comfortable heaven but also from visions of transformations on Earth. Death would be not just easy but purposeful. Southerners and northerners alike elaborated narratives of patriotic sacrifice that imbued war deaths with transcendent meaning. Soldiers suffered and died so that a nation—be it the Union or the Confederacy—might live; Christian and nationalist imperatives merged in a redemptive vision of political immortality.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is perhaps the best-known example of such an explanation and justification of war’s carnage. Determined that “these dead shall not have died in vain,” Lincoln hallowed and sacralized a nation and its purposes with biblical cadences—even as he scarcely mentioned God. In the address the dead themselves become the agents of political meaning and devotion; they act even in their silence and anonymity. Lincoln immortalized them as the enduring inspiration for an immortal nation. Unlike the “honored dead,” the Union would not “perish from the earth.” Soldiers’ deaths, like Christ’s sacrifice, become the vehicle of salvation, the means for a terrestrial, political redemption.39
Lincoln’s providential view of the war and its carnage appeared with perhaps even greater force a year and a half later, as both the conflict and his life neared conclusion. In the Second Inaugural of March 1865 Lincoln again offered an explanation for wartime slaughter, but this time it was God, not man, who gave i
t meaning. An Old Testament God of justice is avenging the sins of slavery. The Civil War and its deaths are not so much sacrifice as atonement. “Yet if God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”40
Providential views of the war had abounded from the earliest days of the conflict, when North and South competed to claim God for their side. The Confederacy, as one southern clergyman declared, would be the “nation to do His work upon earth.” Deo Vindice, with God as vindicator, the official Confederate seal proclaimed. But only as the enormous cost in lives became clear did it seem imperative explicitly to link providentialist notions to war’s losses, to impart to these deaths both transcendence and meaning. As Georgia bishop Stephen Elliott explained this necessity in an 1864 sermon, “To shed such blood, as we have spilled in this contest for the mere name of independence, for the vanity or the pride of having a separate national existence, would be unjustifiable before God and man. We must have higher aims than these.” War’s dead and war’s cost were changing and amplifying the understanding of its ends.41
But as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered on the eve of victory, insisted, God “has his own purposes” and makes his own judgments. He, and neither Yankees nor Confederates, would define the reach of his providence. Both sides in the terrible conflict “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other…The prayers of both could not be answered.” Northern success and southern defeat necessarily altered providential explanations of war and its carnage. Northerners were reinforced in their conviction that lives had not been lost in vain and were encouraged in their sense of national mission; Confederates confronted what for many became a profound test of faith.42
A little more than three months after Appomattox, northern clergyman and theologian Horace Bushnell celebrated northern victory by placing the dead and their sacrifice at the center of war’s accomplishment. The slain, he declared, were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph.” You get what you pay for, his oration implied; only war’s cost had ensured its transformative impact. Bleeding, he asserted, was necessary to God’s expansive—and expensive—purposes for America, and “in this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified.” The Christian narrative of redemption through suffering and sacrifice framed Bushnell’s rendering of the war and its meaning. Death was not loss, but both the instrument and the substance of victory.43
Early in the conflict, on the Sunday after the Union defeat at First Bull Run in 1861, Bushnell had delivered a sermon entitled “Reverses Needed,” calling for the nation’s resolve and devotion to be tested. Four years later he could affirm that America had passed its trial. The war’s suffering had guaranteed that “we are not the same people that we were, and never can be again.” A new understanding of nationhood as the incarnation of God’s design had been purchased by “our acres of dead.” Because, like Christianity, history “must feed itself on blood,” the United States now “may be said to have gotten a history.” The nation was “no more a mere creature of our human will, but a grandly moral affair.” Its purposes were now God’s purposes. “Hallowed” by “rivers of blood,” the United States claimed its place as the redeemer nation. “Government is now become Providential.” The “mournful offering” of war’s deaths had “bought a really stupendous chapter of history.” And the blood that had been shed to achieve God’s design of freedom, emancipation, and inspired nationhood, he explicitly recognized, was black as well as white, sacrificed at Fort Pillow and Fort Wagner as well as at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Shiloh.44
Bushnell closed his oration by invoking a manifest destiny of national expansion, impelled in no small part by the need to compensate for war’s cost. There was a need, Bushnell emphasized, “to wind up and settle this great tragedy in a way to exactly justify every drop of blood that has been shed in it.” Like Confederate bishop Stephen Elliott, he too sought still “higher aims” to balance the flow of “such blood.” War’s destructiveness called for broadened purposes. “Ours be it also, in God’s own time,” he concluded, “to champion…the right of this whole continent to be an American world, and to have its own American laws, liberties, and institutions.”45
Bushnell spoke as a victor. One also suspects that he could talk so enthusiastically about blood because he had spent the war in Connecticut, distant from the battlefields “black with dead” that he described. But Providence had favored him, and he could thus claim its purposes as his own. His dead, the northern dead, could be explained as part of a larger purpose and grander plan. But for the defeated South, war’s terrible losses could only seem meaningless.46
As Confederate fortunes faltered, some white southerners “plainly indicated,” one woman reported, “that if our cause failed, they would lose all faith in a prayer answering God.” Confederate poet Henry Timrod had in fact suggested in “Ethnogenesis,” his 1861 celebration of the southern nation’s birth, that “to doubt the end were want of trust in God.” What then did it mean actually to see the end and to face defeat? What then of God’s trustworthiness? Surrender made war’s sacrifices seem purposeless; losses would remain unredeemed; southern fathers, brothers, and sons had not died that a nation might live.47
Even the most devout struggled to reconcile themselves to defeat and to find meaning for the slaughter. The Presbytery of South Carolina observed in the fall of 1865 that “the faith of many a Christian is shaken by the mysterious and unlooked-for course of divine Providence.” Baptist leader Samuel Ford recognized that “‘Where is God’ seemed to be the anxious questioning of each heart…Is there a God? many many asked.” Virginian Mary Lee felt herself “like a ship without a pilot or compass.” She could see no God at the helm.48
Some believers, like the Presbyterian editor John Adger, reminded their fellow southerners, as clergy had indeed reiterated throughout the trials of four years of war, that God chastened those he loved. Defeat was simply another burden to be borne with the unwavering patience that Job had exhibited in the face of divine affliction. “Yes! The hand of God, gracious though heavy, is upon the South for her discipline.” In Richmond, Reverend Moses Drury Hoge confessed that defeat “enwraps me like a pall.” But he determined not to “murmur” at God and instead would “await the development of his providence.”49
Many felt they had endured enough. After Appomattox Grace Elmore of South Carolina wrote in despair, “I know not how to bear it. I cannot be resigned.” She acknowledged that “hard thoughts against my God will arise.” She had lost two cousins to the war, had dealt with Yankee invaders in her own house, and had lived through the burning of Columbia with “flames before, behind and around us.” She struggled to fit her experience into Christian narratives of suffering and redemption, but with the resurrection of the Confederate state all but impossible, she saw little hope of salvation. “Night and day in every moment of quiet,” she wrote, “I am trying to work out the meaning of this horrible fact, to find truth at the bottom of this impenetrable darkness…Has God forsaken us?” Widowed, homeless, and destitute, Cornelia McDonald of Virginia shared Elmore’s feelings of abandonment. She described lying immobile on a sofa through “dreadful hours of unbelief and hopelessness.” But gradually memories of God’s mercies crept over her, and she resolved once again to trust in him despite her afflictions.50
Like McDonald, most former Confederates would suppress their doubts and return to religious belief and observance. Churches grew dramatically in the South in the years after the Civil War, setting the stage for the region’s emergence as the Bible Belt in the twentieth century. But many white southerners remained bewildered, as Mary Lee put it, by God’s mysterious ways in subjecting them to the anguishing losses of war. The cult of the Lost Cause and the celebration of Confederate memory that emerged in the ensuing decades were in no small part
an effort to affirm that the hundreds of thousands of young southern lives had not, in fact, been given in vain.
The victors’ providential view of the conflict and of Union and emancipation offered white northerners and African Americans throughout the nation a consoling narrative of divine purpose and sacrifice. But not all Americans were satisfied with such a justification of war’s cost. The horrors of battle and the magnitude of the carnage were difficult to put aside. The force of loss left even many believers unable to abandon lingering uncertainties about God’s benevolence. Doubters confronted profound questions not just about God but about life’s meaning and the very foundations of both belief and knowledge.
In his study of a group of prominent mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals clustered around Harvard, Louis Menand has argued that the Civil War not only “discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it” it destroyed “almost the whole intellectual culture of the North.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose father had rushed to find him after he was wounded at Antietam, was one of these men, and Menand believes he never recovered from the mental impact of his experiences. The younger Holmes had volunteered to fight, Menand explains, because of certain moral principles, but “the war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs.” This was more than just a loss of faith; it was an issue of both epistemology and sensibility, of how we know the world and how we envision our relationship to it.51
One product of the horror of the Civil War was the proliferation of irony, of a posture of distance and doubt in relation to experience. Literary scholar Paul Fussell has written that wars always beget irony because intentions are so often overturned by circumstance; war’s outcomes are so much more terrible than we can ever anticipate. Certainly this was true of the American Civil War, which began with statesmen assuring one another of all but bloodless victory. But the predominant response to the unexpected carnage was in fact a resolute sentimentality that verged at times on pathos. Songs abounded in which soldiers entreated their mothers to “come, Your Boy is Dying,” to “bless me…ere I die,” or “kiss me once before I go,” or “make me a child again just for tonight.” Novels and stories shared the enthusiastic earnestness of The Gates Ajar. But another, contrasting sensibility emerged in the course of the war as well, often appearing in direct reaction to the gap between the conventions of Victorian sentimentality and the reality of modern industrialized warfare.52
This Republic of Suffering Page 20
