Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  The phrase “total war,” like “just war” or “immoral behavior,” is vigorously contested but, I believe, necessary. The term “total war” did not exist during the Civil War, but I employ it anyway, taking into account its historical relativity Why? Because I simply cannot come up with a better term. Words like “hard” or “destructive” are often used to distinguish the Civil War from the even greater tragedies of the twentieth century, but they do not penetrate the moral center of the Civil War, which I take to be a war waged deliberately on civilian populations with the full knowledge and compliance of commanders running all the way to the top. In this sense, the spirit of total war emerged quite clearly by 1864 and prepared Americans for the even more devastating total wars they would pursue in the twentieth century. In terms of the civilian victims, North and South, the Civil War differed so profoundly in scale from earlier American conflicts that participants could only understand and experience it as something totally new and unprecedented. Of course, total war in nineteenth-century America describes something very different—and less severe—than total wars in the twentieth or twenty-first century. There exists no equivalent of Dresden, or Coventry, or Tokyo, or Rwanda in the Civil War. But nineteenth-century participants experienced their war as total. If, God forbid, a total war in the twenty-first century were to claim hundreds of millions of casualties that dwarfed losses in World Wars I and II, it would not mean that the twentieth-century wars were no longer “total.” The same is true of the Civil War, and attempts to minimize its destruction—military and civilian—reflect the historian’s cardinal sin of anachronism, literally judging the past by the standards of the present rather than on its own terms.9

  At the same time that the Civil War developed from a limited war into a total war, the moral justification changed in the North from a limited war for “Union” to a moral crusade for “freedom” and abolition. Unlike secession, slavery is not morally ambiguous. At first a background topic as the (initially unacknowledged) cause of the war, slavery would grow ever more powerful in its foreground role throughout the war. With emancipation, it would represent Lincoln’s inner accelerator for mounting a total war on the Confederacy, soldier and civilian alike. And with abolition, it would provide an unambiguous moral triumph.

  The justness of abolition and the freedom of four million dictates that any moral history of slavery unconditionally conclude that the right side won, no matter what the casualties and sacrifices. Lincoln was right when he said in his Second Inaugural Address that if God willed that the war “continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword ... so still it must be said ‘The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ”10

  But this book is not a moral history of slavery. It is a moral history of a war, where questions of proportionality and discrimination continue to remain in play In any moral history of slavery, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would be unquestionably “right” and good. But in a moral history of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation becomes more problematic if it was employed by Lincoln and Northern Republicans generally as a “lever” (Lincoln’s term) for a total war on the Confederacy that deliberately targeted civilian farms, cities, and—in at least fifty thousand instances—civilian lives.“11 In a moral history of the Civil War, it is not enough merely to say that the end of human bondage in the United States was worth a million white lives, true as that may be. The separate question of war remains: was it just? Here it is possible, and, I believe, reasonable, to conclude that the right side won in spite of itself. Instead of declaring the Civil War a just war dictated by prudent considerations of proportionality and protection of noncombatants, I argue that in too many instances both sides descended into moral misconduct.

  Any moral history of America’s Civil War is as much a history of ideas and passions as of actions. The United States was first and foremost an idea built on a foundation of ideology and theology. So, when America was put to its ultimate internal test, it would require not only a war of troops and armaments—the stuff of geopolitics—but also a war of ideas. This war would require each side, especially the South, to establish a legitimate identity as a moral “nation.” It would also demand a moral campaign to establish the justness of a resort to arms. Abstract political arguments would not suffice. They would have to be augmented by moral and spiritual arguments that could steel millions of men to the bloody business of killing one another. Above all, it is crucial to understand how both sides needed to enlist God in their cause as both justifier and absolute guarantor of their deliverance. Here the voices of clergymen in thousands of churches North and South would become especially meaningful as critics or cheerleaders of the war’s conduct.

  Tragically, no less than everyone else, the clergy were virtually cheerleaders all. Throughout this book I have paid particular attention to the voices of clergymen on both sides of the struggle, because they were the sources where moral arguments should have prevailed. One more easily forgives generals, journalists, and soldiers for their moral silence. But clergy—especially the majority Protestant clergy—had traditionally opposed reflexive patriotic rhetoric from the pulpit. They supposedly answered to a higher authority. True, the rare critical voices sounded among the clergy, as evidence that they could have established a prophetic distance from their side. But these voices are precious few, and for one simple reason—nationalism.

  In exploring the Civil War through moral lenses, one sees just how unprepared Americans were for such a cataclysm in the moral sense no less than the military or political. And unlike politics and military arsenals, which geared up to meet the challenge, the ability to fix a moral stance never progressed. Rather, it regressed. On all sides—clerical, political, journalistic, military, artistic, and intellectual—the historian searches in vain for moral criticism directed at one’s own cause. Talk of war certainly bristled from the pages of the secular press and civic assemblies, and statesmen, clergy, and intellectuals raged against the unjust conduct of the enemy. Yet few directly addressed the question of what constitutes a just war, and what limitations ought to be observed in the unpleasant event of war. In this avoidance and unpreparedness appears an important clue to the savage ferocity of fighting that would follow. As well, we discern important clues to the evolving meaning of America, and who (we) Americans are as a nation.

  While few judged or questioned the recourse to total war, many saw in the unprecedented destruction of lives and property something mystical taking place, what we today might call the birthing of a fully functioning, truly national, American civil religion. It was a meaning difficult for anyone to articulate at the time; yet some—including soldiers, clergy and, most notably, Abraham Lincoln—began to posit a moral high ground in the creation of a powerful national or “civil” religion. As the Civil War progressed onto increasingly eroded moral ground, something transformative simultaneously took place that would render the war the defining phenomenon in American history. Patriotism itself became sacralized to the point that it enjoyed coequal or even superior status to conventional denominational faiths.

  Ever since Robert Bellah’s seminal essay on civil religion, published in 1967, American scholars have awakened to a “religion” of American patriotism that exists alongside traditional religious faiths. American civil religion, Bellah observed, is “an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality ... at its best [it] is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people.” The historian of religion Rowland Sherrill defined civil religion this way: “American civil religion is a form of devotion, outlook, and commitment that deeply and widely binds the citizens of the nation together with ideas they possess and express about the sacred nature, the sacred ideals, the s
acred character, and sacred meanings of their country.”12 Though lacking transcendent revelations akin to the Abrahamic faiths, the religion of a sacralized patriotism enjoys a complete repository of sacred rituals and myths.

  In fact, American civil religion borrows so heavily from the language and cadences of traditional faiths, many Americans see no conflict or distinction between the two. Many Americans equate dying for their country with dying for their faith. In America’s civil religion, serving country can be coequal with serving God.

  The evidences for an ongoing American civil religion are ubiquitous. The Bible prevails as America’s most popular book, and often patriotism draws on familiar biblical themes to refer not to the church and its believers but to the nation and its citizens: “Exodus,” “chosen people,” “promised land,” and “New Israel” all represent staple metaphors in American speech and letters that express America’s messianic “mission” to be a “redeemer nation.”

  The rites and rituals of civil religion are discovered less in the laws of the nation than in more informal folkways and traditions. These include a myriad of sacred monuments, chief among them the Mall in Washington, D.C., with recent monuments to the Vietnam War and World War II, and, above all else, the majestic Lincoln Memorial, bracketed by the transforming phrases of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Key places evoke religious significance for many American tourists and patriots: Bunker Hill and Concord, Independence Hall, the Alamo, Gettysburg, and the Statue of Liberty all elicit reverential awe.

  Though lacking a formal creed American civil religion does contain sacred texts, including most importantly the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the two Lincoln orations. Patriotic songs identify America with the sacred. “God Bless America” was sung repeatedly after 9/11, not the “Star-Spangled Banner,” generally viewed as lacking sacred gravitas. “My Country “Tis of Thee” reminds Americans that the transcendent smiles on their cause in unique and self-empowering ways.

  America’s civil religion enjoys no weekly Sabbaths, but it does have its sacred days. For the first three centuries of America’s existence, fast and thanksgiving days, called by civic authorities (rather than churches) and observed on weekdays to judge or celebrate the nation, predominated, especially in the North. They would later be joined by Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day, Presidents’ Day, and Martin Luther King Day. Nonsectarian prayers sacralize political events, including inaugurals and opening sessions of Congress. Historically these have often been expressed in schools in conjunction with the Pledge of Allegiance.

  The American flag stands as America’s totem. Schoolchildren routinely pledge their allegiance to the flag—and the republic for which it stands, one nation under God. Until the late twentieth century, this pledge would be accompanied by prayers asking for God’s blessing on “His” American people. Soldiers killed in battle are buried in flags. America at war is a nation festooned with flags in 2005 no less than in 1861. American patriots reflexively invoke the “Stars and Stripes” or “Old Glory” as the object they are willing to kill and be killed for. Critics of America, at home and abroad, who burn the flag are accused of “desecration”—literally a trampling on the divine.

  American presidents have traditionally been viewed as the prophets and priests of American civil religion. 13 The presidency is the only “office” that cannot be left empty—even for one day. Laws are established to ensure instantaneous succession.14 As commander in chief of the armed services, presidents launch wars and the warrior generals who command them. The United States Military Academy at West Point became, in effect, the first seminary of America’s civil religion, later joined by the other service academies.

  The locus of American civil religion is not the church or the synagogue or the mosque. Rather, it is the state, which uses sacred symbols of the nation for its own purposes and perpetuation. The appeal proves so powerful and all-encompassing that some contemporary religious critics identify civil religion with idolatry.15 In a positive sense, scholarly analysts see in civil religion the social and cultural glue that binds a diverse people together and invests them with a collective sense of spiritual unity capable of withstanding internal disintegration.16

  Civil religion is often associated with, but not identical to, “messianism”—the attribution of sacred status to the place North America.17 New World messianism, unlike American civil religion, stretches all the way back to the Puritans. Indeed, historians point to John Winthrop’s speech aboard the Arbella, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” as the first instance of American civil religion, when Winthrop identified New England with Christ’s “city upon a hill.”18 And scholars of eighteenth-century colonial society document a pervasive “civil millennialism” in colonial wars.

  The rhetoric of messianism or “exceptionalism” is often summarized by the term “jeremiad,” which literally refers to a literary work or speech modeled on the Hebrew Bible books of Jeremiah and Lamentations that expresses a bitter lament or prophecy of doom. But because such prophetic warnings were only issued to God’s “covenanted” people, the lament actually reinforced their identity as God’s chosen people.

  In colonial New England, jeremiads were “occasional,” or political, sermons, preached during special weekday services of fasting or thanksgiving, or at other times such as on election day. The typical jeremiad began with a paean to the founders’ piety as they embarked on an American “errand into the wilderness” and then turned to current sins that imperiled the mission. If unchecked, the sins could lead to doom and defeat. But if the people’s sins were reformed, then all could hope to complete the mission of the founders with God’s blessing and deliverance. In this rhetoric, defeats and disappointments were never seen as signs of divine desertion but as loving chastisements employed by God to renew His special covenant with His chosen people.19 This rhetoric would continue to inform the deepest national identities of the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War.

  More meaningful than the rhetorical similarities, however, is a profound distance that separates New England Puritanism from the United States of America. “America” quite simply did not exist. Something decisive happened in 1776 that set American civil religion apart from such earlier outbursts of religious millennialism as Puritan New England or Cromwellian England. After 1776, the new nation inherited the mantle of destiny, and with it, for the first time on American shores, a national patriotism. That patriotism, however, was restrained by pervasive localism and state sovereignty. Only with civil war and a reunified nation-state would “United States of America” enjoy the national significance that it assumes today.

  Scholars of civil religion sometimes disagree about whether America’s civil religion is understood as “religious” or “ideological,” or whether it is defined as “cultural” or “theological.” Such debates miss the extent to which it exists in ways that incorporate all the dichotomies. American civil religion is religious and ideological, cultural and theological. For that reason it exerts enormous power on the loyalties and perceptions of its citizens: a power that can be even greater than traditional theistic beliefs and rituals.

  Yet one yawning question remains unanswered: given the existence of an American civil religion that everybody recognizes, how was it incarnated? How do we capture the transformation “in the beginning”? Surely the words and some of the symbols appeared with the Revolution. But rhetoric alone cannot create a religion. Neither Puritans’ talk of a “city upon a hill” or Thomas Jefferson’s invocation of “inalienable rights” is adequate to create a religious loyalty sufficiently powerful to claim the lives of its adherents. In 1860 no coherent nation commanded the sacred allegiance of all Americans over and against their states and regions. For the citizenry to embrace the idea of a nation-state that must have a messianic destiny and command one’s highest loyalty would require a massive sacrifice—a blood sacrifice.

  As I was writing this book and sifting through the enorm
ous body of moral and sermonic literature generated by the Civil War, it became apparent to me (as it had to some of the participants) that something mystical and even religious was taking place through the sheer blood sacrifice generated by the battles. The Revolutionary War, though liberating, had never really shaped a coherent sense of the nation as the prevailing object of fealty, over and against local communities and regions. Apart from federal election days and trips to the post office, most antebellum Americans had no real sense of belonging to a vast nation-state whose central government acted directly on its citizens. Their imagined community could not easily stretch beyond their local boundaries. Before the Civil War, Americans would routinely say “the United States are a republic.” After the war they would instinctively come to say “the United States is a republic.”

  As the war descended into a killing horror, the grounds of justification underwent a transformation from a just defensive war fought out of sheer necessity to preserve home and nation to a moral crusade for “freedom” that would involve nothing less than a national “rebirth,” a spiritual “revival.” And in that blood and transformation a national religion was born.

  Only as casualties rose to unimaginable levels did it dawn on some people that something mystically religious was taking place, a sort of massive sacrifice on the national altar. The Civil War taught Americans that they really were a Union, and it absolutely required a baptism of blood to unveil transcendent dimensions of that union.