Printed sermons also appeared. In Savannah’s Christ Church, Stephen Elliott, a bishop of Georgia, published a sermon, Sampson’s Riddle, that confirmed that a people’s strength came from God.9 On the same day, Bishop George Foster Pierce and Benjamin Palmer delivered addresses to the General Assembly at Milledgeville on God’s blessing of the Confederate cause.10 Similar assertions were put forward wherever people gathered, whether at schools, in army camps, or in hospitals throughout the Confederacy.11 In Richmond, Maximilian J. Michelbacher preached at the German Hebrew synagogue, Bayth Ahabah. At St. John’s Church in Richmond the Reverend William Norwood spoke from Psalm 103:19 on the subject of “God and Our Country.”12
While happy to complain about Davis, the secular press was unwilling to take on the clergy and their large popular following. Instead the press praised the fast and the wide participation it attracted. A writer for the Southern Illustrated News reported that “[t]he day of fasting and prayer was generally observed throughout the Confederacy, and we trust that the Almighty will answer the contrition and prayers of the people.”13 In Charleston, the Daily Courier recognized that[w]e are at last awake to the fact that we have to depend upon the means and instruments which Heaven has conferred upon us for the achievement of our independence. In the course of this conflict it has been demonstrated that, with the blessing of God, we are equal to the work in which we are engaged.
Central to that “work” was the preservation of slavery. Thus on the very day set aside for fasting, the Daily Courier followed a call for a “Union Prayer Meeting” with the announcement: “James Grant sold at auction on Thursday, a field hand, about 17 years old, for $2320.”14
After pleading for a sincere fast-day observance, the Central Presbyterian was pleased to report that “[t]here is reason to believe that this day was observed with uncommon solemnity over our entire country. Blessed be God whose spirit prepared the hearts of the people!” Besides “the people,” the generals and their armies increasingly embraced the fasts. In the same editorial, the paper went on to observe that alongside the fast observances of churches throughout the nation had been a fast day in Lee’s army: “The order of General Lee, suspending all duties in the Army of Northern Virginia, save those of necessity, concludes with a stirring address to the soldiers.”15
Lee no less than Davis was getting religion. He sounded ever more evangelical as time passed, locating his—and his army’s—fate in God’s hand, not his own. In a letter to his ailing wife he reflected on marriage and Providence:I will not let pass the day devoted to thanksgiving to Almighty God for His mercies without holding communion with you.... I know that in Him is our only salvation. He alone can give us peace and freedom and I humbly submit to His holy will.16
One striking example of fast-day observances in the Confederate army survives in the sermon book and diary of Robert Bunting, chaplain to the Eighth Texas Cavalry, which was known as Terry’s Texas Rangers in honor of plantation owner and commander Benjamin Terry.17 Though born in Pennsylvania and educated at Princeton Theological Seminary, Bunting considered himself a “Southern by conviction.” Against the wishes of his Northern abolitionist father-in-law, Bunting worked actively at the Presbyterian assembly in Augusta, Georgia, to form the Southern Presbyterian Church, and then enlisted in the Rangers in November 1861. His diary reflects a daily routine of prayer meetings, mail delivery, extensive letter writing on behalf of soldiers, Bible study, and attendance on the sick.
Readers in his hometown of San Antonio received regular reports from Bunting in their newspapers. Bunting tracked Terry’s Rangers as they fought at First Manassas and then returned to Texas, eventually to join fellow Texan General Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Later Bunting would participate in battles at Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga, Georgia.
Bunting was a rigorously Calvinist Presbyterian who made no concessions to ecumenism among his troops or to bland patriotism as a substitute for religion. Repeatedly he insisted that patriotism and religion were essential sentiments for the Confederacy, but clearly separate. One involved earth and history, the other heaven and eternity. In a sermon series on “Tekel” from the prophet Daniel’s vision of the “handwriting on the wall” (Daniel 5:25), Bunting brought home the haunting theme that “thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.” This text, directed to the “fools” in Babylon who turned their backs on the true God, was delivered with modern “fools” in view. Chief of these were Northern “atheists” and “infidels” who “disbelieve the inspiration [of scriptures], and teach that Hell is a fable.” These very people would suffer in hell “irrespective of virtue or morality or character or social position.” His words, he was pleased to observe, inspired a “very strict attention” from the brigade numbering one thousand men. Indeed, he was pleased to observe that “all attend save about a dozen who are busily engaged gambling near by—this is being now a crying sin in the Regiment.”
In the meantime, spring brought a new intensity to the suffering in Richmond. The capital city simply could not accommodate the vastly expanded populations of government workers, soldiers, and, increasingly with the breakdown of exchanges, prisoners of war. The winter of 1863 had been severe and set in motion real deprivations. While balls continued to sparkle for the wealthy, the poor only grew poorer.18
Richmond’s Central Presbyterian ran a series of essays on extortion throughout the winter and spring, strongly hinting that greedy fellow Confederates were as threatening as the enemy outside the gates. Capitalist greed could not supersede Christian charity: “The undue stress laid by Adam Smith upon the cost of production, as the controlling regulator of prices, has been the means of misleading the public mind until the present.”19 Only by controlling prices and eliminating extortion could the public will be maintained.
A beleaguered Jefferson Davis seldom appeared in public and remained badly out of touch with the people. On April 2 a crowd of more than a thousand angry men, women, and children, led by Mary Jackson, a housepainter’s wife, and Minerva Meredith, brandishing a pistol, massed in Capitol Square to cry hunger. Soon the crowd grew from hundreds to thousands. By mid-morning a “mob” marched down Ninth Street and across Main Street looking for “something to eat.” According to war clerk J. B. Jones, “They impressed all the carts and drays in the street, which were speedily laden with meal, flour, shoes etc.”20 The mayor appeared and called out troops, who read the Riot Act and threatened to fire into the crowd. Only the appearance of President Davis prevented carnage upon the Confederacy’s once proud own. Davis himself was unmoved by the citizens’ plight and later addressed the Confederate nation with blatantly unrealistic censure:Is it not a bitter and humiliating reflection that those who remain at home, secure from hardship and protected from danger, should be in the enjoyment of abundance, and that their slaves also should have a full supply of food, while their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers are stinted?21
Sallie Putnam, one of the “haves,” reflected her own distant and aristocratic biases as she witnessed the “disgraceful riot.” The “rioters,” she noted, were “a heterogeneous crowd of Dutch, Irish, and free negroes” who soon went beyond bread for dry goods and clothing. As the women sought food, “men carried immense loads of cotton cloth, woolen goods, and other articles, but few were seen to attack the stores where flour, groceries, and other provisions were kept,” thus calling into question the starvation motive. While conceding that the “want of bread” was “too fatally true,” she noted that most of the rioters were not among the sufferers. All their actions succeeded in doing, she complained, was to add propaganda grist to Northern papers who promptly printed “highly colored accounts of the starving situation of the inhabitants of Richmond.”22
While Sallie Putnam wished to downplay the seriousness of Richmond’s civilian population distress, her telltale concession that bread shortages were “too fatally true” belied the indignation she expressed. In fact, many Confederate women of means suffe
red in Richmond alongside their poorer compatriots. This was especially true of nonnative refugees fleeing battlefields for the capital city. On the same day that rioters demonstrated in Richmond, the aristocratic Ann Grymes of King George County penned the following letter to President Davis:Dear Sir, I am a widow of seventy two years of age. My home ... has been desolated by the Yankees, and my negroes, mules and horses stolen by them. I fled from the destruction that surrounded me there, and took refuge in Fredericksburg, with a daughter that resided in that place. I had to leave there a few days before the Battle, and I went to Dinwiddie Co. where I spent the winter. My means being nearly exhausted, I came to Richmond to seek employment whereby I could support myself during the few remaining years of my life, and will be truly thankful for employment in any of the departments where ladies are employed.23
Outside of Richmond, the devastations wrought by Union armies were as apparent to Northern soldiers as to the victims. In a letter to his wife, Philo B. Buckingham, commander of Company H of the Twentieth Connecticut Volunteers, described the destruction from his vantage point in Stafford Hills, Virginia, directly across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg:Any one seeing the country last fall when we arrived here and looking at it now would hardly know it to be the same place. The houses formerly occupied by the chivalry about here are all desected [sic] and occupied by the general officers or have been burnt up.... There is an air of general desolation and what miserable people there are left here ... their niggers gone with every thing else by the greed of the rapacious soldiers either of the Rebel army or of our own.24
On a more personal level, Buckingham described an old man from a wealthy family, worth $250,000 before the war, who had been reduced to two pigs. These too soon fell victim to hungry Union pickets who “actually took them killed and cooked them before the old mans eyes.” When the old man complained to Buckingham that he was a noncombatant in duress, he received a response that did not bespeak an officer and a gentleman: “The moral is that those who dance must pay the fiddler, those who rebel must take the consequences.” In time, General Sherman would refine this logic to a science; civilians, no less than soldiers, must feel the hard hand of war. And overseeing all was President Lincoln and Lieber’s Code.
Life was not much better in the Army of Northern Virginia than in Richmond. Lee’s ill health grew worse, even as his undermanned army of 50,000 faced Hooker’s 122,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. With Longstreet still detached, all Lee could do was wait for Hooker to make the first deployments and then depend on contingency and ingenuity to win the day. Fortunately for Lee, Hooker accommodated him by wasting his vast superiority and deploying his line of seven corps stretching all the way from Fredericksburg to the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers fifteen miles to the west. By April 30 Hooker’s objective became clear as three Federal corps under General Henry Slocum, a roommate of Philip Sheridan’s at West Point, massed on Lee’s flank.
On the very day that Hooker planned to attack, the North was observing a fast. Most Northern newspapers promoted the fast and underscored Union goodness, but one demurred. In terms that would anticipate Lincoln’s famous Second Inaugural Address, a writer for the New York Evangelist reflected on the meaning of the war:The war has been permitted as a punishment to both the North and the South. Both have been guilty, though in different ways and in different degrees. We trust that God will overrule it for good to both, but it will not be because either deserve it.... There is one sin the North is committing toward the blacks, that needs to be repented of. It is not slavery, but it is the denial of the rights of men to the poor unfortunate negroes who are among us ... we are called as a people to acknowledge the full manhood of the negro race.25
Words like this stand out for their relative scarcity in the rhetoric of war, reinforcing The Liberator’s demand for equality as a “reparation” for “the awful sin and injustice to them which lies at our door.”26 To a culture unwilling to think of blacks as “men” as opposed to “boys,” such sentiments must have appeared oddly alien. For appearances’ sake, most Northern citizens involved in fast services were willing to confess stock sins of envy, greed, materialism, and so forth. They acknowledged the South’s sin of slavery. But they would not concede racism in their own backyard, or even, for that matter, in the South. It simply did not register. Few white voices asked the one genuinely comprehensive moral question that could justify a war and reconstruction. Racism was a sin to which they did not confess, let alone concede as the primary cause of war.
The Evangelist, however, did not stop with African Americans but went on to extend racism to include injustices to Indians. In the same issue, the paper included a column for “the children at home” that told the story of wars fought against Indian men, women, and children. In the story, one child asks in regard to an Indian woman seeking a burial space for her grandson:“Are they allowed to come here?” “No, but they do come.” “Well,” he replied, “if we should see one of them in our streets, we would shoot her.” That is the way multitudes of our good people feel towards these poor miserable natives, and that is the way they express their sentiments. It seems to me that they are almost as savage as savages. I don’t think our Saviour is pleased to see such feelings in the heart. I hope your readers will pity and pray for them.27
Finally, pulling no punches in anticipating the sins of the fast day, the Evangelist took issue with the conduct of the war—again a rare occurrence. In a second “children at home” column, the paper explored “A Story of Fredericksburg.” It was not a story of heroes and just war. Rather it told the story of houses shelled by Northern artillery with only a doll to salvage by “the despoiling hand of war”:For doubtless what the shot and the shell had left was soon spoiled by the ruthless hand of [Federal] soldiers. For it is a fact that the most indiscriminate plundering took place as soon as our soldiers entered the town. Feather beds were turned inside out the most costly furniture was broken up and thrown into the streets.... Children you cannot be too thankful for your peaceful homes.28
In a sixty-two-page handwritten fast sermon, Worcester’s Reverend Seth Sweetser reiterated the myth of American origins in “the Mayflower brought over [by] men who sought a refuge from the oppressed faith,” and who proceeded to lay the foundations for a Christian republic. This continued through the Revolution, Sweetser claimed, and now reappeared in the war: “There has been a wonderful revival of patriotism.... The people were astonished at the resurrection of a spirit, which many thought had long since been buried in the sepulcher of the past.”29
In another unpublished fast sermon, Abijah Marvin, a Worcester minister, took note of the slaughter of the war. He predicted that, if nothing else, it would discourage any future civil wars: “If peace were restored today on the old footing, it would be a long time before another rebellion would occur.... The South remembers that the Revolution was successful, and that it did not cost them much. But their children will remember that this rebellion, whether it proves successful or not—was carried on at a frightful expense of life.”30 Little did he know that at that very moment, carnage loomed with dire consequences.
PART V TRANSFORMATION
HEARTS INVESTED
MAY 1863 TO APRIL 1864
CHAPTER 23
CHANCELLORSVILLE: “THE CHAMBER OF DEATH”
As Northern churches fasted for victory, Hooker set up headquarters around the Chancellor family house, known as Chancellorsville. His plan was simple. He would advance on Richmond, using sheer superiority of firepower to turn Lee’s left flank and rout his army from the rear. Because of his numerical superiority, Hooker believed he could break his army up into three units. One, led by General John Sedgwick, would feint an attack on Fredericksburg, drawing Lee back toward the town where he had been so successful months earlier. Then the other two units would crush Lee’s undermanned army in a converging vice grip, leaving Lee no choice but surrender or destruction. For weeks Hooker savored the sweet revenge his plan would inevitably bring and bo
asted of imminent victory. Like many other generals of both the North and the South, he was fast becoming a legend in his own mind. But he forgot his commander’s dictum that victories had to be won on the field before they could be celebrated in talk. And his pride blinded him in respect to the general opposing him, who spoke very little indeed.
Like McClellan and Pope before him, Hooker badly underestimated both Lee’s intelligence resources and his audacity. By late April Lee knew what Hooker’s intentions were and had determined a counterresponse.1 With only sixty thousand effectives, Lee faced a daunting challenge. But Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had informed him that Hooker was advancing in force through the isolated and densely wooded area of second-growth forest known as the Wilderness to strike Lee in the rear. This was territory Lee knew well and Hooker knew not at all. As before, Lee determined to divide his outnumbered forces, gambling on the power of surprise and the effective use of his interior convex lines for rapid redeployment. Hooker expected Lee either to retreat or to face annihilation. Instead, Lee planned the unthinkable: to take the offensive in a savage attack that so surprised Hooker that numerical inequities no longer mattered.
On the evening of May 1, soldiers on both sides knew they were in for a battle. John Emerson Anderson of the Second Massachusetts Volunteers Infantry was not fooled by Hooker’s bravado and described the scene of anticipation:As we waited for the morning dawn of the Sabbath there seemed to be an unusual soberness take possession of each one as if the soul was trying to look into its future. If we had occasion to speak to one another it was done in that low hushed voice that is used in the chamber of death.2
Upon the Altar of the Nation Page 28
