Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  In contrast to most moral commentators who saw in war a bracing moral tonic uplifting the soldiers and citizenry, Baltimore’s border-state pastor N. H. Schenck saw this war bringing out the worst in American society. The voice is rare, but needs to be heard as an evidence of what might have been said. In a near perfect reversal of the vast majority of moral commentary in the North and South, Schenck concentrated on just war conduct and resolutely ignored patriotism—and emancipation. The war, he observed, represented a great “unmasking” of base motives and the “masquerade” of virtue on both contending sides. Nations did not deserve to be worshipped, and war did not produce martyrdom, only slaughter and immorality: “When victories mean nothing but wholesale slaughter and no great or permanent advantage secured, the victory mainly ascertained by measurement of blood and calculation of corpses, I fail to see in it the occasion of thanksgiving to God.”

  Far from perceiving a cause for thanksgiving, Schenck witnessed a “tragical era”—human life itself devalued in the mindless pursuit of war. But in the grip of patriotism, he declared, the truth became almost impossible to glimpse:The ranks thinned to-day are filled to-morrow and the mournful dead march is directly changed into the gleeful quickstep. And as we grow indifferent to the value of life, we become proportionately indifferent to those great moral interests attached to life.... It is very difficult for us fairly to realize that we are making for history the bloodiest record which has ever crimsoned its scroll. It is very difficult for us to appreciate the fact that we have suddenly become not only a military, but a warlike people. But difficult as it is, the mind must open for the entrance, and widen for the embrace of these tragical ideas.19

  There would be no civil religion in Emmanuel Church, Baltimore.

  The last nationwide fast day in the Confederacy in 1863 took place on August 21. After the debacles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Richmond Daily Whig eagerly complied with Davis’s proclamation. Rejecting the notion that God rained defeat on them for their cause, the Whig instead singled out sins. These were not the sins of pride or profanity or Sabbath-breaking—the stock-in-trade general sins applicable to all peoples at all times—but the sins of materialism and hoarding, particularly acute in Richmond. “No man or woman in the Confederacy,” wrote one commentator, “who is familiar with the doctrines or commandments of the inspired Word can be greatly surprised at the present state of affairs. Have not the people everywhere devoted themselves to the worship of Mammon? Have they not all practiced extortion?”20

  In South Carolina Benjamin Palmer preached a state fast sermon on December 10 that was later printed and widely circulated. The sermon outlined the Confederacy’s civil religion. All hint of separation of church and state disappeared. As Palmer observed from the start, because the state called the fast, “it is the nearest approach which can be made to an act of worship by the State, as such ... the state is, in some clear sense, a sort of person before God.”

  Having justified the holy stature of the Confederacy, it remained only for Palmer to worship. Like countless of his Northern counterparts, Palmer plunged into nation worship. Even as loyal soldiers were martyring themselves, “undergoing the fearful baptism of blood,” so must all Confederates realize the sacred stakes at issue: “The offering which patriotism renders to country, a sovereign state, on bended knee, with sacramental fervor, dedicates to God. Lift up the right hand to Heaven, as the grand oath rolls up above the stars, that you are prepared for death, but not for infamy.”21

  New Year’s opened in Richmond with optimism. Likening the South to David battling a Northern Goliath, the Richmond Daily Dispatch promised deliverance : “The little South, not one fourth her [the Union’s] size, has been chosen the instrument of puncturing the colossal gas bag of Unshaken self-conceit of the enemy.”22 Providence had a “beneficent design” in protracting the war, and for that reason the people should not despair. Citing one of the most favored texts in the American Revolution (“A Nation Born in a Day”), the paper went on to comment: “The American Revolution was mere child’s play compared to the gigantic struggle which is being waged on this continent.... A nation has been born in a day, and at the instant of its birth, it has been called upon to do the work of a giant.”23 Nevertheless, as long as God was trusted and President Davis supported with love and respect, victory would be sure.

  But not everyone in Virginia supported the Davis administration, and even fewer outside of Virginia did. The criticisms of the ambitious governor of Georgia, Joe Brown, were deemed especially dangerous by advocates of the Confederate government. The “peace editors” of the Georgia press pushed for a peace that Davis was unwilling to pursue on any terms other than Confederate independence.24 The Atlanta Daily Register, in a particularly offensive editorial, recommended a return to the independence states had enjoyed before 1772 and secession from the Confederacy.25

  Richmond’s newspapers responded defensively with a shift of editorial direction. In 1862, the Examiner had opined that “the Confederate Ship of State is drifting toward the rock of consolidation, the same rock on which the Union split and went to wreck.” But by April 1864, in a column significantly titled “The Principles of 1776,” the paper criticized Brown and narrow Confederate claims to states’ rights over and against the centralizing needs of the nation: “It is an effort to defeat the object for which we are fighting:which is the nationality of ‘the Confederate States of America,’ and not the independence and sovereignty of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, etc. etc.“26

  Richmond could more easily remain hopeful because they had been in war for three and a half years and had grown accustomed to its hardships. Other Confederates lacked their perspective—and their optimism, as war encroached directly upon their borders. In Charleston the bombardment of Fort Sumter was by this time only a memory. As the tables turned under constant Federal bombardments, however, sentiments shifted decisively toward despair, albeit still short of defeatism.

  Charleston’s Daily Courier saw the full consequences of war: >There are no signs of peace visible to our gaze.... We have ceased to expect help or justice from the nations across the sea.... How many born to fortune, and brought up in the lap of luxury, after enduring numberless and great hardships and sufferings, will lie down in unmarked graves, and no one will be able to tell the spot where those uncoffined bodies repose? The prospect is gloomy, revolting, terrible! “What a fearful scourge war is!” When will this dreadful contest have an end? Exclaim thousands whose hearts are bursting with grief, or beclouded with anxiety.27

  CHAPTER 29

  “THE PRESENT UNHOLY WAR”

  In the North Lincoln was winning bloody battles but under fire from angry Democrats warming up for the national elections in November 1864. Some “Peace Democrats,” most notably the Ohio congressman and gubernatorial candidate Clement Vallandigham, urged peace immediately no matter what the cost. When Vallandigham cleverly arranged his own arrest for “disloyalty,” Lincoln commuted his sentence from imprisonment to banishment. While in exile, Vallandigham ran in absentia on the Ohio Democratic ticket, where he was soundly defeated by the Republican candidate, John Brough.1 Vallandigham was marginalized by the taint of disloyalty, especially in the context of stunning victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The “War Democrats,” on the other hand, posed a more serious threat.

  American memory, as the historian Joel Silbey demonstrates, has viewed the war years through what he describes as a “Republican prism,” effectively sidelining the Democratic Party.2 But in reality, the Democrats remained a potent political force substantially represented in the legislature and governors’ mansions. Since the midterm elections of 1862, the party had grown increasingly powerful. By the summer of 1863 their opposition had intensified as emancipation became law, battlefield deaths mounted, and President Lincoln acted to limit disloyalty and run a war through the draft, income tax, and military tribunals. Though challenged in regard to their “loyalty” because of their criticism of Lincoln’s h
andling of the war, most Democrats remained loyal to the Union. They also served in the armed forces and, for the most part, supported a war fought to reestablish the Union. That did not prevent them, however, from differing profoundly over presidential acts and the conduct of the war.

  On the surface, the Democratic opposition to total war rested on a moral critique grounded in just-war theory. For Democratic leaders such as Congressman Samuel C. Cox of Ohio, the only just cause for war was the preservation of the white Union and a lenient peace that left “the Union as it was.” That single end, in turn, required a limited war seeking neither social revolution, total extermination, nor widespread civilian suffering.

  When faced with the prospect of emancipation and the seizure of Confederate “property,” Cox demurred, citing Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel and the “laws of [civil] war as between nations.” In an address to Congress, he argued from Vattel’s classic just-war treatise that civil war must be a civilized war, which meant a limited war:It was urged to soften the horrors of war, to save mankind from cruel and unjust violence, to limit war and its horrors to the combatants, to reduce the conflict to a duello between armies, and to save the sea, as the land was already saved by law, from being the theatre of cruel, predatory, and barbarous practices. The reason urged for this doctrine is that it enables men to make peace, lasting and fraternal, unembittered by cruelties to helpless women and children, to non-combatants, and men of productive industry and peaceful occupations in private life. It is the doctrine of the Saviour of mankind.3

  In praising General McClellan’s principled opposition to Lincoln’s total war, Cox again cited Vattell: “I affirm on the best human and divine authority, that all objects of human effort, even war, should contribute to human happiness and peace. If this war have any other object, then it is abhorred of God and man; and every dollar and life sacrificed would be a criminal waste.” If rules of clemency and protection of innocents were not rigidly observed, there would be no effective limits:As well fire the hospitals of the sick, and the libraries of the learned; as well pillage the homes of the widow and the hermitage of the orphan; as well refuse the flag of truce or the exchange of prisoners; as well fire upon the former and hang the latter.... Nay, by the same reason that we would abstain from these horrible means which intensify sectional hate, and reinvigorate rebellion, we must leave open the same means which two nations at war ever have, for the restoration of peace.4

  Sadly, Cox’s grim visions would take form soon enough on both sides of the conflict.

  The Democratic opposition was based on pragmatic considerations, including fears that foreign-born soldiers and citizens would bear a disproportional share of the dying (not true), an underlying sympathy with the white South, and a sense of political defeatism (that the war was not winnable).5 Democrats observed correctly that the war had not continued as it began, but rather had become a “holy crusade” to remake Southern society and rewrite the Constitution—nrst as a “war measure” for emancipation and second as a constitutional amendment. They pointed to a vastly expanded Federal bureaucracy with unprecedented powers to draft, tax, and impose martial law. And they vigorously protested Lincoln’s “unconstitutional” reaches, most egregiously his Emancipation Proclamation.

  All of the Democratic principles were legitimate and arguable within the context of a loyal opposition. But in looking for moral significance, the end to which they pointed must be judged. And that end was, bluntly, hardly moral. Essentially, Democratic opposition to Lincoln and the Republican Party found its grounding less in a prophetic critique of the Union military machine than on the creation of an apartheid state built on the social and political reality of white supremacy This all-encompassing mission dictated virtually every Democratic response to Lincoln’s party and Lincoln’s conduct of the war.

  The racist goals of Peace Democrats ensured that they would win no loyalty among the relatively small number of American pacifists in the North. The largest peace party—the American Peace Society—refused to condemn the war at all, interpreting it as a police action rather than a war between nations. Other, more radical “perfectionist” pacifistic organizations, like Alfred Love’s Universal Peace Union, agreed with Peace Democrats that the war was a sin and that therefore the Confederacy should be acknowledged as a legitimate nation, but they refused any cooperation with the Democrats because their “motives” were diametrically opposed. As the historian Thomas F. Curran recognizes, “The perfectionists perceived nothing but insincerity and hypocrisy in the Democrats’ call for peace.”6

  In contemplating the rise of the Republican Party and the evolution of the war, Democratic leaders suspected a conspiracy that had nothing to do with constitutional principles of Federal rule versus states’ rights, and everything to do with abolition. In a speech before Maine’s House of Representatives, Moses Page raged against “the fiddling Neros of the Republican Party.” By “trampling” on the Constitution, Lincoln was betraying his office with mindless bloodshed. In response, Page concluded:I see but one way left open for us to prevent it [disunion], and that is to grant to our wayward sisters the rights which belong to them under the Constitution, and let the nigger alone; then, I have no doubt, we could conclude an honorable peace with the South in less time than Mr. Seward declared he would, when he got the reins of government.... I think this country was destined for one people, and would have remained ok, had not the fell spirit of abolition crept in and overturned the work of our fathers.... Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward are in a great measure responsible for the present unholy war, which has sacrificed so many of the young men of our country, and wasted so much treasure.7

  As war deaths mounted, Democratic critics condemned Lincoln for deceiving the American people with a premeditated plot to transform the war into an abolition war. Like their white Confederate enemies, they insisted that Lincoln’s end was not the preservation of the Union after all, but the creation of a mixed race society that would undermine white supremacy They recited a checklist of Lincoln’s policies, including the Emancipation Proclamation, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, congressional recognition of “the Negro” Haitian Republic, opposition to slavery in the territories, and abolishment of slavery in the District of Columbia. It all pointed inescapably to one fact: Republicans were conspiring to “Africanize” the nation by privileging the interests of blacks over whites. It would be race—and not moral arguments over just war—that set the defining context for the coming national elections in 1864.

  When faced with the issue of recognizing Haiti in 1862, Congressman Cox had objected on the grounds that America should not recognize Negro ministers of state from a nation whose constitution barred whites from office. The United States should do the opposite, Cox argued, and bar blacks from holding public office. This, he averred, exemplified the innermost meaning of America: “I have been taught in the history of this country that these Commonwealths and this Union were made for white men; that this Government is a Government of white men; that the men who made it never intended, by any thing they did, to place the black race on an equality with the white.”8

  Elsewhere Cox praised Lincoln’s state of Illinois for refusing to allow blacks full citizenship, and insisted on the rights of the states, including his own, Ohio, to determine residence and the voting franchise for themselves:The right and power to exclude Africans from the States North being compatible with our system of State sovereignty and Federal supremacy, I assert that it is impolitic, dangerous, degrading, and unjust to the white men of Ohio and of the North, to allow such [black] immigration.... As a general thing, they are vicious, indolent, and improvident.9

  What appeared humanitarian and pacifistic on the surface turned out on closer examination to be a clarion call for white supremacy and a Jim Crow society Indeed, midwestern states with large Democratic constituencies succeeded in passing segregationist legislation that the postwar South would later emulate.10 To the Republican credo “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” Democrats r
eplied: “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Negroes where they are.”

  Democrats had their heroic generals who fought loyally even as they opposed Lincoln’s policies. Most notable was McClellan, the “Christian General.” His behavior in the field comported with the limited goals of Democratic politicians. He tried to enforce Sabbath observance and strove to avoid belittling and vilifying the enemy

  McClellan’s “humane” voice stood in stark contrast to the crude and sometimes profane utterances of Grant or Sherman, but it did not extend to slaves and Northern freed blacks. Their humane “place” was the inhumane condition of enslavement. In an earlier address to the House of Representatives, Congressman Cox praised McClellan and condemned Republican moves toward escalation. Lincoln’s removal of McClellan “was a sacrifice to appease the Ebony Fetich.”