Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Other Democratic generals evidenced similar reservations as the move toward total war gained momentum. For Winfield Scott Hancock, a gifted general but like McClellan a Democrat, the command of the Army of the Potomac held no appeal. In a letter to his wife written soon before Gettysburg, where he would be severely wounded, he wrote: “I have been approached again in connection with the command of the Army of the Potomac. Give yourself no uneasiness—under no conditions would I accept the command. I do not belong to that class of generals whom the Republicans care to bolster up.”11

  Democratic racist rhetoric was hardly limited to the leaders in Congress and the military. They merely echoed their rank-and-file constituency in towns and cities throughout the North and in the army. Besides mob violence directed toward African Americans, popular entertainment reinforced racial phobias.12 As a form of popular entertainment in the North, minstrelsy had no rival, particularly among the urban and immigrant working classes who filled out so much of the Democratic electorate.13 Minstrel shows embodied and dramatized the abstract prejudices that Northern whites, particularly Democrats, absorbed. Chief among these was the bestial inferiority of the black race, captured in virtually all minstrel shows and in the lithographs that advertised them. The historian Jean H. Baker shows howminstrelsy simply placed blacks in nonhuman roles: the hair of Negroes was like sheep’s wool, their faces and features resembled monkeys, their feet were those of elephants, their eyes like “de coon,” their skin tough as animal hide, their arms strong as “the smell of de pole cat,” and their hearts bigger than the biggest raccoon.14

  During the Civil War, minstrel shows featured black “Zip Coons” dancing with white partners at “Emancipator Balls,” signaling white fears of both miscegenation and Republican abolitionists, who were supposedly promoting interracial marriage.

  Hysterical Democratic fears of a Republican-incited campaign for racial miscegenation became one of the great rallying cries of Democrats in the 1863 and 1864 elections. For Congressman Cox, the real issue was race. “The irrepressible conflict is not between slavery and freedom,” he wrote, “but between black and white.” The Republican party sought miscegenation, which, Cox continued, “was another name for amalgamation.” From science, it was clear to Cox and his fellow Democrats that this could never work: “The physiologist will tell the [abolitionist] gentleman that the mulatto does not live; he does not recreate his kind; he is a monster. Such hybrid races, by a law of Providence, scarcely survive beyond one generation.”15

  The same racist themes appeared in other popular art forms, most notably the music of outspoken Democrat Stephen Foster and the lithographs of Currier & Ives. Popular cartoons also contributed to the perspective of white supremacy stereotyping Lincoln as an African-like baboon or a monkey, cementing the Democratic identification of Republicans with those who would “Africanize” America.

  For sheer race-baiting, it is virtually impossible to distinguish Democratic cartoons in the North from their Southern counterparts. In contrast to most clergy and some newspapermen, no abolitionists existed among lithographic journalists. The Civil War of Currier & Ives was not an abolitionist war. Their audience was white, usually middle-class, and predominantly female, and they had no use for black subjects except to degrade and humiliate them. In one lithograph, The Irrepressible Conflict or the Republican Party in Danger, Currier & Ives pictured the major Republican figures of the day with a black man who was trying to keep their boat from capsizing by tossing the radical William Seward overboard and giving the more moderate Abraham Lincoln the helm. Depicted standing on the bank, Uncle Sam recommended that they “heave that Tarnal nigger out” instead.16

  Like northern Democratic politicians and their constituencies, “Christian” (clerical) Democrats insisted on retaining a strict separation of church and state, in keeping with their Jacksonian origins. They maintained the silence of ministers in the pulpit on purely political matters—most notably party politics—opposed preaching social reform, and rejected Federal intervention as an agency of social transformation. 17 If they were not as explicitly racist in their pulpit discourse as their party’s pols, their silence on the subject nevertheless identified them with the cause.

  Clerical Democrats provided their party with the biblical exegesis that supported the proposition that slavery was not a sin.18 As late as 1864, they continued to produce treatises “proving that the institution of slavery was not abolished by the Gospel.” These they often coupled with critiques of Lincoln’s appeal to equality.

  The Reverend John Henry Hopkins of Vermont asked, “In what respect are men ‘created equal,’ when every thoughtful person must be sensible that they are brought into the world with all imaginable differences in body, in mind, and in every characteristic of their social position?” Nor, Hopkins continued, were there any “unalienable rights,” for “they are all alienated, forfeited and lost through the consequences of [Adam and Eve’s] transgression.” As for Christian Republicans, they were anything but Christian: “Here, then, we have a full display of the new revelation—the gospel of ultra-abolitionism which anticipated our mournful war as the true means to emancipate the negro, and seeks to accomplish this favorite object through a deluge of blood, and at any sacrifice of life and treasure.”19 While unwilling to comment on political parties in print, Christian Democrats would address the issue of slavery in writings like “Why Christ did not proclaim emancipation.”

  For all intents and purposes, most Northern Protestant pulpits and publications espoused Republican views, a fact not lost on those Christian Democrats who were denied a voice in all publications save those in the border states. Clerical Democratic dissenters spoke at their own risk, vulnerable to denominational discipline and dismissal. Nevertheless, a small minority of clerical voices did call the Republican Party into question, and with it the conduct of the war and the bald “political preaching” of Northern evangelical Protestant denominations.

  Emancipation did not stand as Lincoln’s only war measure. Earlier he had established his right under the war powers of the presidency to suspend writs of habeas corpus (which enables a citizen who has been detained by government officials to seek a judicial determination on the legality of that detention). Two days after announcing his Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln issued another proclamation suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. At the same time, he established extrajudicial military tribunals for trying all those “affording comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States.” It would be left to the Lincoln administration and the War Department to determine who those “disloyal” citizens were. Just as the war on rebellion was being transformed in military tactics and objectives, so also was the war on insurrectionists in the border states and among disloyal Northerners raised to accommodate the totality of the new situation.

  Most Republican suppression of civil liberties was justified in a war emergency and fell within acceptable limits. Federal arrest records confirm that the arrests had less to do with mere dissent or loyal opposition and more to do with actual treason. Outside of government, however, other more extragovernmental avenues of suppression were blatantly political and designed to intimidate Democratic voices. These were especially egregious in the powerful Northern Protestant denominations.20

  It is difficult to ascertain the number of clerical Democrats, in part because so many feared reprisals and a loss of their living. Furthermore, their strictures against “political preaching” discouraged any public statements from the pulpit (though not in their opinions as private citizens). In any case, civil liberties did not extend to them any more than freedom of speech extended to loyalists in the American Revolution. When New York’s Democratic minister Henry J. Van Dyke attacked abolitionists in print for their moral arrogance and suprascriptural appeals to “higher law,” a Republican mob threatened him with physical attack. Other Protestant ministers—notably Charles Hodge—also hedged on the sin of slavery, but their civil liberties were protected bec
ause they were Republican.

  Methodists and Presbyterians, especially conspicuous as articulate Democratic proponents of peace, paid stiff penalties for their beliefs. Many Democratic Methodist clergymen were suppressed by their congregations and, more significantly, by their denominational boards and agencies.21 Methodist Episcopal Church officials insisted that Northern clergy subscribe to the proposition that slavery was the “cause” of the war; those who demurred risked losing their pulpits and livelihoods. When the Reverend William C. Howard of the Moawequa Circuit (Shelby County, Illinois) failed to pray for Abraham Lincoln and stated his preference for Clement Vallandigham in the Ohio gubernatorial election, he was hauled before the conference assembly, “tried” outside of a formal church trial, and dismissed.

  Even as Christian Democrats accused fellow churchmen of being politically partisan, clerical Republicans did more than live up to the accusation—indeed they carried it as a point of pride. The Republican religious press, like the denominations that sponsored it, continued to be proudly partisan and supportive of the president and the cause. In their view, the war had been transformed with the Emancipation Proclamation into an antislavery war, and therefore an unremitting good that required no hard ethical questions, only victory.

  The idea that God would not grant the North victory until slavery was reduced occurred to evangelical clergy far earlier than to political or military leaders. Already in 1862 radicals had prepared for midterm elections by persuading their churches to vote only for antislavery candidates, i.e., Republicans. The Methodists carried a column in the Ladies’ Repository urging Christian women to spy on neighbors and weed out opposers to war: “Detect and expose the covert traitors in your neighborhood.... Hunt them out.”22

  When Democrats announced a platform calling for negotiated peace with compromise, evangelical denominations, led by seven Methodist annual conferences and eleven Baptist associations, condemned the proposal and urged their congregants to vote Republican. They were soon followed by Congregational associations and Presbyterian synods.23 Throughout the Union the cause of abolition was praised as the real cause of the war, while the topic of just conduct in the field toward soldiers and noncombatants never came up.

  In a perverse jumble of conflicting agendas, the nation was convulsed by war between a white, slaveholding Confederacy and a Northern Republican administration promoting emancipation to justify total war. For the administration, total war was the regrettable end and emancipation the means, while Democrats promoted conciliation with slavery and white supremacy as the end and peace the means. In a profound sense, white America was getting what it deserved.

  CHAPTER 30

  “FROM HEAD TO HEART”

  Religious life in the Confederacy closely resembled that of the Union at the start of the war. But by 1864, material destruction and crushing defeats were taking their toll on the local churches and the denominations that integrated them. Even before the war, membership rates had fallen lower in the South than in the North, and “unchurched” constituted the largest category of membership.1 With the war, matters only worsened. Many church buildings were destroyed, others deprived of members and money. In its annual report to the denomination, the Lexington, Virginia, presbytery stated, “That religion is generally reported to be on the decline is a fact which some of us are beginning to accept as indubitable.”2

  Elsewhere news was also grim. After reporting on the sixty-seventh commencement at the University of North Carolina, the North Carolina Standard noted that enrollments had shrunk from eighty graduates to seven, with the remainder all in the army. One in five faculty members had been killed; it remained the only university running continuously. As for the general mood: “How to escape present troubles ... both temporal and spiritual, are the main questions before the public now. Hence politicians and preachers are the only speakers who can find hearers.”3

  In this barren spiritual environment, faith continued to burn bright in the Confederate armies and hospitals. Abstract warnings of death became chillingly immediate in the aftermath of Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and the battles to come in the spring of 1864. Throughout the winter, an increasingly desperate President Davis urged his soldiers on, placing confidence in Providence even as might of arms and tactics suffered. In an address to the armies he cited revivals to press the point: “Soldiers! Assured success awaits us in our holy struggle for liberty and independence.... When that success shall be reached, to you, your country’s hope and pride, under Divine Providence, will be its due.”4

  Already by 1863, the Southern pulpit and religious press increasingly addressed the public heart rather than the public mind. Reasoned arguments could articulate issues and generate debate and conflict, but they could not sustain courage in the face of the bloodbaths of this war.

  Reason could not motivate suicide, but faith could.5 Nor could reason cross the divide from public, civil religion to private, experiential “saving faith.” Sentiments of the heart would take over and push the drumbeat harder. Justifications for the cause shifted from a legalistic list of “principles” (which, after all, had changed as the war progressed) to an assessment of the “sentiments” motivating each side.

  While some angry editors dissembled, Davis and his universal phalanx of clerical supporters and generals asserted that God was precisely the point of the war. The tendency of some secular presses (though by no means all) to denigrate the fast days and their sacralized rhetoric amounted to rank disloyalty and blasphemy. As the church was sacred, so also was the Confederacy; neither could be worshipped without invoking the other.

  The Confederate shift in rhetorical strategy from head to heart can be seen in two sermons preached and published by D. S. Doggett, then pastor of Richmond’s Broad Street Methodist Church. The first, delivered in September 1862, reasoned from a list of “facts” revealing that God was interested in the struggle. Doggett went on to define the war as a defense of “the rights asserted by our forefathers, in the immortal Declaration of Independence; the rights of self-government, self-protection, and of conscience.”

  In his second sermon, preached in the spring of 1864 and published by the Soldier’s Tract Association in Richmond, Doggett argued that the war received its moral character by the passions and fundamental convictions of each side. It was a war of Southern truth and justice against Northern lust and prejudice—a war of Bible believers against heretics and infidels.6 If rationalizations became tangled and confused as the war progressed, a Christian’s heart could still be in the right place. If God’s designs for the South seemed less clear in 1864 than in 1862, then trust in Him became all the greater an act of faith.

  Meanwhile, alongside the religious press’s relentless support of Davis and the war came a significant shift in rhetorical focus of the fasts that exemplified the advent of increasing rather than decreasing religiosity. Where the object of earlier fasts was social reform, the focus of new fasts shifted to revival and preparation for eternity. The locus of these revivals also shifted decisively away from the churches to the army. Things looked bleak under the harsh light of the secular press, and churches steadily surrendered their property and members to destruction and spiritual depression, but the army revived.7

  The Christian Observer asked, “Is Religion Declining?” in response to the assertion “that religion in the church is in a low and sickly condition.” The answer was yes. In response the paper turned to the army for hope.8 Accounts of “Revival among the Texas Rangers” or “Revival in the Army of Northern Virginia” filled newspaper columns with space freed by the lack of victories in the field. From the “army in the west,” the “news” shifted from battles to revivals: “There is a mighty work of the Spirit going on now in the camps of this regiment and brigade.”9 Like crusaders of old, Confederate soldiers could find an antidote to fear in saving faith and garner a “triumph” over sins that military triumphs were not providing.

  For many in the Confederacy unwilling to embrace journalistic c
ynicism, the army now became the spiritual hope of the land, displacing a dispirited and demoralized populace as vehicles of saving grace. Church societies directed thousands of conversionist pamphlets and tracts toward every Southern town, hospital, and Confederate army tent. In Richmond colporteurs worked feverishly with the armies and in the greatly expanded hospitals to urge the soldiers on to revival.

  Mary Jones reported eagerly the happy news that “revivals in our army are certainly the highest proofs we can possibly desire or receive of the divine favor.”10 A revitalized Southern spirituality, concentrated on individual salvation, along with the logic of the Confederate jeremiad, which sanctified the entire South, would shape the perceptions of white Southerners long after the fall of Richmond and the surrender at Appomattox.

  It would be hard to exaggerate how totally news of revivals began to fill the pages of religious and secular presses following Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The Richmond ReLigious Herald devoted space in virtually every issue to revival. From army missionary A. Broaddus, readers learned of a “regimental revival” where “the chapel has been well filled and frequently crowded.” Soon other reports detailed “Revival in Wilcox Brigade” and “Revival in Mahone’s Brigade.”11 From Tennessee, readers of the Southern Churchman learned of “immense congregations assembled to hear the word ... and many sinners led to cry for mercy; a chaplain informed me that 1,000 men in his division had professed the faith.”12

  Emphasis on the heart did not mean that the “Christian manliness” of Stonewall Jackson declined, only that it became romanticized. Calls for blood revenge continued to sound in the religious no less than the secular press. In a column on “The Voice of Southern Blood,” one writer for the Religious Herald assured his hearers that “in good season, He will speak for [the innocent dead].... When He speaks, He will avenge it.... [Let us] wait remembering that ‘the righteousness of God’ has said, ‘Vengeance is mine—I will repay!’”13 Of course, the “I” in this affirmation was also the army, sacralized to the task of a redeemer nation.