Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Why did they hold on to its justness? I can only conclude that they supported the rightness of the war because at some profound level they believed in Lincoln’s characterization of America as the world’s last best hope. And, further, I can only conclude that for reasons Americans don’t deserve or understand, we are.

  The greatest guarantor of America’s claim to global hope as it emerged in the Civil War was surely abolition. Throughout this book I have counterweighted abolition with the tragic perpetuation of racism in American society. But that in no measure diminishes the enormity of the achievement. Indeed, abolition represented the indispensable prelude to equal civil rights, however long that might take to achieve.

  In claiming America as the world’s last best hope, I certainly do not have in mind particular battles or wars fought in the name of patriotism. There is no lack of such conflicts that were (and are) demonstrably unjust and immoral. Many American wars of conquest and imperialism merely confirm the impalpable truth that because we are the world’s last best hope, we are for the same reason the world’s greatest threat.1 Nor do I have in mind some sort of divine Providence that made America the world’s last best hope by divine fiat—and, by extension, made America a “Christian nation.” Finally, I do not claim that America is the world’s last best hope because of emancipation, noble as that end was. While the end of sanctioned slavery was undoubtedly the greatest good to come from the war, it did not mean that the North was all right and the South was all wrong, as Lincoln so eloquently proclaimed in his Second Inaugural Address. There was plenty of guilt to go around on both sides, reflected both in the North’s slave-trade profiteering in the past and in the ongoing tragedy of racism and the politics of white supremacy in the present.

  People make nations. And the American people, for reasons of culture and environment, created a unique experiment. In the end, they just could not stay apart. Bernard Bailyn correctly argued for the ideological origins of the Revolution.2 Underlying the Civil War, no less than the American Revolution, was a people’s idea: the idea of popular sovereignty. This idea found its resolution, for the most part, in the Civil War, as the North and the South contested to see whose interpretation would prevail. We are and were and forever will be a people of ideas and a nation where people’s ideas count. The outcome of the Civil War ensured that America would remain an idea, first and foremost, and lying at the heart of that idea would be “We the people.”

  From the start, the meaning of “We the people” was contested. The Constitution itself was a compromise reflecting that contest, and slavery was public exhibit number one. In the Civil War, soldiers on both sides self-consciously fought for freedom, even as they differed morally on the definitions and applications of that “freedom.” Ideas. Ideas to die for. Ideas to kill for. This was the innermost meaning of the Civil War, no less than of the American Revolution.

  As an idea, America was uniquely situated to assume a sacred identity as a chosen nation. An American civil religion incarnated in the war has continued to sacralize for its citizens the idea of American freedom. In fact, for many it enjoys more powerful sway over their lives than the sometimes competing, sometimes conflicting ideas of supernatural religion contained in our nation’s many denominations.

  For the Civil War to achieve its messianic destiny and inculcate an ongoing civil religion, it required a blood sacrifice that appeared total. While the term “baptism in blood” did not originate in the Civil War, it enjoyed a prominence in the war rhetoric of both the Union and the Confederacy that had no precedent. Speakers and readers came to accept the term literally as the lists of war dead continued to lengthen and civilians watched their lives and properties being destroyed by invading armies. The Civil War was indeed the crimson baptism of our nationalism, and so it continues to enjoy a mythic transcendence not unlike the significance of the Eucharist for Christian believers. For the unbeliever, both blood sacrifices seem irrational. But for the true believer, blood saved. Just as Christians believe that “without the shedding of blood there can be no remission for sins,” so Americans in the North and the South came to believe that their bloodletting contained a profound religious meaning for their collective life as nations.

  The incarnation of a national American civil religion may have been the final great legacy of the Civil War. How could a people of such diversity, who had more than adequately demonstrated their capacity to live at war, possibly come together in peace without some functioning civil religion? And how does any real religion come into being without the shedding of blood?

  Having said all this, I must add that in the process of writing this book it has become irrefutably clear to me that some moral judgments need to be made, judgments that most Americans have been reluctant to make. We have preferred a violent but glamorized and romantic Civil War.3 Military histories have focused on strategies and tactics and the sheer drama of battles in action. Political histories have focused—especially in the present—on slavery and emancipation, accounting the evil so complete and pervasive as to justify even murder. In this sense, Lincoln’s war strategy was and remains genius. That does not make it right.

  All too often the moral calculus perfected in the Civil War has been applied to other wars, often in cases involving nothing as noble as abolition. By condoning the logic of total war in the name of abolition—and victory—Americans effectively guaranteed that other atrocities in other wars could likewise be excused in the name of “military necessity.” While Lincoln passed tragically from the American scene, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan remained to carry the new moral logic forward. When Grant became president and commander in chief, his general of the army was William Tecumseh Sherman, and the commander of the Department of the Missouri was Philip Sheridan, supported by George Custer. Together they would pursue wars of extermination in the Indian campaigns of 1868 to 1883, employing the same calculus their commander in chief, Lincoln, had approved in the Civil War.4 Just as Sheridan wreaked vengeance in the Shenandoah Valley, so he would wreak vengeance on American Indians—and with the same moral justification.

  Knowing that the western Indians could roam and attack freely over the warm-weather months, when separated from their wives and children, Sheridan began attacking the Indians in their winter camps. The braves would have to remain to protect the women and children or see them killed before their eyes. Another tactic Sheridan used, one already tried and proved in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of the Civil War, was starvation. By destroying winter foodstuffs (and later exterminating buffalo), Sheridan forced the Indians to flee through the brutal winter cold and snow, where most died of starvation or froze to death.

  The system of total war employed in the West aimed at subjugating entire races of people. Incredibly, as he did with Confederate women and children during the Civil War, Sheridan defined the Indians as the “aggressors” deserving destruction. In a letter to Sherman in 1873, Sheridan drew on their Civil War experiences as justification for the Indian wars:In taking the offensive, I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends; and, if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack. During the [Civil] war did any one hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women or children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?

  General Sherman agreed. In response to the Fetterman massacre of December 21, 1866, Sherman had dictated: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”5 If Sherman did not literally intend extermination, the rhetoric certainly succeeded in bringing terror to the life of every Indian—man, woman, and child.

  Americans don’t want to concede the unforgivable wrongs committed by the likes of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Lee, Forrest, Early, and Davis. Individual acts of immorality occur in all wars. But armies are hierarchies, and
responsibility ultimately resides at the top. The web of lies, suppression, and evasion that developed in the Civil War not only shock but also bear witness to the power of war to corrupt—especially at the top. Predictably, as the war continued, the abuses grew ever greater. These were not a rational “measured response” to essentially political challenges, as justifiers of the carnage would like to believe. Rather, the abuses reflected a feeding frenzy of blood for blood’s sake. Nobody significant on either side was ever held to account. Privates may have been executed for rape, but no commanding officer was ever executed for creating the orders and culture in which rape could easily take place. No commanding officer that we know of ordered the death of prisoners of war. But by creating a war with no thought for prisons and prisoners and by refusing all attempts at exchange and amelioration, they again created the environment in which unimaginable suffering and death took place.

  Why is it important to finally write the moral history of the Civil War? It’s important because we are its legates, and if we question nothing from that costly conflict, then we need question nothing in conflicts of the present and future. Issues of discrimination and proportionality recur in every war. The Civil War does not provide an especially encouraging model in this regard, especially if the crimes go largely unnoticed beneath the natural urge to forget and move on. But as with the Holocaust, if we forget, we do so at great peril to our own humanity.

  Judging the Civil War is not a brief for pacifism. Rather, it is an endorsement of the idea of a just war. There are no ideal wars. Peace is the only ideal, and every war is at some level a perversion of it. In a less than ideal world, however, in which we sometimes labor under a moral imperative to war, we cannot afford to do less than demand a just war and a merciful outcome.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The idea for this book first took shape during a conversation with my friend and colleague John Demos in the early 1990s. We talked about new research projects and I mentioned long-standing interests in American religious history, and newly emerging interests in the Civil War as the “fulcrum” of American history. I told him that I did not want to write a “religious history” of the war that focused exclusively on chaplains and ministers, though their words would certainly be important. Nor did I want to write an exclusively military history of the war, though battles too would be central. After listening for a little longer he replied, “Well, it sounds to me like you’re interested in writing a moral history of the Civil War.”

  “A moral history of the Civil War.” I now possessed a title in search of a book. Twelve years and many turns in the road later, I completed the book and “rewarded” John with the first look. Despite the rigorous demands on his own writing schedule, he read the manuscript carefully and offered critical advice and encouragement. Obviously I remain solely responsible for the arguments (and mistakes) in this book, but without that guiding title, I doubt I would have ever undertaken the project.

  Two other early readers slogged through rough drafts of chapters and, in the process, gave friendship and collegiality new meaning. They are Grant Wacker of Duke University Divinity School and Robert Bonner of Michigan State.

  While I would not—could not—write a technically sophisticated military history of the Civil War, it increasingly became clear to me that the battles had to represent the spine of the narrative. In writing my way through the war, I have depended heavily on the multivolume classics by Allan Nevins, Bruce Catton, and Shelby Foote. James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom combined all of those chroniclers’ verve and style with a social historian’s eye for political and economic context that renders his history one for the ages. My footnotes only begin to express how much I have relied on that book, and his other writings on slavery and the Civil War.

  Research libraries are every scholar’s home away from home. Three have been especially essential to this book. First and foremost, I owe a debt of gratitude to Yale University, whose unrivaled libraries and generous sabbaticals supplied the time needed to engage in the systematic research and writing required to complete this project. A special thanks to Nancy Godleski for introducing me to electronic resources on the Civil War that I never knew existed.

  Two research archives deserve special thanks for their long-term support. First, on this project, as with every other book I have written, the American Antiquarian Society has stood in a league of its own. For resources and collegial support I cannot imagine a better environment. In particular, I wish to thank Nancy Burkett, Joanne Chaison, Maria Lamoreux, Thomas Knoles, Georgia B. Barnhill, John Hench, and the Director, Ellen Dunlap. Second, I wish to acknowledge the Presbyterian Historical Society and its staff in Philadelphia for providing access to their superb newspaper collections. A special word of thanks goes to Frederick Heuser, Kenneth J. Ross, and Boyd Reese.

  For fellowship awards that funded research assistants and travel monies I am indebted to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ senior scholar’s awards, administered by Joel Carpenter; to Yale University, especially Susan Hockfield and Barbara Shailor; and to the Association of Theological Schools’ Lilly Faculty Fellowship program.

  To cover a subject as broad as this it is necessary to visit archival collections throughout the country. Invariably I found the staffs of these libraries and historical societies eager to render assistance on everything from bibliography to local restaurants. In no particular order I wish to thank: the Huntington Library and Art Gallery; the Louisiana State University Archives; the Baptist Historical Society at the University of Richmond; Emory University; the John Hay Library at Brown University; the Robert E. Speer Library at Princeton Theological Seminary; the Newberry Library; Tulane University Archives; the University of Notre Dame; the New York Public Library; the Chicago Historical Society; the Georgia Historical Society; the University of Texas Barker Center for American History; the University of North Carolina Southern Collection; Duke University’s Perkin Library; the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee; the Disciples of Christ Archives, Nashville; Vanderbilt Divinity School; the Confederate Museum in Richmond; the Virginia Historical Society; the South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston; the South Caroliniana Library, Columbia; the William Smith Morton Library at Union Theological Seminary of Virginia; the Alabama Department of Archives and History; and the Library of Congress.

  Friends and family helped with penetrating questions and warm accommodations on frequent and far-flung research trips. I especially thank Laura Mitchel Lauretan in Washington, D.C.; Debbie and Scott Robinson in Richmond, Virginia; Douglas Sweeney, then a graduate assistant at Vanderbilt Divinity School; and James Early in Charleston, South Carolina. Closer to home, Susan Stout offered unstinting encouragement—and friendly prodding—to “get back to the book,” and I will be forever in her debt. My children, Deborah and James, have always encouraged my work, but in this case they also worked multiple summers Xeroxing sermons and newspapers, cataloguing books, and compiling bibliographies. In every sense of the term they were research assistants and I thank them.

  From my first arrival at Yale twenty years ago, my colleagues in history and religious studies have been a scholar’s dream come true. They are also wonderful friends who took time from their own busy schedules to read my manuscript in its entirety. I especially thank David Blight, Jon Butler, Johnny Mack Faragher, Glenda Gilmore, Kenneth Minkema, Gene Outka, and the aforementioned John Demos. Towards the end of the project, Sarah Hammond took time away from graduate work to offer insightful assistance with text editing and fact checking.

  Outside of Yale, another group of old and new friends also read the completed manuscript, saving me from many errors. I am pleased to acknowledge James F. Cooper Jr., Allen Guelzo, James Block, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, John Boles, Bernard Lytton, and Christopher Grasso.

  For expert editorial assistance and guidance on the organization and layout of the manuscript I owe a special debt to Deborah H. DeFord. Deborah also offered expert guidance on the book’s illu
strations and maps. The maps were prepared ably by Adrian Kitzinger. My agent, Andrew Wylie, has proved to be a vigorous promoter of my book and a careful reader. The staff at Viking Penguin, in particular my unfailingly wise editor, Wendy Wolf, and her assistant, Clifford Corcoran, have offered superb assistance every step of the way.

  Several institutions offered me opportunities to present my work in progress, and the exchanges that took place on those occasions invariably clarified my thinking. I want to thank the departments of history and religion at the following universities: Duke University, the Yale Center for the Study of Religion in American Life, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame, Calvin College, Union College in Tennessee, the University of Connecticut, Baylor University, Messiah College, St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, the University of Florida, Princeton University, and Arizona State University

  Some of the last reading of my father, Harry Stober Stout, consisted of the final chapters of my book, just coming to life as his was ebbing. I am profoundly grateful that he lived to read the first draft and offer his wise observations on war and the meaning of America from his experiences in the Pacific in World War II. Even as I looked back on the life and influence of my father in the writing of this book, I have looked forward to my grandchildren and the moral decisions their generation will be called upon to make. It is to both past and future that I dedicate this book.