Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era
288
Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era
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Overview
By examining Civil War-era Protestantism in terms of the Union, author Grant Brodrecht adds to the understanding of northern motivation and the eventual "failure" of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African American's equal place in society. Complementing recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, Our Country contends that non-radical Protestants consistently subordinated concern for racial justice for what they perceived to be the greater good. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather they expected to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogenous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause.
Brodrecht eloquently addresses this so-called “proprietary” regard for Christian America, considered within the context of crises surrounding the Union’s existence and its nature from the Civil War to the 1880s. Including sources from major Protestant denominations, the book rests on a selection of sermons, denominational newspapers and journals, autobiographies, archival personal papers of several individuals, and the published and unpublished papers of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. The author examines these sources as they address the period’s evangelical sense of responsibility for America, while keyed to issues of national and presidential politics.
Northern evangelicals’ love of the Union arguably contributed to its preservation and the slaves’ emancipation, but in subsuming the ex-slaves to their vision for Christian America, northern evangelicals contributed to a Reconstruction that failed to ensure the ex-slaves’ full freedom and equality as Americans.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823279913 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Series: | The North's Civil War |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"The Uprising of a Great People"
A Providential Union
Is such a government to die? Is its life and light to go out in blood? Forbid it, O my God!
— Henry A. Boardman, The War (2), April 28, 1861
Following the Civil War, former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens likened Abraham Lincoln to Caesar, the "destroyer of the liberties of Rome!" Lincoln's nationalist construction of the Constitution and his use of executive power to prosecute the war and end slavery suggested the comparison. Writing to Americans who likely knew the Bible better than they knew classical history, Stephens also compared Lincoln to Hazael, an obscure oppressor of ancient Israel. Either way — classically or biblically — Lincoln embodied tyranny, and Stephens contended that Lincoln's "irrational" devotion to the Union drove him to consolidate federal power at the expense of the states, to make emancipation a war aim, and to violate the civil liberties of thousands of political opponents during the war. "The Union with him, in sentiment," Stephens said of his former congressional colleague, "rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism." Regardless of the overall merit of Stephens's interpretation — Mark Neely, for instance, has referred to it as "the constitutional moralizing of sore losers" — Stephens was not wrong to emphasize Lincoln's religious-like devotion to the Union as crucial for understanding what transpired between 1861 and 1865. That devotion was particularly attuned to northern evangelical hearts and minds, and because his public words seemingly reflected their own understanding of the Union, Lincoln received their support throughout the war.
Even in early 1861, prior to his inauguration, evangelical resonances were apparent in Lincoln's speeches. "We are," he said to an Indiana gathering on his way to Washington in February 1861, "bound together, I trust[,] in christianity [sic], civilization and patriotism, and are attached to our country and our whole country. While some of us may differ in political opinions, still we are all united in one feeling for the Union." What "the salvation of this Union" needs, he said to another Indiana audience, is "but one single thing — the hearts of a people like yours" Alluding to Christ's remark to Saint Peter in Matthew 16:18, Lincoln continued, "When the people rise in masses in behalf of the Union and the liberties of their country, truly may it be said, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail against them.'" Given the importance of heartfelt, pious feeling and commitment to evangelicals, similar romantic utterances delivered during the war would only draw them closer to Lincoln while he acted to save the Union.
Although they, like Lincoln, did make actual arguments on behalf of a perpetual Union, their arguments often came infused with civic-religious sentiment and appeal. Henry Boardman provided emblematic expression of that just prior to South Carolina's December i860 secession. "The love of Union is too strong," he said, "to be suppressed when danger threatens. ... When [the Union] is imperiled, our fears and anxieties can no more be repressed, than could those of the Hebrews when the ark of the covenant was in jeopardy" With words that echoed beyond the war, he insisted, "We are one people, Our government is one. We are one in our achievements and traditions; one in our rights and interests. ... The Union is too sacred a trust to be sacrificed except upon the most imperative grounds." Though not insensitive to southerners' feelings of injustice and dishonor within that Union, Boardman did not believe that the controversy surrounding slavery's expansion, the return of fugitive slaves, and ultimately the election of a Republican president warranted secession. In contrast to growing southern defensiveness and regional self-consciousness during the 1850s, which southern evangelicals substantially reflected and to which they contributed, northern evangelicals were increasingly animated by a vision of the whole Union persisting as a distinctly Protestant republic.
Consequently, support for Lincoln flowed from that vision. Prior to Fort Sumter, he had enjoined northerners, "It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty," and evangelicals would do their part. Although many wanted peace to the last, once the shooting began they threw their support behind him and his efforts to save the Union. Cincinnati's Methodist pastor Granville Moody, who would become personally acquainted with Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, embodied that spirit by volunteering to lead the 74th Ohio Regiment; he was wounded three times during the war and being breveted to Brigadier General in 1865 for his gallantry at the 1862-63 Battle of Stones River. His colleague William P. Strickland recalled that Moody believed that crushing the rebellion was "the most sacred duty of every liberty-loving American citizen." Many northern evangelicals understood liberty in Whiggish-Republican terms, thus the Union was that exceptional place wherein striving individuals were politically, economically, and religiously free to make the most of life under God; this was Lincoln's meritocratic, free-labor America intermingled with evangelical Protestantism.
By 1861 the contrast between northern and southern understandings of liberty within the Union had become stark. Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the nineteenth century's most famous evangelical, made the sacred, free republic the centerpiece of his sermon two days after Fort Sumter. "God, through our fathers," he said, "committed to us certain [republican] institutions, and we will maintain them to the end of our lives, and to the end of time" It was "those institutions," Lincoln had earlier said, "which have made us free, intelligent and happy — the most free, the most intelligent and the happiest people on the globe." And thus, before it was anything else to northern evangelicals, the Civil War was a crisis of the Union's existence brought on by southerners in defense of a slave-based way of life that increasingly appeared to be incompatible with the highest ideals of the Protestant republic. Stunned by the attack on Fort Sumter, Boardman perceived it as treachery "laid open" The South actually sought "to destroy the Union."
To grasp the depth of northern evangelicals' devotion to that Union, and then in turn their support for Lincoln, their habituated, often unselfconscious covenantal approach to the republic must be kept in view. This was an integral aspect of their quest for a Christian America, and northern victory would ensure its influence through Reconstruction and beyond. Of course, southern evangelicals were devoted to the Confederate cause and struggled for its existence within a similar framework, though defeat would require them to comprehend and remember the war much differently than victory would enable northerners to do. Appropriated from the Old Testament and inflected by American experience since the seventeenth century, the covenantal disposition came in the form of a syllogism. The major premise maintained that God providentially dealt with all nations or peoples just as he dealt with individuals. Analogous to a father chastising a son, this meant that God would bless or curse in order to bring about increased faithfulness. Judgment in the form of national extinction was also possible, however, and when coupled with republican insecurity, such a potential often left northern evangelicals with a foreboding sense of the Union's fragility — particularly during a civil war. The crucial minor premise, though adhered to somewhat nervously in relation to the reality of older European nations, posited that Americans constituted an actual people. The necessary conclusion held that God was dealing particularly with them from 1861 to 1865, and this implied that they must respond with requisite gratitude, humility, and repentance in order to ensure the Union's survival. Furthermore, few northern evangelicals questioned whether a faithful response included a vigorous defense of the Union, for it was God's Union, and to do other than defend it militarily was a sure sign of ingratitude.
Whether held by radicals, moderates, or conservatives, the force of this syllogistic disposition transcended denominational lines and helped ensure that scores of northern evangelicals would intensely resist national disintegration. As a group of northern Baptists declared in May 1861, just prior to Tennessee becoming the final state to join the Confederacy, "We are threatened to be rent as a people" That Union "bought at Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and Yorktown, was not, without our consent, sold" when seceded states formed a confederacy. "We dispute the legality of the bargain" they resolved, "and in the strength of the Lord God of our fathers still hope to contest, through this generation, if need be, the feasibility of the transfer" Most northern evangelicals would contest the transfer.
Sharing Lincoln's "mystical Unionism" his public words often reflected the essence of their providential understanding of the Union and its obligation to God. Lincoln was someone far different than a tyrannical Caesar or Hazael; with the exception of some radical abolitionists, most notably George Cheever, a great number aligned themselves with the president in his defense of the Union. In accordance with their covenantal understanding, he was to them a heaven-sent defender and savior.
The Supremacy of Providence
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln looked back at the origin of the war with what are now well-known words. "Both parties deprecated war" he said, "but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came" The last sentence perhaps reveals his sense of the war having providentially overtaken the nation. One historian has suggested that Lincoln became "obsessive" in his struggle "to fathom the part that Providence [played] in the war" and one of Lincoln's evangelical contemporaries approvingly observed what some historians have stressed of late: "Nobody can understand [Lincoln] who does not regard [his] solemn sense of being an agent of God in a great work as the back-ground of his whole policy."
And Lincoln provided ample evidence for the plausibility of such a view. As president-elect, he publicly referred to himself as "a mere instrument, an accidental instrument" who might "serve but for a limited time"; on another occasion prior to his first inauguration, while expressing anxiety "that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated," he said, "I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people" At some point during the war Lincoln privately meditated on the probability that both sides in the war were unwittingly serving as God's "human instrumentalities" to accomplish "His purpose" In April 1864, Lincoln remarked to the Kentucky newspaperman Albert G. Hodges regarding the emergence of his emancipation policy: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it."
Perhaps above all, Lincoln's widely reprinted remarks given in February 1861, on the occasion of his leaving Springfield for Washington, set the tone for evangelicals' support over the next four years. What occurred on that occasion appears to have been a very evangelical moment. With great emotion and tears, Lincoln struggled to speak of the task before him, suggesting that it was a burden heavier than that "which devolved upon any other man since the days of Washington" Without the "the aid of Divine Providence," Lincoln offered, Washington would have failed, and "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same Divine aid which sustained him." According to New York Herald reporter Henry Villard, Lincoln's exhortation to the audience to pray "elicited choked exclamations of 'We will do it; we will do it.'" The presidency had come upon Lincoln just as a civil war was about to come upon the nation, and together Lincoln and the nation would struggle to understand the providential meaning of it all.
To George Peck, the war had "thrust itself upon our attention" He had expected that the Union would survive the secession crisis, and this was rooted in historical experience. He remembered the Missouri Compromise and had participated in the political wrangling and compromising that had taken place over the next forty years. He had been a delegate at every Methodist General Conference since 1824, and during the 1840s and 1850s he was intimately involved in Methodist debates over slavery. In those debates the moderate Peck strove to mediate between two uncompromising "ultraist" positions on slavery, and as editor of the denomination's official newspaper he hoped to maintain peace by restricting discussion of the slavery issue following the Compromise of 1850. Peck was consistently concerned for the persistence of the Union and the unity of the Methodist Church. Like many in the Whig-Republican political tradition, he tended to regard himself as essentially apolitical and therefore reserved his harshest criticism for those whom he perceived to be elevating the interests of party or section over the good of the whole. In describing the ideal American character, he alluded to the iconic Whig statesman Daniel Webster in saying that "no limited, local, sectional, partisan feeling should enter into the composition of his political character, or the formation of his political creed. [His] maxim should be: Our country, our whole country, one and inseparable" Despite decades-long anxiety over the fate of the Union, it had survived previous threats through compromise. It is understandable, then, that the war's beginning was "startling." Perhaps the sense of shock is lost on us, however, because the story of the Civil War and its meaning, as Ed Ayers has stressed, have become satisfactorily "self-evident"; or, although it may be true that the Civil War "never goes away," to borrow James McPherson's memorable phrase, perhaps that never going away is akin to background noise.
Being overly familiar and maybe even satisfied with the story and its meaning to us, we take little notice of the existential impact of the war's actual arrival on the people who could not know with clarity what the future held — even for those believers in a God who controlled all mundane events. Eliza Gilmore, the evangelical mother of the future head of the Freedman's Bureau, Oliver Otis Howard, remarked that she could not entertain the possibility of a permanently divided country and thus looked for the providential coming of another great Whig statesman, a second Henry Clay, to stave off war and restore the Union. When the war did begin, a writer in Princeton's staid Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review recalled the feeling as "impossible to describe — there is nothing like it in history" The sounds from Fort Sumter could be heard "through the telegraphic wire, with strange thrills, by every man and woman and child. The nation awoke, as in a moment, to the conviction that ... its very existence [was] in peril" The war's coming meant the possibility of disunion, that which so many northerners dreaded and many doubted would occur. Whereas abolitionists like Frederick Douglass prophetically saw the beginning of slavery's demise during the secession winter and said, "Let the conflict come, and God speed the right," others disbelieved and dreaded God's permission of war. Eliza Gilmore said she "never expected to live to see such a state of affairs as this, [and] I think it calls upon every Christian to seek to know the most sure spiritual manner the Sovereign God can be approach'd and to supplicate his divine assistance in our Country's behalf."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: “Long Live the Glorious Union”1. “The Uprising of a Great People”: A Providential Union
2. 1864: Annus Mirabilis
3. “The Harvest of Death Is Complete”: Imagined Unity
4. From Moses to Joshua
5. The Union Saved Again
6. Pax Grantis: The Great Protestant Republic
Conclusion: “The Nation Still in Danger”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index