Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

and morality of the Bible.” Hence, “all free society must reject the Bible if it approve its own institutions and disapprove slavery.” Southerners should be free to add to whatever catalog of cultural distinctiveness they could assemble a distinctive “morals and religion,” and expect a divine blessing “in this great struggle” where (as Benjamin Palmer put it) “we defend the cause of God and religion. …” The burden of that cause, Palmer explained, is “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing… with the right, unchanged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.”82

In practice, however, the South’s self-image as a God-blessed people proved to be surprisingly shallow. In nine Southern states, clergymen were actually forbidden to hold public office; even James Henley Thornwell accepted the drawing of a bright line between religion and public life in the South, commenting, “The business of a preacher, as such, is to expound the Word of God” and not to “expound to senators the Constitution of the State, nor to interpret for judges the laws of the land.” As it was, many of slavery’s most vigorous defenders displayed little in the way of religiosity. James Henry Hammond scoffed privately at Christianity as the religion of “an infuriated Demon, seeking whom he may destroy. … The result of my experience of Life and Him is that I pant for Annihilation.” And “Stonewall” Jackson, that paragon of martial piety, had a very poor estimate of Southern religion. “I am afraid that our people are looking to the wrong source for help, and ascribing our successes to those whom they are not due,” Jackson complained. “If we fail to trust in God & to give him all the glory our cause is ruined. Give to our friends at home due warning on this subject.” However much the Southern Confederacy liked to speak of itself as a divine cause, so little provision had been made for chaplains’ services in the Army of Northern Virginia that fully half of the regiments in Jackson’s corps in the spring of 1863 were without one.83

When, by 1864, defeat was looking the Confederacy in the eyes, the arms of the pious dropped nervelessly to their sides, and they concluded that God was deserting them, if not because of his opposition to slavery, then as a consequence of Southern unbelief. “God’s dark providence enwraps me like a pall,” agonized Moses Drury Hoge, one of the most prominent Presbyterian divines in Virginia, “The idolized expectation of a separate nationality, of a social life and literature and civilization of our own, together with a gospel guarded against the contamination of New England infidelity, all this has perished, and I feel like a shipwrecked mariner thrown up like a seaweed on a desert shore.” God had judged the Confederacy. He had taken from them the devout “Stonewall” Jackson as a warning, and when the warning went unheeded, he struck the Confederate cause into the dust. It was “their want of faith” that was the “crying sin of the people of God throughout our beleaguered, devastated, and bleeding country,” and now they had paid for it. “Can we believe in the justice of Providence,” lamented Josiah Gorgas, “or must we conclude we are after all wrong?”84

Southern theologians were not the only ones to find disappointment in trying to turn the war into an intellectual struggle. As the war lengthened, the meanings that Northern religious thinkers attached to the war also splintered in frustration. The Transcendentalists were secular thinkers; but they had their religious counterpart in Horace Bushnell, a Congregationalist minister in Hartford, Connecticut, who had carved out a reputation by horrifying more orthodox Congregationalists with his admiration for a Kantian religion of intuition and feelings. He also had a consistently Romantic disdain for the pushing and striving of democracy. Like George Templeton Strong but very much unlike Abraham Lincoln, Bushnell was convinced that the war had only shown how little popular government was to be trusted, and in 1864 he interpreted “the true meaning of the present awful chapter of our history” as proof that “popular governments, or such as draw their magistracies by election from among the people themselves,” were inferior to the national character to be found in historic communities based on race, religion, or tradition.85

It was among the evangelicals that the meaning of the Civil War took on its most dramatic and apocalyptic colorings. American evangelical Protestants had largely chosen the Whigs as their party of choice, and when the Whigs failed to adopt wholeheartedly the moral crusades of the evangelicals, the withdrawal of Northern evangelicals helped destroy the Whig Party and lay the basis for the rise of the Republicans. With the coming of the war, Northern evangelicals swung enthusiastically behind the causes of the Union and anti-slavery. The great Presbyterian preacher and commentator Albert Barnes (who had opened the 1856 Republican convention with prayer) declared two weeks after Fort Sumter that the war would “render the world the abode of industrious freedom, peace, domestic joy, and virtuous intelligence.”86The American Tract Society’s agent Hollis Read went a step further and prophesied in The Coming Crisis of the World, or the Great Battle and the Golden Age (1861) that the Civil War would be the prelude to the return of Jesus and the onset of the millennium; it would be “one of the last mighty strides of Providence towards the goal of humanity’s final and high destiny.”

A few more such strides, a few more such terrific struggles and travail-pains among the nations; a few more such convulsions and revolutions, that shall break to pieces and destroy what remains of the inveterate and time-honored systems and confederations of sin and Satan, and the friends of freedom may then lift up their heads and rejoice, for their redemption draweth nigh. The Day Of Vengeance Has Always Preceded And Been preparatory to the Year of the Redeemed.87

Yet Northern evangelicals could not escape the uneasy sense that