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

slavery—even if not exactly the Southern form of it—was indeed sanctioned by the Bible, and they found themselves driven to the unlikely expedient of arguing, not from the letter of the Bible but from its much more intangible spirit—a tactic that set them uncomfortably close to the Romantics.88

No matter what their interpretations of the war, religious as well as secular intellectuals of every stripe set out to institutionalize these meanings. Secular intellectuals, so far as they could be teased out of their studies, and Romantic Protestants banded together to create the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) in 1861, with the mission of raising and channeling private donations and large-scale giving to the support of the Union army. The USSC was, from the start, an exercise in benevolent elitism. Just as its leaders had no faith in the abstract rationalism of democracy, they had no practical use for unorganized charity, and they struggled throughout the war to redirect clothing, blankets, camp goods, food, and even pen and ink through their own intelligent and efficient hands. “Neither the blind masses, the swinish multitudes, that rule us under our accursed system of universal suffrage, nor the case of typhoid can be expected to exercise self-control,” growled George Templeton Strong, the USSC’s treasurer; if good was to be done for the soldier, better that it be done by the elite, who really knew how to organize their efforts. Thus, Strong and the USSC’s upper-class New York and Boston officers struggled to turn the USSC into the model of what a properly administered nation ought to look like.89

Beside the USSC, and often in conflict with it, the evangelicals organized the United States Christian Commission (USCC), which sent 5,000 volunteers into the Union armies to distribute tracts, hold religious meetings and in general do for the Northern soldier’s soul what the USSC aimed to do for the Northern soldier’s body. Evangelical chaplains, with or without the cooperation of their fellow officers, sponsored revival meetings in both armies. As early as 1862, large-scale “conversion seasons” swept through both Union and Confederate troops: the Army of the Cumberland and the Army of Northern Virginia both experienced large-scale revivals of religion during the winter and spring of 1864. Not content with converting soldiers, Northern evangelicals organized the National Reform Association in 1863 to press for the passage of a “Bible Amendment” that would explicitly unite evangelical Protestantism and republicanism by rewriting the preamble to the Constitution to read: “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government. …”90

None of America’s religious leaders was prepared for the depth or the severity of the wounds that Civil War combat and the disruption of civil society inflicted on these attempts to give meaning to the war. Northern evangelicals who had so confidently expected the war to light up the path to the millennium were cruelly disappointed by profiteering and corruption. The uncertain notes on which the war ended looked like anything but a preparation for the return of Jesus Christ to earth. Charles Grandison Finney, who had been smiting slavery with great revivalistic blows for thirty years, warned his Oberlin College students in 1863 that although “the south must be reformed or annihilated,” still “the north are not yet just. … The colored man is still denied his equal rights” and “is most intensely hated & persecuted by a majority.” It saddened and angered Finney that after two years of war, “in no publick proclamation either north or south is our great national sin recognized.”91

No one, however, lost more confidence in religious interpretations of the war than the ordinary soldier. The general disappearance of moral restraint among Civil War soldiers mocked the efforts of chaplains and USCC volunteers, at all but the most exceptional moments, to force the war into Christian shape. “It is hard, very hard for one to retain his religious sentiments and feelings in this Soldier life,” admitted one New Jersey surgeon. “Every thing seems to tend in a different direction. There seems to be no thought of God of their souls, etc. among the soldiers.” Even more than ordinary camp immorality, it was the shock of Civil War combat and the apparent randomness of death on the battlefield that wrecked peacetime faith in an all-knowing, all-loving God. An Illinois surgeon named John Hostetter remarked, “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, unchristian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.” The chaplains talked in vain to Edward King Wightman about divine purpose and meaning in the war: “A minister and a soldier are antipodes in sentiment. The one preaches ‘election’ and the other fatalism.” Even the lay preacher and future president James A. Garfield told William Dean Howells after the war that at the sight of “dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”92

Although American Protestants had been confident at the beginning of the war that they would be able to interpret the war in ways that their secular counterparts could not, the war itself proved otherwise, and American religion instead became one of the Civil War’s major cultural casualties. Never again would evangelical Christianity so dominate the public life of the nation or come so close to wedding its religious ethos to American democracy. From the 1860s onward, American Protestantism was increasingly marked by the quiet erosion of faith, and religious experience became plagued more and more by incessant questioning, by decaying faith, and an increasing appeal to feeling and imagination over against confessional reason or evangelical conversion. “Perhaps people always think so in their own day, but it seems to me there never was a time when all things