September 15, 1864---The Old Rugged Cross

SEPTEMBER 15, 1864:

Religion played a critical role in the Civil War. To a certain extent, religion was one of the core of the causes of the war, and to that same extent, religion lay at the heart of the resolution of the war.

I

The Northern and Southern religious experience during the war was rather different. Since the passing of the generation of The Founders, most of whom were avowed Deists,  religion did and has continued to play a strong part in American life.  

By 1826, with the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, the secularism that underlies the founding documents had become increasingly unpopular. The growth of religious faith paved the way for The Second Great Awakening, an upwelling of Protestant religious fervor that saw the establishment of many new Christian sects, including some utopian and messianic ones, almost exclusively in the North.  The “Burned-Over District” of western New York State gave rise to Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, and other new churches.

The Second Great Awakening was marked by outdoor mass meetings and tent "revivals"

Many of the churches founded during the Second Great Awakening were dedicated to Temperance (which targeted the tavern culture of German and Irish immigrants) and linked these churches to the nativist movement. Nativists (mostly Anglo-Protestant) were opposed to immigration (particularly of Catholics from Germany and Ireland).  The utopians and messianists were broadly dedicated to “civilizing” the Indians and black slaves. 

Abolitionism was also in its origins a religious movement. Men like Charles Finney, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Henry Ward Beecher, Owen Lovejoy, and his brother, Elijah P, Lovejoy, who was killed by a pro-slavery mob, were all Protestant preachers. 

The fervor of the Second Great Awakening had subsided somewhat during the 1840s as Sectionalism began to emerge as dominant in the American psyche. Protestantism, in fact, suffered its own Great Schism in the 1850s as the Baptist Church and other nationally-organized churches split into “Southern” and “Northern” wings. The teachings of the sectional wings became increasingly divergent.

II

Religion strengthened the Northern cause. By the time of the Civil War, the diverse North was the home of Protestants of many sects (who made up the majority), a significant number of Catholics, and a smaller but growing number of Jews. A few Chinese Buddhists lived in the far west.

For many churchgoers the Northern cause was marked by a Manichaean worldview in which the Union represented the forces of Good and the Confederacy represented the forces of Evil

This relative religious diversity created an unusual dichotomy in the North. Christian organizations and leaders frequently led the way in establishing wartime social services and aid organizations (like the United States Sanitary Commission) but were obligated to offer their services to all soldiers and their families regardless of sect. Thus, overtly sectarian religious overtones among such groups were often muted. Ecumenism was promoted. 

Spiritualist movements, including mediums and seers who claimed to be able to speak with the dear departed, became endemic in the North, especially after the bloodbaths at Antietam and Fredericksburg. 

Religion in the North was a far more “public” phenomenon than in the South. Although the North officially held to the aims of the Founders, keeping a bright dividing line between church and state, the North, somewhat counterintuitively, effectively created for itself an ad hoc secular religion based on American exceptionalism. 

The Founders had stated clearly that America is not a Christian nation: 

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen —and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. --- Treaty of Tripoli, 1797

 

John Adams had taken his Oath of Office as President on a law book rather than on the Bible, underscoring the nation’s separation of church and state. 

Yet, the North freely used the idioms of Biblical religion to advance its war aims. Abolitionists pointed to the punishment of Egypt during the Exodus as a reminder of God’s dislike of the cruelties of slavery. Anti-secessionists divined in the division of Solomon’s Kingdom into Israel and Judah a parable for their own times, highlighting the fact that Israel, which had strayed from the true faith, was ultimately destroyed. 

The popular Northern tune, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” not only invoked religion in its very title, but also in its words:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword

His truth is marching on

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free

Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on

 

American exceptionalism found its roots in the religion of the Puritans, who believed that they were founding a “new Israel,” “a city on the hill,” and a “new Jerusalem” in America. All Americans inherently agreed. Despite the avowed secularism of America, the words of the Liberty Bell are the words of Leviticus, and they are the words that stirred hearts in the battle against the “oligarchs” and “slaveholders” who most Northerners believed controlled the South: 

"Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."  

The Union therefore, was predisposed from the outset to make of the Civil War a crusade, and a moral and ethical contest.  Northern churches pressed the point that the Union had to be preserved because America, with its republican institutions and democratic ideals, ensured civilization's forward march. The loss of the war meant the loss of America and the failure of representative democracy in the world. Thus, in the North there was a millennial, almost Manichaean, aspect to the war. 

Although most Northerners were not abolitionists at the outset of the war, abolitionism was an organic growth and a necessary outgrowth of the religious millennarianism espoused by most churches. The United States was not merely fighting a war, even for the noble purposes of democracy. Its fighting men were liberators of the oppressed, a concept which has informed the United States military, and U.S. foreign policy, to this day.  

The Union military grasped early on, as the Confederate military never did, that religion could be used broadly in an organized fashion to bolster the war effort. Southerners attended mass revival meetings set up by itinerant preachers visiting their encampments. There were plenty of such whoop-and-holler-type camp meetings in the North too, but the Union military preferred that its men attend the regularly scheduled services provided by Union chaplains. 

In the carefully-orchestrated world of Union religious meetings battlefield losses were not cast as a withdrawal of divine favor but as the natural result of straying from the divine purpose.  Missionaries were allowed among the ranks, but the materials they distributed had to be approved. Materials which were deemed destructive to morale were forbidden. Bibles and pamphlets were the usual fare handed out to soldiers. The pamphlets tended to inveigle against drinking, gambling, and fornication. (The story is told of one hospitalized Union soldier, a dual lower amputee, who burst into laughter at a kind missionary woman who gave him a pamphlet on the evils of dancing.) 

President Lincoln himself was sometimes called “Father Abraham” by Administration-friendly Northerners, and this name had been incorporated into a popular recruitment song: 

“We are coming Father Abraham, 300,000 more . . .”

If anyone during the Civil War, North and South, routinely embodied the cadences of the Bible in his public pronouncements, it was President Lincoln, who, despite belonging to no church, frequently used the language of religion in the most unique and poetical manner, to promote Union aims: 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  --- Mark 3:25,  Lincoln June 16, 1858. 

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.” --- The Second Inaugural, 1864, quoting Jesus, Matthew 7:1 

“The nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom” --- The Gettysburg Address, 1863 (A.P., Hale) 

After the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the emancipated slaves often referred to Lincoln as “Moses,” the same name they had given to the great conductor of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman. 

At war’s end, Lincoln’s tragic, shocking death became a symbolic sacrifice for the nation’s vast bloodletting, secularly akin to the Crucifixion.

III

Religion among the black population served several mutually antagonistic purposes. Most African-Americans were descended from peoples that had either been Muslim or animist. Their native faiths had been taken from them like everything else when they were enchained. A few elders remembered fragments of folk tales and knowledge handed down through the generations. Overwhelmingly, however, slaves had been forced to adopt the Christianity (and occasionally the Judaism) of their owners.

 

Whites controlled, albeit imperfectly, the slaves’ access to religion. In all Southern States (except Tennessee) it was a serious violation of the law to educate a slave or to allow a slave to be literate. Regardless, some slavemasters permitted Bible study or even taught a handful of slaves to read so that they could spread the Gospel among their people. Others led the formal services themselves. The emphasis of “Master-approved” Christianity was on teaching obedience and humility to slaves, with the promise of heavenly paradise if they kept to their “place.” 

One way or another, a different form of Christianity spread through the slave cabins of the South, a form practiced quietly and hidden from the people in the Big House. Black religion, when practiced beyond the sight and hearing of whites, was a Liberation Theology, focusing strongly on the lessons in the Book of Exodus. Religion was offered for comfort, but it was also a form of civil resistance. Gospel music and Black Spiritual music focused and focuses almost entirely on the acquisition of freedom, both temporal and metaphysical, and served, during Emancipation, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and all times in between, as a clarion call: 

“Go down Moses . . . Way down to Egypt land . . . and tell old Pharaoh . . . Let My people go!” 

“We shall overcome someday!” 

“Free at last, free at last . . . Thank God almighty . . . I am free at last!”

Freeborn blacks, freedmen, and escaped slaves often became religious leaders in the black community. The use of Biblical idiom was perhaps greater among African-Americans than among any other group well into the 20^th Century.

IV

Religion ultimately weakened the Southern cause. The South was much less religiously diverse than the North. It too had a Catholic population (much smaller than in the North and generally not made up of new immigrants), and a tiny number of Jews (often small businessmen) who lived in the cities. Protestantism, and overwhelmingly the Baptist Church, was completely dominant within the culture. 

When the South seceded, many of its leaders proclaimed that their intention was to establish a uniquely Christian, and hence exclusivist, nation. This was far different than the vision of the Founders they claimed to follow. 

Indeed, the Confederates called upon “Almighty God” in their new Constitution, and Southern leaders claimed to be the “chosen people” of a new age: 

“[We] recognize our dependence upon God … [and] supplicate his merciful protection.” --- President Jefferson Davis, 1861 

Confederate victories were seen as manifestations of God’s grace toward the South:

God has given us of the South today a fresh and golden opportunity—and so a most solemn command—to realize that form of government in which the just, constitutional rights of each and all are guaranteed to each and all. … He has placed us in the front rank of the most marked epochs of the world’s history. He has placed in our hands a commission which we can faithfully execute only by holy, individual self-consecration to all of God’s plans. --- Rev. William C. Butler, on the victory of First Manassas, July 21, 1861 

Although Fundamentalist religiosity has a distinctive Southern flavor in the 21^st Century, in the 19^th Century almost all religious fundamentalism in the United States was Northern as was sectarian diversity. Church attendance in the South had been declining in the 1850s, while it was rising in the North.  Southerners were known for a more easygoing and tolerant brand of religion. (In 1860, only 40% of Southerners claimed membership in a congregation, though 80% admitted going to church “periodically.”) 

In truth, the religious fervor that many people associate with the South was and is a product of the Civil War. Christianity was one of the elements that bound (almost) all Southerners together. It acted as a homogenizing force even as secessionism cut away, violently, a critical element of the Southern national identity as citizens of the United States. Religion became one of the pillars around which Southerners could express their sectional brand of Americanism.  The cross, in several forms, became a central military symbol of  the Confederacy.

The impressive rise of Southern religious consciousness during the war was aided by the seemingly-endless string of Confederate victories in 1861 and 1862. McClellan’s embarrassing withdrawal from the gates of Richmond was presented in the churches as “evidence” of God’s favor. 

Religious figures took advantage of the mass gathering of men into military camps and moved among them seeking converts. Revivals swept the ranks. Men, horrified by what they had seen on the battlefield, accepted Christ as their personal savior by the tens of thousands. The Confederacy never had even an informal policy of coopting religion for promoting its war aims, although individuals like General Leonidas Polk, “The Fighting Bishop” imbued the war with religious meaning. 

On the whole, religious expression in the South was a more “private” matter than in the North. It was also far more sectarian.

 

Military heroes, such as Stonewall Jackson, were honored not only for their military skill but for their faith in God. “Old Blue Light” was exceptional in this respect, even thanking God for the gift of so many dead enemies; most Southern military men, like Robert E. Lee, were far less extreme, praying for peace --- through Southern victory, of course. 

On the home front, churches became central meeting places for war news, for comfort, and for solace, among the women and youngsters left behind. Religion became the especial province of women, who resisted Yankee invaders while carrying the old family Bible in one hand and grandpa’s old musket in the other. 

Religion became ever more central to the Southern identity as the momentum of the war shifted in the North’s favor. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, though essentially secular, had an inordinate impact on how Southerners perceived themselves.  There was no Southern leader who could enunciate the aims of the Southern cause with such lyrical ability and power. As the South declined, many southerners began to see themselves as being on the “wrong” side of history. 

Southern preachers began to speak of the withdrawal of God’s grace, of the sins of the South (among which were whiskey, women, and, later, slavery). Preachers were among the earliest Confederates to call for an end to slavery, seeing in it the reason for God’s displeasure with the South. The war was recast by many Confederate religious leaders as a “refining fire” through which all Southerners had to pass in order to expiate their sins.

The idea of the South as sinful and suffering for its sins was one that caught at the popular imagination in the hard months leading up to the end of the war. 

Although the government in Richmond saw this type of preaching as destructive to the Southern cause --- which it was, in the extreme --- the government dared not attempt to discredit religion. 

Preachers who envisioned a Southern apocalypse undercut any moral basis soldiers might feel for continuing to fight the war. Such preaching lowered further an already lowered morale. Southern religion did much in 1864 and 1865 to convince the men in gray and butternut that they sinned by working in opposition to the will of God. By so doing, it contributed mightily to the defeat of the Confederacy.