[Vision2020] Carnage

[Art Deco]

Book Review
Politics, religion, and the Civil War
By Michael Kenney 
April 4, 2011 

After one of his lightning-strike victories in the western Virginia valleys, Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall'' Jackson exulted to his officers, "He who does not see the hand of God in this is blind, sir, blind!''
And in the early summer of 1862, as Jackson prepared to head east toward Richmond, it was at the head of what he called "[his] army of the living God.''
Jackson was arguably an extreme case, but in historian David Goldfield's "America Aflame'' he stands as a mighty symbol of the competing religious fervor that stoked the conflict and moved North and South inexorably into war.

"The political system,'' writes Goldfield, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, "could not contain the passions stoked by the infusion of evangelical Christianity into the political process.'' The various political disputes of the time, "and above all slavery,'' he writes, "assumed moral dimensions that confounded political solutions.'' And as "the bonds of Union fell away,'' violence and eventually war "became an acceptable alternative because it worked'' as perhaps the only way to resolve irreconcilable differences.

The notion of moral conflict implicit in the Civil War is not a novel concept and has been a theme in the accounts of many historians, most recently another Southern historian, George C. Rable in "God's Almost Chosen Peoples.'' Goldfield's book differs, however, in embracing it as its central element.

"While New England pulpits resonated with the righteousness of anti-slavery ministers,'' Goldfield writes, "Southern divines mobilized their influence for what they believed to be a holy cause.''

The first great clash came at Bull Run "on an idyllic early Sabbath morning'' in July 1861, and their victory "confirmed for many Southerners the idea that the Confederacy was God's Chosen Nation'' - the "crowning token'' of God's love, as a Georgia preacher put it. As a practical matter, however, the battle exacted significant losses on both sides and in the end "was a limited affair, with no strategic advantage gained or lost.''

Amid the carnage, Goldfield offers images of the natural beauty that became fields of blood. Antietam, in September 1862, was "like 'a poem in blue and gold,' covered with patches of woods, sunlit fields, ripe orchards, and mountains gently rolling on the near horizon.''

As the war continued with deadly battles that were never quite conclusive, the early elation turned to bitterness as casualty counts mounted. And by 1864, Goldfield writes, "the persistent flow of blood was giving soldiers and civilians alike second thoughts about God's role, if any, in the conflict.'' The evangelical religion that had fueled the dispute "did not prepare either side for the carnage.''

The North moved on, creating the nation of Goldfield's subtitle. "Exhibit A'' would be the Centennial Exposition of 1876 presided over by President Grant, the North's victorious general.

But as "Northerners moved away from a civil society informed and directed by evangelical Protestantism,'' Goldfield writes, "Southerners embraced it, and embraced it so fiercely that it became a folk religion indistinguishable from Southern culture.'' To have a sense of how powerful a force evangelical Protestantism would become in the South it's instructive to note that the final words uttered by the Confederate leader Jackson after being mortally wounded in the Battle of Chancellorsville were "let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,'' the title of a new Methodist hymn.

Michael Kenney, a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge, can be reached at mkenney777 at gmail.com. 

AMERICA AFLAME: How the Civil War Created a Nation By David Goldfield

Bloomsbury, 632 pp., illustrated, $35 






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