Authors: David Goldfield
The religious transformation served two purposes in the South. First, it shored up a shaken faith. Second, the South's status as a Chosen Nation elevated the cause for which it fought. The impurity was in the southerner, not in the cause. Robert Lewis Dabney, the South's leading Presbyterian theologian, wrote in 1867, “Because we believe that God intends to vindicate his Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it ⦠we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders.” It was not happenstance that white southerners called the men who led the restoration Redeemers.
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White southerners had to perceive the North as evil incarnate in order to sustain the belief in their section's ultimate redemption. For God would not allow evil to triumph. At a memorial service in Charleston in 1870, Wade Hampton reminded his listeners that might did not mean right. Just as the sword had “turned over Spain and Portugal to the tender mercies of the Saracens,” it was now “directed by unscrupulous power against prostrate States, reeking with fratricidal blood, [enforcing] the laws which it alone has made.”
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The theme that the South's suffering was temporary and only awaiting redemption became the prevailing arc of southern expression after Appomattox. The lost war was not a heavenly judgment on southern ideals. It was a call for rededication to those ideals. In 1865, the Rev. Dr. A. W. Miller, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, responded to comments of northern ministers that the South should accept the results of the war as a divine remonstrance against its institutions. Miller replied that “accepting the situation” did not mean that southerners “abandoned their former distinctive views and principles.” He cited Old Testament accounts of neighboring nations defeating the Jewish people. “Providence, for wise ends, may permit an ungodly nation to prosper for a time.” If southerners had maintained a proper relationship with God, “Southern principles would have been crowned with speedy victory.” A purified South would arise from the ashes to serve as God's “last and only hope.”
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The resurrected South would look a great deal like the Old South, a restored regime of white supremacy, patriarchy, and states' rights. These political and cultural principles became holy tenets, dissent from which threatened redemption. Politics and theology became indistinguishable. A Baptist minister declared, “As a Democrat, I love all Democrats. All Baptists are Democrats.⦠It is THE political faith of the great majority of the members of the church.” Politics became a faith, and the vote was an offering to both God and the South.
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The Lord would not allow white southerners to suffer long. Benjamin M. Palmer, the Presbyterian minister who had delivered the stirring Thanksgiving Day sermon in November 1860 on the Christian roots of secession, consoled the members of his church that “the next generation would see the South
free
and independent.” If the South must wander in the desert, it would eventually reach the Promised Land. Redemption would come. Recall: “It was when Isaac lay upon the altar of sacrifice that Abraham's faith was made perfect by works; it was when the Hebrew children walked in the midst of the fiery furnace that the glory of the Lord was revealed before the eyes of His enemies.”
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Remain steadfast to the truths of the Old South and southerners would triumph. Robert Lewis Dabney, in a commencement address at Davidson College in 1868, urged the graduates to maintain antebellum ideals: “Resolve to abate nothing, to concede nothing of righteous conviction.” Dabney warned the students of the evils of urbanization and technology and the enfranchisement of blacks. He prayed that these future leaders of the South would adopt “scriptural politics.” These ideals would not only ensure that the South would prevail, but they would also serve as a “bulwark against the flood of Yankee innovations in religion and morals.” The great danger for the South, Dabney concluded, would be to allow the North to “
Yankeeize the South
,” making southerners “become like the conquerors.”
22
Such ideas coalesced into a creed called the Lost Cause. The creed idealized the Old South, elevated the Civil War to a passion play of courage and martyrdom, and depicted the Reconstruction era as a time of unmerited suffering, the time before Redemption. The Confederacy died and the South was reborn, more pure, more chaste, and more obedient to the old values. While northerners looked forward, filed the war away, and relegated religion to a subordinate role, white southerners embraced and sanctified the past. “The present is a very little part of life, sir,” a character in an Ellen Glasgow novel informs us. “It's the past in which we store our treasures.” Southerners walked backward into the future.
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Southern religion merged with southern culture. Churches altered their hymnals to incorporate the Lost Cause creed. Ministers retitled “That Old-Time Religion” to “We Are Old-Time Confederates.” The Methodist church adopted a new hymn, “Let Us Pass Over the River, and Rest Under the Shade of the Trees,” the final words of Stonewall Jackson.
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Southern history imbued the South's religion. Virginia writer James Branch Cabell asserted, “No history is a matter of record; it is a matter of faith.” In the chaotic and uncertain months after the end of the war, religion was much more than a solace; it was an explanation and a reason to hope. The home would be rebuilt; the town would prosper; the farm would yield its bounty; and whites would regain their patrimony. It was God's promise. And any means white southerners employed to accomplish the South's redemption were justified. Redemption meant the independence of white southerners to order their lives and their society as ordained by Scripture. God had given white southerners the “great mission of political independence,” a writer in
De Bow's Review
asserted in 1868. Now they must fulfill His wish. The war and its aftermath crucified the South; soon would come the resurrection of a great people.
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Church became both the cultural and religious center of southern life. The southern white church boomed in the 1860s. Evangelical denominations had 31,000 more church seats and 450 more congregations in 1870 than in 1860. While property values fell throughout the South during this decade, the church property of these denominations rose in value by nearly $1 million.
Southern women played significant roles in the expanded church polity. They had always been more churchgoing than the men. Women kept the family Bible and saw to it that names and traditions were carried down from generation to generation. They were the guardians of memory for their families. As history blended into faith, and as the boundaries between public and private spheres in the South became indistinct, women become the attendants of sacred southern memory. Their work expanded from the family to encompass the community. The cemetery became an extension of the home.
Southerners constructed their lives around their fallen. The women of Richmond painstakingly carried stones to erect a precarious pyramid at Hollywood Cemetery commemorating the late martyrs. Many of these women were never able to bury their loved ones. Their sons and husbands and fathers lay in common graves in Gettysburg or Antietam, or were missing altogether. The graves they tended were surrogates for the loss of a farewell. They followed Jefferson Davis's admonition to “keep the memories of our heroes green.” Statues went up and wreaths were placed at the tombs of Jackson, Stuart, then Lee. On May 10, 1866, the women organized the first Confederate Memorial Day, drawing the white community together to commemorate the martyrs. They had not departed; they had merely changed their address. If the boundary between religion and culture had disappeared, so had the distinction between life and death. The women placed a banner at the tomb of J. E. B. Stuart in Hollywood Cemetery: “Stuart: Dead, yet alive. Mortal, yet immortal.” By the late 1870s, orators were referring to the Confederacy in the present tense. In the moment of its death, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.”
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Southerners took pride in their defeat, relished and exaggerated their suffering. They lavished more attention on the dead than on the living. These were the penances before the redemption. Father Abram Ryan, the poet of the Confederacy, wrote, “A land without ruins is a land without memories; a land without memories is a land without liberty.⦠Crowns of roses fade; crowns of thorns endure. Calvaries and crucifixions take deepest hold of humanity; the triumphs of might are transient.” As he watched the women lay the wreaths and inscribe the tablets, he wrote, “There's grandeur in gravesâThere's glory in gloom.”
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This was history remembered, not learned. It was history as therapy. The reality of life in the South was too harsh, and the contrast between what was and what is too great. Some, like Ashley Wilkes, found the time after the war so much out of joint that they crumbled. He explained to Scarlett O'Hara that life had “suddenly become too real.⦠It isn't that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for. I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved. Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamour to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art.” Most southerners, however, were not as incapacitated as Ashley Wilkes. They willed the old life back into existence, even if it never quite existed in those terms. Like their religion, it was a matter of faith. And that faith shaped their view of the world. Father Ryan recalled seeing his young niece standing before a painting of the death of Jesus. He asked her if she knew who crucified her Lord. Without hesitation, she replied, “O yes I know. The Yankees.”
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There was an air of defiance about all of this. An acceptance of defeat, but a refusal to acknowledge its consequences. A Confederate veteran declared after the surrender, “In the face of the civilized world the honor of the South stands untarnished and her sons will live in the world's memory as a chivalrous, gallant and brave people.” Better to think that than to despair about the poverty, the hunger, the devastation, and the world turned upside down. Better to be proud than prostrate. White southerners held the past tightly, as it was all they had left. “Everything,” Margaret Mitchell wrote, “in their old world had changed but the forms. The old usages went on, must go on, for the forms were all that were left to them.” It was a remarkable piece of alchemy, turning misery into romance. Leave reality to the Yankees.
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Edward A. Pollard, editor of the
Richmond Examiner
, wrote one of the first histories of the war in 1866. He called it
The Lost Cause
, borrowing the phrase from the Scottish Jacobites. He wrote, “It would be immeasurably the worst consequence of defeat in this war that the south could lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as a people, and cease to assert its well-known superiority in civilization.” He accepted the defeat, the restoration of the Union, and the abolition of slavery. “But the war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights.⦠And these things, which the war did not decide, the southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert them in their rights and views.” Pollard articulated the sentiment of white southerners: defeated, defiant, unbowed, and unwilling to relinquish the ideals they cherished most, particularly now that they had become not only a matter of conviction but of faith as well.
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There were other southerners, black southerners, who held an entirely different perspective on the Old South and the war and its aftermath. These were differences born of distinctive experiences, differences that could not be reconciled. The former slaves failed to advance much beyond their status in 1865 primarily because their white neighbors could not allow it. The subjugation of the black southerner became too much a part of the white southerner's faith. It was essential to redemption.
Frederick Douglass knew that freedom was not enough. While he appreciated the missionary aid societies and the Freedmen's Bureau, the government agency founded in 1865 to ease the transition of the slave to freedom, he wanted equality, not charity. If black people became permanent victims, they would never enjoy full citizenship. The Indian provided a frightening example of a colored race standing outside the pale of white civilization. “The negro needs justice more than pity, liberty more than old clothes,” Douglass wrote in May 1865. Grateful for the well-intentioned white educators coming south to tutor the former slaves, he nevertheless asserted that his people needed “rights more than training to enjoy them.”
31
Douglass believed what most whites did not: that the war and its outcome demanded racial equality. “Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought ⦠shall pass into history a miserable failure ⦠or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, must be determined one way or the other.” Full citizenship for the former slaves honored those men who fought and died and the nation they had saved. For northern whites, it was enough that slavery was ended and the great experiment forged in revolution was saved.
32
Emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment forced southern whites to acknowledge the black man's freedom, nothing more. Even so, many whites predicted African Americans would wilt in their new status. They would descend to barbarism and penury without the discipline of forced labor. Unable to survive, they would become extinct, as many believed would happen to the Indians. A Mississippi planter predicted to a Union officer, “These niggers will all be slaves again in twelve months.”
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