Saturday, July 09, 2011 9:00:49 PM
Evangelicals, Republicans and the Civil War
Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen A. Douglas (seated to his right) during the U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois, 1858.
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL
By DAVID GOLDFIELD
July 7, 2011, 9:00 pm
We often hear the phrase “the party of Lincoln” ascribed to the Republican Party. The image conjures a political movement dedicated to the abolition or restriction of slavery and to saving the Union. A less well-known feature of the party’s early years was its grounding in the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.
Not all evangelicals were Republicans, nor were all Republicans evangelicals. But many of its adherents brought a messianic zeal to the political issues of the day, particularly immigration and the extension of slavery into the western territories. The Republican positions on these political issues derived in great part from their belief that America was God’s Chosen Nation and before His blessing could be fulfilled, the nation must be cleansed of its sins. The nature of that cleansing is known as the American Civil War.
The first national Republican convention occurred in Philadelphia in July 1856. It was a time of great agitation on the slavery issue as well as mounting concerns about immigration, often expressed in violent clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the nation’s growing cities.
A participant reported that the gathering resembled a “Methodist conference rather than a political convention,” and another characterized the party platform as “God’s revealed Word.” The delegates framed a platform condemning the “twin relics of barbarism” — slavery and polygamy. There was no pending national epidemic of individuals selecting multiple marriage partners. “Polygamy” was a code word for “Mormon,” another despised religious group in the party’s pantheon of proscribed faiths.
The ubiquity of religious rhetoric and imagery in the Republican campaign further polarized an already divided Union. One minister depicted the upcoming election as “a decisive struggle . . . between freedom and Slavery, truth and falsehood, justice and oppression, God and the devil.” If our political system depends upon moderation and compromise, these were not promising sentiments in an increasingly torn nation.
A nativist newspaper published in Boston, ca. 1854.
Library of Congress
The Republicans did not invent evangelical politics; they were, however, the most successful political organization to merge faith and policy. Party faithful were heirs (and, in some cases, members) of earlier short-lived political anti-slavery and anti-Catholic parties like the Liberty Party, which, during its 1844 presidential run, urged citizens “to vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.” One of its leaders asserted, “The Liberty Party, unlike any other in history, was founded on moral principles — on the Bible, originating a contest not only against slavery but against atheistic politics from which Divine law was excluded.”
Like the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers tapped into the evangelical spirit in the North, staging a revival-style convention in Buffalo in August 1848. Speakers called for a “great moral revolution” founded on “the idea of right and justice and the truth of God.” The themes of spiritual rebirth and national rededication resonated throughout the hall. “God had determined to make the convention,” one speaker assured the assemblage, “the medium of reviving . . . throughout this great . . . Nation, the pure principles of Free Government . . . ; and by founding here a real . . . Republic, to diffuse its light and truth to all Nations, until every member of the great human family shall know and rejoice in this great Salvation.” Though ostensibly against slavery, they were most concerned, as were the later Republicans, with keeping the territories white.
Messianic politics received a significant boost in 1850 from a speech by New York Senator William H. Seward, who would later join the Republican Party. In appealing to a “higher law” overriding the Constitution, Seward was, in effect, rhetorically transforming a nation of laws into a theocratic state. While the courts interpret the Constitution, each citizen can interpret the Bible. The result, I would argue, is intolerance and chaos.
By 1853, another evangelical party emerged, the Know Nothings. Less concerned with slavery than their predecessors, the new party focused on the dangers of immigration, especially of Irish Roman Catholics. One evangelical adherent called for the “extermination” of Catholics.
But none of these parties were as successful as the Republicans, who combined anti-Catholic and anti-slavery sentiment into a winning evangelical politics. During the 1856 presidential campaign, one Republican newspaper, blending anti-slavery and nativist rhetoric, alleged that “Roman Catholics, whose consciences are enslaved . . . regard the King of Rome — the Pope — as the depository of all authority.” Republicans distilled the Democrats to an unholy trinity of “the Pope, a whisky barrel, and a nigger driver.”
Wide-Awakes, the Republican “army” of young men, marching and singing down lower Broadway during the 1860 presidential campaign.
Library of Congress
With Abraham Lincoln (who denounced religious bigotry) as its standard-bearer in the 1860 presidential contest, Republican rallies exuded an evangelical fervor that blended religious and military pageantry. The “Wide-Awakes,” the party’s shock troops of younger voters, 400,000 strong by one estimate, paraded in black oilcloth capes and red shirts after the fashion of the Paris revolutionaries of 1848. Even into the Democratic stronghold of New York City they marched, holding their torches high through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan preceded by booming military bands, and cheered on by thousands of partisan onlookers who sang out the “Freedom Battle Hymn,” entreating citizens to march “On for freedom, God, our country, and the right.” The rally culminated at Broadway and 10th Street at midnight in a shower of Roman candles. Wherever the Wide-Awakes went during that campaign season, their parades and the accompanying din of music and fireworks lent an impression of an inexorable tide changing the political landscape of America for all time. Here was not merely a political rally; here was a movement.
We all know the rest of the story: Lincoln was elected president; the lower South seceded; the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the Civil War began. Yes, slavery was a major cause of the war. But evangelical politics polarized and poisoned a political process that works best with compromise and moderation. Politicians in the 1850s posed, postured and waved Bibles, but they did not resolve the major issues, until there was no longer any chance they ever could.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose best-selling novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” became an anti-slavery Bible in its own right, summarized the evangelical response to Fort Sumter. To Stowe, the Civil War, now underway, was a millennial war, “the last struggle for liberty” that would precede the coming of the Lord. “God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant wrong.” Her brother, the nation’s most popular evangelical preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, related the familiar story of Exodus to his congregation, how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Red Sea, and how the sea parted and allowed the Chosen People to escape while burying their pursuers. “And now our turn has come,” he exclaimed. “Right before us lies the Red Sea of War.” And God was ready; foretelling Julia Ward Howe’s famous lines, “that awful wine-press of the Wrath of Almighty God” would come down from the heavens and bury the South.
The war that followed buried 620,000 men. That war should teach us that self-righteousness and religious certitude are more likely to lead to violent rather than to peaceful resolution, and that even a good cause — the abolition of slavery — may be served better by peace than by war. We will never know that, of course, but the struggle of African Americans to attain full citizenship for a century after the war should motivate us to at least speculate on a different outcome. Let us commemorate this war and honor the men who died. But it would have been a greater tribute to our nation had they lived.
David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he teaches courses on the American South. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including “Still Fighting the Civil War”; “The American Journey”; and, most recently, “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/evangelicals-republicans-and-the-civil-war/ [with comments]
Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen A. Douglas (seated to his right) during the U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois, 1858.
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL
By DAVID GOLDFIELD
July 7, 2011, 9:00 pm
We often hear the phrase “the party of Lincoln” ascribed to the Republican Party. The image conjures a political movement dedicated to the abolition or restriction of slavery and to saving the Union. A less well-known feature of the party’s early years was its grounding in the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.
Not all evangelicals were Republicans, nor were all Republicans evangelicals. But many of its adherents brought a messianic zeal to the political issues of the day, particularly immigration and the extension of slavery into the western territories. The Republican positions on these political issues derived in great part from their belief that America was God’s Chosen Nation and before His blessing could be fulfilled, the nation must be cleansed of its sins. The nature of that cleansing is known as the American Civil War.
The first national Republican convention occurred in Philadelphia in July 1856. It was a time of great agitation on the slavery issue as well as mounting concerns about immigration, often expressed in violent clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the nation’s growing cities.
A participant reported that the gathering resembled a “Methodist conference rather than a political convention,” and another characterized the party platform as “God’s revealed Word.” The delegates framed a platform condemning the “twin relics of barbarism” — slavery and polygamy. There was no pending national epidemic of individuals selecting multiple marriage partners. “Polygamy” was a code word for “Mormon,” another despised religious group in the party’s pantheon of proscribed faiths.
The ubiquity of religious rhetoric and imagery in the Republican campaign further polarized an already divided Union. One minister depicted the upcoming election as “a decisive struggle . . . between freedom and Slavery, truth and falsehood, justice and oppression, God and the devil.” If our political system depends upon moderation and compromise, these were not promising sentiments in an increasingly torn nation.
A nativist newspaper published in Boston, ca. 1854.
Library of Congress
The Republicans did not invent evangelical politics; they were, however, the most successful political organization to merge faith and policy. Party faithful were heirs (and, in some cases, members) of earlier short-lived political anti-slavery and anti-Catholic parties like the Liberty Party, which, during its 1844 presidential run, urged citizens “to vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.” One of its leaders asserted, “The Liberty Party, unlike any other in history, was founded on moral principles — on the Bible, originating a contest not only against slavery but against atheistic politics from which Divine law was excluded.”
Like the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers tapped into the evangelical spirit in the North, staging a revival-style convention in Buffalo in August 1848. Speakers called for a “great moral revolution” founded on “the idea of right and justice and the truth of God.” The themes of spiritual rebirth and national rededication resonated throughout the hall. “God had determined to make the convention,” one speaker assured the assemblage, “the medium of reviving . . . throughout this great . . . Nation, the pure principles of Free Government . . . ; and by founding here a real . . . Republic, to diffuse its light and truth to all Nations, until every member of the great human family shall know and rejoice in this great Salvation.” Though ostensibly against slavery, they were most concerned, as were the later Republicans, with keeping the territories white.
Messianic politics received a significant boost in 1850 from a speech by New York Senator William H. Seward, who would later join the Republican Party. In appealing to a “higher law” overriding the Constitution, Seward was, in effect, rhetorically transforming a nation of laws into a theocratic state. While the courts interpret the Constitution, each citizen can interpret the Bible. The result, I would argue, is intolerance and chaos.
By 1853, another evangelical party emerged, the Know Nothings. Less concerned with slavery than their predecessors, the new party focused on the dangers of immigration, especially of Irish Roman Catholics. One evangelical adherent called for the “extermination” of Catholics.
But none of these parties were as successful as the Republicans, who combined anti-Catholic and anti-slavery sentiment into a winning evangelical politics. During the 1856 presidential campaign, one Republican newspaper, blending anti-slavery and nativist rhetoric, alleged that “Roman Catholics, whose consciences are enslaved . . . regard the King of Rome — the Pope — as the depository of all authority.” Republicans distilled the Democrats to an unholy trinity of “the Pope, a whisky barrel, and a nigger driver.”
Wide-Awakes, the Republican “army” of young men, marching and singing down lower Broadway during the 1860 presidential campaign.
Library of Congress
With Abraham Lincoln (who denounced religious bigotry) as its standard-bearer in the 1860 presidential contest, Republican rallies exuded an evangelical fervor that blended religious and military pageantry. The “Wide-Awakes,” the party’s shock troops of younger voters, 400,000 strong by one estimate, paraded in black oilcloth capes and red shirts after the fashion of the Paris revolutionaries of 1848. Even into the Democratic stronghold of New York City they marched, holding their torches high through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan preceded by booming military bands, and cheered on by thousands of partisan onlookers who sang out the “Freedom Battle Hymn,” entreating citizens to march “On for freedom, God, our country, and the right.” The rally culminated at Broadway and 10th Street at midnight in a shower of Roman candles. Wherever the Wide-Awakes went during that campaign season, their parades and the accompanying din of music and fireworks lent an impression of an inexorable tide changing the political landscape of America for all time. Here was not merely a political rally; here was a movement.
We all know the rest of the story: Lincoln was elected president; the lower South seceded; the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the Civil War began. Yes, slavery was a major cause of the war. But evangelical politics polarized and poisoned a political process that works best with compromise and moderation. Politicians in the 1850s posed, postured and waved Bibles, but they did not resolve the major issues, until there was no longer any chance they ever could.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose best-selling novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” became an anti-slavery Bible in its own right, summarized the evangelical response to Fort Sumter. To Stowe, the Civil War, now underway, was a millennial war, “the last struggle for liberty” that would precede the coming of the Lord. “God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant wrong.” Her brother, the nation’s most popular evangelical preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, related the familiar story of Exodus to his congregation, how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Red Sea, and how the sea parted and allowed the Chosen People to escape while burying their pursuers. “And now our turn has come,” he exclaimed. “Right before us lies the Red Sea of War.” And God was ready; foretelling Julia Ward Howe’s famous lines, “that awful wine-press of the Wrath of Almighty God” would come down from the heavens and bury the South.
The war that followed buried 620,000 men. That war should teach us that self-righteousness and religious certitude are more likely to lead to violent rather than to peaceful resolution, and that even a good cause — the abolition of slavery — may be served better by peace than by war. We will never know that, of course, but the struggle of African Americans to attain full citizenship for a century after the war should motivate us to at least speculate on a different outcome. Let us commemorate this war and honor the men who died. But it would have been a greater tribute to our nation had they lived.
David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he teaches courses on the American South. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including “Still Fighting the Civil War”; “The American Journey”; and, most recently, “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/evangelicals-republicans-and-the-civil-war/ [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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