Upon the Altar of the Nation Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I PREPARATION - PATRIOTS ALL

  CHAPTER 1 - “THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH IS RISING”

  CHAPTER 2 - “LET THE STRIFE BEGIN”

  CHAPTER 3 - “OUR FLAG CARRIES . . . AMERICAN HISTORY”

  CHAPTER 4 - “THE DAY OF THE POPULACE”

  CHAPTER 5 - “TO RECOGNIZE OUR DEPENDENCE UPON GOD”

  CHAPTER 6 - “THE CHURCH WILL SOUND THE TRUMPETS”

  PART II ROMANTICIZATION - THE MAKING OF HEROES

  CHAPTER 7 - THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN: “A TOTAL AND DISGRACEFUL ROUT”

  CHAPTER 8 - TRIUMPHALISM: “ADORNED BY THE NAME OF GOD”

  CHAPTER 9 - “WILL NOT THE MARTYRS BE BLESSED ... ?”

  CHAPTER 10 - “TO HUMBLE OURSELVES BEFORE GOD”

  CHAPTER 11 - “IS IT NOT GRAND ... ?”

  CHAPTER 12 - “THE POPULAR HEART”

  CHAPTER 13 - “RELIGION HAS GROWN WARLIKE”

  PART III DESCENT - HARD WAR, SPILLED BLOOD

  CHAPTER 14 - “WHAT SCENES OF BLOODSHED”

  CHAPTER 15 - “GOD WILLS THIS CONTEST”

  CHAPTER 16 - ANTIETAM: “THE HORRORS OF A BATTLEFIELD”

  CHAPTER 17 - “BROKEN HEARTS CANNOT BE PHOTOGRAPHED”

  PART IV JUSTIFICATION - THE EMANCIPATION WAR

  CHAPTER 18 - “ALL WHO DIE FOR COUNTRY NOW, DIE ALSO FOR HUMANITY”

  CHAPTER 19 - LINCOLN, EMANCIPATION, AND TOTAL WAR

  CHAPTER 20 - FREDERICKSBURG: “SO FOOLHARDY AN ADVENTURE”

  CHAPTER 21 - “GOD HAS GRANTED US A HAPPY NEW YEAR”

  CHAPTER 22 - “AS SAVAGE AS SAVAGES”

  PART V TRANSFORMATION - HEARTS INVESTED

  CHAPTER 23 - CHANCELLORSVILLE: “THE CHAMBER OF DEATH”

  CHAPTER 24 - GETTYSBURG: “FIELD OF BLOOD, AND DEATH”

  CHAPTER 25 - “FOR THE SAKE OF THE CAUSE”

  CHAPTER 26 - “A POLITICAL WORSHIP”

  CHAPTER 27 - “THE ROCK OF CHICKAMAUGA”

  CHAPTER 28 - “IN THAT IMMORTAL FIELD”

  CHAPTER 29 - “THE PRESENT UNHOLY WAR”

  CHAPTER 30 - “FROM HEAD TO HEART”

  PART VI PROPORTION - THE SOLDIERS’ TOTAL WAR

  CHAPTER 31 - “I CAN ONLY THINK OF HELL UPON EARTH”

  CHAPTER 32 - “NO PLEDGE TO MAKE BUT ACTION”

  CHAPTER 33 - “THE MOST INTERESTING MEN IN THE COUNTRY”

  CHAPTER 34 - “IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER”

  CHAPTER 35 - “JUNE 3. COLD HARBOR. I WAS KILLED.”

  PART VII DISCRIMINATION - A CIVILIAN WAR

  CHAPTER 36 - “THE PIOUS MEN WILL BE HELD UP AS THE GREATEST OF PATRIOTS”

  CHAPTER 37 - “IF THEY WANT PEACE THEY . . . MUST STOP THE WAR”

  CHAPTER 38 - “RED OCTOBER”: “THE WORK OF DESTRUCTION”

  CHAPTER 39 - “A VOTE FOR PRINCIPLE, FOR CONSCIENCE, FOR CHRIST”

  CHAPTER 40 - “I CAN MAKE THIS MARCH, AND MAKE GEORGIA HOWL!”

  CHAPTER 41 - “UPHOLD THE CAUSE AND STRENGTHEN THE HANDS OF THE FAITHFUL”

  CHAPTER 42 - “VENGEANCE UPON SOUTH CAROLINA”

  PART VIII RECONCILIATION - MAKING AN END TO BUILD A FUTURE

  CHAPTER 43 - “LET US STRIVE ON TO FINISH THE WORK WE ARE IN”

  CHAPTER 44 - “RICHMOND! BABYLON IS FALLEN!!”

  CHAPTER 45 - “THE MAN DIES, BUT THE CAUSE LIVES”

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  UPON THE ALTAR OF THE NATION

  Harry S. Stout is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University and the author of The New England Soul. He has received an N. E. H. Research Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among other awards. Currently the editor of the twenty-seven volume series of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Professor Stout has co-edited the seventeen-volume series Religion and American Life designed for public schools.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  Copyright © Harry S. Stout, 2006

  All rights reserved

  Map illustrations by Adrian Kitzinger

  Illustration credits: American Antiquarian Society: pages 80, 96, 195, 268, and 399. All others courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12672-1

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Moral and ethical aspects.

  2. Just war doctrine. I. Title.

  E468.9.S94 2005

  973.71—dc22 2005042420

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the memory of my father, Harry Stober Stout (1923—2004), a warrior sailor in a just war. And to my grandchildren: James Benjamin Klapwijk, Helena Neeltje Klapwijk, and Wendell McCullough Stout. It is to the coming generation and the moral conclusions they reach that this book is ultimately dedicated.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the critical months of spring 1864, when Union and Confederate armies suffered horrendous and unprecedented casualties, Grant’s Army of the Potomac faced Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in an area of open pines and deep ravines called Cold Harbor, Virginia. Both sides had already expended sixty-nine thousand casualties in four weeks of frontal assaults. Soldiers and their commanders were exhibiting unmistakable signs of shell shock. In the mistaken belief that Lee’s lines were spread too thin, Grant ordered yet another frontal assault on June 3 intended to break through Lee’s soft underbelly, roll up his army, and march on the gates of Richmond.

  At 4:30 a.m. the assault began. In lockstep madness, each advancing Union corps was enfiladed by Lee’s cannon and musket fire on the flanks while simultaneously receiving direct fire in front. Artillery batteries worked their Napoleons furiously with double charges of canister, turning the assault troops into a bloody mass of writhing humanity. Three assaulting Federal corps were repulsed in little over an hour, with staggering losses that totaled 7,000—a rate of roughly 116 men per minute. In surveying the carnage, Lee’s horrified gener
al Evander Law would write of the battle: “It was not war, but murder.”

  But was it murder? Talk about war or murder, right or wrong, is moral talk. And talk of past war or murder, right or wrong, is moral history—that is, professional history writing that raises moral issues of right and wrong as seen from the vantage points of both the participants and the historian, who, after painstaking study, applies normative judgments. Insofar as ordinary language is implicitly ethical, all history writing implies moral discernment; a moral history, however, calls more for a determination of right or wrong.

  The historian writing a moral history does not presume to be a sort of Supreme Court justice adjudicating the past, trying actors for their crimes and then sentencing them. The dead no longer care, and they cannot be sentenced. Rather, it is for the living that the historian offers moral judgments in the hope that lessons for life today may ensue. Reflecting on a career of scholarship on Indian-white relations, the historian James Axtell observes that in writing moral history, “[t]he historian’s justice is retrospective, not contemporary, and his goal is not to punish or rehabilitate historical malefactors—who are all mortally incorrigible—but to set the record straight for future appeals to precedent.”1 Moral history imbues the present with a heightened sensitivity to what actors might have done, what they ought to have done, and what, in fact, they actually did. It is in the distances between the oughts and the actualities that moral judgments emerge. One bears witness to the past with all possible integrity and disinterestedness for the sake of the present and the future.

  Writing a serious history of war humbles the author and discourages self-righteous pretensions to a monopoly on the Truth. Does that mean that the historian has no interpretation or point of view? Of course not. But precisely because wars past and present exist in a gray zone of differing opinions among good people, the historian’s primary task is to reveal the zone.

  Current debates over American wars in the twenty-first century dramatically confirm the contested nature of war among good people. The reason is simple: At its most elemental, war is evil. War is killing. War is destroying. It may be a necessary evil, and in that sense “right,” but it is nevertheless lethally destructive. So real-world questions about war will always strain any theory created to justify it and invite debate. In telling the story of the Civil War, I pay particular attention to those aspects of the war that raise moral issues. Such issues appear on the home front and in the trenches, among foot soldiers and civilians no less than generals and statesmen. I seek first to establish a narrative that frees the reader to make his or her judgments, while admittedly drawing conclusions of my own.

  How then do I, as a historian, render moral judgments about a war? By holding up the actions against widely recognized, long-established principles of just war. The subject of war should not be consigned to some random zone of pure historical relativism or postmodern agnosticism. Laws of war and rules of engagement exist that civilized peoples agree to. Such laws and rules transcend personal opinion or individual caprice. War crimes tribunals of our modern era bear eloquent testimony to the ongoing relevance of laws of war. When particular battles and wars are laid alongside the laws of just war, judgments are called for that can be applied to all participants and to nations as a whole.

  The ethical standards employed to judge the rightness or wrongness of war fall under the rubric of “just-war theory.” Just-war theory refers to an intellectual tradition at least two millennia old designed to establish rules of war. These rules first govern whether a people are right to declare war. Once war is declared, they provide guidelines for how that war should be fought, with a view toward minimizing the violence and destruction of war and prompting a peaceful future of coexistence. Although just-war thinking is as old as warfare itself, a self-conscious body of literature on the subject in Western culture began with Saint Augustine of Hippo (354—430), who raised the question of when and how to wage war justly. Its first systematic expression dates from Saint Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225—1274), whose Summa theologica presents the broad categories of what becomes just-war theory. Aquinas’s thoughts became the foundation for later Catholic and Protestant jurists.2

  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, just-war theory has undergone a rebirth in response both to the invention and deployment of nuclear weaponry and other weapons of mass destruction and to wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Perhaps the single most important study has been Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, but other major scholarship appears in the work of Paul Ramsey, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Geoffrey Best, James Turner Johnson, and William V O’Brien.3

  In opposition to both pacifism on the one hand and amoral realism (Realpolitik) on the other, just-war theory offers a series of ethical principles that articulate a plausible moral framework.4 Whether one is dealing with wars in the distant past or contemporary wars, two sets of principles are especially important. The first set of principles offers guidelines for when a war might justly be declared. The second set of principles offers guidelines for governing just and fair conduct in the actual fighting of the war.

  With regard to the first set of principles governing just war (jus ad bellum), most theorists agree that initiating acts of aggression for selfish purposes is always wrong. The only rationale for a just declaration of war is self-defense, and this must be determined at the highest levels of state. In situations where imminent attack looms, a preventive or preemptive attack is justified—but real and present danger must be virtually beyond doubt. In other words, just wars are always defensive wars.

  One corollary principle growing out of a just war for self-defense is that the war have a reasonable probability of success. The net balance of the war’s costs and benefits, as well as its cause, must be calculated by a nation’s leaders. Just-war theory argues against expending (that is, wasting) precious human and economic resources in an obviously uneven fight, though even here theorists concede that a nation must sometimes stand up to a bully in the hope that others will join the cause.

  Jus ad bellum arguments are ideally suited to addressing wars of nation against nation, and, in particular, nations who share some common culture and expect at war’s conclusion to live in some sort of measured peace. In civil wars, however, where significant numbers of belligerent citizens align themselves under warring banners, with substantial territories and competent leadership on both sides, it often becomes difficult to discern with finality who is the unjust aggressor and who the just defender.5 Such was the case with the American Civil War, in which each of two considerable populations came to the conclusion that war was their last best option. With this conviction, each side joined the battle convinced that its cause was just and that God was on its side.6

  As they moved relentlessly toward war, both sides focused on the issue of secession and discovered an ethical problem without a formula for a definitive moral response. There is no “just” or “unjust” behavior a priori. On the eve of civil war, Benjamin Russell Allen, the Congregational minister of Marblehead, Massachusetts, pointed to the ethical conundrum of secession. Recalling the American Revolution, he recognized that “[o]pposition to the Government, secession even, is a revolutionary right in certain circumstances, a right above all constitutions, the right of all people—everywhere; but not a right which any government provides for [emphasis added].”7

  Did Norway have a right to secede from Sweden? Does modern-day Chechnya have a right to secede from Russia? It is a moral issue that recurs through the years, with no definitive answers. Did the South have a right to secede from the North? Yes. And no. Only a civil war would determine the answer.

  The second category of just-war theory, and the one most central to this moral history, addresses the conduct of war (jus in bello). In asking how a just war should be fought, theorists isolate two primary principles: proportionality and discrimination. The former bridges the gap between declarations of war and methods of war by requiring that goals be proportional to the mean
s employed. Even granting that all soldiers at some level give up their right to life by enlisting in armed forces, principles of proportionality still invoke limits to the carnage. This is precisely the issue that Evander Law raised when he said of Cold Harbor, “It was not war, but murder.” In like manner, orders of “no quarter” (i.e., that all wounded and prisoners be killed) in the Seven Years’ War violated the principle of proportionality—the battle had already been won when the orders were given.8

  The principle of discrimination addresses the question of who should be considered legitimate targets in war. Noncombatants are deemed to stand outside the field of war proper; thus it is unjust to attack them. Just-war theory unanimously upholds the protection of civilians—no element of judgment or prudential weighing of costs and benefits is acceptable in deciding whether or not to target civilians or take them hostage; it is always wrong.

  Of course, warfare sometimes unavoidably involves civilians who get caught up in the fighting. Today we use the term “collateral damage” to describe these tragic situations. Just-war theorists address the topic of collateral damage in terms of “double effect.” The doctrine of double effect justifies killing civilians in war only if their deaths are not intended but accidental. So, for example, targeting an undefended city is not permissible but targeting a military establishment in the middle of a city is. The target is the military unit and not the civilians inadvertently caught up in the struggle.

  Issues of proportionality of losses to strategic ends and discrimination of legitimate and illegitimate targets will recur in this book. While the theory remains clear in the abstract (i.e., without actual numbers in play), its application in the Civil War—the determination of right or wrong—is far from clear or unanimous, from the vantage point of both the participants and the later observers. This becomes especially true in the later years of the war, as it escalated from a limited war fought by armies in the field, far from cities and civilians, to a “total” war in which civilians and their property were deliberately targeted. As limited war transmogrified into a total war for unconditional surrender, the moral dimensions changed dramatically.