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When it came to race relations, Ruth Smith believed that she grew up in a progressive community. Her grandfather, so the family stories went, had hated slavery so much that he rushed to fight in the Civil War, and her church in Howard, Kansas taught that all people were created and loved by God. After college, Ruth trekked south to Alabama to teach at a school for African American women. There, her entire world was transformed. In the process of everyday living (with the occasional defense against Ku Klux Klan members), Ruth committed her life to social justice. She felt betrayed, though, by fellow white Christians because they so rarely stood against white supremacy.
Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War
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Perhaps her most painful discovery took place on a visit to her home in Kansas. Ruth found her grandfather's notebook, in which he had recorded his feelings about the Civil War and his ethical transformation during it. "I had never been prejudiced for or against slavery," he wrote. "I had imbibed the idea that a professing Christian should not go to war to kill people, and I had decided to teach school and let the sinners fight." But his friends and minister altered his opinion. "To change my mind they quoted scripture and argued… . 'Christ said you must be subject to the laws… . We live in a government which is threatened destruction by an army… . Our government says we must protect our country.' " Ruth could hardly believe her eyes: Her grandfather's moral ruminations had little to do with slavery and much to do with a shift from Christian pacifism to belligerent patriotism.1
The cognitive dissonance Ruth experienced when she took up the notebook may be felt collectively by readers of Harry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation. This major reevaluation of the Civil War enlightens and entertains, shocks and saddens, tantalizes and troubles. Stout approaches the war in terms of morality and "just war theory," and he finds both sides lacking. Both the Union and the Confederacy may have read "the same Bible" and prayed "to the same God," as Abraham Lincoln said in his second Inaugural Address, but neither engaged seriously with the difficult moral questions of proportionality or discrimination. How much blood was reuniting the nation or obtaining independence worth? Should civilian farmers whose crops made their way to soldiers be held responsible for the conflict's longevity and hence targeted as combatants? Was it appropriate to teach children to glorify combat and generals? How ethical were field orders that shelled cities or federal directives that justified guerrilla tactics? These questions, often avoided during the war, drive Stout's study and make his work fresh, invigorating, and powerful.
Religious, political, intellectual, and artistic leaders offered chilling responses when they approached these ethical problems. When considering martial escalation, they repeated the same refrain: more death and more destruction. To justify the carnage, Americans North and South cast the conflict as sacred and elevated it to a cosmic plane. Gore became godly; war became worship; presidents became prophets; soldiers became saints; the nation's clergy became national cheerleaders; and blood became baptismal water. In this transformation, Stout locates the flowering of an American civil religion. A new patriotism created the United States as a mystical nation that deserved honor, praise, and worship and justified death and murder.
Stout traces the war from start to finish, beginning in the late 1850s and ending in the late 1860s. He finds neither side prepared morally for the start of the conflict. Since no one anticipated a long engagement, no one initiated a discussion about the ethics of the combat. At first, saving the "Union" offered sufficient justification in the North and defending the "homeland" in the South. By late 1862, however, Lincoln believed that the North needed a new ethical imperative to heighten the level of combat, and he crafted one. The Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in rebellious territories but did little to touch slavery still in existence in Union states, served as the moral level to sanctify total war. Now, northern troops would die not merely as saviors of the Union, but as cosmic warriors against the nation's greatest sin: slavery. Emancipation's limitations and northern white society's intense racism could be ignored, and northerners could believe they had obtained what novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren later termed a "Treasury of Virtue."2
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