Reaching the Public Churches and Philanthropic Organizations

Reaching the Public Churches and Philanthropic Organizations
The churches and the benevolent organizations they sustained can claim to have been the first truly effective national networks in the United States. More consistently than any other governmental or voluntary agency in the early republic they drew ordinary people into an arena extending beyond their locality and state. Being a member of a church usually meant being part of a denominational connection whose preachers and press gave members a taste of the world beyond, mobilizing them in pursuit of ambitious benevolent causes, national and international in scope. At the outbreak of civil war this network of churches and related philanthropic reform societies presented the North with a potent weapon. Recruiting their ministerial and lay leaders as active advocates of the Union cause would allow the administration to broadcast directly to the nation’s largest complex of subcultures.
In particular, it would harness the forces of evangelical Protestantism—
the millions of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
and others, who formed the most formidable religious grouping in the country.
The American experiment of separating church and state had done little to blunt the political appetites of religious leaders or church members. In the antebellum years, despite a minority strain of political quietism, not only were most male church members deeply involved in politics, but Protestant ministers themselves were among the most active partisans. Whigs and
Democrats annexed the support of different religious clusters, with the anti-
Catholic, moral reforming nativist elements of the former leading it to claim the title of the Christian party But it was the Republican coalition of antislavery Whigs and third-party remnants of Libertymen and Free
Soilers that more properly deserved the name. The party that put Lincoln into power drew much of its moral energy from the distinctive “Yankee”
religious culture of New England and its diaspora. The Republicans’
collective conscience was shaped by an optimistic millennialism, a modern or New School Calvinism (chiefly located in Congregational, New School
Presbyterian, and some Baptist churches, and a strain of Methodist social activism influenced by Calvinist ideas of citizenship. Though many Northern evangelicals remained true to the Democratic Party in 1860, antislavery and anti-Catholic) clergy and lay leaders regimented their followers more effectively than ever before in the Republican cause of barring the spread of slavery and emancipating free white men from the tyranny of the slave power.
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Lincoln was fully alert to the value of the unprecedented fusing of religion and politics in the campaign of 1860. He could equally have been in no doubt about the subsequent rallying of the Northern churches to the cause of
Union. Bombarded throughout the war by resolutions from ecclesiastical bodies, besieged by religious deputations, and in regular receipt of the New
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York Independent, the most influential of all religious papers, Lincoln and his White House secretaries were well equipped to gauge the shifts in religious opinion. Northern clergy, divided before the war over slavery, now united in defense of the Union. Much of their analysis, even their words,
echoed Lincoln’s own. Secession constituted rebellion and treachery when urged, as by Confederates, without good cause. It was an act of national suicide and anarchy, for its underlying principle destroyed all government.
To destroy the American Union was to end a unique experiment in political and religious freedom, one revolving around government by the people,“the best form of government on earth At issue was the question whether liberty, strength, and permanency are incompatible conditions in the same body politic To sustain republicanism was to fight for for free government in our land and in all the lands for all ages to come.”
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The Union was not just politically significant. It had a spiritual dimension,
too. Protestants prized the Union as the vehicle of God’s unique role for
America within human history. What the historian James Moorhead has described as the acute millennial consciousness of North American
Protestants, carried to the New World by the original Puritan settlers and successively passed down to each new generation, gave the new nation a powerful sense of being God’s instrument in the coming of His Kingdom.
Its physical geography and natural resources indicated the oneness that God had intended for it. For the first seven decades of the republic’s existence most Protestants believed that the fusion of evangelical piety and republican government would have such a powerful moral effect that the Kingdom of God would be inaugurated by persuasion alone, without the need for arms. But Southern secessionists, in an act of destruction that challenged
God’s providence, had changed all that. And whereas in the antebellum generation the call to defend the Union had been the cry of Northern conservatives eager to find common ground with Southern churches, it now became, in Moorhead’s words, a cry infused with anew moral significance. The holy Union that Northerners defended was no longer the compromise-tainted object of earlier years it was democratic civilization in collision with an alien way of life.”
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If the majority of Protestants accepted the government’s initial definition of the war exclusively as a struggle to reestablish the Constitution and laws,
there were those like Thomas Eddy who predicted from the start that the
“logic of events would transform it into an assault on slavery. He was right.
As fugitives and captured slaves began to fill the Union camps the government became further complicit in slavery as the hopes of early victory dissolved into embarrassing failure and cruel defeat, church leaders increasingly judged slavery the essential cause of the nation’s difficulties and saw slaves themselves as a huge resource—“the commissariat of the rebel army”—to be confiscated and freed as the suffering persisted in defiance of
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evangelicals appeals for Divine assistance, so they convinced themselves that the conflict was a punishment for the sin of oppression. Frémont’s proclamation thus elicited a widespread chorus of delight, its revocation bitter disappointment. Through 1862 even previously cautious evangelicals warmed to emancipation and the use of black troops as the only means of restoring the Union. A growing consensus judged that slavery had to die,
a conclusion commonly expressed in the language of the Apocalypse.
American history, the culmination of world history, would resolve the battle between Antichrist and the Christian order between Southern slavery,
feudalism, and the Cavalier mentality on one side, and freedom—Yankee and Puritan—on the other.
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Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was an essential act of purification which would, in cleansing the nation, open the way to victory.
Lincoln worked hard to keep two-way channels open with the leaders of this influential constituency, and to deal sensitively and respectfully with them, aware not only of their power but also of the deep reservoir of goodwill on which he could draw. Here we should note that Lincoln never wore his religion on his sleeve indeed, his personal beliefs remain an enigma to the historian. His Old School Presbyterian churchgoing in both Springfield and Washington gave him a context congenial to his Calvinist, even fatalist,
temperament, but there is no evidence that he ever responded to the evangelicals demand for immediate repentance from sin. He may well have been drawn to skeptical writers in his youth, but now in later life the responsibilities of leadership, and the burdens imposed by public and personal tragedy, brought him face to face with questions of ultimate reality the experience appears to have deepened his faith in a divinity from whom he sought inspiration and strength.
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It is not clear how far Lincoln’s cultivation of the company of religious leaders, especially evangelicals, had to do with his own spiritual quest, but there is no doubt that those contacts provided him with away of both reading and reaching potent opinion-formers.
The President’s overtures to religious men and women took a variety of forms. His private conversations with informal visitors to the White House extended across the full gamut of denominational affiliation with his lifelong aversion to sectarian narrowness, Lincoln offered an inclusive welcome.
Some came to lecture, some to deliver homilies, some to seek appointments,
others merely to pay respects or renew acquaintance. They included the strategically placed, including editors of mass-circulation papers, denominational leaders, and distinguished abolitionists. There were representatives of the chief wartime philanthropic agencies, particularly the US. Sanitary
Commission, which bound thousands of local groups into a national soldiers relief organization. At other times Lincoln met more formally with delegations from particular denominations (Friends, Presbyterians,
Baptists, and others, from particular localities (notably the visit of leading
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Chicago clergy in September, 1862), and from particular causes (including temperance advocates and the US. Christian Commission. Lincoln clearly knew how to squeeze political benefit out of these occasions, commonly responding to their formal addresses with his own carefully crafted words.
Lincoln’s use of a visiting deputation of Methodists in May, 1864, provides a fine example. A committee of five leading members of the quadrennial
General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church meeting in
Philadelphia had been appointed to deliver an address to the President, to assure him of the denomination’s continuing support for the Union and its war aims, including emancipation. One of the party, Granville Moody, knew the President quite well. His colleagues sent him ahead to arrange a meeting at the White House. Lincoln, with the Union party’s nominating convention only weeks away, seized the chance to stage-manage the occasion. He asked
Moody to leave a copy of the address and invited the committee for the next day. On admission the members were received with great courtesy by the President and senior members of his cabinet. Lincoln stood straight as an arrow as he listened to their address. He then took from his desk the brief response that he had prepared overnight. In five short sentences he thanked them, endorsed their sentiments, ensured that other churches would take no offense by his singling out Methodists for praise, and then flatteringly described them as the most important of all denominations:
“It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to field, more nurses to the hospitals, and more prayers to heaven than any.”
After a brief conversation the ministers withdrew, much impressed with
Lincoln’s generous, high-toned remarks. Returning to their conference the next morning, proudly clutching a signed copy of the President’s words to show their colleagues, they were taken aback to discover that a full account of the meeting had already been published in the daily papers. The White
House had telegraphed the news the previous day the story had gone into type in Philadelphia even before the committee had left Washington.
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Lincoln’s reply was designed not just for his five visitors but for the other ministers and nearly one million members of the largest, most influential denomination of the land. Nothing would be left to chance.
There were other ways of reaching out to the influential religious element,
not least through presidential patronage, which offered a means of stroking the institutional egos of churches. But Lincoln’s most powerful weapon was the spoken and written word. In speeches designed specifically for religio-philanthropic audiences, as with his addresses to Sanitary Fairs and denominational groups in documents intended fora specifically religious purpose, as with his calls for national fasts and days of thanksgiving and in his setpiece speeches, which might not be cast in expressly religious language but which were evidently rooted in amoral understanding of
America’s meaning and future (as at Gettysburg) and appealed to the better,
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deeper side of human nature—in all of these ways Lincoln used words, often biblical, which persuaded the public that the administration was under the guidance of a man who recognized his dependence on Divine favor. A
perceptive commentator remarked that both President and people seem. . . to imagine that he is a sort of halfway clergyman.”
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In fact, as Lincoln’s remarkable Second Inaugural Address revealed, the President’s understanding of the Almighty’s role in Union affairs was far more subtle and tentative than that of many professional theologians.
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It also showed a
President capable of a meaningful engagement with the nation’s Christian leaders.
The administration’s efforts achieved their reward. Mainstream
Protestants translated their full-blooded Unionism into a form of patriotic politics that encouraged even some previously apolitical clergy to become the arm of the Republican Party. Silent prayers for the President were necessary but in themselves inadequate vociferous support for the administration became a duty. Church meetings consciously yoked the sacred and the secular congregations sang America and the “Star-spangled Banner”
and cheered the sanctified stars and stripes that fluttered over their buildings.
A minority of dissident radical voices within evangelical Protestantism
(including George B. Cheever, Charles G. Finney, Theodore Tilton, and—
intermittently—Henry Ward Beecher) criticized the administration at the other pole were hostile pockets of conservative, even Southern-oriented,
churches, mainly in the lower North. But the heartland of evangelicalism was aggressively and dependably loyal to Lincoln and his party. The most widely circulating Protestant newspapers in the Union, especially the cluster of regional Christian Advocates that gave Methodist editors such a commanding platform, remained staunch supporters of the government. A
network of potent clerical speakers took to the rostrum and pulpit for the
Republicans. Bishop Matthew Simpson, who crisscrossed the country as an
“evangelist of patriotism was unsurpassed in his power to melt an audience to tears, or rouse it to the heights of passionate enthusiasm for the wartorn flag.
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There was nothing coincidental about the President’s engaging
Simpson to substitute for him in opening the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair in June, Lincoln had no need to take the stump himself when he could rely on a ready-made army of speakers willing to act for him.
Collectively evangelicals worked to prepare the nation for sacrifice in an extended and gigantic war. Press and pulpit steeled women to the knowledge that victory would cost the lives of thousands of sons, brothers and husbands reassured young men that there was a sweetness in dying for their country and its noble, millennial cause and prepared all fora protracted war that would impose a massive financial burden. They speculated on Gods likely purposes in allowing battlefield defeats. They boosted popular morale during the lowest ebb of Union fortunes, in 1862 and 1863. They
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echoed the government’s calls for troops, endorsed the introduction of conscription, and became recruiting agents themselves. They defended the administration’s suspension of Habeas Corpus, and welcomed strong-arm action against draft resisters and dissenters who overstepped the limits of legitimate opposition. Border evangelicals like Robert J. Breckinridge and
William G. Brownlow stiffened the spines of middle-state Unionists.
Chaplains and agents of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions ensured that the serving men of the federal armies did not lose sight of the high purposes of the Union administration.
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The political engagement of evangelical Protestant networks was no more vividly demonstrated than in the presidential canvass of 1864. Even before
Lincoln saw off his Republican critics and secured his renomination in June,
all the evidence indicated that he enjoyed the support of the majority of the nation’s active Christians. A minority of radicals looked hopefully at running
Salmon P. Chase, but when that movement collapsed even fewer thought well of the Frémont boom and the gathering of his disparate supporters at Cleveland. Splitting the Union vote seemed at best a risky experiment.
The widespread Protestant reading of the President as God’s agent was only underscored by the Union party’s platform, endorsing a constitutional amendment that would forever remove slavery from the republic, and by
Lincoln’s subsequent confirmation that acceptance of a slave-free Union was the only acceptable basis for peace negotiations. Throughout spring and summer various gatherings across the denominational spectrum cried out for the passage of the amendment, and declared (as a deputation of the
Baptist Home Missionary Society told Lincoln) that God had raised up His
Excellency for such a time as this The Union victories in early September seemed to confirm that at last the nation was truly moving in harmony with the Almighty’s wishes. The Democrats Chicago platform so alarmed the residual rump of radical critics of the administration that they hurried back into the Union party fold, angered by the threat of a compromise peace,
and emphasizing cause before candidates, platforms before men. They joined mainstream evangelicals, Quakers and liberal Protestants to form abroad front of political activists.
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The final two months of the campaign witnessed the most complete fusing of religious crusade and political mobilization in America’s electoral experience. Baptist and Congregational associations, Presbyterian synods,
and Methodist conferences more or less explicitly told their members to vote the Union ticket. Hundreds of clergy took the stump and (after the fashion of Robert Breckinridge, who had chaired the Baltimore convention in June) became organizational activists. Henry Ward Beecher was employed as a speaker by the National Republican Committee. Religious Tract Society agents distributed literature. Religious newspapers called on churches to become Republican clubs. The election was in no sense an exercise in
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acclamatory politics, let alone the cult of personality. Yet Lincoln was presented as an Old Testament prophet and leader of his people. A common theme was the President’s integrity. John Gulliver, the Congregational minister of Norwich, Connecticut, praised him for his antislavery resolve throughout the turns and twists of war Slow, if you please, but true.
Unimpassioned, if you please, but true. Jocose, trifling, if you please, but

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