Themes of the American Civil War
part with unworthy official advisors, but
Download 2.25 Mb. View original pdf
|
| true. Reluctant to part with unworthy official advisors, but true himself— true as steel!” The campaign wrapped Lincoln, the Southern-born Westerner of unorthodox belief, in the mantle of high-principled New England Puritanism. 48 Instrumental here was Lincoln’s shrewd use of national fasts and days of thanksgiving throughout his presidency. Simply by calling them he won credit as a leader remorseful for the sins of the nation and alert to his and his people’s dependence on God it reinforced a view of the President as the Almighty’s particular agent in the Union’s struggle it did him particular good among those who believed the nation’s Constitution defective in not acknowledging the sovereignty of God. Equally important, the services themselves gave ministers a special opportunity to offer thanks for victories achieved, to identify the public sins that occasioned national humiliation, and to rally support for future struggle. They gave the millions who attended them a consciousness of belonging to a single community united in sacrifice and aspiration. We are mistaken if we seethe meetings as emptily routine. By a short proclamation Lincoln could use one of his most supportive networks to secure a national charge of adrenalin. He chose his occasions with careful deliberation, as his political opponents understood. When he selected Sunday, September 10, 1864, as a day of thanksgiving for recent victories he was effectively encouraging every minister to wave the Union- Republican flag in his pulpit. Opposition Democrats, sensing low political campaigning, cried foul when Union clergy used their pulpits to readout the proclamation and attribute the turn of events to God’s intervention. Then, on October 20, Lincoln issued a further Proclamation of Thanksgiving: with the election under three weeks away, he pointedly wrote of the Union’s hope, under our Heavenly Father of an ultimate and happy deliverance” from the trials of war, and the triumph of the cause of Freedom and Humanity.” 49 “There probably never was an election in all history into which the religious element entered so largely, and nearly all on one side.” 50 We lack hard statistical proof to sustain this judgment of the Christian Advocate and Journal, the chief Methodist newspaper, on the outcome of the campaign. But the impressionistic evidence is very powerful that the big evangelical denominations, and the small, radical antislavery churches, together with the Unitarians and other liberal Protestant groups, swung behind Lincoln in even greater proportions than they had in 1860. McClellan 146 • Richard Carwardine appears to have retained the Democrats hold on Catholic voters. He may also have won a majority of Episcopalian and Old School Presbyterian voters. But the Protestant center of gravity was firmly within a Republican/Union party that seems to have won over many Baptists and Methodists, and even Old School Presbyterians, who had previously been Democrat in loyalty. 51 In a celebratory editorial, written in the grey dawn after election day, Theodore Tilton attributed the Union victory to nothing less than an overruling Divine Hand outstretched to save the Republic.” 52 More prosaically we can see it as the result of an extraordinary mobilization of Union opinion by those who saw themselves as God’s servants the leaders of the Protestant churches. Limitations of space preclude considering other networks of moral or non-coercive influence that contributed to this energizing of Unionism. They included (paradoxical as it may seem) the North’s most potent physical force, the Union army. Federal troops constituted a mighty weapon whose informal operations on the home front were less easily measured than the battlefield impact of their bullets and bayonets but which in their own way worked to stiffen patriotism. Most troops were staunch republicans, loyal, even devoted, to Lincoln, and remained convinced of the political and moral values symbolized by the flag under which they served they generally voted the Union ticket at elections and exercised an unquantifiable but indisputable influence over their families and home communities. That influence reached its apogee in the election that brought an extraordinarily high proportion of voters to the polls, returned Lincoln to the White House, and opened the way to a reconstituted Union free from slavery. 53 The Union leadership’s chief means of mobilizing wartime opinion, however, were the Republican Party and the Protestant churches. Lincoln used them concertedly to articulate the moral purposes that underpinned the material concerns of northern Unionism. Constrained by popular racism and a persisting Democratic opposition, Lincoln could not ignore conservative, loyalist public sentiment. But there was more to the President than the shrewd manager who went only as fast as the ambitions of conservatives would allow. What kept the Union going, both on the home front and on the battlefield, was a sense of purpose and republican vision that owed much to the more radical perspectives of New England and its cultural diaspora. Lincoln’s fluctuating relations with the most radical in his party, those who sought to effect asocial and racial revolution, were scarcely easy. But his steadfastness of purpose and his skill in handling the instruments of communication, allied to a firm moral perspective, made him the architect and anchor of an ethically renewed Union. Lincoln and the Union • Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
|