Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural
Bertram Wyatt-Brown's work on antebellum Southern society provide valuable insights into the consciousness among slaveowners and other white Southerners. He stresses the role of kinship networks and the associated social values and practices revolving around honor.
In The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (2001), he devotes several essays to the role of churches and ministers in the defense of slavery and secession. Southern ministers where generally embedded in the same Southern honor consciousness as most of their parishioners. And once the secession war began, their "hopes were high because the young men who were to fight and die thought their cause honorable, unconquerable, and sacred in the eyes of God".
As occurs in most wars, God tends to back Our Side. No matter how many sides are involved in the war. In "Church, Honor and Disunionism", Wyatt-Brown describes a wide range of shadings of proslavery opinion among Southern ministers. He opens the essay with an observation that provides a good framing for the way in which social assumptions like the various ramifications of "honor" shaped Southern responses to the slavery issue:
Anger and frustration were the root emotions that drove Southerners to secede, a visceral response to a collective sense of degradation and disgrace. Years of transatlantic criticism of slaveholding and growing Northern indifference to Southern interests had been a constant source of vexation. Contrary to some historical opinion, white Southerners were alarmed not simply because they feared what Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans might do once in power. Parties were soon moved in and out of office, prudent men advised. Have patience; conservatism would yet return. Much more disturbing was the election of an antislavery president. Southern politicians and editors had long threatened that such a political victory would mean national dissolution, but slave state grievances and claims to political parity were contemptuously swept aside by Northern balloting. It was bad enough to be insulted, but to have all warnings ignored was the final blow to Southern pride. (my emphasis)The point about the antislavery president is something to keep in mind when various neo-Confederate and other crackpot notions about Abraham Lincoln get floated in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. Lincoln was antislavery, though his prewar political program looked to contain slavery within its then-current borders and to mitigate the damage it was doing to white democracy via such measures as the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The slaveowners were correct in perceiving Lincoln as seriously antislavery, even though they overreacted in a way that ultimately proved suicidal for their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy", as proslavery enthusiasts liked to call it.
The defense of slavery evolved over time. And during the 1850s, there was a difference in tone between the prevailing defense of slavery in the Deep South and that in Upper South states like Virginia. The Deep South version tended to be a more full-throated defense of the Peculiar Institution, while Upper South apologists tended to defend it as a tragic necessity, or a necessary evil that would fade away sometime in the distant future.
Some of the differences in types of Southern ministers' defenses of slavery no doubt reflect that regional distinction, though Wyatt-Brown doesn't stress that aspect in this particular essay. What he does argue is that while Southern churches defended slavery, there were restraining influences on the manner in which Christian leaders could do so. But even when Southern clergymen tried to put a cloak of religious validation on slavery by admonishing masters to be responsible and treat their slaves humanely, there is little evidence that such advice did much to restrain the abuses that were inherently a part of the slavery system. Wyatt-Brown writes:
The Southern clergy might convert thousands of slaves through their earnest mission enterprise, but they could hardly boast of success in the state legislatures. For all the talk of an evangelical "special-interest" agenda, to borrow Carwardine's phrase, their lobbying, timid and sporadic, had produced not a single law that protected slave families, encouraged manumissions, or authorized even the most rudimentary forms of slave education. They felt much more at home complaining of tavern licensing, gambling, and other legal matters that posed little or no sectional peril. No wonder the clergy feared disunion; the prospect of still greater isolation from their Northern church allies was scarcely welcome. (my emphasis)He sees three major factors at work in curbing the enthusiasm of Southern ministers for making all-out defenses of slavery:
- They paid attention to framing their proslavery arguments to maintain some persuasiveness with potentially sympathetic Northerners, with particular attention to religious antislavery arguments.
- They tended to be reluctant to embrace nullification or secession arguments because they were influenced by a conservative, Whig tradition that viewed such radical innovation (radically reactionary innovations, in this case) as inherently dubious and dangerous.
- For many of them, their own sense of Southern honor leaned toward remaining loyal to the Union.
It's important not to look at the 1850s anachronistically in the sense of projecting what we know about the later course of events back into that time. Though there were Southern hotheads who threatened secession at every sign of regional tension, the Southern Slave Power controlled the national government throughout the 1850s, with successive Presidents becoming ever more sympathetic to the slaveowners. Most discussion of secession in the 1850s came from abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, though no mass demand for secession emerged in the North, and most abolitionists opposed Garrison's secessionist talk. So support for secession as such was not a priority for proslavery Southern ministers prior to Lincoln's election in November 1860.
Wyatt-Brown also reminds us not to assume pervasive religiosity in the antebellum South. He points out:
Part of the Southern clergy's polemical hesitancy might well have stemmed from the numerical weakness of the slave state church system. Powerful men - meaning most politicians — paid lip service to the Kingdom of Christ on Earth, but, by and large, most were absorbed in more worldly excitements than the pious emotions of the revival. In addition, there were over twice as many clergymen in New York than in all thirteen slave states put together, and the same number as preached in all the South served the single state of Pennsylvania. To put it another way, in the North, out of 187 inhabitants one was a minister, and in the South, the ratio was 1 to 329.Interestingly enough, the Southern clergy were more reluctant as a group than the Northern clergy to focus on political projects in defense of their side in the slavery debate. Which is what Wyatt-Brown's second point about constraints on the Southern clergy's proslavery advocacy is about. They were influenced by a Whig tradition that was very suspicious of clerical intervention in politics.
His third constraint on the Southern clergy is the fact that their conception of honor tended to make them lean toward staying in the Union. However, after the so-called Great Compromise of 1850, this would have become an urgent, immediate issue only in 1860. And since they were generally swept up in the same war fever and Confederate patriotism as the slaveowners who were the leaders of their society, we can be suspicious of how strongly the pull of honor toward American patriotism was for Southern clergy. After all, it had been three decades or so in the Deep South since any kind of open political debate about the future of slavery had been possible among whites. Clergymen in the South in 1860 had learned not to associate themselves with free-state positions when it came to slavery.
The Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, James Otey, argued after Lincoln's election for restraint and prudence. Wyatt-Brown writes that although the honor tradition of the South was accepted and sanctioned by the clergy, the need top promote "moral improvement was bound to require clergymen to stress the need for humility, penitence, and other signs of godly behavior in the face of human pride, hallmark of honor".
Otey expressed this concern by saying of the secessionists that they were claiming "they can whip all creation - Cotton will make them 'princes and rulers in all lands'! Depend upon it, this is the pride that goes before a fall. ... The day of vengeance I verily believe is near at hand". But even Otey adhered to the Confederate cause after the secessionists' firing on Ft. Sumter.
When war began, Southern clergy pretty much unanimously decided that God supported the Confederate cause:
If biblical quotation did not fill the space reserved for honorable sentiment, the Confederate preacher could always turn to traditional sensibilities about manhood and glory. Warning that shame, the polar opposite of honor, was even a greater threat than death itself, a Presbyterian paper in 1862 preached that "Defeat will be the death to us, and worse than death it will be INFAMY." Even the antipolitical Methodists took up the cry. The Georgia Methodist Conference in 1863 declared that giving up the fight would be "a disgrace to our manhood, a surrender of principles, a sin against our dependents and children." In advocating secession in his impassioned address in New Orleans in November 1860, Benjamin Palmer pledged that "not till the last man has fallen behind the last rampart" shall the South yield its noble standard. If the new Confederacy were supinely to abandon the cause, she would transmit a shameful "curse as an heirloom to posterity." Likewise, Thomas Smyth of South Carolina urged a martial boldness to protect "the undefiled purity and honor of our wives and daughters; unpillaged property; unravaged fields, uninjured harvests; uncontaminated servants; all - every thing that is sacred to honor and to happiness" were "involved in this contest." Samuel Henderson, an Alabama Baptists editor, similary argued that his state "owest it to her own honor ... to secede from the Union."And so the Southern Christian soldiers marched to kill and die in defense of their sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy.
Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008
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