The Politics of Faith during the Civil War

3. Partisanship and Potential Damage: Why Americans Feared “Disloyal” Preachers

44 the politics of faith during the civil war in the balance and found wanting. As Ohio Presbyterian Reverend R. L. Stanton noted in 1864, “The great body of the clergy of all denominations in the loyal states, have unquestionably been loyal to the General Government. But not a few, and among them men of ability and influence, have shown decided sympathy with the rebellion.”3 Many in the Union looked to clergymen for hope and sustenance it is true, but they also recognized that ministerial influence could prove as malevolent as it was mollifying. There was a society-wide campaign to check such negative influences by proscribing supposed disloyal preachers in the North. But before a cleric could be reviled, he had to be revealed. If Reverend Stanton was correct and more than a few homefront preachers were disloyal, how did he and other Americans find out about them? What kind of rhetoric did Americans listen for when they eavesdropped on homefront churches and oratory halls in the effort to identify clerical sedition, and what potential acts of clerical disloyalty did they most fear? In short, why did loyal Americans fear disloyal clergymen to begin with? Both ministerial behavior and what that behavior meant to northerners who pored over such words and deeds situate preachers squarely in the middle of wartime concerns over internal security, a positioning long overdue.4 Americans in the Union acted out of both political partisanship and reasonable fears of the impact disloyal preachers might have on critical wartime variables like recruitment, troop and homefront commitment, and enemy morale. They were aided in their identification efforts by the leaders of their political parties, the editors of the newspapers that they read, and by their own determinative ideas about citizenship. I A dominant theme of this study is the religious sincerity of the positions often taken by believers before and during the Civil War. And yet, clergymen accused of disloyalty were routinely Democrats, and those doing the accusing were just as routinely Republicans. As with most aspects of mid-nineteenth-century American life, partisanship played a role in what preachers said and how their words were received. Because of their political beliefs and attachments, Civil War–era clergymen were maligned by critics who sometimes found it unnecessary to separate a minister’s political affiliation from his assumed disloyal opinions on the monumental issues of the day. Many Republican Christians thus surely offered a heartfelt amen to the unidentified preacher partisanship and potential damage 45 who wrote in the widely read Harper’s Weekly in 1864, “In a civil war men must be judged and treated according to the colors they show. If they choose the enemy’s colors they must expect . . . the treatment of an enemy.” Such colors were apparently donned exclusively by Democrats, for “Clearly, when political differences have ended in civil war, no earnest, devoted man . . . will wish to associate familiarly either with those who are so shallow as not to feel the terrible reality of the condition, or [with] those whose sympathies belong to the party which he opposes with arms.”5 And while true for all politically dissenting churchmen, Democratic ministers were especially targeted for their political proclivities by Republican members who believed such penchants indicated treachery. Northern churchmen and women increasingly conflated support of President Lincoln and his administration’s war policies with church loyalty and Christian righteousness. As adherents of America’s dominant faith traditions conferred upon the Republican Party the mantle of true religion, then, the Democratic minority—both within and outside of their church and especially in the ministry—came under increased religious scrutiny. Bryon C. Andreasen offers that “during the war, a kind of super-patriotism became the standard fare of evangelical sermons, as ministers and laymen alike championed a ‘Holy War’ interpretation of the struggle.” In such a climate, clerics who engaged in ostensibly political acts like criticizing President Lincoln or critiquing Republican war policies were considered religiously blasphemous. In fact, the very Christianity of divines who offered such utterances, or conversely, refused to offer countervailing endorsements of Abraham Lincoln and the war from behind their pulpit, was routinely assumed specious.6 Be they as large as the New York Tribune and Philadelphia Press or as small as the Beaver Argus (Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania), prowar newspapers proved instrumental in campaigns to identify and indict such Democratic clergy.7 Routinely observed by the editors of...